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By Anatoly Liberman

In the eighties of the 19th century, chestnut “a piece of trite information” took American newspapers by storm, but the origin of this strange application of the name of a nut to a “Joe Miller” was lost as soon as the word came up. In 1888, James Murray, while working on the letter C for the OED, wrote the following: “Chestnut. Many circumstantial stories purporting to give the origin of the slang use of this for ‘stale joke, story heard before,’ appeared in the American newspapers in 1886 and 1887. As these differed in toto from one another, they testified to the ingenuity of their inventors, but gave no help towards the actual origin. Are there any facts as to this known?” The bite of Murray’s language is typical. He always begged his correspondents not to indulge in etymological guesswork but to supply him only with evidence. His readers sympathized with this attitude but kept sending him their suggestions.

In the entry chestnut in the OED, we read: “Origin unknown: said to have arisen in U.S. The newspapers of 1886-7 contain numerous circumstantial explanations palpably invented for the purpose. A plausible account is given in the place cited in quot. 1888.” The whole of the relevant quotation will be reproduced below, but it would be of some interest to read those circumstantial explanations even if they testify only to the ingenuity of their inventors. I am greatly obliged to two bibliographers (both incomparably more experienced in such matters than I am)—Stephen Goranson and Dennis Lien—who supplied me with many useful excerpts, but even they were unable to find the conjectures about which Murray spoke with unconcealed contempt. I came across only one such, second-hand: it was quoted in Notes and Queries (July 29, 1889) with reference to the Louisville Western Recorder, but without specifying the issue or date. Allegedly, chestnut is “a corruption of the old saying just not.” If the other etymologies are of the same type, they need not bother us. Perhaps all of them have been preserved in the archives of the OED.

The American dictionaries published close to the eighties (The Century Dictionary and Funk and Wagnalls [FW], 1893, which copied from it) wrote: “In allusion to a stale or worm-eaten chestnut.” This explanation remained in FW until 1959. Related explanations are chestnut, because it is old enough to have a beard and others like it. Frank Chance, about whom I have spoken admiringly more than once in this blog, suggested that chestnut might be a translation of French marron “a kind of chestnut” and “a stencil plate by means of which any word or pattern may be reproduced indefinitely” (he also mentioned a few comparable attributive uses). Some figurative senses of marron refer to things unlicensed or irregular. As always in such cases, the most important thing is not to find a plausible etymon (an old, worm-eaten nut or a French noun/adjective), but to explain why this word attained celebrity exactly when it did. Celebrity is no exaggeration. The name became so popular that a chestnut bell was invented. It was a little nickel-plated gong “attached to the coat or vest of the thoughtless.” When the wearer wished to be offensive or funny, he made use of the bell. The phrases (or compounds) chestnut gong and chestnut protectors existed too. Listeners rang them to express their derision. The device was said to have been invented in New York.

Additionally, chestnut was referred to the family name Chestnut. One more etymology perhaps deserves mention. A correspondent wrote to Notes and Queries in 1923: “I was told [in Philadelphia a few years ago] that the principal—I think the only—theatre in that town stood in Chestnut Street, until a rival house was opened in Walnut Street, which continues the line of Chestnut Street. The partisans of the older theatre attended a performance in the new one as jealous and vociferous critics, and when they recognized any phrase they had heard or passage that they had witnessed in the Chestnut Street theatre, they shouted ‘Chestnut, chestnut!’ I am bound to say that this does not sound very convincing; but I give it as the legend current in Philadelphia.”

If we disregard references to nuts, English or French, family names, garbled phrases like just not, and so forth, we will find only one lead worth pursuing. Tradition, despite its conflicting variants, derives chestnut from theatrical slang. The tale quoted approvingly by Murray has been repeated in many popular books and given additional credence by the Supplement to the OED. But the OED had enough space for only a tiny piece of that tale (from Hatton’s Reminiscences of J.L. Toole). Here is all of it.

“‘There is a melodrama,’ says Mr. Jefferson,’ but little known to the present generation, written by William Dillon, and called the Broken Sword. There are two characters in it—one a Captain Xavier, and the other the comedy part of Pablo. The captain is a sort of baron Munchausen, and in telling his exploits says:—I entered the woods of Colloway, when suddenly from the thick boughs of a cork-tree—“—Pablo interrupts him with the words, “A chestnut, Captain; a chestnut.”—“Bah,” replies the Captain; “Booby, I say a cork-tree!”—“A chestnut,” reiterated Pablo. “I should know as well as you, having heard you tell the tale these twenty-seven times.”—William Warren, who had often played the part of Pablo, was at a stage-dinner a few years ago, when one of the gentlemen present told a story of doubtful age and originality.” A chestnut,” murmured Mr. Warren, quoting from the play, “I have heard you tell the tale these twenty-seven times.”—The application of the lines pleased the rest of the table, and when the party broke up, each helped to spread the story and Mr. Warren’s commentary. And that,’ says Mr. Jefferson, ‘is what I really believe to be the origin of the word ‘chestnut’.”

A few things puzzle me about this etymology, by now itself a venerable chestnut. In the Reminiscences the name of the author appears as Dillon, but it must be Dimond (correctly given in the OED). Likewise, the Captain’s name was Zavior, not Xavier, a circumstance that makes the narrator’s memory an unsafe source of reference (though, to be sure, Xavier and Zavior only look different but are pronounced the same). Dimond’s “melo-drama” was published in 1816 and, despite its apparent success, has never been reprinted. The first edition of Joseph Hatton’s Reminiscences of J.L. Toole came out in 1888, when the slang word chestnut had become widely known, so that it was easy to fabricate a tale for the purposes of folk etymology (compare the report of the war of the theaters in Philadelphia). As far as we can judge, the homeland of chestnut “an oft-repeated joke” is the United States. What made it so wildly popular in American newspapers? Was The Broken Sword performed evening after evening on American stage? (Hardly so: the play “was little known to the present generation”). Why didn’t this word circulate in England before it surfaced in America? We are told that Warren whispered his remark. How did it become the talk of the town? I have great difficulty connecting the dots.

Modern dictionaries behave ignominiously. Under chestnut, they list the sense “a stale joke” and offer no etymology (not even “origin unknown”), as though it is natural for chestnut to have such a meaning. The old verdict “the numerous accounts of the origin of this use… are mutually exclusive and all incapable of proof” seems to be correct. But attempts to trace chestnut to theatrical usage may bear fruit, and this fruit (let us hope) will be less stale and worm-eaten than a rotten chestnut. At the moment we are nowhere near that goal.

By Anatoly Liberman

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.)

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Anatoly Liberman says in his book Word Origins that English is a conservative language when it comes to spelling.

The idea is that even though you might not be able to tell where a word comes from by hearing it, when you see it written down sometimes there are more clues because the spelling often retains evidence of its history.

Such is the case with the word lieutenant.  The word arrived in English from French in 1375 and within 100 years the English were pronouncing it “left-tenant” as if there were a “right-tenant” as well.  Yet the spelling that influences Americans to say “loo-tenant” survived this pronunciation change back in the old country and also shows us in stark clarity where the word comes from.

If you write lieutenant out, but put a space after lieu, the result is two other common English words.

Lieu might have a bit of a legalistic flavor to it but most people recognize that it means “instead of” or “in place of”—for example: “in lieu of paying me the money, she took me out to dinner.”

Of course a tenant is someone who rents an apartment. They hold the lease on the place and if it’s a nice apartment, in a desirable neighborhood, they might hold onto it tenaciously.

From Latin then, lieutenant literally means “place holder” and the military lieutenant acts on behalf of—or in place of—their commanding officer.

No one can really say why in the British Army the word is pronounced “left-tenant” but it’s notable that in the Royal Navy the pronunciation seems half way across the ocean. They drop the “f” and say “le-tenant.”

In the course of this month two journalists have approached me with questions related to political scandals. My answers, neither of which has been printed in full, may perhaps interest the readers of our blog.

Question 1: “How typical are phrases like Ponzi scheme?” As far as I can judge, three ways exist of attaching a proper name to a noun that follows it. A suffix can be added to a proper name: cf. Byronic or Shakespearean. Such adjectives usually mean “in the style of.” Thus, we can speak of a Byronic poem and Shakespearean passions. If the idea of possession has to be expressed, s does the work, as in Ohm’s law. But sometimes the phrase consists of two bare stems: so in place names (Panama Canal, Washington Street) and in Ponzi scheme. (A succession of two nouns is most common in English. They may remain independent or produce a compound, but in both cases the first noun plays the role of an attribute. Even s in the middle does not always prevent the components from merging into a compound; that is why cat food, catfish, cat’s-paw, and cat’s cradle are spelled differently.) We have no trouble choosing between Carnegie Hall (a place named after Carnegie) and Carnegie’s Hall (a residence belonging to him); yet the line between the second and the third variant is often blurred. Parkinson’s Law is unambiguous (the law has been formulated by Parkinson), whereas Parkinson’s disease is not (Parkinson did not suffer from it), and a search in the Internet reveals the variant Parkinson disease. Compare Lou Gehrig’s disease (it was indeed the disease that killed Lou Gehrig). Here too I find the variant Lou Gehrig disease, as though the term commemorates the victim of a disease that at his time was a mystery. Monroe Doctrine and Marshall Plan would have been equally, if not more, natural with s. Chess players know the Philidor defense (you may remember the title of Nabokov’s novel The Luzhin Defense, usually cited with its British spelling defence). However, Philidor developed it, and one could have expected the phrase to be treated like Ohm’s Law. On the other hand, London’s streets and Chicago’s skyscrapers strike me as an affectation, an attempt of a prosaic mind to sound poetic. The difference between word groups like Lou Gehrig disease and Lou Gehrig’s disease does not seem to have attracted the attention it deserves, and if some of our readers are aware of works dealing with it or have ideas on this score, their comments will be welcome. A clearly formulated rule may not bring them the Nobel Prize in literature (linguists are not expected to get it), but it may become a valuable addition to our grammar books.

Question 2: “A recent commentator used the name Blagojevich as a verb. Is it usual for a proper name to be treated like this?” Probably not. We speak of Pasteurized milk and bowdlerized books. The verbs to pasteur and to bowdler do not exist. Nor have Caesar, Attila, Luther, Napoleon, and the names of other celebrities been turned into verbs. Exceptions are rare. Boycott is one of them. In a recent post, I mentioned Oscar Wilde’s Mr. Bunbury, the fictitious peripatetic gentleman appearing in The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde also coined the verb to Bunbury. The only productive model seems to be the one with out, as in to out-Herod Herod. One can substitute any proper name for Herod in this formula. Thus I have moderate enthusiasm for constructions like to be Blagojeviched.

WORDS
Our French correspondent wonders why we say President-elect rather than elected. He asked his American friends, but they only said that correct usage required it. Turning to native speakers with such questions is usually a waste of time. Only trained linguists are in a position to explain grammatical niceties, and in some cases it takes a language historian to offer a convincing answer. For the same reason, native speakers should be allowed to teach their language only if they have been trained to do so. They have the coveted gut feeling for what is right and what is wrong, but not all linguistics can be produced from the guts. I am especially pleased to satisfy our correspondent’s curiosity because the usage that puzzled him is French. A few English legal phrases retain the French word order. Like oyez, they are relics of the Anglo-French jurisprudence. Compare letter patent, heir apparent, Attorney General, and Inspector General. In the phrase President-elect we no longer realize that elect is an adjective, but it is, as follows, for example, from the substantivized plural the elect and a few other forms recorded in the OED. The formulas bride elect and bridegroom elect (with reference to the betrothed) also exist.

In connection with my post on Dutch words in English, a correspondent wondered whether pug-ugly is not the etymon of plug-ugly. The form pug-ugly is known quite well, and Mencken (among others) mentions it in his book The American Language. If pug-ugly and plug-ugly are related, it is more natural to assume that the former is a modification of the latter, for folk etymology turns obscure words into deceptively transparent ones, rather than the other way around. Plug-ugly is opaque, while pug-ugly is silly (why should a pug be called ugly and why should its name become a synonym for a rowdy?), but it consists of two seemingly clear elements, and this is all folk etymology needs. The “French” word order (a noun preceding an adjective it modifies) must be due to chance. The rest is guesswork. Yet the Dutch provenance of plug in plug-ugly is a possibility.

Stephen Goranson sent us several valuable comments, as always. He suggested that the Italian word conundra (it occurs in a medical manuscript) that Leo Spitzer took for the etymon of conundrum is a misspelling for coriandra, the name of a simple (medicinal herb) once used against headaches. His conjecture is so good that I think the question can be considered as settled. I never trusted Spitzer’s etymology, and now even the form he cited has been compromised. In my survey of opinions, I also gave an admiring account of C.S.P.’s etymology of conundrum. Goranson suggested that the initials C.S.P. belong to Charles Sanders Peirce. This is another excellent guess. I am surprised that after decades of reading Peirce’s semiotics it did not occur to me. Incidentally, “Peirce Sc.B., A.M., lately Lecturer on logic at Johns Hopkins University, and of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey” was a consultant of The Century Dictionary for “logic, metaphysics, mathematics, mechanics, astronomy, weights and measures.”

My database contains hundreds of notes signed by initials. Occasionally they can be deciphered, for in subsequent publications someone may refer to the authors’ full names, but I make no attempt to go beyond what I see in the text, except when I know the name, (then I expand it). In a way, I am glad rather than sorry that I did not see through C.S.P. If I had realized who the author of the etymology of conundrum is, I would have been inordinately impressed, but I extolled it on its merit, which shows that I can choose a good hypothesis when I see one. Here I would only like to repeat what I said in my initial post on conundrum. It is a tragedy that English etymologists are sometimes ignorant of the literature on their subject. A scholar of Peirce’s grandeur (I assume that C.S.P. is Peirce) offered a brilliant etymology of conundrum and no one in the whole world was aware of it!

Finally, the information from Wedgwood’s Pembrokeshire friend deserves another brief mention. The following local forms have been recorded: condrim, quadrim, and coodrim “perplexity, confusion of mind, trouble”; they, as Wedgwood said, were “unnoticed in the provincial glossaries.” He derived conundrum from condrim and connected it with the rare Middle English word wandrethe. Now that we know almost for certain where conundrum came from, wandrethe can be dismissed, but I think all the Pembrokeshire forms are variants of conundrum, which also occurred in multiple variants. Coodrim and condrim show the loss of w, a change that regularly occurs in the history of so-called labio-velars (that is, groups of sounds like kw in quick, gw in Gwendolyn, and hw in the speech of those who pronounce what as hwat, only with ch of Scots loch at the beginning) and from modern usage: where I live (Minneapolis, Minnesota) the most common pronunciation of quarter is korder.

From Goranson we also have several 1811 examples of gallivant. They antedate the examples I found in the printed version of the OED by more than two decades. Earlier I said that the suggestions on etymology of gallivanting are uninspiring. In my database that includes notes on the most recondite English words, there is one reference to gallivant. This means that no author of a special publication bothered to explain its origin. The OED suggested “a humorous perversion of gallant.” Leo Spitzer (it is again Spitzer) was right in failing to see the humor in that “perversion.” But his own etymology carries little conviction. All specialists use their expertise in reconstructing the past of words. For instance, those who are proficient in Scandinavian linguistics tend to find Norwegian or Icelandic look-alikes of the words they discuss. Spitzer was an outstanding expert in Romance philology, and, though occasionally he would be carried away by rather fanciful theories, many of his hypotheses are astute. Not unexpectedly, he discovered a local French word that resembles gallivant, namely galavarda “stay in bed; to idle away one’s time,” and took gal(a)vart (one of the variants of the verb in question) for the etymon of gallivant. This etymology has little chance of survival. The idea of a loan sounds persuasive only if the ways of penetration have been elucidated and the time of borrowing makes good sense. Why did a southern French word suddenly become popular in 1811? Did the English learn it from Napoleon’s soldiers? Does the French form have any currency outside the southern dialects in which it has been recorded? Why was (and is) this verb used mainly in its participial form gallivanting? Spitzer did not touch on any of those questions (see The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 44, 1945, pp. 95-97).

No one has so far commented on my post devoted to Engl. cool “excellent” and its Swedish and Finnish look-alikes. One of the relatively older meanings of cool is “unabashedly arrogant.” A touch of admiration seems to accompany this sense: arrogant, impudent, but breathtakingly bold! I wonder whether that usage has rubbed off on our modern cool or whether it owes its existence solely to jazz. In any case, the OED offers no citations of cool “arrogant” in the superlative. Here is a quotation from Skeat, which I will reproduce partly because of the superlative and partly out of love for the author (in this note, he speaks about an idiotic derivation of Whitsunday): “I think this is the coolest and most deliberate invention I remember to have met with. All is thought to be ‘fair’ when it comes to etymology, and boldness of invention is still held to be a merit. It is a strange principle” (Notes and Queries, 7th Series, vol. II, 1886, p. 26).

Thus end December and this year. The drama of 2008 is over. Like the Clown in Twelfth Night, I would like to linger onstage now that all the other characters have recited their verses and say a few lines, with the lights dimming over my head:

Whether fat or lean,
Walk with patience and glean,
Cut your way through a wood.
Take no note of your spleen,
The plate is good when it’s clean;
When the plate is clean, it is good.
There will be many a New Year.
See them in and be of good cheer.
Exit Clown, pursued by a pride of lions.

Act drop

PS. Fate decreed that this post should contain 2008 words (the postscript has not been included in the count).
A HAPPY NEW YEAR!