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Today I am thrilled to introduce you all to the newest residents here at OUP in Oxford. They have made themselves at home in one of our many quads. Behold, the OUP ducklings!

Here they are:

I think they might be the most adorable things I have ever seen in my life. As you can see, we’re taking good care of them - they have their own paddling pool! They decided to make their home in one of the quads without a pond, so we gave them one. They’ve also been given some foam to sit on, so that they stay warm.

But here’s the most important question: what shall we name them? Anyone got any clever ideas?

Justyna Zajac, Publicity

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back in all this week and spread the library love.

Martin Maw is an Archivist at Oxford University Press, UK.  Keep reading to learn about how he was charmed by libraries at an early age.

Though I never analysed it at the time, the power and charm of libraries took me over at a young age. I grew up in a fairly isolated town, long before anyone had even dreamt of the Internet, and the local library was the only way I had to explore my culture. Consequently, teenage Saturday mornings were often spent ferreting round that glass and concrete cube near the town hall, trying to find an alternative to school texts or to the unfathomably dull novels I knew at home.

It didn’t take long. Like many adolescents, I immersed myself in science fiction – though I read probably more of Ray Bradbury than any other writer. These days, I find Bradbury far too overblown and theatrical, but those are exactly the qualities that appeal to an impressionable 13 year-old: he seemed to be writing in wild colour when everything else I read was a tentative black and white. Bradbury was also the first writer I found who expressed the mystery of libraries themselves. His novel Something Wicked This Way Comes hinges on a small-town library and its caretaker, and exactly evokes suspended, after-hours atmosphere of deserted book stacks – places where anything may be revealed at the flick of a page. Equally, in writing Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury showed that books and stories can be dangerous things in themselves – you might have to memorise a text that was too risky to physically possess, and in some sense be taken over by that book. It wasn’t until much later I understood that Bradbury might be saying something else: that some people can get possessed by texts, that they can become walking repositories of other people’s words and thoughts, and that this can be a deprivation, even a threat to their very sense of self. It’s a theme handled with much greater subtlety – and menace – by Shirley Jackson in her story “The Tooth,” and in M. John Harrison’s work, especially The Course of the Heart: a mournful, visionary fantasy about the futility of fantasy itself, and (for my money) one of the best novels published in the past thirty ears. Needless to say, Bradbury’s implied caution is one you need to observe every day when working as a publisher – or as their archivist.

The enchantment of libraries persisted. I went to university in the Midlands, and discovered an open-shelf treasure house that offered everything from V.S. Pritchett’s short stories to obscure works by the Beats, Lorca, and Burton’s rare translation of the Arabian Nights. None of this was on my syllabus – I endured two months of pointless misery, trying to read law, before switching to a history degree – but that didn’t matter. I was after an education; I got one. Or rather, I started on one. The more you read, the more you realise how little you’ve read.

That came home to me when I started working at the Bodleian Library. Not to experience its spell is, I think, impossible: you seem to inhabit a vast, hushed pavilion of ivory stone, which floats at one remove from the crowded lanes around it in Oxford city centre. But for a reader, its stacks are mania made visible. The gorgeous architecture is just a penthouse. Under it lie five floors of subterranean shelves, some 90 miles in total, holding not only every book you’ve ever read, but also all the ones you’ve never read and never will. You see where Jorge Luis Borges, a librarian himself, got his inspiration. Standing in the midst of the Bodleian’s shelving, it’s easy to imagine that the stacks stretch to infinity, as in Borges’s story “The Library of Babel,” and that their volumes capture every conceivable combination of letters – including this article. It’s said that the ancient library at Alexandria had a motto carved on its wall: “The Place of the Cure of the Soul.” Underground in Bodley, you might well think the opposite. This would be an easy place to go mad.

All of which helps to explain the lasting mystery of libraries, even with the “gimmethat” reach of the Internet. Good libraries are zones outside the mundane. They show you what you never imagined. They can put you in touch with the dead voices, take you to imaginary or vanished places: as in séance, you’re suddenly on those extraordinary blue lawns Fitzgerald glimpsed after dark at ‘20s society parties, or at Einstein’s elbow as he writes, very carefully, for the first time, “E=mc²”. Libraries are time travel on the cheap. But more than that, those ordered books on quiet shelves order ourselves in their turn, and help us keep our small intelligence in perspective: for, as an 18th century rabbi once noted, no matter how many books we absorb in our life, we have not yet truly read the first page.

We are in week six of our Word Window series in which we display an Oxford Word of the Week, culled from The Oxford English Dictionary in the windows in front of our NYC office on Madison between 34th and 35th street.

Last week’s word was: Entheogen n.: A psychoactive substance which is used in a religious ritual or to bring about a spiritual experience, typically a plant or fungal extract; (more widely) any hallucinogenic drug.

In case you aren’t in NYC or didn’t get a chance to walk by the office here is what it looked like:

This week’s word is: Nugatory.

Stop by the window to see its definition or check back on the blog next week!

Ah Friday!  I’m not sure how this week is over already but I have to admit that I am happy it is.  With the sun starting to appear and Spring making itself known, good things simply must be on the way.  So cheers to a good weekend and a great April.  Enjoy the links below.

Clip art in motion.

Comfort through comforting others.

1001 rules for my unborn son.

Waltz With Bashir in print form!

Watch Earth Day in Las Vegas.

Tis the season: Inside a Peep Factory.

I love Maira Kalman.

Overvalued board games.

Defaulting on a surrogate pregnancy.

Ferlinghetti and Seeger.

The NYTimes 10 rules for blogging.

Twitter growth in comparison to Facebook and Google.

Well my UK-counterpart Kirsty beat me to the punch this year but once again I’d like to share some of OUP’s favorite books of 2008.  Below are what my co-workers and I were reading this year.  Perhaps they will inspire you to read more next year!  Below I kick things off my with my favorite book.

Rebecca Ford, OUPblog Editor: I read a lot of books this year but I think the one that will stick with me is Crush by Richard Siken.  I haven’t bought a poetry book since college and Siken’s poems made me remember why I love poetry.  Each poem in Siken’s collection is overflowing with emotion and panic and his words make you feel his pain physically.  Don’t know what I mean?  Read here and here.  From “Wishbone”, “There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western, Henry,/ it’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyard out of the bone white afternoon.”

Megan E. Kennedy, Marketing Manager, Academic and Trade Books
My libro favorito this year was Junot Díaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Told in fast-paced Spanglish and full of interesting (and oftentimes hilarious) footnotes, this book chronicles the life of a second-generation Dominican dork trying to overcome the limitations of his weight, ancestry, family, and an ancient curse called “fuku.” Díaz uses a lively cast of characters—including Oscar’s hermana bonita, his disapproving mother, and the dictator Trujillo—to tell the larger story of the history of the Dominican Republic. The high energy prose is captivating, and effectively conveys both the inner struggles of Oscar’s daily life in New Jersey as well as the struggles of a country oppressed by a maniacal dictator. Léanlo! (Read it!)

Cassie Ammerman, Publicity Assistant: Because I spend so much of my time commuting, I’ve started to listen to more and more audio books in the last year. I have a subscription to Audible.com (best gift ever, thanks Dad!) so I get two free downloads a month. It’s definitely hit or miss with the narrator adding another whole dimension to a book, but I’ve found a couple that really stand out as amazing listens.

I know The Graveyard Book has been hailed by critics worldwide as a fantastic young adult novel, but believe me; it’s not just for kids! Neil Gaimon narrates his own work in the audiobook, and his voice is wonderful and warm. Nobody Owens is a character you love, even when he makes mistakes and defies his ghostly guardians. Highly, highly recommended.

My second recommendation is Born on a Blue Day, by Daniel Tammet, narrated by Simon Vance. Another narrator with a British accent (both British authors too, come to think of it. Hmm. Maybe I should pay my colleagues in the UK a visit soon…) who does a wonderful job. This is the memoir of a man with Asperger’s syndrome and savant syndrome. On top of that, he’s gay. But if you think these difficulties kept him down, you’re wrong. He makes the most of his life and has adventures I would never even dream of. This is a great listen, designed to make you think about the people around you and see past the surface of people with disabilities.

Abby Gross, Associate Editor, Brain and Behavioral Sciences: I courted Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler at my neighborhood bookstore for months before going ahead with the purchase. It was worth it. The main narrative is written in the second person — meaning the reader is also the narrator — and it follows on the odd-numbered chapters. Interspersed are first chapters of 10 different books in different styles, set in different parts of the world, with titles that are more like phrases: “Outside the town of Malbork,” “In a network of lines that intersect,” “Without fear of wind or vertigo,” and of course, “If on a winter’s night a traveler.” The main narrative revolves around what begins as a literary detective story: the narrator purchases a book, reads the beginning, finds that where the second half of the book should be, there is the first half of another book, and is compelled to find the rest of the book. The narrator might have given up there but he has met a bookish woman whom he would like to impress by finding the missing ending. In his quest he manages to find not the ending but the beginnings of several other books, the existentialist crises of writers and readers, false authors, false translations, a rogue translator, experts of politically defunct languages, and book-banning dictatorships. Oh, and Mr. Cavedagna, “shrunken and bent,” the poor editor at the publishing house that mangled the books up from the beginning, whose corridors are described as “full of snares: drama cooperatives from psychiatric hospitals roam[ing] through them, groups devoted to group analysis, feminist commandos.” This is not a good subway read, note. But very funny and entertaining and either more profound than I can possibly understand or else not profound at all. A pen has bled itself all over my already rain-crimped copy, so I’ll probably get another one (if not more Calvino books) in 2009.

Dayne Poshusta, Editorial Assistant, History: My favorite book this year is Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. I’m a huge fan of Gabriél Garcia Marquez; this sprawling ode to the timelessness of love and winter in New York City ranks among the best magical-realist fiction. Helprin’s elegant and lyrical writing simply transports the imagination. This was the perfect thing to read in November because it provided a lovely anti-dote to all the doom-and-gloom news about the economy, the war, and the environment.

Eve Donegan, Sales and Marketing Assistant: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz is an easy year’s best for me. Due to a lack of focus on my part, I prefer short stories. Diaz’s use of footnotes and the perspectives of multiple characters really got me involved with the text. I finished the book completely satisfied and without a hint of boredom. While the plot was humorous, it also incorporated a very honest look into the sorrows of Dominican history. Diaz offered just the right amount of history within the quirky, funny, and sometimes sad, storyline. This book is for anyone with an interest in the Dominican culture, underdog stories, tales of love, or generational narratives.

Justin Hargett, Associate Publicist: I’d be hard pressed to find a link between any of the books I read this year, other than at some point they were on my shelf or staring me down in a book store. So, as I’ve tried to determine which of this motley crew I’d call my favorite, I keep coming back to four particular books that I would absolutely recommend to anyone, anytime. (I swear this is not a cop-out, I have a favorite, but insist the other three must be noted.)

The runners up:

Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father (The insightful, inspiring memoir of our president-elect. A must read for the civic minded of both sides.)
Paul Hemphill - Lovesick Blues (The life and death of Hank Williams. A timeless experience of life in show business: poverty, stardom, and abuse.)
Steve Martin - Born Standing Up (Who briefly extended my hope of making it in show business as a juggler with no punchlines. Also, it serves as an interesting, and a completely contrary, companion to the previous.)

But, the winner is:

Haruki Murakami - Norwegian Wood
This tragic romance, the story of a doomed love-triangle soaked in the nostalgia of 1960s Tokyo, is a simple, beautiful novel. Despite a generation’s gap and nearly 8000 miles of ocean and land between, Murakami’s characters (for at least the time I spent with them) were as real to me as the friends I’ve known for years…and perhaps even more real to me than the three very true stories of the runners up.

Cassandra Palmer, Copywriter, Higher Education Group

Earlier this month, I picked up The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago, and found it impossible to put back down. A fictionalized account of the life of Jesus Christ written by a great literary master, this book recreates Jesus Christ as a man who has conflicted feelings about almost everything, but most of all about God. Marked by wry, irreverent narration, it successfully combines philosophical analysis and literary fiction. I would recommend it to anyone dissatisfied with the—religious or commercial, as it addresses both—elements of the holiday season.

Today is our amazing intern’s last day. Below are her thoughts on the experience. If you are interested in interning in the publicity department at OUP shoot me an email at [email protected]. Ashley, you have no idea how much you will be missed!

By Ashley Bray

My time at Oxford University Press has come to an end, and just when I was getting started! I may have only been at Oxford for a few short months, but I am walking away with a lot more knowledge than I walked in with.

To be honest, I happened upon this internship accidentally. I wasn’t planning on interning this semester, but a friend of mine recommended that I apply so I decided to give it a shot. My goal has always been to land an internship in book publishing, and since all of my past forays have been into magazines and newsletters, I couldn’t let this opportunity slide by. Obviously, things worked out in my favor!

My official title has been “Blog Intern,” but that is misleading because I’ve gotten the chance to do a little bit of everything while I’ve been here. What I’ve liked most about this internship is that I’ve done something different each day. There is always a new blog post to write or promote, a galley letter to write, or a press release to put together. I even learned about the editorial side of book publishing at a lunch I scheduled with an editor.

What was my favorite thing to do while at this internship? Why, update Publicity Assistant, of course (PA for short, we’re on pretty close terms, you all know how it is)! For those of you who can’t sense the sarcasm coming off that sentence in waves, let me clue you in— I’m joking. All jokes side, however, I am grateful for what I learned to do with Publicity Assistant; it’s an important program to know how to use and one more thing I can take away from this internship. Becca may think I’m lying considering she lived in daily fear that I would quit each time she gave me something to enter into PA, but really, I didn’t mind it.

So what was really my favorite thing about this internship? Getting the chance to work with a variety of books (and there’s not the least bit of sarcasm in that sentence!). I had the chance to read and write about books all day— it was almost too good to be true! From In Search of Jefferson’s Moose to From Colony to Superpower to The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (a personal favorite), I’ve gotten the chance to work with books in almost every category. For an avid reader and writer, there’s really nothing better.

One of the most valuable things I took away from this internship is a much clearer idea about the blogosphere. Bloggers were quite foreign to me when I first started, and I was a bit overwhelmed at first by this new world of posts, Technorati, and Blogrolls. This is embarrassing for a college student— someone who should be on the forefront of this kind of stuff— to admit. I am forever grateful to Becca for teaching me everything I needed to know about the world of blogs; it’s knowledge that I know I’ll be able to apply no matter where I go.

I’m sad to leave, but I’m thankful that I decided to intern at Oxford. I’ve learned so much, met a lot of great people, and had fun along the way. Thank you, Becca, for making this experience so worthwhile! And thank you to everyone at Oxford who helped me to feel welcome and get involved while I was here.

Although the line between shame and guilt is sometimes blurred, the two differ clearly: guilt points to wrongdoing, whereas shame is the feeling of disgrace. In some communities it is shame that determines people’s behavior, in others it is guilt; hence the division of societies into two groups. In the previous post, I retraced the paths on which language historians hoped to find the root of the Germanic word for “shame,” and we saw how little they know about it (from being uncovered and exposed? from the “scanting” of honor? or was there a more direct way from private parts—so again exposure—to shame?). Guilt, one would think, will be more transparent, for guilt is a legal, rather than moral, category, but look up this word in almost any dictionary, and you will read: “Of unknown origin.” Even entries on shame, a word of rare obscurity, are more informative.

The first citations of guilt in the OED go back to the end of the 10^th century, that is, to the Old English period. At that time, the word was spelled gylt and pronounced like German Gült. The OED states that no “equivalent forms” are known in any other Germanic language. This statement should be taken with a grain of salt, for German offers an exact equivalent, namely Gült (from Gült), though in extant texts it does not predate the 13^th century. Gült(e) designated a specific tax levied on people in the Middle Ages. The German word provides less help that we need, but it has been around for a long time and its origin poses no problems: it is related to the verb gelten “pay.” Taxes exist to be paid. The English cognate of gelten is yield. However, a formidable obstacle prevents us from interpreting guilt as something to be yielded: the noun should have become guild (or yield); final t in guilt has no explanation.

Guild is a legitimate English word. It seems to have come to English from northern German (gilde) or Dutch. Some details remain obscure, but they won’t interest us here. Suffice it to say that a guild probably meant an association of persons contributing to a common object. Since guilt appeared in English long before guild, its pronunciation has nothing to do with an attempt to stay away from the newcomer (such cases are not too rare, for, although homonyms do not endanger communication, occasionally words choose to keep their distance from obtrusive neighbors): it always ended in -t. As regards the meaning of guilt, the OED appears to be a bit too harsh in its assessment. The earliest senses of Old Engl. gylt were “offence; crime; responsibility.” They are not incompatible with the idea of paying the price for a transgression. The OED says (I have expanded the abbreviations): “From the fact that Old Engl. gylt renders Latin debitum in the Lord’s Prayer and in Matt. XVIII. 27, and that is gyltig renders debet in Matt. XVII. 18, it has been inferred that the substantive [noun] had a primary sense ‘debt’, of which there seems to be no real evidence….” All this is true, but, if Engl. guilt had d at the end, the semantic difficulties would not have deterred anyone from comparing it with yield.

Sometimes, when sounds do not match, the idea of borrowing saves the day. Yet nothing supports the suggestion that Old Engl. gylt, a noun recorded several hundred years prior to its German “equivalent,” came to Britain from the continent, the more so because, as the OED points out, the ancient meanings of the two words do not overlap (it is “crime” in English and “tax” in German). One could fantasize that in the 9^th or 10^th century northern Germans had gylt “payment; tax” and that it was carried to the land of the Anglo-Saxons, where it changed its meaning to “crime,” with the only vestige of the original sense “payment; that which is due; debt” preserved in ritual texts (the Bible). Not only does the absence of this word in Old High German texts make such a hypothesis improbable. Phonetics also militates against it. The German language of that period lacked a vowel rendered in writing by Old Engl. y and by Modern German u with the umlaut sign.

To nonspecialists such an infinitesimal detail as t versus d may seem sheer pedantry, but the situation is familiar: “For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost,/ And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!” Etymology (a vulnerable kingdom) approached something that can be called science only when it began to pay attention to phonetic correspondences. Every time this criterion fails us, we should either explain the deviation or concede defeat. German t corresponds to Engl. d: compare German reiten and Engl. ride. There remains a feeling that guilt and yield are related despite the fact that we failed to break the magic circle around the English noun, but it will remain just this: a feeling with a bitter aftertaste. Incidentally, the first consonant is not a problem: g- instead of y- can be ascribed to the northern norm, as in the verbs get and give, which, if they had developed as expected, should have “yielded” yive and yet, but, when the entire structure collapses, who will rejoice at the sight of a relatively unimpaired roof?

We can only seek comfort in the fact that the cause of the odd spelling (gui-) is known. In today’s English the reading of g before i and e is always a problem. One should tread gingerly with all kinds of gills, and never assume that one knows how Mr. Gilson pronounces his name. Gill of Jack and Jill’s fame had to change the spelling of her name to avoid misunderstanding. The spellings gui- and gue- were introduced on the French model to clarify matters. Now gest- in digest, gestation, and gesticulation won’t be confused with guest. Right? Well, not quite. English spelling has never been reformed consistently. As a result, we struggle with get and jet, gig and jig, give and gyve (y is a redundant letter having the same value as i), and even guilt coexists with gilt; the last two words are homophones but not homographs. Thus we will live on with a sense of shame that an army of learned linguists has not solved the etymological mystery of guilt. But this is not their fault: something is really wrong with this word.

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Long ago, after this blog had barely come into being (Spring 2006), I wrote an essay titled “Living in Sin.” It was about the origin of the word sin. Such abstract categories as sin, shame, and guilt develop from thinking about situations in which people realize that they have done something wrong or covered themselves with disgrace, and every now and then the inner form of the words coined for such purposes is transparent. The idea of sin in its Christian sense was alien to the Germanic peoples before the conversion, and in Gothic, a language mainly known to us from a 4^th-century translation of the New Testament, the word for “sin” is frawaurhts, literally “misdeed” (fra- is a prefix of “destructive semantics,” as in Engl. forgo “relinquish,” and -waurhts is akin to Engl. wrought). Nor does transgression, from Old French, ultimately from Latin, pose any problems: it means overstepping what is allowed. But sin is a short word, and how it came to mean what it does is unclear, the more so because the speakers of Old English had forwyrht, an exact cognate of the Gothic noun. Apparently, sin (at that time, syn or synn) and forwyrht referred to different things. Those who are interested in knowing some conjectures on sin are welcome to read my old post. Shame and guilt are no less opaque than sin; shame is especially hard.

Native English words with sh- once began with sk-, and, indeed, the Old English for shame is scamu. The last sound (u) was an ending, while m could be a suffix because sca-m-u had a close synonym sca-nd-u. Scandu and its cognates have continued into modern languages; Germans still say Scham und Schande to express their disgust. Modern English lacks its reflex (if we disregard the archaic participle shent “ruined, disgraced”), but, by way of compensation, in the United States scam appeared in the sixties of the 20^th century, as if from nowhere. All dictionaries dismiss it demurely as being “of obscure origin.” If we are unable to trace such a recent coinage to its source, how good is the chance of success in dealing with an ancient word? The chance is probably not very good, but sometimes the remoter the period, the easier it is to advance hypotheses. For example, if scam had emerged in Middle English, there would have been no doubt that it was a borrowing from Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish have skam “shame”), and the meanings could have been aligned without much difficulty (“scam is a shameful thing”). 17^th-century scam would have been more problematic since the best period for absorbing Scandinavian words was the Middle Ages. Present day Engl. scam leaves us stranded: it is definitely not a continuation of a word from the language of the Vikings! Hence the unanimous verdict “of unknown/uncertain origin.” Even sham, originally “trick, fraud,” which is clearly English (it begins with sh-), baffles researchers. Although it sounds like shame, it may have nothing to do with it. Despite all such hurdles there is no harm in trying to guess how shame acquired its meaning.

Since shame refers to the diminution of honor, it has been compared with the Old English adjective scam “short” (what an etymon for our scam!), from whose Old Norse cognate skamt English has scant. However, a much more popular hypothesis looks for a different root. In the old Indo-European languages, the prefix s- existed. It was an evasive entity. Roots existed with and without it, and its presence did not affect the word’s meaning. The same almost parasitic s (called s-mobile “movable s”) has been recorded in modem English dialects: some people say climb, others say sclimb. The main sound change that separates all the Germanic languages from its other Indo-European neighbors is the so-called First Consonant Shift: compare Latin pater, tres, and quod (that is, kwod) versus Engl. father, three, and what (from hw-). The quod/hwat pair shows that Germanic h corresponds to non-Germanic k. But in the group sk the consonant k was not affected by the shift. For instance, Latin had scabere “scratch,” and its Gothic cognate was skaban “shear.” As a result, some words going back to different languages sound nearly alike: scabies is from Latin, scab is from Scandinavian (Germanic), and their English siblings are shabby and shave. This digression was necessary to show that if a Germanic word begins with sk-, it may have variants with initial k- (the same root minus s-mobile), while its non-Germanic cognates may begin with h- (k regularly shifted) and sk- (in which k avoided the shift). This is why prefixed words like Old Engl. -hama “covering” and Gothic -hamon “get dressed” have been suggested as cognates of scamu “shame.” The idea was that the Germanic word for shame expressed the embarrassment of being naked.

Such a development is probable. A person could not experience a greater indignity than being caught by his enemies and stripped of his clothes. The god Othin (Odin) says in a mythological poem from medieval Scandinavia: “When I saw two scarecrows in a field,/ I covered them with clothes;/ they looked like warriors when they were dressed/—who hails a naked hero?” In the Slavic languages, styd- “shame” is related to stud- “cold,” which seems to give support to the scamu—hama etymology. But if hama (to stay with Old English forms) is a cognate of scamu, could it not be expected to mean “clothes”? Yet we have a huge zigzag: from “clothes” to “unclothed” and to the disgrace caused by not having anything to wear, all of it within the narrow confines of a short root. The phonetic part (hama ~ scamu) is flawless, but the semantic leap is “scarcely credible,” as dictionaries say in such circumstances. Another possibility is to compare scam- and Gothic hamfs “maimed,” a word that has an impeccable Greek cognate, though mutilation need not presuppose shame.

The inevitable conclusion appears to be “origin uncertain/debatable,” but I cannot finish my story without one more reference. The Italian scholar Vittore Pisani pointed to the noun eskamitu in an inscription on an Inguvian table (we are dealing here with an ancient Indo-European language of Italy). It means “genitals,” and Pisani compared it with the Germanic word for “shame.” The obscure Italic word may provide a clue more reliable than any other. Shame and genitals form an indissoluble union from time immemorial (this has been, of course, what gave rise to the “dress” etymology: the horror lay in being fully exposed). We may never be able to find out why the sound complex skam- came to designate what it did, but, if eskamitu has been interpreted correctly, reconstructing the development from “private parts” to “shame” looks like our best choice.

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Everybody must have heard the phrase to go berserk, but not everybody is aware of the fact how little is known about berserks and how obscure the word berserk is. Berserks were mentioned for the first time in a poem commemorating King Harald Fairhair’s victory in a battle that occurred around the year 872. The language of the poem is, consequently, Old Norwegian. For that period, Old Norwegian means the same as Old Icelandic. All we learn from the relevant lines is that “the berserks roared, the battle was in full swing, the wolfskins howled and shook the irons.” It is hard to decide whether wolfskins is a synonym of berserks or whether there were two groups of warriors (one roared, the other howled?) and on whose side the berserks made noises. Be that as it may, the information on the original berserks is admittedly scanty. Perhaps the poet (Old Scandinavian court poets were called skalds) coined the word berserk himself, but it may have existed in the language before him. Contrary to expectation, it occurs most rarely in later poetry, and, when it does, it means “warrior,” without any specification, and only with reference to the heroes of old. Once we hear that the great god Thor fought berserks’ brides. Since Thor’s main opponents were giants, berserks’ brides probably meant “giantesses.” Female monsters were feared more than superhuman males (thus Beowulf overpowered Grendel, a mighty “troll,” but nearly perished by the hand of Grendel’s vengeful mother), so that Thor cannot be accused of attacking defenseless girls.

The greatest Old Icelandic historian was Snorri Sturluson. He lived in the 13^th century, and we owe several priceless books to him. One of them treats the history of the kings of Norway. As was common in those days, Snorri began his work with a mythological introduction, for royalty needs divine origins, and in a short chapter he said that Odin (the Old Norse form is Othin, rather than Odin), the main god of the Scandinavian pantheon, had a retinue of fearful warriors who “fought without armor and acted like mad dogs or wolves. They bit their shields and were strong as bears or bulls. They killed people, and neither fire nor iron did them any harm.” This he adds, “is called berserk rage.” In English we say going berserk (like going amuck), but we too know what rage is, though more often on the road than in battle.

Snorri’s description comes as a great surprise. In addition to his magnificent history of the kings of Norway, he wrote a book called the Edda, a collection of ancient Scandinavian myths. Odin figures prominently in it, but his wild retinue is not mentioned a single time. He is usually depicted as traveling alone or accompanied by two other gods at most. Nor was the word berserk of any importance to Snorri. The source of this passage is a mystery, and no one can tell why berserks failed to appear in the Edda. In the absence of facts theories purporting to explain the role of Odin’s berserks are many. I also have a theory, but it runs counter to those proposed by many eminent scholars, for which reason it found little support. Yet, like a true berserk, I roar and howl and stick to my guns (or should it be spears, slings, and arrows for the sake of preserving the local coloring?).

Berserks reemerged in Icelandic sagas (prose narratives), recorded mainly in the 13^th century, when Snorri was active. But there they are gangs of vagrant marauders, intimidating farmers, raping women, and killing everybody who dares oppose them. It is in the sagas that they bite shields, fall to the ground, with their mouths foaming and frenzy making them allegedly invulnerable to fire and iron (they cannot be killed with a sword, but a cudgel does fine), and practice other stage effects. I suspect that, while writing an introduction to The History of the Kings of Norway, Snorri borrowed the portraits of berserks from the literary clichés flourishing in his lifetime. Real, not epic, berserks certainly existed, though they were exterminated in both Norway and Iceland before Snorri’s birth. Nobler berserks, the choicest warriors of kings, are mentioned in the so-called legendary sagas, and it seems that a vague memory of such bodyguards went back to at least the 8^th century. Later bandits may have called themselves berserks, to aggrandize themselves, or perhaps the population called them this. It matters little who gave them such a name, for they did not resemble their predecessors of King Harald’s epoch. If Snorri had heard or read myths about Odin’s berserks, he would have retold them in the Edda. Apparently, he did not. So I assume that he knew none and, in his history, modernized the god’s image under the influence of literary tradition.

The problem is complicated by our ignorance of the etymology of the word berserk. We remember that Snorri mentioned berserks’ custom of fighting without armor and roaring like bears. The second part of the noun berserk (-serk) means “shirt,” but the first is ambiguous: it may mean “bear” (which accords well with roaring) or “bare” (in reference to throwing off armor in battle; however, being without armor is not the same as being naked), for in Old Norse the words for bare and for some forms of bear are as close as they are in Modern English. (Has anyone seen a pin I saw in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the mid-seventies: “Bare with me”? It was worn by a grinning female. No one seemed to be paying attention.)

Bears play an outstanding role in the history of Germanic cults. On the other hand, medieval sources, both Scandinavian and Irish, describe scenes of heroes fleeing in a panic when women expose themselves to them. No superstitions are connected with male nudity. Thus, either interpretation (“bareshirt” and “bearshirt”) makes some sense. Until the middle of the 19^th century Icelanders had no doubt that “bareshirt” is correct. Then an influential Icelandic scholar opted for “bearshirt,” but seventy years later the original theory again found an excellent supporter. I think he was right. Recapitulating his arguments here would take me too far afield. The main of them is that berr “bear” did not exist in this form in Old Norse, and other compounds with ber- “bear” as the first element have not been recorded either (a single exception is dubious). It is also unclear whether serk- was current as a technical term for “skin” or “shirt” as early as the 8^th century.

Those who will delve into the berserk problem will find numerous things, intriguing but largely irrelevant. Did berserks form unions? If so, did those unions have a religious character? Did berserks consume poisonous mushrooms and, intoxicated like hashish eaters, attack their enemies? Were berserks akin to wervolves? Both agony and ecstasy fill the pages of the works devoted to those semimythological creatures. Little is known, a lot has been surmised. Some medieval Scandinavian warriors were certainly called berserks. They started as kings’ bodyguards. Theirs was a dignified name. With the dissolution of early feudal retinues like King Harald’s, those groups degenerated into plundering riffraff, their members turned into brigands, and the word acquired negative connotations. (The same happened to the word Viking.) Odin was hardly surrounded by berserks, Snorri’s evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It is more likely that berserk first meant “bareshirt” (that is, someone who fights with nothing but a shirt on) even if berserks roared like bears in battle. Anyone who would try to go to battle with a bearskin on will find himself easily overheated and incapacitated. A few of my pivotal statements can be and have been contested, and herein lies the beauty of scholarship. Some people, as Snorri put it, make mistakes and others correct them, so that everybody has something to do.

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Did you sleep last night?  I did, but only because I took NyQuil.  It is estimated that one in ten people suffer from Insomnia- and Jack D. Edinger and Colleen E. Carney have written a guide that can keep you from suffering alone.  Overcoming Insomnia, in our Treatments That Work series, has two editions, one designed for therapists and one designed for patients.  Below is an excerpt from the patient workbook, which provides essential information about healthy sleep and the reasons for improving sleep habits, and then introduces a behavioral program designed to address that patient’s specific sleep problems.

-Select a standard rising time
It is important that you choose a standard rising time and stick to it every day regardless of how much sleep you actually get on any given night. This practice will help you develop a more stable sleep pattern. As discussed in the previous chapter, changes in your sleep-wake schedule can disturb your sleep. In fact, you can create the type of sleep problem that occurs in jet lag by varying your wake-up time from day to day. If you set your alarm for a standard wake-up time, you will soon notice that you usually will become sleepy at about the right time each evening to allow you to get the sleep you need.

- Use the bed only for sleeping
While in bed, you should avoid doing things that you do when you are awake. Do not read, watch TV, eat, study, use the phone, or do other things that require you to be awake while you are in bed. If you frequently use your bed for activities other than sleep, you are unintentionally training yourself to stay awake in bed. If you avoid these activities while in bed, your bed will eventually become a place where it is easy to go to sleep and stay asleep. Sexual activity is the only exception to this rule.

- Get out of bed when you can’t sleep
Never stay in bed, either at the beginning of the night or during the middle of the night, for extended periods without being asleep. Long periods of being awake in bed usually lead to tossing and turning, becoming frustrated, or worrying about not sleeping. These reactions, in turn, make it more difficult to fall asleep. Also, if you lie in bed awake for long periods, you are training yourself to be awake in bed. When sleep does not come on or return quickly, it is best to get up, go to another room, and only return to bed when you feel sleepy enough to fall asleep quickly. Generally speaking, you should get up if you find yourself awake for 20 minutes or so and you do not feel as though you are about to go to sleep.

- Don’t worry, plan, or problem solve in bed
Do not worry, mull over your problems, plan future events, or do other thinking while in bed. These activities are bad mental habits. If your mind seems to be racing or you can’t seem to shut off your thoughts, get up and go to another room until you can return to bed without this thinking interrupting your sleep. If this disruptive thinking occurs frequently, you may find it helpful to routinely set aside a time early each evening to do the thinking, problem solving, and planning you need to do. If you start this practice you probably will have fewer intrusive thoughts while you are in bed.

- Avoid daytime napping
You should avoid all daytime napping. Sleeping during the day partially satisfies your sleep needs and, thus, will weaken your sleep drive at night.

- Avoid excessive time in bed
In general, you should go to bed when you feel sleepy. However, you should not go to bed so early that you find yourself spending far more time in bed each night than you need for sleep. Spending too much time in bed results in a very broken night’s sleep. If you spend too much time in bed, you may actually make your sleep problem worse. The following discussion will help you to decide the amount of time to spend in bed and what times you should go to bed at night and get out of bed in the morning.

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Jeffrey Graf published, on the website of Indianan Notes and Queries, an exhaustive survey (revised in February, 2007) of the surmises about the nickname Hoosier. In 1995 William D. Piersen, and in 2007 Jonathan Clark Smith devoted articles to Hoosier’s early days (both appeared in the Indiana Magazine of History), and I am returning to this chestnut mainly because all three authors, though extremely well-informed, missed a work that, in my opinion, deserves attention.

The starting point for everyone interested in the history of Indiana’s nickname is a brochure with the title The Word Hoosier By Jacob Piatt Dunn and John Finley By Mrs. Sarah A. Wrigley (His Daughter). Indiana Historical Publications, volume IV, number 2. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1907, 29pp. John Finley was the author of the poem The Hoosier’s Nest (1833) that seems to have made the soubriquet recognized by a wide audience. The poem takes up three pages of small print. The painstaking research was carried out by Dunn, who knew most of the silly conjectures, as well as the few plausible hypotheses, on the etymology of Hoosier and offered an explanation of his own. He had a healthy attitude toward etymological folklore, for he realized how little trust one can be put into stories of the type “I was there and know the facts.” Thus, in 1929 Oscar D. Short brought out his recollections in the Indiana Magazine of History (volume 25) that begin so: “There has been a tradition in our family, which I have known since boyhood, that Aaron Short, an older brother of my grandfather, gave to the inhabitants of Indiana the name ‘Hoosier’.” The story appeared four years after Dunn’s death, but, if he had read it, he would have found nothing new for himself in it: a very strong man, so Short recounts, was victorious in a fight, jumped up, and shouted: “Hurrah for the Hoosier” (perhaps he tried to say: husher or hussar). Both versions—of Hoosier going back to husher or being a “corruption” of hussar—were familiar to Dunn. The editors of the Indiana Magazine of History had no illusions about the verisimilitude of Short’s recollections; yet they decided to add a new piece of legendary material to the Hooseriana. The authors of fibs like Short’s believe in them wholeheartedly, but such is all folklore. Even the storytellers who know the most fantastic fairy tales, when asked whether they think that enchanted castles and boys becoming ravens at the will of an evil stepmother exist, tend to answer evasively that, of course, such things do not happen here, but at one time and elsewhere…

Smith accords Short’s story a measure of respect. However, Hoosier, as far as we can judge, has always been pronounced with the vowel of hoo. For this reason alone, the suspicious word husher “stiller” (a person so strong that he can “hush, still” anyone) is an unlikely etymon (source) of Hoosier, and could hussar have been such an active word in the man’s vocabulary that he would recall it in midair? It is also Smith’s contention that Hoosier reflects “local pride” rather than “southern scorn.” The OED quotes from a letter allegedly written in 1826, the first extant text believed to have the word in question. As it seems, the date is wrong, and we have to accept Smith’s conclusion that there is no documented use of Hoosier prior to the thirties. But his other contention, namely, that Hoosier emerged with reference to the Indiana boatmen and, far from being a “slur,” showed how people reveled in being called Hoosiers, is harder to accept.

The traditional theory has it that Hoosier originated in the South as a term of contempt, a word like yokel, hayseed, rube, bumpkin, hillbilly, clodhopper, jake, backwoodsman, and dozens of others; that in Indiana it lost its offensive connotations; and that it retained its negative sense outside the state. This reconstruction agrees with what we know about such situations. Peripheral areas usually preserve archaic features, be it phonetics, grammar, or vocabulary. The adoption by political parties and religious groups of the opprobrious names that in the beginning their enemies and denigrators coined in contempt has often been recorded: such is the history of Tory, Whig, and Quaker. The ties of Hoosier to the rest of the South are too numerous to be ignored, and outside Indiana references to those who are called Hoosiers are never complimentary.

Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) treats the word in depth, and Graf has, naturally, consulted this work. Hoosier can mean “a rustic, especially in such combinations as country hoosier and mountain hoosier; an unmannerly or objectionable person; a White person considered to be objectionable, especially because of racial prejudice; an inexperienced or incompetent person among those skilled in a particular field, especially logging.” The verb hoosier “to be a farmer” and hoosier up “to work incompetently; to slow down or shirk on a job, usually on purpose” also exist. According to Smith, Hoosier came to mean “an inept person, a bad worker, etc.” later, and it is true that the word’s pejorative uses in written and printed documents do not antedate 1836. Yet the time gap is minimal, and slang makes its way into books and letters sporadically. Also, the connection between Hoosier and “Indiana boatman” will appear strong only if we disregard all other contexts. On the whole, it is easier to accept the fact of late attestation than of the development from “a doughty boatman” to “hillbilly; jerk.”

Several times those who investigated the origin of Hoosier have mentioned a similarly sounding family name and made it responsible for the rise of the Indiana nickname. Their hypotheses (Piersen is among the most recent advocates of one of them) do not go far and carry little conviction. But in 1999 R. Hooser published an article in Eurasian Studies Yearbook, pp. 224-231, and this is the article even Graf missed. The author documents the history of his extended family. The Hausers came to the United States from Alsace. In their dialect the diphthong designated in spelling by au had the value of Engl. oo in hoo. Consequently, Hauser and Hooser are variants of the same name. According to R. Hauser, the Hoosers migrated to Indiana from Salem, NC and were mocked for their beliefs and customs. He does not explain under what circumstances the nickname was extended to the rest of the inhabitants of the state, why the meaning of the slur was forgotten exactly where it should have been best remembered, and why such an obvious origin did not occur to the people who wrote about the subject in the thirties of the 19^th century, but all etymologies of Hoosier are marred by similar inconsistencies (hence the never-ending debate). Especially baffling is the circumstance that even in Finley’s days no one knew why Hoosiers are called this, unless we “buy” the husher theory. Nicknames are invented to belittle or tease their bearers, even when applied to kings: consider such cognomens and Harald Bluetooth and Charles the Bald. The case is certainly not closed, but, if the first Hoosiers were the Hausers and “foreigners,” we begin to understand why there was no love lost between them and their new surroundings, why they chose Indiana as their place of residence, and why other southerners stick to what seems to be the word’s original meaning.

It is not for an outsider to solve the question that puzzled so many specialists in Indiana history, but if this publication makes R. Hauser’s article part of the debate, it will have served its purpose. I will add only a few phonetic details. DARE records the following spelling variants of Hoosier: hoogie, hoojy, hoodger, hoojer, hushier, and hooshur; from older sources hoosher has come down to us. They reflect two pronunciations: hooser and hoosier (-sier as in hosier). If the etymon is Hooser, a third variant emerges. All three can be reconciled. The use of sh for s is old in the history of English. The roots of banish, nourish, bushel, and so forth had final s in French, but they were borrowed with sh. This alternation can also be observed in living speech. In Minnesota, people say groshery for grocery. The same alternation affects the voiced partners of s and sh. For instance (drawing on what one hears in Minneapolis), Fraser is pronounced Frasier (we have Fraser Hall on campus, so that Fraser is a high frequency word where I live). It takes an effort to convince students that the name of Sir James Frazer, the author of The Golden Bough, should rhyme with razor. Hooser, that is, Hoozer, would have become Hoosier, as Fraser became Frasier.

Dunn’s attempt to derive Hoosier from a word recorded in Cumberland, with the resulting meaning “a large man,” has little to recommend it: the connection is tenuous, and the original Hoosiers hardly got their name for their physique. The other explanations rarely go beyond exercises in folk etymology. I very much hope to get numerous responses to this blog. They will probably attempt to demolish my cautious defense of the Hooser theory. This is fine; etymology is a battleground. But, if I dare, I would like to ask my prospective opponents not to write anything before they have read the articles mentioned above. The easiest way to find Graf’s survey is to Google Hoosier (the work will appear at once) or to use the website of the journal Indiana Notes and Queries: http://www.indiana.edu/~/librcsd/internet/hoosier.html (this journal, I believe, is an occasional online publication).

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Today we are excited to post an interview with Casper Grathwohl, Oxford’s Reference Publisher, in which he answers some frequently asked questions. Hopefully his answers with give you a glimpse inside the reference publishing world.

Casper Grathwohl is Vice President and Publisher of Reference at Oxford University Press. In his 10 years at the press, Casper has helped transform Oxford’s print dictionary and reference list into one of the leading online academic publishing programs in the world. Electronic initiatives within the Oxford program have included moving trusted copyrights online (Grove Dictionaries of Music and Art, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford Reference Online, and The Oxford English Dictionary) as well as building innovative new research tools such as Oxford Language Dictionaries Online and Oxford Islamic Studies Online. Prior to OUP, Casper worked for both Princeton University Press and Columbia University Press. He currently splits his time between New York and Oxford in England managing the two reference centers of the press.

1. What online resources do you daily and weekly?

I’m a big New York Times online fan. I made the switch from print to online a few years ago for my weekday news and it was a surprisingly easy transition. It’s funny—all these habitual activities we feel define us on a daily level (like reading the paper in the morning with a cup of coffee) are much more mutable than we think. I still like a lazy hour or two with the print paper on the weekends, but I can’t imagine reading an article that interests me and not being instantly able to surf for more on the topic, or follow the editorially-driven links provided.

Over the last couple of months I’ve really gotten into Street Easy. I’m in the process of buying an apartment in NY and one of my friends recommended I use it for information on comparable purchases in the building, sales history of the apartment and other stats. Most of the real estate listings in the city feed into the site, so it’s the one-stop shop that makes this kind of searching so much easier. And its functionality is highly intuitive—I’ve learned a lot about how to set up a really satisfying landing page from them.

These aggregator sites like Streeteasy are really interesting in that they serve the big and the small pretty equally. When the playing field gets leveled that way “large” loses one of its traditional advantages. I grew up in one of those small towns that had an empty downtown shopping area. All retail had moved out to the chain stores in malls and the local paper was filled with op-ed pieces regularly bemoaning the death of the American town and small businesses. And now look, twenty years later, organic butter infused with peaches from a small farm in Enigma, Georgia has a larger customer base online than it ever had before. (So large, in fact, that in 2004 it closed the “Berry Barn” located along Hwy 82 to focus on selling online.)

I love how online commerce has been such a shot in the arm to these types of mom-and-pop shops. As others have noted, the small independent stores that thrive are the ones that have a niche. They have a value proposition that we don’t associate (and will never want to) with big chains. Local peach butter from a Georgia farm? I’d take that over a new Parket margarine flavor any day! That’s their competitive edge, and with online commerce models anyone can find them. It’s this globalization of the local that I find so interesting. As I said, I’m not pointing out anything new here, I’m just having a great time watching it all happen.

What are you reading?

I just finished Joe O’Neill’s Netherland, which I loved. The plot and pacing are a little weak at times, but he’s such a lyrical writer that it’s easy to forgive. Every once in a while I’d come to a paragraph describing a subway station at rush hour or the way the sun hits Manhattan’s midtown and I’d swoon at how simply and perfectly he captured something I see everyday (and will always see a little differently from now on.)

What is your favorite reference work?

Such a hard question! I live knee-deep in the world of reference so it’s difficult to see it with any real perspective. I’m a big fan of reference-based online experiments, like the Encyclopedia of Life and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (which has proved to be a very successful, although not easily duplicated, experiment.) It’s sites like these that are the signposts to where scholarly communication is heading, and I find the energy these sites create really invigorating.

What do you think of Wikipedia?

I get this question a lot, and I think wikipedia is great. And I’m a little disappointed by all the complaints about how unreliable it is as a source. Of course it’s unreliable—quick, cheap information has never been anything but! In my circles I feel like there’s this myth that before user-generated web content everyone slavishly referred to trusted reference authorities for their quick information. If only. What did you do if you needed a quick answer to something in the pre-wikipedia dark ages? Nine out of ten times you’d call a friend or ask a colleague before pulling Britannica off your shelf. Was that more reliable? Absolutely not. But that’s OK, because you’d know not to site one of your friends in the bibliography of your research paper. I think if we start thinking of wikipedia as the equivalent of calling up one of your smart friends and getting a “good enough” answer (which is often all you’re looking for) then we’re on the road to responsibly understanding the awesome power of such user-generated resources.

As the web matures, it has come to reflect an image as complex and rich as culture itself. And therefore it should not surprise anyone that multiple layers of authority on the web are not just necessary, they are inevitable and already expanding. Wikipedia, Citizendium, Britannica, and Oxford Scholarship Online all complement each other as distinct, valuable places along the web knowledge chain.

And speaking of that web knowledge chain (not to go on a rant here)—we need to start making the distinction between information and knowledge. I would define knowledge most simply as “information in context.” Information is just a byte of something with a fact label attached. But what does that information mean? That’s knowledge.

For example, a 13-year-old obsessed with baseball statistics is a fine source for number of RBI’s or home runs Jackie Robinson had. Considering some of the boys I knew growing up, there might not be a more trusted source of such information. But you wouldn’t go to that 13-year-old and ask them to tell you about the significance of Jackie Robinson to the civil rights movement. That would be silly. Yet that’s what we do too often on the internet.

How did you get started in publishing?

Like most people I just fell into it. I liked books and was naïve enough to think that it qualified me for a job in publishing. I started out in publishing at the bookstore end of things: I worked in the buying office at Rizzoli in New York. I remember getting fed up because I was earning $16,000 a year (everyone my age trying to make it in NY was in the same boat, but I somehow failed to notice that) so I quit without another job. Bumming around New York for a summer after that was fun, but I was getting really tired of living on slices of pizza so I moved to Princeton to work as a typesetter at Princeton University Press. After a few years I became an editor and then moved back to New York to take a job editing the Columbia Gazetteer of the World. I love geography and had a great time with it. When that ended (I think it was 1997) I came to Oxford to work in the Children’s and Young Adult group and I’ve been here ever since. And I’ve got to say that I love OUP—the institution, the mission to disseminate knowledge, reinventing scholarly publishing online, all of it. And getting to be the keeper of the great Victorian publishing projects like the Oxford English Dictionary, Grove Music, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is a privilege that regularly humbles me when I think about. How often do you get say something as lucky as that?

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By Anatoly Liberman

All words must have been coined by individuals. This statement surprises and embarrasses not only the uninitiated but also some language historians. We are used to thinking that “people” created ancient language and art, but what is people? (This question, though in another guise, will recur below.) A group of activists working together and producing in chorus meaningful sound complexes like big ~ bag ~ bug ~ bog? Or a committee like those on which we sit, organs of collective wisdom? As a rule, every novelty that does not die “without issue” passes through a predictable cycle: someone has something to offer, a small group of enthusiasts surrounding the inventor adopts it, more adherents show their support, the novelty becomes common property, and (not necessarily) the originator is forgotten. We have no way of tracing the beginning of the oldest words, and even some neologisms remain etymological puzzles, but the names of some “wordsmiths” have not been lost. For instance, Lilliputian was coined by Jonathan Swift, gas by J.B. van Helmont, and jeep (which later became Jeep) by E.C. Segar. As a rule, inventors use the material at hand. Swift seems to have combined lil, the colloquial pronunciation of little and put(t) “blockhead,” a slang word common in the 18^th century. Van Helmont was probably inspired by the Dutch pronunciation of chaos. Jeep is sound imitative, like peep. In similar fashion, we have no doubt about the structure of the noun folklore (folk + lore), but the story of its emergence is worth telling.

William John Thoms (1802-1885) began his literary career as an expert editor of old tales and prose romances. He also investigated customs and superstitions. Especially interesting are his studies of popular lore in Shakespeare: elves, fairies, Puck, Queen Mab, and others. They were published in the forties, the decade in which he met his star hour. Special works on Thoms are extremely few (the main one dates to 1946), and the archival documents pertaining to him remain untapped, but he related some events of his life himself. It was not by chance that California Folklore Quarterly printed an article about him (“’Folklore’: William John Thoms” by Duncan Emrich, volume 5, pp. 155-374) in 1946. A hundred years earlier a letter signed by Ambrose Merton appeared in the London-based journal The Athenaeum. Those who have leafed through its huge folio volumes probably could not help wondering how the subscribers managed to find their way through such an enormous mass of heterogeneous materials. Yet that weekly had a devoted readership, and its voice reached far.

The 1846 letter is available in two modern anthologies, but outside the professional circle of folklorists hardly anyone has read it, so that I will quote its beginning and end. “Your pages have so often given evidence of the interest which you take in what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature (though by-the-by it is more a Lore than a literature, and would be most aptly described by a good Saxon compound, Folklore,—the Lore of the People)—that I am not without hopes of enlisting your aid in garnering the few ears which are remaining, scattered over that field from which our forefathers might have gathered a goodly crop. No one who has made the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc., of the olden time his study, but must have arrived at two conclusions:—the first how much that is curious and interesting in those matters is now entirely lost—the second, how much may yet be rescued by timely exertion…. It is only honest that I should tell you I have long been contemplating a work upon our “Folklore” (under that title, mind Messes. A, B, and C,—so do not try to forestall me);—and I am personally interested in the success of the experiment which I have, in this letter, albeit imperfectly, urged you to undertake.” Not only did the editor of The Athenaeum welcome the letter. He opened a special rubric for “folk-lore,” and “Ambrose Merton” (this was Thoms of course) became its editor.

The letter was followed by an injunction, part of which is so much to the point that it must be reproduced here: “We have taken some time to weigh the suggestion of our correspondent—desirous to satisfy ourselves that any good of the kind which he proposes could be effected in such space as we are able to spare from the many other demands upon our columns; and have before our eyes the fear of that shower of trivial communication which a notice in conformity with his suggestion is likely to bring. We have finally decided that, if our antiquarian correspondents be earnest and well-informed and subject their communications to the condition of having something to communicate, we may… be the means of effecting some valuable salvage for the future historian of old customs and feelings…. With these views, however, we must announce to our future contributors under the above head, that their communications will be subjected to a careful sifting—both as regards value, authenticity, and novelty; and that they will save both themselves and us much unnecessary trouble if they will refrain from offering any facts and speculations which at once need recording and deserve it.”

Thoms may have regretted the fact that he wrote his letter to The Athenaeum under a pseudonym, for a year later, in another letter to the same journal, he disclosed his identity. He more than once reminded his readers that it was he who launched the word folklore. From time to time somebody would derive folklore from German or Danish. As long as he lived, Thoms kept refuting such unworthy rumors (he also suffered from the neglect of his Shakespeare scholarship); after his death others defended him. The word found acceptance both in the English speaking world and abroad. German, Austrian, and Swiss scholars eventually borrowed it with its original spelling (Folklore), though the German for folk is Volk. By the end of the eighties folklore had become an accepted term in Scandinavia, as well as in the Romance and Slavic speaking countries. The British Folklore Society, which was also formed largely thanks to Thoms’s efforts, adopted the title Folk-Lore Record for its journal (now it is called simply Folklore), and Thoms was elected the Society’s director. In the introduction to the first volume he noted, perhaps not without a touch of irony, that the word he had coined would make him better known than the rest of his professional activities.

As we have seen, the “Saxon” term folklore was applied to the vanishing “manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc.” Thoms did not realize how ambiguous his agenda was. For more than 150 years, researchers have been arguing over whether the subject of folklore is only “survivals” (does modern folklore exist?), who are the people, the “folk” to be approached, and whether folklore is the name of the treasures to be collected and described or of the science (“the lore”) devoted to them. Today folklore is often understood as a study of verbal art, but not less often it passes off as a branch of cultural anthropology. In 1846 folk meant “peasantry,” which excluded urban culture. One also spoke vaguely of common people, of story tellers nearly untouched by the advance of civilization, and of the working people in the “byeways of England” (the phrase, spelling and all, is from The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1885). Railways were the main bugaboo of those who watched the rural landscape disappear under the wheels of the devil, the steam engine. Being run over by a train became a literary motif.

In 1849 an event of great importance happened in Thoms’s life: he began publishing his own weekly that, after rejecting many titles and ignoring the advice of some well-wishers, he decided to call Notes and Queries. His old appeal to the readers to send ballads, tales, proverbs, descriptions of customs, and so forth brought many responses, and Thoms was loath to start a rival periodical, for fear of undermining The Athenaeum, but he received the editor’s blessing. The new journal turned into a main forum for letters that Thoms had invited correspondents to send to The Athenaeum. The rubric on “folk-lore” in both periodicals made the term familiar, and later the derivatives (folklorist and folkloric) emerged. Before resigning as editor, Thoms told the story of his magazine in a series of short essays and published them in Notes and Queries for 1871 and 1872. In 1848 Dombey and Son appeared. One of the novel’s most endearing characters is the one-armed Captain Cuttle. Like so many other personages brought to life by Dickens, the good captain has a tag: he likes to repeat the maxim “When found, make a note of.” Thoms used this catchphrase as a motto for his journal, and it was printed on the title page of each issue.

I have already written about the value and the worldwide success of Notes and Queries. This magazine is one of a kind. Personally, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to it, for suggestions on word origins were (and still are) common in Notes and Queries, and I have nearly 8000 of them in my database. Some words have been discussed only in its pages, and some first-rate specialists sought no better exposure of their ideas. The man who invented the word folklore and founded Notes and Queries deserves to be remembered, and I am sorry that no one has written a book about him. The reason may be that he was neither a professor nor a madman. Perfectly sane and of humble origin, he was survived by his wife and nine children.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Many thanks to those who commented on my recently published dictionary and to the listeners of MPR (“Midmorning News with Kerri Miller”). Some of the words about whose origin I was asked (copasetic and quiz among them) have been covered in my earlier posts, and I will not dwell on them again. But I hasten to undeceive our correspondent whose family believes that it invented the noun quiz: it did not. Quiz emerged in the 19^th century as university slang.

SPELLING REFORM. English is indeed a global language, but I fail to see a connection (suggested by our correspondent) between this fact and the conservative character of English spelling. If knock loses its k-, it will lose it globally, much to the world’s gratification. Consistent phonetic English spelling is a utopia. Vowels are realized differently in English dialects. This is the reason it would be better not to meddle with Mike, make, and so forth. But spelling till with one l, quake as kwake, dependent and redundant with -ent, etc. (the main thing is to define the scope of the etc.) won’t hurt anyone. Hence my suggestion to reform English spelling slowly and gingerly, rather than introducing revolutionary measures. The same hold for the etymological criterion. Words of Modern English cannot and should not reflect their past (we no longer speak Old English, do we?), but some morphological ties should probably be retained. This explains my proposal to drop k- in knock but not in know, for knock is isolated, whereas know is related to acknowledge (which I would prefer to spell aknowlege).

Fare fico ~ fare fiasco again. Words that sound alike and have a similar structure (so-called paronyms) are often confused and regularly affect one another’s meaning. My suspicion remains that, whatever the modern understanding of fare fico, it has nothing to do with the origin of fiasco. Is there an equivalent word to phallic to imply something that looks like female genitals? My experience tells me that there is a word for everything, but I am not aware of the female counterpart of phallic, and the reason it does not occur in dictionaries and thesauruses is easy to explain. Phallic was coined to be used in combinations like phallic figure and phallic cult. It is mostly an ethnographic term. Statues and figurines of fertility goddesses and of patronesses of sexual intercourse abound. They usually have many breasts or a conspicuously enlarged vulva. Apparently, a generic term like phallic for describing them is not needed, but I won’t be surprised if such an adjective lurks somewhere in the depths of the OED. Let us wait for the comments on this post.

The origin of jankety “in poor shape.” No slang or regional dictionary of Americanisms I have consulted features it, though the Internet produces the impression that the word is known to many. Perhaps it originated in Black English, but I have only anecdotal evidence to support this claim and can at best offer an intelligent guess about its sources. Janky “lousy, phony” exists too and shows that -et- in jankety is a suffix (jank-et-y, not janket-y), unless janky as a back formation of jankety. Almost all slang words with initial j- (jog, jerk, jig, and so forth) are expressive; many of them designate quick or abrupt movement. Equally expressive (sound symbolic rather than sound imitative) are some native words ending in -ank, for instance, crank, prank, and especially yank. Jank, which, like jerk and yank, may, as I have been told, mean “to pull violently,” aligns itself easily with them. Verbs meaning “to pull” often have gross sexual connotations, and jank “male groin area” confirms my conjecture that neither janky nor jankety was coined as an elegant word. Whether adjectives like rickety and junky have influenced the meaning of jankety cannot be decided, but such influences are not improbable. I should add that practically all the words mentioned above in connection with jankety are also of unknown or uncertain origin.

The phrase to go haywire. Sometimes we stumble across a word that seems to be yesterday’s slang, but it turns out to have been around for several centuries. In other cases a word that looks as though it has been in the language forever can be shown to have sprung up in recent times. To go haywire is such a familiar idiom that the date of its first occurrence in printed sources (1917) comes as a surprise. Haywire is indeed the wire used in hay bailing; hence its association with makeshift and insecure arrangements and its figurative meaning. Apparently, haywire is of American provenance. Push the envelope goes back to aviation slang. The original reference was to graphs of aerodynamic performance. How offensive is the British slang word pikey? In recent time this word has been used so loosely (not only for vagabonds but also for all kinds of outsiders) that it has nearly lost its negative connotations. But, obviously, if used about an Irishman or a Gypsy, it is an ethnic slur.

Drat “damn, darn it” is sometimes explained as od-rat, in which od is a euphemism for god (God without the initial consonant) plus rat, a dialectal variant of rot—not a particularly convincing etymology. Conversely, drot may be (G)od rot it! Drat has the doublet (d)rabbit (for example, rabbit the child! drabbit the girl!). This enigmatic drabbit was first traced to French rabattre “to beat down.” Its variant rat it! drat it! may have been due to rat substituted for rabbit. We do not know whether drat is a contraction of drabbit or drabbit is an extension of drat. Curses often contain disfigured words, for taboo and euphemisms play a significant role in them. As a result, their origin becomes hopelessly obscure.

Gallivanting. This seems to be a playful word, as Ernest Weekley put it: perhaps a blend of gallant and levant “to decamp, steal away, bolt.” But for some reason, it usually occurs in its participial form (gallivanting), a peculiarity that has never been explained. Some connection with gallant is probable.

Heebie-jeebies: “Coined by W.B. DeBeck (1890-1942), American cartoonist, in his comic strip Barney Google” (The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition). Vet is a clipped form of veterinary (surgeon) (compare doc, prof, math, lab, etc. from doctor, professor, mathematics, and laboratory); hence the verb to vet “to subject to professional examination.”

Silly continues the phonetically regular form seely, with cognates in all the Old Germanic languages. Its original meaning was “blessed, happy.” It is amazing how many paths lead to the idea of stupidity. Someone who is happy is stupid (for what is there to be happy about?), and so is someone who thinks too much of himself (the Romance root of fool means “inflated”). The root of daft means “fitting” (consequently, too docile); by way of compensation, its doublet deft exists. The semantic base of words for “stupid” may be “stunned,” “pitiful,” “lacking support,” “unsociable,” “blissfully unaware of the surrounding world,” “too trustful,” “too accommodating.” You are damned if you are too friendly, and you are damned if you are a social moron. Language reflects this attitude most faithfully. In a tale well-known in the East, a boy, an old man, and a donkey go on their way. Whether the old man rides the donkey, with the boy following him on foot, or the boy rides, with the old man walking, or both ride or walk, or whether the old man carries the donkey on his back, those around mock them: every combination is wrong. Lief means “beloved, dear” (compare German lieb). The archaic phrase I would as lief can be glossed as “I would rather.”

I cannot say anything new on the word regionalism. It appears to have been coined some time around the eighties of the 19^th century by journalists, for the earliest citations are from newspapers. At that time regionalism meant only “localism” in politics. It gained popularity after World War I. As a linguistic term (“a local word or feature”) it does not antedate the fifties. Today regionalism is used widely, but the numerous spheres of application have not changed its original meaning.

Two phonetic questions. 1) Education pronounced as ejucation. The sound we hear at the beginning of the letter name u (it is called yod), when it follows t and d, tends to merge with them and produces ch and j. This is why we say picture and verdure the way we do. The same assimilation can be observed in living speech: did you and what you become diju and watchyou and even student sometimes sounds as s-chudent. A similar process can be observed when s, z and yod meet: note how most people pronounce bless you and as you like it. In very careful speech t, d, s, and z retain their individuality before the yod, so much so that snobs rhyme literature with pure. It follows that ejucation is admissible and does not betray the speakers’ lack of education. 2) Dwarfs versus dwarves. From Old English we inherited alternations of the shelf ~ shelves, wolf ~ wolves type. When r, rather that l, preceded f, as in scarf and dwarf, the alternation was the same, but its modern reflexes are inconsistent. It is due to chance that the British norm chose dwarfs, while Americans usually say dwarves. In British English, scarfs seems to be more common, while in America scarves predominates. Wharf and wharves have a similar distribution.

A RETROSPECT. 1) At some time, I cited an amazing number of verbs meaning “to beat, thrash.” A similar, but shorter, list from British dialects was offered in Notes and Queries for 1876. Here are five most colorful ones: mump, beneil, welt, twilt, and skelp. 2) I have a gnawing suspicion that some people do not read this blog or, if they do, refuse to profit by it. One of my posts was devoted, among other things, to the ugly fillers actually and you know. Could those in the highest echelons of society have missed that post? In any case, this is the exchange quoted in newspapers a few days ago. “In an interview last week with ABC, Ms. Bush [Laura Bush] said: ‘I think she probably meant ‘I’m more proud,’ you know, is what she really meant’… ‘…I was touched by it,’ Ms. Obama [Michelle Obama] said. ‘And that’s what I like about Laura Bush. You know, just calm, rational approach to these issues. And you know, I am taking some cues.’’’

Read the next gleanings on August 27.

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By Anatoly Liberman

At the beginning of June, on the technological campus of Coventry University the British Simplified Spelling Society, now called Spelling Society, with Simplified expunged from the title, celebrated its centennial (centenary). As the theme of the conference the organizers suggested “The Cost of English Spelling.” The society and its ally the American Literacy Council were founded at the peak of public interest in spelling reform. Between 1908 and 2008 many edifying publications came out, and some of the best linguists on both sides of the Atlantic showed the weakness of the arguments repeated again and again by the opponents of the reform. However, a century passed, and despite all those activities English spelling has undergone only a few cosmetic changes (like hyphenation in American English), so that there is nothing to celebrate. And yet there may be a glimmer of hope.

The cost of teaching English spelling is enormous. The money spent on drilling the most nonsensical rules in any modern European language and on remedial courses could have fed and educated a continent. (I have the statistics but will skip the numbers.) Although Spelling Society has lost the game, the world at large has not won it. The establishment refused to institute changes, and, as a result, speakers (native, immigrant, and foreign, both young and old) have become less proficient in reading and writing than ever. Now we are dealing with several generations of the illiterate offspring of illiterate parents.

Since the end of the Second World War life in the West has changed dramatically, partly for the better, partly for the worse. Today more than ever in the recent history of our civilization popular culture has the ascendancy over “high” culture. It is not only our age that witnesses the triumph of popular (low) culture: such is the law of all social development. If it were otherwise, we would still be wearing wigs and using declensions and conjugations of the type known from Latin. In language this trend can be observed in both big things and small. For example, the swift substitution of -s for -th (comes for cometh, and the like) signified the encroachment of vulgar speech on the time-honored literary norm. In Shakespeare’s plays, Falstaff’s boon companions use this ending. Even the Authorized Version of the Bible was unable to suppress this novelty. Today no one cometh and no one goeth.

In recent memory (George Babington Macaulay would have said within the memory of men still living) jeans with a prefabricated rent at the knee became fashionable and more expensive than elegant and unimpaired trousers (pants). The vilest language is allowed in songs, on the screen, and in printed production, whereas in 1908 one could not pronounce the words pregnant and underwear with women around. Highbrows made careers explaining to the eager public the profound goals of the hippies and the surpassing value of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. Bras and ties were abolished along with other signs of bourgeois hypocrisy. Only our orthography stands like an impregnable rock in this ocean of change. But the “masses” did not remain indifferent to the preservation of this last relic of the past, and here I come to the subject of the moral cost inflicted on learners by conservative English spelling.

The first point on the list can be called serene resignation. When provoked by the most egregious misspellings in students’ papers, I chide the culprits gently (ever so gently), the answer usually is: “Oh, I know, I am an awful speller.” It is sad to teach people who have never taken geography at school or are, to quote one of my listeners, “lost in space and time” on hearing the word crusades, but the pilot will take passengers to their destination without asking them for directions, and the Middle Ages ended before we were born. In contrast, one has to write something all the time. Yet our orthography is such that people are happy to admit that they are dummies. A state-sponsored inferiority complex is a rather high moral cost for sticking to antiquated spelling.

Point two is the opposite of the previous one. The world in which college graduates are unable to distinguish between principle and principal and think that the past tense of lead is lead has produced its ugly antidote, namely the spelling bee. The contestants cram hundreds of useless words and come away empty-handed because in the last tour they may miss bogatyr “a Russian epic warrior” (the word is not in the memory of my computer). Wouldn’t it have been more profitable to read Russian fairy tales rather than wasting the brain cells on the words one will never see or use? It is an open secret that the most ambitious parents hire coaches to prepare their children for collecting bitter spelling honey. Prestige and prizes are involved in this losing game.

The masses, as I said, have been reduced to the state of blissful illiteracy and will support spelling reform. They have already abbreviated everything. University is simply U. I teach at the U. of M. (University of Minnesota), students in Salt Late City go to the U. of U. (the University of Utah), and if u (= you) want to move south, hire a truck with the sign “U Haul” (that is, “You Haul”) and go there (their) real quick. U Haul to the U. of U., jingling all the way! Text messaging (called texting in British English) and so-called emotics follow the same route. BRB “be right back” cannot be misspelled. Ads vacillate between two extremes: they play on fake nostalgia and invite us to visit their “shoppe,” as in good “olde” times, but also offer lite beer and donuts (curiously, dictionaries now recognize donut as a variant of doughnut—a revolution from below). Simplified spelling is with us, unless you have noticed it. If Spelling Society succeeds in harnessing the energy of popular culture and steers clear of its excesses, it may eventually turn the tide.

However, there is a fly in the ointment. The reformers have always tried to achieve all at once, forgetting the fact that educated people are averse to rapid shakeups of spelling. Any reform that writes giv and hav on its banner is doomed to failure: it will be rejected unanimously by the left and right. Initial changes should be almost surreptitious: first persuade the powers that be (I have no idea where, in the absence of language academies, such powers hide) to abolish the difference between till and until, spell and dispel. Then remove k- in knob and knock (but retain it in know, to preserve its union with acknowledge). Get rid of c in scythe, as well as in excellent, acquaint, and their likes. Dispense with final -b in dumb (pretend that it is a back formation of dummy) but retain it in numb and thumb because of their weakly sensed affinity with nimble and thimble. It is only the underhand “donut way” that may guarantee success: chip away at one word after another. The process will take several decades, if not longer, but, once people agree that change is needed, they will allow the reformers to introduce proksimity, telephone, and perhaps even krazy (not a Romance word!) and wipe out the difference between descendent and descendant.

Necessity has taught us to recycle all kinds of products. Pubs have gone smoke free. We are saving energy, albeit on a small scale. People do all such things, for they realize that they either comply or perish. There is no joy in raising children who know that they are dum(b) and see no means of improving their status. Nor do we want all words being reduced to capital letters. WBA (it will be awful). Investing money in teaching English spelling as it exists will have the same effect that investing millions in Soviet collective and state farms had. But drawing on the experience of that country, we should beware of repeating its other mistake. Post-communist reformers preached that one cannot jump over a chasm in two steps: democracy, market, and privatization—all overnight. A jump indeed presupposes a single effort. But why not build a bridge over a chasm? If spelling reform becomes reality, the English speaking world will emerge from a dark cell into dazzling daylight. This can be accomplished only by passing through many intermediate stages. Lite beer and donuts are the right sustenance on this way.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Hermaphrodites are born rarely, and it is far from clear why their mythology achieved such prominence in Antiquity. Reference to cross-dressing during certain marriage rites does not go far, but the cult of Hermaphroditus is a fact, and Ovid’s tale of the union in one body of the son of Hermes and Aphrodite is well-known. Perhaps this myth reflects the eternal desire to be sexually self-sufficient and thus never bother about a lover, faithlessness, and divorce. In art, Hermaphroditus was portrayed as a youth with developed breasts or as the goddess Aphrodite with male genitals. It is even less clear what the oldest speakers of the Germanic languages knew about hermaphrodites. Characteristically, the modern word (hermaphrodite) is unabashedly Greek with an obvious mythological tinge. But this is so in present day English.

In Frisian, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages, the main (and sometimes the only) word for hermaphrodite has the inner form that can be rendered as “of two sexes” or “with two tools.” German has Zwitter, from earlier zwitarn. Zwi- is related to zwei “two”; the meaning of -tarn or -arn is obscure (a suffix or a remnant of a longer noun?). Medieval Germanic scribes occasionally ran into Latin hermaphroditus, which they had to gloss, that is, to translate into their languages. When we are able to decipher the words they used, we come up with “castrated man,” “effeminate person,” “bad creature” (the adjective bad seems to be the root of such a noun) and even “devil” (for instance, Old Engl. scritta), rather than “a person with two sets of reproductive organs.” Some glosses were probably nonce words, formations coined on the spur of the moment, like Modern Engl. willgill ~ willjill. Most scribes had a vague idea that something was wrong with a hermaphrodite and knew that the flaw pertained to the sexual sphere, but were at a loss to find an exact equivalent. On the other hand, they could know the exact term from dealing with the natural world. Thus, in a Low (= northern) German dialect the word helferling occurs; it is a term used in pigeon breeding, and its affinity with Engl. half is not in doubt. Such formations could have existed a millennium and even two ago. Perhaps zwitarn is one of them.

A brave effort was once made to detect a term for “hermaphrodite” in a 14th-century German legal code titled Sachsenspiegel (-spiegel “mirror”). The term is altvile (plural). Dwarves, cripples, and altvile were not allowed to inherit movable property or fief. The disenfranchised were the people who could not defend themselves, and this explains the exclusion of the handicapped and dwarves, the more so as stunted growth was looked upon as a mental disease rather than a physical, bodily deficiency. But hermaphrodites? How many hermaphrodites could there be in medieval Germany, to justify a special clause? Altvil, analyzed as al-tvil, appears to contain a cognate of two. Or we could be dealing with alt-vil, which resembles the phrase all zu viel “too many” (presumably of organs). Those who copied the Sachsenspiegel in the 14th century did not know more about this matter than we do, for the word turns up in numerous forms, a sure sign of scribes’ perplexity. The Sachsenspiegel was several times translated into Latin, and the original manuscript has splendid illustrations. However, neither the Latin glosses of the German words nor the pictures make it clear what altvile means. More likely, the division is al-tvile, and the word has nothing to do with hermaphrodites. It may have meant “madmen,” with -twil being related to Dutch dwaes “foolish” and its Old Engl. cognate. Defending this interpretation will take me too far afield and is not relevant (not germane, as one of my colleagues likes to say) to the present discussion. A certain Markwart Altfil is known to have lived in 1180. I think he was Markwart dolt. Medieval soubriquets, some of them used about royalty, were unbelievably offensive, and few topics are more intriguing than the attitudes of a society in which one could kill and be acquitted for a scurrilous allusion but would tolerate the most demeaning nickname.

A legitimate question is whether Germanic mythology preserved tales of hermaphrodites. The answer is not really. The Roman historian Tacitus, who in the second half of the 1st century C.E. left an all-important description of the southern ancestors of Rome’s Germanic neighbors, mentioned Tuisto, or Tuisco, the spouseless father of the god Mannus, but nothing is known about his appearance. Only his name suggests “two of something.” The 13th-century Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson tells a story of how Ymir, the primordial giant of the Scandinavian creation myth, fell into a sweat while he slept, whereupon a man and a woman grew under his arm. Also, one of his legs got a son with the other. In such myths, children are usually born to a great spouseless progenitor, but this does not mean that he was a hermaphrodite. Ymir has been compared with Latin gemini “twins.” More likely, it means “howler,” a typical name for a giant. In Scandinavian myths, giants were not particularly huge, and dwarves were not small. They were distinguished by their function: the gods maintained law and order, the dwarves provided them with the treasures that assured their ability to govern (a hammer, a sword, a magic ship, and so forth), and the giants were the forces of chaos. For that reason, giants and dwarves often had the same names. One of them was Billingr, which appears to have meant either “twin” or, less likely, “hermaphrodite” (in regional Swedish and Nynorsk, billing means “twin”). But this is a piece of speculative etymology, not a myth, for we know nothing about either the giant or the dwarf called Billingr: all that has come down to us are their identical names.

Roman and Germanic mythology share numerous tales, but there is no Germanic counterpart of the story told by Ovid or statuettes resembling the pictures on ancient vases. Although the ancestors of the modern speakers of the Germanic languages were apparently not ignorant of hermaphrodites, all our insights come from linguistic forms (glosses and names), poor substitutes for narrative and visual art.

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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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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

There is a folk etymologist in all of us. We expect sever, severe, and severy (“compartment of a roof”) to be cognates and resent the fact that they are not. Poets and punsters connect such words, while etymologists, these dry-as-dust killjoys, ruin native intuition. It is a pity that rhyme has fallen into desuetude, for rhyme is a great uniter. Consider the following. English love is gentle, almost heavenly, because love rhymes with above, dove, and, to a certain extent, move (we will disregard shove for the sake of argument). French love never ends, for otherwise, why should amour have rhymed with toujours “always”? Russians are a different matter, as follows from the triad liubov’ “love,” krov’ “blood,” and vnov’ “again.” German young people of both sexes (sexes, not genders, for German has three genders) have been a model of propriety since the beginning of creation: consider the time-honored rhyme Jugend “youth”/ Tugend “virtue.” A good deal has been written about such convergences, but it is equally interesting to observe how easily language drives a wedge between closely related words. One small phonetic change suffices to obliterate the ties between related words. A few examples come to mind.

Batch, to quote Skeat, is as much as is baked at once; hence, a quantity. This is right; yet we no longer associate batch and bake. In Modern English, the consonants designated in spelling by k and ch respectively alternate with some regularity. Not infrequently, the k-forms are northern, and the ch-forms southern: compare kirk and church, mickle ~ muckel (both regional) and much. Occasionally both forms belong to the Standard, and the gap between them is not too great. For instance, we are ready to agree that seek is a cognate of beseech. The two verbs have strayed apart, but not as far as bake and batch, even though their preterits are different: sought versus beseeched (besought also existed but in the speech of the majority gave way to the more productive type). Another pair whose affinity has been destroyed in our consciousness by the alternation k ~ ch is wake and watch. The etymological meaning of watch is “to be awake.” Today watch means “to look carefully, to observe,” but those who watch for an opportunity must be wakeful, that is, wide awake. The difference in vowels (short in watch, long in wake) also contributed to the rift between those doublets.

A striking example of a how a minor change of a vowel can make the origin of a word impenetrable is trade. Trade, which was borrowed in this form from Middle Low (that is, northern) German in the 14th century, meant “a path, a track,” hence “a beaten track; regular business; buying and selling.” It is related to the verb tread. Middle English had trede “a tread, a step” and trod “a track.” Not only do we dissociate tread from trade despite their material closeness; the etymology of trade comes to the uninitiated as a surprise.

Sometimes grammar, in conjunction with phonetics, plays havoc with “family ties.” Today hardly anyone realizes that truce is, from a historical point of view, the plural of true. Yet what can be more obvious? In the 13th century, when truce first turned up in English texts, it was spelled trewes, trews, and trues, the plural of trew “pledge, promise.” The meaning of the ending was forgotten or disregarded (compare the modern names of sciences like physics : physics is), the pronunciation trues changed to truce, and the form we now know emerged. Similar adventures have been recorded elsewhere. Sometimes final -s has been misinterpreted in foreign words as a plural ending. The anthologized examples are Engl. pea, which evolved from pease (Old Engl. pise, late Latin pisa), cherry (compare French cerise), skate, abstracted from Dutch schaats (whose plural in Dutch is schaatsen), and (the most outrageous of them all) Chinee, from Chinese. However, the history of truce has parallels. Pence (a variant of pennies in compounds like twopence) is still plural, but it is neither spelled nor pronounced like pens. Dice should have been a homophone of dies, but the ending, again in a collective noun, was devoiced (z changed to s). Bodice is a disguised spelling of bodies, with the ending devoiced, as in pence, and body meaning “part of a woman’s dress above the waist” (compare corset, a diminutive of Old French cors “body”). Nowadays, when even bras have been discarded along with other appurtenances of bourgeois priggishness, the word bodice is hardly ever used, but the antiquated phrase a pair of bodies “bodice” and the still familiar (from literature) a pair of stays make the derivation of bodice from bodies sustainable, as at the moment everybody says instead of satisfactory, usable, acceptable. Some etymological solutions look like circus stunts, but no less often the indubitable etymology is right there, for anyone to see, and only a slight quirk dims our vision.

What else is there to say? The ultimate source of sever is Latin separare, so that sever and separate are doublets. Severe goes back (via Old French) to the Latin adjective severus. Severy, a word revived in the 19th century, is a doublet of ciborium “canopy; a vessel for the Eucharistic bread.” Truant is not related to true or truce, cherry and cherish are not congeners, and pea jacket has nothing to do with peas. Peanut, however, is indeed pea + nut.

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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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By Anatoly Liberman

All those who pose as experts in etymology tend to receive questions about certain popular words, with exotic slang and obscenities attracting the greatest attention. (The F-word is at the top of the list. Is it an acronym? No, it is not.) Beginning with my old post on copasetic, I tried to anticipate some such questions, and for a long time I have been wondering how to tell the story of OK, an object of undying interest. The excitement of this oft-repeated story has long since worn off, and only the thought that perhaps I can add nuance (as highbrows say) to the OK epic and thus partly avoid the otherwise inevitable triviality allows me to continue.

OK has been traced to numerous languages, including, Classical Greek, Finnish, Choctaw, Burmese, Irish, and Black English (Black English caught the fancy of many journalists, who in the sixties “rediscovered” Africa without going there and gained the reputation of radicals at no cost). The literature is also full of suggestions that the sources of OK have to be sought in German, French, or Danish. This guessing game presents interest for two reasons. First, it shows that many people do not realize the importance of research in historical linguistics. Not only do they risk offering conjectures without as much as a cursory look at the evidence: they do not even take the trouble to get acquainted with the views of their equally uninformed predecessors. One constantly runs into statements like: “I am surprised that it has not occurred to anyone…”, whereupon an etymology follows that was offered fifty years earlier and rehashed again and again. (Compare the review I once read of a performance of The Swan Lake. The reviewer said that this was the best performance of the ballet he could remember. I concluded that it was either the first time he had seen The Swan Lake or that he suffered from amnesia.) In my database, I have 78 citations for OK, mainly from the press, and this number could have been doubled or tripled if I had made the effort to collect all the letters on the subject printed in newspapers; I availed myself of only some of them. Variations on the same hypotheses keep surfacing again and again. Second, even specialists may not always realize that in dealing with a word like OK, a plausible derivation presupposes two steps. OK spread through the United States like wildfire in the early 1840’s and stayed. Regardless of whether the lending language is believed to be Choctaw or Finnish, the etymologist has to explain why OK became popular when it did. A similar approach is required for all slang and for many stylistically neutral words. Any innovation, be it bikini, recycling, a redistribution of voting districts, or a neologism, comes from a smart individual and is either rejected or accepted by the public. If a word has been rejected, we usually know little or nothing about its history (a stillborn has a short biography). But if it has survived, we should explain where it originated and what contributed to its longevity. Suppose OK is Greek. Why then was its radiation center the United States? And why in the forties of the 19th century? No etymology of OK will be valid while such questions remain unanswered.

In our case, the answers are known. Today we confuse one another with cryptic acronyms like LOL “laugh out loud” and AWOL (here a gloss is not needed). Linguistic tastes do not seem to have changed since the 1830’s. Facts give credence to the belief that OK stands for oll korrect, but not to the legend that this was the spelling used by Andrew Jackson. Although the 7th President of the United States would not have been hired as a spelling master even by a rural school, anecdotes about his gross illiteracy have little foundation in fact. The craze for k, as it was called (Kash, Kongress, and so forth), added to the staying power of the abbreviation OK. But OK would probably have disappeared along with dozens of others if it had not been used punningly by the supporters of Van Buren, the next president, born in Old Kinderhook, New York. To be sure, it could still have vanished once the campaign was over, but it did not. It even became the most famous American coinage, understood far beyond the borders of the United States. This is the account one finds in dictionaries, but dictionaries, quite naturally, do not dwell on the history of the search, which entailed decades of studying documents, broken friendships, and the making of a great reputation.

It was Allen Walker Read who reconstructed the Old Kinderhook link in the rise of OK, and his discovery became a sensation: first The Saturday Review published an article by him (1941), and years later an interview devoted to OK appeared in New Yorker. Read is also the author of many other excellent works, but few people outside academia have heard about them. At the end of one of his article on OK (he brought out four major articles on the subject and several addenda, all of them published in the journal American Speech), Read expressed his surprise that the origin of OK, which everybody must have known in Van Buren’s days, was forgotten so soon. However, the case is not unique. People regularly forget the pronunciations that were current only a generation ago and the events that led to the coining of words.

Read had to dispose of the possible pre-1839 existence of OK. And this is where personal animosities came in. One of the editors of the Dictionary of American English was Woodford A. Heflin, an excellent specialist, whose contributions clarified a good deal in the emergence of OK. But he put too much trust in the following line found in the journal of William Richardson, a businessman from Boston. In his detailed description of a journey to New Orleans (1815), Richardson wrote: “Arrived in Princeton, a handsome little village, 15 miles from N Brunswick, ok & at Trenton, where we dined at 1 P.M.” The ok & part makes no sense. Richardson may have begun a sentence that he did not finish, or a scribal error may have occurred. The amount of interlining and correction in the manuscript is considerable. Even if the sentence can be understood without emendation, the mysterious ok need not mean what it means to us, for the well-educated Richardson would hardly have infused a piece of low slang after mentioning N Brunswick. This was Read’s conclusion, but Heflin insisted that the 1815 occurrence of OK was the earliest we have. The strife that ensued soured the relations between the two scholars. Heflin went public and fought what he called an incorrect etymology of OK in the pages of American Speech. Read responded (the journal showed laudable impartiality and let both opponents express their views). The battle was fought in the sixties, long after Read’s initial article appeared in The Saturday Review.

Read examined the manuscript of Richardson’s journal, but to the best of my knowledge, he never mentioned the fact that he had not done it alone. This is what Frederic C. Cassidy wrote in 1981 (American Speech 56, 1981, p. 271): “After many attempts to track down the diary, Read and I at last discovered that it is owned by the grandson of the original writer, Professor L[awrence] Richardson, Jr., of the Department of Classic Studies at Duke University. Through his courtesy we were able to examine this manuscript carefully, to make greatly enlarged photographs of it, and to become convinced (as is Richardson) that, whatever the marks in the manuscript are, they are not OK. The Richardson diary does not constitute evidence for the currency of OK before 1839.” What an anticlimax! I only don’t understand why Read did not say all of it himself. In 1981 he was an active scholar guarding his priority most carefully, and there is no doubt that if Cassidy’s report had not been accurate, he would have made his disagreement known.

Here ends my story of OK, nuance and all.

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By Anatoly Liberman

On seeing the second line of the title, some experts in Shakespeare’s diction may have jumped to the conclusion that they are in for another essay on a scurrilous topic. Not quite, unless the subject English spelling is considered obscene by definition. How is it possible for a single vowel letter to have so many values? “Elementary, my dear Watkins,” as Sherlock Holmes did not say in any tale told by Conan Doyle. (Supposedly, the phrase was first used in 1915 by P.G. Wodenhouse in his novel Psmith Journalist. In Conan Doyle, the exchange between Watson and Holmes runs as follows: “’Excellent!’” I cried. “’Elementary’,” said he”. Those famous familiar quotations that everybody knows! They are like the proverbs of Alfred and the sayings of King Solomon. Dozens of works on word history open with Voltaire’s witticism that in etymology vowels count for nothing and consonants for very little. Yet it does not turn up in any of his written works.)

Unless counterbalanced by drastic reforms, long tradition usually makes spelling appear at best antiquated and at worst irrational. “This happens in all languages. For example, let us take English,” to quote a linguist of my acquaintance. We will follow his advice and “take” the letter o. Consider the following list:
bosom, Boleyn, woman;
love, dove, above, come, done;
move, prove;
on, gone;
one, none;
so, toe, nose.
On and nose (the short and the long of it) are taken for granted (so and toe are, in partly like nose), but the others?

I’ll begin with woman. The Old English for woman was wifman. Its long i designated a sound comparable with Modern Engl. ee in wee. Later that vowel underwent shortening, so that the word’s pronunciation began to resemble Modern Engl. wifman, rather than weefman, whereupon f was assimilated to its neighbor and wifman first turned into wimman (with regard to assimilation, compare lem’me go from let me go and leman “lover” from leofman) and then into wiman, for, as time went on, English lost long consonants. Contrary to professors of elocution, “common people” mispronounce words, slur as much as they can, and in general do not care about their delivery. Otherwise they would not have allowed wifman to degenerate into wimman. But they did not stop there. To articulate w, speakers protrude their lips and are not always in a hurry to spread them again. The result of this laziness was that Old Engl. widu “wood,” for instance, yielded wudu. Likewise, wiman became wuman. In the Middle English period, scribes disliked the sequences wu, um, mu, un, nu, and uv (because of too many vertical strokes the letters were hard to separate in reading, the more so as the usual signs for v and w were u and uu respectively) and substituted o for u. This is how uuuman became uuoman, that is, woman. Present day English has no words spelled with initial wu-. The few exceptions are dialectal forms recorded by linguists centuries after the phonetic processes mentioned here had been completed, and the only one most of us know is wuther, thanks to Emily Bronte’s title Wuthering Heights. In the early modern period, short u, except in the north of England, changed to the vowel of Standard English one now hears in shut up. Hence love, dove, above, come, and others. The story of done is more complicated: the change from long o (as in the modern paw or pore) to long u (as in the modern school), the shortening of that u, and the last step to the vocalic value of u in shut up. Womb and woman, which also have o contiguous to w, are still pronounced with the vowel of wuther. The original sound remained intact under the influence of w-.

The lips are active not only in the production of w but also in the production of p and b, and this is why pull and bull are pronounced the way they are. However, sometimes p- and b- could not save the following vowel from change, and alongside put, pull, and bull we have putty, pulp, and bulb. Unfortunately, the pernicious habit of designating the vowel in words like womb with the letter o resulted in the modern spelling bosom. The long stressed vowel of Old Engl. bosom (again as in Modern Engl. paw, pore) changed to long u (the equivalent of Modern Engl. oo), underwent shortening, and has been preserved. Boozom, boozam, or buzom would have made sense. Bosom reminds us of the word’s image that has not existed for at least half a millennium, and this is its only virtue. Anne Boleyn’s name was also spelled Bullen, but the unnatural variant has triumphed. When a word of Modern English is spelled with oo, we may assume that in the past it had a long vowel, regardless of whether its today’s reflex is long (as in food, mood) or short (as in good, hood). But the vowel of wood hardly ever was long. It is often said that conservative English spelling comes students in good stead, for it provides a window to the history of the language. It does, but those who look out of that window should be warned that the glass distorts the picture more than once.

It is now clear why prove and proof are spelled differently. The digraph oo in proof causes no surprise. Prove joined the words with v after o. The difference between prove, move and love, dove is that in the first group the vowel has remained long. Had love and dove withstood shortening, the four words would have rhymed, as they probably did in Shakespeare’s days. Today love/move is a so-called rhyme to the eye—a fact of no importance, since rhyming poetry is all but dead.

Old Engl. an “one” (with long a, as in Modern Engl. father) should have developed like stan, which is now stone, and it did, judging by the pronunciation of only (from anlic) and alone (a fusion of two words). In Middle English, an became on (on as in today’s awning). The rest is less clear. At that time, long vowels and diphthongs behaved similarly in that they could be pronounced with stress on the beginning and on the end, and this is why leosan, for instance, existed in two variants: leosan and leosan. As a consequence of this alternation, Standard Engl. lose, the reflex of leosan, has a dialectal variant lease, which continues leosan. This is also the reason show has a competing spelling shew (among the greats G.B. Shaw used only shew). If choose had sheared the fate of lose, today we would be asked “to cheese/chease our cheese.” Apparently, Middle Engl. on, that is, oon could be oon or oon, depending on the rhythm of the sentence. The variant oon was pronounced uon and won, rhyming with on. Several other dialectal variants of the same type have also been attested. Won became wun and later won, indistinguishable from the past tense of win. The pronunciation wonly was already known in 1570. As is usual with phonetic novelties, educated people first rejected the “vulgar” pronunciation of one with initial w- but were overwhelmed. The result is that today one is not a homophone of own. Most language historians trace the novelty described here (from oon to wun and won) to the British southwest, but it is hard to understand why the local pronunciation of such an important word should have been adopted by the Standard. Perhaps the forms with w- developed in the London area in the “allegro speech” of the capital (a great melting pot at all times) or under the influence of the “lower classes.” Once and none have aligned themselves with one. Spelling passed this tempest by.

The conclusion is obvious: the letter o has so many values because spelling has not caught up with the history of English sounds. Language retaliates sluggishness by producing spelling pronunciations. The fairly recent innovations often and fore-head are not the only examples of this type. Those who know about Coventry only from books sometimes pronounce Cov- as in cover. And indeed, who won’t be lost among Coventry ~ cover ~ over? Other people think that the name of the poet Donne, a homophone of done and dun, should be pronounced with the vowel of on. We can pity the naïve foreigner who missed the difference between worsted, the past tense of the verb worst, and worsted, the fabric, but sad is the lot of a native speaker who so often feels like a foreigner at home.

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By Anatoly Liberman

The adjective paltry gives little trouble to etymologists. It came to 16th-century English from the continent, most likely, from Low (that is, northern) German. There was also paltry “trash, rubbish,” but final -y made its passage from noun to adjective easy. A similar fate, from noun to adjective, befell its synonym trumpery “fraud, trickery,” a word of French descent: it soon acquired the meaning “trashy.” Low German paltrig “ragged, torn” is related to palter- in palterlumpen “rags.” This palterlumpen is a curious formation because its first element (palter-) also means “rag(s).” At one time, I became aware of the existence of compounds in which both parts have the same or nearly the same meaning, as in courtyard (“yard-yard” or “court-court”). Once detected, such words began crossing my path with surprising frequency. I had known them for years but never paid attention to their makeup. Compare downhill, literally “hill-hill” and Wealhtheow, the name of the queen in Beowulf, literally, as I think, “slave-slave.” A palterlumpen must have been a prodigiously ragged rag.

Despite its undignified background, palt- (as in palter) is an ancient word, though it occurs more often with its vowel a and consonant l in reverse order. Middle Dutch and Middle Low German had plet “rag,” from the assumed form platja. Danish pjalt, with cognates in Swedish and Norwegian, means the same. In Danish and Norwegian words, j is a typical insertion, used to express the speaker’s contempt of the object of discussion: pjalt turns out to be a despicable rag, a rag-rag indeed In the 4th century, plat “patch” was used in the text of the Gothic Bible (below, the word corresponding to it in the Authorized Version is italicized: “No one puts a piece of new garment upon an old,” L V: 36, Mk II: 21). Also in Russian, plat means “a piece of cloth,” but it remains unclear whether Gothic plat is its cognate or whether one language borrowed from another. Perhaps we are dealing with a so-called migratory, or culture, word (whatever its origin), current from north to south, like the names of tools that travel over half the world with the people who use them. Engl. plot “a piece of land” looks like plat ~ palt, but no consensus has been reached about possible ties between them (and even if all researchers had agreed on the etymology of plot, jubilation would have been premature, for consensus and truth are different things).

The most enigmatic noun in this series is paletot “loose outer garment; overcoat.” English dictionaries record it, but it is an obsolete or obsolescent loanword from Modern French, formerly often applied to a child’s coat. However, in French it is a living word. The initial form of paletot was palletoc. In England, from the 14th to the 16th century, paltock ~ paltok designated a kind of doublet or cloak with sleeves. Strangely, this word appeared in written English before it surfaced in French sources. This chronology does not necessarily mean that the word was coined in England, but it casts doubt on its French origin. Paletot produces the impression of a double diminutive: pal-et-ot (pal- means “pall; a cloak; mantle,” from Latin pallium “coverlet”), assuming that the word is Romance. However, paltok, with its final -k, needs an explanation, and here, too, a Germanic connection has been offered. When a transparent word like pal-et-ot coexists with an opaque one like paltok, the transparent form raises the suspicion of being the product of folk etymology, since it is more natural for people to change a word lacking associations in their language into something making sense than to do the opposite. We can understand how asparagus became sparrow grass, but who would “corrupt” (a favorite verb of older philologists) sparrow grass into the outwardly meaningless asparagus?

A 17th-century lexicographer defined our article of clothing so: “A long and thick pelt, or cassock, a garment like a short cloak with sleeves, or such a one as the most of our modern pages are attired in.” But in France it was first worn by peasants and therefore could not be a fancy cloak. If paltock is an English rather than a French word, perhaps it contains the by now familiar root palt-, followed by the diminutive suffix -ock, as in bullock, hillock, and so forth. A similar etymology turned up in the literature more than a hundred years ago but found no supporters, because the suggested suffix was Welsh, and indeed, why produce a hybrid when a purebred is a possibility? It would be better for my etymology if we knew exactly in which country paltock was coined and who made paltocks, but then its origin would have not baffled scholars so long. My only (weak) consolation is that the existing etymologies of paltock are hardly more convincing that mine.

When Marxism was at its peak among the German 19th-century social democrats, revisionists appeared (no religion without a heresy), whose slogan, with regard to workers’ struggle for their rights, was: “The goal is nothing, movement is everything.” Etymologists cannot occasionally help thinking of this slogan. Yet their goal exists, even if they seldom reach it. Our movement in the present essay has not been useless. The existence of the word palt ~ plat has been ascertained beyond reasonable doubt. It was probably a culture name for “a piece of cloth,” frequently degenerating into “rag.” Some such rags showed particularly strong traces of wear and tear (palterlumpen, for example); other pieces may have been solid enough to be made into cloaks. Ragged things were called paltry in northern Germany and the adjacent lands. Paltry made its way to England and is still with us, though we remember only its figurative sense.

The verb palter (“to talk in a confused manner, babble”) also exists It is anybody’s guess whether this verb has anything to do with palter- “rag” (did palter mean “to deal in rags; to trifle”? Skeat’s suggestion) or with its distant synonym falter (no one has compared them), or with neither.

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Kirsty reports from the London Book Fair.

First impressions? Wow.

I have never been to the London Book Fair before, and I’m not sure I knew what to expect as I approached the forbidding entrance to the Earls Court Exhibition Centre. As soon as I was through the front door, though, I was swept up in a mush of people and sound, everyone and everything seemingly zooming in a multitude of directions. After a minor panic of “where the hell am I going?” I found the ‘Exhibitors’ door, flashed my snazy LBF badge and that was it. I was in.

Chaos presented itself to me, albeit it suited and booted chaos, and I decided the first order of business was to find the OUP stand. L605 my post-it note said. “That’s all well and good,” says I, “but where on earth is it? And more the point, where on earth am I?”. There was no use looking at the map on the wall. There were so many people peering at it that I fear it might have well as been a Tube map for all the good that was to come out of it.

But, we bloggers are brave and hardy souls, so I took a deep breath and threw myself into the throng. As luck would have it, the OUP stand has a large blue tower in the middle of it, so I located it relatively quickly, accdentally swinging my laptop bag into only a handful of other visitors. It, like its partners around it, was a seething mass of table and chairs, and what I presume to be very important meetings. I wouldn’t disturb anyone, I would just go wandering. Who knew what bookish delights lay in wait?

And here is the highlight of Day One so far: crabcakes. Freshly cooked crabcakes, prepared before my very eyes. Look! See?

They were delicious. And as if that wasn’t enough, look what I, er, accidentally stumbled upon next door:

Champagne, you say? Well, all in the name of blogging! See what I do for you readers? Such a hardship.

Catch up with me over the next three days as I bring you the best of the London Book Fair 2008 - and especially check out the edited highlights of tomorrow night’s Oxford World’s Classics Official Launch! I can’t wait. I love my job.

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By Anatoly Liberman

English and Japanese spelling. In one of the comments on spelling reform, my brief statement on English versus Japanese was criticized. A month ago, in the previous set of “gleanings,” I responded to someone’s remark asserting that the complexity of spelling and the level of literacy are not connected, as the experience of Japanese allegedly shows: Japanese spelling is hard to master, but the Japanese, as we hear, are overwhelmingly literate. I suggested that the two systems should not be compared, for hieroglyphs are different from letters. (more…)

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