The level of our expertise: the perplexing verb <em>baffle</em>

Once again, my thanks are to Dr. Goranson. He succeeded in putting together a short biography of Frank Chance, my hero, whom I discovered many years ago (and learned to admire), while working on my bibliography of English etymology. His almost total obscurity today struck me as an incomprehensible slight. Dr. Goranson’s letter will be appended to the post next week. I also received a query from a reader about kayfabe. Alas, though I know something about the etymology of box/boxing (see the post “In and out of the box”), I cannot say the same about kayfabe; not a single publication on this word appears in my database. I should repeat what I have said more than once: my expertise depends on the huge database I have amassed, and when I draw blank, I appear as ignorant as any non-specialist. I know about kayfabe only what anyone can find online.

This post is about a related subject. What does it mean when a dictionary says: “Origin unknown”? We will soon see that the concept of “unknown” has several levels. The verb baffle, the subject of today’s post, has been investigated in an exemplary way in dictionaries and in both old and recent publications. Yet the OED’s latest verdict, despite the helpful notes, remains unchanged: “Origin unknown.” If so, let us look at what is known. Can everything be enveloped in impenetrable obscurity, like what you can see in the header, with a man lost in a forest?

Baffle turned up in English texts toward the middle of the sixteenth century, and rather probably, it was coined or borrowed around that time or a hundred year earlier. At that time, its recorded senses were “hoodwink, confound.” Scotch bauchle, which predates baffle, meant “to disgrace,” and it remains unclear whether we are dealing with several senses of the same word or with two different verbs. This detail of its history will indeed remain unknown or at least uncertain forever, though it is more probable that, regardless of the chronology, the same sound complex suggested to speakers several different negative associations.

The earliest English etymologists searched for the Greek originof baffle or tried to isolate the prefix be– in it. In 1766, Samuel Johnson thought of the French origin of this verb but went no further (etymology was in general not his forte). Almost a century later, Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s predecessor in the field of English etymology, wrote a paper that contained a well-informed section on baffle (the earliest attestations and Romance cognates or lookalikes) and came to the following conclusion (his spelling is retained): “The origin of the Sc[otch] bauch, bauchle is, I believe, the interjection Fauch! Baw! Pah! Pooh!, Fr[ench] Bah! Pouah!, Spanish] Baf! all of which are representations of the strong exspiration accompanied by a projection of the lips, by which we instinctively defend ourselves against a bad smell, and are consequently in the first instance expressive of physical disgust, and then of contempt. ‘Buffa, the despising blast of the mouth that we call shirping.’ Thomas. A.D. 1548… Hence also Port[uguese] bafo, breath; Prov[encial] O[ld] Spa[nish] bafa, mockery jest; Sp[anish] befar, It[alian] beffare, to jeer; Fr[ench] baffler, to mock. From the notion of mocking to that of frustrating the effort of any one, in which the En[glish] baffle is now used, is an easy transition….” A few more examples follow.

Wedgwood, an excellent observer of speech, ruined his otherwise useful etymological dictionary of English (the above quotation is not from that dictionary) by relying too heavily on the similarity of words from various languages and ignoring sound correspondences. Yet many of his conclusions still stand, and what he said about baffle sounds convincing, as also shown by the opinions of the Romance scholars who dealt with the items Wedgwood mentioned.

In Romance, numerous words beginning with baf have a very wide range of meanings: they denote “to breathe,” “full stomach,” “puff up, bloat,” and so forth. Its “relative” is buff (buffo “comic actor” and its twin buffoon belong here). According to a unanimous agreement, such words are sound-imitative: biff, baff, buff…. Baffle rather obviously belongs here. The best proof of the onomatopoeic origin of the root we are discussing is the existence of Middle High German beffen “to bark.” Beff-beff (older German), gav-gav (Russian), or woof-woof (English)—the result is the same! Dictionaries also cite Dutch baffen, Modern German baffen and bäfzen, alongside Danish bjæffe and Swedish bjebba “to bark.” By the way, Engl. baffy is a kind of golf club, while Scotch baff means “to strike.” In blind-man’s buff, buff means “blow, stroke,” and in Russian, a gun goes pif-paf.

What then is “unknown” about baffle? The answer is clear. The same or nearly the same sound complex has been recorded all over Western Europe, more importantly (as far as we are concerned) in French. The unanswerable question is whether baffle is native or borrowed. Similar questions recur again and again, especially with regard to slang, expressive words, and the names of popular tools.

In the sixteenth century, wars never ended in Europe (surprise, surprise!). Mercenaries, native and foreign, were everywhere, and so were prostitutes and vagabonds, following the troops. Despite the unrest, merchants and artisans traveled all over the continent. Foreign words were adopted (and often distorted), sometimes forgotten, and sometimes retained. A few of them survived only in regional speech, others managed to stay and even infiltrated the language of the educated.

Baffle, a word of unquestionably imitative origin (and thus, an expressive word), may be native or borrowed. Seven centuries ago, it probably belonged to the common language of the lower classes. Germanic speakers recognized it as their own (when we speak, we don’t think about the etymology of the words we use!), and so did the speakers of the Romance languages. Baffle and its lookalikes may have been native in both English and French (!), or perhaps they were migratory words (Wanderwörter, as they are called in German), part of international slang (see my blog for August 22, 2012, on ajar and migratory words). It is an important detail of the verb’s history and the only one that is beyond reconstruction. From this (and only from this) point of view is baffle a word of unknown origin.

I believe that verdicts in dictionaries should be more nuanced. (In this case: “Baffle. Sound-imitative. In the early Modern period, similar sound complexes were current all over Western Europe, and it is impossible to decide which words of this type are native and which are borrowed.”) Some words are indeed so obscure that nothing at all is known about their prehistory. Baffle does not belong to this group of etymologically impenetrable words.

_{Featured image: Image by Joe from Pixabay.}

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Seeing red

As I expected, Dr. Goranson did dig up some information about the mysterious F. (Frank?) Adams, celebrated in the previous post (see the comment following it). Yet we still don’t know where this man acquired his vast and accurate knowledge of etymology. He was an amateur, but such a learned one! It is amazing how much nonsense people have written and keep writing about word origins. In this case we are not dealing with a professional linguist, but his observations deserve nothing but praise. By the way, Frank Chance, whom I also mentioned last week, was a medical doctor. My attempts to learn something about him produced almost no results. James A. H. Murray and Walter W. Skeat treated him as their equal!

I also received a letter in connection with my last week’s note on the regional word rowen “aftermath.” Is the tree name rowan “mountain ash” related? No. Rowan was borrowed from Scandinavian. By the way, the tree is famous in Old Scandinavian mythology (it saved the god Thor from drowning) and elsewhere, because of its red berries in winter, and the word rowan may provide a clue to the mysterious curse aroint thee in King Lear and Macbeth. See my post for February 20, 2013. The OED online has no trust in this or any other etymology of the obscure phrase. Yet this derivation of the curse may not be so bad. Finally, a long letter came that I’ll answer next time.

And now back to business. The history of color names presents countless problems, and the literature on the subject is enormous. Today’s post is only about some curious uses of the word red in English. One of them (in the phrase red gold) I discussed in the essay for October 26, 2022. But first, some notes on the etymology of red may not be out of place.

Word historians encounter two difficulties: either the facts at their disposal are too few, or they are too numerous. This trouble (paucity versus excess) is of course familiar to all researchers. The cognates of red are ubiquitous in the Indo-European world, but the sought-for ancient root emerges in too many forms. The word sometimes ends not only in d/t/th (which is fine) but also in b, f, and s. Also, the vowels alternate rather wildly. Given some finagling, there is of course a possibility to reconstruct a common protoroot, but one wonders whether such a root, valid for the entire language group, existed. It has therefore been suggested that we are dealing not only with a group of related forms but also with a so-called migratory word, a word that travels from language to language and changes its shape along the way. We’ll never know the truth.

To complicate matters, references to the color do not aways match: some of the words, seemingly related to red, mean “light brown.” The history of color words is, in principle, complicated, because at one time, people visualized a spectrum, partly different from ours. Homer’s wine-colored sea is perhaps the most often cited example. Nor is the modern picture of the spectrum quite uniform. For instance, English has to do with the phrases dark blue and light blue, while Slavic uses two different adjectives for them. Likewise, English has a most confusing adjective bleak, not related to black. Though red is the color of fire, its root seems to be the same as in rust.

However, my story today is not about the ancient root of red. While looking through some comments on my old posts, I noticed that the most enthusiastic of them were devoted to idioms and mysterious compounds. Hence a few notes on the word redneck. The first note at my disposal, by Sterling Eisiminger, is from the periodical American Speech 59, 1984, p. 284. The reference is to pellagra. The OED online refers to the same source, so that I’ll reproduce only one sentence: “…in the 1930s pellagra was still common in the southern United States among low-income groups whose diets consisted mainly of pork fat and hominy grits.” Hence perhaps the reference to the skin color of the neck.

But redneck also meant “union member,” especially so in the twenties and the thirties in the coal-producing regions of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western Pennsylvania, and southern Illinois and Indiana. Here my source is the same periodical, but volume 69, 1994, pp. 106-11(the author of the article is Patrick H. Huber). Though this source is also known to the OED, I will supply a few details, because the OED online is not open access. We read that the origins of redneck “union man” remain uncertain, but that the word dates back to at least the turn of the twentieth century. It may be an analog of words like cracker (an offensive term for a poor white, etc.) and hillbilly (on hillbilly see my post for March 11, 2026).

The derisive term redneck was also applied to the members of a popular trade union (red, “Communist,” etc.) and, as we are told, with a side shot to the members’ poor, rural-South backgrounds, since so many Kentucky and West Virginia miners were failed farmers and former sharecroppers and agricultural laborers from the outlying rural areas, particularly from the Appalachians.

Especially important is the fact that the term referred not so much to the people’s red sunburned necks as to the red handkerchiefs they wore around their necks. Bandanas, traditionally worn as a form of protection for railroad men, miners, and others, became a badge of honor. Here are the opening lines of the once immensely popular song: “Red Necks, keep them scabs away,/ Red Necks, fight them every day.” The term Redneck became “a badge of working-class solidarity and pride.”

This story does not mean that redneck has “multiple etymologies” (one can often find reference to this phantom). Words, like most rivers, have single sources, though later, tributaries may enrich their content. This probably happened to redneck: first, a literal sense (now forgotten), then figurative accretions. Here is the final statement by the author of the article on redneck: “…the United States labor movement’s adaption of the term redneck speaks powerfully to the fluidity and multiple meanings of language and to how those meanings are socially constructed and interpreted differently by people whose class positions differ.” Red seldom occurs in English idioms. The most interesting of them are to be in the red and to draw a red herring across the path. The curious phrase thin red line originated from the Battle of Balaclava, during the Crimean War on October 25, 1854. However, the original dispatch, as Elizabeth Knowles pointed out, mentioned streak, not line. Red, White and Blue probably needs no comment.

_{Featured image: Little Red Riding Hood c. 1862 by Gustave Doré. Photo by Chris Olszewski. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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<i>Aftermath</i> and its kin

First, two notes in the aftermath of the previous post. 1) My thanks are due to Stephen Goranson, who, as I expected, did find out everything about Thomas Bee, the gentleman, mentioned in last week’s essay on boxing. Mr. Bee discovered the origin of the phrase to box the compass. As usual, I wonder how my old friend Stephen Goranson manages to ferret out all kinds of information, because I also try to do some research along those lines and invariably fail. 2) I am equally grateful to Mr. Gavin Wraith, who asked me why I had not discussed Greek pyx “fist” in connection with box. This connection was noticed long ago. The problem, as James A. H. Murray already knew, is a late attestation of the English word box. As a cognate of box, pyx does not look promising either. Perhaps box indeed originated in university slang (from Greek to English), but this hypothesis is hard to substantiate.

My story today is about several words referring to aftermath. All of them have a rather confusing sound shape. Thus, aftermath is transparent to an etymologist but not to a modern speaker of English. The component –math goes back to a noun meaning “mowing; crop mown.” This noun still exists in modern British dialects, with the suffix –th being the same as in growth and truth. The correct explanation of –math can be found in all detailed dictionaries of English and online. Usually, the root, followed by –th, is changed beyond recognition, as in birth, filth, and death (here, the roots are easy to see in (to) bear, foul, and die). A synonym of aftermath is British regional yeomath. The prefix yeo– means “additional.” I was probably the first to recognize this prefix in yeoman (see the post for June 17, 2009). The OED online seems to concur.

As I said, for some reason, English words for “aftermath” are usually obscure from the etymological point of view. Such is also the case in Russian. For those who know Russian, consider the dialectal words shutyom, probably meaning “an empty space,” and otava “a place left to rest.” Both nouns are stressed on the second syllable, and the origin of both is opaque to modern speakers. I have mentioned Russian for a reason. One Russian word for “fallow land” may, as I believe, throw light on its English synonym. I made this point in the post for November 9, 2016, and would like to repeat my idea here. English fog is, most probably (and such is the common opinion), of Scandinavian origin, even though it surfaced in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century. But we now know that this chronology is not unusual. The Scandinavian invasion happened in the epoch of the Vikings (King Alfred fought the “Danes”). Yet it took some northern words, which flooded dialects, hundreds of years to emerge in written and printed texts.

Another fog, which can be very broadly glossed as “aftermath,” has been known from books since 1400. No doubt, we are dealing with the same word as fog “mist.” Or perhaps some doubt exists, because the senses seem incompatible? Yet the common denominator of both words is “moisture,” and here one Russian phrase comes in most useful. An unsown field is said to be “under vapor” (pod parom). Fog is, most probably, related to German feucht “wet.” By the way, old etymologists, who liked to trace words to their ancient Indo-European roots, reconstructed the root of fog as bhu, a typical sound-imitative complex (an onomatopoeia for a puff of air). English fog “aftermath” means “under vapor, wet.” Even the best historical linguists cannot know all languages in detail. Not unexpectedly, English, German, and Scandinavian etymologists never came across the Russian phrase pod parom, because otherwise, they would have detected the connection, so obvious to me, long ago and would have used it to substantiate the idea that fog “heavy mist” and fog “aftermath” are indeed two senses of the same noun.

Why, I may repeat, do people keep coining such hard words for “aftermath”? Here is one more example: eddish “aftergrowth, stubble.” The root of this noun seems to mean “again,” as, for instance, in eddy. I would probably have left this gallery of etymological riddles in peace if among my folders I had not discovered one, devoted to the word rowen. Here is a note by a man from Madison, Wisconsin (Notes and Queries, 9/VII, June 8, 1901, p. 453): “Aftermath, or second mowing, was not used by New England farmers in the last century. Rowen was their term, derived, doubtless, from those eastern counties where their forefathers lived. Nor has rowen been yet displaced.” Does anyone among our readers know this word? My computer fails to recognize it.

A lively discussion of rowen preceded that note, but I have brought it to light because of the letter printed on the same page. Its author, Mr. F. Adams, did not only debunk a “ridiculous” derivation of the word, given in a respectable English dictionary, and referred to several foreign dictionaries and scholarly publications: he cited the correct date of the first occurrence of the word in English texts and proposed the etymology that still stands, namely, from a word, related to French regain. It “had filtered into our language through a French dialect, w for hard g being common in the north-east of France.”

Who was F. Adams? He sent numerous excellent letters on word origins to NQ between 1892 and 1903 and does not seem to have contributed to any other periodicals. At that time, an English-speaking specialist in word origins could not wish for better exposure: “everybody” read NQ. The great Walter W. Skeat appeared there hundreds of times. But soon after the First World War, its popularity waned. The journal did not die (it still exists) but became more specialized and less “popular.” In this blog, I have often referred to Frank Chance, an outstanding etymologist, who, like F. Adams, never sought another venue for his ideas in addition to NQ and as a result is now almost forgotten. Those who have read my review of a recent book on Webster Unabridged (April 8, 2026) will see that the otherwise well-informed author called NQ an obscure provincial periodical.

At one time, NQ was a famous outlet, and I hope that Dr. Goranson will enlighten us on the career of F. Adams (what a terrible idea it was and still is to use only the first initials in the signature! In references, I have often seen female authors taken for males and namesakes confused). This is the end of my today’s travel through fields left to rest. Along the way, we have encountered many forgotten words and observed once again how rich the English language is and what problems etymologists face. A good aftermath indeed, if you ask me.

_{Featured image: Fallow land near Dale Farm by Bill Broaden. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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In and out of the box

Today’s story is about boxing (that is, about the word box). I cannot offer a new solution and will support the etymology cautiously given in the OED online. Yet sometimes the way to the truth and chance byways are more exciting than the result, obtained at the end of the search. It will also be fair to mention the paper by the German linguist Hermann Flasdieck in the periodical Anglia (Volume 70,1951-1952, pp. 295-307), the best historical study of the word box in linguistic literature.

The earliest citation of box “to beat, bash, strike” in the OED online goes back to 1390, but we have to wait until 1519 until the next one. Even some time later, the word’s occurrences in print were rare. Apparently, box was not a word one chose to use in books. This fact confirms the origin (see it below), proposed tentatively by the OED’s first editor James A. H. Murray and now accepted with some caution by the revisers of the OED and other sources.

In the United States, boxing, a sport whose land of origin is England, became immensely popular. Those who have read Jack London’s short stories “The Mexican” and “A Piece of Steak” will agree. German tourists must have picked up the word box in America, because they brought it home in the forms boxen and baxen. A great difference exists between the way a word like box sounds in most of England and in the United States. Foreigners living and traveling in America often mistake box, not, and their likes for bucks and nut. German boxen ~ baxen tell us that long ago, the word box sounded in America as it does today.

One wonders whether box (the verb and the noun) has anything to do with its best-known homonym. The history of box, as in Christmas box, may not be entirely clear, but that box already occurred in Old English and is a borrowing from Latin. Nothing in the sport, as we know it, suggests its connection with any receptacle. Theater boxes and box offices return us to containers and throw no light on boxing either.

Along the way, we find the phrase to box a compass “to repeat the points of the compass in order and backwards.” Though also unconnected with boxing, the story is worth telling. Walter W. Skeat referred to the OED, but the OED had nothing to say about the etymology of this phrase. Nor did the 1914 edition of The Century Dictionary. The OED online refers us to the verb box (and that is what the original OED did). My surprise came when I consulted The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966). This work seldom deviates from its great model. Yet, surprisingly, it contains a special entry on box the compass: “Probably from Spanish bojar (boxar) ‘sail round’.” Next, we find two examples and the statement that other nautical terms from Spanish also exist in English. Such are allegedly buoyant (which may be from Spanish or Old French!) and capsize (this is Skeat’s suggestion; elsewhere, including the OED online, we find the familiar verdict “of uncertain origin”).

References to authorities in the original OED and in Skeat are rather regular but not generous. In the 1966 dictionary, they never appear. What then was the source of the new entry? Perhaps I can provide the answer (of course, known to the Oxford team but not to the rest of the world, eager for an explanation). In the periodical Notes and Queries XII/1, March 18, 1916, p. 226, H. J. B. Clemens published part of a letter, written in 1836 by Thomas Bee, a native of South Carolina, who was at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1783 to 1789. Here is the relevant part: “You know I had always a smattering of etymology, but never indulged so much in it as since I have become a great reader of Spanish […]. I was principally gratified with the origin of the phrase ‘to box the compass’, which has puzzled me from a boy […]. Boxar (or as it is more modernly written, bojar—with the same pronunciation) signifies circumire, to go round: boxar el mundo, to go round the world; boxar la isla to sail round the island. To box the compass is, therefore, to go round the several divisions from north to south, and from south to north.” I could find no information on H. J. B. Clemens and do not know why he had access to Thomas Bee’s private correspondence. His etymology of the English phrase looks promising.

The 1966 dictionary cites the same two Spanish phrases, which clinches my belief that this note was indeed the source of the entry. Finding the true origin of a difficult word is “a big deal” in the uneventful life of dictionary makers, and the name of an occasional pathfinder should not be forgotten. Obviously, the Spanish verb throws no light on the word box that interests us, but let me repeat my idea that in a convoluted romance, digressions are sometimes more exciting than the main story.

Back to boxing. The Century Dictionary says, “supposed to be of Scandinavian origin”; doubts the relevance of the Scandinavian sources, because baste “to cudgel” and the noun bash “blow” are already known as the legitimate reflexes of those sources; mentions Dutch beuk “a blow” and Middle High German bochen “to strike,” but concludes that the most probable origin should be sought for in box “to place in a box.” The conclusion is not persuasive. The origin of bash is as obscure as the origin of box, and in principle, nothing prevents one etymon (source) from producing two or more reflexes (“offspring”). Reference to box “receptacle” leaves us nowhere. However, German bochen, known to the speakers of Modern German in the form pochen, and Dutch beuk may provide a clue to box.

If we look for the many variants, older forms, and cognates of pochen ~ bochen, we’ll find puchen, puggen, pukken, boka, buka, and (!) Engl. poke (verb). In the present context, it matters little whether poke is borrowed or native. More important is the fact that we are, rather obviously, dealing with sound-imitative verbs (the reference is to the sound heard in striking), like English kick, jab, dab, cuff, bang, boom, bash, Russian bukh (a word reproducing a loud noise, with cognates elsewhere in Slavic), and puk “fart.”

Murray, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, already supposed that box is an onomatopoeia. In all probability, he was right, and one cannot but admire his intuition. “Origin unknown,” so lavishly added to such verbs in dictionaries, is an unhelpful label. The OED online has no citations of box between 1390 and 1519. We may be dealing with two independent coinages: the same verb was perhaps invented or borrowed twice, with about a century and a half between those events. Such words travel widely from language to language, and it is hard to decide whether we see loans or independent coinages.

Such then is a rather probable history of the sound-imitative verb box. Origin unknown? Not quite. Uncertain? Of course! What else could one expect?

Postscript

My thanks are due to the two readers who commented on the previous post on the evils of Spelling Bee.

_{Featured image: By Natalya from Pixabay. Public domain.}

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Spelling bee is back. So am I

Spelling Bee is back. At the end of the marathon, this year’s winner spelled correctly the word bromocriptine, received $50,000 cash, a commemorative medal, $2,000 from Merriam-Webster, $1,000 in flight credit from Delta Air Lines, and $400 of reference works from Encyclopedia Britannica. “Spelling fast is what I do every day,” explained the winner, an eighth-grader from California. As noted, the winning word was bromocriptine. May the youngster never use this medication!

Actually, bromocriptine is not a hard word compared to the other monsters he spelled at a lightning speed: Philepitta, Metohija, hwyl, and Bhubaneswar. Don’t pity my ignorance, but I recognized none of those words, and since some of our readers may not know them either, I’ll provide definitions. Philepitta is a bird name. Metohija is part of Kosovo; the place name is Greek. Hwyl is Welsh for “excitement”; it never occurs outside the Welsh context. (Incidentally, despite all the efforts to save Welsh from extinction, it is still an endangered language.) Finally, Bhubaneswar (not to be confused with Nebuchadnezzar) is a city in India.

The prize winner, as the NYT informed its readers, spelled more than one word every three seconds, and the author of the article mentions some more words used in the competition: oconee bells (a flower name), catometope “a division of crabs,” and Faesulae, the name of an ancient city in Italy. History is good to know. Yet botany and carcinology are rather special branches of scholarship, are they not? I understand: “Crabbed Youth and Age cannot live together,” but I refuse to surrender.

One learns from the article that the world can boast of a spelling community and that seasoned instructors teach young people to compete. Naturally, the world is also full of ambitious parents, ready to pay coaches who specialize in hard words and know how to spell them fast. What a waste, what a tragic waste!

I have been dealing with students most of my life. Among the hundreds of the young people I see at my lectures, I rarely find anyone who is aware of what happened to Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield, and Natasha Rostova, or who recognizes the word Decameron, let alone the names Walter Scott and Washington Irving. I suspect that their teachers belong to the same lost generation. But catometope and Philepitta, which sound like cat on my top and Philadelphia pita deserve everybody’s attention, do they not? Child abuse! Parents of the World, unite against it! I said so years ago and will repeat it today. Of course, the winner receives a good sum of money. Money, “the stuff that passes from hand to hand and never grows warmer,” as Mowgli put it. The money will be spent, but time never returns. Has this year’s winner, who is of Indian heritage, read The Jungle Book?

In 2026, one of the tough words was quillaia, pronounced “key-eye.” It designates a type of bark that yields a soapy lather, originally a word from the Mapuche language, native to southern Chile. Greece, Chile, Albania, Wales…. What about English words?

Our readers know that for at least a century and a half some of the brightest people in the English-speaking world have fought for reforming English spelling. An English Spelling Society was founded in 1908, but attempts to make conservative and partly irrational English spelling more accessible to learners are decades older. Now that English is used so widely all over the world, those attempts deserve special attention. Such efforts have been very mildly successful only in the United States (thanks to Noah Webster). Our spellcheckers do not solve the problem: before making a mistake, the speller has to learn how to try to spell Peru, kangaroo, rue, grew, through, and rhubarb (add guru for good measure); occurrence and endurance; rally and valley, to say nothing of valet. And don’t forget all those horrors with grey and gray and triplets like crayon, reign, and arraign.

Those are the words whose spelling millions of native English speakers and foreign learners have to cram. Do we need oconee bells to make people’s lives even more miserable? We may ask: will English spelling ever be reformed? I keep hoping against hope. Most of those who will read the examples cited above will probably agree that rue, crew, and through should not only rhyme but also be spelled alike.

All the arguments against the Reform are known, and indeed every change disrupts the status quo by definition and makes someone unhappy. But are we happy now? Spelling has been modified by law in several countries. The most drastic reform took place in Russia after the 1917 revolution, but the project predates 1917: it was only implemented by the Bolsheviks. In our lifetime, spelling has been modified in Germany and less drastically in Iceland. We need someone like Elon Musk to support the idea, and before you can say Jack Robinson, our atrocious spelling will also be reformed. (The article in the NYT is titled “He can spell ‘bromocriptine’ faster than you can say it.”)

I was mildly amused to read that Webster Unabridged and Encyclopedia Britannica support the Scripps National Spelling Bee. A dictionary like Webster Unabridged is not only a great national treasure. It is also a historical museum. It should not be abused for the purposes of an insane competition. The Spelling Bee ruins the brain of the youths who believe that they have achieved something useful and praiseworthy. And as concerns the prize, the winner and $50,000 will soon be parted. I would like to finish my diatribe on a less pathetic note. In the pronunciation of the speakers of American English, at least in the Midwest and in some other parts of the country, latter and ladder, writer and rider are homonyms pairwise. The voicing of t between vowels is a phenomenon well-known to British dialectologists. This is the reason pottage (as in a mess of pottage) became poddage and finally (by rhotacism) porridge, which Goldilocks ate up, knowing nothing about historical phonetics. My students write deep-seeded for deep-seated and futile for feudal. I am so happy they never venture into the spelling beehive.

_{Featured image: A school spelling bee in 2011. Photo by Heather Temske. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Restive people never rest

Some parts of the story I am going to tell can be found in most dictionaries, but it is the attempts to connect a few distant dots that may be interesting to those who wonder “where words come from.”

Rest “repose” is a Germanic word with cognates among other related languages, that is, for instance, in Dutch, German, and Scandinavian. At one time, it had the form rasta, as still in Gothic, a fourth-century language, known to us from a translation of parts of the New Testament into it. Yet the Gothic word rasta meant “a mile,” not “rest”! One Germanic mile was equal to two Gaul leagues or five kilometers, a bit over three miles, the distance a walker is supposed to cover on foot in an hour. Consequently, in those days, “rest” had a more concrete sense (namely, “a distance after which one rests”) than “relief from activity.” The history of all abstract words in language runs along similar lines.

This first step in searching for the etymology of rest looks convincing. But we may perhaps go the proverbial extra mile, to obtain a deeper solution. In this blog, I have more than once referred to the old German journal Wörter und Sachen (“Words and Things”). It featured many papers about how words developed their meanings in the process of labor activities. Some such conjectures did not stand the test of time, while others have weathered well. One of the most active contributors to that journal was its founder Rudolf Meringer (1859-1931), for whose contributions I have unbounded admiration. Among other things, he suggested (but in a different periodical) that rasta is related to Gothic razn “house.” This was a great idea. One can find guarded positive mentions of it in all dictionaries, but I doubt that caution is needed here. Meringer guessed well.

Those interested in the origin of other Germanic words designating human habitats will find some information in my posts for January 21 and February 4, 2015 (the essays deal with house and home). Among other things, I noted that the grammatical gender of some such words tends to be neuter. Germanic neuter nouns had the same form in the singular and the plural (like Modern English sheep: one sheep ~ many sheep), so that when we deal with Old English hūs (ū designates a long vowel, as in the modern word who), we cannot know whether the reference is to one building or several “houses” linked together, as is the case with the Old Icelandic word hús (here, ú designates a long vowel).

Characteristically, Gothic razn was also neuter, a circumstance hardly ever discussed in the scholarly literature on this word. In any case, razn, which must have been a place for rest, probably consisted of two or even more adjoining structures, rather than being a separate building. Old English ræsn, a word obviously related to razn, meant “plank, beam,” which means that the Old Germanic razn was made of wood. However, a few non-Germanic cognates of razn refer to branches, switches, and the like. Thus, we get a glimpse of the way old houses were constructed, but hardly of why speakers chose the sound complex raz– (from ras-) to designate one type of their habitat.

Perhaps ras– (a verb, not unlike rush and dash) imitated the sound a branch makes when waved through the air? Unless a word is an obvious onomatopoeia, like puff, hush, grunt, and so forth, we never learn why it has the form that has come down to us. But I find some support for my idea in the fact that quite a few non-Germanic cognates of rest refer to “rush (!), attack.” As Henry Cecil Wyld put it in The Universal Dictionary of the English Language: “We might suppose that the primary meaning of the base was ‘movement’, whether into action or away from it, from which latter sense we later got the sense retreat, cessation from action, rest.”

Disregard the inelegant phrasing and note: “into action or away from it”! The related forms of ras-, as they appear in Greek and elsewhere, are treated with caution or even distrust in some dictionaries and as certain in others. I tend to agree with those who trace English rest, German Ruhe, and Dutch rust (they all have the same meaning) to the root erē– ~ rē– and share Wyld’s interpretation of the root (“movement into or AWAY from action”). I would therefore be happy if my sound-imitative treatment of the Germanic root ras– could find some support: swish branches, build a house, and have a rest!

The old word for “house” can still be discerned in English saltern “saltworks” (that is, a place where salt is prepared commercially), from sealtærn; in barn, from berern, a building for storing “bern,” that is, barley; and in ransack, from Scandinavian (rann-saka, “to search a house,” but the “searching” was performed then, as now, for the purpose of plundering.

Restive, though it now means “restless, fidgety,” once meant the opposite, namely, “inactive, inert”! A restive horse refuses to move. The word goes back to the root of the Romance verb having the sense “to remain in the same position,” from Latin restāre “to rest.” Closely related is English arrest. One wonders at the erratic history of this late borrowing, which emerged in English only in the middle of the sixteenth century: “intractable,” then “stubborn,” and finally, “restless, unruly.” The OED presents, as always, a full picture of this history. The most common sense today (that is, “restless”) surfaced in books only in the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, in Dickens’s days! And we show surprise when unexpected semantic leaps are said to have occurred in the remotest past. 

An Old Idiom

To set up one’s rest “to make up one’s mind, to pause for rest, to halt.” Robert Nares explained this phrase in his indispensable 1822 book A Glossary; or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs, &c. Thought to Require Illustration… From the game of primero, meaning “to stand upon the cards you have in your hand, in the hope that they may win.” Nares explains the rules of the game and gives numerous examples. In 1907, the idiom was still known. The OED has one comparatively recent example.

Postscript

I am sincerely grateful to the readers of this blog who responded to my plea for comments. Indeed, there was a break between August and February. It was caused by personal reasons and had nothing to do with paucity of responses. The rest is of course silence.

_{Featured image: The Long Walk. CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Much <i>hubbub</i> about very little

Soon after the blog Oxford Etymologist came into existence on March 1, 2006 (more than twenty years ago!), I wrote a post on the word hubba-hubba (in those days, I was told not to exceed one page of text, and of course, there were no illustrations). Numerous comments followed. Some time later (on November 22, 2006), my topic was hullabaloo, and again multiple comments rewarded my modest effort. In those days, a stream of responses established a close tie between my readers and me (hence the now defunct section “Monthly Gleanings”). Though I have no idea why that stream has dried up, today even a single comment makes me happy, for “he who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.” Perhaps I should stick to the letter H. Anyway, I decided to woo my fickle luck again and will now add hubbub (see the image gracing the title) to that ancient series.

Exclamations, interjections, and war cries are usually hard to trace to their origins. Oops, upsy-daisy, drat, hurrah, hello, hi, and their likes look natural to speakers but not to language historians. Even oh and ah have nontrivial origins, because when people are in pain or are genuinely surprised, they do not emit such genteel “vocalic gestures”: they scream. Hubbub is of course not an interjection, but it makes one think of hullabaloo and other “emotional” H– words denoting noise. We can also remember hoopla and the bird name hoopoo ~ hoopoe.

I usually avoid  discussing nouns, adjectives, and verbs whose detailed and often transparent origin can be found online or in any good dictionary. Yet the amount of information varies from work to work. Though hubbub seems to be a case in point (nothing new, and nothing to write about), this is an illusion. All sources say approximately but not quite the same thing and not enough. Here is the etymological part of the entry hubbub from The Century Dictionary (though this monumental reference work is seldom consulted today, I treat it with great respect): “Formerly also hobub, hooboob, also whoobub (apparently, simulating whopp, hoop); also extended or reduplicated hubbub–boo, hubbleshow, hubble-shubble—words showing imitative variation of a base *hub, probably of interjectional origin, but perhaps in part of hoop, shout.” An asterisk denotes a reconstructed form.

This is all very true. However, there is a hitch in dealing with that entry. Compare the information from the last edition of Walter W. Skeat’s An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 1911: “Imitative. Cf. Gaelic ub, interjection of aversion. Formerly also whoobub, a confused noise. Hubbub was confused with hoop-hoop, reduplication of hoop; and whoobub with whoop-hoop.” (Many years earlier, Skeat suggested that perhaps the source of hubbub was indeed whoop-whoop.) Surprisingly, The Century Dictionary does not mention Gaelic, and Skeat, who begins (!) with Gaelic, uses only the irritating word cf., that is, confer, compare. Old dictionaries often tell us to “compare” different forms. How are we supposed to do it?

The volume of the OED with the letter H appeared in 1901, and the entry on hubbub rather cautiously suggested the Irish (that is, Gaelic) origin of the English word, but the second edition of The Century Dictionary ignored this tip. By contrast, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966), derived from the OED, states unhesitatingly: “Of Irish origin .” It then cites a few (irrelevant?) Irish words for disgust and amazement, but the alleged source is supposed to be the battle cry. Can interjections be borrowed? Yes, indeed. The bookish word alas is from Old French. Oh goes back to Latin, via Old French. So does ah, a truly international word. Upsy-daisy is from Dutch.

Hubbub, its history and etymology, attracted a good deal of attention in the nineteenth-century popular press (as usual, in Notes and Queries). The most curious analogy takes us to hubbub,a game like dice, played at one time by some Native Americans. Here is a passage from the book by Henry Spelman Relation of Virginia (1613; I have modernized the spelling): “Drums and trumpets they have none, but when they will gather themselves together, they have a kind of howling or whopub, so differing in sound one from the other as both part (sic) very easily be distinguished.” The earliest example of English hubbub from a text in the OED goes back to 1555.

The ship Pilgrim arrived in America in 1620. By that time, hubbub had become widely known in England. Even Shakespeare used it, though he spelled the word as who-bub. Speelman may have identified the native word with the one he had known at home. But this is unlikely. William Wood in New England’s Prospect (1634) described hubbub as a game resembling dice (“…smiting themselves on the breast and thighs, crying out, Hub, Hub, Hub!”). English hubbub is certainly not from Algonquin, but the coincidence is striking. Similar words have been found in some other languages. For instance, in 1904, a report from Egypt mentioned habub “a dust storm of considerable extent.” Hubbub is, most certainly, an onomatopoeia that could have originated almost anywhere at any time. The question is whether the English word is native or borrowed and, if borrowed, then from where.

Thanks to the excellent research of two scholars, David Greene and Alan Bliss, we know a good deal about the history of hubbub. The seemingly plausible suggestion that hubbub is from French, rather than from Irish, should be discarded. But surprisingly, the Irish form is from English! The source of hubbub must have been the Middle English adverb abo “above,” pronounced as aboo. This pronunciation has been recorded even in some archaic eighteenth-century British dialects. The etymon of hubbub seems to have been some war cries like Irish ub! ub! ubub!

But this reconstruction leaves out the origin of initial h in hubbub. Though the history of this h is unclear, we should note that the earliest form of hubbub, recorded by the OED, has the spelling whobub. Similar spellings were common in the sixteenth century and some time later. As Alan Bliss explained, the story may or even must have begun with fubbub, whose f became voiceless hw (as in the pronunciation of those who say what, which, why with voiceless hw) and later h. Details would take us too far afield. All we have to know is that, most probably, hubbub originated in Early English, was taken over by the Irish, and later returned to English. Not unexpectedly, the word changed its pronunciation more than once along the way. To us this itinerary is full of gaps, and we are left wondering why in the sixteenth century the word was reborrowed into Early Modern English. However, something about this itinerary has been traced with a good deal of certainty, so that hubbub is not “a word of unknown origin,” which is good. Thus, after all, our ado (hubbub) was not about nothing.

P.S. Thank you for the comment on sorrow. The alleged tie between the Hittite and the Germanic words is curious, but of course, its existence cannot be demonstrated, unless both forms are sound-imitative.

_{Featured image: Photo by Joe Van. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.}

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Sit thee down, sorrow!

It is easier, following Shakespeare, to tell sorrow to sit down than to discover where the word sorrow came from. No fear: sorrow is native—only joy is borrowed. The word that interests us is Common Germanic. Its cognates have been attested in all the Old Germanic languages: in the fourth-century Gothic translation of the New Testament, in Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Icelandic. Outside Germanic, even in the ancient Tocharian language, an apparently related noun turned up, though there it means “disease.”

Words designating abstract concepts usually have concrete foundations. For example, sad goes back to the idea of “sated; weary.” Dutch zat and German satt still refer to a full stomach (among other things), and Latin satis (as in the root of the English borrowings satiated and satisfaction) means “enough.” Sad “melancholy, unhappy,” it appears, has a most prosaic foundation. Attempts to find a similar concrete foundation of sorrow have been less than fully satisfactory, to use the polite jargon of disgruntled etymologists.

However, one thing is almost certain: sorrow is related to neither sore nor sorry, while those two words are indeed related to each other. Yet for centuries, sorrow, sore, and sorry have formed a union and influenced one another. It is quite natural that speakers looked upon such similar-sounding words referring to similar concepts as related. To repeat, the sense of sorrow developed from “physical pain” to “grief.”

The origin of many ancient names of diseases and physical defects is obscure for an important reason. People were afraid to pronounce frightening words. The situation is familiar: talk of the devil and he will come. For instance, someone will say wolf (cry wolf, as it were) or bear, and the beast, which of course knows its name, will hear it, take it for an invitation, and arrive. That is why Germanic has bear, that is, “a brown one,” rather than some continuation of ursus, and Russian has medved, literally, “someone searching for and knowing honey.” For the same reason, the etymology of ache is almost impenetrable. Taboo names were meant to be undecipherable, and they often remain such to us. (By the way, from an etymological point of view, ill is one of the most obscure English words.)

I have mentioned taboo for a reason. Among some rather secure Slavic and Lithuanian cognates of sorrow (Tocharian has already been mentioned) we find a few words meaning “disease, sickness” and “to be sick, ill.” The most problematic forms related to sorrow are those beginning with sw-. Among the Old Highs German words, the verb sworgen turns up. Where is the initial sw– from? The w after s is not accidental here. Also, a secure Albanian cognate once began with sw-, and the first syllable of a rather probable Sanskrit cognate was sū-.

It is rather likely that also the Old Germanic root of sorrow once began with sw– and later lost w under the influence of its “twin” word sorrow. The group sw– is often sound–imitative and sound-symbolic. Consider the following list of Modern English words beginning with sw– (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in writing): swab “mop” (15), swagger (16; swag also exists), swank (19), swarm (Old English), swarm “climb” (16), swash (16), sway (16), sweep (14), swell (Old English), swift (Old English), swig (17), swill (Old English), swindle (18), swing (partly Old English), swipe (19), swirl (18), swish (18), switch (16), swither “to hesitate” (16), swoon (13), and swoop (16).

I realize that reading word lists is not the most entertaining occupation in the world. But I needed a background for my hypothesis. I suggest that sorrow or rather Old English sorg ~ sorh and its Germanic cognates, all of which sounded almost the same, were “emotional” sw-words. It is hard to tell what this sw– alluded to (perhaps sometimes to the loss of balance and erratic movement: consider swing, sway, swipe, and the rest). Above, I did not mention swamp, a late word in English (17). It has always meant “low-lying wet ground,” and swamps are not good to walk in.

Later, sorrow, Sorge, and their likes influenced sworg-, all of which survived but lost none of their emotional impact. Etymologies of this type cannot be proved: they are not theorems. But considering that dictionaries are happy with the statement “ultimate origin unknown,” I see no harm in offering my hypothesis. If I am right, taboo probably played no role in the history of sorrow, but emotion did: it shaped its origin, and chance modified its ultimate form.

As is well-known, people are afraid of two things: of venturing to say something new and of repeating something so trivial that it needs no proof. Above, I committed both sins. English etymological dictionaries do not begin their story of sorrow with sw-. Yet in other sources, matter-of-fact references to sw– in this context are common. Among other places, I found them in the earlier editions of the main German etymological dictionary and in the writings of the great French scholar Antoine Meillet. Thus, I said something that is new (no one has explained the variation s- ~ sw-) but not earth-shattering. If some historical linguists decide to comment on my reconstruction, the first thing for them to do will be to reread F. O. Lindeman’s paper in Indogermanische Forschungen 98, 1993, 48-54, and the chapter “Sorga” in the 1957 book by Heinrich Götz Leitwörter des Minnesangs (pp. 93-105). The absence of comments will give me much sorrow.

In the meantime, I’ll mention a novel titled Frau Sorge (that is, “Lady Sorrow”) by Hermann Sudermann. Today, few people have heard of it. Yet the epoch described in that book is worth remembering. At one time, I read many such sad books, including John Greenwood’s novel The True History of a Little Ragamuffin. Maxim Gorky read and admired it in his youth.

A few remarks on sorry may not be out of place here. Its Old English form was sārig “pained at heart,” as defined by The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (thus, with a long vowel in the root). Later, that is, in Middle English, ā changed to ō (it did so in all words: hence stān to stōn and stone) and was shortened before the “heavy suffix” -ig. This is when sorry began to interact with sorrow.

The title of today’s essay is from Love’s Labour’s Lost. I preferred it to the trodden-to-death more in sorrow than in anger. Familiar quotations with sorrow are numerous. I will finish this post with my favorite lines by Shelley: “The desire of the moth for the star,/ Of the night for the morrow,/ The devotion to something afar/ From the sphere of our sorrow.”

Postscript. My thanks are to Martin Smith for citing German bergen “to protect” in connection with the post on burg (April 1, 2026) and to Ian Richie, who cited the place from Rob Roy, to which I referred in the post for April 15, 2026. See the comments following those posts.  

NOTE. For scheduling reasons, the next post will appear two weeks from today.

_{Featured image: La Mélancolie by Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Hogs, hedges, hedgehogs, and BA’s

About a year ago (to be exact, on February 19, 2025), I discussed the origin of some obscure idioms, the hardest of which was to go the whole hog, though a hog on ice also makes one wonder. It is frustrating that the origin of hog is unknown. The word surfaced in Middle English, and it would seem that a relatively recent monosyllabic animal name (and hog always had only one syllable) need not give language historians too much trouble. But this is not the case, as the history of dog (Old English) and hog (Middle English) shows. All we can know for certain is that twelve and six, and three centuries ago, people coined words, motivated by the same impulses as today. They have always produced monosyllables like big, dig, gig, bog, gag, smug, and lug, and most of them were “emotional,” that is, sound-imitative or sound symbolic. Hogs grunt. Is the word hog onomatopoeic? Do swine “say” hog-hog or pig-pig? Perhaps. In any case, their Dutch siblings “say” big-big!

Why then is the hedgehog called hedgehog? The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) explains: “So named from frequenting hedgerows and its pig-like snout.” I assume that the corresponding page in the OED online has not yet been edited, because the same formulation appears there. Or perhaps there is nothing to edit in this statement. Perhaps. Hedgehogs may be attached to hedges, but it is amazing that such an inconspicuous feature was chosen for naming the familiar rodent. Isn’t our solution too good to be true?

Hedgehogs don’t live in America, and every time I discuss the Grimms’ tale “The Hare and the Hedgehog” with my students (I often teach German folklore), I have to describe the protagonist’s way of life. I also very much admire the end of the tale, the storyteller’s advice: “If you are a hedgehog, always marry a hedgehog.” I have seen many young people who disregarded this advice and paid dearly for it.

What are the most conspicuous features of the hedgehog? A hedgehog, if attacked, rolls itself into a prickly ball (what a wonderful way of hedging against enemies!), but other than that, it is easily domesticated and is great fun to have at home in summer except that you cannot pet a hedgehog. Also, like mongooses, hedgehogs attack and devour snakes.

In my opinion, the name hedgehog does not do justice to the creature’s behavior and shape. It is also unclear why English replaced the ancient word for “hedgehog” with a new (dialectal?) one. German, Dutch, and Scandinavian have retained the Indo-European name (such is German Igel; the Slavic name is also related to it). Be that as it may, since the hedgehog’s projecting mouth and nose do resemble a snout, prickly hog (this is what the creature is called in numerous Dutch dialects) would be a more accurate name than hedgehog.

Let us now leave hogs to their devices and look at the noun hedge. This word has a dramatic history. The Old English for hedge was hegg. I will not go into phonetic niceties and will only say that hegg is related to haga “enclosure, yard.” Hegge yielded hedge, and haga became haw, as in hawthorn, which is also familiar from the last name Hawthorn. Yet haga is also recognizable, because we know the place name The Hague, Den Haag (see is image in the header). The name of the capital of the Netherlands has retained its ancient form and even its definite article. Last week, we looked at burg and its likes, and I noted that town is akin to Icelandic tún “enclosure.” This is what town meant (consider Modern German Zaun “fence”), exactly like Den Haag.

The most dramatic part in the history of the root we now see in hedge and haw concerns the Old English word hagosteald “bachelor; warrior.” Its counterparts elsewhere in Germanic displayed several meanings: “king,” “retainer,” “servant,” “peasant,” “widower”—a partly incompatible medley of senses. But only at first sight. Among other things, the original “enclosure” was the feudal lord’s residence. In those days and much later, the eldest son inherited his father’s property. His brothers, those who aspired to a career, had little choice and usually became soldiers, or, to use the feudal term, retainers (the same situation with the younger brothers continued into the nineteenth century). Those retainers were, of course, bachelors, and as far as language is concerned, the step from “bachelor,” to “widower” (a male without a wife) must have been short. In Modern German, Hagestolz (now obsolete or facetious) still means “bachelor”; stolz “proud” is a product of folk etymology.

It is amazing how words change their meanings and attain secondary senses, which oust the original sense. From “king’s retainer” to “bachelor”! But incompatible senses also coexist in modern languages and give us no trouble. This, for example, happened to English bachelor. Its Old French source meant “young man aspiring to knighthood,” while Medieval Latin baccalārius referred to a laborer on an estate (baccalāria “area of ploughland”). Though our BA’s don’t aspire to knighthood, getting a college degree is an important step to the proverbial room at the top. And we, the readers of this blog—well, we have made a long way from a piece of enclosed land to the heights of historical semantics. In our journey, we passed by hogs and hedgehogs, visited The Hague, and almost attained a BA. (Yet I keep wondering whether hedgehogs have anything to do with hedges.)

To Our Readers

My sincere thanks to the two readers who have researched some obscure words and asked me about their origin. My resources are good but limited. I have an excellent etymological database and a huge collection of books on word origins. If they provide me with no answers, I give up. This is especially true with regards to the non-Indo-European languages. Alas, all etymologists are in the same position. They know only what little they know.

From My Collection of Useless and Evil Proverbs

It is amazing how many proverbial phrases people have invented to demean women! Here is an Early English gem in its original spelling: “…by the common prouerbe, a woman will wepe for pitie to see a gosling goe barefoote.” John Heywood, a sixteenth-century playwright, is mainly remembered today for his collection of proverbs. He knew the saying quoted above, and it was familiar to English readers of Notes and Queries as late as 1891. Walter Scott seems to have made one of his characters use this saying in Rob Roy (so I have read but did not check). As usual, we have no information about the date and the author of this saying, but the ugly “sentiment” is familiar. The Russian saying “A woman’s tears are water” is still current. What a shame!

_{Featured image: Charlemagne at Court, illuminated manuscript. Public domain via Picryl.}

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<i>Unabridged</i>: some thoughts on a new book about dictionaries and words

Unabridged refers to the title of Webster’s great dictionary. The author of the book, published by Grove Atlantic Monthly Press (New York) in October 2025, is Stefan Fatsis. This volume of nearly 400 pages has the subtitle: “The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary.” Below, I will summarize my impressions of Fatsis’s book. Perhaps Unabridged in the title also refers to the volume’s scope, because it presents a broad picture of British and American lexicography for more than two centuries.

Fatsis has been a passionate word lover since early age, so his foray into the history and practice of dictionary making was not a whim. He approached his project in the best way possible: he got himself hired as a lexicographer-in-training, spent several years with Webster, wrote numerous definitions, spoke to dozens of specialists in the United States and at Oxford, and finally produced this book about dictionaries and dictionary making—not only about Webster’s Unabridged. Rarely does he say something that gives away his insufficient mastery of the subject. Thus, on p. 71, he calls Notes and Queries an obscure British journal. In fact, it was for years one of the most popular weeklies in the English-speaking world, and it still exists. The OED has always been fully aware of it. But this is just faultfinding. Fatsis did become an expert.

I am surprised that we never met. For years we attended the same biennial conferences of The Dictionary Society of North America, talked to and made friends with the same people, and listened to the same presentations. Better late than never. Now we’ll meet virtually in this blog. The book, which in addition to the indispensable introductory remarks, acknowledgments, endnotes (excellent endnotes), bibliography, and an index, contains thirteen chapters. Among other things, they are devoted to the history of Webster’s dictionary. Who were the two Merriam brothers? Their names are now indelibly tied to Noah Webster’s. We do know such hybrids, Schubert-Liszt and Verdi-Liszt, for example. What stands behind the symbiosis? In this case, the story is worth reading. 

Two main questions about dictionaries recur again and again. How many words should be included? And how should they be defined? How, for example, do you define in, as, so, oh, weather, be, and thousands of others? And does anyone need such definitions? New words flood language (any language) at all times. When we study the past, we depend on written records, because only such as are extant. But even a dictionary of Old English, which deals with a closed corpus, is incredibly difficult to put together. Though a living language grows every minute, most of us need not worry about this circumstance. We know what we know, and if some word is new to us, we may either disregard it or look it up. But lexicographers have to anticipate everybody’s questions, and when we do look up a word (for its meaning, spelling, pronunciation, use, or origin), we expect it to be there. Hence this endless, self-defeating chase for the words coined the day before yesterday, yesterday, or five minutes ago. Hundreds of them are stillborn. For an online dictionary space is not a problem, but paper editions cannot be allowed to weigh a ton.

Fatsis believes that modern dictionaries should be all-inclusive: if a word exists or once had, in the poet’s words, its singing minute, get hold of it and rejoice. Also, volatile slang, obscenities, and ethnic slurs? Well, yes. This book is by far not the first one about dictionaries and their problems. Webster’s Third had the audacity to include the F-word and the seemingly innocuous ain’t (my spellchecker still underlines ain’t in red). Today the storm that followed the publication of that dictionary is hard to imagine. The unpronounceable F-word? My goodness! This is the most frequent word (plus its derivatives) hundreds of people use actively. Even our elected representatives constantly feel f-ed up by their f-in’ opponents and share their hurt feelings with the public. Why should dictionaries be guardians of good manners? Actually, they often (and nowadays, even regularly) do play this role, by explaining how certain words are used, where they may or should be avoided, and so forth.

What I missed in this book is a broad discussion of dictionary inclusion and culture. A great dictionary, a monument erected for all times, does feature all the words it can net, but this feast is partly wasted. The vocabulary of our young people is tragically small. Even the books by Mark Twain and Jack London (whom our American children and grandchildren seldom read, if at all), to say nothing of Jane Austen, Dickens, and Thackery, are full of words they don’t understand and don’t care to learn. Dictionaries are getting richer and richer, while individual vocabularies have dwindled like Balzac’s la peau du chagrin (my favorite phrase, which, much to my chagrin, no student I have met so far was able to understand).

More harping on the same note! Fatsis did not mention Spelling Bee, this institutionalized torture chamber, but devoted an enthusiastic chapter to the Word of the Year. What passions, what spirited discussions about a moth that will die an hour later! And all that from the people who call themselves linguists. That says something about the level of modern linguistics. Fatsis, as I said, takes the liveliest interest in such contests. He is a man of liberal views, investigates at great length the history of the adjective woke, likes the new use of pronouns, and many other things that are not to my taste. But I am a highbrow, while he would probably be proud to call himself a lowbrow (no offence meant, and I hope no offence taken). I would prefer chapters on pronunciation and etymology in dictionaries. Both subjects are barely mentioned in the book.

Glossaries and dictionaries have existed for millennia, but the Internet and AI killed their print versions. Such is the way of all flesh. Though even today people sometimes ride horses in towns, usually they drive cars. The OED and Merriam Webster have survived so far by resorting to websites and ads of all kinds and thus attracting funding, but even they have gone online. All print editions have succumbed to the spirit of our virtual epoch. Do you still remember Funk and Wagnalls, the glorious Random House, and the many editions of Heritage Dictionary? Gone, all gone, and with them hundreds of lexicographers were, to use the impolite British phrase, made redundant. In his recent interview with the Pennsylvania Gazette, Fatsis said (in connection with print books and newspapers): “The New York Times is thriving in part because of its growth of its games and recipes offerings.” Hear, hear!

My conclusion? A fine book. Read it from cover to cover. Some chapters are truly excellent, the best one being about the late collector Madeline Kripke. The last two chapters are also excellent. And here is the opening sentence of the Introduction: “I fell in love with the dictionaries on my eleventh birthday. My big present that day in 1974 was Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (Second college edition, Deluxe Color edition), published by the World Publishing Company of Cleveland, Ohio).” Nothing is better than remaining true to one’s first love, especially when it is reciprocated.

_{Featured image: Image from page 450 of “The California horticulturalist and floral magazine” (1870). Public domain via The Internet Archive on Flickr.}

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An etymological ham<i>burg</i>er

My thanks are to Keith Ritchie, who in his comment on the previous post noted that in Scotland, trousers are still called breeches. Unintentionally, today’s word also begins with the letter b, as the italicized part of the title indicates, but it has nothing to do with clothes.

English speakers and speakers in the wide world know the German word burg from place names (Magdeburg, St. Petersburg, and so forth), though only hamburgers, or rather burgers, as they are called, made burg really famous. The closest English cognates (that is, related forms) of burg are all over the place but hidden in compounds and not always easily recognizable. Such are –bury (as in Canterbury), –borough (as in Scarborough and Gainsborough), and of course, –burg itself, as in Edinburgh, with its unexpected pronunciation of –burgh and the redundant h at the end. (But think of Pittsburgh, USA, and of Charles Lindbergh: they could not do without final h either!) Incidentally, the noun burrow “rabbit’s or fox’s hole” is, quite probably, also related to burg, so that Alice in Wonderland need not have been surprised to find the place so well-inhabited.

The word that interests us is one the most ancient and most often-discussed words in historical Germanic linguistics. It occurred in all the earliest texts of the Germanic family, including the fourth-century Gothic Bible. The Old English form was burg; –bury in place names is a relic of the now extinct dative case. As far as we can judge, the ancient burg ~ borg existed for protecting people. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that the verbs bury and borrow are also derived from this root. Protection is a loose concept. Thus, borrow means “to take on pledge or credit.” Note: on pledge or credit!

The trouble with the origin of burg ~ borg is that we have a great lot of information and cannot always decide which bit of it to use. The nouns attested in the oldest Germanic languages and cited above meant “height, wall; castle; city.” The Gothic Bible was translated from Greek. The Greek word the translator saw was pólis “town,” but we do not know what exactly pólis meant in fourth-century Greek. (Note: we are dealing with Medieval, not Classical Greek!) “Town” is a loose concept. In the remote past, Germanic people did not live in towns. The German cognate of English town is Zaun “fence.” Greek pólis also takes us to “fortress, enclosed space on high ground, hilltop.” The beginning was the same everywhere.

Apparently, the early town was a place fenced in. Russian gorod “town” (as in Novgorod “new town”) also refers to a fence. Likewise, the Icelandic tún, a letter for letter cognate of town and Zaun, is a fenced, fertilized home meadow surrounding a farmhouse. Yet the idea that the initial meaning of all our words was “fence,” though defended by some reputable scholars, has little appeal. Likewise, the gloss Gothic baurgs (pronounced as borgs) ~ Greek pólis is less illuminating than it may seem at first sight, because in another Gothic text, baurgs renders the Greek word for “tower” (“stronghold to flee to”?). The German word Bürger did indeed mean “inhabitant of a town,” while its Gothic counterpart seems to have meant “citizen.” On the whole, despite the numerous unclear points, we may say that German burg once referred to “enclosure; protection; fortification.”

What then was the origin of this word? German (and Common Germanic) Berg “mountain” comes to mind as a possible cognate: berg and burg, if related, had different vowels by a regular rule. But were “burgs” built on mountains? If they were structures within an enclosure, mountains were a rather unlikely place for those “towns.” On the other hand, mountains gave people good protection from attackers. We also notice Latin burgus, a borrowing of Greek púrgos “tower, fortification.” Germanic tribes were Ancient Rome’s neighbors for centuries, and borrowed words went both ways. Many Latin words infiltrated Germanic and several other languages, while quite a few others went from Germanic to Latin. However, importing such a Germanic word to or borrowing it from Medieval Greek is improbable.

The Greek noun púrgos is of obscure origin, perhaps itself a loan from some neighboring language. Many of our readers have certainly heard about the famous Pergamon altar (see the header). Pergamon is a Greek place name, and the first syllable (perg-) sounds almost like berg-. In travels from Scandinavia to Greece, from Burgundy (note the place name!) to Pergamon and all the way to the ancient Hittite kingdom, one finds similar place names and similar (almost identical) words having the root berg– or perg– (vowels of course alternated according to the well-known rules : e ~ o ~  u), with the form berg/perg predominating, and all of them refer to fortresses and mountains.

It was therefore suggested long ago that we are dealing with a so-called migratory word, probably pre-Indo-European. In such situations, linguists often refer to the substrate, that is, some unknown ancient language of an extinct tribe. But a migratory word is not even a borrowing from a substrate: it is a term that travels all over the enormous continent (in this case of Eurasia). Of course, it had some source, but we can no longer discover it. Its vowels adapt to the rule of the “guest” language, and the words pretend to be native. They do become native, though they are, rather, naturalized foreigners. Isn’t it odd that a word like German Bürger goes back to an alien root?

As a final flourish, I would like to note that the trouble with the root b-r-g is as acute in Slavic as in Germanic. For example, Russian bereg means “bank; shore,” and bereg– is also the root of a verb meaning “to preserve; keep in safety.” Both words show some phonetic irregularities, and familiar hypotheses have been offered about their history. Cognates of the noun and the verb have been recorded all over the Slavic-speaking world. As far as I can understand, some link between the words in Germanic and Slavic has been recognized, but the borrowing by Slavic from Germanic does not look like a viable option. Nor do Slavic etymological dictionaries refer to substrates or migratory words. A hamburger is a relatively simple thing. All the rest is questionable and complicated.

_{Featured image: photo of the Pergamon Altar by Miguel Hermosa Cuesta. CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Endless trouble with <i>breeches</i>

The trouble begins with the pronunciation of the word breeches. Why does breeches (seemingly so, in the US) often rhyme with riches, rather than reaches? In the best books on the history of English, I could not find a satisfactory answer, but this complication is minor. The real problem is the origin of the word. (I cannot do this without an impotent jab of AI, this wolf in sheep’s clothing. I asked the computer about the short vowel in breeches, and AI supplied me with several lines of nonsense.)

The names of articles of clothing are often troublesome to an etymologist, partly because they tend to travel from land to land with the objects they designate, so that, for example, specialists in English etymology are called upon to deal with the history of Greek, Latin, Celtic, or Slavic words (to name just a few of the possible sources) and offer opinions about the data they know imperfectly or not at all.

As long as we stay with breeches, consider some other names for “loose-fitting garments for the loins and legs” (dictionary definitions of the most common words are a joy to read): pants (shortening of pantaloons; Italian), trousers (French), jeans (also Romance), knickerbockers (from a proper name), and in connection with proper names, bloomers may be mentioned. Probably, most people remember the origin of Levi’s.

Breeches and its cognates have traveled over half of the world for centuries, and over time, a mountain of linguistic literature dealing with the word has accrued. This word certainly originated in the singular (that is, breech was meant). It occurred in all the Old Germanic languages, except Gothic. We know Gothic only from a fourth-century translation of the Gospels (the original was in Greek), but the characters mentioned in the New Testament did not wear trousers (or breeches). The forms of the word in the recorded Germanic languages are so similar that all of them either go back to the same ancient native protoform or were borrowed from the same foreign source. That form or source must have sounded as brōk (ō designates a long vowel, approximately as in Modern English awe; as far as we can judge, that brōk rhymed with Modern English hawk).

And here’s the rub. If the word was native (Germanic), why did people call that article of clothing brōk? (Such is of course the perennial question of all etymology: only onomatopoetic, sound–imitative words, like ga-ga and croak, are transparent.) As regards brōk, we know only one thing for sure. The old noun was singular (that is, breech). To give a relatively late example, in a thirteenth-century German romance, the youth’s mother sews such a brōk (German bruoch) for him as part of a one-piece hunting outfit.

Since the Germanic word refuses to reveal its origin, historical linguists looked at the evidence in other languages and, naturally, noticed Celtic brāca (a similar meaning), along with its less common doublet bracca. The once powerful Celts were close neighbors of the “Teutons,” as Germanic-speaking tribes were referred to in the past (the German form is die Germanen). Germanic and Celtic share numerous words, and sometimes such words occur only in those two language groups. They may designate natural phenomena (shadow belongs here), tribal property (the most interesting term in this group is town), social relations(here the history of free and oath is worthy of notice), and so forth. The most spectacular borrowing from Celtic into Germanic is perhaps iron: apparently, it was the Celts who taught their Germanic neighbors how to deal with iron.

Even when a word has been recorded only in Germanic and Celtic (that is, without cognates elsewhere: in Greek, Latin, Slavic, and so forth), we cannot be sure who borrowed from whom or whether speakers of both language groups borrowed their word from a third source about which we have no information. The recorded Celtic forms that interest us are braca and bracca. Whence the long consonant in bracca? This cc is usually called emphatic, but what was so emotional about a rather trivial piece of clothing? Or did the word once have n in the root (branca?), so that nc became cc? To repeat: who borrowed from whom? Or was there a third source from which the Celts and the “Germanen” borrowed both the piece of clothing and its name? Incidentally, the oldest (unrecorded) Celtic form is also controversial.

Elmar Seebold, the most recent editor of Fridrich Kluge’s etymological dictionary of German, wrote a detailed entry on Bruch and pointed out that the Germanic word has a less opaque history than the Celtic one, because it may be related to the verb break, while the Celtic word has no cognates. But the relation of breech to break is uncertain, and I could not verify the Old English and Old Icelandic names of the body parts Seebold cites. Where then are we? In a sadly familiar place: the hunt was exciting, but the target escaped us. Breech is a very old Germanic and Celtic word, whose ultimate origin has not been found. The etymologist, as I have noted more than once, is a lonely hunter.

Recently, I cited a proverb advising us not to eat cherries with great men. Such adages seem to have bookish origins: they are insipid and too long, even bombastic. In one’s breeches (synonym: in one’s buttons) “perfectly fit” was recorded in several parts of England a century and a half ago and sounds like a genuine “folk creation.” Probably the same holds for the phrase to wear the breeches “to usurp the authority of the husband.” A medieval equivalent of this phrase existed in Italy, and in the nineteenth century it occurred in French and Dutch. Incidentally, in medieval Iceland, the husband was allowed to divorce his wife if she wore breeches. A look at breeches in the OED is also revealing. Other than that, stay in your breeches.

_{Featured image: Christ with his disciples, A.N. Mironov. C-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Americana: enter hillbilly. Moby Dick follows

This is a continuation of the previous post, devoted to all kinds of country bumpkins. Hillbilly looks like the most uninspiring word to discuss: it is so obviously made up of hill + billy. This is also what the entry in the OED online says. The entry has not yet been updated, but as regards etymology, there may not be anything to update. Though the word is rather old, the dates of its first occurrence in print vary. In a source for 2008,1893 is mentioned. The extremely detailed entry in Wikipedia gives 1892. Webster’s dictionary online pushes the date to the 1880s but gives no references. Those details matter little: apparently, the word became rather well-known toward the end of the nineteenth century, which means that it was coined earlier. We have no way of knowing how much earlier.

From an etymological point of view, hillbilly does not look more exciting than, for example, blackboard. A blackboard is indeed a black board, but think of blackmail, blacksmith, greyhound, blueprint, greenhorn, and redneck. Is their origin fully transparent? Greyhound is particularly tricky (even though the dog is grey!). Hillbilly may also contain a secret, among other reasons, because compounds and collocations with rhyming components (like claptrap, hobnob, hodgepodge, and Georgie Porgie) are almost too good to be true, that is, their origin may not be as transparent as it seems. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde wrote a tale titled The Sphinx without a Secret. You never can tell.

Surprisingly, an alternate etymology of hillbilly has been offered. The Dictionary of American Regional English quotes a well-known passage from an old column in the New York Times: “Protestants who came of Appalachian stock were called ‘hillbillies’ and the term connoted ignorance, poverty, vile habits and, in general, low lifers perfectly at home in a pig pen.” Jack Morgan published a short note on the subject in the journal Comments on Etymology (22/8, 1993, p. 22). He was intrigued by the emphasis on Protestant and cited another researcher, in whose opinion the word hillbilly goes back to the emigrants’ preoccupation with their hero “King Billy” (that is, William of Orange), so that they became known as Billy-boys of the hill country. This is a very unlikely source of hillbilly (to put it mildly).  

The historians who stress the North English/Scottish ancestry of the original settlers “of Appalachian stock” failed to find a probable source of the word in Scotland (that is, no appropriate etymon ofhillbilly exists in Scots). Most likely, the word hillbilly is an American coinage, though this fact does not exclude a non-Appalachian “ancestor.” The authors of the article published in the journal American Speech 83, 2008, p. 215, say: “… prior to [!] the word’s chief association with mountaineers in Southern Appalachia and the Ozarks, hillbilly was also generally used in the American language to refer to residents of hill country, especially those in the backwoods districts, in the lower Midwest and Deep South” (emphasis added). To conclude, anyone from hill country was a hillbilly! (Those interested in JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the discussion of this book will find a lot of information on the Internet.)

I’ll now cite a curious German parallel to hillbilly. German Hillebille is a wooden hardboard that served as a primitive signaling device, chiefly in the Graz mountains. People struck it in case of fire and on many other occasions. The etymology of this word is unknown, because neither component of Hillebille means anything in German. Only some dialectal Dutch cognates of hille– seem to contain allusions to romping and other precipitous movements. Between 1894 and 1898, a spate of publications appeared in the local, now little-remembered, but at one time well-read German periodicals describing the device, but almost nothing was then or later said about the word’s origin (the few suggestions I found are not worth discussing). The German Wikipedia describes the device, gives a picture of it, and points out that no connection exists between the German and the American noun. (In America, this connection would not have occurred to anyone, because outside Germany, Hillebille is a word people do not know, while I ran into it more or less by chance.)

Indeed, the similarity is, most probably, coincidental, except that both might be “emotional formations.” English hillbilly is a humorous coinage, even if it surfaced as an offensive sobriquet, while the German noun is rather obviously sound-imitative. Nothing points to the fact that German immigrants brought this word to the Appalachians and produced a German-English pun, that is, turned Hillebille into Hill Billy. Only the coincidence is curious. Thus, we have come full circle: Hillbilly emerged unscathed (a “Billy” from the hills), while the German near-homonym remains unexplained and unrelated to its English twin.

Stalled in the mountains, we will progress to the ocean with our Americana. Chapter 53 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick is titled “The Gam.” Those who have read the book will remember that it opens with a page bearing the title “Etymology.” Therefore, they won’t be surprised that the author supplied us with the following explanation toward the end of that chapter: “GAM. Noun—A social meeting of two (or more) whale-ships on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats’ crews; the two captains remaining, for the time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other.” A good professional definition, even though not containing an explanation of origins.

The OED online features this odd word but cannot offer a decisive etymology. Indeed, such a monosyllabic word might come from all kinds of sources. Erich Maria Remarque even wrote a novel about a woman named Gam (certainly, not his best book). Once again, I have nothing to offer, except for an uninspiring lookalike. Russian gam (pronounced like English gum) means “great noise; ruckus.” The word is probably sound-imitative (onomatopoeic). Could English gam also once refer to a noisy gathering? To conclude, we ended up with two obscure, possibly sound-imitative, words, whose origin should have been clear, but the solution escaped us. As usual, I am turning to our readers’ expertise. Perhaps someone knows more about Hillebille and gam than I do. If so, kindly send us your comments.

_{Featured image: Photo by Ken Jacobsen. Public domain via Pexels.}

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Hobnobbing with a hillbilly

It is unimaginable how many denigrating names people have invented for our breadwinners and shepherds! Those names were, I assume, coined by city dwellers who did not want to soil their hands with earth and manure. Urban dwellers are urbane and genteel, while dwellers in villages are villains. Right? To be sure, those are the most extreme traces of the medieval (feudal) attitude toward the populace, but our more modern vocabulary is neither more tolerant nor gentler.

A look at some of the better-known synonyms for hillbilly is worth an effort. One such word is hayseed, a late sixteenth-century metaphor, now, at least in the US, mainly remembered as meaning “comical rustic.” (Rustics, except in the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, are comical by definition, aren’t they?) Now, what is wrong with the inconspicuous, tiny hayseeds, “grass seeds obtained from hay,” as dictionaries very properly inform us. Yet a hayseed is also one of the names for a country bumpkin. The suffix –kin in bumpkin is Dutch (as in mannikin, napkin, Wilkins, and the unforgettable bare bodkin), so that the entire noun bumpkin is probably also of Dutch origin. It seems to mean “a little tree” (implying a blockhead?).

Wood has not fared well in our metaphors. For instance, Russian dubina “a big wooden stick” (stress on the second syllable; the word more or less rhymes with English farina) means “idiot.” The root bump– in bumpkin ends in an excrescent sound (that is, a sound added without etymological justification: see the post for last week) and means “wood,” as do English beam and German Baum. The implication seems to be clear, because wood is neither gentle nor genteel. A wooden smile will hardly meet with a sweet response. Nor is a wooden gait graceful. However, a bumpkin does not have to be a country dweller. Oliver Goldsmith introduced a rather endearing spoiled brat and trickster Tony Lumkin in his play She Stoops to Conquer. The name, modeled on bumpkin, became proverbial. Tony was not a “hayseed.”

Back to the countryside, where one is expected to meet numerous hicks and rubes. Surprisingly, hick is Hick, a doublet of Rick (Richard), just as Hob is a doublet of Rob, and Hodger of Roger. The union of h and r has a long and interesting history, but it is anybody’s guess why just Hick became a synonym for bumpkin. We may also ask why our genteel restroom is called john and sometimes jenny, while Shakespeare’s contemporaries used a jake for the same purpose. Words from names are countless, and you need a historical linguist, rather than any Tom, Dick, and Harry, to explain their origin. Modesty prevents me from discussing dick, but Richard arrived at Dick by way of its rhyming partner Rick (who, as we have seen, is also Hick). Hick is as good a synonym for “country bumkin” as any other.

More words like bumkin? Take joskin. It sometimes seems that any name, supposedly or really common, might acquire the sense “hayseed.” Yet most peasants were never called Hick! The same holds for Rube, briefly mentioned above. Rube is short for Reuben. According to the story known from the Old Testament, Reuben came to a sad end, but to repeat, Reuben/Rube was never among the most popular names in the English-speaking world, and especially in the countryside. Why then are hicks also called rubes? Just to commemorate a man cursed by his father and to transfer the guilt to an uncultivated villager? Incidentally, some of the names mentioned above are rather recent, a fact that complicates our story even more.

The stock of names for hayseeds and their ilk is almost inexhaustible. Louts and lubbers (the latter as in landlubber) join this motley, nondescript company. Lout is supposedly related to a verb meaning “to bend” (by way of “clown”?). No one takes this derivation seriously, but every dictionary mentions it with a question mark. Lubber is also problematic. Its Old French lookalike does mean “swindler,” but though Middle English may have borrowed such a word from French, more likely, lobur ~ lobeor ~ lobre was part of the Common European slang of the lower classes and criminals (such words existed; this jargon or argot, is called Gaunersprache and Rotwelsch in German).

Another etymology traces lubber to Middle Dutch lobben “clown” (again clown!) with reference to words for “lump.” More probably, the French, Dutch, and English nouns are indeed part of thieves’ (wandering traders’, strollers’) late medieval jargon, used in several parts of Europe. The very word slang may have a similar origin. See the post for September 28, 2016 (“The origin of the word ‘slang’ is known”) and the comments.

The king of hayseeds is probably the hillbilly. The etymology of hillbilly is of course clear, isn’t it? By no means! To this subject the entire next post will be devoted.

POSTSCRIPT

1. Last week, I mentioned William Bates, the author of an excellent essay on the origin of limerick in Notes and Queries, and expressed my regret that I could not find any information about him. As usual, my colleague Dr. Stephen Goranson came to the rescue. This circumstance did not surprise me. Over the years, I have often witnessed his uncanny ability to ferret out all kinds of well-hidden information. This time, he sent me an obituary of Dr. Bates (1821-1884) from the Birmingham Daily Post, an important regional newspaper. Willian Bates, a surgeon, was also well-known in the world of art and literature. The short obituary made a special mention of his contributions to Notes and Queries. A century and a half ago, permanent association with NQ might make one famous or at least distinguished. Those were days! I may add that my database of English etymology features fifteen contributions by William Bates to word origins. No doubt, he also wrote on other subjects. Incidentally, I, too, searched for William Bates and found two celebrities called this, but not the one unearthed by Stephen Goranson.

2. I have a rich database of obscure proverbs and idioms. Here is one of them: “Those that eat cherries with great persons shall have their eyes sprinkled out with stones.” Its analogues have been recorded in German, Romanian, and in a famous medieval Dutch poem. Such an elaborately picturesque and seemingly usleless proverb! Does anyone know its source? Perhaps Dr. Wolfgang Mieder, our great specialist in this area, will enlighten us. Anyway, enjoy a peaceful image of eating cherries below.

_{Featured image: A group of farmers harvesting paddy in Bangladesh. Photo by Zaheed Sarwer Khan. CC-BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A tortuous journey: the word <i>pamphlet</i>

In English, pamphlet is synonymous with booklet, brochure, but in some other modern European languages, a pamphlet makes one rather think of its synonym lampoon. The word surfaced in writing in 1415, and only two things are clear about its origin: pamphlet did not carry political overtones when it was coined, and it must have had a foreign source (or, because of its spelling with ph, was at least understood to be a loan from Latin or Greek).

It is astounding how often and how passionately scholars and amateurs at one time discussed the origin of pamphlet in the popular press. The main vehicle was, as usual, Notes and Queries, but no old etymological dictionary missed the word. The OED online presents a clear picture of the history of the word and supports a well-argued etymology, which was first offered in 1874 by the great French philologist Gaston Paris in Revue Critique, for September 26, 1874, p. 107. The full OED volume with the letter P appeared in 1909.

These are the main old hypotheses about the derivation of pamphlet. Perhaps the etymon is the French phrase par un filet “(held together) by a thread,” with reference to a single occurrence of the word written as paunflet (as though panflet, with u inserted) and an additional reference to French brochure “brochure” (brocher “to stitch together”; see a picture of a relatively old brochure in the heading). This etymon has been offered and rejected many times, because pamphlets contained a page or two, without a cover, and did not have to be connected by means of a thread.

Another suggested source was papyrus, and I might have passed it by as devoid of interest if it had not been defended by Frank Chance, a talented philologist. In some form this hypothesis can already be found in Stephen Skinner’s 1671 etymological dictionary of English. Chance believed that in a word like papyrus the consonant m might easily be inserted (another insertion!). He cited a few analogs of this phenomenon but not English empty: this adjective goes back to ǣmtig. Also,sumpter “packhorse” developed from Old French som(m)etier; in it the entire group mp is excrescent (that is, added without etymological justification). The Old Dutch noun pampier meant “paper.” Frank Chace believed that pampinus and papyrus “got mixed up.” There is a cruel law of etymology: the more complicated the proposed derivation, the greater the certainty that it is wrong. Not without regret, I have to dismiss Chance’s hypothesis as unrealistic.

A somewhat similar guess was offered in 1889 by Richard Stephen Charnock, a good folklorist but a totally unreliable word historian: “…from Spanish papeléta, diminutive of papél paper from which, with an infixed m, pamphlets might have been formed.” Why the infix, and why Spanish?

Naturally, Walter W. Skeat did not stay away from this discussion either. He reconstructed the date when papyrus probably turned up in English texts and came to the conclusion “that the word must be French, with a Greek root.” And here the Greek historian named Pamphila appeared on the scene (she was discovered long before Skeat in this context). Pamphila lived in the first century CE and enjoyed great popularity. Her multiple works are, it appears, lost. As far as our word is concerned, the posited way must have been from the author’s name to a common noun. The process is common. For instance, we may say that travelers take a Baedeker when they go abroad. Yet in the latest edition of A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Skeat wrote: “Etymology quite uncertain. We find French pamphile, the knave of clubs, from the Greek name Pamphilus. Similarly, I should suppose that there was a French form *pamphilet [the asterisk denotes here and below a reconstructed form] or Late Latinpamphilētus, coined from Latin Pamphila….” At the end of the entry, he added a noncommittal reference to Gaston Paris.

Pamphlets were erotic (“amatory”) tracts, and as early as 1344, Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and a great bibliophile, recollected in his book Philoliblon (“The Love of Books”) that the youths of his generation had cared more for fat palfreys than for leanpanfletos (sic). In those days, students were advised to stay away from pamphlets! Surely, the learned Pamphila need not interest us in this context. Such was also the opinion of Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s main predecessor in the area of English etymology. Another Pamphila, responsible for the manufacture of silk, enjoys renown. She cannot be the heroine of our tale either.

The most detailed summary of older views on the history of the word pamphlet will be found in an article by William Bates (Notes and Queries 3/V, 1864, 187-169; see also NQ 3/IV, 1864, 325). I am sorry that I could not find any information about this extremely knowledgeable man.

The second edition of The Century Dictionary summarized some of the attempts to explain the derivation of pamphlet and listed four main hypotheses: 1) from a supposed Old French *paum-fueillet (as though “a leaf of paper held in the hand”), 2) from a supposed Medieval Latin *pagina filata “a threaded (sewed) leaf,” 3) from a supposed use of French par un filet “by a thread,” and 4) from a supposed Old French *pamfilet, Medieval Latin *pamfiletus, resting upon a name Pamphilus or Pamphila, of Greek origin. And here is the corollary at the end of the entry: “The last conjecture is plausible (compare the like personal origin of donet, a grammar, from the name Donatus, and of French calepin, a notebook, from the name Calepinus), but historic proofs are lacking.” My reference to Baedeker is less exotic. Yet I tend to agree with the conclusion by the Century Dictionary.

These are the reasons for my uncertainty. It is usually believed that pamphlet emerged in French, made its way into English, and was later retranslated by French. Perhaps so. I can only add that though words from names and titles are fine, no one, not even the knave of clubs, was called Pamphlet! It is understood that –et in pamphlet is a French suffix. English, –let (as in rivulet, bracelet, and their likes) seems to have emerged in English a century and a half later than the word that interests us. It seems that in 1415, no one in England would have divided pamphlet into pamph-let, but the new noun may have sounded vulgar. Sound groups like pump, pomp, pimp are sound-imitative (the German noun Pumpf means “a fart”). Perhaps this circumstance contributed to the word’s popularity among students. And as for the sound f after m in pamphlet, compare English humph, with its exotic spelling ph!

POSTSCRIPT

1. After the reemergence of this blog, two of our readers expressed their joy that THE OXOFORD ETYMOLOGIST is back on track. I am deeply grateful for their comments.

2. In connection with my derivation of yeoman, a reader reminded us of the British river yeo and suggested that the earliest yeomen might be recruited from that area. I could find no evidence of this connection, while the existence of another word with yeo– (which I mentioned) and of the Dutch cognate of yeo– seem to point in another direction.

3. In commenting on the history of limerick (see the previous post), Stephen Goranson pointed out that during the Civil War in the US, the phrase come to Limerick meant “get to the point, come to terms,” in connection with the Treaty of Limerick (1691). This is a most welcome reference. Search the Internet for THE TREATY OF LIMERICK.

_{Featured image: Pamphlet, “Adieux de madame la duchesse de Polignac aux francois,” 1789. Photo by Eliasdo, CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Bob Turvey, a student of limericks

I have recently read two books by Bob Turvey: The Secret Life of Limericks (Ithaca, NY, 2024. 286 pp.), and Why Are Limericks Called Limericks: An Etymological Detective Story (Bristol, England: Waldegrave Publishing, 2025. 295 pp.). The first book was sponsored by The Mad Duck Coalition, about which I know nothing and am not certain whether it should be featured among the publishers. This, however, matters little, because what really matters is the author’s career and achievement. Last week, I promised to write about his books and am happy to be able to keep my promise.

The author’s career is certainly worthy of mention. Bob Turvey has a doctorate from Cambridge University. As a research chemist he worked in many countries and now lives in Bristol, England. He devoted forty years to studying the history of limericks, spared no money on buying old and recondite books, and never stopped learning more and more about his subject. Probably no one in the world knows half as much about limericks as he does, and therefore, I first envisaged a limerick in his honor, composed in my best Bristol fashion. “A limerick, new, for Bob Turvey?! / Indeed, but it went topsy-turvy. / Neither reason nor rhyme. / I am not in my prime, / Though still unabashedly vervy.” Too bad! I mean the self-effacing admission, but at least this is the first occurrence of the adjective vervy in English. Does the OED take note of blogs?

The earlier of the aforementioned volumes contain the history of eighteen famous limericks. By the way, according to Turvey, here is the most often translated limerick ever: “There was an old man of Boolong/ Who frightened the birds with his song/ It wasn’t the words/ Which astonished the birds/ But the horrible dooble-ontong.” This masterpiece is now almost forgotten, or perhaps it has fallen into temporary desuetude. One wonders what there is to study, while dealing with this or any limerick. Many, many things. First of all, the references. For example, what is and where is Boolong? Is it Boulogne? And why is French entendre pronounced in this ridiculous way? It turned out that such was indeed the way people pronounced the French group –endre when, for example, Dickens and Thackeray were active. No, it did not “turn out”: the fact had to be discovered and documented.

And who composed the limerick? We are not delving into the epoch of Homer or even Shakespeare: no limerick predates the nineteenth century. But popular limericks are almost folklore, and finding their authors is like chasing the author of “Little Red Riding Hood.” (By the way, as Jack Zipes has shown, this tale did probably have an individual author!) And here I am coming to one of the main points of my report.

The first printed version of nearly all limericks appeared in students’ magazines at Oxford/Cambridge or in newspapers. Bob Turvey sifted through tens of thousands of pages in British, American, Canadian, and Australian magazines and newspapers, many of which can now (fortunately) be found online, and sometimes (!) he ran into what seemed to be the first occurrence of the printed text. (I know only too well this labor of love, though in hunting for articles and long-forgotten notes on etymology I limited myself to journals and popular magazines. I realized that I would drown in newspapers, with their word columns and answers to the readers’ queries, and stayed away from this inexhaustible source.) But even the seemingly secure result may not be final. Thus, the author of the Boolong limerick remains undiscovered, though at least two viable candidates have emerged as such.

Is this labor worth the trouble? To my mind, certainly. To give an example from another area. Recently, a piece of music has emerged, with the notes written by Chopin. The piece has been known for years, and yet the discovery was hailed as a great sensation. And quite rightly so: Chopin’s own hand! Limericks are a noticeable part of the culture of the English-speaking world, and their history deserves the attention of those who care for culture. Unfortunately, “history” is made up of tiny details. Only later may they be assembled to produce an impressive whole. Bob Turvey collected countless fragments, and the mosaic he produced is impressive. I should add that he is often satisfied with negative results: he might not be able to find the exact date and the sought-for author, but always succeeded in rejecting fanciful hypotheses. Once again I see a parallel to my work. Sifting through numerous hypotheses of a word’s origin, I often manage to get rid of silly or fanciful conjectures but fail to discover the truth. Such is the way of all reconstruction, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Note my reference above to the culture of the English-speaking world. Limericks can also be produced in other languages, but only English speakers compose them by the hundreds. Bob Turvey noted how hard it often is for foreigners to understand the funniest limericks. He ascribed this fact to the specific English sense of humor, but his examples feature the people whose knowledge of English is inadequate for detecting a pun or a hidden reference. Though the English (French, Jewish) sense of humor certainly exists, we still don’t know why Edward Lear’s 1846 The Book of Nonsense was such a success. Limericks, though not called limericks, existed before him.

As noted, Turvey’s second volume is titled Why Are Limericks Called Limericks? But the book is also about when and who. The earliest mention the word limerick Bob Turvey dug up goes back to 1879, that is, at least a decade earlier than what one could find in old dictionaries. Now 1879 is also the date given in the OED online. Rather probably, limericks were called limericks because they were sung between verses of a song whose chorus included the name Limerick and typically invited the listener “to come to Limerick.” Why come to Limerick? The question remains open. For comfort, you will see a view of that town in the heading of this post. Anyone with a better derivation of the word limerick is welcome to contest this hypothesis. Limerick is certainly not a “corrupted” form of Learick.

You expected a sensation and received a reasonable hypothesis. That’s because the author of the books discussed above bases his conclusions on facts and is not interested in sensations. He is a true scholar.

POSTSCRIPT

I have recently received two questions. Since I am not sure when I’ll be able to post the next issue of my traditional gleanings, I’ll answer both right now. 1) Some people believe that the idiom chock a block is a loan from Turkish, in which an identical word means the same. This conjecture looks unconvincing, because their proponents are unable to show how the Turkish idiom reached English. In chock a block, the word chock is the same as in chockfull. 2) Another correspondent cited a Polish word, whose Russian cognate is diuzhii “strong,” and asked me whether I know it. Yes, I do. It is a cognate of English doughty and German tüchtig, whose origin has been explained quite well.

_{Featured image: King John’s Castle in Limerick by Eric the Fish. CC-by-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Labor and luck in etymology

The blog is back on track, and I’ll begin where I left off in August. I am now reading two books on the history and etymology of limerick by Mr. Bob Turvey. He spent forty years researching the subject, and I’ll devote a special post to his work, but at the moment, I can offer only “point counter point”: this short essay is about how worthwhile conclusions come as a reward for an unpredictable encounter or chance knowledge. All the examples are from my own experience, and I have written about them in the past, but they will perhaps make a stronger impression when collected in one place.

An especially enigmatic English word (enigmatic with regard to its origin) is yeoman, which surfaced in written texts in roughly the middle of the thirteenth century (obviously, it existed in speech some time before it was recorded). The riddle is yeo-. The etymology, half-heartedly (?) supported by the revised OED (the entry was touched up last in 2025), traces yeo– to young. I assume that my hypothesis is more realistic, because, for phonetic reasons, yeo- cannot be traced to young.

Now back to coincidence and luck. In my research, I look through numerous books, on the off-chance that they may contain some information I need. In an obscure book on Dutch linguistics, I came across a detailed discussion of the English dialectal noun yeomath “a second-year crop of grass,” which, predictably, the OED also records, and the entry contains a sagacious guess about yeo– that provides a good but not final clue to this enigmatic sound group. Young grass? No, the prefix means “additional.” With regard to the details, see the post for June 17, 2009. A yeoman was, quite probably, understood as an “added man.” In nearly seven years since 2009, neither Wikipedia nor etymonline (both are sensitive to new hypotheses) has commented on my suggestion, and I decided to repeat it here. I also contributed an essay on yeoman to an excellent Festschrift, but alas, the scholarly climate has changed dramatically since the nineteenth century. Such volumes, honoring retired and still active philologists, are now so numerous that even specialists have a hard time following them.

Watch one more attack on grassroots. English fog means “thick mist,” but in dialects, fog also refers to “second-year crop.” This time, it was a different kind of luck that provided a clue to the riddle. How can “fog” and “grass” be connected? By an accident of birth, my native language is Russian, and I know the Russian words par “steam, vapor” and par “field left under steam/vapor.” Both have the root meaning “to become damp, moist.” Fog, with its final g, is almost certainly a word of Scandinavian origin (English words, like sedge. ridge, bridge, and so forth, end an affricate). Related to this fog is, quite probably, German feucht “damp.” The same semantic thread connects Russian par¹ and par² as the two English nouns. If I did not know Russian, this analogy would never have occurred to me.

Another reward for knowing Russian may not impress too many of our readers, because that key word is Icelandic, rather than English. Yet the case is curious. Icelandic glenna refers to all kinds of open spaces, from “a ray of sunshine” and “a deceptive move in wrestling” to “a clearing in the forest” and “perineum” (hear, hear!). It also means “joke” and all kinds of trickery. Given enough ingenuity, semantic bridges can be built between any two concepts, but still, “joke” and “perineum”?

I decided to look up Russian shutka “joke” in etymological dictionaries and discovered that its Bulgarian cognate means “vagina.” This sense left Bulgarian researchers nonplused. But Icelandic glenna explains everything. We remember “perineum,” don’t we? In the past, shutka referred to a quick motion, leap (with the legs spread wide!), and the like. Henceanytype of opening. The sought for connection becomes clear when we look at all the old senses of shutka and the word’s related forms. But who knows Icelandic, Russian, and Bulgarian?

Until roughly the 1870s, most specialists in comparative philology were Germans. As we have seen, to connect glenna and shutka, an inquisitive linguist should be aware of the relevant Russian and Icelandic words and “accidentally” note the otherwise hidden connection. Too bad, I have never studied Welsh, Ewe, and Japanese. What precious associations must be left fallow in them, as far as I am concerned! A few historical linguists of old, Jacob Grimm and Antoine Meillet among them, knew many languages. Today, their peers are rare. To exacerbate the situation, famous polyglots, those who can talk glibly in thirty or more languages, are seldom endowed with great analytic abilities. As St. Exupéry’s Fox remarked sadly, nothing in the world is perfect.

My most amusing discovery, which I have celebrated more than once in my publications, concerns the origin of the noun pimp. See also the post for June 7, 2007. The word did not interest me, but while reading an old dialectal dictionary, I ran into the entry “pimp ‘faggot’.” I was surprised by the proximity of two infamous nouns with sexual connotations and discovered that the origin of pimp is “contested.” It is “contested,” because older English etymologists did not know the German word Pimpf, while German scholars had no idea of English pimps. Pimpf refers to a youth and specifically, to a member of the youth organization under Hitler. Like Engl. pimp and pimple, it has a root meaning “to swell” (faggots, that is, bundles of sticks, are, it follows, big pimps!).

Finally, galoot “an awkward fellow.” Like pimp, it revealed its history to me by chance. An article on Italian seafaring terms made me aware of the Italian noun galeotto “galley slave; scoundrel.” The rest was plain sailing. My etymology, proposed first in the post for July 23, 2008, has had some recognition, but alas, Webster and the OED keep saying “origin unknown.” I am patient. Everything comes to him who waits, and I hope that the tie I suggested will one day gain wider recognition.

Luck? To be sure. But to quote Tchaikovsky, inspiration never visits the lazy.

_{Featured image: Yeomen of the Guard, in procession to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, for the annual service of the Order of the Garter. Philip Allfrey, CC-by-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Your Indo-European beard

It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name. This rule works for foot, partly for eye and ear, and also for heart (even though the heart isn’t typically open to direct observation), but it breaks down for finger, toe, and leg. In any case, beards cannot easily be hidden, even with our passion for masks. Moreover, through millennia, beards have played a role far in excess of their importance, and beard is indeed a very old word. A beard used to manifest virility and strength in an almost mystical way. We remember the story of Samson: once deprived of his beard, he became a weakling and had to wait until the hair grew again on his chin, to wreak vengeance on his enemies. The earliest example of clean-shaven in The Oxford English Dictionary (OED online) goes back to 1863 (in a poem by Longfellow!), while beardless was usually applied to boy and young man.

Five years ago, I discussed, among other things, the origin of the idiom to go to Jericho, roughly synonymous with to go to hell. Judging by what turns up on the Internet, today, the origin of the phrase is known to those who are interested in etymology, but Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912) claimed that he could not find any explanation for it and referred to the Old Testament (2 Sam. X. 5 and 1 Chron. X. 5). He appears to have been the first to explain the phrase.

The story runs as follows: after the death of the king of the Ammonites, David sent his envoys to Hanun, the son of the deceased king, to comfort him. But Hanun’s counselors suspected treason, seized the envoys, had half of their beards cut off, and sent the men back. This incautious move resulted in a protracted war and the defeat of the Ammonites. When David’s envoys, deeply humiliated and almost beardless, returned home, David advised them to “tarry at Jericho till their beards were grown.” In their present shape, they were “emasculated” and could not be seen in public.

Reference to the absence of a beard is familiar from various sources. Thus, Njál, the protagonist of the most famous Icelandic saga, was wise and virile but had almost no hair on his chin, and this defect became an object of obscene jokes. By contrast, the great Scandinavian god Thor (Þórr) did have a huge beard. More about the Scandinavians will be said below.

English beard has a few immediately recognizable cognates in Germanic, such as Dutch baard and German Bart. The Slavic and Baltic words sound nearly the same. Latin barba, despite some inconsistency in the correspondence between the final consonants, seems to belong here too. But barbarian does not. Barbarian was a Greek coinage (the Greek name for beard is quite different) and referred to foreigners and their incomprehensible babbling. Those people did say something (barabara), but who could understand them, and who cared? Perhaps it should be added that the Old Celtic name for the poet (bard) has nothing to do with beards either.

As usual, a list of cognates may not tell us anything about the ultimate origin of the word (in this case, beard), and as happens so often, we find ourselves in a linguistic desert. It is not for nothing that while discussing beard, our best dictionaries list several related forms and stop. There was indeed the Old Icelandic noun barð “edge, verge, rim” (ð has the value of th in English the), but whether it is cognate with beard is unclear. It may be: the affinity between “beard” and “edge” is obvious. If so, the association that gave rise to the coining of beard stops being obscure. (Though Icelandic barð “beard” also existed, it might be a later loan from German.)

The only other Germanic name of the beard occurred just in Icelandic, and its cognates continue into Modern Scandinavian. The word was skegg, related to Old English sceacga “rough hair or wool.” Its modern reflex shag still exists, but most will remember only the adjective shaggy, related to Old English sceaga “thicket of underwood and small trees; coppice, copse,” almost a doublet of sceacga, cited above.” (In my experience, no one recognizes the word coppice, and even the spellchecker does not know copse; hence my long gloss.) We have seen that in some societies, a beardless man was not really considered to be a true male, and in light of this fact we are not surprised to find that Old Icelandic skeggi meant “man” (boys of course waited for the time when they became men). Yet the famous Romans (as far as we can judge by the extant statues) were beardless, while the Greeks had sizable beards. No custom is or was universal.

Coppice and copse are almost dead words in Modern English, and the same holds for shaw “thicket,” the modern reflex of sceacga, though still common in dialects and place names. The word owes its fame to George Bernard Shaw. No need to feel surprised at the existence of such a surname: don’t all of us know the family name Wood?

One of the curiosities of English is the verb beard “to oppose,” remembered, if at all, only from the idiom “to beard the lion in his den.” Is the implication “to face the enemy (beard to beard)” or “to catch the opponent by the beard”? An example of this phrase also occurs in the Authorized Version of the Bible, and again in connection with David. Beards, it appears, were famous, but they had to be cut and trimmed. Thorr was an obvious exception (but in the figurine that has come down to us, his beard merges with his male organ and emphasizes his potency, which is fair: an ancient thunder god was responsible for fertility). Having paid reference to shaggy males, let us also remember barbers. Today, a barber more often cuts hair than trims beards, but the etymology of barber is obvious. The Barber of Seville immortalized the profession. Long live Beaumarchais and Rossini!

_{Featured image: the Florida Grand Opera presents The Barber of Seville. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A handful of remarks on hinting and hunting

Allow me to introduce a group of seemingly ill-assorted words. Each member of this group occupies a secure place in the vocabulary of English, but no one knows for sure whether they belong together. My pair of distinguished guests is hint and hunt. They look very much alike and, in a way, their meanings are not incompatible: both presuppose the existence of a searched-for target. One wonders whether they aren’t even variants of the same verb or at least related.

It is the third time that I am returning to the origin of English hunt. See especially the post for February 12, 2020, and the comments. There will be some overlap between that essay and the one I am offering today, but now that several years have passed, I think I have partly solved the riddle (for myself) and decided to return to that intractable word.

Like some older authors, I suspect that hint and hunt are related. They even resemble non-identical twins. Mark Twain wrote a little-remembered but very funny tale “The Siamese Twins.” In the final sentence, it informs the reader that the ages of the brothers were respectively fifty-one and fifty-three. The author apologized for not mentioning this fact earlier. I decided to avoid his mistake and to make things clear right away. Hunt (the verb) has been known since the days of Old English, that is, for more than twelve centuries. By contrast, hint (the noun) first surfaced in texts by Shakespeare.

Though hint is a relatively recent word without a respectable pedigree, it looks like it belongs with hunt and hand (we use the hand for seizing things; hence an association with hunting). As expected, opinions on their relationship differ. Hunt is a typical English verb for “chasing game.” It lacks obvious cognates, but in many other languages, words meaning “hunt” are also obscure. For example, German has jagen, about whose origin nothing definite is known either.

There may be a good reason for this seemingly unexpected opaqueness—unexpected, because hunting is such a common and seemingly transparent occupation. For millennia, hunting sustained early communities, and people’s survival depended on the success of the chase. Danger lurked everywhere: the hunter might get lost, killed by his prey, or return empty-handed. Words designating such situations often fell victim to taboo, just as, for example, many animal names did. Call the bear by its name, and it will come and destroy you. But if you speak about the bear as a honey-lover (that is what they do in Russian) or the brown one (that is the case in Germanic: from a historical point of view, bear means “brown”), the beast will be duped and stay away. (Talk of the Devil, and he will appear! Right?) The same practice prevailed for the names of several wild animals, body parts, and diseases. (My apology: taboo was also made much of in the earlier post.)

Common words were distorted, and today we usually have no way of guessing what the original form was. Yet we sometimes know the idea behind the euphemism: for example, not the Devil but the Evil One (or Flibbertigibbet, for variety’s sake); not the bear, but the honey-eater or the brown one. The main Latin verb meaning “to hunt” was vēnārī, related to Venus. The idea must have been “to do something with a will, full of desire.” (A digression: the most often hunted animal was the deer, so much so that Tier, the German cognate of deer, means simply “animal.” Deer is a Germanic word, but those who have read the anthologized opening chapter in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe know that it was the Anglo-Saxons who killed deer, while the meat went to the table of the French barons. Hence venison, related to the Latin verb, cited above.)

The same seems to hold for Russian okhota (with cognates elsewhere in Slavic; stress on the second syllable): the root khot– means “to wish, desire.” The English verb hunt should probably be “deciphered” as “to catch, seize.” Perhaps, it was a vague taboo word, like its Latin and Slavic synonyms. If hint really appeared so late, it cannot be related to hunt, which, though devoid of relatives (and thus “local”), was already old even in Old English.

Fortunately, the situation is not hopeless. Hint, first recorded as a noun, meant “opportunity; slight indication or suggestion”; thus, just a dab, as it were. It was a mere reshaping (or an alternate form) of the now obsolete old verb hent “get, receive”! The desired time bridge has thus been restored. We can proceed with our chase, and while looking around, we notice the already mentioned hand, a Common Germanic word again (!) of uncertain origin, to quote some dictionaries (elsewhere in Indo-European, this extremity has quite different names.)

Could hand also be a taboo word for something like manus (manus is Latin for “hand”)? Indeed, it could. As just noted, the names of body parts are often products of taboo. Hand is an instrument of catching, grasping, “handling” things. It is an ideal member of our ill-assorted family. The scholarly literature on hunt and especially hand is huge, and many (but not all) language historians defend the ideas mentioned above. The bridge exists. Though it rests on unsafe supports, it may sustain the construction rather well.

The final actor in our drama is the Gothic verb fra-hinþan “to take captive” (fra– is a prefix; þ has the value of English th in thin). Gothic, a Germanic language (now dead), was recorded in the fourth century. Some of the Old Germanic words, related to –hinþan, mean “to reach” and “booty.” Though –hinþan and hand have often been compared, þ and d don’t match, and a reliable reconstruction depends on exact sound correspondences. Once such correspondences fail, etymologists are in trouble. However, here we seem to be dealing with a “special” taboo word, and it would be unrealistic to expect great precision in the coining of its forms. Obviously, I am pleading for special dispensation.

As usual, I refuse to press my point, but I also refuse to concede defeat. It sems that a special taboo word with the sense “grasp, seize, catch,” sharing the root hent/hint ~ hunt ~ hand did exist in Germanic, and its reflexes are still discernible today. Hinþan was a strong verb (that is, a verb, whose root vowels alternated by ablaut, as, for instance, in English bind ~ bound or run ~ ran). The nouns, related to it, were like English bend and band. If this conclusion deserves credence, hint (from hent), hunt, and hand are modern reflexes of that ancient taboo word. Let me repeat that numerous researchers think so, but the most cautious critics prefer to sit on the fence. This is fine. The fence is as good a support as any other.

_{Featured image via Pixabay.}

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An etymological knockout

We know that in English words beginning with kn– and gn– the first letter is mute. Even in English spelling, which is full of the most bizarre rules, this one causes surprise. But no less puzzling is the rule’s historical basis. At one time, know, knock, gnaw, and their likes were pronounced as they still are in related Germanic languages, that is, with k– and g- in the onset. What happened to those k- and g- sounds? The groups are hardly tongue twisters and give no one trouble in the middle of acne, acknowledge, magnet, and ignite. To be sure, in acne and their likes, k/g and n belong to different syllables, but one sometimes hears canoeing, pronounced as c’noeing, and the first consonant survives. Nor is the group kn endangered in the coda, as in taken and spoken. (Yet King Knut has become Canute: don’t expect justice from language!)

According to the evidence of contemporary observers, the destruction of k and g before n happened about five centuries ago, that is, shortly before and in Shakespeare’s time. Why did it? True, sounds undergo modification in the process of speech. For instance, most people pronounce a group like his shoes as hishshooz (this process is called assimilation), but kn– and gn– are word-initial groups, and no neighbors threaten k- and g-. As a most general rule, the cause of a systemic sound change is another major sound change. Obviously, this is not the case with initial kn– and gn– in English: no previous event triggered the loss of k and g before n.

A few analogs of the change in English have been found in German Bavarian dialects, but nothing even remotely resembling the loss of k and g before n has happened elsewhere in Germanic. In the remote past, many words began with hl– and hn-. Thus, listen and neck were at one time hlysta and hnecca, but h is a perishable sound, and “dropping” it causes little surprise. By contrast, k and g are sturdy. Our best books on the history of English describe in detail the loss of k and g before n but are silent on the causes.

Nor can I offer an airtight argument about why that process occurred, but I decided to look at the origin of the affected words and risk putting forward a hypothesis. Though knee and know have secure Indo-European cognates, most other items on the list are limited to Germanic. As usual, cognates shed little light on the prehistory of the words that interest us unless their senses diverge radically. In this case, they do not. Here are two instances. Knack: perhaps borrowed from Low German or Dutch; of imitative origin, because knack “sharp blow” exists, and in English (knack), we may be dealing with the same word. (German Knacks means “crack.”) Likewise, knapsack was taken over from the same sources, with knap perhaps being related to German knappen “to snap, crush”; thus, knap is a doublet of snap and snatch, both possibly sound-imitative.

The latest (cautious and conservative) German etymological dictionary says bluntly that kn– is a sound-symbolic group denoting pressure. The statement looks correct, but it is doomed to remain guesswork: since many words with initial kn– refer to pressure, we conclude that such is the nature of this group. The vicious circle in this reasoning (begging the question) is obvious. We are on safer ground with knell: all over Germanic, knell-, knoll-, and their look-alikes and synonyms are probably indeed sound-imitative.  

Knot and knit perhaps make us think of some increase in size. Both evoke clear visual images and are thus in some way “expressive.” Knob and its near-synonym knub (both mean “a small lump”) align themselves rather easily with the rest of kn-words. The same holds for knop “a round protuberance.” The idea that Germanic kn– is expressive (whether sound-imitative or sound symbolic) is old, and I hope the suggestion I am about to advance has some merit. Couldn’t the semantics of kn-words, their constant use under emphasis, contribute to the simplification of kn-?

Every sound change has a cause, but none is necessary. The same words retained their initial kn– in Frisian, Dutch, and Scandinavian. Languages and dialects go their different ways. It is the system’s business to ignore and suppress or make use of the stimulus. The same is true of every change. For instance, some societies resolve crises peacefully, while others are famous for continual revolutions.

If my guess has any merit, it follows that once the group kn– lost its k, the non-symbolic knife (or is it sound-symbolic?!), knee, and know remained in isolation and followed suit under the pressure of the system. It would be interesting to observe whether they were indeed the last to succumb. But we cannot relive the past in such detail, and our spelling makes us blind to the change: we still write kn-, long after its loss of k. Kn- probably did not become n– as an instantaneous act: more likely, it went through the stage of initial hn-, and some kn- ~ hn– doublets indeed existed in Old Norse.

The English gn– group is tiny: gnarled, gnash, gnat, gnaw, and a few bookish loan words: gneiss “a kind of rock,” gnome “a legendary creature,” gnosis (as recognizable in agnostic), and gnu “an African quadruped.” Gnarled is a misbegotten word, whose cognates begin with kn-. German Knorren means “knot, gnarl.” In any case, gnarled is from the historical point of view another kn-word. For the verb gnaw (Old Icelandic gnaga, German nagen) an ancient Indo-European root has been reconstructed, because similar words occur outside Germanic, but more probably, we are again dealing with a sound-imitative verb, and the same is true of gnash. It is curious that Old Icelandic gnat meant “noise.” The same is true of many Scandinavian words beginning with gn-.

Incidentally, n- in the verb neigh goes back to Old English hn-, and we witness a curious set of variants: Old Icelandic gneggja, Modern Icelandic hneggja, and Swedish gnägga versus Swedish regional knäja. This unexpected variation perhaps confirms my guess that however English kn– may have lost its k, it went through the stage hn-. At present, English has retained initial h before a consonant only in the speech of those who distinguish between witch and which, but hn-, hl, and hr– are the norm in Modern Icelandic.

If some students of the history of English sounds happen to read this blog, it would be interesting to know their opinion about my hypothesis. Here it is in a nutshell: English words with kn– and gn– lost their k/g under emphasis, because nearly all of them had a strong expressive character.

Editor’s Note: We’re taking next week off, but Anatoly will be back the following week with a new post!

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Flunkeys and lackeys two centuries ago

In An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, I called William L. Blackley’s 1869 book Word Gossip singularly uninformative, and I am sorry for that remark. One consolation is that when we are young and say something inappropriate or wrong, we fear swift retribution. But with age, most of us realize that the chance of being noticed (whatever we publish) is close to zero and lose no sleep over the mishap. Yet I am indeed sorry that I based a negative opinion of a respectable work on the basis of several unfortunate pages and will now discuss a few things that may be of interest to the readers of this blog.

The Reverend William Lewery Blackley (1830-1902) was an active parish priest in Ireland, a well-known (successful!) social reformer, and the author of many books. Unfortunately, I could not find his portrait on the Internet. By way of compensation, we featured an anonymous parish priest in the header. Blackley knew German and French very well and must have had a good command of Swedish. His education as a prospective churchman presupposed a study of Greek and Latin (and most probably, of Hebrew). Incidentally, quite a few British churchmen were linguists. Thus, the great Walter William Skeat was an Anglican deacon, but he could not function in that capacity because of problems with his voice, while being a professor at Cambridge did not require too much lecturing. (What a contrast! Today’s linguists may not be moderately proficient in any language except their own, while professors teach a good deal as a matter of course.)

Word Gossip was “a series of [fifteen] familiar essays on words and their peculiarities” that first appeared in Churchman’s Shilling Magazine and were published in book form in 1869 by Longmans, Green and Co. (London). In the introduction we read: “The kind reception accorded to the matter of the following pages on its appearance this year [1868] in successive numbers of ‘Churchman’s Shilling Magazine’ had induced me to republish it in a collected form.” I am aware of a single review of the book (in the Athenæum), but there must have been others, and perhaps letters from the readers.

Thoughts (very sensible thoughts) on etymology are strewn all over the volume of 234 pages. However, only the last two chapters deal directly with words of disputed origin. Blackley was aware of the linguistic literature of his time and of some old dictionaries, and since he was fluent in German, he did not miss German books on language history (a rare case in England before the days of Henry Sweet and Skeat, though German colleagues sometimes reproached even Skeat for not paying enough attention to their contributions), but surprisingly, he missed Jacob Grimm and remained unaware of the gigantic progress made by historical linguistics between the 1820s and his time. Therefore, even in 1868 his conclusions were of some interest only to the extent that they did not depend on the progress of Indo-European linguistics.

English (like every other European language) is full of native and borrowed words that appeared in print late, and one does not have to be a comparative linguist to discover their origin. Two such English words are flunkey “man in livery; obsequious person” and lackey “footman, valet.” The words are near-synonyms, and neither (especially lackey) is heard or seen too often. Lackey occurred at one time as a term of political abuse; for instance, the phrase the lackeys of the bourgeoisie was much in use in certain circles. Flunkey surfaced in the eighteenth century, and lackey in the sixteenth.

Both words are “of uncertain origin.” Blackley argued that at one time, they must have been applied primarily to soldiers, or rather mercenaries, for which reason they still “retain a contemptuous signification.” He referred to French flanqueur: “It means one who fights on the flank, a skirmisher.” In English, flunkey first meant “a liveried servant” and only later “toady.” Whether correct or not, Blackley’s guess is reasonable, and our best authorities have nothing to add to it. He also had an alternative hypothesis of the origin of flunkey, which I’ll skip, as well as a few fanciful etymologies of this word, not worthy of mention. Incidentally, those who coined the verb flunk don’t seem to have had flunkeys in view.

Lackey is a still harder word. Its Romance source began with the vowel a, which perhaps points to this noun’s Arabic origin, a- being part of the definite article. The Arabic home of lackey was suggested long ago, but the true etymon remains hidden. Blackley refused to go to Arabic and cited Latin laqueus “a rope with a slip knot, and especially a noose used for hanging.” The way from “criminal” to “hanging,” he said, is short. He also mentioned German Strick and Strang, both of which so often meant “rope, used to bind and hang criminals” that Strick became a common epithet “for a good-for-nothing dissipated fellow.” 

Blackley derived both flunkey and lackey from the names of despised mercenaries. His etymology of lackey does not go too far, but I find all the old conjectures worth knowing. Though quite often they are obviously wrong, a certain idea or association may inspire a better approach to the problem. Such at least has been my experience. Not all that is wrong is nonsense. The idea that in researching the origin of lackey we should turn to military terms is, most likely, correct, because in the fifteenth century, a certain class of soldiers, especially crossbowmen, was called alagues, alacays, or lacays. Arabic luk‘a means “worthless, servile; slave.” Skeat gravitated toward the Arabic hypothesis but added: “This is a guess; it is much disputed.” Yet this guess sounds no less probable than a direct derivation from Italian leccare or German lecken “to lick.” As mentioned above, our best authorities prefer to say almost nothing about the etymology of lackey, which is a pity.

The last word I’ll mention here, bat-fowling, is unknown to me, and it is probably unknown to most of our readers. The OED cites no contemporary examples. Bat-fowling means “catching birds at night by dazing and then netting them.” Blackley was sure that throughout England (!), “people said bat-folding, and for good reason…. The instrument in question is a net stretched upon a rood frame, consisting of two parts which, when opened out, are about of the same shape as a large paper kite, or a gigantic racket, or bat, and is hinged at the top, the ends at the bottom being in the operator’s hands.” I wonder whether those remarks deserve the attention of our lexicographers. Anyway, reading Blackley’s book is what my students call fun. Very much in accordance with the remarks about bat-fowling, I’ll cite the title of Chapter 1: “On Word Hunting in General.” Word hunting, by day or at night, is a noble pursuit.

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In full swing

First, my thanks to those who commented on my previous post. One comment in the busy exchange was negative: the correspondent likes some of those turns of speech I dislike. That’s fine, but I want to defend myself against the reproach that my subject should be limited to etymology. I receive questions from all over the world about usage and occasionally answer them in this blog. The title “Oxford Etymologist” does not tie me exclusively to word origins.

I have no theory for why people say something like do it real quick and she sings beautiful. German or Yiddish, as the comment suggests? Or a product of natural development? German/Yiddish usage also needs an explanation. Finally, I congratulate our reader who keeps a dictionary of Wellerisms on his desk. Our culture of reading classical literature is dying (none of the hundreds of students I have taught has read The Pickwick Papers). Yet I believe that Dickens will be the last to go downhill.

And now back to my main theme. I received a letter with a question about the etymology of swag “booty; cockiness, etc.” The reader complained that dictionaries have nothing to say about the origin of this word. She is quite right. I discussed sw-words almost exactly a year ago (see the post for June 19, 2024) and will try to repeat myself as little as possible.

In 1992, I wrote a paper, titled “The Dregs of English Etymology.” Among other things, it contained a list of about a thousand words whose origin was said to be unknown in the 1985 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Compiling such a list proved to be a much less straightforward task than I had expected, because the text contains numerous phrases like of uncertain, doubtful, dubious, disputable origin, obscurely related, and so forth. Are they polite synonyms for “origin unknown”?

In any case, the many senses of swag have been traced quite well. Some occurred in the 14^th century, while others, like “booty,” turned up in texts almost the day before yesterday. There is no way of deciding whether we are witnessing a long continuous history of one word, or if the sound complex swag was like an empty box, ready to acquire almost any sense with which speakers chose to endow it. Norwegian svagga “to sway” is cited in some dictionaries, but it is a rare (dialectal?) verb, and nothing points to its being the source of English swag. Incidentally, sway also sounds very much like swag.

Swag has as many lookalikes as senses, and this is the main problem with it. Here are some sw-verbs from my list of words of unknown origin (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in texts): swank (20) “to behave ostentatiously” (apparently, little known in American English); swash (16) “to dash violently, etc.” (said to be sound-imitative like clash, dash, lash, and mash); another swash (17) “inclined obliquely to the axis of the work (in turning),” and swizzle ~ switchel (19) “an alcoholic drink.” The material at my disposal is richer, but going over lists of verbs (mainly verbs) is boring. Anyway, one looks at swing, switch, swipe, swither “to hesitate,” swoon, and quite a few other more or less similar words and gets the impression that all of them refer to some quick or erratic movement and are in some vague way related. There is a special term for groups like sw -, namely, phonestheme. The term was coined by John Rupert Firth, a renowned British scholar.

The presence of the phonestheme cannot be predicted, and the same sound group (here, sw) occurs in words in which it evokes no association with movement. Think of swamp, swan, swain, swear, sweat, sweet, and swine. But what about swap, sway, swim, swirl, and swoon? Sw- does suggest a swinging, swaying movement (hence swag and swagger). There is no law, but a tendency is apparent.

Some connections have to be restituted by historians. Thus, German schwach means “weak,” not “swinging,” but the verb sweken once meant both “to become weak” and “to swing.” Swinging, it appears, led to being weak. While German im Schwange sein “to be in vogue” obviously refers to swinging, German schwanger “pregnant” is believed to be a different word. Why so? Pregnancy is a temporary state, isn’t it? Cannot it then be related to the many nouns and verbs with more or less the same reference?

Having reached this state of uncertainty, we come across swoon. The word has been known since the thirteenth century, and it once had g in the root (the verb –swogan existed). A similar-sounding German verb meant “to sigh.” The origin of swoon is said to be unknown. Really? Perhaps there is nothing to know. If we ignore the details, we may agree that being in a swoon, like being pregnant, is a temporary state! When things are up in the air, the phonestheme sw– comes in handy—unfortunately, too handy.

Even so, we need not treat our discovery with too much suspicion. When our authorities say that the origin of sway is obscure, perhaps we should say that the obscurity is a product of our striving for perfection. The OED quotes a 1598 statement that swagger was “created as it were by a natural Prosopopeia [here: without any known source], without etimologie or deriuation (sic).” I am inclined to say that that’s all there is to it. Swap, sway and swag are, rather probably, rootless sound-symbolic or/and sound-imitative formations, produced “instinctively,” as older scholars used to say. It is now believed that the human language emerged about 230,000 years ago. I am rather suspicious of exact numbers in this matter, but let us agree that the date is in principle realistic. As soon as people learned to produce the sounds needed for expressing their emotions, they began to say something like swap and swag.

Such English words often have cognates in closely related Germanic languages and sometimes in Latin, Greek, and non-Indo-European languages. Their common origin in Scandinavian and English or Dutch and English may mean that they are considerably older than the date of their first appearance in texts. Borrowing is also probable, but the main question is their distant origin, rather than their later history. Here is just one, almost random, example that shows how loose ties among such words may be. A Gothic verb that meant “to rejoice” (Gothic was recorded in the fourth century and is a dead Germanic language) has several related forms. In Old English it meant “to resound,” in Old Saxon, “to roar” (just one step from “rejoice” to “roar” and “resound”), but in Old Icelandic, “to splash.” Splashing is not too noisy. One would not be surprised if such a word acquired the sense “water”! Obviously, there once was a sound-imitative word with the phonestheme sw-, which developed in several ways.

Take your swag and go home with the swagger of a winner.

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The words we use

The town where I live has a good newspaper. From time to time, it gives advice to its readers for avoiding language mistakes and for speaking correct English. Today’s post has been inspired by a column by Gary Gilson the Minnesota Star Tribune published about two years ago. It is amusing to compare his advice and the advice I constantly give to my correspondents from all over the world.

Number One on his and my list is the use of buzzwords. People are formulaic creatures, they like cliches as much as being fiercely individual. Some phrases are unavoidable. We cannot substitute anything for Good morning, thank you very much, please sit down, don’t worry, and their likes. It is less obvious whether we should say have a nice weekend every time we part on Friday. But the real problem is with important-sounding phrases that once were new but have lost their freshness from overuse. When I am promised unswerving support or a thought-provoking story, I no longer expect either assistance or excitement.

Likewise, when I write letters of recommendation for my former students, I wonder whether I should say that their research is interdisciplinary. The epithet has been trodden to death and means nothing. Though it takes years for a budding scholar (sorry for this phrase) to master the chosen area and though not everybody succeeds, at twenty-eight, one is supposed to be a giant astride at least two oceans. But if I don’t mention the applicant’s interdisciplinary greatness, this will be noticed and remembered! Everybody is interdisciplinary, and everybody needs a job. I weep but walk in step. Rest assured: my recommendations are always thought-provoking, and I promise my proteges unswerving support.

Not only epithets like glamorous, fascinating, and mature have been worn thin. Even worse are some adverbs. One shudders at abominations like free gift, future prospects, final outcome, exact opposites, and the most precious gem of them all: honest truth. Those who cannot be smart often try to look or sound smart. One of the ways of impressing an interlocutor is to speak long and say little. At this point in time is of course weightier than now or at present, and utilize eclipses the modest monosyllabic use.

Language changes, and the avant-garde variety always sounds like an abomination to the cultured group. When all pedants die out, the “progressives” begin to guard their norm, which has now become conservative! Here is a curious example. In German, gut means both good and well, that is, adverbs lack a suffix like –ly. But I have heard someone saying on the radio: “She sings beautiful.” My neighbor suggested that we ride real quick. This is pure German. To be sure, fast is both an adverb and an adjective (we drive a fast car fast). Is English progressing in the direction of German? Perhaps.

One example I cited in some older post, but my students keep reminding me of this phenomenon. “The mood of the stories are gloomy.” Judging by this ineradicable feature of even graduate students’ style, American English has established a rule: make the verb agree with the closest noun, rather than with the subject. Should we bother? Yes, for the time being. But one day, this usage may become the norm. Incidentally, here is a sentence from a paper by a distinguished British philologist: “The small corpus of nineteen… epigraphical inscriptions… do not correspond very well, in either the date or their geographical distribution…” I understand the British collective in my family are early risers, and the couple were seldom seen together, but the corpus are? Yet I am more troubled by sentences like “They invited my wife and I,” because I cannot explain what analogy produces such phrases. However, we do say “Yes, this is me” and don’t worry.

One of the oldest chestnuts is: “I insist on Mrs. Smith appearing.” Obviously, it should be “Mrs. Smith’s.” But the tug of war between those construction has been going on for two centuries (at least). A grammarian will have no trouble parsing either variant. Yet the speaking community has never had any interest in linguists’ opinions.

A special problem is language and social engineering. Every time I write is not and does not, the computer suggests isn’t and doesn’t. Who programmed it to promote the conversational variants of such forms? I am immune to my computer’s bidding, but many others, especially insecure foreign speakers, will probably obey the command. I wince at constructions like “When someone asks you for help, never send them without assistance.” This usage was imposed on us for two reasons. “Him or her” is bulky,” and the older him is sexist. Yet I constantly see sentences like “It is the viewer’s opinion that matters, and we cannot ignore her reaction,” as though her is less sexist than his. Medication is expected to cure, rather than kill.

My final example has been trodden to death. Everybody fights the phrase very unique. The correspondent of the newspaper I referred to as an inspiration of this essay began his notes with the appeal: “Avoid very unique!” Some people don’t understand that unique means “one of a kind” and take it for a synonym of rare. The misunderstanding is sad, but in the history of language, such events cause astounding changes. Words for “bad” begin to mean “good,” and the other way round. Everything depends on whether any given speaker prefers to be conservative and resist change or is happy to swim with the current. If one day, unique loses its ties with the idea of uniqueness, the avant-garde usage will become neutral. Incidentally, the adverb very is rarely needed. It, too, has lost its freshness, and that is why people often say very, very. Ours is a community of overstatement. Editors used to call very a four-letter word, which it certainly is.

NOTE. During the summer months, the blog will keep appearing but not always with the same regularity as usual.

_{Featured image: sampling of types of dictionaries used in proverb studies by Pete unseth. CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A vicious beehive

One more Spelling Bee is behind us, and one more benighted youngster took the cake. In the final round, he spelled the word éclaircissement “making an obscure subject clear” correctly. He is thirteen years old, he has been playing this game for seven years, and he was the runner up in 2024. According to his statement, he spent five to six hours daily on weekdays and seven to eight hours on weekends studying the dictionary for unfamiliar words. Moreover, he has been practicing this thing for the last seven years, that is, almost since his kindergarten days. I am of course sorry for the kid, because I am not a fan of child abuse and because I know that one can be young only once. Rather long ago, I already spewed my contempt and ire at Spelling Bee, and I remember that my pamphlet did not produce the slightest stir. But as Cyrano de Bergerac said on a different occasion: “One does not always fight to win.” That is why I’ll once again return to Spelling Bee, Spelling Reform, and Walter William Skeat.

Learning the spelling of the words one will never use or even encounter looks like an unprofitable occupation. I suspect that the hero of this year’s contest does not read or speak French (there was no time to learn it). What then is the use of knowing the word éclaircissement? He also spelled Chaldee, Symlin, olona, and adytum correctly. The website says that after winning the prize, he collapsed with excitement and fatigue. And the admiring people who would not hurt a tadpole watched and applauded.

English spelling is irrational and tough, but why should our youngsters know how to spell olona? Wouldn’t it have been more profitable to read Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mark Twain (not of course for five or six hours a day) and come across all kinds of unfamiliar language in them: obsolete but interesting nouns and verbs used in the days of Queen Elizabeth I, the British slang of Artful Dodger, and some medieval vocabulary occurring in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? What a feast of words! Our winner could have learned French and even Latin, or (since he knew how to spell Chaldee) even Hebrew.

English speakers are poor spellers (and for good reason), and considering the fact that most schools in the United States do not teach grammar, this fact should not surprise anyone. My undergraduate students need a semester to learn the difference between the present and the past participle and the mysteries of subordinate clauses. But spelling stopped bothering them long ago, because today, the spell checker does all the work for them. It dutifully changes the inveterate occurance to occurrence and sometimes knows the difference between principle and principal. A spelling bee might sound like a clever idea in the early twentieth century, but nowadays, it has degraded into an ignoble sport. Let me add that this is my opinion, and if someone happens to express indignation at being exposed to it, all the blame goes to me, rather than to Oxford University Press, on whose site this blog appears every Wednesday.

The first Spelling Bee seems to go back to 1908. Below I will discuss a booklet on Spelling Reform, published almost at that time (in 1906). By the way, the origin of bee in spelling bee has never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction. Bee is a word of unknown etymology. It first surfaced in the US at the end of the eighteenth century and meant “a social gathering.” Perhaps it is the same word as the name of the insect: bees, as everybody knows, are great “gatherers.” In Derby, Whitby, and their likes, –by once meant “town; dwelling.” By(e) “cowstall,” with its variant bee, is still known in British dialects. Could this bee mean both “gathering place” and “the company gathered in it,” like court and forum? Just guessing.

Before the First World War, it seems that English spelling would soon be reformed, partly because several famous people supported the idea. On May 2, 1906, Walter W. Skeat gave a talk at the British Academy, and in the same year, a brochure with that speech was published by Oxford University Press. He explained why English spelling is so erratic and what progress philology had made by the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1908 (again the same date!), The English Spelling Society was founded. It advocated “simplified spelling,” The society still exists and is quite active. Today, philology enjoys no prestige, courses in the history of language (even of the English language) have fallen into desuetude, and a graduate student interested in this subject will find neither an adviser nor a job. But English spelling is still a nightmare to millions of native speakers and foreigners.

Below, I’ll only list Skeat’s suggestions, without discussing them. There are twelve of them. Skeat followed Henry Sweet, another great contemporary of his. 1. Abolish silent e, where it is useless (spell hav, giv, abuv, cum “come,” solv, freez, adz, ax). As we know, adz and ax are accepted variants in the US. 2. In the same spirit, write litl, promis, activ, therefor (in today’s spelling, therefore and the rare therefor are different words). 3. The use of ea for short e is absurd and troublesome. Write medow, brekfast, hed, as well as lepard, jepardy (the horror of it! Our beloved Jeopardy!), and also peeple. 4. The use of ie for ee is unhistorical and should be discontinued. Thus, acheev, beleev, cheef, feeld.

5. The Tudor (fifteenth-century) form oo should be restored in words like improov, looz, moov. 6. Norman scribes, while producing their manuscripts, had trouble with um, but there is no reason why we should avoid cumfort, cumpany, cum “come,” munk, muney, and cuver. 7. Skeat suggested curage, cuzin, flurish, and touch. His spelling labor, honor, harbor will not shock anyone in the US, but some of Skeat’s contemporaries feared looking like Americans. Times change (don’t they?), and some people change with them.

I’ll skip 8 and go directly to 9. Get rid of useless double letters. Thus, eg, od, ful, stif, batl, wrigl, traveler. (Needless to say, traveler is now the only American spelling.) 10. Skeat suggested abolishing b in debt, lamb, limb, numb, and thumb. 11. Ache and anchor should become ake and anker. 12. Here are a few verbal forms: puld, lookt, slipt.

At the end of his presentation, Skeat, as always, berated the ignorance and laziness of his countrymen, be it in language history or phonetics. I wonder what he would have said if he found himself in a modern college. He had no illusions about the future, and yet he thought he saw a glimmer of hope in some actions at Oxford and Cambridge. Of course, he could not predict that soon after his death in 1912, the world would collapse and, in a way, never recover. But we are still alive, and English is now a world language. Millions of children at home and in the great world around learn English and curse wright (God forbid, not write or right!), doubt, choir, and occurrence. Have I made myself clear? Was my éclaircissement lucid enough? If so, I am happy, because never in the world would I have been able to win the most modest prize in a deadly fight against bees.

_{Featured image: giant honey bee by Dinesh Valke. CC-BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Cringing with dignity, or the crux of the matter

I have “sauntered,” I have paid some respect to “lust” (see the previous two posts), and now I am ready “to cringe.” The most interesting part of today’s story is not even the origin of the verb cringe but the multitude of words, possibly related to it and explaining nothing. Hence the reference to sham dignity in the title.

In the form in which it has come down to us, cringe was recorded rather late, only in Middle English texts (the first known example goes back to the thirteenth century). The form cringe and its old doublet crenche correspond to Old English cringan ~ crincan “to fall in battle.” Historical semantics knows two processes: the deterioration of meaning and the amelioration of meaning. For instance, the adjective nice, also first recorded in the thirteenth century, was borrowed from French with the sense “silly, simple” and did first mean “foolish; wanton; difficult to manage” but ended up as a “pleasant, delightful.” By contrast, fond meant “foolish” and gradually merged with the sense “having a strong liking (for).” Cringe has obviously “deteriorated.”

The English verb has cognates in most languages of the Germanic-speaking world. Dutch krengen “to heel over” and Old Norse kranga “to creep along” (there also was krangr “weak”) seem to belong here. This list of related forms does not provide a clue to why a sound combination like kr-nk suggested to speakers the idea of bending or shrinking. We may not be able to find the golden key, but etymologists are beggars and should not pretend to be choosers. Knowing this, we may go back to the environment of cringe.

Next to Old English cringan ~ crincan “to fall in battle,” crincan “to yield” (originally, “to weaken”) existed. As the OED online suggests, the two verbs coexisted: one meant “to bend” and the other “to make bend.” Today, the verb crinkle “to bend; wrinkle, etc.” (from Old English crincan) exists. Its oldest history is obscure, but there is hardly any doubt that cringe and crinkle are in some way related, and that is all we need to know. In older German, the verb krenken “to weaken” existed, which interests us mainly because Modern German krank “sick, ill” is related to it.

With krank, we find ourselves in a rather inhospitable snake pit. The cousins of krank are plentiful in English. Crank “liable to capsize; crabbed; awkward; infirm, shaky” is not a borrowing from Dutch or German but a true cognate. The noun crank “portion of an axis bent at right angles” also seems to be related, even if a bit obscurely, to Old English crincan and cringan (“yield” and “bend”). Crank “bend, crook” is, for all intents and purposes, the same word. Cranky “tortuous, eccentric, cross-tempered; silly” emerged in books only in the sixteenth century but obviously, belongs to our story. Hence the Americanism crank “an eccentric person” now well-known also outside the United States. No doubt, cringle “a ring of a rope”, borrowed from Low German, is another part of the family. As a curiosity, I may mention that German Kringel ~ Krengel “a kind of pretzel,” deservedly popular in its country of origin, made its way into Russian and became krendel.

There is no doubt that all the words discussed above have a common feature, namely “round or crooked.” It comes as a surprise that they have no established etymology: in the best dictionaries, we find only long lists of cognates, sometimes also outside the Germanic family. Occasionally, a special helpful note alerts us to the fact that the oldest history of the entire group is unknown. But already in 1902 (such is the earliest reference in my database), Joseph Schrijnen, an excellent Dutch philologist, observed that the Germanic words for “ring” (hear, hear!) resemble and may be related to those meaning kring-. The resemblance is unmistakable.

At one time, ring had initial h: the oldest form was hring-. We also notice the similar-sounding word wring. Of those, hring holds out more promise to etymologists, because it has a good Slavic cognate, Russian krug “round, circle,” among others. It is related to Engish rung (from hrung), defined as “stick of rounded form [“stick of rounded form”!!] used as a rail; a spoke of a wheel,” etc., though most of us probably associate rung with “a step of hierarchy.” Rung had related forms in fourth-century Gothic, namely, hrugga (pronounced as hrunga) “staff.” Though staffs and poles are not round, roundness seems to be the implied goal: in order to twist or bend something, one should first have a straight object. (It seems that with this kind of reasoning one can prove almost anything.)

The previous statement looks like trying to save a hopeless etymology, but long ago, the initial meaning of rung was reconstructed as “a round pole.” This odd gloss was, naturally, contested by other specialists. Squaring the circle and making a straight object round are hard tasks. Rung, in its figurative sense, means “step,” and steps are neither round nor bent. To show how shaky our ground in this case is, I may mention a few more cognates of rung. One of them is Latin crux “cross.” Still another noun, related to rung (from hrung), is ridge (from hrycg; Germs Rücken, noun, means “back”). About every word, mentioned above, solid dictionaries say with rare consistency: “Origin unclear, doubtful, unknown.” Isn’t it amazing? Reliable cognates in Slavic, Latin, and Sanskrit, all having more or less the same sense, and yet the origin is still “unclear.” A squirrel is busy running in its cage and not getting anywhere! What is it that will make the sought-for etymology clear? How can our squirrel leave its cage and reach a tree?

Perhaps English wiggle ~ waggle will provide some help? Alas, no. The English verb is a borrowing from Dutch, where its traces are lost. I am finally coming to the point: no more meandering. It seems that once upon a time Germanic had the sound groups hring- ~ kring- ~ wrink-, all of which, for the reasons that are beyond reconstruction, suggested bending, twisting, and coiling (with the initial point being, naturally, something straight). Those groups mut have been sound-symbolic, and that is perhaps why we failed to find their origin. Sound symbolism is in the eyes (ears) of the beholder. Its existence cannot be proved. Only sound imitation (croak, gaggle, twitter, and the rest) is obvious. Yet the existence of three rhyming synonyms, whose etymology remains undiscovered (and for aught I understand, will remain such) perhaps makes my idea, inspired by Schrijnen’s observation, not entirely groundless. A blog is a genre that allows its author to risk a hypothesis, without being laughed out of court or fearing retribution. If it is promising, fine. If it is unacceptable, too bad.

At the end of this month, the merry month of May, I will be at the conference of the Dictionary Society in Buffalo, NY. Therefore, the next installment of this blog will appear in two weeks.

_{Featured image: A squirrel in a wheel. CC0 via Picryl.}

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