By: Camille,
on 2/12/2008
Check out this Tales from the Slush Pile as our hero introduces his book to a group of children.
See the kid in the front row trying to stand on his head?
And then the inevitable question...
Yep.
By: Stephanie,
on 2/6/2008
This is a story of the naked but not necessarily the dead. Traveling through time, we notice the same grim custom: a defeated enemy or a prisoner of war may be killed or stripped of everything he wears before (and sometimes instead of) being murdered. Reports gloat over the details. Marauders search for good clothes and valuables on the battlefield and care little for the indignity with which they are treating corpses, but it was the ability to humiliate the survivors that gave the greatest joy to the winning party. The shame of being left naked clung to the victim forever, and it was worse than death. With amazing regularity the languages of the world show that the similarity between robber and robe is not fortuitous, that those words are indeed related. (more…)
By: Rebecca,
on 1/2/2008
Every now and then, some words arouse public curiosity and produce a torrent of correspondence: people write letters to the editors, argue with one another, and offer etymological conjectures. In the past, Notes and Queries on both sides of the Atlantic, The Athenaeum, and The Nation regularly served as an outlet for this type of exchange. It is hard to believe how much ink (yes, in the past writers used ink: look it up in some good dictionary) was wasted on the history of theodolite “an instrument for measuring angles; level, bubble,” a word that hardly anyone remembers today (my spell-check suggested that I replace it with theologize, but I refused). A similar case is blizzard. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 10/24/2007
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…)
By: Stephanie,
on 10/17/2007
“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…)
By: Rebecca,
on 10/3/2007
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…)
By: Rebecca,
on 9/26/2007
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…)
By: Rebecca,
on 8/8/2007
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…)
By: Rebecca,
on 4/25/2007
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…)
