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It so happened that at the end of this past summer I was out of town and responded to the questions and comments that had accumulated in August and September in twoposts. We have the adjectives biennial and biannual but no such Latinized luxury for the word month. Although I realized that in this case bimonthly would be misleading, I hoped that the context would disambiguate it. Let me assure our correspondents that my gleanings will keep appearing every last Wednesday until some unpredictable circumstance (for example, a sudden lack of queries: I can’t think of anything else) do us part. My bimonthly meant “gleanings for two months.”
Etymologies
Gaul, Walloon, Wallachian
Wallachian, Walloon, and Welsh share the same Germanic root, which means “foreign” (one can also see it in walnut, as well as in the family names Wallace, Welsh, and Walshe). The Anglo-Saxons called the Celts and the Romans foreigners. The element -wall in Cornwall is related to them. Gaulish is a Romanized form of the same adjective (compare ward and guard, Wilhelm and Guillaume). But one should not argue from etymological affinity to tribal or national identity. Calling some people foreigners does not say anything about their origin.
Hull gull
Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) has an entry for the word, and descriptions of the game abound, but the origin of the name remains undiscovered. My browsing has not yielded anything worth reporting. What little has been said on the subject in books on games can be found on the Internet in five minutes. The idea that hull goes back to the Old Engl. verb for “hide” (hellan ~ helian, in Modern English, rare and dialectal hele; compare German hehlen, hüllen, and their cognate -ceal in Engl. conceal, from Latin, via French) is, in my opinion, fanciful. Hull gull is known among American Indians, but in the absence of its native name nothing follows from this fact. The hully gully dance seems to have been called after the game. Some people have looked for its source in Africa, yet no facts bear out its African origin. In my experience, the nucleus of such reduplications (hugger-mugger and the like) is more often the second element; the first is then added to rhyme with it. This is especially true of the words whose first element begins with an h. Should some brave word sleuth decide to search for the etymology of hull gull, it may pay off to begin with gull. Perhaps some of our correspondents have ideas on this subject. If so, kindly don’t hide them.
A hazel-grouse
Color words
Brown
My gratitude is due those who informed me about the origin of brown shirts in Germany. I knew most of what was said in the comments but can now state with certainty that brown had no symbolic value in the choice of that uniform. As regards the name of the hazel grouse, it indeed has a root with wide Indo-European connections. The remark on braun und blau (see the quotation from DeutschesWörterbuch adduced by Roland Schumann) should be considered, but in such binomials a descending scale is also possible: compare Engl. black and blue.
Livid
I am sure Michael Lamb is right. It did not occur to me to consult dictionaries. The OED explains that livid withanger means “pale with anger.” However, I still wonder whether anger, rather than fear, causes pallor. In those few cases in which I heard the phrase, the speakers always meant “suffused with red.” Apparently, I err in (good) company.
One as a pronoun
One is responsible for one’s mistakes. Is this a silly sentence? In at least one opinion, it is as silly as Johnis responsible for John’s mistakes. I am afraid I disagree. One, our correspondent points out, is not only an indefinite pronoun but also a noun, a circumstance ignored by grammarians. However, grammarians have always been aware of the nature of one. In the United States, grammar is seldom taught today (where some watered down elements of it remain, grammar has been replaced by the less offensive term structure; I cannot vouch for the rest of the English-speaking world), but those of us who did study this allegedly-devoid-of-fun subject at school have heard about the parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, and the rest). The division of the vocabulary into parts of speech is a minor catastrophe. For instance, adverbs often resemble a trashcan (what is not a noun or an adjective finds refuge there, and, to add to the confusion, nouns and adjectives in oblique cases tend to be “adverbialized”). Numerals fare even worse: we provide a list of them (one, two, three, etc.) and say: “This is your part of speech.” Is twice a numeral or an adverb? Twelve is a numeral, while dozen is a noun. Is threescore a numeral or a noun? Sixty is certainly a numeral. In the Old Germanic languages, the words for one, two, three, and four could be declined (as they still are in Icelandic) and belonged to the same classes as nouns; yet we call them numerals. All this is common knowledge. One is the worst offender, because, despite its meaning, in Old Germanic it had a plural form and sometimes meant “only.” Modern Engl. ones shows how natural that plural sounds, while once is a petrified genitive.
My next point concerns usage. John is responsible for John’s mistakes is unnecessary and even silly, because his, instead of John’s, would refer to the subject quite clearly. But one has no correlate, hence the trouble. One is responsible for his (her) mistakes is embarrassing, because one is neither a man nor a woman. Their is safe and politically correct, but one is singular, while their is plural. To be sure, those who say when a studentcomes, I never make themwait will find the correlation one/their unobjectionable, and let them enjoy their usage (“every man in his humor”). In addition to those variants, we can say either one is responsible for one’s mistakes (logical but perhaps inelegant) or rephrase the sentence (all of us areresponsible for our mistakes). “John” is doing better: he pays the price for his folly, just as “Mary” rues her missteps. While speaking English, one occasionally hits the wall, and there is no help for it.
Come one, come all
I wrote my response before Michael Lamb’s comment appeared. There was no need for me to change anything in my text, and “at this point of time,” as so deplorably many people say and write, I invite our correspondents to read our “polemic” and express their opinion: come one, come all.
Disagreements over strategy, or a maid of all work: over
Some prepositions succeed in ousting all their competitors. Henry W. Fowler, the author of the immortal book ModernEnglish Usage, wrote with contempt about those who say as to, because they are too lazy to think of for, about, and their synonyms. I have a dim recollection that in one of my old posts I discussed over as an example of an evil invasive species. Recently, Walter Turner has sent me a list of such overdone phrases from the most respectable British and American newspapers. Some of them are offered below for the wise to be aware. “Egypt jails nine men over sex assaults”; “Moscow faces bank curbs over new public-sector projects” (= because of?in connection with?); “Journalists face jail over spy leaks”; “Cameron ambushes Labour over tax plans”; “Cameron criticized over plans to knight Tory reshuffle victims”; “X warns Y over boozy night out,” and many more. This virus, like all viruses, knows no borders. Take note and think it over.
I have something to say about the Indo-European names of fruits, the phrase in brown study, the origin of Viking, and about the ever-green subject of English spelling but will do so next Wednesday.
Image credits: (1) Hazel grouse. Naumann, Naturgeschichte der Vögel Mitteleuropas, Band VI, Tafel 8 – Gera, 1897 digitale Bearbeitung : Peter v. Sengbusch. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Marx Super Circus Tent Side 2 Inside Detail 1. Photo by Ed Berg. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Baron, mark, and concise.
I am always glad to hear from our readers. This time I noted with pleasure that both comments on baron (see them postedwhere they belong) were not new to me. I followed all the references in Franz Settegast’s later article (they are not yet to be found in such abundance in my bibliography of English etymology) and those in later sources and dictionaries, and, quite naturally, the quotation from Isidore and the formula in which baron means “husband” figure prominently in every serious work on the subject. No one objected to the hypothesis I attempted to revive. Regrettably, Romance etymologists hardly ever read this blog. In any case, I have not heard their opinion about bigot, beggar, bugger, and now baron. On the other hand, when I say something suspicious or wrong, such statements arouse immediate protest, so perhaps my voice is not lost in the wilderness.
Thus, in one of the letters sent to Oxford University Press I was told that my criticism of the phrase short and concise “is not well taken,” because legal English does make use of this tautological binomial, along with many more like it, in which two synonyms—one English and one French—coexist and reinforce each other. What our correspondent said is, no doubt, correct, and I am aware of numerous Middle English legal compounds of the love-amour type. However, I am afraid that some people who have as little knowledge of legalese as I do misuse concise and have a notion that this adjective is a synonym of precise. Perhaps someone can give us more information on this point. I also want to thank our correspondent who took issue with my statement on the pronunciation of shire: my rule was too rigid.
As for mark, our old correspondent Nikita (he never gives his last name) is certainly right. Ukraine (that is, Ukraina) means “borderland.” In the past, the word was not a place name, and other borderlands were also called this. Equally relevant are the examples Mr. Cowan cited. I don’t know whether Tolkien punned on myrk-, but Old Icelandic myrk- does mean murk ~ murky, as in Myrk-við “Dark Forest” (so a kind of Schwarzwald) and Myrk-á “Dark River.”
Spelling and general intercourse.
I suspect that Mr. Bett (see his comments on the previous gleanings) is an advocate of an all-or-nothing reform. I’d be happy to see English spelling revolutionized, and my suggestion (step by step) is based on expedience (politics) rather than any scholarly considerations. When people speak of phonetic spelling, they usually mean phonemic spelling, so this is not an issue. But I would like to remind everyone that the English Spelling Society was formed in 1908. And what progress has it made in 116 years? Compare the two texts given below.
To begin with, I’ll quote a few passages from Professor Gilbert Murray’s article published in TheSpectator 157, 1936, pp. 983-984. At that time, he was the President of the Simplified Spelling Society.
“There are two plain reasons for the reform of English spelling. In education the work of learning to read and write his own tongue is said to cost the English child [I apologize for Murray’s possessive pronoun] a year longer than, for example, the Italian child, and certainly tends to confuse his mind. For purposes of commerce and general intercourse, where the world badly needs a universal auxiliary language and English is already beginning in many parts of the world to serve this purpose, the enormous difficulty and irrationality of English spelling is holding the process back.…”
He continued:
“Now nearly all languages have a periodic ‘spring cleaning’ of their orthography. English had a tremendous ‘spring cleaning’ between the twelfth and the fourteenth century.… It is practically Dryden’s spelling that we now use, but few can doubt that the time for another ‘spring cleaning’ is fully arrived… It must not be supposed that the reformers want an exact phonetic alphabet…. What we need is merely a standard spelling for a standard language…. The ‘spring cleaning’ which my society asks for is, I think, quite certain to come; though the longer it is delayed the more revolutionary is will be. It may come, as Lord Bryce, when President of the British Academy, desired, by means of a Royal Commission or a special committee of the Academy. It may, on the other hand, come through the overpowering need of nations in the Far East, and perhaps in the North of Europe, to have an auxiliary language, easy to learn, widely spoken, commercially convenient, and with a great literature behind it, in a form intelligible to write and to speak.”
All this could be written today, even though with a few additions and corrections. English is no longer beginning to serve the purpose of an international language; it has played this role since World War II. We no longer believe that the desired “cleaning” is sure to come: we can only hope for the best.
Let us now listen to Mr. Stephen Linstead, the present Chair of the English Spelling Society, who said to The DailyTelegraph on 23 May 2014 the following: “The spelling of roughly 35 percent of the commonest English words is, to a degree, irregular or ambiguous; meaning that the learner has to memorise these words.” A need to memorize irregularity, he explains, “costs children precious learning time, and us—as a nation—money…. A study carried out in 2001 revealed that English speaking children can take over two years longer to learn basic words compared with children in other countries where the spelling system is more regular.”
We can see that our educational system is making great strides: what used to take one year now takes two. Mr. Linstead says other things worth hearing of which I’ll single out the proposal. It concerns the formation of an international English Spelling Congress “made up of English speakers from across the world who are open to the possibility of improving English spelling and who would like to contribute to the difficulty of mastering our spelling system.” As I understand it, the reformers plan to pay special attention to organizational matters, rather than arguing about the details of English spelling. This looks like a rational attitude. The public is not interested in the reform. Nor did it show any enthusiasm for it in 1936. There were two letters to the editor in response to Professor Gilbert’s article, but both came from the members of the Society, that is, from the “choir.” If the Congress materializes, it should include a lot of very influential people (what about Lord Bryce’s idea?). Otherwise, we will keep talking for another one hundred and six years without any results.
Busy as a bee.
The public, as I said above, does not care about the reform, but it is greedy, covets monetary prizes, and sends children to a torture known as spelling bee. The hive originated in 1925. Here is a case of a bright thirteen year old boy. He speaks English (and to some extent two other languages, one of them learned at home) and is an avid reader. He made it to the semifinals but misspelled ananke (a useful word that reminds even the gods that doom is unavoidable—just what a young boy should keep in mind). I don’t know what he did wrong. Probably he assumed that the word was Latin and spelled it with a c, but alas and alack, it is Greek. For eight weeks a coach (another young student) used to work with the boy three times a week. What a waste! The boy said: “I was really nervous, because you really don’t know what word you were going to get. I wanted to make it farther. [However,] I was really pleased with how I did and how I placed.” I am afraid he will grow up knowing several hundred words he will never see in books and using really three times in two lines. Remembering the spelling of ananke will be the only reward for his efforts.
A snake in the slough of despond. Image credit: A Cantil (Agkistrodon bilineatus) with a shed skin nearby at Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo. Photo by Jonathan Crowe. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via mcwetboy Flickr.
I think society (society at large, not the Spelling Society) should do what administrators, masters of a meaningless jargon, call sorting out priorities, stop abusing children, forget the fate of the gods, and concentrate on the misery of the mortals who try to make sense of bough, cough, dough, rough, through, and the horrors of the word slough.
As I said, when I first broached this subject, discussing the merits and demerits of the split infinitive is an unprofitable occupation: all the arguments have been repeated many times. But an ironic comment on my post made me return to splitting. The differences between me and a huge segment of the world (a look at British newspapers shows that the infection is not limited to American usage) can be formulated so: my principle is “split if you must,” while many others seem to stick to the principle “split at all costs.” Our correspondent asserted that nothing justifies keeping the particle to and the verbal form in close proximity. Not quite so. From a historical point of view, the particle is the same word as the preposition to. In Old English, the infinitive could be declined, and, when it followed to, it stood in the dative. In the most clear-cut cases, that dative expressed purpose, as does the substandard modern construction for to (“Simple Simon went a-fishing/ For to catch a whale:/ All the water he could find/ Was in his mother’s pail”). In Old English, catch would have stood in the dative, and the preposition would have been to. Consequently, there is good reason why the two words refuse to be separated. But as time went on, English lost nearly all its endings and the word order became rigid. Then the problem arose what to do with an adverb when one wanted to say something like promisedto transform the country quickly but five or more words fought for the privilege of occupying the slot immediately after transform. Those who did not want to restructure the phrase (promised a quick transformation of the country) found the solution in to quickly transform; poets endorsed this usage. But in challenging my opponent to a duel, I would like to ask him what he thinks of the following sentences (which are unacceptable to me): “Minnesota Wild officials are warning fans toonly buy tickets from authorized agents….” Wouldn’t to buy tickets only from sound—let us put it—more elegant, even more natural? “The military defended the caretaker government… but pledged to soon change it….” What about to change itsoon? My problem remains the same as before: to be or to not be? Tastes differ, and, like Dickens’s Miss Dartle, I am asking merely for information.
No consensus on agreement
1) Those who follow this blog with some regularity may remember that I have a rubric titled “The mood of the tales are gloomy.” Most Americans write so, and I watch this syntax (which is rather old) with equanimity: if the verb is supposed to agree with the word next to it rather than with the subject of the sentence, so be it. Still some sentences are uglier than the others. Here is one of them: “The uprising shows that the fate of Palestinians, about 3 percent of the world’s Arab population, were not the foremost concern on most people’s minds, despite what the West was led to believe.” Curiously, the closest word to the verb is population, but 3 percent overpowered it. From Newsweek: “The next wave of leaders aren’t about to take risks….” 2) The correspondent who commented on my discussion of constructions like “What matters
0 Comments on Monthly Gleanings: February 2011 as of 1/1/1900
LOL and the wide world. Many thanks for the interesting comments, questions, and antedatings! Here comes the first spring set of gleanings. In a story, supposed to be funny, a boy who did not speak until he was six years old suddenly said at dinner: “Too much salt in the soup.” The family was overjoyed, and everybody asked: “Why have you not spoken before?” “So far, I had nothing to complain about,” was the answer. My mail is not too heavy, apparently because I seldom irritate our readers. But last month I applied the epithet short-lived to LOL, the king/queen of texting, and immediately three comments assured me that LOL is very much alive. I stand corrected and hasten to express my joy about the longevity of such a serviceable “word,” the more so as I have studied the history of laughter, and every expression of it, especially when it is unconcealed and loud, warms the cockles of my heart.
Generic they, a permanent irritant. This is an old hat. At one time, I launched a quixotic attack on sentences like when a student comes, I never make them wait and if a tenant is evicted, it does not mean they were a bad tenant. I contended that such sentences owe their existence to a misguided attempt to get rid of generic he and that the remedy was worse than the disease. Let it be repeated that I did not defend him or her and in general did not say anything outrageous, but my taunt brought forth numerous responses. Some people said that constructions of this type had been used since the days of King Alfred, Chaucer, Fielding, Thackeray, and many other illustrious authors who lived before the-mid seventies of the 20th century (the chronological span is a bit disconcerting). Almost nothing of any interest has been found, and certainly no monstrosities like those I quoted in my post turned up in any old book, for the antecedent has invariably been someone, no one, a person, and so forth. However, every now and then I receive letters purporting to prove me wrong. Here is an example dated 1909: “I don’t want to be a lady… they can’t ever ride straddle nor climb a tree, and they got to squinch their waists and toes.” (Frances Boyd Calhoun, Miss Minerva and William Green Hill; I have no page reference). This is a far cry from the expectant student and the hapless tenant mentioned above. There was no way to avoid they here except for repeating the noun (I don’t want to be a lady. Ladies…). I can say something like it about anything. “No, not a marker. They leave traces on my hands” or “Is this only a mouse? I am not afraid of them.” But they were not a bad tenant? Give me a break!
More about pronouns: “You are It.” I received a question about the origin of it in children’s games. Much to my disappointment, not a single citation has been found in my database (which now exists as A Bibliography of English Etymology). This means that in over 20,000 articles and notes I have read while compiling this bibliography, no one mentioned the history of it even in a perfunctory way. The editors of the OED seem to have run into a similar problem. In the original edition, it (in games) is not mentioned at all. In the First Supplement a few examples appeared, none of them antedating 1888. Later an 1842 example was dug up. The most amazing thing is how late those examples are. Should we assume that it in the games of tag and blindman’s buff did not exist before roughly the middle of the 19th century? This would be a startling assum
0 Comments on Monthly Gleanings: March 2010 as of 1/1/1900
A Bibliography of English Etymology: An Aftermath
I would like to thank all those who congratulated me on the appearance of A Bibliography of English Etymology. In connection with this publication I have been asked two questions. 1) What practical results do I expect from it? The answer is obvious. Now everyone who is interested in the origin of an English word can at once begin reading the relevant literature. The same holds, though to a lesser extent, for the cognates of English words in other languages. My lists are not exhaustive (because no bibliographical list is) but sufficiently representative. Since all kinds of obscure periodicals have been looked through in the preparation of the volume, many titles may enjoy the light of day for the first time. However, this bibliography is not a pot from a fairy tale to which one has to say: “Little pot, cook,” for sweet porridge to begin flowing into the plate and even down the streets. I have copies of all the articles in my office, but no one else does. Obtaining them takes time. Also, one has to read everything written about the chosen word (another time consuming procedure), and this brings me to the second question. 2) How many articles featured in the bibliography contain trivial and even nonsensical information? Very many of them do. But I could not be choosy. I felt like the compiler of a telephone book. Some people use their telephone all the time but never say anything worth hearing, let alone repeating. (A lot should even have been left unsaid.) Some others use the telephone for plotting against their neighbors and the rest of the world, and still others have a telephone and do very well without it. Yet a telephone book cannot pass judgment on the character and habits of the company’s customers. Although a foolish article on etymology is not murderous, triviality and self-admiring ignorance are the curse of scholarship, and a bibliography cannot aspire to remedy this situation. I have been working on a new etymological dictionary of English for over twenty years, and if I had had such a bibliography in the mid-eighties, by now, instead of being “the proud author” of An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction, I would have had all the work behind me. This is the greatest justification of the bibliography now published I can think of.
Etymology as a Profession
I regularly receive questions from young people who would like to become etymologists but do not know how to go about it. I can only repeat what I have said before. Someone who is interested in the history of recent slang should try to discover the earliest known citations and meaning of the word in question (which is hard: compare buzzword, below) and find out who used the word and why. Such a project can probably be completed without formal linguistic training, though the lack of training is a great handicap even in this area. For all other purposes, one has to study the history of several languages (the more, the better) and the methods of linguistic reconstruction, that is, take special courses from knowledgeable teachers. Reading popular books about the “fascinating” history of words and being “passionate” about the subject won’t do.
Etymology Husk. The word almost certainly contains the diminutive suffix -k, whereas the vowel of hus- goes back to u, as in put, and ultimately to “long u,” that is, the sound we now hear in hoo. Hus (with a long vowel) is the earlier form of house, so that the original meaning of husk emerges as “little house.” In some oth
0 Comments on Monthly Gleanings: January 2010 as of 1/1/1900
USAGE Spelling pronunciation and analogy. Why do some people mispronounce fungi (that is, say it with -ji instead of -gi)? They do so because the letter group gi is ambiguous in English. Compare gin and be-gin. Only those can pronounce such words correctly who know them. But fungus is Latin (or Italian). The Latin plural fungi poses no problems (Latin had no j-sound), while the Italian plural funghi tells a foreigner that “hard” -g, rather than -j, is meant. However, not every English-speaker has studied Latin or Italian. It should be added that in some such cases tradition is more important than etymology, and many words are pronounced differently from what one expects. Consider Gillespie, the name of the jazz player, let alone Gilbert, with g-, and be grateful for the spelling Ghirlandaio. Forte. This is a favorite question of many. The “classic” pronunciation requires two syllables in forte “loud(ly)” and one syllable (just fort) in forte “strong point,” because the first word is Italian and the second French. But not enough people are aware of this nicety, and the uniform pronunciation in two syllables has almost won out. If sounding more educated than your neighbor does not frighten you, keep the distinction but expect ridicule behind your back. Being too smart is usually considered snobbish or even worse, elitist. Patronize. Here the “classic” pronunciation of the first syllable requires pat-, not pate-, but the influence of patron is so strong that the variant with a long vowel has become common. However, the old variant does not stigmatize the speaker as a highbrow. Bored of versus bored with. Obviously, one can bore someone only with inane talk, but in the passive bored comes perilously close to tired, and we are tired of something. Analogy makes some people say bored of, like tired of. This usage has nothing to recommend it but will probably spread.
Spelling. Is alright acceptable? This is another favorite of talk shows and word columns. From a historical point of view, alright is unobjectionable. No one winces at also, almost, although, always, already, and altogether, all of them with one l. Whether forever and today should be spelled as one word, separately, or with a hyphen, is a matter of agreement. The same holds for alright. But I will repeat my favorite dictum: “Language is not only a means of communication but also a product of culture.” Despite the passionate love of the modern wealthy “elite” for prefabricated torn jeans, the culture of the educated tends to be conservative. For this reason, alright is still frowned upon by editors. However, its ultimate acceptance need not be doubted.
Back formation. Does the verb flabbergast exist? It does, if you heard it. The past participle flabbergasted was recorded before the verb and remains the only common form. The verb may be an example of back formation (like beg from beggar). It sounds odd (“Don’t flabbergast me.” “He flabbergasted his parents.” Will anyone say so, except for fun?). Countable versus uncountable
0 Comments on Monthly Gleanings: December 2009 as of 1/1/1900
As always, many thanks for comments, questions, additions, and corrections. I keep eating my way through a mountain of questions I have received since June, but something will be left over for October. My mail contains many traditional queries, that is, people ask the same questions over and over again. Let me refer our correspondents to this blog for some information on who versus whom,kitty/catty corner, andhunky-dory (separate posts were devoted to them). With regards to tomfoolery, see my book Word Origins…, in which the use of the proper name Tom is discussed at some length. However, I will return briefly to one old problem. Our correspondent writes that she hates hearing drive safe instead of drive safely. Some time in the past I wrote on “the death of the adverb,” and the essay provoked numerous comments, which I need not reproduce here. I only want to provide some comfort to the defenders of the beleaguered part of speech (and by the same token to myself, for I am one of them). My advice is to treat the change philosophically. The drive safe construction has been gaining ground for centuries, and in German it has won. For the benefit of English speakers here is a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128. In this sonnet, the poet begrudges the luck the virginal of his beloved enjoys: the keys (“jacks”) of the musical instrument kiss her fingers, while his lips are not invited to do any work: “How oft…/ do I envy those jacks that nimble leap/ To kiss the tender inward of thy hand.…” Obviously, nimble here means nimbly, and what is good for Shakespeare is good enough for us. Right? No, but I promised to provide comfort, not a justification for safe driving under the influence (of the Bard).
Big questions. 1. How does one expand one’s vocabulary? The usual answer is: “By voracious reading.” The answer is correct but insufficient, especially if one wants to expand one’s active vocabulary. The only way to learn words is to learn them, that is, to treat one’s native language as one treats foreign languages. Read good books, write out the words new to you, look them up in a dictionary to make sure that you did not misunderstand their meaning, and learn them together with the context in which they occurred. One word a day will go a long way. 2. On several occasions I mentioned the fact that American English, being a colonial language, is more conservative than the language of the metropolis. How does this fact tally with the readiness of American English to adopt countless foreign words? Conservative refers to the phonetic and the grammatical structure of language. American English has retained the pronunciation and some forms that were current four and three centuries ago, while British English has often modified them.
Separate words. In (the) hospital. Why do British and American English differ in the use of the definite article? English-speakers who have not studied the history of their language (that is, 99, 999% of the population) believe that the use of articles is natural and stable. However, it is not and changes from century to century and from one part of the English speaking world to another. Note the vacillation even in Modern American English: in the future ~ in future (the second variant seems to be winning out; German has a similar alternation: in Zukunft ~ in der Zukunft). The definite article disappeared in such adverbial phrases as go to bed, at school, in prison, at work, and even in that time of year. In hospital marks the triumph of “adverbialization”; by contrast, in the hospital remains a free combination of a preposition and a noun. Aluminum versus aluminium. This pair is another famous example of the difference between American and British English, second perhaps only to fall ~ autumn, truck ~ lorry, and sidewalk ~ pavement. Sir Humphrey Davy called his invention (1812) aluminum, but in England i was later added to it on the analogy of chemical substances like sodium. American English preserves the earliest form. What is the origin of Sardoudledom? I am quoting from the OED, a most useful book for learning etymology: “[From] blend of the name Victorien Sardou (1831-1908). French dramatist + DOODLE + -DOM. A fanciful word used to describe well-wrought, but trivial or morally objectionable, plays considered collectively; the characteristic milieu in which such work is admired.”
Pleadedversuspled. Pled, which is being used more and more often, is an analogical form: plead ~ pled, as lead ~ led and read (infinitive) ~ read (preterit). How did savings end up being a singular form? I think most people avoid saying a savings of $20 (though a saving of $20 is not the most elegant phrase either), but his savings is will shock few. Words ending in -s, like digs, Boots (the name of a servant at a hotel), or Sniffers (the name of a guinea pig), often become singulars. We have means (a means to an end) and works “factory” (a chemical works is situated not far from where we live). In a relatively recent edition of Little Red Riding Hood, it is written that the girl lived near a woods. This usage seems odd to me (and to my spellchecker), but apparently, not to everybody. Thus, savings joined the words whose plural ending does not prevent them from being looked upon as singulars.
Sam Hill. My timid refusal to connect Hill with hell (unless it is a taboo form) impressed no one. I hasten to repeat that I have no clue to the origin of the idiom but would like to know where, regardless of Hill ~ hell, Sam came from. Hill, even if etymologized convincingly, is only half of the problem. Cottage cheese: Is it derived from ricotta? I am sure it is not. If it were, it would, most likely, not have been “folk etymologized” so drastically. Compare German Schmierkase (literally “smear cheese”), which in American English became smear-case! (See it in the OED.) Cottage cheese is also an “Americanism” and seems to mean what it says. The name of this dairy product often consists of two words: a noun meaning “cheese” and some attribute (so, for instance, in French: fromage blanc or fromage frais). The similarity between cottage and ricotta is coincidental. Ricotta means “recooked” (tt in -cotta goes back to ct: the Latin root of this word can be seen in Engl. concoct); compare Italian biscotto “twice cooked,” that is biscuit. Cottage cheese is often called in unpredictable ways. Curds is a word of unknown origin despite the existence of look-alikes in Celtic. German Quark is a borrowing from Slavic, where it means “product,” while Scandinavian ost has a respectable Indo-European descent.
What is the preferred spelling of czar? It is czar, though tsar (not czar) reflects the pronunciation of the Russian word much better. “The spelling cz-, which is non-Slavonic, is due to Herberstein, ‘Rerum Muscovitarum Commentarii’ [A Commentary on the Deeds of the Muscovites], 1549, the chief early authority on Russia in Western Europe” (The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology). What happened to -ce- in Worcestershire? It was shed, and not only in this place name. Compare Leicestershire and Gloucestershire, pronounced Lester-, Gloster-. Place names drop middle syllables with dire regularity. Worcester goes back to Old Engl. Wigraceaster (the second element -ceaster, like -caster in Lancaster, is the Latin word for “camp”). In today’s pronunciation only Wuster is left, though the archaic spelling has preserved some traces of the original form. American speakers should be warned not to rhyme -shire, when it occurs as the second part of place names, with hire, mire, wire: it should be a homophone of sheer.
As noted, I still have some unanswered questions on file. I’ll take care of them on the last Wednesday of October.
An Etymologist’s Status and Pastime. Below, I will try to satisfy the curiosity of our regular correspondent about how etymologists work. He guessed correctly that they do not form a “community.” The origin of words constitutes the shortest part of college courses devoted to the history of language, while courses in lexicology (the study of words) are rarely offered even to linguistics majors. Phonetics (phonology), grammar (mainly syntax) and semantics (all of them geared toward the latest version of a theory considered to be “cutting edge”) dominate the curriculum. As for the other language majors, they may graduate with only one course in linguistics; the rest is literature (predominantly modern), literary criticism, and “culture.” Add to it that, contrary to the tradition of the 19th century, descriptive, rather than historical, linguistics enjoys the greatest prestige in the profession. Fortunately, people have an ineradicable interest in the origin of language. Books on the rise and development of words appear in a steady stream, and some young people ignore the trend and the state of the academic market and choose to study language history. Etymology as a branch of scholarship owes its survival to public support, which one can observe in book stores and libraries, as well as at talk shows and lectures (see also what I wrote about this subject in my first post in March 2006). Etymologists do not meet at special congresses, and their “density” on any campus is minimal, but they often participate in linguistic meetings, and their papers appear in journals and miscellaneous collections with great regularity.
Finally, there was a question about why I usually devote my efforts to difficult and obscure words rather than to such as constitute the core of our vocabulary. My choice is determined by the requirements of the genre. A blog is not a textbook, and if I begin to repeat what anyone can find in a dictionary or the Internet, my essays will be of no use. Hence the focus on the controversial and exotic.
Split Infinitive. I keep collecting examples of what in the post “To Be or To Not Be” I called gratuitous splitting. Both of my latest excerpts are from reputable newspapers. “In his resignation letter, XX said the controversy had ‘made it impossible for me to effectively lead the … office’.” Probably no one will mind this syntax (I have no serious objections to it either), but why not “impossible for me to lead the … office effectively”? “An official with knowledge of the investigation said police stopped XX shortly after the shooting, spoke to him and let him go, only to later realize he was a suspect.” In my opinion, this is an ugly sentence. Only the vogue for splitting could make the author write to later realize.
Separate Words.
Ghetto. Professor John Peter Maher, the author of a detailed comment on my post on ghetto, allowed me to disclose his identity and restated his views. We agree that most of the current theories on the origin of ghetto are untenable but do not see eye to eye on which one is the most convincing. He supports the derivation of ghetto from (bor)ghetto. I can only offer a suggestion. It will be remembered that I was struck by the history of the English word jetty “squalid neighborhood” and its variant jutty. It is as though jetty ~ jutty mirrored the history of ghetto ~ (Germanic) gata “street.” In the past, the words for “street” designated public space. Neither my explanation (ghetto ~ gata) nor the one that is based on borghetto, both of which were offered long ago, is specific enough. The fact that borghetto and numerous other words rhyming with it have been clipped to ghetto speaks for, as well as against, Maher’s reconstruction. True, living quarters anywhere could be called ghetto, but we are left wondering why such a common name was used for a new “reservation” and why the contemporaries of the first ghetto in Venice failed to associate ghetto with borghetto and invented Hebrew etymologies for it. This circumstance is also detrimental to my idea. The question, I believe, remains open.
The pronunciation of slough. The verb to slough (a snake sloughs its skin) rhymes with enough. In the Slough of Despond, slough should rhyme with now. In British English, slough “swamp” (also Slough, the name of a town) and slough “misery” are homophones, for they are two senses of the same word, “misery” being the figurative use of “swamp.” The Old English form of the noun slough was sloh ~ slog ~ slo (with a long vowel). In some dialects of Middle English, this vowel developed as in school, which accounts for the conservative (17th-century) American pronunciation of slough “marshy ground; stagnant pool” as slew. At one time, this pronunciation was confined to northern US and Canada, but it seems to have spread far beyond its original area of distribution.
The meaning of semolina. “There seems to be a consensus from most dictionaries that the word semolina derives from Italian semola ‘bran’, which in turn comes from Latin simila ‘fine flour’. As bran and fine flour are basically opposites, do you know how it came to be?” I do not know but I have a suggestion. Latin simila (Italian semolina is a diminutive form of it) meant “the finest wheat flour after being sifted.” Bran is the inner skin or husk of wheat (oats, etc.) separated from the grain. Both are the products of sifting, and it often happens that such a common semantic denominator allows divergent meanings to be assigned to the reflexes of the same word in related languages.
The etymology of demodromic. This is a term of mechanics, and our correspondent explained its meaning in his letter (which was inspired by the recent post on theodolite). In a demodromic valve system, the engine valves are opened and closed with a cam. Theodolite is obscure, but demodromic is obviously made up of two Greek parts. The element -dromic comes from Greek dromicos “swift, fleet” and also “pertaining to running or to a racecourse” (compare hippodrome). Greek dema meant “fetters,” and the element demo- has been used in several coinages with the sense “to fasten, bind, chain” (for the Greek connection compare diadem). Thus, approximately “binding quickly.” (Dema, with its short e, has nothing to do with demos “people,” in which e was long.)
Heavy petting. The beauty of a blog is that one can always correct one’s mistakes. In my post on the etymology of pet, I suggested (on the basis of my reading) that, contrary to what is said in dictionaries, pet had come to English from Celtic, rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, I forgot to consult the OED online (the so-called 3rd edition of the OED), and a correspondent pointed out that there I would have found the same solution, which is true. But my oversight, embarrassing as it may be, will allow me to touch on an important aspect of etymological lexicography.
Among other things, I said that nowadays two streams—of books and articles on the origin of words and of English dictionaries (to the extent that they deal with etymology)—seldom meet and explained why this happens: the huge amount of work lexicographers face increases manifold because of the obscurity of countless publications in numerous languages. I became aware of a persuasive etymology of pet because I have a reasonably complete database, and two articles on this word (by O’Rahilly and Vendryes) turned up in it. At Oxford they undoubtedly have their own bibliographical resources; this case their information probably came from Vendryes’s etymological dictionary of Old Irish. The volume with the letter p was published in 1983. In the entry petta, Vendryes referred to O’Rahilly’s but not to his own 1927 article, which contained the same reconstruction he gave in the dictionary 56 years later. The etymologists at OED, quite naturally, consulted the dictionary, read O’Rahilly’s article and, like me, agreed with him. I am glad that our opinions coincided. But they went further than I did and tentatively accepted Vendryes’s distant etymology of the Irish word, and this is a point I would like to discuss.
English absorbed more foreign words than perhaps any other European language. However, an English etymologist is at best a specialist in Indo-European linguistics, and more often only in Germanic. Let us have no illusions about it. The field is vast. Even the history of one language (in our case, English) is so full of esoteric details that some people call themselves experts in Old English, others in Middle English, and still others in early Modern English, to say nothing of the latest period. It is unrealistic to expect that this person, who (for example) has spent years mastering every sound change and every semantic twist of Middle English will feel even half as comfortable in the history of Frisian, Dutch, German, Danish, and so forth. But English etymologists also deal with French, Latin, Greek, and Celtic. Borrowings from Finnish and Russian (as long as we stay in Europe), Native American, African, and Asian languages also occupy them. Obviously, they cannot have an informed opinion about such a mass of disparate material and depend on the works of specialists, who argue over the origin of “their” words, just as English etymologists argue over the derivation of English vocabulary. Copying their verdicts is fraught with danger. I can add that Skeat and James Murray boldly attacked Latin words in their dictionaries and often did not see eye to eye. Their suggestions are invariably clever, for their command of two classical languages left nothing to be desired (Skeat’s education was in Latin and Greek, and Murray seems to have mastered every old and new language), but I still think that they should have left Latin to people like Alois Walde. It is enough to compare the subsequent editions of his dictionary to see what a minefield Latin etymology is.
In 1927 Vendryes offered what he thought to be a good etymology of Old Irish petta, but the entry in his dictionary is short and rather dogmatic. O’Rahilly’s article but not his conjecture is mentioned. Historians of English are usually not in a position to agree or disagree with a distinguished Celtologist on the origin of an Old Irish word. I could afford the luxury of contradicting Vendryes because I was the author of an evanescent post and realized that, if I was wrong, the fault would be only mine and do no one any harm. The idea of tracing Old Irish petta to an ancient Indo-European root seemed unfounded to me, for petta looks like an example of early European slang (pet ~ put “small”), while Latin suesco “to get used” (the cognate suggested by Vendryes; sue- in it is from the historical perspective a prefix) and other related forms have little to do with pampered people and home animals.
By contrast, a semi-anonymous dictionary does not enjoy the freedom of an individual contributor. The OED is especially vulnerable, because most of its users take its pronouncements for absolute truth. The same holds for Webster and some other “thick” dictionaries. My advice to the editors is disappointing. I believe that bold hypotheses should be either discussed in them with the attention they deserve or avoided altogether. Research into the history of pet has reached a stage at which an expert in the area of English can say “from Scottish Gaelic” without fear. The origin of the Gaelic word is somebody else’s business. Etymological dictionaries of French cite the Latin etymons but never discuss them, and I think they are right. It is enough to read the old reviews of Kluge-Mitzka (a German etymological dictionary) with titles like “Slavic Words in KM” and “French Words in KM,” to see how hard it was for Mitzka to deal with the material he did not know in detail. Even discussion of the Frisian element in the latest etymological dictionary of Dutch fills one with dismay, though Frisian is much closer to Dutch than English is to Gaelic.
Last week, my post was devoted to the origin of race. Here I think we are in a better situation than with pet. Contini’s reconstruction is not an “opinion,” not an attempt to connect a Romance word with a hypothetical root; it is based on evidence. Von Wartburg, the great compiler of a multivolume etymological dictionary of French, challenged Contini’s colleagues to boost the derivation of race from Old French haras “stud” (he preferred to trace race to ratio), and this is exactly what they did. In the entry race, the online edition of the OED is cautious: it lists two other conjectures and mentions Contini’s idea (though the reference is to dictionaries). Here I think we may be less circumspect. Just as we now know that Engl. pet is a borrowing from Celtic, we know that race did not come to French from Italian, but since French etymology is not what the OED (or any English dictionary) is expected to elucidate, had the editors said “from French” and stopped, they would have been justified. If some users of the OED are curious about the history of razza ~ race in the Romance languages, they are welcome to find out. Even the great OED is not a clearing house of world etymology. No dictionary is.
Small fry. 1) Generic they. In my old polemical notes on the pronouns they and their being used with reference to a single person, I should have made it clear that this usage (the price we pay for purging English of gender-specific words when gender-neutral ones are expected), apart from being inelegant and often silly, leads to people’s stultification, for the simplest sentences begin to verge on self-parody. Here are two such sentences from a local (University of Minnesota) student newspaper. “As someone who has been pro-life all their life, I believe life begins at the point of conception.” The letter writer did not dare to use my, with I being the antecedent; their seemed to be safer. “Can someone in Dateopia tell me [the correspondence was addressed to Dr. Date, a collective expert on “relationships,” loss of virginity, and unrequited love] why it is that we have so many brooding male writers out there? … I am struck by the feeling that the writer has spent a lot of time thinking about their situation in an academic sense….” A male surely has their problems. Don’t all of us?
2) Ghetto. Those interested in the origin of the word ghetto should pay special attention to the comment by Anonymous (I happen to know the identity of the commentator but see no reason to make it public.) He is a proponent of the borghettoetymology defended by such outstanding experts as Alfredo Prati and Leo Spitzer. Unfortunately, etymologies cannot be proved (even disproving a palpably wrong etymology is sometimes hard.) I thought that the meaning of the clipped form ghetto was too general for naming the newly established Jewish quarter in Venice, but “street” (gata) is not much better, except that Jewish quarters were called “street” all over Eastern Europe, whereas ghetto did not mean “street.” My extremely modest goal was to enliven the discussion by offering what I though was a novel idea. I will take refutation in stride, even gratefully. As for why I cited the Gothic and the Swedish form rather than those from Danish (gade) and Norwegian (gate), the question has been answered by our correspondent Paul Peterson: gade and gate show traces of later sound changes; gata is more archaic. 3) Latin pax ~ English fair, Engl. war ~ French guerre. I mentioned these cognates in my post on “Peace and War.” Our correspondent wonders how -ax (in pax) and -air (in fair), as well as war and guerre, are connected. Pax is pak-s; its root is pak-. The early history of fair becomes clear from its Old Icelandic cognate fag-r (-r is part of an ancient suffix). Latin p corresponds to Germanic f, and k corresponds to h, but there is a rule by which voiceless spirants may, depending on the ancient place of stress, become voiced; hence g in fagr. In certain positions, Old Engl. g was pronounced like y in Modern Engl. yes, and this is how fair acquired its pronunciation. Romance speaking people borrowed a word meaning “strife” with the Germanic root wer-, but, since the sound w was alien to them, they replaced it with gv (spelled gu). In Old Northern French (the dialect of William the Conqueror), the pronunciation was evidently werre (without g-), so that the French noun returned to English in almost the same shape in which it at one time had existed. Yet war is not a direct continuation of the Germanic form.
4) Engl. pet and German Petze “female dog.” Those are most probably unrelated. Several similar-sounding words for “female dog” have been recorded in old and later European languages: Engl. bitch, Old Icelandic bikkja (from which, I think we have the verb bicker), as well as baka (in greybaka), and German Petze. Petze surfaced only in the 15th century. It is anybody’s guess how those words are related (if at all). One can go even further and cite Russian sobaka“dog” (stress on the second syllable), an irritatingly obscure word that has a history of its own. A similar common European litter accompanies us the moment we whistle to a tyke. Perhaps some of the names mentioned above imitate the bark. Neither sounds like bow-wow, barf-barf, or yap-yap, but there was an Old English word tife “bitch,” and one of the Russian words for “bow-wow” is tiaf-tiaf! Dogs, as I understand, were domesticated to guard herds, rather than as pets. 5) Caius of Cambridge. In discussing the origin of the word key, I mentioned John Caius, the founder of a college at Cambridge. The question was about the man and the pronunciation of his name (which is keez). All the eminent bearers of the names Kayes and Keys seem to have Latinized their name as Caius. The Oxford man was also Caius (keez). Googling for the biography of both produces several worthwhile results. As for the pronunciation, I consulted the book Laut und Leben. Englische Lautgeschichte der neueren Zeit by Wilhelm Horn and Martin Lehnert. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1954, p. 288. (I am indebted to this book for many of my posts on spelling.)
6) Acronyms. I said in connection with the etymology of tip “gratuity” that all attempts to explain common words as acronyms are usually wrong. Our correspondent cited NABISCO and others. But those are not “common words”: they were coined as acronyms and never concealed their origin. Of such formations we have hundreds. 7) Shed light. There is little to say about the origin of this phrase. Light can be shed, thrown, or cast. According to the OED, the figurative use of shed light (that is, to illuminate some matter) does not antedate the middle of the 19th century. 8 ) I was pleased to get support of my views on Shakespeare. Somebody wrote his plays. This person was probably William Shakespeare.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of 
