By: Lizzie Furey,
on 9/28/2016
Caution is a virtue, but, like every other virtue, it can be practiced with excessive zeal and become a vice (like parsimony turning into stinginess). The negative extreme of caution is cowardice.
The post The origin of the word SLANG is known! appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Lizzie Furey,
on 9/21/2016
Last week some space was devoted to the crawling, scratching crab, so that perhaps enlarging on the topic “Crab in Idioms” may not be quite out of place. The plural in the previous sentence is an overstatement, for I have only one idiom in view. The rest is not worthy of mention: no certain meaning and no explanation. But my database is omnivorous and absorbs a lot of rubbish. Bibliographers cannot be choosers.
The post Sticking my oar in, or catching and letting go of the crab appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Lauren,
on 10/19/2011
By Anatoly Liberman During five and a half years of its existence, this blog has featured the periodical Notes and Queries twice. Why I am turning to this subject again (now probably for the last time) will become clear at the end of the post. Notes and Queries appeared on November 3, 1849. In a series of short notes (naturally, notes) spread over the years 1876-1877, its first editor William John Thoms (1803-1885) told the world how the periodical had become a reality and how almost overnight
By: Lauren,
on 5/11/2011
For this essay I have to thank Walter Turner, who asked me about the origin of larrup. The verb means “beat, thrash, whip, flog.” Long before my database became available in printed form as A Bibliography of English Etymology, I described in a special post what kind of lexical fish my small-meshed net had caught. (Sorry for the florid style. I remember a dean saying in irritation to one of the speakers at the Assembly: “Can you stop speaking in metaphors?” I mean that our team read a lot of articles and marked the places where anything pertaining to etymology turned up, without missing even the most trivial remarks.) After some of the words had been gathered in a mini-thesaurus, I observed with surprise the number of synonyms for “beat, strike.” Baist, bansel, clat, dozz, keb, lase, polch, starn, and what not. Needless to say, my knowledge of the language and of the ways of the world did not go beyond bang, buffet, lick, trounce, whack, and the like. And let me repeat: the database includes only such words about whose origin something has been said in the articles I have read, so, by definition, a small fraction of the existing literature. Later in Notes and Queries an exchange titled “Provincialisms for ‘To Thrash’” came my way, with mump, clool, wheang, and more of the same enriching my passive vocabulary. Among other things, in elementary school “‘thimble-pie’ was a serious letting down. It was administered with the dame’s thimble finger,” and (the author adds), “as I remember, was very much past a joke.” All the northern correspondents knew skelp, but no one mentioned larrup, though, according to Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary, it is recognized in every part of England. It is also widespread in the United States, even if less so (see Dictionary of American Regional English). What then is its etymology? Larrup does not occur in my database, which means that I have not run into a single article or note in which its history is mentioned. And yet, as happens so often in etymological studies, its origin was, if not explained, at least elucidated, almost a century ago; only no one has paid attention.
The OED lists larrup (the earliest citation there goes back to 1823) but offers no etymology. It only quotes an 1825 publication, in which lirrop (not larrup) “to beat” is followed by a short remark: “This is said to be a corruption of the sea term, lee-rope.” Larrop and lirrop, as pointed out in the OED, are, naturally, variants of larrup. As to lee-rope, we need not bother about this exercise in folk etymology. The Century Dictionary also has an entry on larrup and says: “Prob. [from] D[utch] larpen, thresh with the flails; cf. larp, a lash. The E[nglish] form larrup (for *larp) may represent the strongly rolled r of the D[utch]: so larum, alarum, for alarm” (in linguistic works, an asterisk before a form means that it has not been attested). This statement can be found verbatim in several later dictionaries. From time to time I write about “unsung heroes of etymology.” Charles P. G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary, is one of them. He can always be relied upon; yet I do not know where he found the words larp and larpen. The Great
By: Lauren,
on 3/2/2011
The surprising thing about the runic alu (on which see the last January post), the probable etymon of ale, is its shortness. The protoform was a bit longer and had t after u, but the missing part contributed nothing to the word’s meaning. To show how unpredictable the name of a drink may be (before we get back to ale), I’ll quote a passage from Ralph Thomas’s letter to Notes and Queries for 1897 (Series 8, volume XII, p. 506). It is about the word fives, as in a pint of fives, which means “…‘four ale’ and ‘six ale’ mixed, that is, ale at fourpence a quart and sixpence a quart. Here is another: ‘Black and tan.’ This is stout and mild mixed. Again, ‘A glass of mother-in-law’ is old ale and bitter mixed.” Think of an etymologist who will try to decipher this gibberish in two thousand years! We are puzzled even a hundred years later.
Prior to becoming a drink endowed with religious significance, ale was presumably just a beverage, and its name must have been transparent to those who called it alu, but we observe it in wonder. On the other hand, some seemingly clear names of alcoholic drinks may also pose problems. Thus, Russian vodka, which originally designated a medicinal concoction of several herbs, consists of vod-, the diminutive suffix k, and the feminine ending a. Vod- means “water,” but vodka cannot be understood as “little water”! The ingenious conjectures on the development of this word, including an attempt to dissociate vodka from voda “water,” will not delay us here. The example only shows that some of the more obvious words belonging to the semantic sphere of ale may at times turn into stumbling blocks. More about the same subject next week.
Hypotheses on the etymology of ale go in several directions. According to one, ale is related to Greek aluein “to wander, to be distraught.” The Greek root alu- can be seen in hallucination, which came to English from Latin. The suggested connection looks tenuous, and one expects a Germanic cognate of such a widespread Germanic word. Also, it does not seem that intoxicating beverages are ever named for the deleterious effect they make. A similar etymology refers ale to a Hittite noun alwanzatar “witchcraft, magic, spell,” which in turn can be akin to Greek aluein. More likely, however, ale did not get its name in a religious context, and I would like to refer to the law I have formulated for myself: a word of obscure etymology should never be used to elucidate another obscure word. Hittite is an ancient Indo-European language once spoken in Asia Minor. It has been dead for millennia. Some Hittite and Germanic words are related, but alwanzatar is a technical term of unknown origin and thus should be left out of consideration in the present context. The most often cited etymology (it can be found in many dictionaries) ties ale to Latin alumen “alum,” with the root of both being allegedly alu- “bitter.” Apart from some serious phonetic difficulties this reconstruction entails, here too we would prefer to find related forms closer to home (though Latin-Germanic correspondences are much more numerous than those between Germanic and Hittite), and once again we face an opaque technical term, this time in Latin.
Equally far-fetched are the attempts to connect ale with Greek alke “defence” and Old Germanic alhs “temple.” The first connection might work if alke were not Greek. I am sorry
By: Lauren,
on 11/17/2010
Last week I wrote that one day I would reproduce some memorable statements from Skeat’s letters to the editors. This day has arrived. I have several cartons full of paper clippings, the fruit of the loom that has been whirring incessantly for more than twenty years: hundreds of short and long articles about lexicographers, with Skeat occupying a place of honor. A self-educated man in everything that concerned the history of Germanic, he became the greatest expert in Old and Middle English and an incomparable etymologist. In England, only Murray, the editor of the OED, and Henry Sweet were his equals, and in Germany, only Eduard Sievers. Joseph Wright, another autodidact, the editor of the English Dialect Dictionary, was interested in many things outside English philology, but for Skeat English remained the prime object of research all his life. Like most people who learned so much the hard way (that is, on their own), he despised ignorance, especially when it hid behind pretense and pomposity. A professor (though not burdened with too much teaching, especially by modern standards) and a family man (yet in this area he could not compete with Murray, the father of a whole brood of children), he never flinched at the idea of writing an edifying or indignant letter to the editor, for he was a born enlightener. He chose as his perennial target was the inability of his countrymen to understand that etymology is a science rather than mildly intelligent guesswork.
James Murray often asked the readers of popular journals (especially of Notes and Queries) to send him information on the words he was editing, and his letters used to end with one and the same refrain: “But please send me facts, not guesses.” Skeat offered a short “treatise” on this subject:
“As to ‘guesses’, they differ greatly. It is quite one thing for a person to make them without any investigation and in defiance of all known phonetic and philological laws; and quite another thing to offer a suggestion for which it is worth after all available means of obtaining information have been exhausted. It is a curious thing that the worse a guess is the more obstinately it is maintained, the object being to hide ignorance by raising a cloud of dust…. The whole matter lies in a nutshell. If a man is entirely ignorant of botany or chemistry, he leaves those subjects alone. But if a man is entirely ignorant of the principles of philology (which has lately [1877] made enormous advances), he does not leave the subject alone, but considers his ‘opinions’ as good as the most assured results of the most competent scholars. The knowledge of a language is often supposed to carry with it the knowledge of the laws of formation of the language. But this is not in the least the case…. My object has always been the same, viz., to protest against the usual state of things. In course of time the lesson will be learnt that there is really no glory to be got by making elementary blunders, or by suggesting ridiculous emendations even of Shakespeare. I cannot at all acquiesce in the notion that people who talk nonsense must never be reproved for it.”
As an illustration of the principle that there is no glory to be got by making elementary blunders, I will quote Skeat’s pronouncement on the word bower and on his opponent, a certain A.H.: “I submit that Old English should be learnt, like any other subject, by honest hard work, and the sense of old words ought not to be evolved from one’s internal consciousness…. A.H. is merely showing us how little he has really studied the subject….” The abrasive tone of Skeat’s letters made many people wince: after all, no one likes bein
