By Anatoly Liberman
How did pettifoggers get their name? Again and again we try to discover the origin of old slang, this time going back to the 16th century. Considering how impenetrable modern slang is, we should always be ready to stay with extremely modest conclusions in dealing with the popular speech of past epochs. In this blog, the essays on chestnut, tip, humbug, scoundrel, kybosh, and the much later copasetic and hubba-hubba, among others, have revealed some of the difficulties an etymologist encounters in dealing with such vocabulary.
In regards to the sphere of application, pettifogger belongs with huckster, hawker, and their synonym badger. All of them are obscure, badger being the hardest. Pettifoggers, shysters, and all kinds of hagglers have humble antecedents and usually live up to their names, which tend to be coined by their bearers. At one time it was customary to say that words like hullabaloo are as undignified as the things they designate. Today we call a marked correspondence between words’ meaning and their form iconicity, admire their raciness, and organize international conferences to celebrate their existence. Pettifogger is unlike hullabaloo (to which, incidentally, another post was once devoted), but there is something mildly “iconic” in it: petty refers to smallness, while fogger resembles f—er and thus commands minimal respect. As we will see, the resemblance is not fortuitous.
The Low (= Northern) German or Dutch origin of fogger is certain. The early Modern Dutch form focker was Latinized as foggerus, with -gg- in the middle. German has Focker, Fogger, and Fucker, none having any currency outside dialects. The OED cites them from the Grimms’ multivolume dictionary. (As is known, the OED had to bow to the morals of its time and excluded “unprintable” words, but in the entries where no one would look for them, offensive forms appeared: such is a mention of German fucker, with lower-case f, under fogger, and of windfucker “kestrel.”) Although today Dutch fokken means “to breed cattle,” its predecessor had a much broader semantic spectrum: “cheat; flee; adapt, adjust; beseem; push; collect things secretly”—an odd array of seemingly incompatible senses. Most likely, “push” was the starting point; hence “adjust,” then “adjust properly” (“beseem”). But despite doing things as it beseems or behooves, pushing suggested underhand dealings (“collect things secretly; cheat,” and even “flee,” evidently from acting in a hurry and clandestinely).
There can be little doubt that the English F-word is also a borrowing of a Low German verb whose basic meaning was, however, “move back and forth” rather than “push.” “Deceive” and “copulate” often appear as senses of one and the same verb. Fokken is a member of a large family. All over the Germanic speaking world we find ficken, ficka, fikla (compare Engl. fickle), fackeln, fickfacken, fucken, fuckeln, and so forth, meaning approximately the same: “make quick, short movements; hurry up; run aimlessly back and forth; shilly-shally; cheat (especially in games).” Unlike German, Dutch, and Scandinavian, English had almost no words with the fi(c)k ~ fa(c)k ~ fu(c)k root, so that fogger is rather obviously not native. The same, I believe, is true of several Romance words like Italian ficcare “copulate,” though in the latest dictionaries it is said to be unrelate