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By Anatoly Liberman

All historians who purport to reconstruct the past are detectives; consequently, some mysteries are bound to remain unsolved. Those who do not study etymology for a living (the majority of the world population) have no idea how word origins are discovered. To become a professional in this area requires years of training, but all too often expertise and acumen fail to provide the coveted answer: “Where did such and such a word come from?” Every now and then we stumble upon the right solution by chance. To be sure, only persistent players can expect to meet with such a chance, for, as Tchaikovsky put it, inspiration does not visit the lazy. Yet luck and serendipity are not uncommon factors in linguistic pursuits. I can think of three situations.

The policy of scorched earth, or a reward for diligence. When more than twenty years ago I began work on a new etymological dictionary of English, my goal was to become acquainted with everything that had ever been said about the origin of English words and their closest cognates. The authors of the existing English dictionaries mention the works of their predecessors in exceptional cases, partly due to the limitation of space, partly because they have little knowledge of the myriad articles and books that might have made their search more fruitful. Nor is it easy to find the relevant literature, and this is why my mill accepted all kinds of grist, regardless of its quality. Among the 18,000 odd titles I have amassed, many could have been dispensed with, but telephone books and bibliographies cannot afford being choosy. Long ago I obtained through Interlibrary Loan and read an old commentary on the language of the Gothic Bible. Gothic was recorded in the 4^th century, and its forms are of great value for comparative Germanic linguistics.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I had seldom read a more useless book. But in one of the footnotes, of which there were hundreds, the author remarked that, in his opinion, thrutsfill, the Gothic word for leprosy (I am using simplified spelling), and its Old English cognate thrustfell have the same root as Engl. thrush, the name of infants’ disease. The idea seemed much more illuminating to me than the universally accepted one, according to which Gothic thruts- is related to words for “swelling” (like Engl. throat); in Old English, the group -st- (thrustfell) was believed to be an alteration of the more ancient -ts- (thrutsfill). The name of the disease (thrush), a word distinct from the bird name, has been explained satisfactorily, even though some dictionaries hedge on this point: the almost indubitable cognates of thrush in the Scandinavian languages mean “rotten.” The symptom caused by thrush (multiple white spots in a baby’s mouth) was likened to rot. Fell, the second component of thrustfell, meant “skin,” as it still does in Modern English (“an animal’s hide or skin with hair on it”). It follows that thrustfell should be understood as “rotten skin” rather than “swollen skin” and that the consonants were switched in Gothic, not in Old English. To my mind, this etymology is excellent. I did not discover it myself, but, if I had not read that otherwise useless book from cover to cover, no one would have known it today, so, in a way, I am its coauthor. And here is my point. I might have spent my whole life trying to find the origin of the Old Germanic name for leprosy and would have drawn blank. The answer turned up where no one could expect to find it.

Rarely taught languages, or a reward for unpredictable knowledge. English etymologists have trouble understanding the connection between two meanings of the word fog: “deep mist” and “a second growth of grass” (this is what was originally called aftermath, that is, “after-mowing”). I happen to know Russian, a language that few Germanic scholars can read fluently, let alone speak. My knowledge of Russian is an accident of nature; I have not done anything for it. In Russian, a field left unsown (“to rest”) is called pod parom, literally “under vapor,” so that an association between moisture (mist, fog) and new grass seems natural to me. Therefore, I can offer a sensible explanation of two fog’s in English. If I knew Irish or Albanian as I know Russian, I would undoubtedly have been able to solve some other riddles of English etymology, for in a study of word origins a parallel is often all one needs to make a possible solution probable.

Delectable rambles, or pure serendipity. Like fog, the English word pimp also has two meanings: one is universally known (“a provider of prostitutes”), the other is dialectal (“a bundle of wood”). When I saw the second pimp in a dictionary, I was struck by its definition: “Pimp. Faggot.” How can it be, I asked myself, that two words related to sex have found themselves in such an unusual union? Greatly puzzled, I began to investigate the etymology of pimp. If its definition were only “a bundle of wood” (and this is what a faggot is), I would hardly have thought of the connection. Two of my previous posts in this blog were devoted to pimp and faggot, so here I will only say what gave me the best clue to their history.

Our students, like students at most American colleges, in order to graduate, are supposed to write senior projects. At Minnesota, those in the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch with an interest in language rather than in what is nowadays called culture on our campuses usually end up as my charges. One of them said that he wanted to write a work on the vocabulary of the Nazi time. I told him that our library had a sizable collection of newspapers published in Germany in the thirties and advised him to read some of them, in addition to the many books on the subject. But first I went to the periodical room and read a few issues myself.

In one of the newspapers the word Pimpf (“a small boy; a member of a youth organization under Hitler”) attracted my attention. I had known it before, but it was not active in my German. I immediately thought that Pimpf and pimp must be related, and so they turned out to be. This idea had not occurred to the great etymologists of the past because Pimpf was a rare word in 19^th-century German, and even some native scholars, let alone English-speakers, did not know it. People like Friedrich Kluge and other famous German etymologists rarely spoke English They could probably make an eloquent oration in Old English but would have been unable to communicate the simplest thought in the modern language. Pimp, predictably, does not occur in Beowulf; nor was it a permissible word in elegant Victorian literature. To be aware of its existence, one had to live in England, but they lived in Germany. Later dictionaries mainly copied and repackaged older works. This is why the obvious comparison pimp—Pimpf fell between the cracks. If that student had not come to me with his subject, the etymology of pimp would have remained undiscovered.

The next example was also discussed in one of my old posts, but I will mention it because it fits the subject so well. The librarian who at that time was in charge of our Special Collection (“Rare Books”) saw me once reading an 18^th-century journal and inquired whether I was the local etymologist who had reportedly explained the origin of the F-word. When I answered in the affirmative, he asked: “Do you know that we have a bunch of letters of James A. H. Murray and Henry Bradley, the first editors of the OED?” The result of his tip was my publication “James Murray at Minnesota.”

Here is my advice to etymologists. Do not despise the trashiest books, learn foreign languages, advise students who are interested in linguistics, and associate as much as possible with the librarians of your institutions. If you follow this advice, you shall have your reward. (The things I recommend are good to do even if you are not an etymologist.)

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A faint coat of pollen blanketed the top of my grandmother’s front porch throughout my childhood. The pollen on the porch was a constant source of aggravation for my grandmother, who apparently declared war on the pollutant long before any of us were born. Everyone gravitated to the front porch at grandmother's house, which was my families stomping ground for several generations; our place to touch base with each other and visit my grandmother, especially on holidays.


My grandmother complained of pollen every time we visited, forever using the occasion to draft her family in her war against the contamination of her front porch. However, her complaining did result in our desire to please her, so she managed to recruit many loyal elves in the process. Moreover, it encouraged her grandchildren to happily run around slinging a soapy front porch mop, in an effort to become proficient mopers.

Since my grandparents bought the house when my mother was ten, the front porch endured three generations of temper tantrums, holiday fights, and beatings by whatever new toy appeared on the market every Christmas. I wonder how many toy trucks made their way from one side of the porch to the other.


My siblings and I spent a good deal of time on the front porch, or in the yard playing, until we were old enough to graduate to the house. With the exception of a holiday, bad weather, or illness we were not in the house much, a practice I understood with more clarity when I became a grown-up. Of course, we went in the house to eat, and in the evening, but the rest of our time was spent playing outdoors.

Playing inside was a privilege for many reasons, but I loved listening to the sound of the screen door as everyone crossed the threshold.

If you were inside the house, the sound of the door defined what was going on outside, by the way it swung on the hinges. For example, if the door closed abruptly, you could hear the screen bounce off the door frame a few times before it slowly swung to a close.

Happiness on the other hand, was marked by silence, since it meant the door was open, while someone stood in the threshold socializing with whoever sat on the porch. In addition, I spent much of my young life listening to the sound of a voice shouting, “Close the screen door!” and much of my adult life will be spend enjoying the memory.

It will join the phrase, “You are letting in mosquitoes! Alternatively, another favorite expression, “You’re letting the air out the door” letting the air out? I know, I know, I know what it means when referring to a front door, but a porch screen door? The air on the porch is the same air, is it not?

Anyway, the best example of my screen door theory took place one Christmas holiday, after Christmas dinner:



One Christmas my grandmother invited a close friend as a guest for Christmas dinner. This visitor was a quest the previous year, and was kind enough to bring her awful tasting plum pudding for dessert. And though the sentiment was appreciated the pudding tasted so awful we took turns excusing ourselves from the table- that way we could race each other to the bathroom, so we could spit out the ingredients in the sink. This is not an exaggeration, we were literally stepping over each other to get in the bathroom, the only exception was my mother who retreated to the restroom upstairs. Well, that was the first Christmas, my example is about the following Christmas when my grandmother's friend volunteered her fabulous plum pudding again!


And this year, my grandmother insisted, we would not repeat the same rude behavior from her table again on Christmas Eve. Consequently, I spent precious library hours searching for the appropriate etiquette one should display when eating distasteful food, or food one cannot stand from the dinner table! It is now comical that my grandmother actually expected us to eat something we found so awful. Moreover, did her friend not realize that the pudding tasted terrible, or did she enjoy torturing small children and others at Christmastime? I will for the life of me, never understand why she brought this plum pudding a second time, I guess it will always be another pudding in the sky mystery!

Anyway, I knew this guest was angry when she arrived that Christmas, because the front porch door snapped back quickly when she marched through it, her hands full of plum pudding. I was young, so the most I remember is the giggling and the quick trips to the bathroom, with the exception of the look on my grandmother’s face, when she herself took a bite of her friend’s dessert.

Toward the close of the evening, our guest left in a polite manner, graciously thanking my grandmother, and telling us Merry Christmas. However, her true feelings about the evening were expressed by way of the screen porch door. My grandmother's guest took what was left of her pudding, politely smiled, and said, “ Ya’ll do have a Merry Christmas” whereupon she closed the door so abruptly, you could hear the screen slam against the door frame more than a few times before swinging wildly to a close.


The moral of the story? If you have a screen on your front porch door, you will always know the true feelings of your guests. But if you don't have a screen on the porch door, it'll be harder to tell.. Although, I suppose any front door can possess these qualities, therefore pay close attention to yours and see if you can tell...

Of course, that is with the exception of those who abruptly slam the door to a close- that would suggest you have an angry guest on your hands. In addition, watch the faces of those eating your Christmas desserts, if they run quickly to the bathroom, you should probably choose a different recipe the following year. :)


Merry Christmas everybody!



(Authors note: This is an edited version of a Slamming Porch Door I wrote back in August. Since it is about a Christmas dinner I decided to repost it.

If you've read it thanks for reading it again, if not, I hope you will enjoy your first read-)