By Anatoly Liberman
LOL and the wide world. Many thanks for the interesting comments, questions, and antedatings! Here comes the first spring set of gleanings. In a story, supposed to be funny, a boy who did not speak until he was six years old suddenly said at dinner: “Too much salt in the soup.” The family was overjoyed, and everybody asked: “Why have you not spoken before?” “So far, I had nothing to complain about,” was the answer. My mail is not too heavy, apparently because I seldom irritate our readers. But last month I applied the epithet short-lived to LOL, the king/queen of texting, and immediately three comments assured me that LOL is very much alive. I stand corrected and hasten to express my joy about the longevity of such a serviceable “word,” the more so as I have studied the history of laughter, and every expression of it, especially when it is unconcealed and loud, warms the cockles of my heart.
Generic they, a permanent irritant. This is an old hat. At one time, I launched a quixotic attack on sentences like when a student comes, I never make them wait and if a tenant is evicted, it does not mean they were a bad tenant. I contended that such sentences owe their existence to a misguided attempt to get rid of generic he and that the remedy was worse than the disease. Let it be repeated that I did not defend him or her and in general did not say anything outrageous, but my taunt brought forth numerous responses. Some people said that constructions of this type had been used since the days of King Alfred, Chaucer, Fielding, Thackeray, and many other illustrious authors who lived before the-mid seventies of the 20th century (the chronological span is a bit disconcerting). Almost nothing of any interest has been found, and certainly no monstrosities like those I quoted in my post turned up in any old book, for the antecedent has invariably been someone, no one, a person, and so forth. However, every now and then I receive letters purporting to prove me wrong. Here is an example dated 1909: “I don’t want to be a lady… they can’t ever ride straddle nor climb a tree, and they got to squinch their waists and toes.” (Frances Boyd Calhoun, Miss Minerva and William Green Hill; I have no page reference). This is a far cry from the expectant student and the hapless tenant mentioned above. There was no way to avoid they here except for repeating the noun (I don’t want to be a lady. Ladies…). I can say something like it about anything. “No, not a marker. They leave traces on my hands” or “Is this only a mouse? I am not afraid of them.” But they were not a bad tenant? Give me a break!
More about pronouns: “You are It.” I received a question about the origin of it in children’s games. Much to my disappointment, not a single citation has been found in my database (which now exists as A Bibliography of English Etymology). This means that in over 20,000 articles and notes I have read while compiling this bibliography, no one mentioned the history of it even in a perfunctory way. The editors of the OED seem to have run into a similar problem. In the original edition, it (in games) is not mentioned at all. In the First Supplement a few examples appeared, none of them antedating 1888. Later an 1842 example was dug up. The most amazing thing is how late those examples are. Should we assume that it in the games of tag and blindman’s buff did not exist before roughly the middle of the 19th century? This would be a startling assum
By Anatoly Liberman
Neologists, thesauruses, and etymology. A month ago, one of our correspondents asked what we call people who coin new words. I suggested that such wordsmiths or wordmen may be called neologists. My spellchecker did not like this idea and offered geologist or enologist for neologist, but I did not listen to its advice. Geologists study rocks, and (o)enologists are experts in wine making. Mountains and alcohol are for the young; I have enough trouble keeping my identity among entomologists (the motif of an insect will turn up again at the end of this post). Soon after my answer was posted, a letter came from Marc Alexander, a colleague teaching in Glasgow. He was a member of the team that produced the great Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (this is only part of the title) that Oxford University Press brought out in 2009. He kindly looked up the relevant category in the thesaurus and found the following: logodaedalus (current between 1641 and 1690), logodaedalist (it lived in books between 1721-1806), neologist (which surfaced in 1785 and is still alive), neoterist, and verbarian, coined in 1785 and 1873 respectively, all in all a nice gallery of stillborn freaks. Mr. Alexander adds: “Based on OED citations, neologist is, I think, exclusively one who uses rather one who coins [new words].”
I would like to profit by this opportunity and thank all our readers who comment on my posts (I wish there were more of them) and in addition say something about the role of thesauruses for etymology. When the first volumes of the OED, at that time called NED (New English Dictionary) reached the public, two attitudes clashed, and the polemic was carried out with the acerbity typical of such exchanges in the 18th and the 19th century. (Those who have never read newspapers and popular and semi-popular magazines published in Addison’s days and much later have no idea how virulent their style often was. Both James A.H. Murray and Walter W. Skeat represented the trend in an exemplary way and never missed the chance of calling their opponents benighted, ludicrously uninformed, and unworthy of even the shortest rejoinder; then a long diatribe would usually follow.) Some people praised Murray for including all the words that occurred in printed sources, while others objected to filling the pages of the great national dictionary with obstructive rubbish: they would never have allowed logodaedalist and its likes to mar the pages of a serious reference book. No convincing arguments for or against either position exist. The public will not notice the presence of logodaedalist or use this preposterous word, but those who are interested in the sources of human creativity, for whom language history is not only a list of survivors (be it sounds, forms, syntactic constructions, or words) but a chronicle of battles won and lost will be perennially grateful to the OED for documenting even the words that lived briefly. Such words show how English-speakers have tried to master their language for more than a millennium, and the picture is inspiring from beginning to end.
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary… (two handsome volumes) is a great book, a monumental achievement, a truly bright feather in OUP’s cap. It will serve as an inestimable tool in etymological work. When we ask the often unanswerable question about the connection between what seems to be an arbitrary group of sounds (“sign”) and meaning, sometimes our only guide or supporting evidence is analogy. I will use a typical example from my work. The origin of basket (from C
