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By Anatoly Liberman

People constantly wonder why understand means what it does. The concept of understanding is highly abstract. It is much easier to say I see (implying that now everything is clear), and I grasp (suggesting that the object is now mine in the literal or figurative sense) than I comprehend the nature and significance of a phenomenon or message. The briefest survey of other languages shows that words for observing (seeing) and seizing (grasping) are often used to express the ideas of comprehension and acquiring knowledge. The idea of “understanding” may also come from “separation”: we sift a mass of things and by sifting discern what they are made of (discern, from Old French, ultimately from Latin dis-cernere, is “to separate”). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

This is a story of the naked but not necessarily the dead. Traveling through time, we notice the same grim custom: a defeated enemy or a prisoner of war may be killed or stripped of everything he wears before (and sometimes instead of) being murdered. Reports gloat over the details. Marauders search for good clothes and valuables on the battlefield and care little for the indignity with which they are treating corpses, but it was the ability to humiliate the survivors that gave the greatest joy to the winning party. The shame of being left naked clung to the victim forever, and it was worse than death. With amazing regularity the languages of the world show that the similarity between robber and robe is not fortuitous, that those words are indeed related. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

First I would like to respond to the comments on my discussion of spelling reform. I was aware of the continuing efforts by some groups to simplify English spelling, but I think their chances of success are slim, because there is no public awareness of the damage done by our erratic spelling system. We need respelling bins, similar to the now ubiquitous recycling bins. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

People always try to learn the origin of things, but the world and even most human institutions arose so long ago that our reconstruction can seldom be secure. Language is also old, and we know next to nothing about the circumstances in which it arose. The age of words differs greatly: some were coined millennia ago, others are recent. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Our civilization has reached a stage at which together we are extremely powerful and in our individual capacities nearly helpless. We (that is, we as a body) can solve the most complicated mathematical problems, but our children no longer know the multiplication table. Since they can use a calculator to find out how much six times seven is, why bother? Also, WE can fly from New York to Stockholm in a few hours, but, when asked where Sweden is, thousands of people answer with a sigh that they did not take geography in high school: it must be somewhere up there on the map. There is no need to know anything: given the necessary software, clever machines will do all the work and leave us playing videogames and making virtual love. The worst anti-utopias did not predict such a separation between communal omniscience and personal ignorance, such a complete rift between collective wisdom and individual stultification. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Everybody seems to resent buzzwords, and everybody uses them. It may therefore be of some interest to look at the origin of those universally reviled favorites. Language consists of ready-made blocks. When we want to express gratitude, we say thank you. The reaction is also predictable, even though the formula changes from decade to decade. At one time, people used to respond with if you please, don’t mention it, or not at all. All three yielded to you are welcome, and now I constantly hear no problem, which irritates me (of course, no problem).

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By Anatoly Liberman

Every now and then, some words arouse public curiosity and produce a torrent of correspondence: people write letters to the editors, argue with one another, and offer etymological conjectures. In the past, Notes and Queries on both sides of the Atlantic, The Athenaeum, and The Nation regularly served as an outlet for this type of exchange. It is hard to believe how much ink (yes, in the past writers used ink: look it up in some good dictionary) was wasted on the history of theodolite “an instrument for measuring angles; level, bubble,” a word that hardly anyone remembers today (my spell-check suggested that I replace it with theologize, but I refused). A similar case is blizzard. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

I received a few questions in connection with the runic alphabet. Not everybody realizes that the origin of various scripts is as hard to trace as that of the most exotic words. According to the evidence at our disposal, people always borrow scripts; yet someone somewhere must have been the inventor! The Greeks owe their script to the Phoenicians, and the Romans got their inspiration from the Greeks. The runic futhark was hardly used before the beginning of the Common Era, though some scholars trace it to a remoter period. Be that as it may, no inscriptions antedating the end of the second century C.E. exist in Scandinavia. Therefore, the Roman alphabet, to say nothing of the Greek one, is older than the futhark. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Etymologist, working sub specie aeternitatis, that is, routing among withered but durable leaves and dead (immortal?) roots, has seasonal stirrings. Of course, every month there are gleanings, but how much can a tiller, an inhabitant of a northern state, glean from barren furrows in December? Yet one more post and the year will be over—something to celebrate. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Strange things have been observed in the history of the verb shine, or rather in the history of its preterit (past). To begin with, a reminder. Verbs that change their vowels in the formation of the preterit and past participle are called strong (for instance, sing—sang—sung, shake—shook—shaken, smite—smote—smitten), in contradistinction to verbs that achieve the same results with the help of -t or -d (for instance, shock—shocked—shocked, cry—cried—cried). For practical purposes this division is almost useless, for weak verbs can also change their vowels, as in sleep—slept, and mixed types exist (the past of strew is strewed, but the past participle is usually strewn). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Countless unnatural things happen in the history of language. Coincidences, as bizarre as in Dickens’s novels, encounter us at every step. For example, it turns out that Modern Engl. un- is a symbiosis of two prefixes. One has broad Indo-European connections and is the same in English and Latin. It occurs in adjectives, adverbs, and participles, such as unkind, unkindly, undaunted, and can be appended with equal frequency to Germanic words (unwise, unfair, unfit, unheard-of) and to words of Romance origin (unable, unpromising, undaunted, unimaginable). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

A correspondent found the sentence (I am quoting only part of it) …stole a march on the old folks and made a flying trip to the home of… in a newspaper published in north Texas in 1913 and wonders what the phrase given above in boldface means. She notes that it occurs with some regularity in the clippings at her disposal. This idiom is well-known, and I have more than once seen it in older British and American books, so I was not surprised to find it in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). To steal (gain, get) a march on means “get ahead of to the extent of a march; gain a march by stealth,” hence figuratively “outsmart, outwit, bypass; avoid.” The earliest citation in the OED is dated to 1707. As far as I can judge, only the variant with steal has continued into the present, mainly or even only in its figurative meaning. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The etymology of the adjective pretty has been investigated reasonably well. Many questions still remain unanswered, but it is the development of the word’s senses rather than its origin that amazes students of language. The root of pretty, which must have sounded approximately like prat, meant “trick.” Judging by the cognates of pretty in Dutch, Low (Northern) German and Old Icelandic, the adjectives derived from this root first meant “sly, crafty, roguish, sportive.” Before us is evidently a slang word that has been current in Northwestern Europe since long ago, a circumstance that can perhaps account for some of the vagaries of its history. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

It is of course snuck that will interest us, but the origin of this illegitimate form should not be handled in isolation. We can begin with sneak, a verb whose recorded history is relatively short. The earliest examples with it turned up about four hundred years ago. Old English had snican “creep,” with short i, and this form could have yielded sneak, just as Middle English crike, from Scandinavian, yielded creek. But for snican to become sneak, it had to pass through the stage sneek (such is the phonetic regularity), which has not been attested. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Confusing as English spelling may be, it has one well-publicized, even if questionable, merit: it tells us something about the history of the language. For example, sea and see were indeed pronounced differently in the past. This fact is of no importance to a modern speaker of English but can be put to use in a course “Spelling as Archeology.” In other cases, modern spelling only puzzles and irritates. For example, most of my undergraduate students believe that the preterit of lead is lead (like read ~ read), though they never misspell bled and fled. We are heirs not only to the pronunciations of long ago but also to the absurdities of what may be called learned tradition. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Looking Back
As always, I am grateful for comments. So far, I have received the most responses to my post on the death of the adverb. One of our correspondents notes that students in creative writing tend to put adverbs at the beginning of the sentence, as in “Happily, she met her boyfriend at the mall.” Sorrowfully, I have also noticed this mannerism, and not only in students’ stories. The adverb, nearly wiped out by morphology in American English, is doing “just fine” in syntax. For instance, the authors of scholarly publications love the word undoubtedly; they use it when arguments are weak and doubt exists. Obviously, certainly, and definitely serve the same purpose. Actually has become the bane of our life. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Although we have long since become unisex in everything we do, most witches are still women. It is therefore a great comfort to know that the earliest recorded form of witch is Old Engl. wicca (masculine) “man practicing witchcraft”; it first occurred in the Laws of Alfric (890). The feminine wicce surfaced in the year 1000. This chronology does not mean that witches arose after wizards. Words, especially such words, may exist long before they find their way into a manuscript or onto a printed page, but, as far as Anglo-Saxon England is concerned, men have some precedence when it comes to pursuing magic, at least in terms of their names’ attestation. All of it is interesting and even intriguing, but, like so many other interesting things, quite irrelevant, because in Middle English, endings were leveled and the difference between wicca and wicce disappeared—antiquity or our time, nature always triumphs over nurture and unisex will have its way. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

“From the north so dear to southern climes” is an awkward prose rendition of a line occurring in a lyric titled “Clouds” by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov. In 1840 he was exiled to the Caucasus, where Russia tried to “pacify” the Chechens (!). Lermontov improvised “Clouds” at a small farewell party in St. Petersburg, and I have chosen it to introduce the discussion of the words north and south (check out the discussion of east and west here). The juxtaposition of the hands will become clear later. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Last week my theme was the history of the word quiz. Now the time has come to deal with gig. The main meanings of the noun gig are as follows: “something that whirls,” for example “top” (known since approximately the middle of the 15th century), “flighty girl” (attested as early as 1225); “odd-looking figure” (chiefly Eaton slang; the earliest citation is dated 1777), “joke, whim” (1590), “fun, merriment” (again 1777), “light two-wheeled one-horse carriage” (1791), “a kind of boat” (1790), and “live performance of popular music”(1926); hence “temporary job”. Today only the last-named meaning is alive in everyday speech. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The following dialogue takes place in the play The Heir at Law by George Colman the younger:

Dick. But what a confounded Gig you look like.
Pangloss. A Gig! umph! That’s an Eton phrase; the Westminsters call it Quiz.—Act IV, Scene 2.

The play was first performed at the Haymarket in 1797. The OED quotes Pangloss’s reply at gig, but it is the exchange that will interest us. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Responses to this blog come from our correspondents (in the form of questions and comments) and from other blogs. On the whole, my suggestions have been treated gently, and disagreements have been rare. Like most people, I prefer praise to censure. Etymology is an absorbing area of study, but it is no less interesting to learn something about the climate in which etymologists of the past worked. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

All over the world when people decide to name cardinal points, they look at the sky. Terms used for orientation should therefore be immediately transparent: we expect them to mean “toward sunrise,” “toward sunset,” “related to a certain constellation,” “in the direction of a certain wind,” and so forth. And indeed, Latin oriens “east” is akin to oriri “to rise,” while occidens “west” is a cognate of occidere “to fall down.” Speakers of Latin did not need an etymologist to interpret those words (such specialists existed even then, for example, Varro, the most famous of them all): sunrise and sunset tell their own story. But of the English words—east, west, north, and south—only the first reveals its past to the initiated. The other three are so opaque that after centuries of guessing their origin remains a matter of dispute. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The Devil is uppermost in people’s thoughts, and his names are many. One of them is Old Nick. Its origin is obscure. The word nicker “water sprite,” explained as an old participle “(a) washed one,” is unrelated to it. Then there is nickel. The term was easy to coin, but copper could not be obtained from the nickel ore, and Axel F. von Cronstedt, a Swedish mineralogist despite von before Cronstedt, called the copper-colored metal copper nickel (German Kupfernickel), later shortened to nickel, after the name of a perfidious mountain demon (wolfram and especially cobalt have a similar history). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Language changes through variation. Some people say sneaked, others say snuck. The two forms may coexist for a long time, almost forever, or one of them may be considered snobbish, and, once the snobs die out, the form will go to rest with them. Or the snobs may feel embarrassed of being in the minority and adopt the popular form. The life of language is a constant tug of war: some speakers emulate their superiors, others try to merge with the crowd. Regardless of the trend, change is effected through variation. What passed for a mistake yesterday is the norm today, but language does not always favor innovation; it often suppresses novelties and awards victory to conservative forms. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

For quite some time, I have been answering direct questions at the expense of comments, even though they, too, often contained enquiries. I want to offer my apologies to the correspondents who have had to wait so long and incorporate my answers to them into this month’s gleanings. (more…)

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