Login
“Lying” in computer-generated texts: hallucinations and omissions
There is huge excitement about ChatGPT and other large generative language models that produce fluent and human-like texts in English and other human languages. But these models have one big drawback, which is that their texts can be factually incorrect (hallucination) and also leave out key information (omission).
In our chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Lying, we look at hallucinations, omissions, and other aspects of “lying” in computer-generated texts. We conclude that these problems are probably inevitable.
Omissions are inevitable because a computer system cannot cram all possibly-relevant information into a text that is short enough to be actually read. In the context of summarising medical information for doctors, for example, the computer system has access to a huge amount of patient data, but it does not know (and arguably cannot know) what will be most relevant to doctors.
Hallucinations are inevitable because of flaws in computer systems, regardless of the type of system. Systems which are explicitly programmed will suffer from software bugs (like all software systems). Systems which are trained on data, such as ChatGPT and other systems in the Deep Learning tradition, “hallucinate” even more. This happens for a variety of reasons. Perhaps most obviously, these systems suffer from flawed data (e.g., any system which learns from the Internet will be exposed to a lot of false information about vaccines, conspiracy theories, etc.). And even if a data-oriented system could be trained solely on bona fide texts that contain no falsehoods, its reliance on probabilistic methods will mean that word combinations that are very common on the Internet may also be produced in situations where they result in false information.
Suppose, for example, on the Internet, the word “coughing” is often followed by “… and sneezing.” Then a patient may be described falsely, by a data-oriented system, as “coughing and sneezing” in situations where they cough without sneezing. Problems of this kind are an important focus for researchers working on generative language models. Where this research will lead us is still uncertain; the best one can say is that we can try to reduce the impact of these issues, but we have no idea how to completely eliminate them.
“Large generative language models’ texts can be factually incorrect (hallucination) and leave out key information (omission).”
The above focuses on unintentional-but-unavoidable problems. There are also cases where a computer system arguably should hallucinate or omit information. An obvious example is generating marketing material, where omitting negative information about a product is expected. A more subtle example, which we have seen in our own work, is when information is potentially harmful and it is in users’ best interests to hide or distort it. For example, if a computer system is summarising information about sick babies for friends and family members, it probably should not tell an elderly grandmother with a heart condition that the baby may die, since this could trigger a heart attack.
Now that the factual accuracy of computer-generated text draws so much attention from society as a whole, the research community is starting to realize more clearly than before that we only have a limited understanding of what it means to speak the truth. In particular, we do not know how to measure the extent of (un)truthfulness in a given text.
To see what we mean, suppose two different language models answer a user’s question in two different ways, by generating two different answer texts. To compare these systems’ performance, we would need a “score card” that allowed us to objectively score the two texts as regards their factual correctness, using a variety of rubrics. Such a score card would allow us to record how often each type of error occurs in a given text, and aggregate the result into an overall truthfulness score for that text. Of particular importance would be the weighing of errors: large errors (e.g., a temperature reading that is very far from the actual temperature) should weigh more heavily than small ones, key facts should weigh more heavily than side issues, and errors that are genuinely misleading should weigh more heavily than typos that readers can correct by themselves. Essentially, the score card would work like a fair school teacher who marks pupils’ papers.
We have developed protocols for human evaluators to find factual errors in generated texts, as have other researchers, but we cannot yet create a score card as described above because we cannot assess the impact of individual errors.
What is needed, we believe, is a new strand of linguistically informed research, to tease out all the different parameters of “lying” in a manner that can inform the above-mentioned score cards, and that may one day be implemented into a reliable fact-checking protocol or algorithm. Until that time, those of us who are trying to assess the truthfulness of ChatGPT will be groping in the dark.
Featured image by Google DeepMind Via Unsplash (public domain)
Etymologists interacting with the public on a day-to-day basis usually receive questions about words like copacetic and shenanigans, but so many nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and even prepositions and conjunctions not crying for attention are not less, perhaps even more, interesting. Over the years, I have written about summer, winter, ice, sheep, dog, live, leave, good, bad, red, and even such inconspicuous words as but and yet, to mention just a few. We use them like old trusty tools and never stop to ask where they came from. Somebody somewhere coined them, which probably means that once upon a time they were as transparent to speakers as giggle and hiccup. But today their origin is either debatable or unknown. Isn’t a dog called a dog because it looks like a dog, runs like a dog, and barks like a dog? This is what the naïve speaker thinks, though nothing in the group d-o-g suggests a muzzle, swiftness, or any kind of explosive sound. How did day and night get their names? Aren’t the words in some way associated with light and darkness? Dictionaries know a lot about the oldest history of both but do not always provide a clue to the “motivation” that might explain their origin.
Let us look at day. Its past is not totally hidden (no reference to or pun on clear obscure!). Day has exact cognates everywhere in Old Germanic, including of course Old English, as well as in Sanskrit, Celtic, Slavic, and elsewhere. In Old Icelandic, the proper name Dagr has been recorded. Similar names existed in Gothic and Old High German. Does this fact testify to the word’s significance in some religious ritual? We’ll never know. What conclusion will an etymologist two thousand years from now draw about our names June, Melody, and Makepeace? Day, it should be remembered, does not always mean “a period of twenty-four hours” (as in a few days ago) or half of this period (as in day and night or daytime): it sometimes refers to “a certain period or date” as in Doomsday, the day of reckoning, I’ll remember it until my dying day, and the like. Even if you were born at night, you probably celebrate your birthday. It follows that we are not quite sure where to begin our exploration, though day as “the period of light” looks more promising: after all, law-abiding citizens tend to make their arrangements for the time when there is enough light around, while at night most of us sleep.
Speakers of Modern English no longer realize that dawn has the same root as day. The verb to dawn means “to begin to grow light,” and the same reference is obvious in the phrase it dawned on me. I’ll skip the phonetic part of the story (why dawn? In German, unlike what we observe in English, the connection between the noun Tag and the verb tagen is immediately obvious). Will then a search for the etymology of day take us to the idea of “light,” as suggested above? Perhaps. But first, let us remember Latin diēs “day.” Its root occurs in the English words diurnal, dial “an instrument to tell the time of day by the shadow cast by the sun,” and diary, all three of course borrowed from Romance. Though diēs and day sound somewhat alike, they are not related (a fact often mentioned in dictionaries, to warn readers against what looks like an obvious conclusion), and as though to prove the absence of ties between them, language provides us with a word like Gothic sin-tiens “daily,” in which sin– means “one” and –tien– is a cognate of the Latin word. The correspondence d (Latin) ~ t (Gothic or any other Germanic language) is regular, by the so-called First Consonant Shift: compare Latin duo versus English two.
This –tien- has unquestionable correspondences all over the Indo-European world: for example, Sanskrit had dínam “day.” In Latin, we find the word nun-dinum “market held every ninth day.” Also, Russian den’ “day” (with cognates elsewhere in Slavic) and many other references elsewhere to burning, ashes, and warmth belongs here too. On the strength of, among others, several Greek words meaning “appear” and “visible,” the root of all such words has been understood as “shining.” Since the Sanskrit dèvas (obviously related) means “god,” this idea looks realistic. The Indo-Europeans habitually referred to “god” as “shining” or “sky” (such was Latin Jū-piter “sky father,” known to the ancient Scandinavians as Týr, no longer a sky god; but the name reveals his distant past). Yet it is still odd that both the words related to day and those related to diēs, though unconnected, sound somewhat alike and not only mean “day” but also begin with d. Did d suggest burning, heat, or glowing or refer to things dry and arid? Such ancient sound-symbolic associations are beyond reconstruction. They are often hard to pinpoint even in our modern languages.
Another puzzling lookalike is Sanskrit áhar “day.” It almost rhymes with Proto-Germanic dagaz but lacks d-, to which, above, I ventured to ascribe magical properties. An incredible coincidence? The Sanskrit noun has no correspondences in Germanic, Romance, Celtic, and elsewhere. (At least, none has been discovered.) Did áhar once have d- and lose it? The fertile imagination of historical linguists reconstructed several processes that could be responsible for the loss. Initial d- does sometimes disappear for no known reasons. For instance, t in tear (from the eye), which, as expected, corresponds to d outside Germanic, is sometimes absent altogether: this is true of Sanskrit and Baltic, among others. We have enough trouble with s–mobile (it tends to turn up wherever it wants). Did d–mobile also exist? Most unlikely.
My point has been to show how intriguing some of our common words sometimes are. Copacetic is late (it was first recorded in the twentieth century), while day is older than most of the hills around us. But the problem of origin remains the same: people coin words and etymologists wander in a labyrinth of look-alikes, roots, fleeing initial, and final consonants, and emerge with the all-too familiar verdict: “Origin unknown (uncertain, disputed).” Yet day probably did refer to heat or a bright light. This conclusion sounds reasonable, assuming (and this a reliable assumption) that the word’s initial sense was “the time of light,” rather than “a certain period, date.” Plain as day? Almost.
Featured image by Ivana Cajina via Unsplash (public domain)
My former colleague Osman Durrani, who has died aged 77, was a scholar of German literature and culture with a broad range of research interests. He wrote books on Goethe, Faust and the Bible (1977) and Faust: Icon of Modern Culture (2004), and another on fictions of Germany in the modern novel. He also edited an anthology of German Romantic poetry and had a collection of his poems, After Sunset, published in 1978.
There was more to Osman’s range than classical literature, though. He was a close observer of the contemporary literary scene, a friend of the novelist Joseph von Westphalen, and a key participant in the 1990s at conferences on post-unification German themes, one of which he organised himself at University College Durham in 1994, resulting in the publication The New Germany: Literature and Society after Unification, co-edited with Colin Good and Kevin Hilliard. To the end of his life he enjoyed reviewing books, for academic journals and the Times Literary Supplement, insisting that a review should never take more than a day to write.
Continue reading...Confronting <em>bud</em> and <em>buddy</em>
In the previous installment (14 June 2023), I mentioned several attempts to explain the origin of bud(dy). See also the comment at the bottom of that post. It may perhaps be useful to remember that monosyllabic words beginning with b, d, g ~ p, t, k and ending in one of those consonants (bed, big, pig, kick, gig, dog, gag, keg, dab, bug, and a host of others) are notoriously obscure from the etymological point of view. Sound imitative? Sound-symbolic? Baby words? Borrowed? Some of them once had an ending (e, i, a), which is of no consequence as regards their origin. Incidentally, bud (on a plant) also poses problems. Known from texts since the Middle English period, it has a Dutch lookalike with t at the end and resembles French bouton, which may be of Germanic origin, but this derivation is far from certain. In one widely-used but rather unreliable dictionary, buddy is said to be “etymologically identical with the adjective buddy ‘full of buds’.” Thus, our correspondent, who had a similar idea, even though she cannot be said to be in good company, is at least not alone. Another complicating factor deserves mention. Such nouns and verbs may be coined, forgotten, and coined again in the same form. After all, it is not too hard to come up with words like bob, gab, pad, and so forth.
Buddy poses familiar problems. It may or may not be a native word. Everybody is agreed that we are dealing with an Americanism. It appeared in texts around the year 1800, which excludes the idea of its derivation from bud “part of a plant.” Strange things sometimes happen. Guy, one the most common American words, goes back to a proper name and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. The plot happened in England, but guy ousted or limited the use of pal, fellow, and their likes in American English. Last week, I mentioned Skeat’s derivation of buddy from booty-fellow and expressed my doubts on this score. Despite my admiration of everything Walter W. Skeat did, I keep thinking that in this case he was wrong.
What follows depends largely on Jeremy Bergerson’s article in the Dutch periodical Leuvense Bijdragen (91, 2002, 63-71). Dutch has the dialectal word boetje “brother.” It has been recorded in numerous variants, and, according to a reasonable suggestion, it is an affectionate form of the baby word boe “brother.” In recent English scholarship, the idea that buddy goes back to brother has gained the upper hand. The direction seems to be correct, but the way may have been less straight than etymologists would like it. The problem is the loss of r after b. In languages in which r is a trill (or a roll: both terms mean the same), for instance, Spanish, Italian, and Russian (to cite a few examples), r is usually the hardest sound to master. Children tend to substitute l for it. But English r is NOT a trill, and the well-known substitution for it is w. Many of us have heard children say: “I am hungwy.” This is also a much-ridiculed pseudo-aristocratic affectation. As a general rule, an English-speaking baby would probably not say buddy for brother.
We may try to ask for help abroad. Dutch bout, beut, boetje, and budde, among many other similar forms, seem to go back to the baby word boe (pronounced with a vowel like English oo in boo). The story is partly reminiscent of the history of English boy. Boy, too, may be a derivative of a baby word for “little brother,” and the Old English name Boia perhaps contains the “root” in its pristine form. Dutch Boio, Boiga, Boga, and even Scandinavian Bo may once have meant “little brother.” (More details on this score can be found in my and J. Lawrence Mitchell’s An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction, pp. 15-16). If this reconstruction is correct, the many words cited above do go back to “brother,” but not to the word brother. The baby etymon contained no r. This suggestion runs counter to what we find in some of our most respectable sources.
Unexpected light on the origin of buddy comes from the English word Boots. The word is known from such compounds as slyboots and lazy–boots, but most will probably remember Boots “a name for the servant in hotels who cleans the boots.” The OED cites numerous examples. Apparently, Boots emerged with the meaning “servant; a person at the lowest level of the hierarchy” rather than “shoeshine boy.” This is evidenced by such senses as “the youngest officer in a regiment” and others. The hotel Boots did clean boots and put them outside the gentleman’s door, but this is not why he received his name. George Webbe Dasent used the word Boots for rendering Norwegian Askepott ~ Askeladden (this is what the despised third son in fairytales, “male Cinderella,” is called). If Dasent had associated Askepott only or mainly with the shoe shiner, he would hardly have used the word in such a context. An ingenious correspondent to Notes and Queries once suggested that Puss in Boots might be a misnomer, because allegedly, Puss and Boots, that is, Puss as Servant was meant. But the English title is a translation from French, where Chat botté is unambiguous.
Bergerson suggested that Boots is a borrowing of Dutch boet, a childish word for “brother.” We find Dutch boet “a recent recruit in the Indian Army” and a few other words that fit our story well. If boet (pronounced approximately like English boot) was indeed borrowed into English with the meaning “a person of inferior rank,” the rest is plain sailing. The ending s is added freely to English words. I, for example, have dealt with two guineapigs: Cuddles and Sniffers. In Dickens’s Dombey and Son, the servant who wheeled Mrs Skewton around had the name Withers. Dobbin of ours, a most important character in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, was called Figs, because his father sold all kinds of groceries. And don’t we occasionally live in digs and have things for keeps?
Dutch words in English are numerous (very numerous indeed). If Boots is one of them, perhaps so is buddy from boetje. The voicing of t between vowels is no problem. Buddy is an American coinage, and in American English, intervocalic t is voiced, so that seated and seeded, Plato and playdough, sweetish and Swedish, futile and feudal (to mention just a few examples), are homophones pairwise. With time, the vowel in boetje acquired, as expected, the value of u in but, and butty ~ buddy was born. Speakers quite correctly interpreted the last sound as a diminutive suffix and produced bud from buddy by back formation. The word has just the expressive value one needs: compare studs “a great virile guy,” as in Studs Lonigan byJames T. Farrell.
Have we solved the riddle? No, the etymology of buddy and Boots will probably remain “debatable” (unless it suddenly gains universal recognition—a rare case in etymological studies), but perhaps we have made a step in the right direction.
Featured image via pxfuel (public domain)
The company we keep, part two: <em>bud(dy)</em>
I am picking up where I left off two weeks ago. Since there have been no comments or letters connected with part one, I will, as promised, tackle the convoluted history of bud. The Internet is awash in suggestions about the origin of this universally known word. Some such suggestions are reasonable, even clever; others fanciful (for instance, bud has been derived by some from Pashto, from Spanish, and even from the names Buddha and Budweiser!). Of course, we now have the opinion of the OED online, and yet I may add something to the ongoing discussion—no revolutionary hypothesis: rather a glance at the state of the art. Predictably, bud ~ buddy can also be found in the first volume of the original OED, but its editor James A. H. Murray was reticent on the word’s etymology. Today’s editors have much more to say about the history of bud; yet the sought-for origin remains disputable and will probably remain such.
Though the first volume of the OED appeared in 1896, people kept returning to the history of bud, and some of their hypotheses deserve attention. Perhaps the most important part of the tale is whether bud ~ buddy has anything to do with the word butty “comrade.” Here are some quotations from the letters sent to the biweekly Notes and Queries (my constant and inexhaustible source of inspiration). “What is the origin of the word butty, gamekeeper’s slang for “comrade”? The dog was took away home to granny by my butty” (Richard Jefferies, ‘The Amateur Poacher,’ 1896, p. 117”). The editor answered:
“The origin is unknown. The ‘H.E.D.’ [that is, Historical English Dictionary, the original name of the OED; even Murray could not remember when HED became OED!] says that it is a possible corruption of booty. The word is in general use in England. See ‘English Dialect Dictionary’ [by Joseph Wright].”
Other contributors also cited butty from the regions where they lived, and Walter W. Skeat, ever-ready with a suggestion when it came to etymology, wrote:
I would suggest that butty, comrade, is a mere abbreviation of booty-fellow, one who shares in booty; hence a comrade. The full form occurs in Palsgrave [an early sixteenth-century lexicographer] and is duly explained in the “H.E.D.”, s. v. [sub voce “under the word”] “Booty,” §5.
Since that time the derivation of butty from booty-fellow has been repeated more than once. Other contributors to Notes and Queries mentioned butty collier “a man who contracts with the proprietor of a coalpit to get and raise coal to the bank at so much per ton.” In that context, butty was also connected with boot. Additionally, “in ironworks, where two men frequently manage a forge, one superintendent by day and the other by night, each often describes the other as his butty.” In the same region, “a man and a woman living together irregularly sometimes describe each other as his or her butty, and other people would so describe their relations” (1901). “In Warwickshire [the West Midlands] sweethearts who keep company describe their association as buttying with each other.” Bud “husband” has been used for centuries, but of course no phonetic legerdemain can produce this wordfrom husband. Finally, in Scotland, buddy, buddie, and butty have been long since used as a pet designation for a little child.
Judging by the meaning of the words mentioned above, it seems that buddy and butty have rather little to do with booty, a French word of Germanic origin. Booty-fellow is close but seems to have little to do with buddy as we know it. Below, I will quote part of a letter from the journal American Speech 4, 1929, p. 389. Though the author’s suggestion looks like an example of folk etymology, bud is such a controversial word that even dubious remarks have some value.
The Standard Dictionary [that is, Funk and Wagnalls] gives butty as a variant of buddy. I raise the query whether precedence should not be the other way. When I was a boy in the Pennsylvania coalfields, one of the commonest words in the miners’ speech [again mining, as in England!] was butty, or buttie, as I have always preferred to spell it, meaning work-fellow. In the cramped, underground and honey-combs where bituminous coal is dug, the man with a pick and the man with the shovel are literally butties, working all day long buttock to buttock, or in the vulgar but comradely abbreviation, butt to butt. The word was used generally in a technical sense, without any endearing connotation of spiritual nearness. But the boys of the community thirty years ago adopted the word for the idea which later at school they were to express by chum, a word which I confess always sounds emasculated and utterly lacking the vulgar warmth of buttie (!).
The author begins his letter by saying that buddy “is by origin a childish corruption of brother, with a familiar form ‘bud.’ … it is incontrovertible that bud and buddy are diminutives of brother…”.
The “emasculated” chum was discussed briefly and inconclusively in the previous blog post, and I will not comment on the author’s use of the word incontrovertible. I have more than once expressed my objections to terms like certainly, undoubtedly, obviously, and so forth. (Very few things in etymology are incontrovertible.) I am only a bit confused about the order of events. If buddy is from brother, how can it a variant of butty? Here, I’ll also mention the enigmatic sixteenth-century adjective baddy of unclear meaning, but, apparently, with some negative connotations. This word deserves attention, because Murray devoted a long letter to “the queer phrase” paddy persons in Notes and Queries 9/XII, 1903, 87-88, and nothing that great man wrote should fall through the cracks. It turned out that paddy persons is a misreading: the correct 1585 phrase is baddy persons, and I wondered whether baddy has anything to do with buddy. My question remains unanswered, but the syntax of the quotation is characteristic, and I would like to quote that phrase as a postscript to my blog post.
Here is this phrase: “I doubt [= fear] not that the flower of the pressed English bandes are gone, and that the remnant supplied with such baddy persons as commonly, in voluntary procurements, men are glad to accept.” Baddy will, unfortunately, remain a minor riddle, but another thing should not be overlooked: “The flower of such band(es) are gone.” The subject is of course flower, and the verb should have been is. Yet the writer made the verb agree with the noun closest to it (bands). As is well-known, colonial languages are conservative. American English is no exception. The Revised Version of the Bible has: “Our Father which art in heaven.” And I sometimes hear statements like: “That’s the guy which I told you about.” But this usage is relatively rare. By contrast, the syntax of the phrase quoted above is ineradicable: students’ papers teem with it. I have once quoted my favorite example from an undergraduate’s essay: “The mood of the tales are gloomy.” This usage, well-known to the historians of English syntax, is still rather common in Ireland and in other “colonial” varieties of English. It would be interesting to heart what our readers know about it.
Next week, I’ll finish my discussion of buddy and say what little I think I know about its origin. Nothing in my suggestion will be original or incontrovertible.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Observing how various words for “friend” originate and develop is a rather curious enterprise. Some etymologies are trivial, that is, they have been known for a long time and are undisputed. Such is, among others, the case of friend. Any good dictionary will tell the same story. The last two letters of friend (-nd) are a trace of an old present participle. In English, present participles end in –ing (a barking dog, flowering wilderness, and so forth), but at one time, the ending of this part of speech was –and. The other Germanic languages still have some easily recognizable traces of –and (cf. German kommend “coming” and so forth). The root of friend is also transparent to the language historian: it once meant “to love” (so already in Gothic, a fourth-century Germanic language, which has come down to us in a rather full form). In Old English, the word did mean “lover.”
Do we love our relatives? It depends. In a society in which kinship determines people’s behavior, love (the sense of belonging, loyalty, devotion, and many other feelings) has numerous “pre-modern” shades. In any case, Icelandic frændi means neither “friend” nor “lover” but “kinsman, relative.” Those who believe that English spelling will gain greatly if reformed may note that friend and fiend are spelled alike and yet do not rhyme. Fiend is also an old present participle. It once meant “hating; hater.” So much for the origin of friends and friendship.
Another trivial case is fellow. Fellow certainly belongs with the subject announced in the title: compare fellow traveler and good fellow “an affable person.” The word came to English from Scandinavian. Icelandic félagi is a compound: fé means “property, money” (English fee is its distant cousin), while –lagi is related to English lay (as in to lay something). Consequently, a fellow is a person who lays down money with someone in a joint undertaking. The word bears some similarity to companion, except that companion is a borrowing from French, rather than Scandinavian. The Romance roots of this word are obvious: com– “together” and panis “bread” (a companion is therefore “one who breaks bread with another”). My students have never heard the phrase boon companion “good companion.” In older books, this phrase usually means “someone with whom one drinks and makes merry” (for example, we can remember Tony Lumpkin and his boon companions in She Stoops to Conquer), and there is no reason why it should be forgotten.
Sharing food will now take us to the noun mate. We have received and welcomed linguistic guests from Scandinavian and French. It would therefore be wrong to ignore Low German. Enter mate. The word (ge)mate, from gamato-, had the prefix ga- ~ ge-, denoting association, and the root discernible in English meat. Meat once meant “food,” as it still does in sweetmeats and green meat (two other items of the English vocabulary my students fail to recognize), from the root “to cut,” as in German messen and (!) English mete out. Thus, we again end up in a friendly company of food sharers.
A few more notes about this mess. The word mess, of French origin, first meant “a serving of food; dish.” In the eighteenth century, it could refer to “mixed food for an animal.” The familiar sense “medley; jumble; a state of utter disarray” appeared later. The root of mess can be seen in Latin mittere “to send out” (as in e-mit and mess-age). In a way, the noun messmate is a tautological compound like pathway. Both parts mean approximately the same: here “food-food,” rather than “someone with whom ones shares food.”
In the company we keep, three words are more serious etymological puzzles: crony, chum, and buddy.
Crony turned up in books in the 1660s. Samuel Pepys knew the word, and so did Stephen Skinner, the author of the 1671 etymological dictionary of English (the second ever). Both Pepys and Skinner were Cambridge men, and crony, long before it acquired the modem negative connotations, meant “roommate” (at Cambridge). In the entry for 30 May 1665, Pepys speaks of the death of Jack Cole, “who was a great chrony (sic) of mine.” The only reasonable derivation of crony seems to be from Greek Chronios “contemporary,” from Chronos “time.” The use of Greek and Latin words at British universities and public schools was commonplace. Pepys’s spelling of the word with ch probably shows that this is how he too understood the word, even though at that time and later, “elegant” (Greek or Latin) spelling variants were customary. To be sure, by Pepys’s time, the word may have been used for decades and been garbled more than once. Therefore, the current etymology looks acceptable but not certain. The once suggested derivation of crony from some cognate of the verb croon is nonsense.
Chum, the Oxford counterpart of crony, became known from printed texts at almost the same time as crony. (Does it follow that both were, after all, recent seventeenth-century coinages? If so, why did they suddenly come into being?). Both were slang, and those who discussed them two hundred years later sometimes apologized for dealing with such low terms: at that time, slang was a synonym for filth. “I confess I rather like the word, though not a few of those born in the [eighteen]-forties, at least, seem disposed to call it slang” (from an 1895 letter). E. B. Brewer, the author of a once tremendously popular 1870 book on the origin of words and idioms, defined chum as “bedfellow.” It is unclear where he found this gloss, but every two students at old Cambridge and Oxford did indeed share a bed.
Cicero and Tacitus used the Latin word con-taberna-lis (literally, “someone sharing a taberna,” roughly “tavern”) with the sense “comrade” (incidentally, a comrade is also a person sharing a camera “chamber” with someone). But contabernalis could hardly have been “Englished” into chum. Even less probable is the derivation of chum from Latin cum “with.” Those old suggestions deserve little consideration.
In 1896, the great Walter W. Skeat offered his etymology of chum. He cast doubt on the derivation of chum from chamber-(fellow), suggested cautiously in the OED, and indeed the path from chamber to chum “does not run smooth.” Skeat found the following entry in the 1767 very well-known Bremen Dictionary: “[In my translation]: “Kumpan, abbreviated as Kump, associate, companion, comrade; College socius, consors. Engl. chum.” He believed that chum was not only a gloss on but also a borrowing of German Kump and explained how the change may have happened. He reconstructed a devious way from Kump to chum. Yet if people could alter chamber into chum, they could do the same, and much more easily, with Kump. But why should British students have borrowed a German slang term? Though that is again not improbable, the reconstruction remains guesswork. With time, Skeat probably lost enthusiasm for his hypothesis, because he did not even include chum in the latest edition of his Concise Dictionary. Thus, today, we can remain chummy, without knowing why we use the word everybody knows (not a rare case in etymology in its relation to life).
The story of buddy is long, and I’ll leave it for the next blog post, but I hasten to thank our readers for their corrections, conjectures, and comments on cowardly custard. (Sorry for the alliteration!). I also have to inform them that I am off to a conference of the Dictionary Society of North America in Boulder, Colorado. This is my first trip “abroad” since the beginning of the pandemic. Therefore, the buddy thriller will appear a week later than scheduled. The long wait will, I hope, whet everybody’s appetite for more tales in the series of One Thousand and One Etymologies.
Featured image: “Chronos and his child” by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has honored philosophers Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch with plaques at their former homes.
The Blue Plaques program “promotes recognition and awareness of people, places and events that have been of lasting significance in the life of Oxfordshire or more widely.”
You can see a list of other Blue Plaque honorees here.
The post Foot & Murdoch Honored With Plaques in Oxfordshire first appeared on Daily Nous.
More short words, or negation of the negation
In late spring and summer, when the days are long, I am often overwhelmed by the desire to write something about the shortest words in Modern English. At one time, I discussed if, of, and, in, both, and (very briefly) yet. See the posts for 2 August and 9 August 2017, and 27 July 2022. The reason I am seized by such an unnatural desire is the almost total obscurity of such words. Open the most detailed etymological dictionary of any Indo-European language and look up in, on, at, to, of, and their cognates: you will find long lists of short forms but no origin. Some pronouns, especially she, have been discussed many times, but the discussion invariably turns round their later history.
Now take any of our negations. All over the Indo-European map, the main word begins with n. What is in this sound that invites denial, refutation, or repulsion? Unable to answer this question, I decided to turn to some negative prefixes and began with the word ignoble. Latin nōbilis meant “(well-)known, excellent, highborn” (the range of meanings was broader than in the Modern English adjective noble), while īgnōbilis referred to people of low birth, undistinguished, and insignificant. Note that the first vowel of the Latin word is long (ī). Once, the prefix was the familiar in: compare such adjectives as inadequate, inappropriate, inefficient, and so forth. The original form must have been in-gnōbilis (theroot in it is the same as in gnostic), but in the heavy group ingn-, the first n was lost, and the preceding vowel, by way of compensation (as it were) lengthened. Or perhaps the heavy cluster ngn with its two n’s flanking g was dissimilated. The same sound change accounts of the form of ignorant and ignominious.
In other positions, the process of assimilation is so obvious that we need no reference to historical phonetics to recognize the origins. Such transparent forms are illegal, improper, and irreversible, as opposed to indifferent. Many Latin words ended up in Middle English by way of Old French. That is why enemy (from Old French enemi, with one n) begins with en-, while inimical “hostile” looks perfectly Latin. (An enemy is not an amicus “friend.”)
The sound of n prevails in negations. English once had ne-, corresponding to Latin nē, as in nefarious (from ne– + the root of fas “rejection of divine command”) and in Nemo, familiar thanks to the famous captain: it goes back to nē + homo “nobody.” (Those who remember Jules Verne’s book The Mysterious Island know that the real name of this fictious character was Prince Dakkar.) Being so short, ne tended to attract all kinds of barnacles. Thus, in the earliest Romance languages, p and c clung to it. We can still see the slightly transformed remnant of that c in negate, neglect, and negotiate. The syllable neg- goes back to nec-, and the roots of the aforementioned verbs can be seen in Latin aio “I say,” lego “I gather,” and otium “leisure, ease.” The consonant g is an insertion.
At present, the English negation is no, from nā, an old contraction of ne + ā As though English had too few negations, it borrowed nei “nay” from Scandinavian. There, it was a compound made up of ne + ei “ay, ever,” that is, a reinforced negation. German nein, though it means “no,” corresponds exactly to English no one or none. The word not is a later form of naught, which is the sum of ne and aught (as in for aught I know). Likewise, Russian net “no” is the sum of ne and a short phrase meaning “is here.” The more synonyms we have, the more nuanced our speech becomes and the harder it becomes to make small distinctions. Compare you are not a man and you are no man.
A curious word is German kein, used attributively, for example, kein Mann “no man.” It emerged as nih-ein, occurred also in the form (ni) dehein (with the obscure syllable de-), and meant “some,” rather than “no.” Today, it means only “no,” and if we want to say “no book,” the only way to say it in German is kein Buch. Its k-, from h-, has not been explained to everybody’s satisfaction. Very short words have to fight for their existence and sometimes change according to puzzling rules.
We will probably never know why the sound of n allied itself to negations in Indo-European, and this is a pity, for there must have been something in this consonant that suggested the opposite of unity, attraction, and agreement. Reference to sound symbolism fails us here, as it always does when linguists try to see a direct connection between the articulation of consonants and the meaning of words in which they occur.
However, we observe that n is not the only actor in the game of negation. In Old Icelandic, the adverb ei meant “ever.” English aye (“yes; ever”; cf. the ayes have it) is a borrowing of it. But the other ay meant “not” (thus, simply a verbal sign of reinforcement?) and as a rule, occurred with the particle –gi. Eigi became ekki and, like eigi, stayed in the language. The universally used Scandinavian negation (ei, ej) corresponds exactly to Finnish and Estonian ei, and as could be expected, two hypotheses compete. One defends the Finno-Ugric origin of the Finnish and Estonian word; the other equates it with the Germanic one. In any case, the coincidence is remarkable.
Suffix-like words are called enclitics. Germanic, so rich in negative words, also had several negative enclitics. One of them was –gi, discussed briefly above. It varied with –ki, but the meanings often fluctuated between negative and indefinite, which makes sense, because the line between negation and doubt and even between strict and qualified negation is easy to cross. (Hence the problem of ne and ni in Russian. It drives learners crazy, because those two unstressed words sound very much alike. An even worse horror is that ne and ni are sometimes spelled together with the word they modify, and sometimes separately.)
In Germanic, negative enclitics were rather numerous. Sometimes they corresponded to Latin –que, which meant “and”(!). They abounded in the oldest stages of the language, and poets enjoyed them. One such short particle was Old Icelandic at. Its etymology, cited in dictionaries, carries little conviction, and here we may ignore it and only note that the poets of that period loved multiplying negations. For example, né (é designated a long vowel) might occur before the verb and -at at the end of it. Incidentally, –at also has analogs in Finno-Ugric. The rule prevalent in Modern Germanic that requires only one negation in a sentence is relatively late, and those people who still say I don’t know nothin’ are unaware of the norm imposed on the Standard. Incidentally, in Russian, the English sentence I don’t know anyone anywhere, if translated literally, would sound as “I don’t know nobody nowhere.” Obviously, the more, the better.
Our tour of negations in this blog post was a mere introduction to a complicated subject. The great question is how speakers learned to negate their statements, and we wonder at the variety of the means they invented. We also wonder why the sound n- figures so prominently in the process. Apparently our statement “no means no” had many nuances at the dawn of civilization.
Featured image by cottonbro studio, via Pexels (public domain)
On cowards and custard from a strictly linguistic point of view
It is curious what a multitude of synonyms for “brave” Modern English has (bold, courageous, valiant, fearless, and at least a dozen more), while coward ~ cowardly have practically none. For coward only a few rather unexciting nouns like poltroon and dastard turn up, and for the related adjective we chiefly find compounds like chicken-hearted and faint-hearted. It appears that language endows courage with many shades, while cowardice has only one hue. Such picturesque metaphors as scaredy-cat and milksop don’t count.
The origin of coward is known, and I’ll say nothing about it that cannot be found elsewhere, but the story will take us to other, more interesting words. The strangest thing is that coward, a single common name in English for a person lacking fortitude, is a borrowing from Old French. Where, we would like to know, is the Germanic coward lurking? We’ll discover that ignoble person later but will first note that people seem to have resented this lack of native, grassroots diffidence and mobilized folk etymology to fill the gap. Time and again, coward has been explained as an alteration of cowherd. Why should cowherds be or have been prototypical cowards? The silliness of this derivation did not bother its proponents. Folk etymology seeks an easy explanation rather than logic. The same approach to word origins connected coward with the verb cower, but neither cower nor incidentally, the verb cow has anything to do with coward, even if cower may have reinforced the meaning of our noun.
The source of coward is Old French couard, ultimately, from Latin coda “tail.” In the immensely popular and beautiful poem Reynard, The Fox, translated into Middle English from Old Flemish by the great William Caxton (1415-1490), the hare is called Cuwaert and Kywart. Perhaps the original allusion was to a frightened dog with its tail between its legs. It has also been noted that in heraldry, a lion with its tail between its legs, called couard in Old French, has the deprecatory suffix –ard and means “having a short, drooping, or otherwise ridiculous tail.” The reference to the tail is sometimes called obscure, but on the whole, the existing explanation is not bad. As for the suffix, which we can see even in the name Reynard, it also occurs (among others) in drunkard, dotard, sluggard, and the already mentioned dastard.
Now back to the Germanic coward. We find him in German and Scandinavian: German feige and Dutch veeg mean “cowardly,” while Old Icelandic feigr means “doomed, fated, destined to die.” In Modern Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, the cognates of feigr mean “fearful; unusual; crazy,” but this change happened under the influence of German. The sense in Old Icelandic is the original one. In German, the transition from “doomed” to “cowardly” went through several stages, one of which was “hated.” The distant origin of our word is unclear and need not bother us. I should only note that the most usual Indo-European root cited in this connection looks unconvincing. The development must have been from “doomed to die” to “afraid of death.” Perhaps one of the intermediate stages was “ready to die.” In some southern German dialects, the related adjective means “almost ripe” and “rotten.” The most ancient root may have had that meaning, as suggested long ago but dismissed by later scholarship without discussion. And this brings us to English fey “fated to die,” an exact cognate of German feig(e), Dutch veeg, and Old Icelandic feigr, now and for many centuries, chiefly Scottish. Such is one of the verbal sources of Germanic fear.
Yet it is not the only one. German Angst “fear” has made its way into English dictionaries, along with the untranslatable Zeitgeist and Schadenfreude. The word, whose specific meaning goes back to Freud, is at least a century old in English, but it still exists only as a synonym for “anxiety.” Itis related to German eng “narrow” and a host of words outside Germanic. When you find yourself in a narrow spot, you experience anxiety, you are afraid. This etymology highlights the development of abstract concepts from concrete ones, about which more will be said below. Here we will only note that the root of Angst can also be seen in anger, anguish, angina, anxious, agnail (!), and so forth. The related words in Greek and Latin sound almost like those in Germanic, and we recognize their English offspring without any trouble.
Fear is also a Germanic word. Its Old English source meant “sudden calamity; danger.” Its cognate in Old Saxon (another West Germanic language) turned up with the sense “ambush.” By contrast, “danger” is the only meaning of Modern German Gefahr and Dutch gevaar. Our knowledge of the subtler meanings of words in the oldest texts is imperfect, because we depend on a limited number of contexts and on occasional, often untrustworthy Latin glosses. Even though such a rigorous semantic law does not exist, it makes sense to assume that abstract senses tend to be derived from more concrete ones. In our case, “ambush” (a source of fear) may have developed into “danger” and “fear.” Yet our material is too scanty for bold generalizations. Though great perils awaited a traveler (ambushes, highwaymen, inhospitable terrain), English fare and its numerous congeners, including German fahren, are not related to fear, because the noun fear had a long vowel in the root, while the vowel in fare and the rest was short. Such niceties did not bother our oldest scholars, but all modern etymological research depends on them.
Here then is a short summary of what we have found. Cowards, those mean-spirited, pusillanimous people who treasured their lives more than the common good, have always existed, but the oldest Germanic words for the lack of bravery seem to derive from the ideas of being fated (doomed, destined) to die. When French words for the spiritual sphere flooded Middle English, the native nouns designating the lack of courage were lost, and coward, a loan from Old French, replaced them. However, fear, an old word, survived, though its original meaning was more concrete, namely, “calamity” or perhaps “accident.” German Angst preserves its status of a foreignism in English, but fear is native and thus makes amends for the imported word coward.
For dessert, I would like to quote the phrase cowardly, cowardly, custard, an alliterative taunt used by boys and reported in 1872 in the biweekly Notes and Queries by a correspondent from Philadelphia. He wrote: “It is supposed to have its origin in the shaking, quivering motion of the confection called ‘custard’. In Microcosmos (1687) [by Johann Martini], Act iii, Tasting says “I have a sort of cowardly custards, born in the city, but bred up at court, that quake foe fear.” The date of the OED’s earliest citation of the phrase is 1833. The explanation given in 1872 seems to be correct: a quivering heart has always been associated with cowardice. In an Old Icelandic poem from the Elder Edda, one of the heroes sees a heart, allegedly cut out of the breast of his brother, but gives the messenger the lie: the heart is quivering. And indeed, the heart belongs to a cook. Then they kill the brother, whose heart looks right! My questions is obvious: Does any of our readers know the taunt? If so, where is it still used?
Featured image: “Two Jack Russell terriers chasing a rabbit into a burrow”, Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Etymology gleanings for April 2023
Since my previous attempt to glean on a half-frozen field, I have received quite a few letters and suggestions. All of them deserve a response. But first, as always, let me thank our correspondents for consulting the blog, asking questions, and offering words of encouragement.
Since my subject was hooker “prostitute,” I stayed away from the other senses of the word. Therefore, I apologize to the correspondent who excels in rugby, calls himself a proud hooker, and found nothing about the game in my post. I share his pride, feel his pain, and have two things to say. First, a hooker is obviously anyone who wields a hook. In fishing, for example, a hooker is distinguished from a netter, and of course, a hooker is a filcher, as explained at length in my post. Consider also hook it “to make oneself scarce,” discussed at some length in my recent dictionary of idioms. As to hockey, yes, the word may be related to hook, but some details are obscure.
Another observation concerns the impact of words related to the sexual sphere on their sources. Obviously, gay “homosexual” is an extension of gay “merry, etc.” The development of the now prevalent sense has been traced in detail, but what matters is that gay “homosexual” killed all the other senses. I once noted that in A. T. Hatto’s splendid English translation of The Lay of the Nibelungen, gay (that is, richly dressed) knights appear with great regularity (this usage was already known to Chaucer), much to the amusement of my undergraduate students. The same happened to queer. In the mid-1950s, I learned and was puzzled by the word because of my lifelong admiration for Oscar Wilde’s works. The phrase snobs queer caused the 1894 trial. Was it possible anywhere in the English-speaking world to say in 1957 “what a queer (= odd, quaint, bizarre) dress,” without making the interlocutor blush or giggle? Many older people can undoubtedly answer this question. The same happened to proud hookers, alas! Today even hooker “ship” is funny. On the other hand, only forty years ago, it sucks was taboo, and now my computer, this precocious child of artificial intelligence, stubbornly suggests three answers to every letter I receive and lists this variant as an expression of my indignant disapproval. Cool!
As for filch (see the post Prolegomena to the word hooker for 19 April 2023), the connection with filchman is obvious, and that is why I referred to Jamieson. The putative Romany etymology of filch is also well-known. But it is far from clear whether the Romany word is not a borrowing of the cant of English thieves. And this brings us to the serious question of alternate hypotheses of word origins. I was asked what I think of the derivation of the adjective secure. Latin had sēcūrus and apparently, sicurus, because the latter was taken over by the speakers of Old English as sicor (Modern English sicker is dialectal, but compare German sicher “certain,” from sihhur). Could the English word be borrowed from a similar-sounding Greek one and be traced to a cognate of Latin sīcut “like” and understood as sic-urus? When there is a secure explanation, why look for another one? How is the vowel length in sīc– to be explained away, and what is –urus? Our correspondent borrowed his etymology from someone who, apparently, had little exposure to historical linguistics. People not versed in etymology often have good ideas about the origin of slang, technical terms, puzzling idioms, and the like, but the history of old words is a special subject, and guesses about their past are seldom, if ever, profitable.
Trawl has traditionally, even if with reservations, been derived from Latin trahere “to draw.” All the senses of troll (“move about; roll; sing in full round voice”) may be related. The difficulty is that tr– and dr– verbs are often either sound-imitative, sound-symbolic, or both (compare trip, drip, trap, trickle, tread, tremble, trample, trill, drill, drawl, droll, drool, and so forth). This means that all of them might emerge in their respective languages independently of one another or influence their look-alikes, or serve as their sources, or be borrowed. Perhaps trawl has been borrowed or coined more than once with vaguely the same meanings. As regards the verb troll, the existence of stroll complicates the picture, and we wonder: is stroll a variant of troll with so-called s-mobile, mentioned in this blog more than once (a ubiquitous prefix without a clear function)? There is no way to answer this question, because we always face possible, even probable, but not definite solutions.
What is tizzy, part the phrase in a tizzy “in a state of agitation”? Given such a funny word as tizzy, it is almost natural to refer to it as an expressive coinage and to stop wondering about its origin. Compare drizzle, sizzle, swizzle “a frothy (!) intoxicating drink,” and fizz ~ fizzle. Once, tizzy also meant “sixpence,” apparently, an alteration of tester, itself an alteration of teston (the same meaning). Tizzy is a word easy to coin (the pun and half-rhyme are not intentional). There once was the word tuzzy-muzzy “a nosegay.” Dialectal tuzzy means “a tuft of hair” and must be related to touseled, which has respectable relatives but seems to be a member of the same group. The fuzzy Tootsie-Wootsie is also close by.
Can step change “a significant change” be an alteration of sea change? Similarly, can thin as a rake be an alteration of the much more transparent phrase thin as a rail? In the absence of recorded intermediate stages, this type of reconstruction leads nowhere. Also, in connection with rake, our correspondent noted that the Hebrew for “rake” is a word spelled with the consonants resh-het-tof. If rake is of sound-imitative or sound-symbolic origin, then the combination r-h ~ h-r looks natural, but, as always, sound imitation is absolutely obvious only in cases like blah-blah and barf–barf.
Sliding down in a handbasket to hell, I agree, is easy to visualize. It is the ascension to heaven by the same vehicle that remains a puzzle. What is the means of transportation? I asked our readers whether anyone could make sense of the phrase five miles to hell, where Peter pitched his waistcoat. The puzzle has not been solved, but one of our correspondents remembered an old man saying out where Jesus lost his sandals. This image makes more sense! Finally, I received a query whether I have any dirty idioms in my book. Alas, no! In the journals I screened for Take my Word for It, almost everything was prim and proper: in those days, smut and profanity were not allowed in print. The samples sent to me are a delight, but I dare not share them with the readership of this blog. In our speech, we are so squeamish, are we not?
Did both ever refer to more objects than two? No. Bo– in both has cognates in and outside Germanic and has the same meaning everywhere. I believe that in the phrase both Father, Son and Holy Ghost through all eternity, Father and Son was taken for one unit. I am also grateful to another reader who pointed out that the word sib is very much alive in the genetic community and means “sibling” in the speech of its practitioners. And one more. A teacher wrote me that explaining a spelling rule by reference to history is often helpful. I agree. We have rite, right, write, and wright. While dealing with an advanced learner who wonders why English has four written images for the same phonetic unit, a glance at the past may be valuable. But the problem is that spelling is taught (or should be taught) at an early age, and we cannot delve into the history of English while dealing with children. In explaining the spelling of Kate, cat, car, and care, history is good for dessert but not as the main dish.
Once again: please send me questions and notes, and I’ll do my best to comment on them in my gleanings.
Featured image by quintinsmith_ip via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
This is not a mystery tale, but a few twists in the history of the word riddle are worthy of note. Riddles, it should be noted, played and play an outstanding role in world culture. To win a bride, suitors had to offer or solve an insoluble riddle, as happened, for example, to Samson and Turandot. Forever memorable is the riddle of the Sphinx. According to an Old Norse myth, when the shining god Baldr was killed, Odin (that is, Óðinn) whispered something to his dead son on the funeral pyre. For a long time, the best Scandinavian antiquarians have been trying to guess what Odin imparted to his son, a task as profitable as chasing a rainbow or nailing a pudding to a tree (in an earlier post, I referred to a sleeveless errand). Baldr is dead, to begin with, and if Odin wanted the secret message to be known, he would have pronounced it aloud. In principle, all riddles defy solution: they are meant to be insoluble. Collections of riddles from many cultures make such an unexpected conclusion clear. The scholarly literature on this genre of popular culture is a shoreless sea. Especially instructive is the excellent recent book byProfessor Savely Senderovich Riddle of the Riddle.
English has two homonyms: riddle “puzzle” and riddle “sieve” (the latter, I think, mainly northern English). Their origin has been known for centuries and can be found in any middle-sized dictionary, so that I won’t be able to say anything new about them. However, I have a tiny postscript, and it is for its sake I am telling this story. But first, here is a short and trivial note on the origin of riddle1 and riddle2.
The root of riddle “puzzle,” from rǣdels(e), is Old English rǣdan “to read.” Reading, it will be noted, is unlike swallowing or breathing: it is a skill, not an instinct. Literacy came to the Western “barbarians,” including the Anglo-Saxons, from Latin (with the conversion to Christianity), and they had to invent a word for the new occupation. Along that road, each tribe went its own way. Verbs meaning “think, guess; collect; count; carve, scratch,” and so forth were pressed into service. The closest cognates of English read are German raten “to advise,” Dutch raden “to advise; guess,” and Old Icelandic ráða (ð has the value of th in English this) “to rule, advise; explain.” Modern English still has the phrase to read a dream and another, semi-tautological, one, especially instructive in this context, “to read a riddle” (read “interpret”), though today the tautology is lost on us.
German Rätsel “riddle”is still an obvious cognate of raten, and the same holds for Dutch raadsel, related to raden. Such, however, is not the case of English riddle ~ read. Two sound changes severed the ties between the verb and the noun, and nothing connects those two words in the language intuition of today’s English speakers. Since the vowel in read is long, we might expect riddle to rhyme with beadle, but in the noun, that long root vowel was long ago shortened before the suffix. It might remain long, as happened in ladle (related to lade “to load”), bridle (related to braid), and many other similar words, but quantitative phonetic changes are rarely consistent.
Some words succumb to them, while the others manage to stay intact, and it is hard to account for their power of resistance. For example, English silly (with its short vowel) is related to German selig “happy” (with its long vowel preserved), while breeches is spelled with ee but rhymes with riches, rather than reaches. Likewise, sieve looks like a perfect rhyme for receive and deceive, but in fact, its poetic partners are live and give. To make matters even worse, the final consonant s in the old form of riddle was taken for the ending of the plural and dropped. The history of –s in English is a fitting plot for a short story. For example, alms, eaves, and riches were once singulars. Speakers misinterpreted –s in them but let it live, while in riddle, s was dropped, to reemerge only in the form of the plural.
Riddle “sieve” traces to Old English hriddel, related to the synonymous form hrīder and the verb hrīdrian “to sift” (sifts of course exist for sifting). The suffix –el in this riddle is the same as in riddle1, ladle, and the rest. Centuries ago, many English words began with hr-, hl-, hn-, and hw-. This initial h has been lost, except in the pronunciation of those who still distinguish between witch and which (in today’s erratic spelling, the old group hw– is reflected as wh-: consider which, when, who, and so forth). Thus, riddle1 and riddle2 became homonyms because of a series of phonetic changes, a most usual scenario. As a result, a modern proposal can be riddled with riddles to the despair of evaluators and the joy of punsters.
And now the promised desert should be served. There is another English word for “sieve,” namely, temes, going back to tamis “worsted cloth, originally used for straining sauces,” familiar from Indian cooking. Tamis “sieve, colander” is a living Modern French word. It has been known for centuries, but its origin remains disputed, and unambiguous facts do not support the suggestion that the Romance noun is an adaptation of the Germanic one. We will leave its etymology in limbo and only note that temes sounds like Thames. This fact gave rise to the hypothesis that in the popular saying to set the Thames on fire (usually about someone or some event that cannot set the Thames on fire) refers to that unfortunate sieve, rather than the river name.
Perhaps this wild guess would have been dead on arrival if it had not been supported, with a most dubious reference to material culture, by E. Cobham Brewer, the author of the once immensely popular Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. The book was on “everybody’s” desk. For years, people kept discussing whether in the process of sifting, some sieves or strainers may catch fire. Citations in my database go all the way from 1865 to 1921(!). Finally, sieves left the drama unscathed, and the Thames was allowed to remain inflammable. Analogs of phrases about rivers set on fire exist in several languages. The origin of the English idiom has not been found, and the OED has no citations of it before 1720. Such a late date makes one suspect that we are dealing with an adaptation of a similar idiom in a language other than English. Be that as it may, the entire argument looks like a parody of etymological research: some people who have more time on their hands than they need launch a ludicrous hypothesis, and the rest of the world keeps the ball rolling until the last thread disappears in the sand.
Featured image: “The Great Fire of London” by Josepha Jane Battlehooke, Museum of London, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
The promise, referred to in the title, was made last week (19 April 2023) in connection with the etymology of the verb filch. I also indicated that my exposition would be written in honor of and as a tribute to Professor E. Peter Maher, who had explored the history of hooker in exhausting detail. Everything I will say below, except for a few remarks in brackets, will be borrowed from his book-length publication “The Unhappy Hookers; Origin of hooker ‘prostitute’,” published as a special issue of the monthly journal Comments on Etymology 50, 6-7, 2021 (58 pages, with numerous illustrations and an exhaustive bibliography).
Maher’s main point is that hooker “prostitute” swept (American) English only after the publication of Xaviera Hollander’s (XH) book The Happy Hooker (1971). Twenty-five million copies were sold, and “everybody” read it. The author’s real name was Vera DeVries. There is an entry on Hollander in Wikipedia, and I’ll dispense with retelling it. XH of course did not coin the word hooker. Occasionally, it even had some connections with sex, but before 1971, it had not yet become common property (far from it). In his youth, Maher did not know hooker “prostitute.” Family names are often incredibly offensive, but the many Hookers faced no opprobrium. For example, the founder of the Connecticut colony was the Rev. Thomas Hooker and Harriet Beecher Stowe had a sister who was a Hooker, Mrs. John Hooker, i.e., Isabella Beecher Hooker.
At one time, hookers made hooks, just as carters made carts. But hookers also hook (players play, hookers hook, etc.). That is why thieves were called hookers. The Century Dictionary (a great American reference book) cites hooker ~ hoker “thief,” with an example from a 1598 dictionary: “A cunning filcher, a craftie hooker”, and Maher quotes Mark Twain: “…while Aunt Polly closed with a happy scriptural flourish, Tom hooked a doughnut,” that is, he “filched” it. Maher continues:
“Equipped with hooks, thieves snatched valuable clothes and bed-clothes through open windows and doors. Poor girls and boys of England and Ireland could be sentenced to transportation to Australia for stealing a handkerchief. [Those who have read Oliver Twist will know how true this statement is.] Shoplifters were termed hookers from their modus operandi.”
Indeed, they behaved like filchers (sorry for harping on the familiar note).
Hooker “a glass of whiskey” is “a word of unknown origin.” Was it not called this for its intoxicating purposes: it “sort of” hooked the drinker, did it not? We also find hooker “a boat for fishing with hook rather than net” (from Dutch). Amusingly, as late as 1979, there was an Irish ferry called The Happy Hooker. “The captain must have heard of Xaviera and hoped to attract American tourists,” Maher noted. Enter General Joseph Hooker (1814-1879). The morals of the servicemen in his army were notoriously low. Yet despite the obvious connection, the word hooker owes nothing to the Union general. Some websites keep clinging to this discredited etymology.
Maher found only one pun on hooker before World War II. Even before the 1960s, hooker appeared very rarely in magazines, and the word never made anyone blush. [By blushing I mean unwanted but inevitable associations. For instance, when we speak about the poop on a ship or see the word nincompoop, we cannot suppress our knowledge of what poop usually means.] Later, the word, though not yet vernacular, gained some popularity, but only in the early seventies, after Xaviera, did “all whoredom break loose.” That the 1901 volume of the OED missed hooker causes little surprise: such “vulgarisms” were not allowed in print and could be smuggled in only in the hope of being overlooked, as happened to the bird name windfucker, but more probably, the OED’s team did not have any convincing citations of the word. Once the censorship of this type was abolished, prohibited nouns and verbs swamped the printed page.
The OED team was of course familiar with John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms. The post-World War Two Second Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, cited hooker, as it cited the F-word, and referred to the relevant passage from Bartlett: “Hooker … strumpet, a sailor’s trull, so called from the number of houses of ill-fame frequented by sailors at the Hook (i.e., Corlear’s Hook) in the city of New York.” Maher remarks that Bartlett’s hooker indeed designated someone living or frequenting Corlear’s Hook in New York. [It was a word like Londoner or New Yorker. There is a village in Buckinghamshire, England, called Wing. I assume that its inhabitants are called Wingers. Some of them may be wingers.] Corlear Hook’s hookers were prostitutes, but that local name is not the beginning of the now universally known word. Bartlett discarded his entry on hookers as sailors’ trulls from the fourth and the fifth edition of his dictionary.
Though it is true that in the works of Hemingway and his contemporaries, hooker, denoting a woman who could be easily hooked, does occur at irregular intervals, those were occasional coinages. They were easy to understand, but their occurrences do not show that English had an accepted noun hooker “prostitute.” In 1845, a young man tells a friend that “he will find any number of pretty Hookers in the Brick row not far from French’s Hotel,” who do it for love (!). The story sounds almost too good to be true, but those selfless Hookers were obviously not prostitutes. In any case, they were not the immediate ancestors of Xaviera’s happy hookers. Maher’s ironic comment is: “Prostitutes hook a john. Honest women hook a husband.”
Hooker “prostitute” also turns up in later American English, and Maher quotes a passage from a tale told by an Englishman, a naïve outsider but not an idiot, about an encounter with a woman in 1863, whom, from his description, his interlocutors identified as a “hooker,” that is, a prostitute. Quite a few later occurrences make this sense of hooker certain. More examples follow that show the same: hooker “prostitute” existed, but though people understood it (the context was unambiguous and could not be misinterpreted), it remained a rarity.
“The Unhappy Hookers…” is a riveting personal memoir by a seasoned linguist who did not set out to “prove” anything. His aim was to dispel etymological myths by investigating the history of one word, and he did it in an exemplary manner (but I in general have a soft spot for monographs devoted to a single word, be it ginger, shyster, kibosh, or hooker). I’ll now quote a postscript, apparently, added in 2021:
“As I write this I’m a geezer though still ambulatory. My Cold War army hitch was over fifty years ago now, but it seems like yesterday. I can still see it, hear it, smell it, taste it. None of us in the ranks called a prostitute a hooker then. Novelists Wolfe and DosPassos and Steinbeck, born between 1898 and 1902, were now in early middle age. They were writing their novels in the twilight of the Civil War veterans. Some sixty years after the end of the Civil War Bonnie and Clyde were on the road. I was a baby. In this span of time the H-word spawned and spread….”
The final picture on p. 49 is of Bonnie and Clyde.
Featured image by Anthony Mac Donnacha via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Digital dilemmas: feminism, ethics, and the cultural implications of AI [podcast]
Skynet. HAL 9000. Ultron. The Matrix. Fictional depictions of artificial intelligences have played a major role in Western pop culture for decades. While nowhere near that nefarious or powerful, real AI has been making incredible strides and, in 2023, has been a big topic of conversation in the news with the rapid development of new technologies, the use of AI generated images, and AI chatbots such as ChatGPT becoming freely accessible to the general public.
On today’s episode, we welcomed Dr Kerry McInerney and Dr Eleanor Drage, editors of Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Data, Algorithms and Intelligent Machines, and then Dr Kanta Dihal, co-editor of Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, to discuss how AI can be influenced by culture, feminism, and Western narratives defined by popular TV shows and films. Should AI be accessible to all? How does gender influence the way AI is made? And most importantly, what are the hopes and fears for the future of AI?
Check out Episode 82 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.
Look out for Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney, which publishes in the UK in August 2023 and in the US in October 2023.
If you want to hear more from Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney, you can listen to their podcast: The Good Robot Podcast on Gender, Feminism and Technology.
In May 2023, the Open Access title, Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal publishes in the UK; it publishes in the US in July 2023.
You may also be interested in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, which looks both at classic AI to the modern age, and contemporary narratives.
You can read the following two chapters from AI Narratives for free until 31 May:
Other relevant book titles include:
You may also be interested in the following journal articles:
Featured image: ChatGPT homepage by Jonathan Kemper, CC0 via Unsplash.
Prolegomena to the word <em>hooker</em>: the English verb <em>filch</em>
My initial idea was to write a blog post about the history of the word hooker, in order to celebrate the extensive research into this question by Professor J. Peter Maher, and I’ll do so next week, but it suddenly occurred to me that as regards meaning, the verb hook has some affinity with the verb filch, and I decided to write what I know about it. One can find an entry on filch in An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction,published fifteen years ago (2008). There is a brief mention of my hypothesis in Etymoline, but without reference to the source or even minimal discussion. Nor did the omnivorous and omniscient Internet take cognizance of what is said in An Analytic Dictionary about filch. Below, I’ll make the idea of that entry common property, assuming that the hungry readership will pound on this post.
Problems emerge the moment we begin to explore the history of filch, because two homonymous verbs exist: filch “to attack” and filch “to steal.” They are almost certainly unrelated. The earliest attestation of filch “to steal” goes back to the second half of the sixteenth century, and, most probably, the verb entered English at around that time. Therefore, searching for its Old English ancestor looks like a sleeveless errand (see the post for 26 April 2017, on this curious phrase). The first book-length dictionary of English etymology was published in 1617, so that its author (John Minsheu) knew filch, and indeed, he offered a hypothesis on its derivation. All his followers also wrestled with filch, and now, four centuries later, responsible sources have a solid answer to the problem: “Origin unknown.”
Those interested in etymology are well aware of the fact that in dealing with slang (and filch is of course slang), historical linguists seldom succeed in finding such words’ unquestionable sources. The same holds for filch (hence the shocking verdict “origin unknown”), but tracing the pathfinders’ way to the truth, even if it is a devious way with no dazzling light at the end, cannot be called a futile endeavor. At the very least, it prevents later researchers from repeating the mistakes of their predecessors. I’ll briefly go over the attempts to discover the etymon of filch, but without giving references. Those interested in the bibliography will find all they need in my dictionary.
For quite some time, Greek fēlós “deceitful” and Latin fallax “deceitful; fallacious” looked like the desired etymon, but filch was probably coined or borrowed by those English speakers who knew more about filching than about Greek and Latin. Besides, filch is a verb, rather than an adjective! Old Portuguese filhar “to seize,” perhaps allied to Italian pigliare “to seize” or French piler “to crush,” have also been pressed into service by ingenious word hunters. Thieves’ secret lingo has always been to a certain extent international, because at all times, criminals used to cross the borders of their native regions and made attempts to communicate with one another, ideally without being understood by the uninitiated. Their cant (as this language is called) has been explored by several excellent scholars. The Old Portuguese verb does look like a fairly good fit, but the source is suspicious: why Portuguese, and why no modern synonyms elsewhere in the Romance-speaking world?
Germanic words related to filch seem to hold out better promise. Therefore, filch has been compared with Old Icelandic fela “to hide” (however, the senses do not match!) and especially with Gothic filhan “to steal.” Apart from the -h ~ -ch mismatch, the latter verb looks like a feasible cognate of filch. Gothic, it will be remembered, is an Old Germanic language, known mainly from a fourth-century translation of part of the New Testament. Filhan may have a more secure cognate in English, namely, the regional verb feal “to hide,” though it should be repeated that “steal” and “hide” are not synonyms. Curiously, Stephen Skinner, the author of a 1671 etymological dictionary of English (the second ever published), seems to have cited a reasonable cognate of filch, namely, German filzig “feltlike,” with numerous figurative senses, from “sleazy” to “corrupt; greedy,” but no one seems to have taken his suggestion seriously. Filz is related to English felt, the name of a fabric.
Many old etymologists were content with stringing together various look-alikes, without even wondering how filch could develop from or be related to them. Dutch fielt “rascal,” Swiss German flöke “to steal,” French filouter “to cheat” (French filou “crook, rogue”). Irish Gaelic fealleaidch “knavish,” Old English flōcan “to beat, strike,” and quite a few others have been compared with filch. Filching presupposes a sleight of hands, and it may not be due to chance that in so many languages, words designating all kinds of quick and unsteady movement begin with the sound–symbolic group fl. Compare fly, flow, fleet, flimsy, and the like. However, spotting a vaguely similar word, without showing how it could reach English and yield filch, is a wild goose chase.
The consonant ch did not exist in the earliest form of English. Theoretically, filch can go back to some form like filk. Norwegian and Scottish pilk(e) ~ pilk mean “to pick,” and it has been suggested that filch is a rhyming synonym of pilk. This derivation is not impossible but rather improbable. As often mentioned in this blog, the more ingenious or convoluted an etymology is, the smaller the chance of its providing a clue to the riddle. I think the same also holds for the comparison between English filch and Danish regional filke “to scrape.” And we are facing the familiar question: how did the Danish dialectal verb become known in English? In my opinion, filke as the etymon filk looks as improbable as pilk. The answer should be closer to home.
The great Scottish lexicographer John Jamieson recorded filchans “rags, patched or fastened together, hooked in a bundle,” and we can return to Skinner’s idea. German verb filzen means “to comb through,” and in Middle High German (that is, in a language spoken many centuries ago), filzen already meant “to search a person” (from Filzer “comb”?). The inspiration for all such words was the name of the fabric felt (German Felz). An Early English filcher ~ filchman was, apparently, a person who could use his hook for stealing things. Let us note that English filch was recorded late, and filk, its putative base, has never been found. Most probably, it never existed. As far as we can judge, filch has always meant only “to pilfer.” Filch “hook” seems to be the best starting point for tracing the origin of filch “steal.” Also, hook is a familiar starting point for all kinds of slangy phrases. Compare hook it! “make yourself scarce,” hook up, and of course hooker, the subject of next week’s post.
Filch, it appears, is an English adaptation of German filzen,a term of the thieves’ (international) slang. The German verb ends in z, that is, ts, which, obviously, could not survive in English and was replaced with ch. In principle, I am returning to the suggestion first made in 1671. Three and a half centuries of fruitless wanderings? No, not quite fruitless. Rejecting implausible guesses is part of all good research. Hence the inevitable sleeveless errands and wild goose chases. Scholarship exacts a high price, but all is well that ends well.
A rake’s etymological progress to hell
Another punning title! I am so sorry. This post is about a garden instrument, not the profligate, immortalized by William Hogarth and Igor Stravinsky. Last week, I wrote about the verb scratch and promised to discuss the origin of rake. The superficial factor that unites the two words in this blog is the letter in which a reader asked me about their derivation, but as will be seen, there is a deeper link between them. And hell will turn up below more than once, with my good intentions taken for granted.
Three English words sound as rake: the two mentioned above and rake “inclination from the perpendicular” (a sailing term). Though at first sight, they do not seem to be connected, I’ll try to show that their histories perhaps intertwine. Rake “implement” is related to Old Norse reka and German Rechen, a southern word (from rehho). This Rechen has a northern synonym, namely Harke, attested first only in the sixteenth century. Its origin is murky, but rehho and Harke do sound somewhat alike. Rake “profligate” seems to go back to rakehell, that is, a person for whom hell is raked (prepared, made available?), such a compound as puzzles us until we learn its history (think of spendthrift or cocktail).
The sailing term rake is one of several seventeenth-century nautical words of obscure antecedents (like awning and tarpaulin, for example; both have been discussed in this blog). Rake “implement” is related to the verbs meaning “to reach out, stretch, remove,” and it resembles English reach, from raikjan. Then we notice German ragen “to protrude,” most often used with some prefix. A few related forms in Scandinavian also exist. Judging by its Old English cognate, rake, the name of a gardening implement, once began with hr-. And to repeat, an etymologically mysterious synonym (doublet?) of German Rechen “implement” is called Harke. We seem to be dealing with two competing sound groups—rk and hrk—for “rake” and the other words being discussed here. For Harke a sound-imitative origin has been suggested, though cautiously. The others have been traced to the basic meaning “to reach out.”
Writing a blog is different from writing a scholarly article. In a post, one may risk an unsafe hypothesis, listen to a refutation, and, if necessary, recant. I would therefore like to suggest that the initial impulse behind the oldest words mentioned above was to render the noise produced by scratching (this is the link to the scratch–kratzen pair of last week). They came to designate all kinds of objects, including a few protruding ones. After all, a rake is a big, long thing. Reaching out, an angle at which the prow rises above the surface, and so forth, seem, I suspect, to be products of secondary associations.
Perhaps the idiom thin as a rake will support my idea. William. B. Lockwood, mainly known for his studies of the origin of bird names, occupied himself one day with raking together the cuttings on the lawn, and a thought occurred to him that there is nothing thin about a rake. (Remember an apple falling on Newton’s head? All dedicated researchers are alike: their problems never leave them in peace.) No one, Lockwood added, says: “thin as a hoe.” Struck by this idea (and it is surprising that it had not occurred to anyone before him), he decided to derive the word in the English idiom from the Old Icelandic root hrak– “wretched, wicked.” I agree that thinness is not a distinctive feature of a rake, but apart from some phonetic difficulties (which I will ignore here), I wonder whether the Scandinavian noun was known widely enough in English to become part of the simile. Lockwood’s supporting material is meager. Also, it might be good to find a similar idiom in a Scandinavian language, but it does not seem to exist anywhere outside English.
Lockwood’s idea, first published in 1973, never lost its appeal to him, and he reproduced it in his 1995 book An Informal Introduction to English Etymology. Philip Durkin, Deputy Chief Editor and the chief etymologist of the Oxford English Dictionary, shared Lockwood’s doubts, but in a 2012 paper, referred to a fact of material culture: “… the implement used by medieval farmers appears to have been rather more similar to the modern soil rake… …perhaps the expression arose from the similarity of a soil rake to the skeletal form of an emaciated figure….” Since the simile was already known to Chaucer, Durkin’s idea looks plausible, and, in an indirect way, it may confirm my suggestion that the old rake, a kind of hoe, did not protrude or stretch, or reach out, but mainly cut-cut-cut, perhaps producing hrk-rk sounds. As Durkin puts it, opinions are likely to continue to differ. But if my hypothesis has any merit, it follows that the names of the objects mentioned above did not go to an ancient root meaning “to heap up, reach out; arrange” or something similar. Such a root may not even have existed.
In an old post, I once told a story of a little girl asking her mother about how the streetcar (tram) functions. The woman explained everything in a most scholarly way. The girl listened patiently and then said: “No, this is not the way it goes.” “And how does it go?” “Ding-dong.” I suspect that the ancient rake went hrk–rk or rk–hrk. Those who will take my musings seriously may also consult the posts on trash and rubbish (24 and 31 March 2021), and those who are interested in the origin of other implements are invited to read the posts for 25 March 2020 (adze) and 14 September 2022 (mattock). Mattocks and rakes belong together, at least to a certain extent.
“In Sussex the devil is called ‘the poor man’, and the earthworks of the ancient British hill-fortress at the well-known Devil’s Dyke (near Brighton) are known as ‘the Poor Man’s Wall’.” The great Max Müller responded to the author of this note and pointed out that the extraordinary features of nature and even works of art are ascribed to the devil all over the world, for which reason the philologist Herbert Coleridge called the Devil Pontifex Maximus, a pun with an obvious reference to Latin pons, pontis “bridge.” Does anyone know the origin of the phrase poor devil (French pauvre diable, German armer Teufel)? Who coined it and when? Neither thin as rake nor poor devil occurs in my rather complete database featuring the etymology of English idioms. It means that for three centuries no one has discussed them in popular periodicals or scholarly journals.
“The Devil’s Mouth. The term was applied by the Spaniards to the Old Mole battery, whose fire caused them much annoyance when they were besieging the fortress, and the Devil’s Tongue is the point or spit of ground on which the Old Mole battery is built. The Devil’s Tusk is a pinnacle of limestone in the shape of a tooth, and about thirty feet in height, at the rear of the Royal Naval Hospital” [the author did not specify which hospital is meant].
TOPOGRAPHIA INFERNALIS is endless, because the Devil is a famous rake. End of pontificating.
Featured image: William Hogarth, The Tavern scene from “A Rake’s Progress”, Sir John Soane’s Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
“Of Socrates we have nothing genuine but in the Memorabilia of Xenophon,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in 1819, comparing Xenophon’s work favourably with the “mysticisms” and “whimsies” of Plato’s dialogues. More recently, many philosophers have taken the opposite view; a typical verdict is that of Terence Irwin in 1974, who described Xenophon as a “retired general” who presented “ordinary conversations.” The idea that Xenophon’s Socratic dialogues entirely lacked the philosophical bite or intellectual depth of Plato’s had become a commonplace in a philosophical discourse which prioritised abstract knowledge over broader ethics.
Both Jefferson and Irwin were right in identifying the characteristics of Xenophon’s depiction of his teacher—his overwhelming concern with providing practical advice for living a good life, and for managing relationships with family and friends. But both missed Xenophon’s lively wit, and his use of the dialogue form to put Socrates in conversation with Athenians, both friends and family and more public figures whose identity adds some spice to the discussion. Xenophon depicts a Socrates who offers pragmatic solutions to the difficulties his Athenian friends face, from Socrates’ own son’s rows with his mother to his friend Crito’s difficulties with vexatious lawsuits targeting his wealth. Where Plato shows Socrates leaving his conversation partners numbed and distressed by their recognition of their ignorance, as if attacked by a stingray, Xenophon takes more care to show how Socrates moved friends and students on from the discomfort of that initial learning moment. He offers practical solutions and friendly encouragement, whether persuading warring brothers to support each other or finding a way in which a friend can support the extended family taking refuge in his home. His advice is underpinned by an ethical commitment to creating and maintaining community.
It is not that Xenophon’s Socrates is afraid to show the over-confident the limits of their capabilities; while he offers encouragement and practical advice on personal and business matters, he rebukes those who want power and prestige without first doing their homework. His Socrates demonstrates to the young Glaucon that he needs to be much better informed about the facts and figures of Athenian civic and military resources before he proposes policy to his fellow citizens in Athens or seeks elected office. Socrates’ forensic uncovering of the young man’s ignorance of practical matters is sharpened for readers who recognise that this is Plato’s brother, depicted in his Republic as an acute interlocutor, able to follow Socrates’ most intellectually demanding arguments. In the conversation Xenophon presents, Glaucon is reduced to mumbling one excuse after another:
“Then first tell us,” said Socrates, “what the city’s land and naval forces are, and then those of our enemies.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I couldn’t tell you that just off the top of my head.”
“Well, if you have some notes of it, please fetch them,” said Socrates. “I would be really glad to hear what they say.”
“Frankly,” he said, “I haven’t yet made any notes either.”
(Memorabilia 3.6.9)
Xenophon might be making a very ordinary claim here, that good leadership decision-making rests on a firm grasp of practical detail. But it gains depth when read against Plato’s argument in the Republic for handing over political leadership to philosopher kings, trained in theoretical disciplines. Xenophon argues that rule should be grounded from the bottom up; he is a firm believer in transferable skills, and that the ability to manage a household might equip someone to lead an army or their city.
Xenophon does not leave Glaucon quite as discomfited as Socrates’ interlocutors in Platonic dialogues become, such as the Euthyphro where the titular character hurries away rather than go through another round of being disabused of his opinions. He shows how Socrates moves on from the low point of the realisation of ignorance and starts to rebuild his interlocutors’ self-confidence, now underpinned by knowledge and self-awareness. Socrates offers Glaucon a careful recommendation for developing his management skills and gaining credibility before returning to public debates as a more impressive contributor. With another student, Euthydemus, Socrates switches from the argumentative mode familiar from Plato’s work—the Socratic “elenchus” or refutation—to exhortation and encouragement, as teacher and student become more familiar with each other and learn together cooperatively.
“Responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust.”
One reason that Xenophon was motivated to show a Socrates who encouraged his students to make useful contributions to public life was to rebut critics who presented him—not entirely without cause—as the teacher of some of the leaders of the brutal regime of the Thirty, which briefly overthrew Athens’ democracy after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Xenophon insists that these former students had abandoned Socrates’ teaching in favour of an aggressive pursuit of power.
Xenophon recognised the usefulness of a wide range of practical experience. A businessman might well make a useful general. But he makes Socrates insist that leaders must show practical knowledge and analytical skills in order to persuade others to follow them and to deliver successful outcomes, whether in business or in battle. The combination of knowledge and skill, which his students label basilikē technē, the “royal art”,” is an essential attribute of leadership. By responding to Plato’s dialogues with a less intellectualist account of the capacities that leaders need, Xenophon made a case for the importance of leadership skills and knowledge as the basis of public trust. In a contemporary context where trust in leaders and educators alike is low, perhaps there is a powerful and accessible case for the role of expertise in government and society, which Xenophon makes through his memories of Socrates’ conversations.
Featured image: “The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David via The Met (public domain)
Scratching all the way to hell (second series)
Quite some time ago, I was asked about the origin of the verbs scratch and rake. At first sight, the etymology of both looks unproblematic, but modern researchers are cautious people and see reefs where the rest of the speaking community glides happily over the surface. Today, I’ll confine myself to scratch (oh, how hard it was to resist the temptation of saying that I’ll begin from scratch!).
Scratch turned up in English texts only in the fifteenth century. As usual, it does not follow that this verb was coined so late. My doubts are based on the fact that German kratzen (the same meaning) goes back to the oldest texts in that language. Middle English had two synonyms: skratten and cracchen. Cracchen looks French, and William W. Skeat, our greatest but not infallible authority for the origin of English words, believed that scratch and cracchen had been confused, that is, got into each other’s way and produced some sort of semantic blend. Perhaps they did. It is sometimes hard to tell apart even not fully identical twins.
I notice that Swedish skrata means “to make a lot of noise, to laugh uproariously,” while sratta means “magpie.” Both words are rather obviously sound-imitative. To add to this list, Old Icelandic skrati meant “ghost” (a noisy creature?), and its near-doublet skratti was a designation of the Devil; hence English Old Scratch “Devil.” (See some musings on such words in the post for 2 May 2012 “Further Adventures of Scr-Words.”) Scratching does not produce a lot of noise, but the group scr- ~ skr- does occur in quite a few sound-imitative and sound-symbolic words. Scream and screech are ideal examples. Since a bird called “screech-owl” exists, I may mention Swedish skrata “owl” and skratta “to laugh.” (The Germanic verbs for “laugh” were all onomatopoeic: laugh goes back to hlah-; compare hlah– with cluck-cluck and giggle.) English scrape, a verb of Scandinavian origin (Old Icelandic skrapa), makes one think of a jarring sound. Likewise, English scramble may or may not be a loan from Scandinavian, but borrowed or native, it does not refer to peace and quiet.
In dealing with scr– ~ skr– words, one never knows where to look: everything is so suggestive. Is the English adjective scrumptious indeed an emphatic alteration of sumptuous, as some of our sources suggest? This hypothesis is not entirely without merit. Scrimmage is, apparently, a variant or a close relative of skirmish. On the same note: where is scrouge “to crowd out” from? Dickens’s Scrooge, who scrimped and saved, knew well how to screw people and leave them screwed up. The origin of scrimp is also obscure, as it should be. A doublet of skimp? Even Latin scrībere “to write” (consider scribe, script, Scriptures, and others) belongs to our sound-imitative corpus, because writing began as scratching.
In any case, scratch and German kratzen seem to belong together, despite the gap in the chronology of their earliest attestations. To my mind, it may not be too bold to assume that even in the oldest period, a pair of synonyms sounding like kratzen ~ scratch coexisted. I even wonder whether the s-form is the later one. When we encounter the enigmatic s-mobile, the ancient prefix that attaches itself like a barnacle to the roots of so many words, we assume that the s-less form is the older one. But perhaps (just perhaps), given the coexistence of a great number of words with and without that spurious prefix, some forms with s- are at least as old as those without it. Kratzen is a verb of murky origin, but if we assume that it began its existence with s and then lost it, rather than that scratch acquired its s later (and developed from cratch to scratch), we may solve the puzzle of their relationship. Be that as it may, we are certainly dealing with sound-imitative and/or sound-symbolic formations.
Last week, I promised to continue my series on TOPOGRAPHIA INFERNALIS. Since I did mention the Devil in today’s post, this subject will come in handy. (All the passages below are from Notes and Queries for 1884-85.)
Five miles beyond hell, where Peter pitched his waistcoat. No one could explain the allusion, and the modern Internet provides no help either. And here is another question that received no answer in the eighteen-eighties: “Is anything known of the origin of the saying ‘Elephant-end,’ which place is supposed to be situated ‘where the devil can’t get for nettles’”? Nettles and thistles are the proverbial food of the Devil. Apparently, the rush belong to his diet too (see below). The Devil, unable to get nourishment, is of course hungry and irate. But why elephant-end,and what does the phrase mean?
“‘An eminent book collector, noted for his good nature, declared that a man who published a book without an index ought to be put into thistles beyond hell, where the devil could not get at him’ (Temple Bar, October 1882, p. 191.) Yet the thistle appears to be in some sense one of the devil’s plants. ‘Having met the Lord one day, the devil asked for oats and buckwheat as his reward for having taken part in the creation of the world. The request was granted, whereupon the devil began to dance for joy. The wolf came up and suddenly asked the meaning of this frivolity. In his confusion, the devil forgot what had been given him, and replied that he was dancing for joy at having received the rush and the thistle, to which plants he still adheres”
(Athenæum, Sept. 23, 1882, review of La Mythologie des Plantes, by Angelo de Gubernatis.) [Temple Bar, 1860-1906, was an excellent literary magazine, and so was Athenæum, 1828-1926. I mainly used the latter for book reviews and letters to the editor, while compiling my bibliography of English etymology and my recently published dictionary of idioms.]
Gudbrand Vigfusson (an anglicized spelling of the name of a great Icelandic lexicographer and philologist) published, in English, the following note in connection with Hekla, the volcano about which I wrote a few lines last week: “In an old Danish hymn or song of the sixteenth century I remember having read of a drove or hunt of condemned souls on the way to Mount Hecla [sic] from Denmark. Satan, the drover, called Lureman [from Danish lure “to lurk”?], sings out: “Come! come! come! you must [that is, you must go] to Heckenfield, to Hecken, to Heckenfield, with the swarm of souls into the black hole…” (The Academy, February 14, 1885). [The Academy, 1869-1902, was another first-rate magazine. One sometimes wonders how in the period 1850-1920 the literate British public could support so many popular journals and consume those thousands of pages every week, and there were many, very many more than the three mentioned here. The Wild Hunt was a story known all over Europe. At one time, in Scandinavia, the god Odin was associated with it.]
In a comment on the previous post, our correspondent wrote that he knew the phrase to go to hell in a handcart (rather than in a handbasket). I think both mean the same, that is, “to go from bad to worse,” and in both, the way of propelling the vehicle remains obscure. Perhaps the driver is Old Scratch.
A guide to going to hell (first draft) and other matters
Since December 2022, when the University of Minnesota Press published my semi-etymological dictionary of English Idioms (Take My Word for It), I have received several questions about the origin of familiar phrases and some queries about the absence of others. The second batch of questions is easy to answer. My team consisting of two faithful volunteers who stayed with me for years and two more assistants, each of whom spent a single semester, looked through all the popular journals ever published in the English-speaking world, from The British Apollo (1708) to The New Yorker (still thriving), and alerted me to the articles and notes dealing with idioms. The selection and commentary were my duty. Also, if I happened to know some relevant works in a language other than English (provided they touched on English idioms), especially often in Latin, French, German, the Scandinavian languages, and Russian (less rarely in Spanish, Polish, etc.), I might add the relevant item or two to the database.
Some of the idioms featured in the book are hopelessly obscure, and the discussion in Take My Word for It may perhaps call attention to them for the first time since they were featured in Notes and Queries, The Academy, The Gentleman’s Magazine, and the rest. Conversely, some of the most “famous” phrases never turned up in my database. A glaring gap (to cite one example) is the whole nine yards. Here I should repeat that we screened only popular journals. Subscribers constantly sent letters to them with questions about the etymology of words and idioms, received answers from other readers, refuted, or supported certain suggestions, but as time went on, the exchange would often be forgotten, with the result that fifty or so years later, somebody would ask the same question, receive the same or similar answers, and no one would remember the first round. Alas, publications on etymology are hard to find.
This kind of exchange in the popular press lingered for a decade or so after the First World War and then petered out. Occasionally, Scientific American or Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset would still feature a discussion of a word or idiom, but in principle, this genre is now dead. The Internet provided a forum of which our ancestors could not even dream. Look up the whole nine yards in Wikipedia: an excellent article, supplied with an exhaustive bibliography. Nowadays, every literate person probably has a computer or/and a smartphone. Why should I have included such an entry? The greatest danger of even a semi-popular work is to be not wrong (mistakes cannot be avoided) but trivial.
While working on my dictionary, I googled for each item, to make sure that I had something of substance to add. Wikipedia features a semi-satisfactory entry on the idiom by hook or by crook, but I knew much more and included the idiom. With regard to rain cats and dogs, the Internet supplies the user with shameful nonsense (it refers to Old Norse mythology; allegedly, Odin had dogs, produced thunder, and so forth). Kick the bucket seems to have been explained rather convincingly, but the Internet fails the user. Finally, the Internet, except for a few responsible websites and Wikipedia, bears no responsibility for the information it provides, and the etymology found on it should be treated with healthy distrust. When the telephone was installed in Iceland, an old woman made herself famous by saying: “You heard it on the phone? That should be checked”—a most reasonable attitude, I would say.
Since the exchange on word and phrase origins in the popular press more or less petered out a century ago, I have no citations for countless new idioms, especially those going back to sports, jazz, rock, pop, and the rest of popular culture. Yet if articles on the origin of some idiom appeared in scholarly periodicals like American Speech, I of course discussed them. A good example is spittin’ image. Another example is put the kibosh on. The phrase was extensively discussed in the old issues of Notes and Queries, but two years ago, a book about it was published, and I, naturally, made use of it. Finally, I may mention a hog on ice, the object of long and not fruitless discussion. The phrase graces the title of a mainly dependable book by Charles Earle Funk. Finally, I looked up my material in all the existing English dictionaries of “phrase and fable” and commented on the solutions offered there when they differed from mine.
There are slightly over a thousand entries in Take My Word for It, while English, including its regional varieties, probably has at least a hundred thousand of them. Also, I mainly ignored proverbs, which are more numerous than stars in heaven.
Finally, I did not include phrases like give up, give in, put up with, and light out (for) “to rush out (for another place).” Their history is a special branch of lexicology (very dear to my heart, because it was the first topic I discussed in a research paper as an undergraduate). The only exception in my book was made for put up (with), because it once made its way into Notes and Queries. The origin of such verb-adverb collocations is often obscure: compare do in, make up, and their likes. The usage is also partly capricious. Why do we shut up but shut down our computers? I remember my puzzlement when I read in John Galsworthy’s novel Flowering Wilderness a woman’s request to another woman: “Please do me up from behind.” The British-American joke about knock me up in the morning is too stale to bear repetition.
What follows was inspired by the question about the origin of the phrase unleash holy hell “to criticize one in a very angry way.” Holy hell (an exclamation) exists outside the longer phrase. I don’t know its origin, but I have a suggestion. Holy in holy hell is an obvious euphemism for “unholy, damned,” and it must have been chosen for the sake of alliteration, an important feature of English idioms and name giving. Even the latest of our cliches often follow this principle: publish or perish, bed and board, bed and breakfast, and so forth. I also recollect some other phrases with hell. One is to go to hell in a handbasket. The phrase seems to have been coined in America. The variant to go to heaven in a handbasket is also known. Countless people have asked word historians about the mysterious handbasket and received no answer. An alliterating joke that has no explanation? Consider also come hell or high water. The opposition (an ultimate depth versus a flood) is obvious, but so is the alliteration. Hot as hell and hell’s half-acre are not particularly memorable, but, like holy hell, they also alliterate. In the merry month of May, someone may meander less and enlighten us better. I know that my answer about hell is not convincing, but I had the best intentions in the world.
In the not too remote past, Hekla (the famous Icelandic volcano) was believed to be the place of real hell. Did it happen because Hekla sounds somewhat like hell in English, German, and the Scandinavian languages? In Sweden and Denmark, go to Heckenfel was once a famous curse. Hecklebirnie was known to be three miles beyond hell. The same usage has been recorded in Aberdeenshire. If one said: “Go you to the deil,” the reply often was: “Go you to Hecklebirnie.” Alliteration seems to be able to placate holy heaven and unleash unholy hell.
I have a curious set of notes tilted “Topographia Infernalis,” going back to 1884, and may quote parts of it next week.
Featured image by Hansueli Krapf, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
This essay was the overall winner in the Undergraduate Category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student, Lukas Joosten
Most parents think they are helping their children when they give them a very high standard of life. This essay argues that giving luxuries to your children can, in fact, be morally impermissible. The core of my argument is that when parents give their children a luxurious standard of life, they foist an expectation for a higher standard of living upon their children, reducing their lifetime wellbeing if they cannot afford this standard in adulthood.
I argue for this conclusion in four steps. Firstly, I discuss how one can harm someone by changing their preferences. Secondly, I develop a model for the general permissibility of gift giving in the context of adaptive preferences. Thirdly, I apply this to the case of parental giving, arguing it is uniquely problematic. Lastly, I respond to a series of objections to the main argument.
I call the practice in question, luxury parenting. Luxury parenting consists of providing certain luxuries to your child which go beyond a reasonably good standard of living. I will consider this through a framework of gift giving, since luxury parenting can be understood as the continual gifting of certain luxuries to children. While my argument also applies to singular gifts of luxury to children, it is targeted at the continual provision of luxury goods and services to ensure a high standard of living throughout childhood.
Section 1: Preference Screwing
When we discuss harming one’s wellbeing, we are usually referring to taking some action which changes the actor’s situation so that they are further from their preferences. However, a person’s wellbeing can be harmed in the opposite way as well, by changing their preferences away from their situation. Consider the following example.
Wine pill: Bob secretly administers a pill to Will which changes his preferences so that he no longer enjoys cheap wine.
Will has been harmed here in some morally significant way without having received any immediate disbenefit. The harm consists in the effect on future preferences. We can call this type of harming “preference screwing”.
Preference Screwing: Making it more difficult for an actor to achieve a certain level of utility by changing the actor’s preferences so that there is a larger divergence between the preference set and the actor’s option set.
Section 2: Adaptive Preferences and Gift-giving
The theory of adaptive preferences tells us that people tend to return to their baseline happiness after positive or negative shocks to their wellbeing because people’s preferences adapt to their current situation. I argue this process of preference adaptation implies that some instances of gift-giving are impermissible, because consuming a high-quality gift, screws with the preferences of the recipient, so that they derive lower utility from future consumption of lower-quality variants of the good they were gifted.
There exists a vast literature debating the accuracy of adaptive preferences.[1] However, my argument only requires a weak restricted form of adaptive preferences. Namely it simply says that there is some negative impact of consuming expensive goods on the enjoyment of future cheap goods. That such an impact exists is generally empirically supported, even if the strength of the impact is debatable.[2]
It might be objected that if preferences are adaptive, then gift-giving has no long-term harm since, upon returning to the lower-quality good, preferences will adapt downward immediately. There are two independent reasons why this is not a problem for my argument.
Firstly, I don’t assume (and the empirics don’t support) complete adaption, only partial adaptation. This means that once the preferences of an actor have (partially) adapted up after consuming the higher-quality good, then if the actor returns to the lower-quality good, their preferences will adapt down but not completely, so there remains a long-lasting upwards pressure on their preferences.
Secondly, as discussed in section 3, since childhood is a formative life-phase, preferences adapt more quickly and more permanently for children. Luxury parenting thus fixes children’s preferences at a high point, which will take much longer to adapt back down in adulthood.
This allows us to develop a model of gift giving. When A gifts X to B, B’s lifetime wellbeing is affected in two ways. Firstly, there is the immediate positive (or negative if a particularly poor gift) utility derived by B’s consumption of X. Call this the immediate utility. Secondly there is the long-term impact of the gift’s preference screwing. The preference screwing effect is the total harm to the lifetime wellbeing of B incurred by B as a result of the preference screwing caused by consuming X. This allows us to state the following:
Net wellbeing impact of gift giving = immediate utility – preference screwing effect
Now, consider that preference screwing through gift-giving is usually not considered a form of wronging. Consider the following example:
Wine gift: Bob gifts a bottle of Château Latour to Will for his birthday. After thoroughly enjoying the wine, Will no longer enjoys cheap wines as much
In wine gift, we would not say that Bob has wronged Will. There are two distinctions between wine gift and wine pill which explain why gift giving to adults is generally permissible.
Firstly, wine gift is not necessarily a net negative for Will’s lifetime utility. The spike in utility of drinking the gifted bottle may outweigh the loss in utility from the future discounted happiness of drinking cheap wines. In wine pill, there is only a negative impact on Will’s utility (ignoring the health effects).
Secondly, and crucially, Will consents into receiving the gift. Generally, we think that a person’s potential complaint versus a particular action is much weaker when they consented into that action being conducted upon them.
This allows us to say that the permissibility of gift given is a function of the following two parameters:
The weight given to each is going to vary with one’s background intuitions on paternalism. Anti-paternalists might thus completely disregard the first parameter, arguing that given sufficient consent, gift-giving is always permissible. My argument is inclusive to a broad pluralism on this matter, since it avoids the 2nd parameter altogether, as discussed in section 3.
Section 3: Giving Children Luxuries
By evaluating luxury parenting on the two parameters, I argue that many instances of practice are impermissible.
Firstly, consider level of consent. Children are usually thought to lack the required capacities for autonomous decision making, such as critical thinking, time-relative agency (ownership of future interests) and independence[3]. This means that children, generally, cannot consent into receiving luxuries from their parents.
As such, we must adapt the model of consent for children. Brighouse suggests that the autonomy rights of children express themselves as fiduciary duties upon parents.[4] Parents thus have the authority to make decisions for their children, but this authority is limited by the duty to act in the child’s best interest. This means that both parents can permissibly give gifts to children, but only when those gifts appear to be in the best interest of the child. Assume now that, ceteris paribus, the non-welfare interests of children are unaffected in cases of gift giving. Given this assumption, we can say that the permissibility of child gift giving boils down to the expected net impact.
Luxury parenting is thus usually impermissible since it is particularly likely to lead to a negative expected net impact. This is because the preference screwing effect is likely to be strong, while the immediate benefit is small. Children are particularly vulnerable to preference screwing from luxury parenting for four reasons.
Firstly, childhood is an especially formative stage in life. Due to the ongoing development of the brain, the patterns children learn are going to be extra lasting. [5] This means that if preferences are formed to expect a high standard of living, these preferences are going to be especially sticky. If the child’s standard of living drops upon reaching adulthood, those preferences will likely adapt down less quickly and won’t adapt down completely.
Secondly, when children experience certain goods, they often experience them for the first time. If the first time they experience a particular good or service, they are experiencing an expensive variant of that good, they are likely to calibrate their future expectation on this expensive good, because they have no cheaper variants to compare it to.
Thirdly, children generally will have a lesser appreciation of the uniqueness or scarcity of the goods they experience at a high standard of living. In wine gift, Will is acutely aware that his drinking of Château Latour is a unique and temporary experience. This awareness can deter the preference adaptation. However, children are less likely to be aware of the fleeting nature of the standard of living and so are not protected from preference adaption in this way.
Lastly, the effect is going to be especially strong because the luxury gifts are provided for an extended period of time. If parents provide a luxurious standard of living for multiple years, that gives a very long time for the child’s preferences to be pushed upwards and solidify there.
On the flip side, the immediate utility effect is going to be smaller for children. The satisfaction people receive from luxuries often goes beyond the direct experiential joy of the good or service. There is also the novelty of the experience, the secondary reflective happiness from knowing that you are consuming something special. Children are much less likely to appreciate the novelty of the experience since they are likely, as argued above, to be less aware of the uniqueness of the experience.
In sum, luxury parenting has strongly negative preferencing screwing effects while it offers a limited positive immediate utility. In turn, luxury parenting is likely to have a negative expected net impact on children, meaning that luxury parenting is often impermissible.
Section 4: Objections
Objection 1: Symmetry Implications
If it is impermissible to give a luxurious standard of life to children, this could imply that it is morally required to give a miserable existence to children instead. If childhood suffering will push preferences down such that children will be happier in the long run, this may be better for the child. This implication would be so clearly unacceptable that it would condemn the whole argument. However, the implications of the model are asymmetrical. This is because children are generally thought to have significant rights, which ought to be respected. They have rights against being physically harmed and to a reasonable standard of living. Parents cannot impose suffering on their children even if it is a net-positive on lifetime wellbeing because this would violate these rights protections.
On the flipside, parents can permissibly withdraw these luxury goods, since children generally are not thought to have a right to luxury living.
Objection 2: Shared Time
One might argue that luxury parenting is permissible because it is necessary for parents to give themselves a high quality of life. Parents are generally thought to be under an obligation to spend quality time with their children because a healthy parental relationship is crucial for the child’s development. This is problematic since many opportunities for quality time are also opportunities for parents to spend money on themselves, such as restaurants, vacations, or entertainment. So, if we think parents should be permitted to spend money on themselves, this could make luxury parenting permissible. There are three responses to this objection.
Firstly, there are still many ways parents can spend on themselves without spending on their children. Parents can spend money on activities without their children or they can spend money on themselves while shielding their children from the same luxury expenditure, for instance by ordering a lobster for yourself and the pasta for your child.
Secondly, the magnitude of this sacrifice, being unable to spend on oneself, directly correlates with the level of wealth parents have. This makes the sacrifice a less significant problem because the wealth of parents reduces the required sacrifice of parenting significantly in other contexts. Wealthy parents can afford babysitters, summer camps, and meal boxes. This means that the sacrifice of giving up luxury is balanced out by the diminished sacrifice in other facets of parenting.
Thirdly, parents are routinely asked to make sacrifices for their children in determining how they spend their time. They can only watch child-friendly movies, avoid bars, and go to child-friendly holiday destinations. It’s unclear, for instance, how giving up luxury is materially different from forcing parents to go on vacation to Disneyland.
In sum, a parent’s interest in treating themselves is insufficient for making luxury parenting permissible.
Works Cited:
Bagenstos, Samuel R., and Margo Schlanger. ‘Hedonic Damages, Hedonic Adaptation, and Disability’. Vanderbilt Law Review 60, no. 3 (2007): 745–98.
Brighouse, Harry. ‘What Rights (If Any) Do Children Have’, 1 January 2002. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242682.003.0003.
Coleman, Joe. ‘Answering Susan: Liberalism, Civic Education, and the Status of Younger Persons’. In The Moral and Political Status of Children, edited by David Archard and Colin M. Macleod, 0. Oxford University Press, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242682.003.0009.
Russell, Simon J., Karen Hughes, and Mark A. Bellis. ‘Impact of Childhood Experience and Adult Well-Being on Eating Preferences and Behaviours’. BMJ Open 6, no. 1 (1 January 2016): e007770. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-007770.
[1] Bagenstos and Schlanger, ‘Hedonic Damages, Hedonic Adaptation, and Disability’.
[2] Bagenstos and Schlanger.
[3] Coleman, ‘Answering Susan: Liberalism, Civic Education, and the Status of Younger Persons’.
[4] Brighouse, ‘What Rights (If Any) Do Children Have’.
[5] Russell, Hughes, and Bellis, ‘Impact of Childhood Experience and Adult Well-Being on Eating Preferences and Behaviours’.
Spring gleanings and a partial spring cleaning
I have received several letters dealing with borrowings and cognates (that is, related forms). I hasten to thank our correspondents for their questions and those who did not ask me anything but stated that the blog helps them in teaching language, spelling, and (in particular) etymology. Friendly feedback is a rare commodity. Only irritation and abuse are common and cheap.
Much to my surprise, I know the word’s etymology. I am surprised because the great Dictionary of American Regional English does not seem to feature canoose, though the Internet reports its occurrence in several places. In any case, the derivation from German cannot be doubted, that is, the word was brought to America by German immigrants (possibly, but not certainly, from the north). The following German forms have been recorded: Knust, Knaust, and the diminutive Knäust-chen (chen is a suffix, as in Mädchen “girl, maiden” and Gretchen), with exactly the same meaning as canoose. Numerous German words beginning with kn– designate thick objects. Not improbably, the meaning of the noun Knaus developed from “fat; conceited” to “stingy.” In English, kn– does not occur initially, except when you go “c’noeing”; hence the intrusive vowel a between k and n. (Words like knock, knead, and the rest bear witness to the existence of kn– in the past. We still tolerate kn if a syllable boundary divides k and n, as in ack-nowledge or rock’n’roll. No one knowns for sure why kn– changed to hn, and then, predictably, to n. But this change does not affect the etymology of the American noun.)
The non-Germanic cognates of end have been known for a long time. Those are Sanskrit ántas “end, boundary; death,” Greek anti “opposite,” and others. The Hittite adjective hanza “front” (mentioned in the letter) is close. In my post, I ignored all of them (dictionaries list them with or without questions marks), because I tried to show that the words for “beginning” and “end” often have the same semantic nucleus. This circumstance makes their origin especially interesting. By contrast, a tie between begin and the root found in generate is out of the question. Why should the earliest Germanic speakers have isolated the stem of the Greek word, changed the vowel, and shifted the sense from “generate” to “start”? Also, as I have pointed out more than once, if a word with initial g had been borrowed very long ago, it would have undergone the First Consonant Shift and become ken. Finally, the gen– root does have a legitimate cognate in Germanic: such is English kin (Gothic kuni). It is also useful to remember that unlike children picking up pebbles on a beach, people do not borrow words in an unpredictable, haphazard manner. (Here is a good root, why not borrow it?) I am afraid that our correspondent and I have been talking at cross-purposes for a long time.
To repeat a piece of trivial information: for almost every word of a given language one can probably find a similar-sounding word in any other language with a more or less matching sense. (Thus, an old correspondent of mine pointed to a similarity between wīf, the etymon of wife, and a Hebrew word. Well, things happen.) English bubo is mainly remembered because of the phrase bubonic plague. Greek boubōn means “groin; swelling in the groin.” The word made its way into Medieval Latin and from there into English. Our correspondent cited a rather similar Biblical Hebrew word (Exodus 9: 9, 10: in translation—I always use the Revised Version—a boil breaking forth). Is there any connection? Dictionaries derive the Greek word from a root “to swell.” As usual, one wonders whether such a root ever existed. Words like bubu, baba, and bobo are typical baby words (like baby itself), and the name for a swelling, something that hurts, could very well be a word used by adults while addressing and soothing infants.
Kibosh has recently attracted great attention. See the book by Gerald Cohen, Stephen Goranson, and Matthew Little On the Origin of Kibosh (2020). Our correspondent, who is aware of the connections between the speakers of Greek and Hebrew in the ancient world, cites kabash “subdue” in Exodus 1: 28 (in translation: …and subdue it…). He also refers to the use of the word in Arabic. Could this verb enter Yiddish and be borrowed by English? The Yiddish etymology of kibosh has been suggested many times and even accepted by some authorities. In the aforementioned book, a special chapter is devoted to the refutation of this etymology. The main problem, as I understand it, is that the supporters of the Yiddish origin of kibosh have to explain the derivation of the entire phrase, rather than of the enigmatic word. Somebody had to PUT A KIBOSH (apparently an object) on somebody or something. An isolated verb could hardly become a noun and end up as part of the phrase we know (kibosh never occurs outside the idiom in question). See other arguments along the same lines in the aforementioned book.
English troll, “to move back and forth.” The letter I received concerns itself with the hypothesis that the verb may go back to Vulgar Latin tragulare “to trace.” The origin of troll (the verb not the noun!) is doomed to remain guesswork, partly because the word and its lookalikes surfaced late and partly because, with its initial tr-, it may be sound-symbolic. But in Germanic, it resembles several other words outside English and thus seems to be more at home than in Romance. Besides, troll may be related to a few words beginning with s, such as English stroll and German Strolch “vagabond.” It seems that the old opinion (traditionally supported by both Germanic and Romance historical linguists) deriving the verb troll from Germanic still stands.
Ghee “clarified butter made from buffalo’s milk” is a seventeenth-century borrowing from Hindi (the Sanskrit root means “to sprinkle”). Grime came to English from Middle Low German or Middle Dutch. I think Earnest Weekley was the first to suggest that Old English grīma “mask” is related. If grime goes back to the root meaning “to rub; anoint,” then Christ is indeed related. The root of grisly (a Germanic word) means “horror,” and the word can therefore be allied to many other gr-words for fear; horror.
Finally, I am grateful for the comment that informed me that the word sib is still very much alive in Modern English. I believed that it rarely occurs in everyday speech but was, apparently, wrong.
I was also asked about the origin of rake and scratch. I’ll deal with both words next week.
Featured image by USFWS/Steve Hillebrand (CC BY 2.0)
FreshRSS 