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By Anatoly Liberman

The etymology of the adjective pretty has been investigated reasonably well. Many questions still remain unanswered, but it is the development of the word’s senses rather than its origin that amazes students of language. The root of pretty, which must have sounded approximately like prat, meant “trick.” Judging by the cognates of pretty in Dutch, Low (Northern) German and Old Icelandic, the adjectives derived from this root first meant “sly, crafty, roguish, sportive.” Before us is evidently a slang word that has been current in Northwestern Europe since long ago, a circumstance that can perhaps account for some of the vagaries of its history. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

It is of course snuck that will interest us, but the origin of this illegitimate form should not be handled in isolation. We can begin with sneak, a verb whose recorded history is relatively short. The earliest examples with it turned up about four hundred years ago. Old English had snican “creep,” with short i, and this form could have yielded sneak, just as Middle English crike, from Scandinavian, yielded creek. But for snican to become sneak, it had to pass through the stage sneek (such is the phonetic regularity), which has not been attested. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Confusing as English spelling may be, it has one well-publicized, even if questionable, merit: it tells us something about the history of the language. For example, sea and see were indeed pronounced differently in the past. This fact is of no importance to a modern speaker of English but can be put to use in a course “Spelling as Archeology.” In other cases, modern spelling only puzzles and irritates. For example, most of my undergraduate students believe that the preterit of lead is lead (like read ~ read), though they never misspell bled and fled. We are heirs not only to the pronunciations of long ago but also to the absurdities of what may be called learned tradition. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Looking Back
As always, I am grateful for comments. So far, I have received the most responses to my post on the death of the adverb. One of our correspondents notes that students in creative writing tend to put adverbs at the beginning of the sentence, as in “Happily, she met her boyfriend at the mall.” Sorrowfully, I have also noticed this mannerism, and not only in students’ stories. The adverb, nearly wiped out by morphology in American English, is doing “just fine” in syntax. For instance, the authors of scholarly publications love the word undoubtedly; they use it when arguments are weak and doubt exists. Obviously, certainly, and definitely serve the same purpose. Actually has become the bane of our life. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Although we have long since become unisex in everything we do, most witches are still women. It is therefore a great comfort to know that the earliest recorded form of witch is Old Engl. wicca (masculine) “man practicing witchcraft”; it first occurred in the Laws of Alfric (890). The feminine wicce surfaced in the year 1000. This chronology does not mean that witches arose after wizards. Words, especially such words, may exist long before they find their way into a manuscript or onto a printed page, but, as far as Anglo-Saxon England is concerned, men have some precedence when it comes to pursuing magic, at least in terms of their names’ attestation. All of it is interesting and even intriguing, but, like so many other interesting things, quite irrelevant, because in Middle English, endings were leveled and the difference between wicca and wicce disappeared—antiquity or our time, nature always triumphs over nurture and unisex will have its way. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

“From the north so dear to southern climes” is an awkward prose rendition of a line occurring in a lyric titled “Clouds” by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov. In 1840 he was exiled to the Caucasus, where Russia tried to “pacify” the Chechens (!). Lermontov improvised “Clouds” at a small farewell party in St. Petersburg, and I have chosen it to introduce the discussion of the words north and south (check out the discussion of east and west here). The juxtaposition of the hands will become clear later. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Last week my theme was the history of the word quiz. Now the time has come to deal with gig. The main meanings of the noun gig are as follows: “something that whirls,” for example “top” (known since approximately the middle of the 15th century), “flighty girl” (attested as early as 1225); “odd-looking figure” (chiefly Eaton slang; the earliest citation is dated 1777), “joke, whim” (1590), “fun, merriment” (again 1777), “light two-wheeled one-horse carriage” (1791), “a kind of boat” (1790), and “live performance of popular music”(1926); hence “temporary job”. Today only the last-named meaning is alive in everyday speech. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The following dialogue takes place in the play The Heir at Law by George Colman the younger:

Dick. But what a confounded Gig you look like.
Pangloss. A Gig! umph! That’s an Eton phrase; the Westminsters call it Quiz.—Act IV, Scene 2.

The play was first performed at the Haymarket in 1797. The OED quotes Pangloss’s reply at gig, but it is the exchange that will interest us. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Responses to this blog come from our correspondents (in the form of questions and comments) and from other blogs. On the whole, my suggestions have been treated gently, and disagreements have been rare. Like most people, I prefer praise to censure. Etymology is an absorbing area of study, but it is no less interesting to learn something about the climate in which etymologists of the past worked. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The Devil is uppermost in people’s thoughts, and his names are many. One of them is Old Nick. Its origin is obscure. The word nicker “water sprite,” explained as an old participle “(a) washed one,” is unrelated to it. Then there is nickel. The term was easy to coin, but copper could not be obtained from the nickel ore, and Axel F. von Cronstedt, a Swedish mineralogist despite von before Cronstedt, called the copper-colored metal copper nickel (German Kupfernickel), later shortened to nickel, after the name of a perfidious mountain demon (wolfram and especially cobalt have a similar history). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Language changes through variation. Some people say sneaked, others say snuck. The two forms may coexist for a long time, almost forever, or one of them may be considered snobbish, and, once the snobs die out, the form will go to rest with them. Or the snobs may feel embarrassed of being in the minority and adopt the popular form. The life of language is a constant tug of war: some speakers emulate their superiors, others try to merge with the crowd. Regardless of the trend, change is effected through variation. What passed for a mistake yesterday is the norm today, but language does not always favor innovation; it often suppresses novelties and awards victory to conservative forms. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

For quite some time, I have been answering direct questions at the expense of comments, even though they, too, often contained enquiries. I want to offer my apologies to the correspondents who have had to wait so long and incorporate my answers to them into this month’s gleanings. (more…)

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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

Etymologists constantly lament their fate: either the word to be explained was not recorded early enough (a typical case with vulgarisms and slang) or it is isolated (some monster like catawampus), or it has a sufficient number of allied forms but they are so similar that their semantic history cannot be traced (this circumstance—to give one example—handicaps the research into the origin of dwarf: like their English cognate, German Zwerg, Swedish dverg, etc., denote a short person, but how this combinations of sounds acquired its meaning is hard to decide ). The list is long enough for composing a full-fledged elegy “The Etymologist’s Complaint.” By contrast, an overwhelming amount of material may also pose problems. A case in point is the children’s verse of the eena—meena—mina—mo type. It has been recorded in numerous countries from east to west—naturally, in different form, but the first word is more or less the same everywhere. Although eena and its kin resemble one, they are too far from it to be qualified as its “garbled” or “corrupted” variants. Nor are meena, mina, and mo less obscure than eena. Why some human or beast has to be caught by the toe is equally puzzling but will not concern us. I will touch only on the English word eena and its analogues.

Our first sojourn will be in the Yorkshire Dales, where sheep are (or were at the end of the 19th century) scored as follows: yain, taien, tethera, (m)ethera, pi(m)p (the first five numerals). Another variant is eina, peina, para, pattera, pith. The origin of those numerals has been subjected to a long and fruitful discussion, whose main result is that we observe here a relic of an ancient British (Celtic) system of counting. Since to modern speakers yain, taien, etc. are meaningless words, their form is unstable and tends to vary from region to region. Some of the lists are mere gibberish, with English words replacing the original numerals, and rhyming words invented by informants. Complications arise when we cross the ocean and discover a similar string of numerals in use among the native population in North America, for example, een, teen, tother, fither, pimp, with the variant eeny, teeny, tuthery, fethery, fip. The American (Wawena) numerals were published in 1867. According to an informed opinion, those scores should be regarded as tally-marks rather than numbers; they were used in counting by fives, tens, or twenties. Presumably, they were “brought to New England by English colonists and used by them in dealing with the Indians in counting fish, beaver skins, and other articles of traffic. When the memory of their origin was lost, the Anglo-Americans believed them to be Indian numerals, and the Indians probably believed them to be good English.”

According to other hypotheses, the home of the phrase eena, meena, mina, mo is French Canadian or a language spoken on an island off the West Coast of Africa. Both hypotheses are fanciful. One should never tire of repeating that the idea of borrowing has value only when the way of penetration is known. In the world of words, tales, and customs, seeming convergences abound. Some words, plots, and rituals often have close analogue in different regions. It is easy and tempting to suggest borrowing. Positing loans without identifying intermediaries is a waste of time. The Celtic origin of sheep scoring is nearly certain. Incidentally, not only sheep and not only in Yorkshire are counted this way. The unresolved question is the connection between the American list and eena, meena, mina, mo. The resemblance between the rhyme and eina, peina, para, pattera; yain, taien, tethera, (m)ethera; eeny, teeny, tuthery, fethery is minimal. Only the first word is almost the same, and, as pointed out, it is such everywhere. Far from the English speaking world, Russian girls begin their games with the words eniki, beniki (eni-, pronounced like Engl. any). The second words (meena and beniki) must have been coined as rhyming partners of eena and beniki, but where did the first ones come from? The Old English for one was pronounced an (with a as in father), in Middle English it changed to on (with o as in British pawn); neither can be called a phonetic variant of eena. Equally slight is the similarity between eniki (after we subtract the meaningless ending -ki) and Russian odin “one” (stress on the second syllable; its older form began with ted- or yed-). Referring eeny to some “ancient British numeral” like eina suggests itself (obviously, a reasonable solution), but why wasn’t the entire sequence reproduced? Why only the first word? Children’s folklore often preserves remnants of ancient incantations, but no such incantation has been found. As far as we can judge, no magic formula ever began with eeny or eniki. Russian etymological dictionaries do not discuss eniki; the OED calls eena a nonsense word. To be sure, all is nonsense that we do not understand. Folklorists believe that the English counting out rhyme is relatively recent. If this is true, the emergence of eeny and its closeness to words like eniki makes the riddle of its origin even harder.

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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

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

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

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

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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