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Now that U.S. voters are deeply enmeshed in the presidential primary season, I’ve been thinking a lot about the word primary. (Or maybe it was last week’s column on subprime that primed the pump.) Primary and its colleague caucus are distinctly American political terms for the processes by which a party’s candidates are selected, and tracing the usage of these words offers a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of the nation’s electoral process.
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When we think about new additions to the English lexicon such as locavore or tase (or other candidates for the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year), it’s easy to forget that some of our most common vocabulary items were once awkward newcomers, like transfer students desperately trying to fit in with the other kids in class. A good reminder of that is John Ayto’s A Century of New Words. Looking through this “chronology of words that shaped our age,” one is struck again and again how so many of our old lexical friends are really not so old after all. Have we really only been talking about plastics since 1909, when Leo Baekeland invented bakelite? And who would have guessed the T-shirt has only been around since 1920, and the zipper since 1925? All of these words must have sounded downright peculiar when they first came on the scene, and yet now they’re unremarkable elements of the linguistic landscape.

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Lost in the hubbub about the new words and disappearing hyphens in the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is a more subtle type of editorial revision. The Shorter, as a dictionary built on historical principles, provides information about the age of words and their main senses. The date range of earliest known use is noted in each entry by E (early), M (mid), or L (late) plus a century number: thus “M18″ means a word was first recorded in the mid-18th century. This style of dating is admittedly approximate, but giving the exact year of a word’s first recorded use would lend a false sense of precision. We very rarely can determine the first “baptismal” usage of a word with any confidence. But even with dates given by rough century divisions, the editors of the Shorter have been able to revise the dating of nearly 4,500 words and senses based on discoveries of earlier recorded uses, known as “antedatings” in the dictionary world. Much of this new antedating information is derived from the ongoing work done for the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Since I dabble in what my colleague Erin McKean recently called “the competitive sport of antedating,” I thought I’d share a discovery of mine that made it into the new edition of the Shorter.

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Evan has to go with his great-aunt Kathryn but she is really creepy and when he goes there he has no friends but his dog and he can't stand it there when he was walking is dog,Trigger,he actually met someone!A girl...Oh well her name was Andrea, she was at least someone his age or maybe a little bit older but they became friends.One day when they were taking Trigger for a walk they went into town and saw a toy store they went inside and it wasn't as clean as they expected,there was dust everywhere and they still did see cool thing,Evan found a can of slimy goo when they got home they Evan and Andrea played with it for a little while until Trigger ate it,it at first chocked him because he was chocking really bad!Then Evan pulled it out of the dogs mouth.Then after a few days it started growing and growing and something wierd happens.

What I like about the story is that this book also reminds me of my little brothers,they,since they are boys would pick the goo,my other sisters would not pick the goo and nor would they play with it,I guess it reminds me of me,too.The book is very well written and it tells details,too.I don't like books with too much detail but with some detail.There are other books in this series and I am looking for reading those ones too!I might write that one.

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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Today’s an exciting day for OUP, as we launch the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. If this were a birth announcement, we’d have to give the vitals: Oxford University Press joyfully announces the arrival of twin volumes, weighing a total of 13.6 pounds (6.2 kilograms), with 3,800 pages, 6 million words of text, more than half a million definitions, and 84,000 illustrative quotations. Welcome to the world, Shorter volumes 1 and 2! (Oh, and your diminutive friend too, the Shorter on CD-ROM.) (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

All over the world when people decide to name cardinal points, they look at the sky. Terms used for orientation should therefore be immediately transparent: we expect them to mean “toward sunrise,” “toward sunset,” “related to a certain constellation,” “in the direction of a certain wind,” and so forth. And indeed, Latin oriens “east” is akin to oriri “to rise,” while occidens “west” is a cognate of occidere “to fall down.” Speakers of Latin did not need an etymologist to interpret those words (such specialists existed even then, for example, Varro, the most famous of them all): sunrise and sunset tell their own story. But of the English words—east, west, north, and south—only the first reveals its past to the initiated. The other three are so opaque that after centuries of guessing their origin remains a matter of dispute. (more…)

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Ben’s column this week looks at the fascinating history of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. He explains how the OED, quite possibly OUP’s most important book (well, series of books), got trimmed to a manageable two volumes and why this development was important. Enjoy!

In 1902, a fellow named William Little took on the task of making a “shorter” version of the monumental Oxford English Dictionary. When it was finally published in 1933 (more than a decade after Little’s death), the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary took up two thick volumes totalling 2,500 pages. Still, the abridgment proved to be a more convenient (and more affordable) alternative to the massive OED. This month sees the publication of the sixth edition of the Shorter, and the two volumes now span more than 3,700 pages, packed with more than half a million definitions covering ten centuries of English. Little’s dictionary, it turns out, is far from little. And despite its name, it’s not getting any shorter! (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

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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When people consult a dictionary, they expect to find entries defining individual words, compounds made up of two or more words, and common multi-word phrases. But what about when a frequently occurring phrase or compound is used as a blueprint for generating new concoctions, with some parts kept constant and other parts swapped out? Last week I discussed some simple two-word “templates” that allow for creative choices in filling one slot, such as ___ chic, inner ___, and ___ rage. In such cases, lexicographers can make a note of a particularly productive usage in the entry for the word that is kept constant (like chic, inner, or rage). Things get a little more complicated when we consider longer phrases that follow a similar pattern of substitution. Traditional dictionary entries aren’t always well-equipped to describe this type of “phrase-hacking.” But one thing becomes quite obvious when looking at a large corpus of online texts (whether it’s the Oxford English Corpus or the rough-and-ready corpus of webpages indexed by Google or another search engine): writers are fiddling with phrasal templates all the time, revivifying expressions that may have become too formulaic or hackneyed. Of course, there’s always a lurking danger that the constant modification of a cliché may itself ultimately become a cliché!
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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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Rebecca OUP-US

Today we are proud to present Ben Zimmer’s first installment in his new column, From A To Zimmer. To read more about the column click here.

When I told friends that I was taking a job as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press, I started getting emails asking, “So how do I get a word in the dictionary?” One college friend, who’s now a pediatrics professor researching the effects of smoking on children, had a specific term that he thought deserved recognition: thirdhand smoke, used to refer to residual tobacco smoke contamination that lingers after a cigarette is extinguished. I had never heard of thirdhand smoke, but it turns out it’s gotten some press attention due to recent research indicating what a serious danger smoke residue poses to infants. (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.

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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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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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