How to use this Page

Samuel Johnson, The Idler 88, "Idleness", 18 November 1758:

But Idleness predominates in many lives where it is not suspected; for being a vice which terminates in itself, it may be enjoyed without injury to others; and is therefore not watched like Fraud, which endangers property, or like Pride, which naturally seeks its gratifications in another's inferiority. Idleness is a silent and peaceful quality, that neither raises envy by ostentation, nor hatred by opposition; and therefore no body is busy to censure or detect it.

Dr. Dornhaus is breaking new ground in her studies of whether the efficiency of ant society, based on a division of labor among ant specialists, is important to their success. To do that, she said, “I briefly anesthetized 1,200 ants, one by one, and painted them using a single wire-size brush, with model airplane paint — Rally Green, Racing Red, Daytona Yellow.”

After recording their behavior with two video cameras aiming down on an insect-size stage, she analyzed 300 hours of videotape of the ants in action. She discovered behavior more worthy of Aesop’s grasshopper than the proverbial industrious ants.

“The specialists aren’t necessarily good at their jobs,” she said. “And the other ants don’t seem to recognize their lack of ability.”

Dr. Dornhaus found that fast ants took one to five minutes to perform a task — collecting a piece of food, fetching a sand-grain stone to build a wall, transporting a brood item — while slow ants took more than an hour, and sometimes two. And she discovered that about 50 percent of the other ants do not do any work at all. In fact, small colonies may sometimes rely on a single hyperactive overachiever.

(via Jenny Davidson)

By Anatoly Liberman

Long ago I wrote a column with the title “Tit for Tat.” Engl. tip for tap also existed at one time. Words like tip, tap, top, tick, tack, tock, tit, tat, tot, as well as those with voiced endings like tid- (compare tidbit), tad, and tod (“bush; fox”), are ideal candidates for sound imitative coinages. One of the Swedish calls to hens is tup-tup-tuppa (tup “rooster”). The Russian for “knock-knock” is took-took-took, whereas top-top means “thump-thump.” The symbolic value of such words is equally obvious. Tip and tit designate small objects, while the things called tap and tat must be big. All this is perfectly clear. But an etymologist is expected to provide more than a bird’s eye of the origin of every word, and this is where the Devil, whose favorite abode is the details, shows his ugly head, horns and all. For example, tup is “rooster” in Swedish but “uncastrated ram” in English (whence the verb tup “to copulate,” memorable from Othello). Are we dealing with an ancient, undifferentiated name for a male animal that acquired one meaning in Swedish and another in English or with a sound complex applied to the rooster and the ram by chance? Was the idea of copulation foremost in the minds of those animal breeders who dealt with mammals and fowl (after all, tup is as expressive and energetic as our beloved F-word, and rooster is merely a polite substitute for cock). These and many similar questions are hard to answer, mainly because the list of the nouns and verbs to be explored has vague contours. Tit ~ tat ~ tot remind us of tut-tut, which in turn resembles dud. The so-called nasalized variants also suggest themselves: dimp(le), dump, thump, tumble, and a host of others. They multiply like maggots, have partly overlapping meanings, pretend to be related, but refuse to divulge their pedigree.

Another aggravating factor is the rampant homonymy among such words. First comes tip “a pointed end” (alongside the verb to tip, as in Chaucer’s tipped with horn). It is supposed to have reached England from Scandinavia, for its ancestor did not turn up in Old English. The Old Icelandic form was typpi, evidently from tuppi “top.” It is nice to know that when you look at tip long enough, you discover top. Northern (or Low) German also had tip, but this form, like its English equivalent, was recorded late, so that we cannot judge to what extent (if at all) it enjoyed popularity in England and interacted with the Scandinavian form. Thus, tip is top. Next we notice the verb tip, whose original meaning was “to pat,” and realize that tip is also tap (anyway, tap is simply pat read from right to left). This verb had a strange history. It surfaced in a most respectable 13th century book, then disappeared for 400 years, reemerged in thieves’ cant, and stayed in honest people’s usage with the sense “to strike lightly,” as in the following sentence from Swift (cited in The Century Dictionary; Swift detested the newfangled monosyllabic slang of his time): “A third rogue tips me by the elbow.” Perhaps it is the same verb as in tipped with horn (tap “touch with a point”?), but there is no knowing.

Tip also means “overturn” (a tip-cart in British English corresponds to the American dump truck), and it too may be of Scandinavian descent. But it emerged in texts so late (in the 17th century) that its “prehistory” is beyond reconstruction. In close proximity to tip we find tipple and tipsy. Tippler seems to have preceded tipple. If such is the order of these words’ appearance in language and not only in our texts, then the verb is a back formation from the noun (like beg from beggar and sculpt from sculptor). Presumably, a tipsy person is unsteady on his legs (in this delicate situation, we will not say his or her and avoid using their). The suffix -sy is not productive, even though it occurs in a few adjectives, such as topsy-turvy, and deceptively in clumsy, flimsy, and so forth. The circumstances in which tipsy sprang up remain unclear, especially because a tipsy person, unlike somebody who is three sheets in the wind, cannot serve as the embodiment of unsteadiness. Regional Norwegian has tippa “drink in small quantities” and tipla “drink slowly.” Verbs with the suffix -le (they tend to refer to recurring action) are called frequentative. In English, babble, cackle, and the like are usually of northern German or Dutch origin. In the Scandinavian languages, such formations exist too; however, some frequentative verbs are probably native English (thus, gobble seems to be from gob). Be that as it may be, tipla is a frequentative extension of tippa. A tippler sips liquor, that is, indulges in what is called tippa. (I wish we had the noun sippler.) The idea of smallness is unmistakable in tippa, but the connection with tipping and tapping is not. Tap “faucet” provides no help, for its basic meaning is “plug.”

The most interesting part of the story is the origin of tip “to give advice” and tip “gratuity.” In principle, it is not too difficult to derive tip “advise in a small way” from tip “touch,” and tip “gratuity” from “thing ‘tipped’ into a hand.” For Samuel Johnson, whose dictionary appeared in 1755, tip “give” was “a low word.” Colloquial and slangy phrases with the verb tip were frequent, and some of them are still around: “tip me your daddle or flipper” (hand), “tip me a hog” (shilling), “tip him a wink” (advice), “tip the traveler” (humbug a guest at an inn with travelers’ yarns), “tip the double” (decamp),“tip the grampus” (an old seafaring phrase: “duck a skulker for being asleep on his watch”), “tip a stave” (sing), “tip one’s rags a gallop” (run away; thieves’ slang), to mention a few. It is the predominantly “low” sphere in which this meaning of the verb tip flourished and a sudden explosion of its use in the second half of the 16th century that make the idea of a straight line from tip “touch, tap; turn over” to tip “give” suspect. One wonders whether we have to look for a missing link in northern German slang. German etymological dictionaries are cautious. In the entries on the cognates of tip, tap, and top, we read that the origin of those words is unknown or known insufficiently.

Given the verb tip “provide” (almost anything from money to information), tip “gratuity” constitutes no problem. More often verbs are formed from nouns, but occasionally the process goes in the opposite direction. Two other etymologies of the noun sound improbable. One connects tip with stipend, that is, stip or stips, minus initial s. The other goes back to the following story (I quote from Leo Pap’s 1982 article): “One day at the Cheshire Cheese tavern in London’s Fleet Street—that famous hangout of Dr. Samuel Johnson, of Boswell, Goldsmith, Reynolds, and some other men of letters who had constituted themselves into a Literary Club—a waiter hung a small wooden money box onto the wall near the dining room entrance. On this box, which evidently was in imitation of the receptacles customarily displayed in private houses at Christmas and on visiting days during the year, for donations which the servant staff expected from guests or from the master’s own family—on the box the waiter painted the words TO INSURE PROMPTNESS. The idea, of course, was that entering guests who wanted to be assured of speedy service might do well to drop a tinkling little penny or halfpenny in the box, so as to shoot some joyful energy into the servitor’s tired legs. Similar collection boxes went up in other coffeehouses and hostelries in town; and soon the motto on the box could safely be reduced to the mere initials, T.I.P. Before long, the T.I.P box was commonly referred to as the tip box, whence tip.” Although Pap doubts that the story was “fabricated out of whole cloth,” he does not believe that this is how the word tip came into being. It is indeed a cock and bull story, good enough only to “tip a traveler.” In my experience, all etymologies that refer to common words as acronyms (F.U.C.K. and its ilk) are wrong. Apparently, tip as everybody understood in the days of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Reynolds, was “decoded” into T.I.P. and “glossed” as to insure promptness.

There is one more hitch in the etymology of tip. In several European languages, a gratuity of this sort goes under the name of drink money (German Trinkgeld, French pourboire, etc.), with the intimation that the servitor will drink it up. Engl. tip “a draught of liquor” has been recorded (and let us not forget tippler and tipsy). It is possible but not very probable that two factors contributed to the rise of tip “gratuity”: the money could have been “tipped” into the waiter’s hand, and he could have used it to drink the giver’s health. Ever since the word struck root in the language, waiters have been tapping their patrons’ pockets, and patrons have been tipping waiters. We have perfected the system: add 10%, add 15%, or eat free but give (tip) a “donation.”

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Last night saw the OED 80th Anniversary celebrations culminate in a public panel discussion on ‘The Oxford English Dictionary: Past, Present, and Future’ at the incredibly beautiful and historic Bodleian Library in Oxford.

On the panel was OED chief editor John Simpson, historian and author of The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary Simon Winchester, and Ammon Shea, who wrote Reading the OED and who of course needs no introduction to OUPblog readers.

Simon Winchester opened up proceedings with a history of dictionaries, telling us that 1604 saw the first modern dictionary as we understand them today. In that case, it was a slim book written by Robert Cawdrey called A table alphabeticall conteyning and teaching the true writing, and vnderstanding of hard vsuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons. Whereby they may the more easilie and better vnderstand many hard English wordes, vvhich they shall heare or read in scriptures, sermons, or elswhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselues. Snappy, huh?

He then went on to talk about arguably the most famous dictionary (other than the OED obviously!): that by Samuel Johnson. Johnson was known as a bit of a cantankerous fellow, and this sometimes filtered down into his definitions. For example, his famous definition of ‘oats’:

A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people.

I won’t take offence, promise. Then we heard about the famous OED editors of the late 19th and early 20th century: Herbert Coleridge, Frederick Furnivall (who had to leave the job after it was realised that he was more interested in sculling and well-endowed young ladies), and, of course, James Murray.

John Simpson, today’s OED editor, took us through what happens to an entry and the kinds of information that is needed for the Dictionary. He used the example of ‘lifeboat’ and took us through its history from its first appearance in the first edition of the OED , to moving from being hyphenated (life-boat) to a solid word in 1903, up to the latest evidence of its earliest usage, which will be in the updated entry to go online soon.

Then, to finish the evening, Ammon Shea told us all about reading the OED from A-Z in one year. To read more about the many wonderful words he discovered during that year, then do read his past posts for OUPblog. But I couldn’t agree with him more when he said that there is much emotional content within the Oxford English Dictionary: the poignancy of a word that means ‘to no longer own something, but to wish that you still did’, or a word that means ‘the sound of leaves rustling in the wind’. The OED is, as Ammon said, a “remarkable creature of literature”, which is why I am so happy to have been here for the 80th anniversary celebrations.

Here’s to another 80 years, and many, many more.

ShareThis

Sorry, folks. There's going to be a three hour delay. At least.

Aaaaargh! The world is supposed to keep pace. Our planes shouldn't be late; our reserved tables must be ready; our overnight packages have to arrive as promised. And don't get me started on traffic jams.

But in order to write, I have to purposely delay. Not delay writing---that's easy---you just start picking fuzzballs off the couch cushions and see how many will fit in an old root beer bottle. I mean delay judgment.

This thought didn't come to me while tidying up the couch. I got it from the pages of Eric Booth's book, The Everyday Work of Art. He says that all artists master the skill of holding an idea, an object, or a thought in their gaze of attention for as long as possible without forming a judgment about it. Booth uses some fancy words, "mastering the gestalt default," but what he means is that artists are aware of their own natural instinct to categorize and label new things instantly, and through practice, get better and better at resisting that instinct.

This is contrary to how we operate in the real world. In class, it's important that you come up with the correct answer before the teacher gives the "A" to someone else. While driving, it's crucial you label the guy in the red car an "idiot" before he kills you. And if you stand at a Starbucks counter too long, not forming a judgment about the high cheekbones of your barista, he will just add another shot of espresso to your order and tell you he's not allowed to talk to women over forty.

I think this delaying is precisely what I enjoy about freewriting. I can jump into the stream and float along without wondering where it's going. It's truly an odd feeling, if you're not used to it. At first, I felt that extended freewriting was like pushing a wall of water uphill. How could I keep filling the pages of my notebook with nonsense? Later, I would find a poem, scattered like bits of polished rock, on the river bed of that nonsense, and be glad.

I still find freewriting difficult when I'm using it to come up with new material for a book. I keep trying to dam up my thinking, force it to flow down the course I've set for it: Chapter Five. But it doesn't work that way. I have to float, not row.

How long can you look at an apple without calling it an apple? How long can you freewrite about bees without using the word "buzz"? How long can you hear musical notes without framing them as a song? Truly, we don't need to set aside time to make judgments about what we encounter each day; we do that naturally. But delaying? That takes real skill.