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By Anatoly Liberman

Spelling reform and genitals will keep the rubric “gleanings” afloat forever. In connection with my series of posts on the oddest English spellings (which will be continued), I received several questions about dyslexia and orthography. Since I am unacquainted with the neural aspects of dyslexia, I cannot have a professional opinion on this subject, but the main divide seems to be between alphabetic languages and those using hieroglyphs (such as Chinese) rather than between languages like Finnish, in which the word’s aural Gestalt and visual image correspond remarkably well, and languages like English, in which the spelling of numerous words is unpredictable (bury, build, bosom, choir, till ~ until, and so forth), for different parts of the brain control our mastery of letters versus symbols (in this case, pictures).

Now to the genitals. Thanks to the correspondent who provided a quotation of dildoes from John Donne’s “Elegy 2: The Anagram” (1599). Those lines confirm the fact that the word was well-known in Shakespeare’s days. While our British correspondent was watching “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” an idea occurred to her that the opprobrious sense of knob had existed for centuries. My information on this subject is sparse. Knob “penis” was indeed known in the second half of the 17th century, but neither Shakespeare nor his younger contemporaries, whose language is often coarser than his, seem to have used it, even in puns, while reproducing the speech of their time. Nor do I find it in the old classical dictionaries of slang. Apparently, it reemerged after a long period of underworld existence only in the 20th century.

By way of compensation, I will add a note to my old post on the origin of Engl. brain. I suggested in it that brain is akin to bran and that the earliest meaning of the word was approximately “refuse,” not too different from “gray matter.” At that time I did not remember that 400 years ago the brain was supposed to produce semen, because both substances look rather similar. Hence the allusion to “brains between legs.” As regards Italian fiasco, I am sure that, contrary to a guess of our correspondent, far’ fico and far’ fiasco are unrelated. Some discussion of the Italian word (in connection with Engl. fig) can be found in my An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction; fig is mentioned in the entry on the F-word. To the best of my knowledge, far’ fiasco had no scurrilous overtones when it was coined. Fiasco (this is an answer to a different question) can, of course, have entered English directly from Italian, but if an Italian word (except for art terms and those pertaining to Italian realities) is also current in French and if the chronology does not militate against such a conclusion, it is safer to suggest that English took it over from French rather than Italian. I will return to fiasco in a different context.

In my etymological database, only one citation on poontang turned up. G. Legman wrote in the journal American Speech 25, 1950, p.234: “The Southern term poontang, for sexual intercourse ‘especially between Negro & white’ (Wentworth), is popularly and mistakenly believed to be a Negro word, perhaps of African origin. Actually, as pointed out by the well-known translator Keene Wallis, poontang is merely a heavily nasalized Creole pronunciation of the French word putain, whore, and undoubtedly spread through the South from French-speaking Louisiana. Wallis reports it as current in Missouri about ‘1915’.” This is followed by twelve quotations (but not from Wallis), three of them from Look Homeward, Angel (1929; Poon Tang). Few words are more detrimental to an etymology than undoubtedly and doubtlessly, but the derivation from putain is not bad, and the southern provenance of poontang seems to be correct.

A question was asked about the adverb yet. It concerns usage, but the development of yet also has a historical dimension. Our correspondent finds the sentence “Has Lucy come yet?” strange. It sounds perfectly idiomatic to me. In Modern English, yet has numerous meanings, and in two situations it alternates with “substitutes.” One is still: he is still here ~ he is not here yet. The other is already: he has already come ~ has he come yet? Apparently, the latter alternation is not universal; otherwise, there would have been no query. A few things about past usage may be of interest. Still is an adjective (“quiet, motionless”) and an adverb, as above. In Shakespeare’s language still meant “always” (“Thou still hast been the father of good news”). In some British dialects, yet occurs as still was in the 16th and 17th century. Consequently, it may be that in Wordsworth’s sonnet addressed to Milton: “So didst thou travel on life’s common way / In cheerful godliness, and yet thy heart / The lowliest duties on herself did lay,” yet is misunderstood by modern readers, for Wordsworth may have meant “and always (ever) thy heart.”

Extinction of Languages. The disappearance of every language, like the disappearance of every species, is an irreparable loss, and it is a good thing that in the 20th century many languages have been saved from extinction and in a few cases even revived (Hebrew is an anthologized example). But it is also a fact that languages, and not necessarily endangered ones, those with few speakers left, have been dying throughout history. Take Hittite, Hunnish, and Gothic. They were spoken by tens of thousands of people forming powerful tribal unions. What is left are a heap of clay tablets, a few biblical fragments, and the like, while from preliterate societies (to which the Huns belonged) almost nothing has remained. Vandals have a bad press, though at one time they were not worse than, say, the Goths. The Vandals are gone, and, but for a few names and words recorded by the Romans, we would have had no idea of their language. History is cruel; however, it is also unpredictable: it sometimes spares the weak and destroys the strong.

Etymologies. How are Engl. bold and Old Icelandic ballr related, considering that the Icelandic word meant “frightful, dangerous, fatal?” Adjectives often refer to a quality possessed by an individual and the effect this quality has on others. Here we deal with courage and its results: a stout-hearted person is “bold,” whereas his boldness is “dangerous” to others. Can Engl. evil be related to Latin evilescere “to become vile, worthless, despicable,” and, if such a possibility exists, can certain conclusions be drawn with relation to the writings of early English saints? Our correspondent is correct in isolating the root of vilis “vile” in the Latin verb (e- is a prefix). This structure excludes its affinity to evil, but any influence of this relatively rare Latin verb on the Old English adjective should also be ruled out, because the original form of evil was yfil (the modern pronunciation of the stressed vowel is a “Kentism”) and because its cognates, beginning with Gothic, already had the meaning it has today. A medieval scholar would have been delighted to catch at the similarity between evil and evilescere, but by the time umlaut changed u in ubil- (the reconstructed but secure protoform of evil) to y, let alone by the Middle English period (when Old Engl. long y yielded e), all the works cited in the letter had been written and become canon. Ubil-, though pronounced with -v-, did not sound like Latin evil- and would not have inspired even the most ingenious thinker of the Middle Ages. The literature on counting-out rhymes is vast. As always, I am grateful for every tip, but, while writing about eena-meena, I included among my references only those works that deal with the origin of the relevant words, and such works are not many

Pronunciation and grammar. (I won’t repeat the questions, for they can be guessed from the answers.) Unless the norm has changed in recent years, the first vowel in Coventry has the value of o in on. It is true that the o in womb is not identical with its counterpart in woman. But since I do not use phonetic symbols in this blog, I disregarded the vowels’ respective duration. Food and foot are distinguished in the same way (the first oo designates a longer sound). I doubt that anyone acquainted with Emily Bronte’s novel pronounces wuthering, as in Wuthering Heights, with the vowel of strut, though the name Wuthering does have such a vowel. It was good to hear that the OED allows shrank, my past tense of shrink, to exist. I am aware of the fact that in American English the common past form of shrink is shrunk but feel quite comfortable with my slightly idiosyncratic grammar. There is no way I can keep abreast of the times. Most people around me say shined where I say shone (my shone used to rhyme gone, and when I finally made it rhyme with lone, it was too late: shined replaced both). Likewise, I refuse to say plead-pled and stick to pleaded. Little restaurants in my area post the coy apology: “Excuse us: we are slightly old-fashioned.” I am afraid I should carry a board on my breast with a similar message.

Antedatings and contested etymologies. Thanks to Stephen Goranson for his information about the first occurrences of fiasco and snob. Snob remains a word that reached London around the 1770’s. The story connecting the introduction of fiasco with a bad performance by Biancolelli, the harlequin, has been repeated many times, and I knew it. I cannot disprove it, but long experience has taught me to treat such tales with great distrust. When it comes to etymology, they usually turn out to be wrong. One can imagine that far’ fiasco had existed before the actor’s poor performance and that he deliberately carried a bottle around his neck, a good precautionary measure for all of us, whether comedians or etymologists.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Words can be related in more ways that one. 19th-century language historians discovered so-called sound correspondences. For example, French has trois, while English has three, and a “law” regulates the t ~ th alternation between French and English. This law works so well that if words in both French and English begin with t, they cannot be true cognates. And indeed, Engl. touch and French toucher are not siblings: the English verb is a borrowing of the French one, not its congener. Similar correspondences have been found between vowels. But language is not arithmetic, and words are not soldiers on the march. Time and again we seem to be dealing with related words despite the fact that they violate sound correspondences. Engl. cob, in any of its numerous meanings, looks as though it is connected with cub; yet no “law” covers the alternation of o and u in Modern English. Hundreds of words look like members of a club rather than of a family (club members recognize one another and dine together but have different parents) or the children living in the same orphanage (identical clothes and similar habits, but the union is artificial), or even mushrooms growing on a stump (no common root despite the unmistakable ties). Scholars feel insecure when faced with this situation: once they step outside the green zone of regular sound correspondences, the door opens to arbitrary etymologizing. They suddenly find themselves in the 18th century (at the latest), when no control for comparing look-alikes existed. At that time, god was derived from good and rabbit from rub or rough-foot, and such derivations aroused no protest. As we will see, the origin of snob is not particularly complicated, provided we agree to remain in a word orphanage rather than in a family.

Even an approximate age of the noun snob is beyond reconstruction, for no citation of it predates 1776. Judging by the records, it originated in the north of England, which neither means that it is a loan from Scandinavian into Middle English nor makes such a conjecture improbable. Some Scandinavian words that had been current in the north since the Vikings’ raids reached the Standard unexpectedly late. One of them is slang, whose history, contrary to the history of snob, has been traced in detail. The attested meanings of snob are as following (the dates in parentheses refer to their first known appearance in print); “shoemaker; cobbler’s apprentice” (1781); “a townsman, anyone not a gownsman (that is, a student) in Cambridge” (1796); “a person belonging to the ordinary or lower classes of society; one having no pretensions to rank or gentility; one who has little or no breeding or good taste, a vulgar or ostentatious person” (1838, 1859); “one whose ideas and conduct are prompted by a vulgar admiration for wealth or social position” (1846-1848). Snob “cobbler” is still a living word in some dialects, but most English-speakers remember only the last-mentioned meaning.

The word snob and its derivatives (snobbery, snobbish, snobbishness; rarely snobbism) owe their popularity to Thackeray, who first published his essays on various snobs in Punch and later collected them in a book. His snobs are not always vulgar and ostentatious people: some are insufficiently refined, and their manners are ridiculed only because of the pressure of society, which slights those whose manners violate certain rules. A reader of older English literature may wonder what is meant when snob turns up in the text. Long ago, an annual called The Keepsake (the predecessor of Christmas books) was published in the United States. In the annual for 1831, the following verse appeared: “Sir Samuel Snob—that was his name—/ Three times to Mrs. Brown/ Had ventured just to hint his flame,/ And twice received—a frown.” We applaud Sir Samuel’s perseverance but would like to know why his surname was Snob. Most definitely, he was not a cobbler. I suspect that he lacked breeding, for otherwise he would not have accosted a married woman in such an ungentlemanly way.

Some tie connects snob and nob. The latter has a doublet knob, and the two are often impossible to distinguish. Among other things, nob/knob means “head.” Cobblers (“snobs”) deal with people’s feet, not their heads, but nobs did not make hats or bonnets. Snobs and nobs are said to have arisen among the internal factions of shoemakers. (Here and below, I am using shoemaker and cobbler as interchangeable synonyms, but originally the cobblers claimed control over the soles of boots and shoes, and shoemakers over the upper leathers.) Allusions to “two great sections of mankind, nobs and snobs” turn up occasionally in 19th-century fiction and the popular press. According to an 1831 newspaper statement (again 1831!), “the nobs have lost their dirty seats—the honest snobs have got ‘em.” A hundred years ago, in British provincial English a strikebreaker, or scab, as such an individual is known in the United States, was called knobstick, blacknob, knob, and nob. Here “nobs” are again represented as dishonest. Although in regional speech the sound s- is often added to all kinds of words (hence the secondary bond between slang and language, for example), nothing suggests that the etymon (source) of snob is nob, with s- prefixed to it. Both snob and cobbler contain the group -ob-, but this coincidence is probably of no importance either.

It does not follow that “cobbler” is the original meaning of snob because it is the earliest one in our texts. More likely, the starting point was “a vulgar person,” with “cobbler” chosen as the epitome of vulgarity. Students at Cambridge must have had that connotation in mind when they, the gownsmen, showed their contempt to the townsmen. At Eaton and Oxford, townsmen were called cads. Cad is a shortening of cad(d)ee, that is, of caddie “cadet” (cadet is a French word), and it meant “an unbooked passenger on a coach; assistant to a coachman; omnibus conductor; confederate,” in dialects also “the youngest of a litter; an odd-job man” before it acquired the meaning “townsman” and “an ill-bred person.” Cobblers and their apprentices are no more “vulgar” than conductors and their assistants.

The question is why snob, whatever its age and provenance, came to designate a person deficient in breeding and how it was coined. In the Germanic languages, the consonantal group sn- is sound symbolic, and in this respect it shares common ground with gl- (which often turns up in words for “glitter” and “glow”) and sl- (which is frequent in words for “slime” and things slovenly and sleazy). Initial sn- occurs in numerous words designating cutting (compare snip, snap, and snub) and sharp objects, including “nose” (compare snout) and its functions (compare sneeze, snooze, snort, sniff, and snuff). Among the Scandinavian words resembling snob, especially prominent are a few meaning “fool, dolt, idiot,” but they have the structure sn-p. The connection between cutting/snapping/ sniffing and stupidity is not immediately obvious, but one can be called a fool for so many reasons that guessing would be unprofitable. People may have called the sn-p man a fool because he was of stunted growth (“snubbed” by nature) or had an ugly “snout.” A snotty person produces too much mucus in his nose, but snotty is also “arrogant, supercilious.” Perhaps snotty “arrogant” is a variant of snooty “snouty,” unrelated directly to snot; however, one cannot be certain. Old Icelandic snotr “clever, wise” has cognates in other Germanic languages and continued into Modern Icelandic (snotur). The etymology of snotr remains a matter of debate. In any case, a person who has a sensitive nose smells things others miss and becomes clever in the process. In historical semantics, as in life, the distance between “wise” and “stupid” is short.

Welcome to the sn-club. Snob belongs to it, but its origin is partly obscure. When it emerged, it seems to have designated a person whose social status was low. Although, apparently, a northern word, snob does not sound exactly like any Scandinavian noun or verb and could be coined on English soil. It correlates with nob but was not derived from it, and its association with cobblers is more or less fortuitous. Snob may be a cognate of snub, but their kinship does not explain how it was coined. According to a legend, whose earliest version was offered in 1850, snob is an abbreviation of either s(ine) nob(ilitate) or s(ub) nob(ilitate). Allegedly, those words were written in the matriculation documents at either Cambridge or Oxford, or Eaton if a graduate was not an aristocrat. This legend, as Skeat, himself a long-time professor at Cambridge, put it, is a poor joke.

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Haitian novelist and memoirist extraordinaire Edwidge Danticat was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for her most recent book Brother, I'm Dying; you can read an interview about her book and the nomination here. A few weeks before the awards, however, Danticat was gracious enough to talk a bit about her childhood in Brooklyn. Though Danticat no longer lives here, the borough's literary culture is a little bit richer for having her.

Brooklyn Lit Life
Edwidge Danticat

Describe your particular literary project, and your role in it.
It’s a book called Brother, I’m Dying, a family memoir.

Why Brooklyn? What made you decide to live/work here, in both practical and emotional terms?
My father moved here when I was 2 and my mother when I was 4. They left me in Haiti with my aunt and uncle while getting settled here. With immigration red tape it took us 8 years to be reunited in Brooklyn when I was twelve years old.

Is there a Brooklyn sensibility or character? How would you describe it? How does it differ from the character of New York City as a whole?
Brooklyn is like a microcosm in the world. So many people from Brooklyn come from somewhere else, even somewhere else in the United States. Brooklynites are feisty and strong and proud. I meet people all the time from all over the world who have some type of connection to Brooklyn and they are always very proud of it.

What about your particular neighborhood? Does it have its own unique character? This can include the kinds of people you tend to find there, particular characters or places that epitomize the neighborhood, etc.
I grew up in East Flatbush which was a very Caribbean neighborhood. You could/can find spices and foods there that you can find in Port-au-Prince, or Kingston. That made it feel even more like home, in spite of the cold winters. Also the labor day Caribbean festival is unmatched in its scale in the States. It’s a wonderful carnival that we all participated in from my community and others.

Is there a Brooklyn literary sensibility? Which writers or works most emblematize Brooklyn for you? Which older writers set the tone? Which contemporary writers are you reading with interest?
Paul Auster has it. Sapphire, Gloria Naylor Paule Marshall, Jacqueline Woodson, Jonathan Safran Sofer [sic], Jonathan Lethem of course are all emblematic Brooklyn writers. But we have wonderful writers too who even though they’re not writing about Brooklyn yet are now part of the fabric, writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and other more recent Brooklynites.

Why do you think Brooklyn has such a dense population of writers? Is there something particularly literary about Brooklyn? Where and how do people read here?
Brooklyn lacks the craziness of having to be all business all the time publishing wise, plus it offers a community. I think that’s very appealing to writers.

What events, series, readings, happenings, places, stores, publications, movements, etc. seem to you currently interesting or important in the Brooklyn literary world?
The Brooklyn public libraries have some great liteary events. The Brooklyn book festival is fabulous. I’ve never seen that many people at a book event in Brooklyn. BAM is a great treasure, our own Lincoln Center with edge. There are also a slew of smaller event within the different ethnic communities that are very exciting.

Imagine the ideal Brooklyn bookstore or literary venue, a place you'd like to read on your own or participate in literary community. What would it be like? What would it avoid?
Nkiru Books when it existed was great. It was a great independent that brought wonderful writers like that. More small independent bookstores would be great.