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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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Going out on an etymological limb
I despise coy, punning titles, so familiar from newspapers, but constantly invent such myself. Be that as it may, today’s post is about the murky origin of the word limb. This word had the same form in Old English, except that it lacked b at the end: just lim. The parasitic b must have appeared in declension. For example, in the old plural, limu became limbu, or the excrescent b first emerged in the genitive and the dative: m, a labial sound, produced an illegitimate offspring, closely resembling its parent. Later, just because both m and b are labial, the second consonant was eliminated, as in dumb, comb, and so forth. There is, apparently, no way to please speakers. (Some such trickery must also have happened in the history of thumb; yet in thimble, we still pronounce b. Likewise, mb has stayed in assemble and crumble, but not in crumb.)
It is always hard to discover the etymology of a word that has no related forms in other languages, but non-matching cognates, even though they are better than nothing, also cause trouble. The Dutch cognate of lim(b) is lid, corresponding to German Glied, and we wonder what to do with the difference between the final consonants (m and d). G- in Glied poses no difficulties: it is a remnant of the prefix ge– (compare English like and German g-leich). This old prefix often occurred and still occurs in collective nouns. Thus, German Berg is “mountain,” while Ge-birge refers to a mountain range. Likewise, the German for “brother” is Bruder, and its plural is Brüder, but “brethren” or “brothers united for some enterprise” are (or at least were in the past) called Ge-brüder. Therefore, it looks probable that Glied initially referred to all the “members” (limbs) of a body.
But we may go farther and risk suggesting that even without the prefix the root -lim/-lid had a collective meaning and that the prefix only reinforced the reference that was there to begin with. The Old English word (which had no prefix!) was neuter, and from that period, we know the phrase dēofles limu “devil’s limbs,” referring to a multitude. Not inconceivably, lim originated as a collective neuter plural. Such words were many. The question remains open, because the fourth century Gothic cognate (liþus; þ has the value of th in English thin) was masculine (not neuter), while Old Icelandic had both lim-r “limb” (masculine) and lim “branch” (neuter). Perhaps the neuter form lim once designated all the limbs of a body and all the branches of a tree, later developed the sense “an individual limb (branch),” and became masculine (limr). In Old Germanic, short i alternated with its long counterpart ī (that is why English has ridden, with short i, and ride, with the vowel going back to ī). In Icelandic, we find lími (í designates a long vowel) “a heap of brushwood; broom.” Once again, the reference is to a collective noun (“many limbs”).
Those interested in the relations between collective plurals and neuter nouns in the singular may consult my old post for 12 October 2011 “Were ancient wives women?” A few comments on my hypothesis appeared much later, and I have only now read them. Also, something is said about Sib there, the goddess discussed last week. Today, I would rather refer to community and family relations, rather than just family relations, but other than that, I have not read any refutation of my etymology of wife, though a long article about it (and not only a post in this blog), multiple references and all, was published long ago.
Those musings must needs remain vague. Another problem is the difference between the final consonants: lim ends in –m, while the final root consonant in Gothic liþ is þ, corresponding to d in Dutch lid and in German Glied. The traditional approach to this difference is easy to guess. When such words occur, etymologists isolate a root (in this case, it must be li-) and call the final consonants extensions (unlike suffix, extension is a vague term, because extensions have no ascertainable functions: they are mere additions to reconstructed roots). Perhaps li-meant “to bend.” If so, el– in elbow may be related.
To explain why I am suspicious of extensions, though they have been sanctified by our best and most reliable etymological dictionaries, I’ll give an example from Modern English. Let us compare tip, tit, tid, tig, tick, and tiff. Compare the definitions: tip “pointed end; touch lightly; gratuity”; tit “teat; small horse”; tid (as in tidbit; the more common British form is or used to be titbit); tig “to touch lightly”; tick “an insect; to touch lightly”; tiff “a slight quarrel.” Those are late words, some of which of questionable or unknown origin. If they were recorded in our oldest texts, etymologists would unhesitatingly have isolated the root ti– “a small amount” and a series of extensions. Yet such a procedure will of course not occur to anyone looking at the list above. Why not? How is the root le– “to slip, vanish” different from my suggested root ti– “small”? Nothing prevents us from saying that in the phrases tit for tat or in tic-tac-toe we recognize the existence of some common “stems,” but were they instrumental in coining the words? This is the crucial question.
I assume that two or three thousand years ago, people formed words, just as they do it today. In the past, two names for “limb” competed: one began with lim– and the other with lith-. Supposedly, both the lith-word and the lim-word have cognates elsewhere. Latin lituus “a crooked staff borne by an augur” (incidentally, an obscure word, perhaps even a borrowing), Tocharian lit- “depart, fall down,” and Lithuanian liemuõ “depart, fall down” have been cited as possibly related to the Germanic forms. The connections are insecure and explain nothing about why just such sound groups were once upon a time chosen for denoting branches and other “limbs.” That is why the etymology of limb is “unknown.” Even forty thousand cognates cannot throw light on the origin of a word unless we are able to answer the main question: in this case, what is so “special” in the group lim- ~ lith– that it came to denote “limb.” No sound symbolism, no sound imitation.
Etymology is often a travel with no end in view. Here, we have lim-. It alternated with lith-. A few suspicious relatives showed up elsewhere. Perhaps in Germanic, the word initially designated all the branches of a tree and by extension, all the limbs of the body. It seems to have referred to something pliant, or bending. The impulse behind the coining remains undiscovered—just going out on a limb.
Editor’s note: the Oxford Etymologist will return on Wednesday 22 March.
Featured image by brewbooks via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The title of this post reminds one of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, but it means “Peace and Peace.” Though the story is long and in some points incomplete, this need not worry us, because few etymologies are complete (here, our object of investigation will be sib), and in reconstructing the history of an old and partly obscure word, one can go only so far.
In Modern English, sib is a dead or almost dead word, but sibling has survived, and many people will also remember that gossip traces back to Old English god-sibb. This compound once meant “sponsor at baptism” (god– of course refers to God), but rather soon it deteriorated into “familiar acquaintance” and “idle talker.” The phrase old gossip “an old talkative woman, tattler” occurred in nineteenth-century literature with some regularity. For many years, dictionaries remained noncommittal with regard to the origin of sib, even though the wordhas close cognates all over the Germanic-speaking world (German Sippe, and so forth).
At present, the verdict in reference works has changed, though we are still warned that the situation remains partly unclear. In any case, the formulation “origin unknown” has all but disappeared from the entry sib. Somewhat unexpectedly, it remained in the 1966 Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Unexpectedly, because the original OED listed the cognates and stopped, wisely without adding the fateful phrase. The Century Dictionary and The Universal English Dictionary by Henry Cecil Wyld, two sources to which I refer with great regularity (their treatment of etymology deserves our respect), followed the example of the OED, that is, offered the obvious cognates and refrained from further conclusions.
Let me begin with a story some of whose details are relatively little known outside the professional circles of mythologists. The old (that is, medieval) Scandinavians worshipped Thor, the thunder god. In the extant tales, Thor has nothing to do with thunder (he is a giant-killer and sometimes a foil to Odin), but his name does mean “thunder,” and his past of a sky god can be reconstructed with a high degree of certainty. (Now comes the denouement.) Among other things, he is married to a goddess named Sif. Almost nothing is said about this divinity, except that her name is an obvious cognate of sib. Consequently, she had something to do with contracts and unions.
The perfidious god Loki is said to have once cut her hair. How Loki dared do such a thing to Thor’s wife remains unclear. Later, he made amends, but cutting a woman’s hair might be a sign of her going to become married. Old English had a special word for the hair of a bride. In a late text (a song from the Poetic Edda), Loki brags of having slept with Sif. The truth of this scandalous assertion cannot be verified, but the author of the song may have drawn this conclusion from the hair-cutting episode.
Yet Sif appears, for whatever reason, to be Thor’s wife, and their union must have had some reason. We will soon see that this reason is hard to find. Long ago, it was observed that the great Vedic fire god Agni had the cognomen Sabhya, which was compared with Sif. The old attempts to connect the idea of lightning and fire with the concept of a family hearth seem strained, but nineteenth-century scholars tried to understand why Thor and Sif belonged together (according to myths, they did not only belong together but even had two sons) and believed that they had found a link. The main question for an etymologist is not Sif’s marital status but whether the ancient protoform of sib– (as in sibling) and Sif meant “family.”
And this is where we are in for a surprise. In the Old Germanic languages, sib and its cognates meant “peace,” rather than “family.” The evidence at our disposal points unambiguously in this direction. In the fourth-century Gothic Bible, translated from Greek, sibja meant “relationship” (and this is the closest we come to the idea of “family”). The negative adjective un-sibjos glossed the Greek words meaning “unlawful” and “impious,” not “devoid or bereft of family”. In Old High German, Latin pax “peace” was glossed with sibbo, though frid, the ancestor of today’s Frieden, existed too. In Gothic, the noun with this root meant “reconciliation.” (Elsewhere in Germanic, the words with the root frid– referred to things beautiful and cherished.)
“Relationship” is a vague concept, and the main question is whether the Germanic words with the root sib- ~ sif- referred to a family or a broad community. Though opinions on this matter differ, it appears that “community” is a more secure choice. Individual ties often took precedence over those imposed by the family. (Incidentally, Romeo’s friend Mercutio, did not belong to ether clan; hence: “Plague on both your houses.”) If the preceding argument can be sustained, Sif, we conclude, did not protect family relations, regardless of who her husband was (at best, she took care of community ties), and the clever idea of her being a goddess of family ties or the family hearth must be given up. The root of Sif’s name recurs in several reflexive pronouns meaning “one’s own,” such as English self and German sich, with cognates in probably all Indo-European languages, while Agni disappears from out story.
The name for a close-knit community, rather than a group of family members, seems to underlie the English noun sib(ling), so thatthe word sib need not be defined as “related by blood.” Curiously, this word has all but disappeared from Modern English. The same happened to German Sippe and its cognates in the Scandinavian languages. German Sippe was revived in the eighteenth century and later used with a vengeance by the Nazis. English has also lost the native word for “peace.” As early as the twelfth century, a borrowing from French replaced it: peace goes back to Latin pax. In the Germanic-speaking world, the strangest word for “peace” occurred in Gothic: it had the root of the verb glossed as “to happen, to come to pass,” as in German werden (with the implication of “good thing happening”?) and had nothing to do with any of its synonyms elsewhere. “Peace” and “community” are sometimes called the same (so in Russian: mir “peace” and “world”). The root of German Frieden “peace” means “free” or “dear.” Despite the fact that people have always fought and killed one another in endless wars (and the Germanic-speaking people were certainly not an exception to this rule), peace was looked upon as the desired norm. In Old Scandinavian, an independent word for “war” did not even exist: people called hostilities (in translation) “un-peace.”
I should repeat that though the treatment of the Germanic nouns with the root sib– is a hotly disputed area, I gravitate toward understanding it as “community,” rather than “family,” and communities are formed for protecting peace, that is, for defending themselves from aggressors and suppressing internecine strife.
Featured image by Nomu420 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A shaky beginning of the end and the state of the art
The previous two posts were devoted to the verbs begin and start. For consistency’s sake, it is now necessary to say something about the noun and the verb end. Two weeks ago, you saw a picture of Sophus Bugge, a great Norwegian literary historian and linguist. Etymology was not his main area, but he made many astute remarks about word origins. Some of them have been accepted with reservations, others rejected. As mentioned two weeks (a fortnight) ago, Bugge compared the root of begin with the Slavic root chin-,from kin-. Since his days, a spate of articles dealing with begin has been published, and as far as I can judge, the common opinion of Germanic researchers is that Bugge’s idea is wrong (in most sources, it is not even mentioned as worthy of consideration). Slavic chin– means “end,” not “begin,” and this is what makes the situation intriguing. While discussing begin, I mentioned the fact that in the linguistic intuition of many speakers, “beginning” and “end” are often hard to differentiate, because both refer to such concepts as “edge, margin, border.” The post even featured a ball of thread, with one “end” of the thread showing.
Curiously, the Slavic verb for “begin” (like Russian (na)chat’) practically never appears without a prefix, and likewise, the Germanic verb be-gin (Gothic had du–ginnan) is invariably tied to a prefix. We have no way of knowing why the bare root was avoided. Did the prefix denote direction? Or did it make the verb perfective, as up does in English finish up? (Think of the difference between eat and eat up, finish and finish up.) The Germanic verb for “begin” looks like a mirror image of the Slavic verb for “finish.” The phonetic match is also unobjectionable.
For many decades, a group of highly qualified specialists has been working in Moscow on a comparative etymological dictionary of the Slavic languages. The multivolume project has reached perz– (Vol. 41; the volumes are rather slim), so that by the middle of the century, unless the world collapses, the task will perhaps have been accomplished. The entry on the root for “finish” that interests us is short. As elsewhere, the root is compared in it with –cēns in Latin re–cēns “recent” (!), with Greek kainás “new” (!), and with Germanic –ginnan “to begin,” as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. That is why I mentioned the state of the art in the title of the post. Someone who will consult this excellent Slavic dictionary and then open an equally excellent modern Gothic (German, English, Dutch, Scandinavian) etymological dictionary will come away with incompatible answers. Beware of dogmatic verdicts!
Here are some of the senses of the Slavic words with the root –chen: “finish; thread; aim, target; edge; village street, beginning” (Vol. 11, pp. 5-6). Unfortunately, none of them can throw light on the mysterious origin of the Germanic verb end. Therefore, in a way, ours has been a disappointing journey. Apparently, once upon a time, the sound complex ken ~ gin (in and outside Germanic) meant “fringe, limit, border” and could refer to either end of an object. But why just this complex? We ask this question and realize that unless etymologists deal with sound imitation or sound symbolism, they cannot answer it. Something in the syllable ken must have been symbolic (this is true even if this complex was borrowed), but we cannot guess what.
English end is surrounded by a group of well-attested cognates: Gothic andeis, Dutch einde, German Ende, and so forth. Latin ante “before” (not “after”!) is also related. Among others, the most ancient Indo–European word that interests us must have meant “front” or “in front of,” because the same root regularly appears in the conjunction and (not a surprise!) as well as in Indo-European words for “forehead.” Such is Old Icelandic enni and Old Irish ēhtan (ē designates a long vowel), alongside Old Irish ēt “end, point.” Latin antiae “forelock” (remember the idiom take time by the forelock?), the much better-known ante “before” (up your ante, ladies and gentlemen!), and anterior belong here too. It would be more natural to expect that the story began with the word for “forehead” (a tangible object) and that only later, the concept of “fore-head” acquired the abstract sense known to us from the preposition. (Incidentally, in Slavic, some cognates of the word for “forehead” mean “the back of the head, occiput”!). But this is all like guesswork on coffee dregs or taking omens by the flight of birds. The ultimate origin of the word end, that is, the impulse behind its coining, remains unknown.
It may be of some interest to look at the familiar root hidden in a prefix. The noun answer, from Old English and–swaru, contains the prefix and– meaning “against” and the root of “swear,” from swar-. The verb denoted a solemn affirmation in response to a charge. Even the innocent-looking English along in go along, come along derives from Old English and-lang and corresponds to German entlang. The prefix in them means “opposite.” See what is said above about the history of the conjunction and. All this is interesting and instructive, but the sad truth remains: we failed to reconstruct the primordial impulse behind the coining of the words begin and end. In my end is my beginning.
By way of compensation, I may add a few lines on the story of the English word forehead. Like Old Icelandic enni, forehead is also an old word, and its inner form is the same. As time went on, the pronunciation of forehead changed. Do you remember: “There was a little girl, / Who had a little curl/ Right in the middle of her forehead. // When she was good, / She was very, very good. / But when she was bad, / She was horrid.” This poem is often called a nursery rhyme, perhaps suggesting anonymity, but it has become such: its author was Henry W. Longfellow, now cruelly and undeservedly neglected (practically forgotten, like almost everybody else). The rest of the poem is equally good. In the second element of a compound, h was lost in several other words, the best-known of which is shepherd. The true late pronunciation of shepherd can be seen in the family name Shepard. The now common pronunciation fore-head, like the variant often (with t in the middle) is a tribute to those words’ spelling, a pseudo-cultured “accurate” pronunciation. I hope no one yet says list-en or whist-le.
The End
Featured image by Chaitanya Tvs, Unsplash (public domain)
A new beginning: the verb “start”
Last week (8 February 2023), I discussed the murky etymology of the verb begin. As pointed out there, begin is a rather abstract concept. There must have been some concrete idea, inspired by people’s everyday activities, that underlay begin in the remote past. To make this suggestion more convincing, we may examine the history of the verb start, because in trying to discover the origin of a problematic word, it is always useful to look at the history of its synonyms. What ifat least one of them throws a dim light on begin? Alas and alack, in our case, this hope wanes only too soon. For instance, initiate (from French, from Latin) goes back to in (a preposition) and īre “to walk”; commence has the same root. And start is even more obscure than begin. It has an interesting history, but the paths of the two verbs never cross. Therefore, we will have to examine start for its own sake, with only sometimes throwing a side-glance at begin.
Riddles appear at once. We know the verb startle. The suffix –le is said to be frequentative, that is, to refer to a repeated action. A similar explanation will satisfy us in dealing with twinkle, giggle, and fiddle–faddle (among many others). Surely, startle does not mean “to start many times.” However, the Old English for start meant “to jump, leap.” “To jump more than once” (in fear, when frightened?) makes good sense. This then is at least one way the concept “begin” can develop (from jumping, from initiating movement).
While looking for cognates of start, we notice Dutch storten and German stürzen “to fall precipitously; rush, etc.” Such senses also accord reasonably well with “begin,” but nothing in the root –gin suggests the idea of a rapid movement. The group gin is not sound-imitative, and no one will sense the smallest trace of sound symbolism in it. The complex st-r is another matter: it “produces vibrations” and makes one think of vigorous efforts. Here is a short list of native and borrowed str-words in English (without an intervening vowel): straight, strain, strangle, strap, stream, strict, stride, strident, strife, strike, strip, strive, stroke, strong, and strut.
Symbolism in the emergence of start and its family was noticed long ago. In 1908, Heinrich Schröder, an astute and bold historical linguist, wrote an article about Germanic words having the roots stel– (which won’t interest us) and ster-. The article appeared in a leading German periodical. Schröder cited dozens of such words and argued that they were sound-symbolic and sometimes sound-imitative. Consequently, he made the same point I made above, but I jumbled together native and borrowed words, to emphasize the panhuman role of the group in question. In his view, the combinations str– suggested the idea of strength, precipitation, and the like. Forty years later, J. H. van Lessen, another astute scholar, this time a Dutch one, searched dictionaries for similar words and came to the same conclusions. Apparently, Van Lessen missed Schröder’s work. This is not said to belittle my distant predecessor’s achievement. Researchers have a hard time finding the relevant literature on word origins Outside Greek/Latin, Finnish, and now English, etymological bibliographies do not exist, and some of those that exist are woefully outdated.
What then is the closest kin of start? First and foremost, we notice Dutch storten and German stürzen “to rush, plunge; fall.” All the rest is less clear. These are the Modern English words Schröder mentioned in his paper: stark, start “tail” (outside dialects, extant only in the name of the bird name redstart) and stork. The meaning of some of them goes back to the idea of immobility (a precipitous movement results in a fall!). He also listed stroke, strut, strumpet (!), and starve. The problem is that in dealing with sound symbolism, one seldom knows where to stop. However, only one word in the list given above merits our attention, namely, redstart or, rather, its second component, start “tail.” Here, you can see this bird in a picture. Its tail is nothing out of the ordinary, but straight it certainly is.
Skeat wrote at start “to move suddenly” that some even (!) connect it with Old Engl. steort “tail.” This even was not said in disapproval: he simply could not decide whether the connection is valid. The Century Dictionary, a major American contribution to lexicography in the early nineteen-hundreds, stated: “The explanation given by Skeat that the verb [start] meant originally ‘turn tail’ or ’show the tail’, hence turn over suddenly… is untenable.”
This is a strong statement, considering the dependence of that dictionary on Skeat. Charles P. G. Scott was an excellent etymologist, and such a curt verdict (“untenable”) without any arguments was not typical of him. Also, start “tail” and start “turn” can be allied in more ways than one. Henry Cecil Wyld, an outstanding philologist, to whose dictionary I refer with great regularity, noted cautiously that perhaps (!) start and the Old English word for “tail” share the same root. Likewise, Elmar Seebold, the modern editor of Kluge’s German etymological dictionary, wrote at stürzen that the meaning “fall” may have developed from Sterz “tail,” but that this is not very probable (!). One should be cautious when it comes to etymology: the land underfoot is in most cases boggy.
Thus, the ultimate origin of start is not quite clear, but perhaps it meant something like “to fall or rise precipitously, jerk,” hence “to set in motion” and “begin.” More definite is the etymology of stark–naked, which I am adding to my today’s story for good measure and for the sake of entertainment. English stark, like German stark, once meant “strong,” then “rigid, stiff; sheer, absolute,” and finally, “naked” in “stark-naked.” But stark-naked is a curious alteration of start-naked, as if “naked to the tail.” A stark-naked redstart might serve as an emblem created for this blog post. Despite all the uncertainty about the main question, our ramblings have not been quite fruitless. We can say with confidence that the impulses behind coining words for “begin” are various and hard to discover. Start is sound-symbolic and perhaps partly sound-imitative. Begin will continue languishing in its partial obscurity.
I have more than once expressed my doubts about the existence of some ancient roots to which it is customary to trace the words recorded in Old Germanic and Indo-European. As an example, I may cite the case of the putative root ster-. There were allegedly five such homonymous roots. From one of them, meaning “stiff,” we are told to have stark, stork, strut, start, startle, and starve. The other four yielded strew, star; steal, and stirk “a yearling heifer or bullock.” If, motivated by a sound-symbolic complex like str, people created the words mentioned in this post, one cannot help doubting the existence of an ancient unifying root, and my perennial metaphor of mushrooms on a stump (similar but rootless units) may look like a more viable metaphor of word creation in the remotest past and also in the present, especially when slang is at play.
To conclude: begin remains without a convincing etymology, while start, if we accept its symbolic past, seems to be less problematic. Some of their synonyms, including enter, are transparent metaphors.
Featured image by Andrew Thomas via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The murky beginning of the verb <em>begin</em>
This is an unfinished story of the word begin. A look at the numerous papers devoted to the etymology of begin and at what dictionaries say about this subject creates the impression that as time goes on, we know less and less about our verb. The first volume of The Oxford English Dictionary was published in 1884. Though James A. H. Murray, the OED’s editor, realized that begin is an opaque word, he risked writing a detailed entry and suggested a solution. Most of the later reference works stress the verb’s opaqueness. Such is perhaps the true path of all dependable scholarship: don’t say anything unless you are sure, don’t be sure of anything unless all the facts are known, and remember that all the facts will never be discovered. This is a safe but sad approach.
As far as begin is concerned,two circumstances immediately alert the historical linguist to the trouble ahead. First, we notice that though the verb sounds almost the same and means the same in most of the Germanic languages, it never occurs without a prefix, and the prefixes vary. For example, the Old English for “begin” was on-ginnan (the most common form) and ā-ginnan (ā designates “long a,” as in Modern Engl. spa). Beginnan occurred in Old English very rarely. The verb’s cognate in fourth-century Gothic was du-ginnan. In Old High German, biginnan and inginnan turned up. The second problem concerns two n’s in the root –ginn. Double consonants (they are called geminates) were extremely rare in the oldest form of Germanic. When they occurred, they were either expressive or the result of assimilation. (An example of assimilation: Latin illegalis from inlegalis “illegal.”) It seems that “in the beginning,” the root ginn– was gin- with some other consonant after it. What was that consonant? Another n? What was its function?
All attempts to understand the origin of begin turn around the mysterious meaning of –gin. About a dozen interpretations exist, and this multitude of opinions does not augur well for the sought-for answer. Let me “begin” at the end. According to a conjecture by the famous Norwegian philologist Sophus Bugge (1833-1907), begin has a good Slavic cognate. Allegedly, Russian po-chin “beginning” (stress on the second syllable; chin from kin; po– is a prefix) contains the root that provides the desired semantic fit. But non-Germanic (here, Slavic) k does not normally correspond to Germanic g. Bugge’s suggestion has been neither forgotten nor endorsed in modern scholarship, and at the end of this post, we will see that the idea behind it is quite clever, even though it hardly provides a solution to our etymology. One wonders: Is it possible that Germanic –gin developed from –hin? If it did, the matter will be perfect.
Slavic linguists are not in a hurry to endorse the –kin ~ -gin idea, but it occasionally appears in our reference books. (At one time, all Soviet citizens knew the word pochin, because Saturday, 1 May 1920, witnessed the first display of voluntary (?) enthusiasm: people decided to spend a free day doing community service: removing trash, and so on. Lenin participated in the activity. Pictures of him carrying a log were ubiquitous, and so was his phrase velikii pochin “a great initiative.” Later, pochin became a buzzword, and subbotniks [the Russian for Saturday is subbóta, that is, Sabbath] became obligatorily voluntary.)
To return to Germanic g from h. Latin prae-hen-d-ere “to seize” (compare English reprehensible) looks like a fairly good phonetic match, and the senses (“begin” versus “seize”) are not incompatible. A Sanskrit verb meaning “to drive on” perhaps belongs here too. A year ago, on 19 and 26 January 2022, I discussed the origin of the verbs hear and see and attempted to show how hard it is to reconstruct the earliest form and sense of such basic words. The same holds for begin.
According to the usual assumption, the sought-for initial sense of such words was absolutely tangible, concrete (“to seize,” “to touch,” “to follow,” and the like). But begin is a rather abstract concept. Only in Albanian, a verb meaning “to begin” and sounding like –gin– has been found. This precious find leads nowhere. Should we assume that both Albanian and Germanic borrowed their verb from some unknown, pre-Indo-European substrate language? Naturally, this idea occurred to some etymologists, but it is another version of the painfully familiar verdict “origin unknown.” What is that mysterious pre-Indo-European language? Where was it spoken? What did the word that interests us mean in it?
An old hypothesis, favored by JamesA. H. Murray, connects –gin– with the root of the verb that has become Modern English yawn (that is, to “open widely”). The root of that verb had two variants: one with a short vowel (gin) and one with a long one (gīn). The name of the ginnungagap of Scandinavian mythology, the void in which the world was created (thus, a vague analog of our black hole), reminds us of that verb. Murray wrote that the transition of sense from “open up” to “begin” is a common one and cited to open speech, to open fire, and to open up negotiations. Indeed, opening remarks are “beginning remarks.” In 1932, that is, half-a century after Murray, Henry Cecil Wyld, in his excellent The Universal Dictionary of the English Language, half-heartedly endorsed Murray’s reconstruction but followed Friedrich Kluge, the main authority on German etymology, and referred to Bugge’s Slavic cognate.
Elmar Seebold, the latest editor of Kluge’s dictionary, in the entry on German beginnen, cited German an–packen and an-fassen “to begin,” in which the root means “to seize.” Also, Latin in-cipere “to begin” (which left its trace in English incipient) is related to a verb of seizing (capio). Seebold compared beginnen with Latin pre-hend-ere “to seize, grasp” (English speakers recognize it from prehensile, and comprehend). This is an acceptable analogy. As a parallel, I may refer to Icelandic byrja “to begin,” which seems to have developed from the sense “to raise.” Seizing, raising, lifting an object from the ground looks like a feasible starting point in the development of the more abstract sense “to begin.”
A certain mystery surrounds the idea of beginning. In quite a few cases, “beginning” is indistinguishable from “end.” Indeed, if messengers are sent to the four ends of the town, those are ends only if one looks at them from the center, but, from the point of view of the person entering the town, the “ends” are the beginnings. I am returning to Bugge. The root gin– bears a strong similarity to the root kon– in Russian kon-ets, related to the aforementioned po-chin, but this fact sheds no light on the origin of the root.
Slavic kon– is phonetically incompatible with Germanic –gin, unless there was some migratory word that traveled from language to language and meant something like “an outer point.” Such fantasies are not productive, but one thing is clear. The word that has come down to us as begin must have referred to some movement. Hence the multitude of prefixes: the movement could be toward or around, or away from an object. “Open” versus “close”? “Seize” versus “let go”? The words related to Icelandic byrja display an amazing multitude of meanings. Begin is much less colorful. It does not seem to go back to Indo-European, but the impulse behind its creation may have been the same as witnessed in the history of byrja.
Featured image via Hippo PX (CC0 – public domain)
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