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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Implicit negation is easy to miss

One of the odder bits of language use is the phenomenon of overnegation, or misnegation. This is much different than the overly fussy stigmatizing of double negatives like “I didn’t see nothing” or “Nobody didn’t see anything,” which are common, colloquial, and not at all confusing. No one takes “I didn’t see nothing” to mean “I saw something.”

Misnegation is a rather more complicated situation where a negation and a hidden negation conspire to trip up a writer, as in this example from a Hägar the Horrible comic strip (first noticed in a 2018 post by writer Stan Carey). Hägar says “This is the only time of year when I miss not having a nine-to-five job.” When his sidekick Lucky Eddie asks “Why?” Hägar says it’s because “I never get to go to an office Christmas party!” The word miss hides a negation and if you “miss not having a nine-to-five job,” you would be missing the absence of such a job. But what is meant here is that Hägar misses ever having a nine-to-fiver.   

Misnegations happen in speech quite frequently, but unless they are in print or online, we may overlook them. The term seems to have first cropped up in 2004, on the Language Log blog in a series of posts by the linguist Mark Liberman and others. Two of the most common types of misnegations involve expressions of the form:

no NOUN is too ADJECTIVE to VERB

and

it is IMPOSSIBLE to UNDERESTIMATE X

The first type is found in examples like “no detail is too small to ignore,” where the intended meaning is “all details matter, regardless of how small,” or “no detail is too small to matter.” With the misnegation, it actually reads as if details are routinely ignored and none are too small to receive that treatment. Liberman offers some true-life examples:

No one is too young to avoid being tempted.

No business is too small to avoid or ignore protecting itself from another business using its name, product, service, or invention.

Kelly… said that in the playoffs no advantage is too small to ignore.

No error is too small to ignore—I want to make the second edition perfect!

If these make your head hurt, just wait.

The second type of misnegation is found in examples like “It is impossible to underestimate Springsteen’s influence,” and many similar examples. If “overestimate” means to attribute too high a value and “underestimate” means to attribute too low a value, then one is saying “It is impossible to attribute too low a value to Springsteen’s influence,” which is presumably not what is meant, unless it is a backhanded compliment.  

Here are some more real examples:

The challenge of creating weekly scripts that move seamlessly among six clearly defined principal characters cannot be underestimated. (Liberman found this one in The New York Times, 2004)

All of which is to say that we can never underestimate the psychological impact of language’s massive migration from the ear to the eye, from speech to typography. (from Neil Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood, noted in Stan Carey’s post)

Tracy and Shelli contributed to the band in those early days in ways that cannot be underestimated. (from Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven, also noted by Carey)

There are other types of misnegation as well. Ben Zimmer points out some examples of overnegation that arise from one too many nots: It’s HARD NOT TO X AND NOT Y.

It’s hard not to walk into a press conference these days and not hear, at some point, “With scholarships where they are today…” (The Michigan Daily)

But it’s hard not to read Olney’s book and not appreciate the key members of the team that dominated baseball for half a decade. (Deseret News)

[In researching the period] it’s hard not to look at 1910 and not see what’s coming down the road. (Provincetown Banner)

The first not in each example means that one is not doing the walking, reading, or looking. But if you are not doing those things how can you then not hear, not appreciate, or not see what’s coming. The first not in each example is causing the problem and needs to go. And Zimmer points that that you also get misnegation with the variant “It’s hard not to do X without doing Y” as in “It’s hard not to think of the art of New Mexico without thinking of Georgia O’Keeffe” (his example from the Tucson Weekly).

And then there’s the phrasing “fail to miss,” where there is a pair of negative verbs and no not, and the expression is used to mean “fail to see.” That one was made famous by sportscaster Dizzy Dean, who told fans “don’t fail to miss tomorrow’s game.”

For writers and editors, it’s important to be aware of the possibility of misnegation or overnegation. Editing and style guides don’t tell you to put things in the affirmative for nothing.

^{Image by MasterTux from Pixabay. Public domain.}

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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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This old <i>house</i> and these old <i>houses</i>

I don’t recall the first time I noticed the pronunciation of houses as HOWsiz with a voiceless s sound rather than HOWziz with a voiced z. But I remember thinking: “That’s weird. I wonder if houses is becoming regularized. Historically, the word is one of those nouns whose singular and plural stems alternate between voiceless and voiceled sounds. The most prominent examples of such alternations involve f and v, as in singular/plural pairs like wife and wives, life and lives, leaf and leaves, etc.

With the f/v alternation, the sound change is reflected as a spelling change, but not so with house and houses. The pair house/houses is the only example of an s/z alteration between the singular and the plural, though there are other s/z alternations in English, like louse and lousy, lost and lose, useful and use, et. cetera.

I checked to see what dictionaries had to say about house and houses. The online Merriam Webster Dictionary gives the pronunciation ˈhau̇-zəz also -səz, where the “also” indicates a less common pronunciation. The online American Heritage Dictionary (based on the 2011 5^th edition) gives both houʹ zĭz and houʹ sĭz for the plural, also recognizing the new pronunciation. 

The Oxford English Dictionary, however, gives British English /ˈhaʊzᵻz/ and U.S. English /ˈhaʊzəz/, both with the z sound, and just differing in the height of the final vowel. Webster’s Third (from 1963) gives hau̇z͘ ə̇z and flags hau̇s ə̇z as “chiefly substandard.” Going back a few decades, the 1934 Webster’s Second only gives the z pronunciations.

The difference in transcriptions systems notwithstanding, what all of this suggests is that in the mid-twentieth century the HOWsiz variant was common enough to be noticed but had not yet been sanctioned by elite pronouncers. Webster’s Second ignored it, Webster Third shakes a finger at it, and today’s Merriam.com is fine with either variant. 

So what happened? Most other nouns ending in –se don’t change their pronunciation in the plural (horse, case, blouse, course, excuse, lease, base, purse, vise, etc.), so perhaps houses is undergoing some analogical leveling (as we linguists call this regularization). Even though house is a fairly common word, and such words tend to preserve their irregularity, houses has finally come around. Reinforcing the contrast with the verb house, which ends in a z-sound, could also be a factor. And what about the possessive forms, like that house’s color? For me, the first s of house’s is voiceless and most dictionaries don’t address the issue. (Webster’s Third, curiously enough, lists both options for the possessive.)

It’s worth noting too that house is not the only voiceless/voiced alternation that is not reflected in spelling. It’s just the only one with an s. A smallish number of words ending in th also show alternation between singular voiceless th (as in thin) and plural voiced th (as in then): mouth and mouths, baths and baths, wreathe and wreathes often show alternation of the two variants ofth. 

In a 2018 article in the journal Language Variation and Change, titled “Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð∼θ]s of change,” linguist

Laurel MacKenzie of New York University reported on the frequencies of devoicing in more than 2,000 tokens of words in spoken corpora. MacKenzie looked at a number of factors, such as the age and gender of the speaker, the surrounding sounds and morphemes, and more. She found that houses was pronounced with a stem-final s about 50% of the time, with younger speakers leading the way: the voiced z pronunciation was present for about 65% of speakers born in the 1940s but dropped to a rate of 38% among speakers born in the 1980s. The voiceless/voiced alternation of th is also being lost. And as one might expect, the words where spelling reinforces the alternation (like knife and knives) are have better retention of the voiceless/voiced alternation. 

When I first noticed the HOWsiz pronunciation, it was already pretty robust. I may not switch my pronunciation of houses, but I’m going to be listening more carefully to these plurals.

_{Featured image by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash.}

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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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The rule of three

I’ve been reading S. Jay Keyser’s fascinating book Play It Again Sam, which (despite its waggish title) is a serious and insightful study of the role of repetition in the verbal, musical, and visual arts. The key idea is that repetition is both efficient and pleasurable, setting up patterns that reinforce linguistic structure and create aesthetic impact.

Part of the book deals with the “rule of three” and the role that triples play in capturing and focusing our attention, providing rhythm, and making things memorable and surprising. Take a second and think of some tripled up phrases if you can. My list included these tricolonic phrases, in which the repetition builds the list in significance:

Vini, vidi, vici

Friends, Romans, countrymen

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Government of the people, by the people, for the people

we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow – this ground

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman.

The number three shows its rhetorical impact in a number of places. It’s in jokes (“A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar …”), folklore (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”) and advertising (“Snap, Crackle, Pop). The stereotypical five-paragraph essay, which is still taught in some places, consists of an introductory paragraph, a concluding paragraph and three body paragraphs. And its paragraphs are often made up of topic sentence, a concluding sentence, and at least three supporting sentences. 

In prose, tricolons show up in sentences where triples are used to build emphasis. Sometimes a simple bicolon is too little and a tetracolon is too exhausting. Here are a few from recent reading. In Annie Lowrey’s essay about avoiding microplastic, “I Fought Plastic. Plastic Won” in The Atlantic (August 2025), in one sentence we find a compound noun phrase with three parts, where the second echoes the first and the third expands the idea:

Scientists have found plastic in brains, eyeballs, and pretty much every other organ.

In another sentence, the triple goes down the body, from the eyes to the groin:

We cry plastic tears, leak plastic breast milk, and ejaculate plastic semen.

Triples can pack a lot into a small space as the compound subject of a gerund:  

Concerns over plastic exposure have exploded in recent years, with podcast bros, MAHA types, and crunchy moms joining environmentalists (and a number of physicians and scientists) in attempting to ditch the substance.

And they can even be used to organize longer lists in to rhythmic triples of pairs of adjectives:

Plastics are amazing. The synthetic polymers are light and inexpensive, moldable and waterproof, stretchy and resilient.

Compare that last one to the same sentence with “light, inexpensive, moldable, waterproof, stretchy, and resilient.” You’d be snoring before you get to the end. If you stop, look, and listen, you find tricolons everywhere. Look for them.

_{Featured image by Adriano on Unsplash.}

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On reading reviews

After I’ve finished a book, I’ll often check the reviews to see how my opinion lines up with what others have to say. Sometimes I’m surprised at points I’ve missed and amazed at what others have found (factual flubs, influences, allusions). After reading one recent book where a reviewer flagged a meandering style, I was prompted to reconsider my own reaction: was the meandering an indicator of the narrator’s mental state or the author’s inattention? The review prompted me to think further and reflect on previous books by the same author. Was he slipping?

I often use reviews in advance, to get a feel for a book that I’m thinking of reading before I commit. And sometimes I’ll compare a few reviews. I’m still wondering, for example, whether to commit to the 1,000 plus-page biography of Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. I read the New Yorker review by Lauren Michele Jackson (“Up the River,” in the May 5, 2025, issue) which opens with the idea that

America sees itself in a young boy who learns—but not too much—and whose story ends with his eyes on an open horizon, a stretch of land claimed by the nation but not yet bound to it.

The review implies that Twain’s work and life parallel the story of the United States and describes Twain as a man of contradictions, whose restlessness “was the most American thing about him.”

Graeme Wood’s review in the Atlantic (“The Not-at-All-Funny Life of Mark Twain,” in the May 9, 2025 issue) tells us that the book “dwells more on the wreck of a man than on his sublimely comic work.”

Both reviews mention Twain’s coming of age in an era dominated by the legacy of the Civil War and slavery, his sad family life, his addiction to get-rich-quick schemes, and his concern with leaving biographical footprints. Jackson offers a more straightforward summary of the book’s path, commenting on Chernow’s “misreading of Southern racial dynamics,” his focus on Twain’s writing habits, and his “apologies” for some of Twain’s attitudes and behaviors, such as his Lewis Carroll-like affection for young girls, whom he called his “angelfish.” Wood sees Chernow as presenting a Twain who was “gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams…,” a man “able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others [but who was] … powerless to correct them in himself.”

For good measure, I also read Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times, (“A New Biography of Mark Twain Doesn’t Have Much of What Made Him Great,” May 13, 2025). Garner gives away the game in the title and opens with a jab:

Ron Chernow’s new biography of Mark Twain is enormous, bland and remote — it squats over Twain’s career like a McMansion.

It gets rougher, but there are some key insights. Garner notes that the book seems out of balance to him, with Twain’s formative early life given short shrift. The review points us to some other Twain bios that might be worth a look, and it notes that Chernow’s is the first biography to appear in the context of the #Black Lives Matters and #Me Too movements.

All three reviews are chockful of detail and wit, so I appreciate them as a writer as well as a reader. I still don’t know if I’ll commit to Mark Twain. But if I do, I know what to watch for.

_{Featured image by Ugur Peker via Unsplash.}

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Unexpected words

When I read slowly, I’m a somewhat easily distracted reader. I might ponder an idea, puzzle at a phrasing, or admire elegance and style. Sometimes, though, it is unexpected words that cause me to stop and wonder about their origins. 

Here are a handful of expressions that have sent me to the dictionary: “shades of,” “craned her neck,” “sported a new hat,” “madcap kids,” “stool pigeon” and “moniker.” They all put my reading on pause. When I encountered them, I pondered a bit, jotted down the words so I’d remember to research them, and got back to what I was reading.

Here’s what I learned.

Shades of is related to shadows and to shadow-like nuances. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, from about 1818, shades of was used, “in humorous invocation of the spirit of a deceased person,” with the implication that the deceased person would be horrified or amazed at what was going on. The dictionary notes that it is no longer exclusively humorous and can now refer to some person or thing that is reminiscent of a present happening. So to say “shades of Bruce Springsteen” would be to invoke the Boss’s image or music as a point of comparison.

To crane one’s neck is from 1799, according to the OED, and means “To stretch (the neck) like a crane,” and it even has the variant to crane one’s head. The crane in question is the bird, of course, though cranes for lifting have been around for millennia (think Archimedes or the Egyptian pyramids). But the mechanical ones have only been called cranes since 1487, also getting their name from the bird.

The verb to sport is fearsomely complicated and has nothing to do with football. It wends its way back to disport, meaning “to divert, amuse or entertain” often with a reflexive. Over time sport came to refer to the act of amusing oneself or frolicking, often outdoors. Sport also developed the meaning of “to display” something ostentatiously or to say something publicly. Since about 1778, it could mean “to wear”, and the OED gives the example of “Some macaroni Barristers [who] have presumed to sport Bags and Pig-Tails.” “Macaroni barristers” refer to ones wearing fashionable Italian and French styles—eighteenth century hipsters.

Madcap, it turns out, began as a noun, with a first citation from 1589, meaning a madman, and within a few years the word was also used as an adjective. The suggested etymology is mad + cap, where cap has the metaphorical sense of “head.” And the OED points us to such similar uses as goose-cap, huff-cap, and fuddle-cap for a simpleton, a swaggerer, and a drunk. All are now obsolete. 

When I hear stool pigeon, I think of a criminal who snitches on cohorts to make a deal. But it turns out to refer back to the practice of using a decoy bird tied to a moving stool to attract its fellows. The OED treats stool pigeon as US usage from about 1804 to indicate first a literal decoy and later an informer. An 1804 citation refers to a turtle “exhibited like a stool pigeon to a parcel of geese, in expectation that it would encrease the flock” and in 1844 we find “Those secret partners, by gamblers, are termed ropers, or stool-pigeons: their business is to delude the inexperienced into their dens of iniquity.” A few years later, we get an 1850 citation that “The senior high constable of Philadelphia … recollected that Harry White … who he had been lately using as a ‘stool pigeon’, or secret informer, had informed him … that ‘a big thing’ was coming off shortly.”

Moniker is still a bit of a stumper to me. The OED gives it as “origin uncertain” with an earliest citation from 1851. One suggestion is that it arose from a slang usage for eke-name (meaning nickname). Other ideas relate it to the words monarch or monogram. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, in The Secret Languages of Ireland (1937), suggests its origin can be found in the mixed language Shelta (sometimes called Tinker’s Cant or simply The Cant). Macalister posits the Shelta word munika meaning name, and this idea is developed further in a 2007 essay by William Sayres called “Moniker: Etymology and Lexicographical History.” That’s the latest word on moniker.

Since I started writing this piece, I’ve come across new words and phrases to puzzle over and research: cheapskate, right as rain, beck and call, chockful, and bespoke. I’m off to the dictionary again.

_{Featured image by Paul Melki via Unsplash.}

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“I’m good”

The word good does a lot of work in English. Aside from its garden-variety sense (as in “good game” or “good job” or “good dog”), we find the word has a number of extended uses. For example, it shows up in the funky expression “good and …” which means “very” when connected with short adjectives (“good and smart,” “good and hot,” “good and ugly”). 

The expression “I’m good” is especially interesting. As a reply to “How’re you doing?” it can be a replacement for “I’m well,” “I’m fine,” or “I’m okay” (acceptable to all but the snarkiest of prescriptivists). “I’m good” also has a related sense in which it expresses satiation or satisfaction and implies refusal. When a server brings more coffee around or the bartender points to your empty glass, you might hold up a palm and say “I’m good.” Here “I’m good” is an indirect way of saying “No, thanks.”

In fact, “I’m good” is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary with the sense “no thank you; I’m not in need of anything.” The OED gives it as originally a US usage, with a first citation from 1966 in John Ball’s novel The Cool Cottontail. Asked if he wants another beer, detective Virgil Tibbs replies, “I’m still good, thanks.”

“I’m good” can also indicate a negative reply to a suggestion, as in this 2003 OED example from the Toronto Star:

‘Try these on Paige,’ says Emma, holding up the smallest pair of pink shorts I’ve ever seen in my life.

‘Thanks, I’m good!’ I tell her, laughing. 

That was a definite “No” on the pink shorts. But sometimes “I’m good” seems to signal agreement. If you are planning to meet someone, you might propose a time by saying “Can we meet at 7:30?” and get a reply that “I’m good.” This may be a reduction of phrases like “I’m good with that.” Similarly, if you are inquiring of a friend or significant other whether they are prepared to do something. you might ask “Are you just about ready?” A possible reply (one of many), might be “I’m good.” Again this could be a reduction of “I’m good to go” or a response to an implied disjunction “Are you ready or do you have to go to the bathroom?” In the latter case, “I’m good” can indicate “No, I don’t need more time.”

Sometimes the meaning of “I’m good” is in the eye of the beholder. The linguist John Rickford recounts an incident involving two African American sisters who were on a bus that was being checked by Drug Enforcement Agency agents. When an agent asked if he could search their bags, one sister said yes. When he asked the other sister if he could search her, she said “I’m good,” which the agent took as “Okay.” He discovered some drugs and arrested the woman. She contested the search, and Rickford presented a long deposition giving evidence about the meaning and frequency of “I’m good” to mean “No, thanks.” The case ended in a plea deal with time served—two years.  So the next time you say “I’m good,” stop to consider what you might be saying.

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Symbol swearing with the Grawlix

I miss a lot of things about the decline of paper newspapers, especially the comic strips. The comics were verbal humor with pictures and recurring characters, and the language of the comics provided a window into how spoken language was represented in print.

I was particularly taken with the swearing symbols known as grawlixes. That’s a term coined by Charles D. Rice of This Week magazine, and popularized by the Beetle Baily creator Mort Walker. Typically, Walker’s grawlixes came from blustery Sarge, cursing at his men for being slackers. As an artist, Walker didn’t limit himself to punctuation marks, sometimes adding hand-drawn lightning bolts, stars, squiggles and jagged lines as well. For those of us who are not artists, a grawlix is typically made from the characters on top of the number row of a keyboard: the at-sign (@), the pound sign (#), the dollar sign ($), the percent sign (%), the ampersand (&), and the asterisk (*), along with the exclamation mark.

Symbol swearing didn’t begin with Mort Walker or Charles Rice. Examples have been traced back to newspaper comics around the turn of the turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century like The Katzenjammers Kids, by the German immigrant Rudolf Dirks, and the Lady Bountiful strip by Gene Carr. And the Belgian comics historian Thierry Smolderen spotted an even earlier use in a 160-page book from 1877 called Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes: A Volume of Choice Telegraphic Literature, Humor, Fun, Wit & Wisdom. Grawlixes made their way to comic books as well as strips, particularly under the Comics Code Authority which lasted from 1954 till 2011. In an early issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson complains that he doesn’t have “one %$!!?#$#!* photographer” to cover a big story. Along with their use in comics and comic books, grawlixes have also shown up in book and television show titles. There was the short-lived CBS comedy $#*! My Dad Says, adapted from the 2011 book Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern.  

Grawlixes, or obscenicons as linguist Ben Zimmer has dubbed them, call to mind the so-called minced oaths of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists: gadzooks for “By God’s hooks” and zounds for “By God’s wounds,” or the replacement forms gosh darn, heck, fudge, and so on. And they serve the same purpose as abbreviations like SOB and WTF. Such replacements simultaneously pretend to protect readers from being offended and protect writers from stepping over a line. Sometimes propriety is maintained by replacing all but the first letter with a hyphenated –word, as in the title of Jesse Sheidlower’s splendid study The F-Word. On occasion you can see the label censored replacing a bit of swearing, or in some older journalistic practice the phrase [expletive deleted].

We probably don’t want to consider a single * to be a grawlix, but rather a redaction, and the * is pretty common in book titles. There is Adam Mansbach’s book Go the F*ck to Sleep, whose cover replaces the missing vowel with a moon, Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, andMelissa Mohr’s Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing.  

Grawlixes like $#*! or replacements like sh*t sometimes need to be read aloud. $#*! My Dad Says was referred to as Bleep My Dad Says on air, but the full word was used in the audiobook. The same is the case for Go the F*ck to Sleep and Holy Sh*t. It’s hard to imagine pronouncing the *s.

Redacted forms and grawlixes also offer some complications to indexers as well. The Guidelines for Alphabetical Arrangement of Letters and Sorting of Numerals and Other Symbols put out by the National Information Standards Organization advises alphabetizing symbols before numbers and letters (and putting numbers before letters). But practices seem to vary. The index to Micheal Adams’s In Praise of Profanity, indexes shit before s**t and fuck before both f–k and f**k. However, the very first entry in that index is @#%&*! Smilers, a reference to the 2008 album by singer-songwriter Aimee Mann. Grawlixes and redactions are increasingly rare, but there’s a lot to them. No $#*!

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Let’s stop talking about conspiracy “theories”

A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on “Cons, Cults, and Conspiracy Theories,” exploring the connections and parallels among those phenomena. Many of my students had some experience with cons, often from work in the service industry. Several also had relatives who had been in cults of various ilks. However, students were overwhelmingly skeptical of conspiracies theories. As we explored the three c’s, I found myself struggling with the term “conspiracy theory.” The term “theory” lends a patina a of scientific thought and rigor that is often lacking in fabulist conspiracy narratives. 

The term “conspiracy theory” has a long history. It is sometimes erroneously attributed to the US Central Intelligence Agency, but, according to Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, the term can be found in nineteenth-century press accounts of trials and in the coverage of the assassination of US President James Garfield.  

In academic use, the term “conspiracy theory of society” was popularized by Karl Popper in a pair of papers delivered in 1948, and later in the second edition of his book The Open Society in 1952. Popper described it as

the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed) and who have planned and conspired to bring it about

—Popper, The Open Society, 1952, 94

Popper’s discussions sparked spirited commentary among other philosophers, part of which hinged on the distinction between a particular account of something as due to a conspiracy (the 1969 moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, the September 11^th attacks, the COVID pandemic, etc.) and the more general tendency of looking for cabals of hidden conspirators behind all sorts of historical events.

As my students and I talked though the distinction and poked at it in various ways, we started to use the term conspiracism to refer to the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. Some studies, such as those of Stephen Lewandowsky and colleagues, refer to this as “conspiracy ideation,” and scholars have studied the attitudes and mindset that go along with it. I found myself preferring “conspiracism” to “conspiracy ideation” because it is more concise and is parallel with other -isms—and because it suggests the self-deluding aspect of many believers in conspiracy theories. “Ideation,” like “theory,” feels academic and reasoned.

In addition, the term “conspiracy theory” itself is problematic in other ways, as scholars such as Jesse Walker (and my undergraduates) have noted. The term is loaded with negative connotations as well as positive ones. Today, “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” suggest tinfoil-hat beliefs in the wildest counter-factual narratives and the fuzziest thinking. And to make matters even more complicated, there are actual conspiracies in the world—political, criminal, business—and before they are confirmed as actual conspiracies, there might be “theories” about what happened. Once the conspiracy is confirmed, we tend not to refer to it with the word “theory.” No one talks about the conspiracy theory of Watergate, for example. Rhetorically, there are conspiracies, theories about conspiracies (which are subject to evidence constraints), and “conspiracy theories” (which are not if you are a conspiracist).

A friend of mine once suggested that such unfalsifiable “conspiracy theories” be treated as fan-fiction about history and current event. That’s a bit unwieldy and does a disservice to fan-fiction, I think. But the notion underscores the way in which conspiracy theories typically have key fabulists and promoters and a dedicated fan base of believers. Maybe we should start referring to them as “conspiracy fiction.”

As a linguist, I know that I can’t control usage other than by example, but I’m going to start referring to “conspiracy fiction” and “conspiracism.” Maybe the terms will catch on.

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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.

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What does <em>one day</em> mean?

A while ago, a reader pointed me to a comment on another writer’s OUPblog piece. The comment complained about a caption on a photo, an image of the painting “Adam and Eve in Paradise” by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter David Teniers the Younger. The original caption read “The world was also young one day,” and the comment read

The caption to Adam and Eve pic “the world was also young one day” should be “the world was also young once”. “One day” is only for indeterminate future time.

The reader who pointed this out to me wondered whether the claim that “One day” is only for indeterminate future time” was a legitimate correction or, as he put it “nonsense.” I responded that I was pretty sure that “one day” was not only for future tense. The blog editors didn’t get into the grammatical issue, but changed the caption to “Adam and Eve in Paradise. The age of innocence.”

The whole exchange got me curious about the expression “one day.” The original caption “The world was also young one day” does seem a bit odd, but certainly there are plenty examples of “one day” in the past sense, for example:

One day I was out walking, and passed by the calaboose; I saw a crowd about the gate, and heard a child’s voice…

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin

One day I was drawing a picture merely to fill in a blank space in the daily cartoon.

Rube Goldberg, The American Magazine, Jan 1922, 64

One day I was down on my knees polishing a man’s shoes on State Street when I happened to look up, and there was my teacher just passing.

Eddie Foy, “Clowning Through Life,” Colliers, Dec. 18, 1926, 7

In the examples, the one day signals something that that happened in the past. Try substituting once or one time and you’ll get a different, less specific narrative effect. One day is like Once upon a time, but without the fairy-tale feel.

Curious, I checked what dictionaries had to say. The Oxford English Dictionary is clear, telling us that one day means refers to “On a certain (but unspecified) day in the past.” It gives examples from Daniel Defoe and George Bernard Shaw, among others:

One Day walking with my Gun in my Hand by the Sea-side, I was very pensive upon the Subject of my present Condition.

Robinson Crusoe, 1881

I moralized and starved until one day I swore that I would be a full-fed free man at all costs.

Major Barbara, 1907

The OED notes as well that one day can refer to something occurring “On an unspecified day in the future” like the expression someday, as in this example from Tennessee Williams’s Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton:

One day I will look in the mirror and I will see that my hair is beginning to turn grey.

The key feature, past or future, seems to be the idea of an unspecified day. The OED also contrasts one day with one of these days. The latter is described as also indicating an unspecified day in the future but as often “implying a more proximate or immediate future than the equivalent use of one day.” The OED gives an example from David Lodge’s 2009 Deaf Sentence:

It wouldn’t surprise me if we both turn up lightly disguised in a campus novel one of these days.

Try substituting one day or someday here and you’ll see contribution that one of these makes.

I didn’t find entries on one day in Garner’s Modern American Usage, Merriam Webster’s Guide to English Usage, The Chicago Manual of Style, in Websters Second or Third dictionaries or in the Random House Unabridged, all of which suggests that it is not a very contested bit of grammar.

Oddly though, the Cambridge Online Dictionary gives one day only as “at some time on the future,” citing the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus and the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary.Collins Dictionary also gives one day “at some time in the future,” with no mention of the past.

Merriam Webster’s online dictionary treats one day as an idiom (perhaps to distinguish it from the literal sense of one day as “a single day”). Like the OED, Merriam gives both definitions: “at some time in the future” and “on a day in the past.”

The positioning of one day can also be a factor. When I looked through the full list of Merriam-Webster citations, I was struck by this quote from college football player Justin Dedich “My old soccer coach became the coach of pole vaulting and asked me to try out one day.” Here it is possible to associate the one day with the asking (an unspecified days in the past) or with the trying out (an unspecified day in the future, relative to the asking). The context makes it clear which is intended.

One day can refer to past or future events, and is part of a host of temporal settings phrases like once, one time, once upon a time, someday, and one of these days. Each has its own nuance.

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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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Doppelganger names

We often think of personal names as specific to an individual, and sometimes they are. Yet often they are not. After all, the same individual may go by more than one name. Consider secret identities, for example. Superman is also Clark Kent (and Kal-El, his Kryptonian birthname), Wonder Woman is also Diana Prince (and Princess Diana of Paradise Island), and so on. Pen names and stage names are the literary equivalent of superhero secret identities: Samuel Clements becomes Mark Twain, Mary Ann Evans becomes George Eliot, Eric Arthur Blair becomes George Orwell, Marguerite Annie Johnson becomes Maya Angelou, Daniel Handler becomes Lemony Snicket, and Belcalis Almánzar becomes Cardi B. If someone is referred to by their less familiar name, we may not understand who is being mentioned. And, less famously, an individual’s name may have more than one variant, depending on the use of initials, diminutives, marital surnames, or gender transitioning. And in the legal system, there are any number of anonymized or unknown John Does and Jane Does (as well as Richard Roes, Jane Roes, and Mary Moes).

The opposite situation can easily arise as well, and here is where we find doppelganger names. Sometimes different people have the same name or similar ones, creating potential confusion. There are, after all, two Saint Augustines (one the 4^th century bishop of Hippo, the other the 6^th century monk who became Archbishop of Canterbury), two presidents named George Bush, two William Pitts (the Elder and the Younger), two Oliver Wendell Holmeses (one a physician-poet and one a Supreme Court Justice), two Hank Williamses, and two Frankensteins (the doctor and the monster), among many others. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, there is a pair of Cinnas, and the poet Cinna is fatally mistaken for Cinna the conspirator.

Doppelganger names have real-world consequences in today’s surveillance-minded world. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. federal government instituted something called the No-Fly List, which was a list of people prohibited from boarding commercial aircrafts in or into United States. The No-Fly List and similar watch lists are controversial, and one of the points of controversy has to do with so-called false positives. These arise when a prohibited individual or an individual flagged for additional screening has the same name as an unlucky innocent traveler. The late Massachusetts Senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy ran into this situation when the name “T Kennedy” appeared on the list. Kennedy was told that the name “T Kennedy” had once been used as the alias of a person on a screening list. The vagueness of the listed “T Kennedy” subjected the well-known politician to repeated travel delays.

The practice of naming boats and ships also sometimes results in different vessels having doppelganger names. A pair of such ships named Peerless was involved in a famous misunderstanding routinely taught in law schools: the 1864 case involved a lawsuit brought by a man named William Raffles against Daniel Wichelhaus and Gustav Busch. Wichelhaus and Busch had made a contract for cotton arriving from Mumbai (then called Bombay) on a ship named Peerless. It turned out that there were two ships called Peerless—and both were travelling from Mumbai to Liverpool, but at different times.

Wichelhaus and Busch said the Peerless intended in the contract was the ship that had set off in October, but their shipment of cotton arrived later on the other Peerless, which had left Mumbai in December. Wichelhaus and Busch refused to pay for the delivery, so William Raffles sued, arguing that the cotton had arrived on the Peerless as the contract stated. However, the English Court of Exchequer declined to enforce the agreement because the reference to a ship called Peerless was ambiguous.

The Raffles case might seem like a unique misunderstanding—a historical oddity—but it was followed by (and cited in) an 1869 Massachusetts case, Kyle v. Kavanagh. This time the dispute was about the sale of property “on Prospect Street” in Waltham, Massachusetts. However, there were two Prospect Streets in the town. The court’s instructions to the jury explained that: “[I]f the defendant was negotiating for one thing and the plaintiff was selling another thing, and if their minds did not agree as to the subject matter of the sale,” they could not be said to have made a contract.

Sometimes a rose is not just a rose.

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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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What I learned from reading Harlan Ellison

When I was in high school, I went through a Harlan Ellison phase. Ellison, who died in 2017, was a prolific science fiction and screenwriter and the author of such stories as “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman,” “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” and “A Boy and His Dog,” as well as the celebrated Star Trek episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.”

I had no ambition to write science fiction, but I liked Ellison’s edginess and I soon stumbled onto his two books of television criticism: The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. Published, respectively in 1970 and 1975, these were collected essays originally published in the Los Angeles Free Press. Ellison dissected network television’s presentation of politics, sex, race, culture, and more, and his writing had a snark and sarcasm that appealed to high school me.

Stylistically, what stood out most was his use of parentheses. In the essays, Ellison used them all the time. In a random four-page section I count six parentheticals, some as long as a paragraph. Elsewhere, I found a couple that went on for more than half a page.

Here are a handful of examples. Commenting on a young TV personality who spoke in “a syntactical jumble of ‘yeahs’ ‘uh-huhs’ and ending lamely with ‘I really don’t know’.” Ellison twists the knife with “(Everything she comments on ends with ‘I really don’t know.’).” Writing about First Tuesday, the NBC network’s answer to CBS’s 60 Minutes, he offers this aside: “(And wouldn’t you know the sonsofbitches would put it on directly opposite 60 Minutes …)” Occasionally, the parentheses explain a novel word usage such as “I sat Elmer’d (as in the glue) in front of various TV screens” or “things here in the ‘underground’ (if you’ll pardon the pretension) are not good.” Ellison used the parenthesis to amplify his outrage, to underscore his smart-alecky awareness, and even occasionally to poke fun at himself.

For a time, Elision’s style left a mark on me as a writer. I began including (what I thought were) pointed, witty asides in my essays and correspondence. I got away with it in high school, less so in college, and finally my wife convinced me to give it up. It was, she said, “too cutesy” and “distracting.”

Every now and then, I miss parentheses and trot a pair of parens out, but for the most part I’ve given them up. The style worked for Ellison, who managed to never be too cutesy and whose distractions were interesting, but I could not pull it off. I would later describe parentheses to my students as a whispered aside, as opposed to the breathless shout of dashes or the matter-of-factness of commas. It was a device, I would say, not to be overused.

There is a coda to this tale of parentheses. Fast forward about twenty years from high school, and I saw Ellison speak at the university where I was working. In his talk to a packed house, I listened as he began one story, then started another, then another and then two more. After concluding the final story, he went back to the penultimate one, then the ones before that, wrapping up each in its place until he was back at the first story. I laughed, realizing that he was using parentheses within parentheses within parentheses to narrate his stories. Whether in an essay or in a lecture, parenthesis was a rhetorical trick he had mastered.

But it is not a trick for everyone to attempt.

_{Featured image: Harlan Ellison at the LA Press Club. Photo by Pip R. Lagenta. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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