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Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant

Barry Blake is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University, and his books include Playing with Words, All About Language, and this most recently Secret Language: Codes, Tricks, Spies, Thieves, and Symbols. In the following piece he reveals the mysterious significance of the name in societies past. To read more from Barry Blake check out his piece on allusions that may have eluded you.

In Western Society we have at least two official names, a given name and a surname. Surnames carry some history in that they give an indication of our ethnic origins. Think of Zellweger, Banderas or Zeta-Jones, to take a few at random. Given names often have similar associations of ethnicity or religious affiliation; some tend to be associated with a particular generation, and a few such as Napoleon and Washington evoke particular historical figures. Occasionally we have to hide our ethnic or religious affiliation. During World War I the British royal family had to change their name from Battenberg to Windsor, but normally we have no fear about revealing our name, and right from when we start school we have to give our name to authorities. However, in many societies in the past, and still in some today, people tended to keep their name secret. This is possible in a small-scale traditional society where there are no authorities wanting to record your real name, and for most purposes you are called by a pet name, a nickname, or a kin name like ‘little brother’ or ‘nephew’.

The reason for keeping personal names secret is that one’s name can be used in sorcery. In a wide variety of cultures it is believed that if enemies know your name, they can place an effective curse on you. This belief in the power of a name is linked to a belief that a name is part of one’s being just like an arm or a leg. In English we can say ‘my arm’ or ‘my leg’ just as we might say ‘my dog’ or ‘my car’. We treat them all as possessions, though of course an arm or a leg is part of one’s body. In some languages you cannot speak of body parts as possessions. For example, in most of the indigenous languages of Australia words for ‘my’ and ‘your’ cannot be used with body parts. In the Kalkadoon language, for instance, although you can say, ‘There’s a spider on your blanket’ to say ‘There’s a spider on your arm’, you have to say, ‘There’s a spider on you, arm.’ In other words you say the spider is on the person and then specify what part of the person is involved. Names are treated like body parts. You can’t say, ‘He wrote down my name’, you have to say, ‘He wrote down me, name.’

Since a name was considered an integral part of a person, it could be an effective target for sorcery. In some literate societies mistreating a person’s name was thought to be able to produce an analogous effect on the person. In Ancient Egypt the names of enemy kings would be inscribed on pottery bowls and ritually smashed with the aim of bringing about the death of these rulers. Curse tablets from the Ancient Greek and Roman world have been unearthed in whic

By Anatoly Liberman

Like a few other essays I have written in the past, this one has been inspired by a question too long for inclusion in the “gleanings.” Are break and brake related? Yes, they are, but the nature of their relationship deserves a detailed explanation. Break is an ancient word. It has cognates in all the Germanic languages, and Latin frango, whose root shows up in the borrowed words fragile, fragment, and refract, is believed to be allied to it (the infix n may be disregarded for reconstructing the protoform).

The grammatical system of the Germanic (and other Indo-European) languages depended on vowel alternations of the type we still have in break ~ broke, rise ~ rose ~ risen, drink ~ drank ~ drunk, give ~ gave, and so forth. Vowels were arranged in non-intersecting sets and resembled parallel railway tracks. Occasional shunting was allowed, but each move required special dispensation. The principal parts of break in Old English were brecan (infinitive), bræc (preterit singular; æ, as in Modern Engl. man), and brocen (past participle). All the highlighted vowels were short. At that time, verbs like break (so-called strong verbs, which displayed such alternations) had four principal parts, because the preterit singular differed from the preterit plural (the modern language has retained this distinction only in be ~ was ~ were ~ been), but three will suffice for comparing break and brake. In the history of English, vowels have been shortened and lengthened so often, and so many later changes have interfered with the ancient system that the original state is hard to observe from the perspective of the modern language. The vowel of the infinitive underwent lengthening and diphthongization; this accounts for today’s sound shape of break. The past plural form has disappeared altogether, and the extant form broke has the vowel of the past participle, also lengthened and diphthongized.

While I am at it, I may mention that in Middle English the ending -en was usually shed (compare English and German infinitives: break versus brechen), but after a good deal of vacillation past participles retained it (so in broken, spoken, given, and so forth, though we have come ~ came ~ come, as opposed to German kommen ~ kam ~ gekommen). Yet when we are bankrupt, we go broke. From an etymological point of view, broke is the same word as broken. Also, those who can afford it wear bespoke suits; recently, bespoke has spread to computer technology. Bespoke is a variant of bespoken.

The system of vowel alternations, as in Old Engl. brecan ~ bræc ~ brocen, that is, e ~ æ ~ o, is called ablaut (a term coined by Jacob Grimm, the elder and the more famous of the two brothers, who did many things in addition to collecting folk tales), and each vowel represents what is technically called a grade of ablaut. If bræc had not been lost, the modern past tense of break would, most probably, have been brake (compare spake, the archaic preterit of speak). No reflex of bræc has survived, but

By Anatoly Liberman

In today’s English, the letters u and o have the same value in mutter and mother, and we have long since resigned ourselves to the fact that lover, clover, and mover are spelled alike but do not rhyme. (Therefore, every less familiar word, like plover, is a problem even to native speakers.) Those who want to know more about the causes of this madness will find an answer in any introduction to the history of English. I will state only a few essentials. For example, the vowel of mother was once long, as in school, but, unlike what happened in school, it became short and later acquired its modern pronunciation, as happened, for example, in but. We still spell mother as in the remotest past. Medieval scribes had trouble with combinations uv/vu and um/mu (too many vertical strokes, “branches”) and preferred ov and om. That is why we write love and come instead of luv and cum (or kum). If I may give one more blow to a dead horse, these are the words that spelling reform should leave untouched: love and come are so frequent that tampering with them will produce chaos, even though luv appears in all kinds of parody.

Bosom, with its first o before s, looks odd even against this checkered background, though from a phonetic point of view it is not more exotic than mother. (The difference is that we become familiar with the written image of mother early in our education; also, other and smother produce a semblance of order, whereas bosom is unique in its appearance and is close to a poeticism.) Both mother and bosom had long o, as in Modern Engl. awe and ought in the speech of those who distinguish between Shaw and Shah (isn’t it a pleasure to have the privilege of choosing among aw, au, augh, and ough—compare taw, taut, taught, and ought—for rendering the same sound? In British English they also have or and our, as in short and court, on their menu). Consequently, if bosom were today pronounced like buzz’em, we might perhaps feel less baffled. And at one time it was pronounced so.

The first vowel in bosom alternated with its long partner as in booze and with u as in buzz until at least the end of the 18th century. The Standard Dictionary (Funk and Wagnalls), published in the United States in 1913, recommended the vowel of booze in bosom. Nor is this word an exception. Today it is hard to believe that the pronunciation of soot used to vacillate in the same way and could rhyme not only with loot but also with shut. Professionals, who dealt with soot on a daily basis, preferred the vowel of shut, but the tastes of their cleaner superiors prevailed. In British dialects, book, cook, look, and took often have the vowel of Luke. In what is called Standard English, bosom is now pronounced with a short vowel, and, all the historical elucidations notwithstanding, its spelling produces the impression of a typo. I have not yet met a beginner who would not mispronounce this word, though foreigners studying English are enjoined never to trust what they see, even when the word has the most innocent appearance imaginable (for example, one, gone, done, lone, pint, lead, read, steak, Reagan, and pothole, the latter somewhat reminiscent of Othello).

The etymology of bosom, from bosm, an old word with a long vowel, as noted, has not been found, even though the other West Old Germanic languages (this type of grouping excludes

By Anatoly Liberman

This is a weekly blog, and ever since it began I have been meaning to write a post about the word week. Now that we are in the middle of the first week of the first summer month, the time appears to be ripe for my overdue project.

In Latin there was the word calendae (plural) “the first day of the month.” These dates were “called out” or proclaimed publicly (from calare “proclaim,” not related to Engl. call, unless we take into account the fact that the syllables kal ~ kol ~ gal ~ gol designate “voice” in many languages; therefore, all such words may go back to the same sound imitative complex). The calendae were “called out” because interest was due on the first day of the month; therefore, money changers’ account books of interest got the name calendaria. Fortunately, our calendar (from Latin via Old French) does not remind us of debts and taxes only. Unlike calendar, week is possibly a Germanic word. Why “possibly” will become clear at the end of the post.

We will pass over the question about the origin of the seven day week but remember that, according to the Bible, the creation of the world took a week. Consequently, after the Christianization of Europe a word designating the seven day week had to be coined. Among the Germanic speakers the Goths were the first to be converted to Christianity (this happened in the 4th century), and long fragments of the Gothic Bible have come down to us, though almost only of the New Testament. As a result, we do not know how their bishop Wulfila translated, or would have translated, the Hebrew (or the Greek) word for “week.” The possibilities for naming the week are not too few. For example, Russian nedelia (stress on the second syllable), with cognates everywhere in Slavic, means “day on which no work is done”; the transference to “week” came later. A curious anti-parallel to nedelia may be Sardinian chida ~ chedda “week,” if, as has been suggested, it is a borrowing of Greek khedos “sorrow,” with reference to work and the “suffering” it entails. Yet for the Western translators of the Bible the main sources of inspiration were the ecclesiastic words containing the root for “seven,” namely, Latin septimana and Greek hebdomas. Hence Modern French semaine, Italian settimana, and Spanish semana. But Spanish also has hebdomada, and similar words have been recorded in many old and new Romance dialects.

We can now look at Germanic. In Gothic, the word wikon, the dative of the otherwise unattested wiko, occurred. It means “sequence” (not “week”!) and glosses Greek taxei, the dative of taxis (Engl. tactics, taxidermy, and taxonomy have its root). In the Latin version of Luke I: 8, ordine corresponds to Greek taxei and Gothic wiko. Old Engl. wice ~ wicu is akin to Gothic wiko, and at first sight their etymology poses no difficulty, for they seem to be related to the Germanic verbs for “move, turn; retreat; yield” (German weichen, Icelandic víkja, Old Engl. wician, and others). However, what exactly “moves” or “turns” during a week remains unclear, and various explanations have been offered, none fully convincing. Some Germanic cognates of week differ from the English noun considerably (compare German Woche and Danish uge), but they are still variants of the same word and mean the same, except Old Icelandic vika, which has two senses: “week” and “nautical mile.” Perhaps vika, before it acquired the meaning “week,” referred to the change of shifts in rowing. In my post on the etymology of Viking, I supported the idea that Vikings were called this fro

By Anatoly Liberman

The young Dickens was the first to record the word kibosh. We don’t know for sure how it sounded in the 1830’s, but, judging by the spelling ky(e)-, it must always have been pronounced with long i. The main 19th-century English etymologists (Eduard Mueller, Hensleigh Wedgwood, and Walter W. Skeat) did not include kibosh in their dictionaries. They probably had nothing to say about it, though Mueller, a German, hardly ever saw such a rare and insignificant word. Even in Webster it appeared only at the beginning of the 20th century and, as far as its etymology is concerned, was given short (very short) shrift: “Slang.” Suggestions concerning the origin of kibosh kept turning up in the popular press, but they were too fanciful to satisfy anybody. Dickens wrote the following in Sketches by Boz (“Seven Dials”): “‘What do you mean by hussies?’ interrupted a champion of the other party, who has evinced a strong inclination to get up a branch fight on her own account. (‘Hooroar,’ ejaculates a pot-boy in parenthesis, ‘put the kyebosk [sic] on her, Mary!) ‘What do you mean by hussies?’ reiterated the champion.” (In those innocent days, when one could have intercourse with one’s neighbors, ejaculate meant “exclaim.”) This passage has been reproduced in many works dealing with kibosh.

In 1901, discussion on kibosh resurfaced, and the following explanation, by M. D. Davis became widely known: “…English slang is indebted to these synagogues for another peculiar term, kybosh, signifying a trifling affair, a matter of no moment. The evolution of the word would puzzle a Skeat. Originally it meant eighteenpence, a trifling amount. It is still used in that sense. It consists of two words, the guttural chi = eighteen, and bosh = penny….The Hebrew for penny is poshet, abbreviated into posh, afterwards bosh. Consequently, kybosh is eighteenpence good in Jewish affairs, something of no value in ordinary transactions.” Regardless of a Skeat, the Skeat must have been irritated by this note, but in the absence of a valid proposal, he preferred to keep silent (a rare case in his life). One need not have Skeat’s perspicacity or be a specialist in Hebrew to see how weak Davis’s etymology is. When the name of a small coin is used to characterize a meager quantity, words like penny and farthing come up. Would anyone think of eighteenpence as the embodiment of smallness? And how could a word meaning “trifle” become part of an idiom for “finish off” (with the definite article before it)? Davis did not say that a similar idiom existed in Hebrew or that chibosh means “a trifle” in that language. According to him, “kybosh is eighteenpence good in Jewish affairs,” whatever that means. Incidentally, eighteen pence was not such a small sum in the early part of the 19th century.

The OED had no enthusiasm for Davis’s hypothesis and said only: “Origin obscure. (It has been stated to be Yiddish or Anglo-Hebrew),” with reference to the article quoted above. So far, that entry has not been modified. In addition to the phrase put the kibosh on, kibosh has been recorded with the meanings “nonsense, humbug,” “the proper style or fashion ‘the thing’” (as in the proper kibosh, the correct kibosh), and, surprisingly, “Portland cement.” Unless put the kibosh on arose as an alteration of some foreign idiom, we must assume that kibosh, a separate word, existed before the long phrase. It is hard to imagine that kibosh “stop” (noun), kibosh “nonsense,” kibosh “the proper thing,” let alone kibosh “Portland cement,” are four etymologically distinct words. So what was the proto-kibosh? Was it “nonsense”?

Charles P. G. Scott, the

Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant

Barry Blake is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University, and his books include Playing with Words, All About Language, and this May’s  Secret Language: Codes, Tricks, Spies, Thieves, and Symbols. In the following piece he samples some allusions that may have eluded you over the years.

Have you ever wondered where the titles of novels, plays, films and the like come from? Some are obvious, at least after you’ve read the book or seen the movie, as with Star Wars and The English Patient, but many titles are not transparent and leave you wondering just why the author chose them. These are usually allusive, they refer to something in history or literature or they take their wording from a text. These allusions are often quite esoteric, and authors must know that only some of the audience or readership will pick up on them. Presumably they get satisfaction from choosing a title with some kind of hidden significance and some theatregoers or readers probably find gratification in spotting the allusion. Surveys I have conducted over the years reveal that many allusions are lost on university students, so I’ve rounded up some examples I find to be the most “elusive.”

LITERATURE

John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden takes its title from the Bible (Genesis 4:16) and refers to Cain, who slew his brother Abel and was exiled to live ‘on the East of Eden’. There is no mystery about the source of the title for it is discussed in the novel, but its use summons up an allusion to the whole story of Cain and Abel. The novel is about two rival sons, the goody-goody Aron and the not-so-good Cal, and as the story proceeds the reader sees parallels with the Bible story and begins to wonder if Cal will kill Aron.

Along with the Bible the other main source of literary allusions is Shakespeare. Another novel by Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent takes its title from the opening words of Richard III,

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York

These lines, which incidentally contain a pun, have become a most hackneyed source of allusion, and journalists writing about any unpleasant winter are likely to trot out this phrase in the title of their article.

TELEVISION AND FILM

A few years ago there was a television series called To the Manor Born. This combines a pun and an allusion since it is based on Hamlet’s remark,

-though I am a native here,
And to the manner born,-it is a custom
More honour’d in the breach than the observance.

There is a fi

By Anatoly Liberman

Slang words are so hard to etymologize because they are usually isolated, while language historians prefer to work with sound correspondences, cognates, and protoforms. Most modern “thick” dictionaries tell us that rogue, the subject of this post, is of unknown origin. This conclusion could be expected, for rogue, a 16th-century creation, meant “a wandering mendicant.” (Skeat attributes the original sense “a surly fellow” to it but does not adduce sufficient evidence in support of his statement.) Words for “beggar,” “vagabond,” and “scoundrel” often originate among beggars, vagabonds, and scoundrels. Not improbably, the first “rogues” called themselves rogues, but even if this is true, it in no way clarifies matters. We do not know where hobo, a much more recent coinage, came from; consequently, it should surprise no one that rogue, which appeared in a text in 1561, remains an unsolved etymological puzzle.

The first English etymological dictionaries were published in 1617 (John Minsheu) and 1671 (Stephen Skinner). Neither author had a clue to the origin of rogue, though for Minsheu it was contemporary slang. But he looked for the answer in a wrong direction and cited a Hebrew and a Greek look-alike as a possible etymon. Skinner thought of an Old English source and (predictably) found nothing of interest. The same holds for Franciscus Junius, the third most erudite English etymologist of the “prescientific” epoch. Other researchers made no progress either, for fanciful references to Dutch and to various English verbs beginning with an r took them nowhere (sterile guesswork can hardly be called an achievement). We seem to be in the same position as our distant predecessors, except that we can now say with a clear conscience: “Origin unknown.” However, something is known, and this “something” is not unimportant.

Quite early, rogue acquired the senses “knave” and “villain” and became a facetious term of endearment. Today we mainly apply it to scamps and mischievous persons, especially to the rogues prone to displaying a roguish smile. The main stumbling block (though it should have been a stepping stone) in reconstructing the history of rogue is French rogue “arrogant, haughty,” which, odd as it may seem, is evidently unrelated to arrogance. Arrogance and arrogant go back to the root of Latin arrogare “claim for oneself,” from the prefix ad- and rogare “ask” (compare interrogate and prerogative). If French rogue is not akin to arrogant, what is its origin? Friedrich Diez, the founder of Romance comparative linguistics, suggested that the French had borrowed rogue from Old Norse (Scandinavian) and cited Old Icelandic hrókr “rook; long-winded talker.” This rather improbable etymology has been questioned a few times, but it still appears, though not without some hedging, in the most authoritative dictionaries of French. Our greater concern is that, according to an opinion that has long since become dogma, French rogue is neither the source nor a cognate of Engl. rogue. Only the great German etymologist Friedrich Kluge thought otherwise (but he devoted a single line to the English word), and Skeat believed that the meaning of roguish had been influenced by French.

Similar Celtic words, such as Scottish Gaelic rag “villain; a thief who uses violence,” with a cognate in Breton, were noticed long ago. Judging by their geographical distribution, they are not loans from French. Nor does the French word look like a borrowing from Celtic. The OED offered no etymology of rogue and did not mention the oldest hypothesis on its origin. William Lambarde, a famous 16th-century author on legal matters, traced rogue to Latin