By: Alice,
on 7/1/2015
Several years ago, I wrote a post on the origin of the word frigate. The reason I embarked on that venture was explained in the post: I had run into what seemed to me a promising conjecture by Vittorio Pisani. As far as I could judge, his note had attracted no attention, and I felt it my duty to rectify the injustice.
The post Monthly etymology gleanings for June 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 2/11/2015
One does not have to be a specialist to suggest that threshold is either a disguised compound or that it contains a root and some impenetrable suffix. Disguised compounds are words like bridal (originally, bride + ale but now not even a noun as in the past, because -al was taken for the suffix of an adjective) or barn, a blend of the words for “barley,” of which only b is extant, and Old Engl. earn “house.” I cited æren ~ earn in the post on house. Nor is it immediately clear whether we are dealing with thresh-old or thresh-hold. Some of our earlier etymologists (among them Junius, 1743, in a posthumous edition of his dictionary, and Mahn, the 1864 editor of etymologies in Webster) thought that threshold was indeed thresh + hold. They were wrong. An attempt to identify -shold with sill is a solution born of etymological despair. This Germanic word for “threshold” was opaque as far back as the time of the oldest written monuments. For some reason, Latin limen and Russian porog (stress on the second syllable), both meaning “threshold,” also lack a definitive etymology.
The attested forms are many. Old English had þrescold, þerxold, and even þrexwold (þ = th), which shows that the word’s inner form made little sense to the speakers. Thus, -wold meant, as it more or less still does, “forest.” Hence the persistent belief that the threshold is a board or a plank on which one thrashed. This interpretation survived the first edition of Skeat’s dictionary (about which more will be said below) and surfaced in numerous books derivative of it. But wold never meant “wood, timber.”
Swedish tröskel and Norwegian terskel go back to Old Norse þresk(j)öldr, which, like its Old English congener, underwent several changes under the influence of folk etymology; the second element was associated with the Old Norse word “shield.” The fact that the threshold has nothing to do with shields did not bother anyone; folk etymology gets its nourishment from outward similarity and ignores logic. Old High German driscubli ~ driscufli live on only in dialects. The Standard Modern German word for “threshold” is Schwelle, a cognate of Engl. sill, as, among others, in windowsill.
The Scandinavian forms look like the English ones, but those of the Low (= northern) German-Dutch-Frisian area bear almost no resemblance to them. Modern Dutch has drempel and dorpel. The suffix -el causes no problems. The fact that in drempel r precedes the vowel, while in dorpel r follows it, can be explained away as a typical case of metathesis (see Old Engl. þrescold and þerxold, above). An extra m in drempel need not embarrass us either, for such nasalized forms are plentiful. Thus, Engl. find may be allied to Latin petere “to seek,” and if it is not, there are dozens of other examples. Consider stand—stood; though, when one word requires so much special pleading, some feeling of unease cannot be avoided. The English noun makes us think of thrash and its doublet thresh, while Dutch drempel seems to be cognate with Engl. trample. Now the threshold comes out as that part of the floor on which we tread, rather than thrash, though neither trample nor especially thresh ~ thrash are close synonyms of tread. In making this argument, Germans often glossed threshold as Trittholz (Tritt “step,” Holz “wood”).
Jacob Grimm, who sometimes made mistakes but never said anything that failed to provoke and enrich thought, believed that threshold designated the part of the house in which corn was threshed or stamped upon (stamping constituted the primitive system of threshing) and had some following, but Charles P. G. Scot, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary, noted that “the threshing could not have been accomplished on the narrow sills which form thresholds, and it was only in comparatively few houses that threshing was done at all.” Some time later Rudolf Meringer, who devoted much energy to researching people’s material culture in the German and Slavic-speaking areas, said the same. He pointed out that, as a general rule, the oldest Germanic threshing floors were situated outside living houses and that the only exceptions could be found in Lower Saxony.
Not without some reluctance we should accept the conclusion that in the remote past the threshold denoted an area next to the living quarters, rather than what we today understand by this word, assuming of course that thresh- in threshold is identical with thresh ~ thrash. However, this assumption seems inevitable. The verb in question could perhaps at some time mean “rub,” as shown by the possible cognates of thrash ~ thresh in Latin (terere) and Russian (teret’; stress on the second syllable), not “beat repeatedly and violently.” Yet this nicety will only obscure the picture, for the threshold was not a board people’s feet “rubbed.”
We should now turn our attention to -old. The OED, in an entry published in 1912, cautiously identified thresh- with the corresponding verb and called the residue of threshold (that is, -old) doubtful. The much later Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology shifted accents somewhat: the first element is said to go back to Old Engl. þerscan, retained as Modern English thrash in the primitive sense of “tread, trample,” while the second element is called not identifiable, which sounds more ominous than “doubtful.” (The entry has yet to be revised as part of OED‘s current comprehensive revision.) In my opinion, the situation with the second element is not so hopeless.
The famous German linguist Eduard Sievers isolated the ancient suffix -ðlo (ð = th in Modern Engl. the). Its existence cannot be put into question, and it is still almost discernible in words like needle. Sievers reconstructed the etymon of threshold as þersc-o-ðl(o). Old High German drisc-u-bli (see it above) looks almost like his etymon. In that form, ðl changed to dl and allegedly underwent metathesis: dl to ld (a common process: even needle has been recorded in the form neelde); hence threshold. Skeat must have read the article suggesting this reconstruction too late (it is not for nothing that the Germans sometimes accused him of not following their publications!), but, once he became familiar with it, he accepted Sievers’s reconstruction with undisguised enthusiasm. Although he usually reported new findings in his Concise Dictionary, strangely, for many years the old derivation remained the same in the subsequent editions of the smaller book, despite the fact that in his ambitious work Principles of English Etymology (1887) the new solution was presented as self-evident. Surprisingly, the last Concise published in his lifetime appeared in two versions. In one, Sievers is only mentioned; in the other, the reference to the volume and page is given, exactly as in a note published many years earlier. This shows that even an accurate reference can be misleading and lead critics astray.
I don’t know the reason for the OED’s caution (in 1912), seeing that Sievers’s article appeared in 1878 and that Skeat first defended it in print in 1885. Some dictionaries follow Sievers, but isolate the suffix -wold in threshold. One of the Old English forms did end in -wold, but, as noted, it must have been the product of folk etymology. Scandinavian scholars are especially prone to favoring this suffix because the Old Norse for thrash ~ thresh was þryskva, but þryskva can be dismissed as a doublet of þreskja. Besides, once we allow w in the suffix to take a permanent place, there is no way of getting rid of it in other forms.
Thus, threshold is less troublesome than our reference books sometimes make it out to be. At one time, it appears, the threshold was not part of a doorway. The word’s original form became obscure quite early and produced a whole bouquet of folk etymological doublets. Old High German driscubli stands especially close to the sought-after etymon. Most probably, the threshold was a place where corn was threshed (a threshing floor). The word contained a root and a suffix. That suffix has undergone numerous changes, for people tried to identify it with some word that could make sense to them. What remains unclear is not this process but the semantic leap. We are missing the moment at which the threshing floor, however primitive, began to denote the entrance to the room.
Image credits: (1) ‘Dweller on the Threshold’ by Arthur Bowen Davies, circa 1915. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Hadrian’s Wall. Photo by Glen Bowman. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
The post Our habitat: threshold appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 3/14/2014
Stories are powerful ways to bring the voice and ideas of marginalized people into endeavors to restore justice and enact change. Beginning in the early 1990s, I started using oral history to bring the stories and experiences of abused women into efforts to make policy changes in New York City. Trained and supported by colleagues at Columbia Center for Oral History and Hunter College’s Puerto Rican Studies Department, I was able to pioneer the use of oral history to leverage social change.
In 2007, I became an Ashoka Fellow and had the space to organize my ideas and experiences about oral history, story gathering, and participatory practices into a set of teachable methods and strategies. This resulted in the creation of Threshold Collaborative, an organization that uses stories as a catalyst for change. Our methods aim to deepen empathy and ignite action in order to build more just, caring, and healthy communities. Working with justice organizations around the country, we help design and implement ways to do that through engaged story work.
This is why when a colleague who runs a youth leadership organization in Pennsylvania wanted to share the ideas and voices of the area’s marginalized youth, we helped to create a school-based story-sharing initiative called A Picture is Worth…. This project came to fruition after the New York Times gave Reading, PA the “unwelcome distinction” of having the highest poverty rate of any American city. Reading also suffered from elevated high school dropout numbers and extraordinarily low college degree rates.
Threshold went to the I-LEAD Charter High School in Reading, which offers poor and immigrant youth another chance to succeed. After spending time at the school — meeting and talking with teachers, parents and learners — we brainstormed a project that would incorporate the personal stories of 22 learners into an initiative to help them learn about themselves, their peers, and their larger community. Audio story gathering and sharing were at the core of this work. The idea was to support them in identifying their vision and values, link them with their peers, and thereby align them with positive change going on in Reading.
With the support of I-LEAD, assistance from the administrators and teachers, the talent of a fabulous photographer Janice Levy, and of course, the participation of the students, Threshold was able to launch an in-school curricular literacy class, which revolved around story gathering and sharing. The project uses writing, audio stories and photography to create powerful interactive narratives of students, highlighting their unique yet unifying experiences. A Picture is Worth… also provides an associated curriculum in literacy for high school students. The project fosters acquisition of real-world knowledge and skills, and encourages young learners to become more engaged in personal and scholastic growth, by combining personal stories with academic standards.
We also gathered and edited the stories of all 22 learners and have linked them with the wonderful photos done by Levy. You can find these powerful voices and images on our Soundcloud page. Here is one of the photos and stories:
Now, we are growing this project to be able to share it with schools and other youth leadership programs around the country. Through our book, curriculum and training program, we hope to inspire youth justice programs to see how young people can contribute to positive change through the power of their stories.
More information about the project can be found at apictureisworth.org, as well as on Facebook.
Alisa Del Tufo has worked to support justice and to strengthen empathy throughout her life. Raising over 80 million dollars, she founded three game changing organizations: Sanctuary for Families, CONNECT, and Threshold Collaborative. In the early 1990s, Del Tufo pioneered the use of oral history and community engagement to build grassroots change around the issues of family, and intimate violence. Her innovations have been recognized through a Revson, Rockefeller, and Ashoka Fellowship.
The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, add them to your circles on Google Plus, follow them on Tumblr, listen to them on Soundcloud, or follow the latest Oral History Review posts on the OUPblog via email or RSS to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history.
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The post Threshold Collaborative: a lesson in engaged story work appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Jennifer Wylie,
on 12/12/2011
They say to write about what you know. When I was young, I had a near-death experience. Back then people didn’t understand much about the phenomenon, but I knew something extraordinary had happened. The search to understand the event fueled a lifelong spiritual journey.
After Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books published my first two paranormal thrillers, I wrote a novel about near-death experience told from the perspective of a young boy who drowns, has an NDE, and returns with a mission. Although Threshold is told from three alternating points-of-view: the boy, his teenage sister, and a Native American shaman, my literary agent didn’t believe it would be suitable for an adult market because the primary POV character was a tween. She also thought the subject matter too mature for a young adult market. Disheartened, I stashed the manuscript and—like a hidden and forgotten treasure—recently rediscovered it. I dusted it off, did a bit of updating, and the novel was released in November. The market has changed since I first wrote the book—YA readers have matured, and adults have embraced younger protagonists in popular fiction. Threshold hit Amazon’s Metaphysical Fiction Bestsellers List within three weeks of release, and reviewers are unanimous in their opinion that it is my best work yet. I believe that’s because I really did write about what I know.
When I died, I did not interpret the tunnel of light as a wormhole. Nor did the guide on the other side resemble Q, the omnipotent character from the Star Trek franchise. In trying to figure out the meaning of it all, I did not reflect on profound Star Trek episodes. Cole, my young protagonist, invokes Star Trek imagery because it is what he knows.
Following my NDE, my own spiritual journey took me through a variety of faiths and magical traditions, and many of those are touched upon in Threshold: shamanism, Wicca, mystical Christianity, and the Jewish Kabbalah. The novel is a tale about the lightside threatened by the darkside. This is because shadows follow Cole back through the wormhole, and terrible things begin to happen.
Threshold is a paranormal thriller about life, death, faith, courage, sacrifice, and the transformative power of love.
~ ~ ~
Cole pulled Shiloh up short while he tried to get a fix on his location. They were on the shore of Deer Lake, the lake’s frozen surface looming gray before him in the early morning light. His grandparents lived in Johnstown, which was across the lake and beyond by ten miles. He remembered their house from family gatherings prior to his mother’s disappearance and was sure he could find it again because Johnstown was a small town. He decided that braving the bitter weather was a small price to pay if the journey finally closed the case of his missing mother.
Cole and Shiloh were near the river that fed the lake, and he could see the bridge which crossed it. As he urged Shiloh to turn in that direction, the sharp sound of splitting ice ripped the air. Horrified, Cole realized that he had misjudged the lake’s shoreline—the recent snowfall and wind-driven drifts had completely changed the landscape. Shiloh reared up in fear and caught Cole off guard. The horse bucked, Cole flew off, and he hit the split ice with such force that he crashed straight through to the freezing water below. Before he had time to react, a fierce undertow from the river captured and swept him away from the hole, deeper into the lake. Through t
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