Petty devils are all around us. Products of so-called low mythology, they often have impenetrable names. (Higher mythology deals with gods, yet their names are often equally opaque!) Some such evil creatures have appeared, figuratively speaking, the day before yesterday, but that does not prevent them from hiding their origin with envious dexterity (after all, they are imps). A famous evader is gremlin. It has the same “suffix” as goblin, and quite probably borrowed -lin from its ancestor. The “ancestor” is known to have caused mischief already in the twelfth century, while the word gremlin surfaced in the Royal Air Force (RAF) around 1920. It may seem strange that we don’t know the derivation of such a recent coinage, but such is the fate of all slang; our acquaintance may have come up with a catchword and never boasted of it. As a result, dictionaries say ruefully: “Origin unknown.” Is gremlin a grim goblin (that is, a slightly altered blend) or a witty variant of Kremlin (a place responsible for all kinds of trouble)? Since this is anybody’s guess and moreover, since gremlin also means (or meant) a low-ranking air pilot, we will leave Mr./Ms. Anybody at their guessing game and turn to goblin.

The names of demons often fall victim to taboo. People believed that, if they pronounced goblin (to give one example), the creature would mistake the speech act for an invitation and come, but if the sounds were scrambled, the danger would be averted (obviously, if you said Kid, no one called Dick would appear). See the post on Old Nick. It once occurred to me that goblin was really boglin, with gob for bog, as in bogey, and an obscure diminutive suffix. However, I gave up this idea, because -lin kept vexing me. The diminutive suffix is -in; -l belongs to the root. Later I learned that I had a predecessor who launched the same hypothesis in 1953. This is the reward or punishment for having a good etymological database. You always discover that, however imaginative you may be, you are not the first. Nothing like having someone to prick your vanity.

As always, people have tried to derive goblin from some similar-sounding word: gobble or French gober “swallow, gulp down” (though goblins are not cannibals and do not devour their victims) and even gibberish (though the resemblance is slight, and goblins do not have a reputation for obsessive chattering). According to the funniest theory, elves and goblins go back to Guelphs and Ghibellines, the names of two political parties that divided Italy during the Middle Ages, when the Pope and the Holy Roman Empire were at daggers drawn. The author of this etymology was E.K., the otherwise anonymous glosser of Edmund Spenser, the author of Fairie Queene. Before that great poem he published Shepheardes Calender (1579), and in the commentary on “June Eclogue” E.K. tells us that elves and goblins were invented to keep the common people in ignorance:

“When all Italy was distraicte into factions of the Guelfs and the Gibelins, being two famous houses in Florence, the name began through their great mischiefs and many outrages, to be so odious, or rather dreadful… that if theyr children at any time were frowarde and wanton, they would say to them that the Guelfs and the Gibeline came. Which words nowe from them… be come into our usage, and, for Guelfs and Gibelines, we say Elfes and Goblins….”

James f. Royster (1928), of the University of North Carolina, suspected (quite rightly, I believe) that E.K. had borrowed his etymology from an earlier authority but failed to find the source. This etymology received a mention in two great seventeenth-century dictionaries (Minsheu’s and Skinner’s), and to my amazement, I found it in a British encyclopedia published less than a hundred and fifty years ago.

We have only one firmly established fact at our disposal. Orderic Vitalis (1075-1142), an English chronicler and Benedectine monk, gave an account of a certain demon called Gobelinus (that is, Gobelin; -us is merely a Latin ending), expelled from a neighboring temple in Normandy. It follows that the English probably borrowed the word from northern French. We would like to know how the French obtained it. A similar word is German kobold “brownie,” a house spirit and a gnome that haunts mines (I mentioned it in connection with nickel, while dealing with Old Nick). Its origin is also unclear, and consequently, we remain in the dark as to its affinity with goblin. Perhaps kob-old consists of a word for “hut; dwelling,” with the second part meaning “ruler” or “spirit” (two candidates have been proposed). But perhaps this interpretation is a clever folk etymology. We also have Medieval Latin cobalus “mountain spirit.” The route might be from Germanic or simply German to Medieval Latin, to northern French, and from there to English. In this well-designed itinerary, a small point seems to have been overlooked, namely the absence of -d or -t in the English word. Whatever the ultimate origin of -bold — in Old Engl. cofgodas or cofgodu, plural (cof “chamber,” god “deity”) and in German Kobold — d is present but in goblin it is not. Only once have I run across a puzzled query about the loss of d in Gobelinus ~ goblin. Yet this question strikes me as important.

From early on, etymologies have cited Greek kóbalos “an impudent rogue, an arrant knave” (the plural Kóbaloi meant “a set of mischievous goblins, invoked by rogues”) and derived goblin from it. However, in later dictionaries, including the 1910 edition of Skeat, who followed the OED, the idea of the Germanic origin goblin has prevailed. I see little advantage in the Greek etymology. The truth will, of necessity, remain hidden, but goblin looks like a migratory name of a malicious hideous sprite. In Greek, the word is usually believed to be of Phrygian origin, though its relatedness to the root for “vault, arch” (verb) has also been considered. (Kóbalos emerged as “the spirit of the cave,” a rather fanciful reconstruction.) Its way to the rest of Europe cannot be traced, for Medieval Latin cobalus has no known etymon in Classical Latin. Orderic’s Gobel-in is fairly close to kóbal-os, while Old English cof-god is not.

If German kobold goes back to kob-walt or kob-hulth, it has nothing to do with the Greek form but resembles (somewhat) the Old English one. To be sure, one can suggest that not the entire Greek word but only its root caught the imagination of the oldest Germanic speakers and that to this root, reinterpreted as “chamber; dwelling,” they added their own words meaning “god; ruler; spirit.” Cob is such a common syllable in the languages of the world that its association with some other word can always be expected. For instance, when we hear Welsh coblyn “goblin,” from English, cobio “thump” comes to mind (as in coblyn y coed “woodpecker”). On the other hand, Old Engl. cof-god- may, like its German analog, have been independent of the migratory word I posited. Then goblin owes nothing to Germanic. I don’t know the answer but would like our most authoritative dictionaries to be less dogmatic when it comes to dealing with such a sly creature. Too bad lexicographers have not invited Harry Potter as a consultant.

Gobelin, a national establishment in Paris, celebrated for its tapestry and upholstery, goes back to the family named Gobelin. The existence of such a forbidding surname need not surprise us; compare the German family names Teufel, Düwel (both mean “devil”), and Waldteufel (= forest devil). In hobgoblin, hob- is a variant of Rob, Robert being a common name of the devil (compare Robin good fellow). The whole has a particularly good ring, because hob- rhymes with gob-.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: “The Goblins in the Gold-Mine” The Book of Knowledge, The Children’s Encyclopedia, Edited by Arthur Mee and Holland Thompson, Ph. D., Vol II, Copyright 1912, The Grolier Society of New York. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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We might have grown skeptical about our cultural legacy, but it is quite natural for us to assume that our own cognitive theories are the latest word when compared with those of our predecessors. Yet in some areas, the questions we are now asking are not too different from those posed some two-three centuries ago, if not earlier.

One of the most topical questions in today’s cognitive science is the precise role of language in the brain and in human perception. Further disciplines, such as anthropology and evolutionary biology, are concerned with the emergence of language: How is it that homo sapiens is the only species possessing such a complex syntactic and sematic tool as human language? What is the relationship between human language and animal communication? Could there be any bridge between them, or are they of categorically different orders, as seems to be suggested by Noam Chomsky’s views?

Such questions stood at the very centre of a fascinating debate in eighteenth-century Europe. From Riga to Glasgow and from Berlin down to Naples, Enlightenment authors asked themselves how language could have evolved among initially animal-like human beings. Some of them suggested some continuities between bestial and human communication, though most thinkers pointed to a strict barrier separating human language from vocal and gestural exchange among animals. In broad lines, this period witnessed a transition from an earlier theory of language, which saw our words as mirroring self-standing ideas, to the modern notion that signs are precisely what enables us to form our ideas in the first place. Such signs had, however, to be artificially crafted by human beings themselves; after all, natural sounds and gestures are also used by animals.

According to various eighteenth-century thinkers, this transition from natural communication to artificial or arbitrary signs was the prerequisite for the creation of complex human interrelations and mutual commitments — in short, the basis for the creation of human society as we know it, with its political structures, economic relations, and artistic endeavours. In this sense, the language debates in eighteenth-century Europe highlighted a crucial problem in Enlightenment thought: how to think of the transition from a natural form of life (frequently conceptualized as a ‘state of nature’) to an artificial or man-made social condition (usually referred to as ‘civil society’). Language was a much more significant topic in Enlightenment thought than hitherto suggested.

Furthermore, the idea that all distinctive forms of human life are based on artificial signs has been regarded as a main tenet of the Counter-Enlightenment, a relativistic and largely conservative movement which Isaiah Berlin contrasted to a universalistic French Enlightenment. By contrast, that awareness of the historicity and linguistic rootedness of life was a mainstream Enlightenment notion.

This last point means that even if the eighteenth-century discussions of language and mind were quite similar to ours, particular nuances and approaches were moulded by contemporary concerns and contexts. The open and malleable character of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters is found in a wide variety of authors: Leibniz, Wolff, Condillac, Rousseau, Michaelis, and Herder, among others. The language debates demonstrate that German theories of culture and language were not merely a rejection of French ideas. New notions of the genius of language and its role in cognition were constructed through a complex interaction with cross-European currents, especially via the prize contests at the Berlin Academy.

Avi Lifschitz is Lecturer in Early Modern European History at University College London (UCL); in 2012/13 he is Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin. He is the author of Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century, available in print from Oxford University Press and online from Oxford Scholarship Online, and co-editor of Epicurus in the Enlightenment (2009).

Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) is a vast and rapidly-expanding research library. Launched in 2003 with four subject modules, Oxford Scholarship Online is now available in 20 subject areas and has grown to be one of the leading academic research resources in the world. Oxford Scholarship Online offers full-text access to academic monographs from key disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, science, medicine, and law, providing quick and easy access to award-winning Oxford University Press scholarship.

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Image credit: Portrait of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), German philosopher, circa 1700, by Christoph Bernhard Francke. Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Although a German word, Pumpernickel (which in what follows will not be capitalized) seems to be sufficiently familiar to the English-speaking world not to require a gloss. The origin of the bread (Westphalia, and there perhaps the town of Osnabrücken) has been ascertained, but the etymology of the name remains a puzzle—at least to some extent. It would have been almost impossible to collect the countless publications on this word without an exhaustive survey by Kurt Ranke (1954), an outstanding folklorist and dyed-in-the wool Nazi, a scholar who returned to a university career shortly after the war and was embraced by academia with open arms. Too bad, talented people so often turn out to be scoundrels. Those who know enough about the career of Jan de Vries, a great Dutch Germanist, will agree.

All the earlier attempts to trace pumpernickel to its etymon failed because they assumed that everything had begun with the name of the bread. Ranke showed that this idea was wrong. Carin Gentner, who brought out her investigation on pumpernickel in 1987, two years after Ranke’s death, mentioned her illustrious predecessor in passing, but her material and conclusions contain little that is new. Documents show that pumpernickel has been attested with many senses: “different kinds of bread,” “a short fat man (or child),” part of the phrase connected with the custom of ‘singing Pumpernickel’ (the meaning of the phrase is no longer clear, but the reference is to something unconventional and often obscene; sometimes fisticuffs and the like are at the center), and “the hero of a children’s song about someone called Pumpernickel” (he is often in trouble and becomes everybody’s laughingstock). Westphalia is situated in the north of Germany, but the word pumpernickel and the character bearing this name have been recorded all over the country, including its southernmost regions.

In popular literature, one can read fanciful explanations about how the word pumpernickel came about. Most of them center on some episode in the history of the heavy bread made with coarsely ground rye: either a French soldier expressed his disgust of the food a Westphalian peasant offered him, or a kind-hearted bishop fed his starving flock with it. But, as noted, pumpernickel is not tied to the Osnabrücken region. Besides, the name does not always designate course bread. In Vienna, the well-known Lebkuchen is called this; it resembles gingerbread and is a Christmas treat baked with almonds. The word made its way into several countries outside the German speaking world, including France, and its foreign offspring are neither heavy nor coarse. No mention of pumpernickel in published sources predates the beginning of the seventeenth century. The word also occurs as pompernickel and bombernickel, but both are phonetic variants of pumpernickel and add nothing to our search.

Of real importance is the fact that already in the first third of the seventeenth century Pumpernickel sometimes meant “devil.” The name as applied to Westphalian bread appeared in documents and books some time (though not considerably) later, and perhaps the short chronological gap reflects reality: first the devil (a rather than the devil), then “devilish” bread. Despite the general uncertainty surrounding the derivation of pumpernickel, the origin of the first element poses no difficulties. In the post on bogey, I listed some b-g and p-g words that denote swelling, a noisy explosion, and so forth. Bomb and pomp were among them. Pump, pamper, and even pimp belong there too. A pimp (like the German Pimpf) was a youngster, a weakling unable to produce a big pumpf, that is, fart. Pamper refers to stuffing one with food (hence spoiling). Pumper-, as has been known for a long time, carries the same connotations. Despite the occurrence of the word from Osnabrücken to Vienna, it must have been coined in the north, for otherwise it would have had pf in place of p, at least after m. Whoever Pumpernickel was, he must have been able to produce a lot of noise, probably by breaking wind, though it is not improbable that he, like Bogey, deafened people in some other way.

Pumpernickel emerges as a vulgar clown, a prankster, the hero of drunks and whores, a figure typical of low popular culture, like Til Eulenspiegel, the protagonist of scatological tales, Richard Strauss’s symphony piece, and Charles de Coster’s magnificent prose epic. Less clear is the origin of -nickel. German etymologists are reticent on this point, but most probably we find ourselves in the presence of our friend Old Nick. As Charles P. G. Scott pointed out, in English, Nick is an abbreviation of Nicol. There indeed was a devil bearing this name.

Here the metal nickel provides some help. The history of nickel is known. In 1754 Swedish mineralogist Axel F. von Cronstedt obtained an ore he called Kupfernickel (Kupfer “copper”) and shortened it to nickel because it yielded no ore despite its appearance. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology calls nickel a dwarf, a mischievous demon. The German etymological dictionary by Kluge-Mitzka clarifies the situation: “The name Nikolaus often became a term of abuse, especially in eastern Germany.” Let us not miss the formulation: “…the name Nikolaus,” not “the name of St. Nikolaus.” (The etymology of the metals cobalt and wolfram is similar to that of nickel.)

The word pumpernickel gained great popularity during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), which, quite appropriately for our subject, ended after peace treaties were signed in Osnabrücken and Münster. By that time most of Europe lay in ruins. The only good result of the war was the spread of the word pumpernickel, evidently from the “coarse” language of soldiers. They seem to have sworn by Nickel and mentioned him all the time. Just why he rather than somebody else became so prominent (given an abundance of competitors) will hardly ever become known. It could have been Tom, or Harry, or Dick (the last two would have done especially well). The bread soldiers ate in the seventeenth century was indeed heavy and produced more than one “Pumpf,” or great flatulence (to use a polite, sufficiently Latinized word). It deserved being called “fart Nickel.”

And here comes my hypothesis. It did not occur to others because they did not realize that Old Nick was a sibling of Nickel. This is what I meant when I said that etymologists never know enough. I believe that mercenaries and those who accompanied the troops made the petty devil Nickel also famous in England. It cannot be fortuitous that Old Nick and pumpernickel are such close contemporaries in the two countries. I suggest that Nick in Old Nick is a borrowing from German. If my conclusion is right, then Old Nick has no roots in medieval European folklore. St. Nicholas (our Santa Klaus) need not worry about his disreputable namesake (unless someone succeeds in showing that there is a connection between them after all). The Old Germanic crocodile (nicor ~ nihhus) fades out of the picture. Nixes and nickers are one thing, and Old Nick is something quite different.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: 10 Euro Gedenkmünze 2011 – 500 Jahre Till Eulenspiegel, PP, Bildseite. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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In our enlightened age, we are beginning to forget how thickly the world of our ancestors was populated by imps and devils. Shakespeare still felt at home among them, would have recognized Grimalkin, and, as noted in a recent post, knew the charm aroint thee, which scared away witches. Flibbertigibbet (a member of a sizable family in King Lear), the wily Rumpelstilzchen, and their kin have names that are sometimes hard to decipher, a fact of which Rumpelstilzchen was fully aware. For some reason, devils, at least in English, are often called old: Old Bogey, Old Scratch, Old Nick, and even Old Nick Bogey…. Bogey was my subject two weeks ago, Scratch has respectable Germanic siblings (probably also onomatopoeic), and Nick seems transparent. But who was Nick? This question has bothered numerous researchers.

Did Nick at any time refer to some person (real or mythic) or does the name go back to Engl. nicker “a water sprite”? In Old English, nicor was a sea monster, and Beowulf met many of them while swimming through the ocean. However, nicker is a word only folklorists today recognize easily, whereas Old Nick is still familiar to many. Some people even think that nickname (from an eke name “additional name”; eke as in eke out one’s salary, related to German auch “also” and so forth) is really Nick name, given intentionally to hoodwink the Devil: confused by a wrong name, the one not given at birth, the Devil will not fetch his victim. More than one etymologist suspected that Old Nick “nicks” (kills) people, that is, cuts them; leaves a notch in them; has something to do with their necks, or taunts them (compare German necken “tease”).

A truly bizarre etymology of Old Nick connects Nick with Niccolò Machiavelli. As Macaulay observed, while the Church of Rome pronounced Machiavelli’s works accursed, Englishmen coined out of his surname an epithet for a knave and of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil. Fortunately, he admitted the existence of a schism on this subject among antiquarians and philologists, but it is odd that he could mention such a conjecture as worthy of anyone’s attention. The OED discusses the Old Nick and Machiavelli theory. Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, wrote: “Nick Machiavel had ne’er a trick,/ Though he gave his name to our Old Nick,/ But was below the least of these” (III.1: 1313). Hudibras, a long mock-heroic satire by Samuel Butler (not to be confused with another Samuel Butler, the author of The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon, and other clever but moderately entertaining books), was published in three parts between 1663 and 1678. The Machiavellian etymology of Old Nick must have been widely popular in the middle of the seventeenth century for the collocation surfaced in print just around that time. One should always count on a period during which a joke or slang leads an underground existence before it turns up in a written text, but if Old Nick had long existed before 1678 in what we today call oral tradition, it would probably have left some traces in legends, charms, or songs. The earliest citation of Old Nick in the OED is dated to 1643.

A fairly recent hypothesis derives Old Nick from Old Iniquity, the name of the devil in medieval plays. The derivation is clever, and the OED mentions it in a noncommittal way, but it is one of several equally ingenious guesses. Charles P. G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary, wrote a book-length article titled “The Devil and his Imps.” At one time, he remarked, the name Nicol was very common (compare Nicolson). That Nicol could be abbreviated to Nick requires no proof. But Nick also served as the “nickname” for Hick (from mine Hick, in the same way in which Ned developed from mine Ed). As a result (so Scott), it aligned itself with Dick (the root of Dickens; compare what the Dickens!), Hob, Rob, Jack (with the lantern), Will (with the wisp), and the devil Hick, to cite a few. In Scott’s words: “In considering the application of the name Nick thus derived, and of other familiar personal names, to the Devil, we are not to think of that personage as the black malignant theological spirit of evil, but rather as a goblin of limited powers, a ‘poor’ devil, who may be half daunted, half placated, by a little friendly impudence or homely familiarity.” Curiously, not a hint of this hypothesis can be found in The Century Dictionary.

Scott was an excellent etymologist, neglected by later scholarship and most undeservedly forgotten. He denied any connection between Nick and Old Engl. nicor, though this connection was taken for granted by all earlier sources, including the first edition of Skeat’s dictionary (1882). Here the OED (in 1907) followed Scott, and once the OED made its opinion known, everybody repeated it. Skeat, too, gave up his initial idea. We don’t know whether the name Old Nick is considerably older than the seventeenth century or roughly contemporaneous with the sixteen-forties. As I said, the first scenario is unlikely. However, serious scholars have at least twice tried to discover echoes of ancient superstitions in Old Nick. According to a medieval legend, a certain man called Nicola pesce (Italian pesce “fish”) could live many days under water and plunge to the bottom of the sea. Popular belief turned this person into a sea demon—hence, allegedly, Norwegian Mikkelfisk, from the unattested Nickelfisch. In it n is said to have become m under the influence of the Scandinavian word for “great” (as in Scots mickle), and confusion with St. Michael was the result. Elsewhere, the fabulous sea dweller was confused with St. Nicholas. We can see that Johann Knobloch, the author of this reconstruction, also does without Old Engl. nicor but in a way different from Scott’s.

Unlike Scott and Knobloch, Claude Lecouteux returned to nicor and the words related to it. In Germany, nicchus ~ nihhus (now Nix ~ Nixe) meant “crocodile.” Lecouteux suggested that St. Nicholas, whose cult spread in the eleventh century, was venerated for encountering and vanquishing a sea monster (a nihhus) and became inseparable from him. He pointed out that St. Nicholas has strong ties with water. Quite often the saint appears in legend accompanied by a frightening figure, seemingly a transformation of his old adversary. This theory has a grave flaw. Beowulf killed Grendel (another water demon) and his mother, while St. George killed the dragon, but we do not have a story in which St. Nicholas confronts the nihhus. One would have expected that such a story would have become the kernel of his cult.

As far as I can judge, all the conjectures briefly mentioned above are wrong. My bitter experience has taught me that an etymologist never knows enough. Certain facts look convincing, as has happened with Old Nick, but there is one more that ruins the reconstruction. Neck, necken, to nick, “Nick” Machiavelli, nicor ~ nihhus (nicker), Old Iniquity, Hick, the amphibian Nicola pesce, the indomitable St. Nicholas— some of them had at least some chance of becoming Old Nick, while others had none. Sometimes the decisive factor in offering a good derivation is chronology. Why did Old Nick turn up only in the seventeenth century? The scholars and amateurs who dealt with our “poor devil” never asked this question and missed a crucial piece of information. What is it? But here, Scheherazade-like, I will stop, to return to my fairy tale next week (not next night).

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Nøkken by Theodor Kittelsen, 1904. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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How subversive was the speech of Flemish rebels in the later Middle Ages? Violence remained the exception in urban rebellions, whereas subversive utterances, though always risky, must have been almost the rule of daily politics in the urban centres of late medieval Flanders and in many other European towns and cities as well. Quoted below, you can find five of the most popular expressions of urban rebels in Flanders. Naive at first sight, they contain however hidden messages for those who were shouted at.

1. ‘A bad chicken was brooding’ (een quaet kiekin broedde; Ypres, 1477) was a common proverb in the Middle Ages. It meant that wicked people were hatching a malicious plan. They ‘were brooding on’ subversive plans that had to remain hidden from the authorities, until they could take action and openly call for a strike in the textile industry. Testimonies of Flemish rebels not only show that they planned their political actions in clandestine meetings, but also that even groups completely excluded from political power, as the young apprentices of the Flemish textile guilds, commonly exchanged dangerous political ideas amongst themselves without the initial knowledge of the urban rulers or the deans and masters of their guilds. When these bad eggs were hatched, subversive speech could pose a serious threat to the authorities.

2. ‘Son of a b*tch’ (hoerezuene; Bruges, 1478). Such vulgar language was not used only by rebels, as it seems to have been quite common in all social layers in town. Anyway, as today, one of the most common metaphors used to describe the strengths and weaknesses of opponents in past societies involved sexuality. Insulters targeted men and women with references to their (alleged) sexual excesses and unreliability. Furthermore, a victim’s descent was called into question when an insulter called him or her a ‘b*stard’ or a ‘son of a b*tch’. Power and status depended not only on behaviour, but also on membership in an important family through birth or marriage. Both aspects came under pressure if a man or woman was labelled as an illegitimate child, because in Flanders ‘b*stards’ had no legal rights unless the sovereign legitimized them.

3. ‘I sh*t on you’ (ic schyte in ulieden; Bruges, 1527). In 1527, the fishmonger Thomas Haghebaert had shouted to the dean and the sworn men of his guild ‘I have nothing to do with you or with the magistrate. I sh*t on you and on the aldermen and on all those who think they can harm me!’ He was exiled as well, a heavy punishment for a serious crime. More than just social status and reputation were at stake when Thomas threatened his superiors with these ‘faecal insults’. He was also challenging their legal authority. Therefore, this ‘indecent language’, as it was called in the final verdict of Thomas, not only wanted to dishonour the chiefs of the guild, as the main purpose of the defamation was to destabilize the political authority of rulers and privileged social groups.

4. ‘Liver eater’ (levereter; Ghent, 1432). This offensive term was generally aimed at corrupt officers or aldermen. The term was linked to ‘organologic’ views which compared the city with a body that could be harmed by the corrupt acts of individuals. In this case, according to rebel ideology, people who ate the ‘liver’ of the city damaged the most important part of its ‘body politic’. Medieval medicine saw the liver as the source of all necessary body fluids, but medical models aside, the basic idea of eating one’s liver is expressive enough. By accusing someone of this severe crime, rebels legitimated the punishment of those who were accused of corruption, as they claimed that it was a necessary action to cure ‘a wounded town’.

5. ‘Kill! Kill!’ (slaet doot, slaet doot; Bruges, 1477). The rhythmic structure of the Middle Dutch text, and of several other similar examples, shows that it was meant to be chanted or sung. If a mob of thousands was shouting such phrases unisono, this would obviously have an extremely intimidating effect on the aldermen hiding in the city hall. Using a rhetoric of violence targeted at the moral failings of rulers, these shouted slogans did not attack the urban government as a whole, but just those who had failed to fulfil their proper role as good governors. Rebels sought to hold up the mirror to magistrates, asking them to correct their faults and remedy the particular grievance that lay at the heart of the protest. Rebels did perhaps not fully understand what the ‘bad practices’ were that they were referring to when they collectively shouted similar slogans in public during times of commotion, but they certainly did know what was at stake and why they shouted it.

Jan Dumolyn is a lecturer in medieval history (with special research assignment) at Ghent University. He publishes on the social, political and cultural history of the later medieval Low Countries. Trained as an urban historian, Jelle Haemers wrote his first book on the Ghent revolt of 1449-53. In recent years his research interests have widened to encompass other kinds of social and political conflicts in the late medieval town, notably in the Low Countries (1100-1600). Their recent article in Past and Present — “‘A Bad Chicken was Brooding’: Subversive Speech in Late Medieval Flanders” — is available to read for free for a limited time.

Founded in 1952, Past & Present is widely acknowledged to be the liveliest and most stimulating historical journal in the English-speaking world.

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The Telegraph Hay Festival is taking place from 23 May to 2 June 2013 on the edge of the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park. We’re delighted to have many Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year. OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Hay-on-Wye, you won’t miss out. Don’t forget you can also follow @hayfestival and view the event programme here.

Simon Horobin will be appearing at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Tuesday 28 May 2013 at 2.30pm to ask: does spelling matter? More information and tickets.

By Simon Horobin

‘The apostrophe is the most troublesome punctuation mark in English, and perhaps also the least useful. No other punctuation mark causes so much bewilderment, or is so often misused.’
–R.L. Trask, The Penguin Guide to Punctuation

The recent decision by Devon County Council to drop the apostrophe from its road signs was met with dismay and anger by those concerned about the preservation of linguistic standards. Lucy Mangan, writing in The Guardian, branded it an ‘Apostrophe Catastrophe’ which ‘captures in microcosm the kind of thinking that pervades our government, our institutions, our times’, drawing parallels with the government’s handling of the banking crisis, binge-drinking and sexual assault. Similar prophecies of doom followed the decision by the bookseller Waterstones to drop the apostrophe from its shop names. Writing in the Daily Mail, Lindsay Johns lamented this wanton disposal of the rules of grammar which enable us to communicate. But is the preservation of the apostrophe really so crucial to the well-being of our society? Would consigning the apostrophe to the dustbin really threaten the future of our language as a means of communication?

It is seldom recognised by its guardians that the apostrophe is purely a feature of written language, with no spoken language correspondence. If we can do without it in speech, then why is it necessary in writing?  Even in writing the apostrophe is a relatively recent innovation; it was first introduced into English printed books in the 16th century to indicate an elision or a contraction, as it still does today in she’ll, can’t, it’s. In the 17^th century its use was extended to indicate possession in singular nouns, the boy’s book, where the –s ending was understood either as an elision of the earlier ending –es, or erroneously as a reduced form of the possessive pronoun his. Further confusion was introduced in the 18^th century when the apostrophe was extended to plural possessives, the boys’ books, where nothing has been omitted.

The use of the apostrophe to signal both elision and possession is the cause of much of today’s confusion, most notoriously in the distinction between it’s and its. For Lynne Truss the rule is simple and the punishment for breaking it should be suitably brutal:

‘Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave’.
–Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves.

But is such harsh condemnation really warranted? Since the apostrophe can signal possession, it is natural to assume that the neuter possessive its should also have an apostrophe. The pronoun its was first introduced in the 17^th century to replace an earlier form his, which overlapped unhelpfully with the masculine pronoun. Because it was formed by adding a possessive ending to the subject pronoun it, the new pronoun was initially written it’s; a spelling which persisted until the 19^th century.

Insecurity about where to place the apostrophe increasingly leads to its omission, so that we frequently find examples of its mine, as well as its insertion in contexts where it isn’t required. Particularly common is the addition of an apostrophe to plurals, known as the ‘greengrocers’ apostrophe’; so-called because it is thought to be particularly prevalent in signs advertising apple’s and orange’s. There is some historical justification for this error, however, since the apostrophe was originally inserted in the plurals of words which ended in vowels, like folio’s and opera’s, and still is in cases like ‘p’s and q’s’, ‘do’s and don’t’s’.

The apostrophe has long been a polarising issue among otherwise rational people. George Bernard Shaw, a vocal critic of English spelling, wrote cant and hes instead of can’t and he’s, arguing that the apostrophe was entirely redundant: ‘There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli’. Lewis Carroll, on the other hand, inserted additional apostrophes, preferring spellings like sha’n’t and ca’n’t as the proper contractions of shall not and can not. While there are those today who happily omit apostrophes in emails (not e’mails) and text messages (or txt msgs), there are those who firmly insist on its inclusion. The self-appointed monitor of Twitter posts, YourorYou’re, retweets messages in which these two words are confused with the simple comment: ‘WRONG!’.

The media storm that followed Devon County Council’s announcement resulted in  the decision being overturned. Residents of Tiverton’s Beck’s Square and Blundell’s Avenue can sleep peacefully in their beds; Lucy Mangan can put away her tin of paint. The precious apostrophe is safe. For now.

Simon Horobin is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His book, Does Spelling Matter?, examines the role of spelling today, considering why English spelling is so difficult to master, whether it should be reformed, and whether the electronic age signals the demise of correct spelling. He also writes a blog about English spelling.

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Image credit: Greengrocer’s apostrophe correction by Sceptre, [Creative Commons] via Wikimedia Commons.

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Arrested Development—the cult comedy set to rise from the dead on Netflix 26 May 2013—had its own distinctive language. It was a show of catchphrases.

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”
“No touching!”
“I’m a monster!”
“There’s always money in the Banana Stand.”
“Steve Holt!”
“Her?”

Unlike 30 Rock, Seinfeld, or The Simpsons, Arrested Development didn’t crank out many new words. Much like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Arrested Development took characters, rather than language, to the limit. Sure, there was hop-on, as in “You’re gonna get some hop-ons” (while driving the preposterous stair car). “Douche chill” was a memorable exclamation by Tobias, though it was used in only one episode. Cornballer is a fun word for a ridiculously unsafe product that produced delicious cornballs and first-degree burns.

One Arrested Development term stands out: never-nude (or, if you like, never nude or nevernude).

This term was first used in the 14 December 2003 episode “In God We Trust,” when twins Michael and Lindsay Bluth discuss her farcical marriage to Tobias:

Michael: You guys were not sharing a bedroom before?
Lindsay: Well, the cut-offs weren’t exactly a turn-on.
Michael: Yeah, what’s the deal with the cut-offs?
Lindsay: You’ve got to promise not to tell anyone this.
Michael: Okay.
Lindsay: He’s a never-nude.
Michael: Is that exactly what it sounds like?

Narrator Ron Howard then chimes in: “Tobias suffered a rare psychological affliction of never being able to be completely naked,” accompanied by ridiculous images of Tobias in those cut-offs. The cut-offs—a horrifying, do-it-yourself version of Daisy Dukes—are always worn by Tobias, even in the shower or under underwear. A preference for this denim disaster is the main symptom of being a never-nude, as shown by all the people wearing them at a recent fan gathering. Cut-offs are to Arrested Development fans as pointy ears are to Trekkies.

This term is not widely used, but it’s part of the lexicon for some, as shown by uses on Twitter. A female professional wrestler describes a situation that would surely make Tobias freak: “Had my first massage. As someone who is awkward being touched, ticklish, a never nude, and can’t sit still, it was a traumatizing experience.”

Had my first massage. As someone who is awkward being touched, ticklish, a never nude, and can't sit still, it was a traumatizing experience

November 26, 2011 5:56 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@WWEAJLee

A.J.

It's the last year we'll be able to dress the 2yo for Halloween as anything we want. Last year she was a never-nude. Any suggestions?

September 12, 2010 11:56 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@AuntMarvel

Jerilyn Hassell Pool

The Hulk is a never nude.

May 9, 2012 7:15 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@MrWordsWorth

Mark Campbell

Meryl Streep is a never nude.

January 19, 2012 4:46 am via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite

@seanoconnz

sean oconnor

I should be prepping for TV but I keep wondering who in the WH is a never-nude. Pretty sure it's not Biden... He's more of an Oscar.

May 15, 2013 3:42 pm via Tweetbot for iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@anamariecox

Ana Marie Cox

In “Marta Complex,” narrator Howard notes that never-nudes are not recognized by the DSM-IV, the then-latest edition of the renowned psychiatric manual. Alas, the recently published DSM-5 still neglects the term. Never-nude may never be recognized by the psychiatric community or the Oxford English Dictionary, but it’s as near and dear to Arrested Development fans as Buster’s hook, Lucille’s alcoholism, Job’s scooter, and George Michael and Maeby’s incestuous love.

As Tobias once said of never-nudes—in a line that perfectly doubles as a rallying cry for fans of the cultiest of cult shows—“There are dozens of us! Dozens!”

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, and language columnist for Visual Thesaurus. If you’re in Chicago, go see the sketch comedy show he wrote: Nachos…From the Abyss. Read his previous OUPblog posts on the language of Batman, reduplication, and tweets.

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As has often happened in the recent past, this essay is an answer to a letter, but I will not only address the question of our correspondent but also develop the topic and write about Old Nick, his crew, and the goblin. The question was about the origin of the words bogey and boggle. I have dealt with both in my dictionary and in passing probably in the blog, but after more than seven years the archive of “The Oxford Etymologist” has grown to such an extent that even I remember dimly whether certain subjects have been covered in the “gleanings” or in a special essay. So what is the origin of bogey? One should perhaps begin with the word boo!

Nobody will contest the idea that boo is an interjection. However, putting a classificatory label on it does not mean solving its etymology. Most interjections are studied, artificial words, from oops and ouch to jiminy and Gosh, and their origin is often lost. The same can be said about the polite oh, ah, and eh. Only natural shrieks (when we holler with pain) are natural, but they are hard to verbalize. Let us agree for the sake of (the) argument that boo is an imitative word and proceed from there. To put it differently, let us agree that we associate boo with noise. Noisy things deafen people. They swell, burst, explode, and by doing so scare us; they are often huge and inflatable, and their spread is beyond people’s control. The most dangerous step in our search will be the first. Can we assume that various consonants tend to attach themselves to sound complexes like boo or bu and form nouns, adjectives, and verbs of more or less predictable semantics? Once we make such a step, we will be in serious trouble, but there is no choice. If boo is sound imitative, does the same hold for boom? Most language historians think so. And bomb? It matters little that Engl. bomb is a borrowing from French (ultimately from Latin, from Greek). Imitative words are similar all over the world, don’t obey so-called phonetic laws, and are easily borrowed.

Now, if bomb is onomatopoeic, nothing prevents us from drawing pomp, pumpkin, and even pooh-pooh, into this net, and, sure enough, it has been done. Since we have allowed our words to begin with p- and have various vowels, we may try to add consonants other than b ~ mb to b- ~ p-. Along the way, we cannot avoid the adjective big. Its derivation has been the object of involved and largely profitless speculation, with one or two improbable hypotheses thrown in for good measure, but, since we need words designating menacing, noisy objects, big will suit us. Strangely, big is the Dutch for “pig,” and pig (the name of a fat, “big” animal) is another word whose origin has been called unknown.

The next object of horror is buck, designating a particularly corpulent beast. The Germanic spectrum of senses in this word is limited: “the male of a horned animal,” (specifically) “the male of the bovine family,” “male deer,” and “billy-goat,” with the root often ending in -kk (a long consonant, or geminate, to use a technical term, emphasizes the word’s affectionate, expressive nature). Irish bocc and Sanskrit bukka “billy-goat,” Armenian buc “lamb,” and Russian byk “buck” (with similar cognates elsewhere in Slavic) are variants of the same word. They may trace to boo “moo,” but pigs do not moo and yet big ~ pig resemble buck, whose most ancient form must have been bukkaz. Nor is bleating (compare Armenian buc) the same as booing ~ mooing, but we remain in more or less the same sphere.

Once we have done with the cattle, we run into Russian buka “bogyman” and wonder what to do with Russian bukashka (stress on the second syllable) “a small insect of any kind,” a word allegedly (but uncertainly) related to another onomatopoeic verb. Lost among bucks, pigs, and their look-alikes, we cannot avoid bug. Its earlier English synonym (or etymon?) was budde, but consonant and vowel variation has long since stopped bothering us: in this game, everything goes. Besides, buds swell and burst, just as we expected. Norwegian bugge means “big sturdy man.” Bug “an object of dread” and bug “insect” (in British English, mainly “beetle”), along with the verb bug (“What’s bugging you?”) and the bug in our computers, are probably different senses of the same word, originally the name of a creature endowed with the ability to swell (hence ready to explode, produce a lot of noise, and fill its surroundings with fright). In its vicinity we discover bugaboo and its earlier variant bugaboy. The latter need not be a “corruption” of bugaboo, because boy, a noun phonetically close to boo, was attested in Middle English with the sense “devil,” and the phrases at a boy and oh, boy may be relics of that sense. The second element of bugbear is bear (an animal name), because people stood in mortal fear of bears and wolves.

Boogie, as in boogie-woogie, is believed to be a West African coinage, and, if it is true that boogie originally meant “prostitute,” we are dealing with a social bugaboo. Speakers all over the world use the sound complex boog- ~ bog- for naming similar objects. Bogey emerged as a member of a large family. Old Bogey is the Devil, a bug, a bugbear. Bogus, initially, as it seems, part of counterfeiters’ slang, is, like most words being discussed here, of unknown etymology. It may well be a relative of bogey. Boggle means “to bedevil,” that is, not only “to confuse” but also “to frighten.” Russian bog (a Common Slavic word) means “god.” It is akin to several Sanskrit and Iranian words for “endowing with gifts” and so forth. In Modern Russian, bogatyi (stress on the second syllable) means “rich.” Long ago attempts were made to connect Slavic bog with English bogey, but they were given up as fanciful. Yet I wonder whether the positive senses (“riches, gifts”) did not arise later. Pagan gods, an invisible multitude, filled worshipers with dread and were propitiated in the hope of warding off the evil they caused. The development of the generic concept (God), characteristic of monotheistic religions, is particularly hard to trace.

Etymology stopped being guesswork when phonetic correspondences were discovered. The exercise offered above smacks of medieval linguistics. Vowels and consonants play leapfrog at will. It is no wonder that good dictionaries call most of such words etymologically obscure. If one can mention boo, boom, bomb, pomp, pig, big, bud, bug, and bogey in one breath, when and where do we stop and for how many more words should we make special dispensation?  Are we allowed to incorporate bog “swamp,” puddle, and pudding into the list? They do not burst, but they certainly “spread.” No one can give a definite answer to those questions. 

Words are not soldiers marching in single file, but they are not a disorganized crowd either. Neither limitless free trade nor strict planning will do them justice. Boggled by this opportunistic conclusion, we can only say that Old Bogey is a noisy demon, an evil bug and that his name reflects this fact.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: The Buck Stops Here sign from Harry Truman’s White House desk. Image courtesy of the Truman Presidential Library. Public domain.

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Oxford University Press recently partnered with The Poetry Archive to support Poetry by Heart, a new national poetry competition in England which saw thousands of students aged 14 to 18 competing to become national champion for their skill in memorising and reciting poems by heart. OUP provided free content from OED Online, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the American National Biography Online to support students participating in the competition. Here, 18 year old winning contestant Kaiti Soultana writes about the experience.

By Kaiti Soultana

What impelled me to participate in Poetry by Heart? Like many of the other contestants, I wanted both to galvanize others and to be inspired myself. It seems that poets strive to enhance the minds of those reading and listening, and I find this so philanthropic. Though a cliché, it is true to say that although I won the competition, I would have won even if I had not gained first place; the experience was invaluable and truly irreplaceable.

What Poetry by Heart offered was an opportunity to deliver a poem aloud and consequently for me to retain it. What I think makes the spoken word superior to reading a poem silently is that delivering a poem aloud allows for both the poet’s and the speaker’s voices to truly be heard. Quite often you find that it is not only the words of the poem but also the sound of it that attracts us to it, even before fully understanding the message it is giving.  That is something I experienced when exploring the part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that I chose to recite. As competitors, we were provided with an anthology of poems of two categories to choose from and recite: a pre-1914 and a post-1914 list. It was the work of that anonymous 14th century poet that aroused within me such delight, though amusingly I initially understood very little of what I was reading.

It was that yearning to learn, and to explore what would otherwise go unexplored, which I found so inviting about Sir Gawain. I took up the challenge to inspire others through this astonishing, demanding, and somewhat alien ‘old’ English language. The alliterative threads that bound the poem made it easier to immerse both myself and the audience in such an unfamiliar realm, and it was this, I believe, that made my recitation successful.

My choice of post-1914 poetry developed from a somewhat different quality that poetry as a medium triumphs in: the ability to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary. Elizabeth Bishop seemed to express such perplexed beauty in her poem The Fish, so much so that it established an abnormal yet completely natural and loving bond between myself as a reader and a mere fish.

I began preparing my recitations by acquiring as much basic contextual knowledge about both poem and author, attempting to understand what message each one was trying to convey, yet interpreting it personally and intimately. My progression in understanding each of my poems grew from a minimal surface reading to one where my own interpretation and ideas worked alongside that of the poet’s. I seemed to gain companionship with a person I had never met or talked with. I began to gain an insight into their minds, into the worlds they had constructed. It wasn’t just a poem by rote I had gained, but the appreciation and understanding of a poet’s imagination.

The competition itself seemed far more like a humble gathering of young literary enthusiasts. Through the stages – from school heats to county contests and finally the regional and national finals weekend – the rounds seemed more like a programme of complementary performances. They allowed for initial introductions to mature into lasting friendships – I have experienced the development of such friendships with people across the country thanks to Poetry by Heart.

Though enjoyable, I was unsuccessful in casting away the nerves I am often plagued with. However, it was participating in a competition that I sincerely valued and appreciated, that motivated and inspired me, and allowed me to at least control those nerves.

In addition to viewing others’ regional heats, Poetry by Heart’s organisers scheduled excursions for participants to the London Eye, the British Library and tours of the National Portrait Gallery, none of which I had been privileged to visit before. I was stimulated to explore a small part of London, an opportunity that was exciting, fun, and invaluable.

The weekend itself was nothing shy of extraordinary. It seems unanimous that what we had gained by offering ourselves as orators of the poems was more than just the memory of the poem itself. What I gained was far more remarkable; I discovered the importance of poetry to human beings, and how this importance has spanned generations. It continues to grow as a form of universal expression, and with great thanks to Poetry by Heart I have truly understood its often unacknowledged value.

Kaiti Soultana is 18 and studying A levels at Bilborough College, Nottingham.

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Image credits:  Courtesy of Poetry by Heart; do not reproduce without permission.

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There is a very specific language of Gothic and horror literature that has its roots buried deep in the history of English: doom has been around since Old English; dread carries over from Middle English; eerie, that sense of vague superstitious uneasiness, enters Middle English through Scottish. The adjectives are harsh and guttural: moons are always gibbous, the trees eldritch. Rather famously, Sigmund Freud begins his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ by exploring for several pages the etymology of the German term unheimlich (literally the ‘unhomely’, but cleverly translated using the ancient Scots word ‘uncanny’). Freud rests his entire argument about this elusive, uneasy emotion which is often said to be typical of Gothic fiction on the strange instability of this word. Heimlich and unheimlich are not always opposites, but can come to mean the same thing. What is the most alien, weird, and foreign – the uncanny – produces its effect precisely because it erupts in the most domestic, familiar, and ‘canny’ spaces of the home.

A name to be remembered

It is no surprise that the Gothic, a literature that emerged from the heart of northern Protestant Europe in the eighteenth century, uses an insistently harsh and ancient Northern tongue for its disordered and fantastical imaginings of murky deeds in the Dark Ages centuries before Enlightenment. The Gothic avoids the erudition of suspicious southern Latin sophisticates for a harsher Anglo-Saxon tongue. And if we still associate the modern Gothic with this language of the north it is largely down to the influence of one writer: H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). In the 1920s and 30s Lovecraft wrote pulp horror fictions about men undone by nasty tentacled gods in the backwoods of New England or at the ends of Earth amongst the savage races of Pacific islands or the keening penguins of the Antarctic. Horrible things slithered and slimed, invading human bodies and threatening all human values. He published in amateur journals with tiny print runs and then in pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction. He published only one novella in book form during his life, yet his influence on modern horror has been huge. There is no Stephen King without Lovecraft, no Ridley Scott Alien series, no body-horror, no X Files, no Guillermo del Toro films. Thousands of writers continue to use Lovecraft’s cosmogony of alien gods. He has influenced contemporary philosophy, Goth and Black Metal music, Japanese manga, and there are even religions that worship Lovecraft’s fictional god ‘Cthulhu’.

‘Weird literature’ and Lovecraft’s style

Lovecraft was responsible for fixing down a particular form of ‘weird literature’, a mode of writing slithering somewhere queasily between Gothic and science fiction. ‘Weird’, of course, is another ancient Northern word, found in Saxon, Old German, and Old English. In 2003, young genre writers like China Miéville were associated with a movement christened ‘The New Weird’, further attesting to Lovecraft’s continuing influence into the new century.

The most striking thing about Lovecraft’s prose is his extraordinary, mannered style. His stories are often static mood pieces, building their effect through dense descriptive passages that achieve an almost hypnotic rhythm. He over-eggs every description with tottering towers of adjectives, breaking every decorous rule of ‘good writing’. Adjectives move in packs, flanked by italics and exclamation marks that tell rather than show. He always exhaustively describes what is repeatedly said to be indescribable. He wrote passages like this, from his most famous tale, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’:

That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-like imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membranous wings … It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway… The Thing cannot be described – there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.

The risk of such a style is that it always teeters on collapse, tipping over to become funny rather than frightening. There are many readers who find Lovecraft inept and comical, and this style is certainly very easy to parody. Rather disarmingly, though, Lovecraft tended to agree, berating his own style and failures in letters to friends. He abandoned writing for a long time after the initial rejection of At the Mountains of Madness, feeling there was no point in continuing. But there is a kind of logic to his stylistic awkwardness – it’s as if he needs to make language clatter and break open in order to get at the weird effect. The weird, I always think, is a pulp sublime that slithers out of the carcase of Lovecraft’s broken sentences.

Lovecraft on language and race

Lovecraft was rigorous in imagining his aliens – why would the English language be able to express absolute otherness? His god ‘Cthulhu’ is named with the barest approximation of the horrible sound his debased and savage followers utter. There is even a ritual chant that Lovecraft’s narrator transcribes: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn (which means, obviously, ‘In the house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming’). Yet even this alien language perhaps distantly echoes the hard consonantal sounds and alliterative rhythms of Old English.

There is a darker reason for Lovecraft’s heavy investment in the old languages of the Gothic. Lovecraft was a deeply reactionary man, the last representative of two decaying New England families, deeply afraid of the whirlwind of change in modern America. He lived two years in New York in the 1920s, the huge influx of immigrants terrifying him and feeding his fantasies of invasion and dethronement. He feared that those of Nordic origin (the descendants of the first American white settlers, the Puritans of the Mayflower escaping Popish decadence in Europe) were being threatened by an influx of the Asiatic and other lesser races. He approvingly quoted from the very popular racist books of Madison Grant, who published works with titles like The Passing of the Great Race. It was after Lovecraft escaped from New York in 1926 and returned to Providence in Rhode Island that he wrote his greatest horror masterpieces. ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ is explicitly about the degenerate world of Brooklyn’s port district (then the largest port in the world), but soon these fantasies of racial in-breeding were transfigured into a register of cosmic threat.

For Lovecraft, the Gothic was deeply tied to questions of inheritance, race and language. He spoke explicitly of the Gothic as a literature of the Nordic tribes, best written by those heralding from the Goths and the Teutons. ‘Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense,’ he wrote in his essay ‘The Supernatural Horror in Literature’. He spoke of his favourite Gothic authors Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany and Arthur Machen as possessing ‘a purely Teutonick quality’ in which ‘you ought to find plain evidences of Nordick superiority; and derive therefrom a proper appreciation of your natural as distinguisht from your adopted race-stock.’ Language is never neutral, and in Lovecraft’s extraordinary fiction it is always a question of race and identity, produced in an era of great anxiety about the alleged ‘race suicide’ of the Western world in the aftermath of the Great War.

Always tread carefully: Cthulhu waits dreaming.

This article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.

Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. An expert on science fiction and Gothic literature, he is the author of The Invention of Telepathy, Science Fiction, The Trauma Question, and The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy. He is the editor of H. P. Lovecraft’s Classic Horror Stories published by OUP in May 2013.

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It may not be too widely known how hard it is to discover the origin of even “easy” words. Most people realize that the beginning of language is lost and that, although we can sometimes reconstruct an earlier stage of a word, we usually stop when it comes to explaining why a given combination of sounds is endowed with the meaning known to us. Moo poses no problems (sound imitation); neither does diesel (a proper name). Outside those two spheres, everything is “riddled with riddles.” Today I want to tell a story of how the “easy” origin of the adverb aloof was discovered. The sought-after etymology looks almost self-explanatory, but such is the first impression.

At present, aloof is used only in its figurative sense (we stay aloof, remain aloof, and so forth; hence aloofness), but it arose as a nautical term. This fact remained hidden for a long time. Stephen Skinner, the author of the second etymological dictionary of English (1671; the first was published by John Minsheu in 1617) thought that aloof meant “all off.” It was a relatively new word at his time: the OED has no examples of aloof predating 1535. Skinner’s solution appeared tempting to those who did not care too much about phonetic niceties. In aloof, the vowel is long, while in off it is and has always been short. Obviously, in 1671 no one would have been bothered by such a detail. Being aloof does more or less mean being “all off,” and that equation satisfied people for two centuries. I found it even in an 1870 book, where it was given without discussion as fact. The great Samuel Johnson copied most of his etymologies from Skinner, and the popularity of his dictionary (1755) guaranteed the longevity of the all off derivation.

However, the search for the true descent of aloof did not stop there. It occurred to some people that aloof was perhaps an alteration of a-loft. In 1864 Webster’s original etymologies underwent a drastic revision by C. A. F. Mahn, a German philologist, who, as one of our correspondents assured me, had never made it to America (I had suspected the truth but could find almost nothing on him) and worked, to use the modern cliché, “from home.” His contribution was important, and many absurd suggestions Noah Webster had launched disappeared from the dictionary. But, of course, who could single-handedly rewrite the etymologies of a whole language, especially considering that comparative linguistics was just then coming into its own and that not a single reliable dictionary of English word origins had yet been written! At least Mahn, though a Romance scholar, was a native German and therefore had sufficient familiarity with the achievements of the young science. But in the entry aloof even he vacillated between all off and aloft. Aloft has the already familiar fatal flaw: its root vowel is short. Also, we would like to know what happened to final t.

I have no way of finding out who nowadays reads The North British Review (abbreviated below as NBR). In the nineteenth century, “Reviews” of this type flooded both England and the United States. Many of them became deservedly famous. Sometimes they contained only long critiques of various books, but sometimes they also published essays, poetry, and fiction. One of the contributors to NBR was George Webbe Dasent, a brilliant translator of Icelandic sagas and Norwegian folktales. He knew both languages very well (he also felt comfortable in their grammar, as his manual testifies) and believed that being proficient in a language made him qualified for solving etymological puzzles. In this he was mistaken. Most “Reviews” published everything anonymously, but some contributors later brought out their collected works in book form, and that is how it is occasionally possible to ascertain their authorship. Dasent’s two volume set Jest and Earnest (1873) is excellent reading. His review of Latham’s revision of Johnson’s dictionary (and it is this review that I excerpted for my database) is there. I am used to the vituperative style of the epoch gone by, but Dasent was not only sarcastic, trenchant, and arrogant: he was unbearable. He never doubted that he possessed a key to the ultimate truth. Etymologists’ specialization may have a negative influence on their preferences. The number of deluded people who descry Hebrew, Arabic, or Slavic roots everywhere is not negligible. Someone who has an intimate knowledge of Irish tends to trace hundreds of words to Celtic. Familiarity with Icelandic makes one oversensitive to Scandinavian. This is what happened to Dasent, in whose opinion, aloof was a borrowing of Icel. á hlaupi, literally, “on the run” (the verb hlaupa is akin to Engl. leap). Now, in the earliest examples, as they appear in the OED, aloof signifies an order to the steersman to go to windward, so that “on the run” does not look too good a match for it.

Windward ho!

Dasent wanted to cut rather than disentangle the knot, but etymology, to quote an old lexicographer, is a work of difficulty and delicacy. The puzzle was solved by Skeat in the first edition of his dictionary (1882). Many of the solutions he offered in that work proved wrong, and Skeat, aware of his deficiencies, kept revising them, but this etymology has remained intact. Already in 1857 aloof was explained as the word for keeping one’s luff in the act of sailing to the wind, the luff being a contrivance for altering a ship’s course. Very many nautical terms reached English from Dutch. (A respectable English sailing term almost has to look Dutch. That is why schooner, which is not from Dutch, has the letter h after sc.) The same holds for aloof. Its etymon is Dutch te loef. English substituted on for te, and on loof became aloof, just as aboard, despite the many vicissitudes through which this word went, developed from on board.

Does the denouement look like an anticlimax? I don’t think so. To be sure, the etymology of aloof is almost in plain view, but it took people more than two hundred years to see the picture in its true light. Aloof may have come not from Dutch but from Danish, because the phrase had international currency (for example, it was also used by French sailors), but the Dutch source is more likely. Some dictionaries keep saying that aloof is a word of unknown origin. This verdict should be dismissed as unjustifiably harsh. No doubt, it is better to be safe than sorry. Yet, in this case there is nothing to be sorry about. Could aloof experience the influence of aloft (a suggestion made by many)? Such possibilities can never be excluded. Similar words of this type are sometimes called paronyms. The closer any given two words sound, the greater the possibility they will interact. As far as I can judge, aloft and aloof have little in common. From an etymological point of view, loft, a borrowing of Scandinavian lopt, means “air,” as German Luft still does.

The episode related above (a typical just so story, but with a much greater degree of verisimilitude than the story of the elephant’s trunk) shows that panning for etymological gold, even when the gold does not lie too deep, is hard but that some efforts pay off. And this is all there is to my tale, as Chesterton might have said and perhaps even said somewhere.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Sailing ship by Ivan Aivazovsky. Public domain via Wikipaintings.

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Some time ago I read Sidney P. Moss’s 1984 book Charles Dickens’ Quarrel with America. Those who remember Martin Cuzzlewit and the last chapter of American Notes must have a good idea of the “quarrel.” However, this post is, naturally, not on the book or on Dickens’s nice statement: “I have to go to America—on my way to the Devil” (this statement is used as an epigraph to Moss’s work). In Chapter 10, titled “The Reading Tour,” Moss recounts the impressions of the listeners who had the good luck to hear Dickens in 1867-1868, during his second and last trip to the United States. He was a splendid actor (it is not for nothing that he enjoyed describing theaters and circuses), and newspapers followed his tour at every step.

Two places aroused my curiosity. The Boston Daily Journal (3 December 1867) described Dickens’s appearance, his suit of faultless black, a profusion of gold chains festooned across his vest, and so forth. The description ended so: “A cashy, good-natured, shrewd English face it is, one that would be associated with the out-door life of a smart man of business, not particularly troubled with the sentiments, and most unmindful of good cheer, brusque, not beautiful, wide-awake and honest” (p. 271). The florid style of the description does not appeal to me, but this is beyond the point. I stumbled at the phrase cashy face. Judging by the general tenor of the article and the situation (a performance by a worldwide celebrity), the word could not be too conversational, and indeed, cashy did not turn up in slang dictionaries with the sense that might fit the context. It is also absent from Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles and A Dictionary of American Regional English. I finally hunted it down in John Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language, from which it made its way into Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary. Wright rearranged the senses, but the information remained intact.

Cashy, recorded in the form cashie, means “delicate, not able to endure fatigue; soft, flabby, not of good quality (said about vegetables); luxuriant, succulent (said about plants).” Most senses seem to carry negative overtones. Obviously, Dickens’s face was “delicate.” But why should the reporter have used a word that in his days had restricted currency even in Scotland? Cashy could not be an over-subtle allusion to Dickens’s fondness for the word. We may be certain that it does not occur in Dickens, for otherwise James Murray would have included it in the OED, but he did not. I assume that in 1867 the readers of the Boston Daily Journal were expected to understand what was written in their newspaper. It would be interesting to know whether our correspondents from Boston and Scotland still know this adjective.

Charles Dickens: A cashy face and rising inflection.

From an etymological point of view cashy looks like cash-y (expensive? involving great care?). All the modern senses of this adjective go back to cash. A cashy job is one performed “under the table,” usually by individuals who are not qualified or by persons avoiding taxes. A finished (“cashed”) box of marijuana is called cashy, and the simplest sense of cashy is “wealthy.” But it is most doubtful that the adjective meaning “delicate, flabby, succulent, luxuriant” can be traced to cash. Nor does it seem likely that cashy is an Anglicized form of French caché “secret, hidden.” Once again I would like to appeal to our readers. Someone may know something about the derivation of this troublesome adjective.

The New York Tribune (14 December) was equally laudatory. However, it criticized Dickens’s “partiality for rising inflection and some Cockneyisms of pronunciation” (p. 282 of Moss’s book). Since the “Cockneyisms of pronunciation” were not cited (did Dickens say toime instead of time?), we will let them be. It is the rising inflection that merits a moment’s attention. Rather long ago, I discussed the rising intonation in American English but would like to return to it in connection with Dickens’s speech habits. I remember my embarrassment when I came to Minnesota and could not interpret statements, all of which sounded like questions to my ear. “Where is that building?” “It is two blocks away from here…” (with a strong rise). The dean informed us (among many other things): “We cannot expect a decision before the end of the year…” (again with a strong rise). Someone told me that this intonation is peculiarly Midwestern: people are shy here and raise their voice to leave room for retreat (“That building is two blocks away from here, but, if you miss it, don’t blame me…”; “We cannot expect a decision before the end of the year; yet, it may come earlier, who knows? I am really not sure”). The explanation struck me as fanciful and unconvincing. Later, much to my satisfaction, I discovered that the timidity of the allegedly self-effacing Midwesterners is a myth. They are people like everybody else. Some are timid, while others are not.

Then, I think about ten years ago or so, everybody suddenly began to speak about young women in California using exactly this rise. It was discussed in the media, and journalists ascribed the phenomenon to the emancipatory trend among the female segment of the population, as though a rise were a challenge (“This is what I say. Will you dare to disagree?”). I was amused by a theory opposite to the one I had heard in my semi-native Minnesota. It should be noted that the history of intonation does not exist. English vowels and consonants have been described by schoolmasters and other interested people since the seventeenth century, and old spelling tells its own story, but we have no record of intonation predating the late eighteen-hundreds. Remarks like people in this area “sing” abound, but such remarks are not informative. They only tell us that the outsider did not “sing” in the same way. Also, those observations usually refer to tone languages and dialects rather than intonation. Some conclusions about pauses in the uninhibited speech of the past can be drawn from the division of an old text into words, lines, and paragraphs, and poetry provides us with clues about sentence stress. Other than that, the “singing” of our ancestors is lost.

It is hard to account for some rules. In principle, one expects a rise in a question. But in English only questions beginning with a verb have a rise (“Is he your friend? Do you know him well? Have you ever lived together?”), while so-called special questions end like statements in a dip (“When was he born? Where does he live? Who is he?”). This also holds for the second part of disjunctive questions (“Do they call him Bob [a rise] or Rob [a fall]?”). One and the same intonation can have different functions. I have read several descriptions of Cockney, but I don’t remember whether anyone mentioned a rising intonation as a special feature of that dialect. What will Londoners say? There is no certainty that the correspondent of the New York Tribune was a trustworthy judge of Cockney speech. But seemingly, Dickens did raise his voice the way they do in Minnesota and California (only in Minnesota this intonation is not “gender-specific”). The three identical patterns need not have a common origin, and it would be interesting to hear the opinion of people from the Midwest, California, London, and elsewhere.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: Charles Dickens – Scenes in his life. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery.

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Obrigado a todos que participaram no período de acesso gratuito à Oxford Reference e ao OED pela Semana da Biblioteca Nacional. Tanto o OED quanto a Oxford Reference oferecem algum conteúdo gratuito adicional para o público e ambas estão disponíveis para teste gratuito por um período de 30 dias (Bibliotecas podem enviar por e-mail solicitações de períodos de teste gratuito para library[dot]marketing[at]oup[dot]com).

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Ele ilustra estas definições citando mais de 100.000 textos modernos e históricos, desde literatura clássica como peças de Shakespeare a roteiros de filmes e televisão como Buffy – A Caça-Vampiros, como também testamentos, livros de culinária, blogs e outros.

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Exemplos de perguntas que você pode responder com o OED:

• É uma palavra específica de Londres ou da Austrália?
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Obrigado mais uma vez a todos por nos ajudar a celebrar bibliotecas semana passada.

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Gracias a todos los que participaron en el periodo de acceso gratuito a Oxford Reference y al OED para la Semana Nacional de Bibliotecas. El OED y Oxford Reference ofrecen periodos de prueba gratuitos adicionales y ambos se encuentran disponibles por 30 días. (Las bibliotecas pueden escribir sus solicitudes para periodos de prueba gratuitos a library[dot]marketing[at]oup[dot]com ).

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El OED es uno de los diccionarios más grandes en el mundo y rastrea la evolución y el uso histórico de  más de 600,000 palabras en los últimos 1,000 años a través de 3 millones de citas.

El OED define:

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Ilustra estas definiciones citando más de 100,000 textos históricos y modernos, desde la literatura clásica cómo las obras de Shakespeare a guiones de películas y televisión, como Buffy the Vampire Slayer, hasta blogs, testamentos, libros de cocina y más.

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Suscritores al OED pueden acceder el tesauro histórico del OED en www.oed.com. Este recurso único le permite explorar la riqueza del idioma inglés por tema, y trazar el progreso lingüístico a través del tiempo de un objeto escogido, concepto o expresión.

¡Gracias nuevamente a todos por ayudarnos a celebrar las bibliotecas la semana pasada!

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Thanks again for everyone for helping us celebrate libraries this past week. See who won our National Library Week Photo Contest on Tumblr.

First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Today is Earth Day. At least, that’s the date of the official International Mother Earth Day, as adopted by the United Nations in 2009. It’s a day when we’re asked to reflect on the interdependence of all living things, our responsibility to restore damaged environments to health, and to cherish the world around us.

It was in the 1960s, the decade in which the modern environmental movement emerged, that the idea was born of dedicating one day of the year to celebrating the natural world and publicizing the injuries being inflicted on it. There had been several recent spectacular disasters. In 1967 the oil tanker Torrey Canyon ran aground on the Scilly Isles, causing the world’s first major oil spill. Between 1953 and 1960, people living near Minamata Bay, Japan, were slowly poisoned by eating fish and shellfish contaminated with mercury compounds in effluent from a chemical factory. Londoners had long experience of the winter smog, a mixture of fog and smoke, which afflicted most industrial cities, but in December 1952 the smog killed some 4,000. It was so dense that a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells Theatre had to be cancelled because the audience couldn’t see the stage. Cinemas closed because no one could see the screen. Gaylord Nelson, a US senator from Wisconsin, saw the damage caused in 1969 when an oil well blew out not far from Santa Barbara, California, releasing between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of crude oil, and called for an ‘environmental teach-in’ to be held on 22 April 1970 to raise awareness of the harm being done. That was probably the first Earth Day.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books and articles appeared around that time, warning of the dire consequences of allowing the situation to continue. And in June 1970 the first edition of The Ecologist magazine hit the newsstands, dedicated to describing and analyzing what many saw as an impending crisis of existential proportions. It all came to a head early in 1972, when The Ecologist devoted the whole of its January issue to one long article called ‘A Blueprint for Survival.’ Meanwhile, the United Nations was preparing for its first major international conference, which was also the first conference on the state of the global environment. The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment—the Stockholm Conference—was held in Stockholm in the summer of 1972.

June in Stockholm was sunny and warm, and the summer days were long. I was there as a member of a team from The Ecologist that collaborated with the recently formed Friends of the Earth to produce a daily conference newspaper, the Stockholm Conference Eco. Each morning we set out to attend meetings, returning in the evening to our office at a technical college in a Stockholm suburb to type our stories—no desktop computers in those days. The reports were cut out, pasted down, headlined, and finally taken to a Stockholm daily where it was printed. The following morning, volunteers distributed copies to all the hotels where delegates were staying and after the first few days they were allowed to take it into official conference premises.

The ‘Stockholm Conference Eco,’ (c) Michael Allaby.

The Stockholm Conference exposed the conflict between environmental protection and the need for economic development, a conflict that still remains unresolved. But it also encouraged governments to work together in addressing the most urgent environmental problems. Mainly under the auspices of the United Nations, a series of treaties followed, and in subsequent years there were more environmental conferences. Stockholm led to the creation of the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme, which coordinates much of this activity.

On 22 April, as we mark the forty-third Earth Day, we can perhaps take stock of what was achieved. There are no more London smogs. Factories are no longer permitted to discharge their untreated effluents into rivers, so the rivers are cleaner. There are fish—lots of fish—in the Thames. Nor are industries allowed to release harmful dust and gases into the air. The condition of regional seas, such as the Mediterranean, is monitored and regulated by the countries bordering them. Pesticides are rigorously tested for their effects on non-target organisms before being licensed for use. The list of improvements is a long one, and the improvements are very real.

It is not to say that no problems remain. Of course they do, and some are serious. But they are acknowledged and serious professionals dedicate their lives to finding and applying solutions, and environmental protection and nature conservation now offer rewarding careers. There is always more to be done. But experience shows that we can advance, and that a better, healthier, and more interesting environment is within our grasp.

Michael Allaby has written many books on environmental science and especially on climatology and meteorology. He is an editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation, and the General Editor of several other Oxford Dictionaries, including the Dictionaries of Earth Sciences, Ecology, Plant Sciences, and Zoology.

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This post is an answer to a letter I received from our correspondent Jonathan Davis. Not too long ago, I mentioned the differences in the pronunciation of niche: in the speech of most Americans it rhymes with pitch, but the rhyme niche/leash can also be heard, and it seems to be prevalent in Britain. Mr. Davis is an Englishman living in Texas and, not unexpectedly, favors the vowel of ee and sh in niche, while those around him prefer short i and ch. This difference made him raise the general question about the norm governing such words. He cited valet and ballet as examples. My inconclusive answer follows.

The fear of sounding snobbish is familiar to many people who use the French pronunciation of niche, valet, and their likes. As a radio host I am regularly asked whether forte “a strong point” should have one syllable or two. Some listeners castigate those who do not know the “correct” pronunciation; others are confused and unhappy. In my capacity as a public figure I am supposed to increase the amount of happiness in the world, but all I can say is that the “norm” does not exist in this area. Sounding more educated than one’s neighbors is awkward because neighbors never forgive those who (they think) put on airs. On the other hand, sounding under-educated to gratify the “lowbrows” is also a torture. You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Dictionaries sit on the fence (assuming that dictionaries can sit): they register the existing variants and, by ordering them, indicate which are more common.

In the process of assimilating French words English has always been torn between two tendencies: it either retained their foreign shape or Anglicized them. Equally important has been the tyranny of writing: spelling pronunciation tips the scale more than once. Not only borrowed words succumb to spelling. Consider the sad fate of often and forehead. Nowadays, everybody I hear says often (of-ten) and fore-head. Yet both are Germanic words. Forehead used to rhyme with horrid—except in “vulgar speech,” as old sources inform us; now the “vulgar” have won (as always: that is why language changes). Often is puzzling. Listen, glisten, whistle, and thistle stayed with mute (silent) t. So why often? Hypercorrection, the fear of the timid and the insecure to appear illiterate? It should be added that American English arose as a colonial language and is therefore in some respects more conservative than the language left behind in the metropolis. In the former colonies we regularly find variants that were current in Shakespeare’s days but are no longer admitted into the British Standard (dialects, to be sure, go their own way). This also holds for grammar and usage.

Lily of the Valet?

Jonathan Swift knew the pronunciation of verdict as verdi and vardi. We dutifully mimic the French in dealing with éclat, croquet, crochet, chalet, and bouquet (in all its senses), except that, since a word of Modern English cannot end in a short vowel unless it is schwa (as in sofa) or i (as in icky), the final vowel becomes long (éclat rhymes with spa) or turns into a diphthong (chalet rhymes with lay). Trait has fared even worse. It stuck to its heritage in England (that is, it has become a homophone of tray) but not in America, where it is indistinguishable from the root of the noun traitor. Extra care is needed in dealing with buffet: being buffeted is not the same as enjoying buffet dinner, regardless of the length of the food line. I remember reading about the rich and generous Mr. Buffet and wondering how to pronounce his family name.

French has lost not only final t but also s. Fracas and tapis (as in the phrase on the tapis) are words with a checkered history. Robert Burns rhymed fracas with Bacchus, and for a long time both British and American dictionaries registered final s in the word. It seems that Americans now know only the spelling pronunciation (with -s), while British English does without s. On the tapis occurs rarely, but most people probably understand it. American lexicographers, including Webster (the first edition of his dictionary appeared in 1828), and the authors of pronouncing dictionaries used to recommend tapis rhyming with lapis; at present this does not seem to be the case. One never hears the phrase, so it is hard to judge.

Niche is spelled with ch. At one time, the group (digraph) ch designated in French the same affricate it does in Modern English. When chamber, chance, charge, charity, chief, to cite a few, were borrowed from Old French, ch sounded similarly in them. When French ch yielded to sh (compare chief and its doublet chef), the pronunciation, but not the spelling, of borrowings began to reflect the change as evidenced by chagrin, champagne, charlatan, chemise, moustache, and so forth. If a word of Modern English is spelled with tch, it follows that the preceding vowel has always been short (catch, itch, wretch), while ch indicates length (each, reach, coach). Touch also had a long vowel (that is why we spell it with ou), but which, much, and such are real exceptions. According to this rule, the vowel in the etymon of niche was long. Consequently, nitch is a spelling pronunciation. May those say nitch who feel like it! May every speaker go his or her own way (it is their language they mold or trample underfoot): our withers are unwrung. German also appropriated this word, but Nische has a short vowel after the French consonant.

The valet or the varlet?

The French for the lowest playing court card (“jack” or “knave”) is valet. The character on this card usually bears demeaning names ranging between “servant” and “rogue.” Since valet is a cognate, almost a doublet, of varlet, who would be surprised that the knave of hearts stole some tarts? Let us hope that the dealings of this lady killer with tarts did not go much further.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credits: (1) Convallaria majalis, Rusaceae, Lily of the Valley, inflorescence; Karlsruhe, Germany. Photo by H. Zell, Creative Commons License, via Wikimedia Commons. (2) The knave of hearts, he stole those tarts. From R. Caldecott’s picture book (no.1) . NYPL Digital Gallery.

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Celebre a Semana Nacional da Biblioteca com acesso gratuito ao OED e à Oxford Reference, disponível para todos na América do Norte e do Sul até 20 de abril. Acesse o site e use o

nome de usuário: libraryweek e a senha: libraryweek

para entrar e acessar tudo o que o site tem a oferecer. Todas as pessoas terão acesso através do mesmo logon, sem necessidade de registro. Estamos liberando essa quantidade inédita de conteúdo da OUP em agradecimento a todo o trabalho vital que os bibliotecários realizam para apoiar seus patronos e em celebração à semana que honra as bibliotecas.

OED

O Oxford English Dictionary(Dicionário Oxford de Inglês) acompanha a evolução e o uso das palavras e é amplamente reconhecido como o registro mais competente e abrangente do idioma inglês. O Oxford English Dictionary Online  (Dicionário Oxford de Inglês Online) oferece o conteúdo mais recente do Oxford English Dictionary completo, bem como o Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (Tesauro Histórico do OED). O OED Onlineinclui mais de 600.000 significados de palavras com mais de 3 milhões de citações, cobre o inglês britânico, americano e todas as variedades do inglês e é atualizado quatro vezes por ano com novas entradas.

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Oxford Reference

A Oxford Reference reúne mais de dois milhões de entradas em um único recurso de pesquisa cruzada, de referência de assunto, citação e dicionários de idiomas na coleção Oxford Quick Reference (Consulta Rápida Oxford) e nas premiadas publicações Oxford Companions e Encyclopedias na Oxford Reference Library..

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First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Celebre la Semana Nacional de Bibliotecas con acceso gratuito al OED y Oxford Reference, disponible para América del Norte, del Sur y el Caribe hasta el 20 de Abril. Visite cualquiera de los sitios Web y utilice libraryweek como nombre de usuario y contraseña  para acceder a todo el contenido que los sitios tienen que ofrecer. Todo el mundo tendrá acceso a través del mismo nombre de usuario y contraseña  y no se requiere ningún registro.

Estamos librando el acceso a este contenido gracias al trabajo arduo y vital que los bibliotecarios realizan para apoyar a los usuarios y para celebrar esta semana honrando a las bibliotecas.

OED

El Oxford English Dictionary describe la evolución y el uso de las palabras y es reconocido como el recurso más comprensivo y autoritario del idioma inglés. El Oxford English Dictionary Online brinda el contenido más reciente del Oxford English Dictionary al igual que el Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. El OED Online incluye más de 600,000 significados de palabras, utilizando 3 millones de citas y cubre todas las variedades del idioma inglés incluyendo el estadounidense y el británico, y es actualizado 4 veces al año con nuevas entradas.

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Oxford Reference

Oxford Reference reúne más de 2 millones de entradas en un sólo recurso, desde referencias temáticas, citas, y diccionarios de lenguajes en el Oxford Quick Reference a los galardonados Oxford Companions y enciclopedias en el Oxford Reference Library.

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First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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Celebrate National Library Week with free access to the OED and Oxford Reference, available to everyone in North and South America through the 20^th of April. Visit either site and use

Username: libraryweek / Password: libraryweek

to login and access everything the sites have to offer. Everyone will have access through the same login and no registration of any kind is required.

We are freeing up this unprecedented amount of OUP content in thanks for all the vital work that librarians do to support their patrons and in celebration of the week honoring libraries. In addition, we’ll announce a contest just for librarians on Tumblr, which will bring attention to the events that libraries hold during National Library Week.

OED

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the evolution and use of words and is widely acknowledged to be the most authoritative and comprehensive record of the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary Online gives you the latest content of the full Oxford English Dictionary as well as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED Online includes more than 600,000 meanings of words using over 3 million quotations; coverage of British, American, and all varieties of English; and is updated 4 times a year with new entries.

Visit the OED National Library Week webpage for helpful tips on exploring the OED during this free week.

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Oxford Reference

Oxford Reference brings together over 2-million entries into a single cross-searchable resource, from subject reference, quotation, and language dictionaries in the Oxford Quick Reference collection to award winning Oxford Companions and Encyclopedias in the Oxford Reference Library.

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First sponsored in 1958, National Library Week is a national observance sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and libraries across the country each April.

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