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Continued from “Bimonthly etymology gleanings for August and September 2014. Part 1″…

Dangerous derivations and chance coincidences

A correspondent cited a few tentative etymologies of English words.

• Sail: in Mennonite Low German sähl means “harness.”
• Bride: Dutch brudespaar allegedly means “broody pair.” Doesn’t bride mean “broody hen”?
• Cow: the German word kauen means “to chew.” Couldn’t that be the origin of the word cow?

I am sorry to disappoint our correspondent, but such haphazard comparisons should be abandoned. To discover the origin of old words, one has to compare their most ancient attested forms. For example, kauen always had a diphthong, while cow has its late diphthong from a long monophthong that once sounded like Modern Engl. oo (compare German Kuh). And so it goes. On the more intuitive level, one should realize that, if a word has baffled professional scholars for centuries, the most tempting solutions have probably been offered and rejected. By the way, the Dutch compound for “bride and bridegroom” is bruidspaar, not brudespaar; the word has nothing to do with brooding.

Another correspondent wrote that the Russian word for “kiss” also means “to aim.” Whoever suggested this connection seems to have confused the Russian words tsel “whole” (discussed in the post on kissing) and tsel’ “aim.” The sign l’ stands for palatalized (or “soft”) l; where the transliteration has an apostrophe Russian has a special letter (the so-called miagkii znak). Tsel is an old word, while tsel’ is a borrowing of German Ziel “aim” (more precisely, Middle High German), via Polish.

Still another correspondent wonders whether the noun chapbook and the verb tucker (out) “to tire, to weary” can be of Hindi origin. I think chapbook has such a transparent English derivation that it does not merit further discussion. Tucker is probably a frequentative of tuck, like very many verbs of this structure. There is no denying the fact that our correspondent cited Hindi words that have both the form and the meaning closely corresponding to chapbook and tucker. But, as I have written many times while answering similar questions, the fact of borrowing can be ascertained only if we succeed in showing how a foreign word reached English (compare the history of thug, which is indeed from Hindi, or other examples cited in the great book Hobson-Jobson). Was tucker used mainly by Hindi speakers? Do we have any proof that this verb spread from their community? Only a detailed investigation along such lines can sound convincing. Otherwise, we will stay with kauen ~ cow and their likes.

Wise restraint. An old colleague of mine wrote in connection with my post on roil.

“Honoré de Balzac published in 1842 a novel called La Rabouilleuse. The title name is explained as being a word local to the Berry region of France where a young girl is employed to stir up the mud in a stream, thus clouding the water and permitting a fisherman to more readily catch crayfish (crawfish?). One can easily see the way the word is formed: the verb bouillir “boil” plus a reduplicating prefix ra- and a feminine agent suffix. Now the verb rabouillir or some variant of it might fit in with roil both with some phonemes and the meaning.”

The author of the letter did not suggest any solution, and I think he was right to do so. The coincidence looks like being due to chance.

Old Friends

Every now and then I run into publications that would have come in most useful in my earlier posts and comments. But it is never too late to pick up even the oldest chestnuts. For instance, I have challenged the supporters of they ~ them in sentences like when a student comes, I never make them wait to give examples that are really old. Almost nothing has turned up. But here are two more phenomena that have aroused some interest among our readers.

Split infinitive. It would seem that passionate, as opposed to rational, splitting set in several decades ago, and the construction I called to be or to not be conquered the ugly day. Roswitha Fischer’s article on the split infinitive appeared in 2007; however, I read it only this summer. Among many other examples, she quoted Wycliffe: “It is good for to not ete fleisch and for to not drynke wyn” (ca. 1382). I do not follow Wycliffe’s recommendation but in defense of his grammar should say that with for to he had nowhere else to put the negation. I am sure everybody will remember: “Simple Simon went a-fishing, / For to catch a whale.” Nowadays, for to, an analog of German um zu, is dead, except in some dialects.

One… his. We have been taught to say one…one’s. But people keep correlating one with his (now probably their; see above). In The Nation for 1921 I found a letter to the editor from Steven T. Byington (Ballard Vale, Massachusetts) with the funny title Four Centuries of Onehese. The writer quoted five sentences with one—his. I’ll reproduce only the relevant part of them:

• “…one was surer in keeping his tunge, than in muche speking” (excellent advice going back to 1477)
• “…the higher one doth mount, the less doth euery thing appeare which is below him” (1607)
• “If one proposes any other end unto himself” (1650)
• “…one’s sure to break his neck” (1650), “One should do what his own nature prescribes” (1886)

Among other things, the letter discusses the utterance: “One oughtn’t never take nothing that ain’t theirn.” I suspect that in the great books on English grammar by Jespersen, Poutsma, and Curme many more examples of the one… his type will be found. A certain Markman, a friend of James Steerforth’s, “always spoke of himself indefinitely as a ‘man’, and seldom or never in the first person singular” (David Copperfield, Chapter 24 “My First Dissipation”). This way of speaking may help those who have trouble with one.

Check your slang

Also in The Nation, this time for 1922, I found a more than enthusiastic review by Clement Wood of Carl Sandburg’s fourth book of poetry Slabs of the Sunburnt West. In the opening paragraph, Wood expressed his delight about Sandburg’s use of slang. I ran the list by my undergraduate students. Here it is: humdinger, flooey, *phizzogs, fixers, frame-up, *four-flushers, rakeoff, getaway, junk, *fliv, fake, come clean, gabby mouth, *hoosegow, *teameo, *work plug, lovey, slew him in, bull, jazz, scab, booze, stiffs, hanky-pank, hokum, bum, and buddy.

The words that no one recognized are given above with an asterisk. I knew more. However, some of them I knew by chance. For instance, long ago, a bookstore near our main campus closed its doors. It began to sell its stock at a small discount, but every two days the prices went down. The only books that no one wanted to take even when they were free were those by American poets. I grabbed the entire batch and read everything. In this rather dubious treasure trove, I discovered Sandburg, read his poem called Phizzogs, and looked up the word. It has never occurred in my reading since that day. In my work, I have dealt with synonyms for “prison,” so that hoosegow was quite familiar to me. I also knew fliv, but the word is forgotten. This is what I expected, for once I tried the same experiment with jitney and drew blank, while people of my age recognized it immediately. If I had run into a poker player, such a person would have had no trouble identifying four-flushers. Fixers, bull, work plug, slew him in, and stiffs look transparent, but without the context it is impossible to decide their exact meaning. We of course guessed that hanky-pank is a back formation on hanky-panky.

My students say that, when they watch movies of the fifties, they do not understand the slang used there, while their parents are in the dark when it comes to the slang of their children. On the other hand, the words given in bold in my list are today so familiar that no one would have referred to them as particularly striking. One should take into consideration that, to know one’s language, one has to read the literature written in it. It is curious to follow the modern annotations of Oliver Twist and Vanity Fair. Both Dickens and Thackeray used slang quite generously, and the commentators assume that no one understands it today. Perhaps they are right.

I still have some questions unanswered and will take care of them at the end of October.

Image credits: (1) Photograph of Carl Sandburg, 1947. Library of Congress. (2) Sandburg book cover via Booklikes.

The post Bimonthly etymology gleanings for August and September 2014. Part 2 appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Anatoly Liberman

The Infamous C-Word. This is the letter I received soon after the publication of the post devoted to our (formerly) most unpronounceable word: “…I am writing to ask you if you have run across it [this word] as a nautical term. I am a former sailing ship mariner (a.k.a. “tall ships”) and sailmaker and currently maritime historian/editor for the National Maritime Historical Society. I have always understood that the word c**t in our slang usage comes from the nautical term for the groove between the twisted strands that make up rope. That groove is called a cuntline or just cunt for short. I used to teach undergraduates maritime history and literature aboard wooden traditionally rigged sailing ships on semester-at-sea programs, and they were always shocked to learn that cunt was a legitimate nautical term to use. It gets worse because when you teach slope splicing, you have to show them how to insert a wooden fid between the cunt to open up the strands. You can just imagine their faces. In any case, I did not see this come up in your column and thought that, if there is a chance you hadn’t heard this variation, you might like knowing about it.”

I am aware of another nautical term, and, if it has anything to do with the one under discussion, its etymology stops being a riddle. Cunt may have begun its life in English as cant. Under cant, The Century Dictionary lists “a ship’s timber or frame near the bow or stern whose plane makes an acute angle with the vertical longitudinal plane of the vessel” (hence also a corresponding verb). The OED gives a slightly different definition: “A piece of wood laid on the deck of the vessel to support the bulkheads, etc.” Apparently, this cant also has a variant rhyming with runt rather than rant. Alongside cuntline, there is cantline, though here again the senses do not match. Cantline “the space between the sides or ends of barrels where they are stowed side by side.” Cantline, also spelled contline, has a synonym cutline. Is it possible that we are dealing with two descendants of the same etymon? Cant “ship’s timber” goes back to cant “edge, border,” a borrowing from Middle Low (= northern) German or Dutch. In case cunt “splice cut” also descends from German kant (Kant), the term retained its original German pronunciation in sailors’ language either because this way it kept its distance from all other borders or because the association evoked by thrusting the fid into the splice cut was too obvious to miss. I am sorry if I found myself in a position described in Mark Twain’s short story “How I Edited an Agricultural Paper.” Be that as it may, cunt “splice cut” is not the source of its much older homophone meaning “vagina”; it must have been the other way around.

For my database I have screened the entire run of The Mariner’s Mirror. To the best of my knowledge, the word c**t has not turned up in any of its numerous articles and notes on the origin of special terms. As to the students’ embarrassment, I can draw on my own experience. For many years I taught English to foreigners. Adults were not sure whether to laugh or feign indifference when they came across poop “the stern of a ship,” while schoolchildren blushed vigorously at learning the words male screw and female screw, especially those who also knew the meaning of the verb screw.

Another correspon

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By Anatoly Liberman

USAGE

Split infinitive soup: enjoy

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 promised to 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 to only 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 it soon?  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

Historians are always born too late: Alexander the Great is dead, and so is Charlemagne, so that descriptions of past events have to be reconstructed from chance remarks, unreliable accounts, deliberate lies, and semi-obliterated traces. Language historians are in a similar situation. All of a sudden (always all of a sudden) texts begin to suggest odd pronunciations, new auxiliaries, loss of endings, or previously unheard-of syntax. Why did people in 1324 or 1657 change the norm (the dates are, of course, imaginary) and why did the innovation spread? If we could be there and observe! Alas and alack: too late. But every now and then we are allowed to witness such shifts. Curiously, it turns out that phenomena happening before our eyes are often as hard to explain as those of epochs past.

Several years ago, I read the following sentence in a student newspaper: “Pedestrians are warned to not cross the street, etc.” I am sure I missed the “birth” of this process, but I do not think that to not cross the street was so common, let alone universal, in the seventies and even in the eighties. Few questions about grammar are less exciting than the use of the split infinitive. The topic was made famous by H.W. Fowler (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1926), who divided the English speaking world into five categories: 1) those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; 2) those who do not know but care very much; 3) those who know and condemn; 4) those who know and approve; and 5) those who know and distinguish. He addressed mainly the second group. What followed that discussion has been a long and trivial anticlimax, though Fowler’s joke about people who would as soon be caught putting their knives in their mouths as splitting an infinitive has made several generations of language lovers smile. Since 1926 variations on Fowler’s entry have been repeated in every book with the words English usage in their titles, and every author arrived at approximately the same conclusions: split if you must, but do it with understanding. The essence of the change that has occurred in American English and that constitutes the subject of this post can be captured in the formula: “Split, split, split.” Splitting has become gratuitous.

There is, apparently, no gain in substituting to not cross the street for not to cross the street. From a theoretical point of view, it would be easy to justify either variant, for measurements proving that the particle to is attached more closely to the verb than to the negation do not exist. A phrase like to not cross suggests a great cohesiveness of not cross, whereas not to cross points in the opposite direction. At one time, to (now a formal marker of the infinitive) was the same to that we know today as a preposition. The infinitive could be declined, and originally its dative preceded by to indicated purpose (“in order to”), but quite early this construction began to be used more or less mechanically in contexts in which reference to purpose could not be detected. No words ever stood between the preposition to and the dative infinitive. Splitting became necessary after English had lost most of its endings and the rigid word order deprived the language of its former flexibility. However, with regard to infinitives, tradition remained stable and favored not to be over to not be, unless special emphasis and a particularly artificial mode of expression were required (“How sad it is to not be when flowers bloom and all around make love!”). Needless to say, the new usage (to not cross the street) does not imply emphasis. Here is an ad: “The military is experimenting with a program that uses meditation and yoga to not only treat stress, but helps troops prepare for the rigors of combat.” Why to not only treat instead of not only to treat? The entire text is awkward. The editor knew little about the rigors of writing good English but unwittingly, almost instinctively (a common case in language change) imitated what had become the most recent norm.

The split infinitive creeps in (unless the writer is ready to restructure the whole sentence) when the choice is between delaying an adverb too long and thrusting it between to and the verb (for example, to fully understand the use of such an intricate rule in a few days is impossible). But in the following sentence it would have been easy not to split. “All we expect them to do is to quietly withdraw from regions [where] they have never been before…” To withdraw quietly from regions would have served its purpose equally well and not made the period bulky. “As president of the United States I would order the secretary of the Treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America…” The speaker (John McCain) wanted to say immediately together with buy, not after America, and I would immediately order to buy up is not quite the same as I would order to immediately buy up, but to immediately do something can now be seen everywhere. It has become a stock phrase (compare: they wanted us to immediately discontinue the experiment). In most cases switching the adverb would have been easy, as in: “It is common to relocate or remove buildings that have proven to frequently be in the wake of storms, flooding or other disasters” (= that have frequently proven). Splitting to be strikes me as especially ugly. From students’ papers: “…again allowing French words to easily be borrowed at will” (= to be easily borrowed); “This made them more likely to also be very familiar with… Latin” (= this also made them). I have a rich collection of similar sentences.

Little can be added to what Fowler and others have said about the split infinitive. When used reasonably, it need not irritate anyone, though the commonsense rule (do not split if you can help it) has lost none of its value. In …a nationalism that allowed the English language to once again outlive the language of a foreign conqueror (from a paper), that once again allowed would, to my mind, have been preferable, but let her rip. As an observer, I find it interesting that someone somewhere began to incautiously split infinitives, and now everybody splits them, as though they were firewood. No other shifts in syntax, morphology, or phonetics seem to have triggered the new fashion. Did some celebrity speak so and the public follow the splitter? Do videogames promote this usage? Language historians are always on the lookout for causes. Does anyone know the cause of this change?

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