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By Anatoly Liberman

When I was growing up, I read Paul de Kruif’s book Microbe Hunters so many times that I still remember some pages by heart. Two chapters in that book are devoted to Pasteur. The second is called “Pasteur and the Mad Dog.” A book about great word hunters would similarly enthrall the young and the old. Think of the chapters: “Jacob Grimm and an Enchanted Castle of Roots” (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did not only collect folk tales: they, especially Jacob, were the founders of comparative philology), “Wedgwood beyond Porcelain” (etymologist Hensleigh Wedgwood was related to the porcelain makers but had nothing to do with cups and plates), “Walter Skeat at Home and on the Skating Rink,” a spoof on the analogy of Jean-Jacque Brousson’s memoirs Anatole France en pantoufles (the author of our best etymological dictionary happened to be an excellent skater, and outside the university, folks at Cambridge knew him mainly in that capacity), “Frank Takes His Chance” (about Frank Chance, one of the most sagacious English etymologists of the second half of the 19th century), “James A.H. Murray: The Man Who Was Monday-to-Monday”—what a field for a fertile mind, what a joy for an inquisitive reader! In any book on word hunters, some space should clearly be allotted to the Swiss linguist Wilhelm Oehl. Thus, “Wilhelm Oehl and the Butterfly.” (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Bishop John Wilkins (1614-1672), a renowned man who regularly preached before the king himself, had multifarious sensible ideas, as one can judge by reading his works. A discovery of a new world, or, A discourse tending to prove that ‘tis probable there may be another habitable world in the moon: with a discourse concerning the probability of a passage thither… (we, postmodernists, love “discourse,” don’t we?) and Mercury, or, The secret and swift messenger shewing, how a man may with privacy and speed communicate his thoughts to a friend at any distance (this is what I do every Wednesday with the help of this blog). However, our readers are probably familiar only with his treatise Of the principles and duties of natural religion. Bishop Wilkins believed that English spelling is an appendix to the curse of Babel, and many wise and learned people shared his opinion. The very spelling shewing proves him right. (Shew survived the 19th century. Among the famous modern writers G. B. Shaw never wrote show. The reason for this strange spelling will be explained at some other time). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The adverb is an endangered species in Modern English. One should neither wring one’s hands nor weep on hearing this news. In the course of the last thousand years, English has shed most of its ancient endings, so that one more loss does not matter. Some closely related Germanic languages have advanced even further. For example, in German, schnell is both “quick” and “quickly,” and gut means “good” and well,” even though wohl, a cognate of Engl. well, exists. Everybody, at least in American English, says: “Do it real quick.” Outside that phrase, which has become an idiom, adverbs are fine: he is really quick and does everything quickly. During his visit to Minneapolis after the collapse of the bridge, President Bush said: “We want to get this bridge rebuilt as quick as possible.” This is not a Bushism: few people would have used quickly here despite the fact that my computer highlighted the word and suggested the form with -ly. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Thanks to the correspondents who commented on the earlier posts. Some time ago, in discussing the origin of Georgia cracker, I could only refer to some inconclusive derivations of this slang phrase. Craig Apple writes: “My understanding (and I absolutely can not document this) was that a ‘cracker’ was a turpentine distiller, the process of rendering turpentine from pine tar being analogous to the cracking of crude oil to produce, say, gasoline. Crackers… went off alone into the woods for months to boil pine tar—they came out with a wagon full of casks…. So, like ‘redneck’ it became a general term of opprobrium for poor rural whites.” (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Even a quick look at the history of words meaning “break” shows how often they begin with the sound group br-. Break has cognates in several Germanic languages. The main Old Scandinavian verb was different (compare Modern Swedish brytta, Norwegian brytte, and so forth), but it, too, began with br-. A verb related to brytta existed in Old English (breotan). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Cockney: in the 19th century, the origin of few words was discussed as much and as vehemently in both professional and lay circles. It surfaced in a text dated 1362, but the earliest known attempt to explain its derivation goes back to 1617. John Minsheu, the author of the first etymological dictionary of English, recounted an anecdote about a London child, who, after being taken to the countryside and informed by his father that horses neigh, heard a rooster and asked: “Does the cock neigh too?” Hence, allegedly, cockney, a derisive name for a Londoner. This story has been repeated innumerable times and can be found in both the OED and the multivolume American Century Dictionary. Of course, the anecdote was told tongue in cheek, for no one could grow up in London without knowing anything about horses. Yet even 200 years later some credulous folks, who touched on the origin of cockney, referred to Minsheu as their authority. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Insanity is a relative concept. What’s meat (normalcy) for one is insanity (poison) for another. Language shows how fluid the boundaries of madness are in human consciousness. One can rise from the abyss or fall into it depending on the caprices of the speaking community. Especially characteristic is the history of the adjective mad. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Many people have seen a dictionary of confusables before. Not only such classic near twins as affect ~ effect, principle ~ principal, lie ~ lay, and biannual ~ biennial get confused. English, it appears, is a veritable pandemonium: all words mean the same, and everything sounds like something else, thereby creating insurmountable difficulties for the unwary. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

I wish I could write something called “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” but, unfortunately, a similar idea occurred to someone who lived before me. So I’ll write “The Curmudgeon and the Catawampus” instead. Who is a curmudgeon? The word has been around in English books since 1577 (OED). Samuel Johnson, the author of a famous 18th-century dictionary, defined the gentleman in question as “avaricious churlish fellow,” but in British usage a curmudgeon’s first quality (love of money) is more prominent than the second (lack of social mores). A British curmudgeon is preeminently a miser. Nearly all lexicographers agree on that point. Only Henry Cecil Wyld, in his A Universal English Dictionary, says “a churlish, cross-grained, surly, ill-tempered, cantankerous fellow.” (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Part one of this essay can be found here.

Faggot “bundle of firewood,” which can be spelled with g or with gg, came to Middle English from French. Modern French has fagot (with the same meaning) and fagoter “tie up (wood, etc.) in bundles.” Italian fagotto “bassoon,” ultimately of the same origin (or so it seems), spread to many languages. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Even though etymology rests on the solid foundation of the comparative method, its conclusions are tentative, like those of all sciences dealing with reconstruction. Knowledge of sound correspondences and historical facts may prevent researchers from making silly mistakes, but it often fails to point the way to the best solution. In tracing the prehistory of words, serendipity and inspiration still play (and will always play) a role. The next two essays on this blog owe their existence to a happy coincidence. In some British dialects, pimp means “small bundle of firewood.” This fact (recorded in the OED) has been celebrated, to use a trendy word, in several books on language, though I am not aware of anyone’s attempt to explain the second meaning. Nor did I intend to delve into this problem, but, when I read about pimp “bundle,” I decided, out of curiosity, to look it up in several dictionaries. One definition struck me as nearly incredible: pimp “faggot.” Faggot, it will be recalled, besides being an insult, means “bundle of sticks.” How could one opprobrious word become the definition of another? This is what made me study both of them. My conclusions have a few holes, but perhaps they will partly dispel the obscurity enveloping the etymology of pimp and faggot. At the moment, all dictionaries say: “Pimp. Origin unknown.” (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Many thanks to our correspondents for questions and comments. First, the future of my etymological dictionary. Work on the dictionary and a bibliography of English etymology is going well, with occasional unexpected but pleasant complications. At the moment, I am mostly interested in words beginning with the letter B, but one day, while reading an old book on Dutch etymology, I understood where Engl. yeoman came from. I am sorry that yeoman begins with the second letter from the end rather than from the beginning of the alphabet, but the way of research are unpredictable: one often has to enjoy the dessert before an appetizer.

(more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

What a blow to national pride: cake is a loanword from Scandinavian, and cookie has been taken over from Dutch! The story of cake is full of dangerous corners, as will become immediately obvious. Anyone who begins to learn Swedish soon discovers that the Swedish for cake is kaka. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The names of musical instruments are often loanwords, in English they are usually from Greek (via French intermediaries) or Italian. Sometimes their original forms are transparent. Thus the medieval wind instrument shawm goes back to Greek kalamos “reed”; nothing could be simpler. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

This story is about ranks, and we will work our way to the highest echelons of the military, but it is proper to begin with sergeant. The family name Sargeant ~ Sargent has a after s but is pronounced like sergeant. Such a trifle would not attract anyone’s attention (after all, this is English) if the same variation (er ~ ar) did not occur so often, sometimes reflected in the spelling, sometimes disguised by it. Consider Berkeley (the North American place name) and the philosopher’s name Berkeley (the latter is pronounced Barkley); University, as opposed to ‘varsity; parson, derived from person (Latin persona); clerk (rhyming in American English with jerk), Derby, and merchant versus Clark, Darby and Marchant, among many others. The very name of the letter r does not begin with e, like ef, el, em, en, and es (it should have been homonymous with err rather than are). English spelling is so erratic that we do not notice the oddity of beard, heard, and hearth having different vowels but the same -ear- in the middle. The change of er to ar is at least 500 old. Like all changes in pronunciation, it was “vulgar” when it surfaced and has therefore proved ineradicable. Some words succumbed to it but the Standard enforced the conservative variant. For example, learn and heard are no longer larn and hard (as they were for a long time). In other cases, spelling conformed to the new pronunciation, and we do not suspect that heart could have merged with hurt. Sergeant goes back to Old French sergeant ~ serjeant (Modern French sergent). Its root is serv-, so that sergeant comes out as an etymological doublet of servant (sergeant-at-law has retained the oldest meaning). The disappearance of -vi- in Latin servientem, the accusative of serviens “serving” and the etymon of sergeant, looks strange, but compare the development of Latin plovia “rain.” It changed to plovia; -v- was lost in it and -i- (pronounced like y in Engl. yea) “hardened” into j (as in Engl. John), whence French pluie and Italian pioggia, whereas Spanish has lluvia (from pluvia). Another pair is Latin cavea “stall, coop, hive, etc.,” presumably not related to cava “hollow pace” (Engl. cave), and its French continuation cage, from which English has cage. (Cavea must have had the diminutive form caveola, later gaviola “small cage”; Spanish gayola is close to this reconstructed form. Engl. jail/gaol and Spanish gayola are related, but it is hard to believe that both are akin to cavea and cage; yet they are.) You are surprised that a word designating a military rank did not turn out to be more steadfast (its spelling is archaic, but its pronunciation is modern). Wait until you read the history of colonel.

However, the most opaque item on our list is lieutenant. Those, who, like speakers of American English, say lootenant, will not object to its spelling once they learn (“larn”) that lieutenant has been borrowed from French and consists of two parts: lieu “place” and tenant “holder” (from Latin locum tenans, understood as “deputy, substitute”); even the word order–first the noun, then the attribute, as in court martial and heir apparent–betrays its place of origin. But the British pronunciation is leftenant, and f in the middle remains a puzzle, the more so because, according to an authoritative British English pronouncing dictionary, published in the fifties of the past century, until recently the usual pronunciation of lieutenancy in the navy was lootenancy (stress on the second syllable) or lootnancy, while lieutenant was pronounced leftenant in the army and letenat in the navy, though the variant with f also had some currency among sailors. As early as the 14th century, spellings with leef- ~ leeu- began to turn up, and they reflected a pronunciation that can be accounted for in only two ways: either Old French also sometimes had f ~ v (from the w-sound) or folk etymology affected the word’s form. Folk etymology is a usual suspect in such cases. For instance, German Leutnant owes its spelling to an association with Leute “people.” But in English only leeful “permissible, lawful; just” has the same beginning as leeftenant, and it seems hazardous to connect them. Even less credible is the old conjecture that the letter -u- in lieutenant was misread as v. The possibility of confusion between u and v needs no proof, but why should it have had such dire consequences for the oral form of the word? Leeftenaunt (not leevtenaunt!) occurred in a text of 1378. The phonetic explanation (f ~ v from w) carries more conviction. Apparently, two forms have competed in the language for centuries. One was preferred in the army, the other in the navy (a common occurrence). Those who colonized the New World must have brought the f-less variant with them. A good deal of trouble would have been avoided if the English had followed the example of the Italians and abridged the word to tenente, for then there would have been no problem.

Now to colonel, a homonym of kernel. The earliest (mid-sixteenth-century) recorded form is coronel; it modified its spelling in imitation of French colonel. The etymology is not in doubt: a colonel is the leader of the column at the head of the regiment. So why coronel? In words like colonel, which have two identical consonants, one of them occasionally changes as the result of what linguists call dissimilation, the sequences l-l and r-r being especially vulnerable. As a result, r and l play leapfrog in many languages. Middle Engl. marbre (from French) yielded marble, purpuran, an oblique case of purpure, acquired the form purple (initially purpur- denoted the crimson color; not only pronunciations but also meanings change), and in dialects frail has been attested as a variant of the noun flail. Colonel became coronel in French (the form has not survived) and Spanish; a similar process happened in Portuguese. The influence of corona does not seem to be a factor in the history of this word. In the second part of the 18th century, curnel sounded “low” in comparison with colnel. Today the “low” pronunciation is the only one, but the spelling is genteel. A well-known scholar remarked in 1791: “This word is among those gross irregularities which must be given up as incorrigible.” And so be it.

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This week’s monthly gleanings from Anatoly mark a special moment for me and my family. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

R-less English dialects again. The correspondent who last month inquired about the loss of r in British dialects, wanted to learn more about that process. First a few general remarks. The so-called resonants (l, r, m, and n) are often absorbed by preceding vowels or lost. This is how nasal vowels arose in French (oral vowels merged with n and m). The archaic spelling of Engl. walk, folk, and calm alerts us to the fact that l was at one time pronounced in all such words. In early Middle English, palesie “palsy” developed from Old French paralesie “paralysis,” and mossel for morcel “morsel” was attested at the same time. 14th-century examples of this type are numerous, but the change seems to have reached its peak by the 18th century, when (naturally) it was criticized by those who did not want to see English “corrupted.” As I have said more than once, it is instructive and pleasant to study the history of language, but disgusting to be part of it. Any large colony is a melting pot of dialects, and we can assume that among those who came to the New World some people rolled their r’s, others pronounced them weakly, and still others barely sounded them after vowels and in word final position. In the metropolis, the change went on: words like fort and fought became homonyms, and dawn began to rhyme with adorn. In American English, this pronunciation did not achieve the status of the norm, though it is rather widespread on the East Coast. As to the prestige of the r-less dialects (the question contained this point), phonetic variants are never admired for linguistic reasons (vowels and consonants are neither beautiful nor ugly: everything is in the mind of the observer). People usually imitate the speech of those whose position in society guarantees success, and to an American ear, all the irony notwithstanding, King’s/Queen’s English sounds as particularly “classy.”

Why do we have words for “widow” and “orphan” but not for someone whose child or other close relative has died? Can I suggest such a word? As long as a community is governed by law, it has legal guidelines for inheritance. This is why the words widow and orphan were needed. It was necessary to protect the rights of those who would have become destitute after the death of the breadwinner. The loss of a child, sister, or brother did not involve comparable problems. Both widow and orphan have wide connections in the Indo-European languages and in the beginning were devoid of emotional overtones. Originally, they meant “bereft.” I would not dare to create the neologism our correspondent is looking for. Perhaps survivor will do. It is better than subsister, a noun with the suffix -ee (like deprivee), or some pompous word made up of Latin and Greek roots.

Are houri and whore related? No, they are not. Houri, taken over into English from French, is ultimately an Arabic word meaning “gazelle-like in the eyes,” from hawira “to be black-eyed like the gazelle” (the transliteration is simplified). The meaning “voluptuous, seductive woman,” known from English and French, is secondary. By contrast, whore has retained its ancient meaning almost intact. The English word has cognates in all the Old Germanic languages (for example, Gothic hors meant “adulterer”). By a well-known rule, Germanic h corresponds to k in other Indo-European languages, so that we find Latin carus and Old Irish cara “friend” among the words akin to whore. In Germanic, the meaning “dear, loving” deteriorated and was associated with illicit sex and promiscuity. Thus, neither the sounds (Indo-European k versus Arabic h) nor the meanings of the two words match.

Is there a connection between kayak and its approximate Turkish synonym caique? Our correspondent provided a link to http://www.idiocentrism.com/kayak.htm and asked my opinion about the article by John J. Emerson, who argues that the Eskimo word goes back to the Turkish one. I find Emerson’s explanation convincing. The factual basis of his etymology is solid, and he is aware of the linguistic traps that the uninitiated tend to ignore. Since the article is available in the Internet, I see no need to retell it. Those interested in the history of flat-bottomed boats from East to West will find an interesting chapter on the subject in Emerson’s work. As an amusing addendum to his essay I can say that the Russian word kaiuk means not only the boat of the type discussed here (though the meaning of the Slavic word poses some difficulties) but also “quick (catastrophic) end.” Apparently, the Turkish boat was not a safe vessel.

A few separate words. Another correspondent wonders whether some words she heard from her grandfather exist or were his invention. Boychick “kid.” The guess in the letter that the word is of (Eastern, Ashkenazi) Yiddish origin is correct. It is made up of Engl. boy and a diminutive suffix borrowed from Slavic (compare Russian mal’chik “boy”; mal- “small”). Boychick is not rare in Jewish families. Bumbershoot “umbrella.” This is another relatively common word, first attested in texts in 1896. It looks like bumbrella, with its end changed to describe the “shooting” (opening) of the umbrella and initial b- perhaps added to make it sound slangy (consider bimbo, bamboozle, bum, bumble, and other less than dignified b-words). Dapadoodle “hat.” This colorful word has not turned up in any source I have consulted, but, considering the previous results, I am sure that it existed. Since doodle means “stack a pile; decorate” and also “round object,” it is an appropriate second part of a word for a hat. The vowel a in the middle (assuming that we are dealing with dapadoodle rather than dapperdoodle) often serves as a connecting element: compare cock-a-doodle-doo (and note another doodle). Dap ~ dab belongs to a group of sound symbolic verbs designating a light movement. You “dap” a “doodle” and look jaunty and dapper with a hat on. Putchky “baby girl.” Here again I have been unable to find an exact correspondence, but putchkity “grouchy,” pudjicky, and so on (many variants) occur widely. Perhaps the old man referred to disgruntled, pouting girls? Or could he have had pudge ~ podge “short, fat person” in mind? In any case, all the words are real, even though their origin is sometimes obscure.

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By Anatoly Liberman

A stream of questions about the origin of loo never dries up, though most people know that they will not get a satisfactory answer. Cornering a specialist is a rare treat, and guests at talk shows are genuinely pleased when the host says that he has no clue to the past of a certain word. Doctors are expected to recognize diseases; plumbers are called to fix leaking taps and blocked sinks, and etymologists’ duty is to shed light on word origins. They are paid for it. Right? (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Nowadays we are not expected to correspond to our names. Our friend Makepeace may be a bully, and a girl born in December may be called April or June. But in the past, people looked on the name as part of an individual. Knowledge of a hero’s name gave allowed the enemy to do him harm. To be sure, at all times there have been cowardly boys called Wolf or Leo and battered wives called Brynhild (bryn- “armor,” hild-“battle”), but things may not turn out the way we predict. (more…)

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