THE HAPPY END: FROM BOOZE TO MILK
(THE WORD BEESTINGS)
By Anatoly Liberman
The word beestings once had its day in court. About half a century ago, American linguists were busy discussing whether there is something they called juncture, a boundary signal that supposedly helps people to distinguish ice cream from I scream when they hear such combinations. A special sign (#) was introduced in transcription: /ais#krim/ as opposed to /ai#skrim/. The two crown examples for the existence of juncture in Modern English were nitrate versus night rate and beestings versus bee stings. I remember asking myself: “What exactly is beestings?” Well, it is “first milk from a cow after calving,” considered a delicacy in some quarters, for example, in Iceland, as an old dictionary informs us, and perhaps elsewhere; colostrum is its Latin synonym and gloss. More or less along the same lines the nonexistent difference between wholly and holy in oral speech bothered phoneticians. If I am not mistaken, unprejudiced informants treated the members of such pairs as homophones, and the term juncture disappeared from linguistic articles and books, the more so as around that time about everybody agreed that most of pre-Chomskyan linguistics had been a sad aberration, and the terminology that dominated the previous period lost its relevance. In this drinking bout, bee stings and beestings are connected in a rather unpredictable way: mead played an important role in my discussion (and mead is inseparable from honey and, consequently, from stinging bees), while beestings may share the root with booze and, according to a bold hypothesis, also with beer.
Obviously, -ings is a suffix in beestings, a word that has been attested in numerous similar-looking shapes. Old English already had the forms with the suffix (bysting) and without it (beost), and beest has wide currency in modern British dialects. The German, Frisian, and Dutch cognates of beest are unmistakable: they sound alike and mean the same. A probable Norwegian (dialectal) cognate has also been discovered. The most authoritative dictionaries call beestings and the related forms words of unknown origin, but, as always, everything depends on how we define “unknown.” Some words are so impenetrable that nothing at all can be said about their past, while others are obscure to varying degrees. As a rule, numerous conjectures have been put forward about the derivation of hard words, and, even if the problem remains unsolved (the most common case), some contain the proverbial grain of truth. “Origin unknown” is a loose concept. This also holds for beestings.
Early attempts to connect beest with an Old Romance word for “curdled” (such as Provençal betada “clotted” and 17th-century French caillebotes “curds”) have been abandoned, and indeed, Old Engl. beost and betada resemble each other by chance; nor is the resemblance impressive. A more serious riddle is whether Old Engl. beost has anything to do with Gothic beist “leaven, yeast” (Gothic is a dead Germanic language, recorded in the 4th century). Many lexicographers combined them (some even us