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By Anatoly Liberman

Two or three times a year I receive questions about what the profession of an etymologist entails. I usually answer them briefly in my “gleanings,” and once I even devoted a post to this subject. Perhaps it won’t hurt if I return to the often-asked question again.

Etymology purports to explain why the words we use have the meanings familiar to us. Why is a tree called “tree,” why do we say man, winter, nine, and so forth? People have always been interested in the origin of things. Numerous myths explain how the world was created, how the first people came into being, why it rains, and why winds blow. There is no myth about the origin of the faculty of speech. We don’t know how human language originated. It is not even quite clear what we are looking for. How complicated should signals be to deserve the name of language? Are we looking for intelligible primordial cries or a well-formed vocabulary, or coherent syntax? The wide use of the term language (compare the language of art, of music, and the like) makes the search even more complicated. We constantly hear about some bright chimpanzees mastering language at the level of a two-year-old child, about the language of bees, dolphins, and others. This is all very interesting but not particularly helpful.

Numerous attempts have been made to obtain the answer about the origin of language from a study of the languages of “primitive peoples.” Alas, the level of material culture proves no clue to the level of the speakers’ language sophistication. The concept of primitive people has been compromised for all times, and, when it comes to the Indo-European languages, the more ancient a language is, the more complex its structure turns out to be. A language of primordial cries has not been found. The chasm between the first words of humanity and the words at the disposal of modern linguists is impossible to bridge. Our records span only a few millennia, and there is no certainty that any of the truly ancient words are still current today. The Semitic languages developed more slowly than the languages of the Indo-European family, but even with Aramaic and Hebrew we are incalculable centuries away from the beginning.

Consequently, we are better qualified to discover the origin of the words of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, and other “extant” languages than the origin of the elusive first words. But even this task is often unattainable. Some words are among the oldest known, and we have no idea how long they had existed before they surfaced in written records. They are simply signs to us. One of such words is the numeral one. In all the Indo-European languages its cognates mean the same, and at some early time it probably sounded as oinoz. The form is unrevealing. Did it refer to the thumb or the little finger, or some single object? We feel more comfortable when it comes to derivatives. Thimble is related to thumb, and we only have to find out whether thimbles were ever worn on the thumb. We also notice that the German for thumb is Daumen and wonder why the English word has b at the end. Such questions can usually be answered quite well. It follows that an etymologist has to be informed about the properties of the things whose names are being discussed. Sometimes the answer is almost on the surface, but more often it is not. For example, German einladen means “to invite,” while laden means “to load.” What does loading have to do with invitation? This is a fairly complicated problem. The trouble with one is typical. Scholars collected all the forms related to it. The search presupposed the existence of certain nontrivial rules. They asked how people counted at the dawn of civilization and, to do this, traveled all over the world. The result is a mass of conflicting hypotheses, and a method is needed to decide which of them are especially promising. Hundreds of pages have been written about the origin of numerals.

The only junk worth admiring.

Other words are late. They too are the product of human creativity, but, even while dealing with recent coinages, we often fail to discover their sources. It may amuse non-specialists to see how many people have tried to find the origin of jazz and how uncertain even the best results are. Bigot (the subject of a recent post), like jazz, must also have arisen as a slang word. The circumstances in which a certain word comes into being may be so inconspicuous that we have little chance of discovering them. For a long time I have been planning to write a series of short essays on the words jink “to dodge a blow,” high jinks, I’ll be jiggered, and jingo, and their possible connections with jiggle (jink looks like a nasalized version of jiggle, and by jingo! is as emotional as high jinks). Unfortunately, too little is known about their history. Does junk belong with them? Is junk something that is avoided, “jinked”? Compare the vowel alternation in sink ~ sunk and drink ~ drunk. One should tread gingerly, that is, gently on this marshy ground. In a British journal for 1928, I read: “The taxi-drivers of London have announced that they are going to call the new two-seaters jixis, after the licencing House Secretary, Sir Williams Joynson-Hickes.” I am glad I know it. Otherwise, I may have proposed a profound theory of jixi being related to the jink words. In fact, it is a blend of Joynson and taxi (still not jaxi!).

So what are the qualifications of an etymologist? There is a thin layer of late words like jixi that requires no expertise in linguistics. Quite naturally, journalists prefer to write mainly about them, though the history of slang is often irritatingly opaque (capricious coinages, borrowings, and so forth). Work with the other words presupposes familiarity with historical phonetics, historical grammar, and historical semantics. If a language has a long written record, the specialist should be able to read old texts. Comparison is the backbone of linguistic reconstruction. Therefore, an etymologist is expected to have at least a passive knowledge of related and unrelated languages. Since words are the names of things, it is important to feel at home among both things and words. One may ask whether there are or have been people who met the requirements mentioned above. Yes, and rather many. Thanks to them we have an array of excellent etymological dictionaries. To the extent that a complicated etymology is a reward for weighing probabilities, it is seldom final and, by definition, can be superseded by a better one. But the assertion that nothing is final in this area of knowledge misses the mark. It is the end that tends to elude us, for a hunter cannot always be successful.

Occasionally I am asked whether there are job opportunities for etymologists. Paid jobs for experts in word history are few, though great dictionaries usually need editors who revise the etymological part of the entries. The OED has a group of professional etymologists, but this case is exceptional. Even university courses in etymology are rare, because historical linguistics has fallen into desuetude on our campuses. However, the public has a healthy interest in word origins, and books on etymology find a good market. Blogs dealing with etymology have a wide readership, and a stream of questions sent to bloggers never dries up. As long as people exist, they will want to know where words come from, and the world will need specialists who are able to satisfy their curiosity. However, a student aspiring to be an etymologist should remember that etymology is a respectable but not a lucrative occupation. Pre-etym is not quite the same thing as pre-med and pre-law.

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.” Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology articles via email or RSS.

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Image credit: A Chinese junk depicted in Travels in China. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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By Anatoly Liberman When asked about the origin of a certain word, I often answer: “I have no idea” (in addition, of course, to “I don’t remember” and “I have to look it up in a good dictionary”). Sometimes, after consulting a dictionary, I add: “No one knows.” The questioners express surprise: a doctor should be able to diagnose patients, a plumber is called to fix the leak, and etymologists are evidently paid for explaining the origin of words. There may or might be a fat living in

By Anatoly Liberman

The number of people in the English speaking world who distinguish in pronunciation between witch and which, wine and whine, wen and when is relatively small, and those who make this distinction do not say w-hitch, w-hine, and w-hen, but rather hwitch, hwine, and hwen. What follows is a breathtaking story of the hw-sound and the wh-spelling.

All the Old Germanic languages had words beginning with hl-, hn-, hr-, and hw-. At first, their initial h- was pronounced like ch in Scots loch or in German ach. Very early, thirteen or fourteen centuries ago, the fricatives, that is, f, s, th, and ch (the latter as in loch) began to weaken, and ch was hit the hardest: it turned into a sound we now hear in hope and help (kindly note the alliteration in the preceding part of the sentence). As time went on, h tended to disappear altogether. In English it no longer occurs between vowels. Word initially people drop their h’s “like a house on fire.” Before l, m, and n it was also lost, and, thank heavens, spelling retains no trace of it. As a result, modern speakers do not realize that listen, neck, and roof go back to hlystan, hnecca, and hrof (nor do they need to be informed about the previous stages of their language). By contrast, wrong, wreak, and their likes—at one time they began with “real” w—have preserved this venerable ruin in spelling. The same holds for knock and gnaw, in which k- and g- have been mute for centuries.

In the Germanic group of languages, only Icelandic still has a semblance of hl-, hn-, and hr- in pronunciation. Why fricatives began to weaken, why they were sometimes dropped and sometimes hung on, and why the position before l, n, and r turned out to be more vulnerable than before vowels (compare house and help with listen, neck, and roof) are important and interesting questions studied by historical phonetics, but discussing them here would take us too far afield. One of the mysteries of this process is that h- managed to stay before w long after it was shed before l, n, and r. In Icelandic, it was even reinforced: in one of the two main dialects of that language, hw- (by that time hv-) became kv-. A similar process took place in northern Middle English, as evidenced by the use of qu-, quh-, and cu- for hw- in multiple manuscripts. In southern English, including London, hw- and w- merged eventually, but in the north and in some central regions words like which and witch remained distinct. English words with the historical initial hw- are not too many; yet the highly frequent which, when, what, why, and where (who stands somewhat apart from this group) do not allow us to forget them. Why then do we write when rather than hwen?

Above I said that in southern English hw and w merged. This is true, but it should not be understood as meaning that one day h was lost before w and that where (to give a rand

By Anatoly Liberman

Of all the ethnic slurs invented for a Jew, Kike is the best-known (a dubious distinction) and the most widely used. Dictionaries prefer to say that its origin is unknown, which is right but uninspiring. By contrast, the Internet and books on ethnic conflict and on American English offer such detailed summaries of opinions that I have little to add, except for outlining the nature of the problem. Some general ideas on the subject can also be found in my earlier post on Sheeny. (Dictionaries usually print such words with low-case letters, but I prefer to capitalize them. Though abhorrent to all decent people, they are, unfortunately, the names of nationalities and should be treated accordingly. That capitalizing ethnic names, the names of the days of the week/ the months of the year, and notional words in titles is silly is another matter, “not germane to the subject,” as a retired colleague of mine used to put it.)

In dealing with Kike, Sheeny, and so forth, the question arises whether the word came into being among the Jews (one group of the Jews may have tried to denigrate another group, as, presumably, happened in the history of Sheeny) or among their persecutors. Nothing is easier than to turn a perfectly innocent word into a slur. Names are perhaps the best candidates for this kind of transformation. Dago has become a mocking term for Italians, Spaniards, and the Portuguese (because so many of them were supposedly called Diego), while Abram (stress on the second syllable) is a great favorite of Russian anti-Semites, partly because it is a prototypical Jewish name and partly because it contains r, a trill the Jews often pronounce with a gh-like sound (“burr”). Hence the conjectures that Kike and Smouch are alterations of Ike “Isaac” and Moshe “Moses” respectively. However, the etymology of a low word, even of a low word inspired by low feelings, has to be investigated according to the same rules that hold for the rest of the vocabulary: one expects a plausible explanation of the sounds and reference to the milieu in which the word under discussion is believed to have emerged. Since no one has accounted for the phonetic change from Ike to Kike and from Moshe to Smouch; both guesses should be rejected without regret.

Another derivation traces Kike to the name Hayyim, transcribed in German as Chaim. Kaim “Jew” was recorded in mid-18th-century German cant. Then, we are told, “since Jewish speakers took -im of Kaim as a plural ending in Hebrew, they created a new singular *kai [an asterisk designates reconstructed, as opposed to attested, forms], which by reduplication gave the form ki-ki,” later simplified to Kike. It is hard to understand why Jewish speakers mistook the last syllable of the name they must have known for centuries for a plural ending. Would any English-speaker identify the final -s of Rose with a plural ending? And how did the reduplication arise? I don’t think this etymology is any better than the previous two.

Two main hypotheses on the origin of Kike are often mentioned. According to the first (its author is J.H.A. Lacher, 1926), the suffix -sky in the Jewish family names of emigrants from Poland and Russia became a linguistic marker of their poor manners (compare the adjective buttinsky, with its implied reference to the behavior of pertinacious Jews). Allegedly, the word arose among the Jews “of German origin, who soon insisted that the business ethics and the standard of living and culture of these Russians were far lower than theirs.” According to J.H.A. Lacher, the snobbish “brethren” of emigrants from the Slavic countries (most of whom ended up as traveling salesmen) called the newcomers kikis. Lacher gives no reference to his sources, except the following: “When I heard the term kikis for the first time at Winona, Minnesota, about forty years ago, it was a Jewish salesman of German descent who used it and explained it to me, but in the course of a few years it disappeared, kike being used instead.” We can assume that i in both syllables of kikis was long (as in the word sky, for instance). How did it develop from the short i/y of -sky? Also, s, the initial consonant of the suffix was supposedly left out and the remaining stub (-ky) reduplicated (again reduplicated!) and pronounced with a long vowel. Given such freedom of phonetic change, almost any combination of sounds can be shown to become any other. (Incidentally, in Minnesota the first vowel of Winona is short; stress falls on the second syllable, which is long.)

The second hypothesis turns round the Yiddish word for “circle” and has two variants. According to the main of them, on Ellis Island those immigrating Jews who knew neither English nor the Roman script were asked to put an X near their names, but looked upon it as a picture of the cross, a symbol of their former persecution, and instead put a circle. One of the variants of the Yiddish word for “circle” can be transcribed as kaykl, and this is said to be the etymon of Kike. Could the English speaking officials on Ellis Island isolate one Yiddish word in the speech of the Jewish people they dealt with, use it mockingly, and make it famous? I am afraid that we have here an example of the rich Ellis Island folklore that produced a Jew Shaun Ferguson and a Chinese man Sam Ting.

In an article by David L. Gold I read a slightly different version of the kaykl etymology, which he endorses, though cautiously. He quotes a letter to the editor of The American Israelite: “It seems probable that drummers [that is, traveling salesmen] called the Russian Jew, who unable to sign his name in English made his handmark in the form of the traditional Kykala [a diminutive form of Kaykl], a Kyke. The term undoubtedly originated as drummer slang.” We will dispense with the adverb undoubtedly, for in etymological research doubts are unavoidable, but accept the propositions that Kike, a disparaging term of Yiddish origin, was coined by the Jews and that its etymon must have contained a long vowel. The letter, dated July 23, 1914, was written relatively soon after the word Kike spread in American English. The OED could not find any mention of it prior to 1904. The tradition ascribing the coining of Kike to Jewish traveling salesmen (hucksters, hawkers, badgers) may be trustworthy. Compare the etymology of the English word slang (it can be found in an earlier post and in my dictionary); it also seems to have been coined by traveling salesmen.

However, the connection between Kike and Kaykl is hard to demonstrate and possible associations are many (couldn’t the reference be to the special routes of the Russian immigrants of Jewish descent or to their circle of support, the in group?). Although we cannot be certain of the word’s origin, we can perhaps account for its popularity. Palindromes (words that remain the same if pronounced backward) often have an expressive character: consider tit, tat, poop, peep, kick, sis, boob, and the rest. Kike is offensive because its very form demeans its target. Peter Tamony, a famous student of American slang, wrote an article on keeks, Kikes, and kooks. He had no linguistic background and sometimes allowed suspicious ideas to run away with him (does anyone still use run away in this sense?). His etymology of Kike hardly merits the briefest mention, but his intuition did not betray him. In a way, Kike indeed belongs with keek and kook. Too bad this linguistic perfection serves such an ugly cause.

By Anatoly Liberman

Much to my embarrassment, I am using a title of the type I ridiculed not too long ago, but the temptation was too strong, and I yielded to it. The idea (of this post, not of the title) occurred to me when I was reading a book on the history and archeology of Ancient Greece. The ultimate source of ocean in the European languages is Greek, but where the Greeks got their word is not known. Etymological conjectures on this score have not been too numerous. Some scholars compared okeanos with a Sanskrit verb and its Greek cognate meaning “to surround” (may I mention in parentheses that surround has nothing to do with round but everything with Latin superundare “rise in waves,” whose root is unda “wave”?); however, nowadays hardly anyone has trust in this connection. A Hebrew root, also meaning “surround,” holds out even less promise. Most likely, the Greeks borrowed the word from the non-Indo-European speakers of their islands.

The image of a mighty sea or river encircling the world is common in the beliefs of many Eastern peoples (the Babylonians, for instance), and it also occurs in the mythology of the Indo-Europeans. According to the most archaic Greek beliefs, the Ocean was a river, but later authors identified it with the Black Sea, and its single island with the entrance to Hades, the kingdom of the dead. Homer placed this entrance on the shore of the Ocean.

The history of the Germanic word sea presents a striking parallel to what has been said above about ocean. Its early form, recorded in fourth-century Gothic, is saiws, and, as far as we can judge, it designated, at least originally, a body of stagnant water. We know one of the Indo-European words for “sea” from Latin mare (compare such English borrowings from the Romance languages as marina, marine, marital, maritime, and marinade) and its cognates. The German for “sea” is still Meer, a synonym of See, but Engl. mere has little currency. At one time it meant “sea,” whereas today, in the rare instances it is used, it means “lake.” This puzzling confusion of words for a body of salt and of stagnant water goes back to the beginning of recorded Germanic. Thus, Grendel, the monster Beowulf killed, lived in a mere, and a detailed description of his uninviting habitat points to a swamp, but when Beowulf returned to fight Grendel’s mother, he plunged to the bottom of the sea. Yet mother and son were said to live together.

From Gothic we have an incomplete text of the Bible. The translator of the New Testament into Gothic (Wulfila) needed words for Greek limne “lake; sea” and thalassa “sea” (someone may have come across the English noun limnology “study of lakes” and the adjective thalassic “pertaining to the sea”). In addition to marei (an obvious cognate of Latin mare) and saiws, he had at his disposal a curious tautological compound marisaiws, that is, “sea-sea” or “lake-sea,” which he used to render the same limne (those interested in tautological compounds will find a special post on the subject in this blog). According to some indications, the protoform from which saiws and its cognates were derived sounded approximately like saikwi- (with the hyphen for an ending). This fact militates against the tempting comparison between saiws and Latin saevus “raging”; -k- is the problem. Probably saikwi- and its Indo-European ancestor soigwi- designated a body of stagnant water not prone to rage.

None of the other attempts to find a convincing etymology for sea has found universal recognition, and many word historians (many, not all!) tend to think that the speakers of the Germanic languages borrowed it from the former inhabitants of their homeland in northern Europe. The similarity between the search for the roots of sea and ocean is instructive. The Greeks were very well aware of the great expanse of water around their archipelago; yet the word Okeanos may be part of the pre-Greek substrate (substrate refers to a language of the indigenous population submerged in the language of the new settlers). Likewise, the isolated fact that sea has no obvious Germanic origin would prove nothing about the closeness of the first speakers of Germanic to any coast. But saiws forms part of a sizable group of words pertaining to sea and seafaring that have no convincing Indo-European etymology (sail, boat, ebb, storm, and others—they are listed on p. 277 of my book Word Origins…and How We Know Them), and in their entirety they pose the question about the home of Germanic-speakers and their familiarity with the sea. However interesting this question may be, it need not delay us here.

The Greeks, as noted, associated the Ocean with the kingdom of the dead. Germanic speakers also believed that life ends in the sea. The legendary Scyld Scefing, a king described in the opening pages of Beowulf, departs after being given a ship burial. Another ship burial was that of the Scandinavian god Baldr, the hero of a famous myth. The Gothic for “soul” is saiwala, and its etymology has been contested as vigorously as the etymology of saiws. Jacob Grimm, the elder of the two brothers of fairy tale fame, believed that saiws and saiwala are related. He may have been right. Indirect proof of his hypothesis can be seen in the proposals to connect both saiws and saiwala with either Latin saevus “raging” or Greek aiolos “rapid,” the latter familiar to us from Aeolus, the ruler of the ever-changeable winds; whence Aeolian harp.

I will take the liberty to finish this post with a personal remark about Jacob Grimm. Linguistics, literature, and history are unlike mathematics, physics, or music. One should beware of calling a language historian a genius. Yet at least three language students deserve this appellation. One of them is Jacob Grimm. The public knows him only because of the fairytales, but he was the founder of comparative Germanic philology and of several other areas of study. More important is the fact how often, though armed only with his prodigious memory and unerring intuition, rather than our dictionaries, manuals, and computers, he offered correct solutions. Every time I have a bright idea about the origin of a word, an old custom, or belief, I look up the relevant passage in the volumes of Jacob Grimm’s works. In most cases, it turns out that he anticipated my guess by at least 150 years. So I think his view of the derivation of the word soul (saiwala) is right, and I find some confirmation of it in the Greeks’ treatment of the Ocean. No doubt, Grimm knew all of it long before I was born.

By Anatoly Liberman

“Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe,/ Give it a stitch and that will do:/ Here’s a nail and there’s a prod,/ And now my shoe is well shod.” At first sight, all is clear in this nursery rhyme except how the cobbler, who, according to ancient advice, should stick to his last, got his name. Yet the first impression is false, and the beginning of the rhyme hints that the researcher’s paths won’t be straight. The instructions in the opening strophe are puzzling: “Cobbler, cobbler, mend my shoe,/ And get it done by half-past two:/ If half-past two can’t be done,/ Get it done by half-past one.” Really? My adventure began when somebody asked me about the etymology of clobber “to hit hard,” and it turned out that no one knows. Ever since, it has been a fixed idea with me that a mysterious tie exists between clobber and cobbler. It will be seen that my attempt to discover this tie has been at best moderately successful.

A cobbler is obviously someone who cobbles, whereas cobble looks like a frequentative or iterative verb derived from cob (such verbs—this follows from their name—designate repeated action). However, though cob “to beat, strike, thresh (seed)” has been recorded (mainly in dialects), nearly all its occurrences are late, and the meanings do not match too well, for a cobbler mends or makes shoes rather than beats or strikes. The other cobble “a rounded stone,” as in cobblestone, ends in a diminutive suffix (“a small cob”), but the etymology of cob “a round object” is also obscure and therefore sheds no light on its homonym (to) cob. Many words in the modern Germanic languages containing the syllables cob- and cop- refer to blows (“beat, thresh, hit”) and roundness (“head” and “clump,” among others), that is, a shape produced by continual striking.

Cobbler has been known from texts since the 14th century. By contrast, clobber surfaced in the middle of the 20th century and is believed to have originated in British air-force slang. From a chronological point of view they are incompatible; yet we do not know enough about the impulses that make people use certain sound groups to denote certain meanings. Numerous studies of sound symbolism attest to stable associations in this area, but they are not always able to account for the choice of the material. Even if we agree that cob- ~ cop- are sound symbolic formations, we will still be left wondering why they have been endowed with the meaning “beat, strike.” Nor do cob- and especially cop- reproduce the sound of collision accurately enough to be called echoic. However, we may recognize the connection even if we fail to explain its nature. Perhaps cobble/cobbler and clobber do go back to the same impulse.

The plot thickens in every sense of this word once we discover the existence of clobber “a black paste used by cobblers (!) to fill up and conceal cracks in the leather of shoes and boots,” first recorded in the 19th century. Predictably, its etymology is unknown. A typical feature of such formations is their ability to huddle into pseudo-families. Consider tit, tot, tat, and tad: they look alike and designate something small or insignificant, without being true cognates. In the present case, a search reveals Engl. clob “a lump of earth,” clog (originally) “a block; clump,” clod, and clot. Clout, cleat (from Old Engl. cleat “lump, wedge”), clutter, and cloud belong with clot. All those near synonyms begin with cl- but end in different consonants. Some of them turned up in texts late, the others are ancient. Their age, old or young, does not make their origin clearer. Supposedly, we are dealing with a root meaning “lump, clump” or “to stick together.”

In addition to clot-clog-clob, we should look at club. The connection between a club “cudgel” and beating, hitting, striking needs no proof. Unlike later dictionaries, the OED was cautious in tracing the English noun to Old Norse klubba, but even if club is native, it is related to klubba. An Old Norse synonym of klubba was klumba, a word always compared with Engl. clump (apparently, a borrowing from German). Skeat and others pass over the variation b ~ p (klumba ~ clump), and we can also disregard it here. More to the point is the circumstance that another Old Norse word for “club, cudgel” was kolfr, related to Old High German kolbo (Modern German Kolben). Everybody agrees, and with good reason, that kolfr ~ kolbo and klubba are cognates. Consequently, in such words l may precede or follow the vowel. Armed with this discovery, we return to cobble and clobber, the latter with both of its meanings: “lump of earth” and “hit hard.”

The verb cobble is probably what it appears to be, that is, a frequentative variant of cob “beat,” with the more specialized sense “to shape up, process (by beating)” or something similar; hence “mend.” When it arose, it began to resemble the noun clobber “paste,” which, I believe, is much older than our texts suggest. Originally, it may have had nothing to do with shoe making, but what would have been more natural than assigning it to a cobbler! It will be seen that the main difficulty in disentangling the cob-cobble-cobbler-clobber knot is chronological. The words came into existence in the depths of regional speech, whether in Common Germanic, Old English, or the 19th century, and all we know about them is that at their birth they may have been expressive, sound symbolic, or even sound imitative. The initial impulse is unclear, and recorded texts are a poor guide to their age.

Here then is the summary. Clubs exist for clobbering;-er in the verb is a suffix synonymous with -le, as in flicker, shatter, and so forth. The o ~ u variation is common in dialects. For example, slobber has the variant slubber; such pairs are rather numerous. A cobbler cobbles and a club clobbers. But in this etymological stew we find many other words, “obscurely related,” as old dictionaries liked to put it. This should not surprise us: some items of the vocabulary are aristocrats whose ancestors are millennia old, whereas others are plebeians reveling in their obscurity and incredibly vital. Clobber and cobbler do not pretend to be of noble descent.

By Anatoly Liberman

Most words do not reveal their origin to a modern speaker. Nor are they in a hurry to open up to an etymologist. But compounds pose fewer problems, especially those of the roommate or cornflakes type. Room, mate, corn, and flakes are conventional signs to us (that is, we don’t know why they mean what they do, whether they are native or borrowed, and how long they have existed in the language), but their sum is clear: room + mate, corn + flakes. However, compounds tend to deteriorate, and we are surprised to discover that long ago barn contained two syllables and meant “a place for storing grain, “barley”)” or that bridal was the ale drunk at the wedding ceremony in honor of the bride and bridegroom (for us -al is an adjectival suffix). All books on the history of English words discuss such disguised compounds, as they are called. The origin of barn “storehouse” is as opaque today as the origin of bairn “child.” But many compounds have not succumbed to wear and tear or have changed their phonetic shape in a minimal way, and yet we still have trouble understanding their history. For a long time I have been collecting such words and below will write a few lines about three of them beginning with black (the reason for my brevity is that each of them deserves a full-fledged essay).

What is blackguard? It has lost one sound, for we do not pronounce kg in the middle, but other than that, its elements are without doubt black and guard. In Modern English, a blackguard is a worthless, contemptible person, so where does guard come in? The earliest example of blackguard in the OED is dated to 1532. In this and in a few other citations the word refers to a group of people (“guard”) doing the same work. In some contexts scullions were meant, and those must have been sooty. Other members of the blackguard were link boys (torch bearers), youngsters of ill repute. Perhaps they too were covered with soot. According to an old suggestion, a blackguard may have consisted not only of link boys but also of mutes (mourners at a funeral), carrying torches and wearing black clothes. (It will be remembered that one of Oliver Twist’s first occupations was that of a mute. He was instructed by his master to look sad, though he did not need that advice, for despondency was his natural state.) With time the meaning blackguard was transferred to all kinds of servants making a living in great households and to menial riffraff in general, to use a cruel characterization of a late Victorian author. The collective meaning of the noun gradually disappeared; today a blackguard is an individual, not a body of people. Black may have contributed to the word’s negative meaning. The Devil is black, however He is painted, and compare Black Friday and the like. The OED mentions the possibility of a guard of soldiers at Westminster having been called the Black Guard, but if it existed, we do not owe the emergence of blackguard to it. Thus, not every aspect of the question has been clarified.

Needless to say, attempts to derive blackguard from some foreign language cannot be taken seriously, but I would like to mention a small detail. James Emerson Tennent (Notes and Queries 1853, Volume VII, pp. 78-79) made an improbable suggestion that blackguard goes back to French blagueur “joker, teller of tall tales.” He was rebuffed by other correspondents (first in Vol. VIII, pp. 414-415). This exchange does not amount to antedating blagueur in the OED (1883), but it may serve as an example of the occurrence of the word in the popular British press thirty years before it was used, still italicized, in a non-linguistic context.

Even more obscure than blackguard is blackleg “scab, non-unionist.” This meaning is an American creation, but blackleg “a turf swindler; also, a swindler in other species of gambling” occurred in England as early as 1774. The OED remarks dryly: “As in other slang expressions, the origin of the name is lost; of the various guesses current none seem worth notice.” Clearly, hypotheses like Brewer’s in the original edition of his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (“so called from gamecocks, whose legs are always black”) do not seem worth notice because the ways of the metaphor have not been explained, but blackleg is a compound of the same type as redcap (whether applied to a station master or Little Red Riding Hood), so that there may be some truth in the explanation given in Hotten’s Slang Dictionary: “The derivation of this term was solemnly argued before the full Court of Queen’s Bench upon a motion for a new trial for libel, but was not decided by the learned tribunal. Probably it is from the custom of sporting and turf men wearing black top boots.” The Century Dictionary does not find Hotten’s etymology totally fanciful.

Finally, a story with a happy end. What is the origin of blackmail? The answer is known. The hitch is that mail also meant “tribute.” Mail “post” and mail “armor” are not related to it. Skeat explains: “Mail is a Scottish term for rent. Blackmail or black rent is the cattle, as distinct from white money or silver.” So it arose as a term for a tribute exacted by freebooting chiefs and came to mean any payment extorted by intimidation or pressure.

My list of puzzling compounds includes browbeat and beetle-browed, pitfall (why not fallpit?) and deadpan, among dozens of others. Etymology deals with ancient roots and modern slang, with sounds and meanings, as well as with spelling and printing conventions. It also concerns itself with history, and that is why it is one of the most interesting areas in the humanities, even though so much in it depends on guesswork.

By Anatoly Liberman

The trick that once probably took everybody’s breath away or, to use a more modern phrase, wowed the whole world (very genteel) has by now acquired a rather threadbare look. I mean the art of giving punning titles to newspaper articles. For example, if a restaurant goes out of business and a liquor store replaces it, the newspaper will say: “Something Is Brewing Again.” Plumbers’ profits go down the drain, whereas chimneysweeps’ money, naturally, goes up in smoke. Fowlers croak. Coopers kick the bucket. Tenors join the Choir Invisible. How unbearably trite! The genre has outstayed its welcome, but journalists keep producing more and more paper tigers. To show how easy it is to engage in such lackluster punning, I gave my post a corresponding name. So back on track: to the story of tram.

A street car can also be called tramway or simply tram. At one time, trams used to dominate towns; now they are gone almost everywhere. A typical folk etymological tale has woven itself around the word tram, and, for a change, we seem to know its author. Allegedly, tram is the second syllable of Benjamin Outram’s family name. According to the OED, we owe the popularity of this fib to Samuel Smiles’s book Life of George Stephenson (see p. 59 of the 1857 edition; different pages in later reprints). Both Outram (1764-1805) and Stephenson (1781-1848) were distinguished civil engineers, and Smiles was an influential author regularly writing about engineers’ achievements. In Life of George Stephenson, he devoted a short paragraph to the origin of tram, but it did the harm anyway. He wrote: “In 1800, Mr. Benjamin Outram, of Little Eaton, in Derbyshire, used stone props instead of timber for supporting the ends and joining of the rails. As this plan was pretty generally adopted, the roads became known as ‘Outram roads,’ and subsequently, for brevity’s sake, ‘tram-roads’.”

Even though Smiles could hardly have invented the Outram—tram story, no references to it prior to 1857 have been found. Here is a passage from the Stamford Mercury, September 6, 1861: “The father of Sir Jas. Outram was the founder of the Butterley Ironworks, now the largest ironworks in England. He was a man of great ability, energetic, self-reliant, of fertile and ready resources; so much so, that his opinion was deferred to by many of the most eminent engineers, such as Sir John Rennie and Thos. Telford. He was the first, in connection with these works, to lay down an iron way, and it is to this circumstance, and from his name, that we have the word ‘tramway’.” This passage was reproduced in Notes and Queries a few days later and set off a lively discussion. Many correspondents, also possessing fertile and ready resources (Rudyard Kipling, steeped in the idiom of his day, called one of his characters a man of great resource and sagacity), pointed out that this derivation of tram is wrong. Indeed, the word tram is much older than 1800, the date of Outram’s invention; besides, Outram has initial stress, so that no one can hear tram in it. I assume that some witty man noticed the similarity between Outram and tram, made a joke about it, and Smiles took it seriously.

The real, rather than folk, etymology of tram, first recorded in the middle of the 15th century, is more complicated, but some basic facts have been discovered. The word is, apparently, of northern descent. It was a local name for a special wagon; hence tramway “the road on which this wagon ran.” In coal-mining, a tram was a frame or truck for carrying coal baskets. The shaft of a barrow was also called a tram, and in the Scandinavian languages all kinds of things called tram, tromm, etc. are made of wood too. That is why Skeat suggested that the original “tramroad” was a log road. Low (= northern) German treme means a “doorstep” (thus, another object made of wood), and some other words beginning with tr-, such as German Treppe “doorstep” (perhaps allied to Engl. trap), may be “obscurely or distantly related” to tram. This is what etymologists say when faced with a mass of near synonyms looking similar but not similar enough to qualify as congeners.

Latin trabs “beam” seems to belong here too, but it can be akin to Treppe and its likes only if at one time they began with th (such is the rule: compare Latin tres versus Engl. three), but th changed to d in the continental Scandinavian languages and German, while in German d was often confused with t, so that in the Germanic group one has to look for thram, tram, and dram as possible cognates of tram, and this complicates matters. Trabs and trap end in b ~ p and may be of some interest in discussion of tram only if we are dealing not with real cognates but with sound imitative nouns and verbs of the tread and tramp type, in which almost any combination of vowels and consonants is able to reproduce some noise. In case all these tr- words in the Indo-European languages go back to the sound of a tool interacting with wood (to knocking on wood, as it were), an etymological family, or rather a foster home, emerges. Granting affinity to its inhabitants may take us too far. It is therefore safer to say that tram is a word of either northern German or Scandinavian provenance whose earliest meaning was “a wooden object” (with specifications). Shafts, beams, doorsteps, wagons, and logs will feel at ease in its company. When trams were put on iron sleepers, the old name remained. This is a usual case. Compare pen, originally “feather,” though no one has been using quills for more than a century and a half, and even fountain pens are now antiques.

By Anatoly Liberman

Scalawag, whose origin is (predictably) “uncertain,” seems to have surfaced in American English, which does not mean that it was coined in America. Its earliest recorded sense (“a favorite epithet in western New York for a mean fellow, a scapegrace”) goes back to 1848. Many people must have known it at that time, but its heyday had to wait until after the Civil War, when it swept over the country as a buzz word applied to native white southern Republicans. Consequently, scalawags should not be confused with carpetbaggers, northern men who came South after the war for economic, political, and other reasons.

In the fifties of the 19th century, scalawag had the variants scallywag, scallaway (as we will see, a form of some importance in the present context), and even scatterway (most probably, a fanciful alternation of scalaway). The spelling with y and two l’s was common, and it is still preferred in England, where this word enjoys much greater popularity than on the American continent, as evidenced, among others, by the clipped form scally, a competitor of the ubiquitous chav (a slang term for an asocial youth) that fortunately did not cross the Atlantic. I am pleased to report that chav is also a word of debated origin. In the 19th century, the phrase our American cousins cropped up with some regularity in British periodicals. Well, a chav is a twin brother of a scally and a cousin of a scalawag. No one has yet discovered the etymology of either denomination.

Not only a contemptible person but also an undersized, scraggy, or ill-fed animal of little value can be called a scalawag. No evidence supports the contention that scalawag was originally a drover’s word for ill-conditioned cattle, and we are still in the dark about which came first: “a mean man” or “worthless animal.” I am aware of only one ramification of the main sense. In The Nation for 1910, an anonymous reviewer of the OED wrote: “Dr. Bradley strangely neglects to remark that scallywag, like scamp (which formerly meant a ‘highway robber’), has lost much of its early savor, and is now largely employed as a term of endearment for particularly vivacious and heart-ravishing infants.” Bradley should hardly have been faulted for that omission. Almost any word meaning “rascal” can be used facetiously about a vivacious individual. Even The Century Dictionary did not say anything about heart-ravishing infants. Other sources are also silent on this point. Only The Oxford American Dictionary refers to the sense “a white southerner who collaborated with northern Republicans during Reconstruction, etc.” as historical but begins the entry with “informal a person who behaves badly but in an amusingly mischievous rather than harmful way; a rascal.” A term of political opprobrium has been ameliorated to a name for a whimsical pest. I wonder whether anyone in the United States ever uses scalawag except in jest.

The suggestions about the etymology of scalawag are few and inconclusive. There is a district in the Shetland Islands called Scalloway, in which small, runty horses are bred, and scalawag has been tentatively derived from this place name. The small port of Scalloway was once the capital of Shetland, and inferior cattle or ponies were indeed imported from the Shetland Islands. Also the existence of the short-lived variant scallaway gives this hypothesis some credence, but the history of a loanword consists of at least two chapters: identification of the etymon in a lending language and tracing its routes in the new home. Who popularized this term of cattle breeding in North America? Scallag, a Scottish Gaelic word for “vagabond; menial servant; bondsman; predial slave” in the Hebrides, looks like another probable sibling. (One of the researchers remarked “Interestingly, the Hebrides Islands are located off the northwestern coast of Scotland, not far from Shetlands”; this fact may be interesting, but the connection evades me. Are Scalloway and scallag related?). Scottish Gaelic scalrag “tatterdemalion” (still another candidate for the evasive etymon) clearly contains the same element scal- and sounds somewhat like scalawag. The fact that scalawag cropped up in western New York sheds no light on the ethnicity of those who may have brought this word to America.

A few other hypotheses are even more daring. The word schalawag occurred once in a late medieval Swiss German poem; it seems to have meant “belled shackles” (German Schellenwerk). Those were put on criminals. “A term coined to apply to a criminal and social outcast, marked by society in such a fashion as to attract attention by his every movement, the term schalawag was ideally suited to apply to the scamp, loafer, or rascal who was a post-bellum ‘scalawag’ in the South.” The match is indeed close, but who in the English speaking world knew the word that even in Germany was hopelessly rare? Finding such a person would be more difficult than belling a cat. (A reminder to those who have forgotten the tale. A young mouse suggested that it would be a good idea to put a bell on the cat’s neck; then the beast would not be able to hide. Everybody agreed, whereupon an old mouse asked who was going to do the work. Apparently, there were no volunteers.)

From the Celts and the Swiss Germans, we will briefly turn our attention to the French. By a series of phonetic steps scalawag has been connected with the root of scavenger. The adventure was entertaining but unrewarding. Dictionaries suggest Scalloway or scallag as the etymons of scalawag or say: “Of unknown/uncertain origin.” About the only exception is Ernest Weekley (An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 1921), where we find the following cryptic remark: “? From scall.” Now scall is a skin disease, so that, if we follow Weekley, scalawag will be understood as a derogatory term of the same order as scab “blackleg, non-unionist.” (From the same root as in scab we have shabby, a word that, according to Samuel Johnson,” has crept in conversation and low writing; but ought not to be admitted into the language.” A losing battle, a forlorn hope: low words always triumph in the long run.)

I think no one came closer to the solution than Weekley. He did not say anything about the second half of the word, but here I have a suggestion. Scalawag may be scal-a-wag, a formation like rag-a-muffin and cock-a-doodle-doo, a compound with -a- in the middle. Wag “a mischievous person” (originally “a mischievous boy”!) is a noun in its own right; to play the wag is slang for “play the truant.” If it could be shown that scall had sufficient currency in American English (in western New York or elsewhere), a scalawag would emerge as a scabby wag, whereas diminutive horses, predial slaves, criminals wearing bells like the lepers of old, scavengers, and their daughters will stay where they belong: in Shetlands, Hebrides, Switzerland, and France. Good riddance if you ask me.

By Anatoly Liberman

Few words are more offensive than ethnic slurs. The origin of some of them is “neutral” (for instance, a proper name typical of a group), but the sting is in their application, not in their etymology. The story of squaw is well-known, but it bears repetition. It is also a sad story because it should not have happened.

In 1992 Suzan Harjo said to Oprah Winfrey that the word squaw means “vagina” and added: “That’ll give you an idea what the French and British fur trappers were calling all Indian women, and I hope no one ever uses that term again.” Countless TV viewers believed her and joined the ranks of protesters. Fight against the s-word began. On June 6, 1994 Saint Paul Pioneer Press carried an article titled “Students Seek to Expunge Place Name ‘Squaw’.” This is its beginning: “Squaw Lake. Minn. ASSOCIATED PRESS. Two high school students have launched a campaign to change the names of a small city, a reservation community, a half-dozen lakes and a pond, all of which contain the word ‘squaw’. The word, the students say, is offensive. Their teacher [I deleted the name] agrees. He referred to works by Saxon Gouge, an instructor in American literature at Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and a book Literature of the American Indian, which said the word probably is a French corruption of the Iroquois word “otsiskwa,” which means “female sexual parts.” The initiative met with near universal approval. The students were also encouraged by Indian elders and tribal authorities, who until they were enlightened by the two teenagers (or the TV show) had had no idea how bad the word squaw is. But “[b]oth students knew that the word went beyond its definition as ‘Indian woman’, found in some dictionaries, and they wrote letters to several newspapers advocating changes” (emphasis added).

The moral of this episode is that etymology is a science and in serious situations should be left to specialists. Neither an instructor in American literature nor Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peck, the authors of Literature of the American Indian, could have an informed opinion about word origins and should not have been cited as authorities. It is now an open secret that squaw has never meant “vagina, vulva,” but lots of people, including some Native Americans, decided that they had either done wrong or been wronged, and the fib triumphed, for any word means what speakers believe it means. This is how misspent political zeal turned squaw into an ethnic slur. Place names have been changed in Minnesota and Arizona, Utah did not stay away from the campaign, and there is little doubt that the stone will keep rolling. An ingenious author even mentioned the horrors of sound symbolism and explained that no one would want to be called a name beginning with the sounds one hears in squint, squat, squalid, and the like. I wonder whether he is equally squeamish when it comes to eating squash, crossing a square, or looking at squirrels playing in front of his house

Mohawk  ojiskwa (such is its usual spelling) does mean “vagina,” but squaw was borrowed by Europeans from Massachusett, the language of an Algonquian people, which is not related to Mohawk or any other Iroquoian language. Nor were there any cultural ties between the two communities, separated by half of North America (a reminder: Massachusetts is not in the Midwest, and the action of The Song of Hiawatha is not set in Massachusetts). By contrast, cognates of squaw exist in many Algonquian languages and mean “woman” in all of them. Present day Mohawk speakers do not identify the English word squaw with any word in their language. The similarity between -sqwa and squaw is accidental. One can as well compare squaw with the last syllable of Moskva.

The motto of every political initiative should be: “Do no harm” (as in medicine). Looking before leaping is also useful. Although language is easy to politicize, historical linguistics rarely falls prey to this kind of maneuvering. Rabble rousers occasionally use borrowed words for boosting the national pride of their group, but in retrospect such campaigns fill the victims of fraud with shame and surprise at their gullibility. Words for “woman” have a tendency to deteriorate: from “the loved one” to “whore,” from “maid(en)” to “a pert, saucy girl,” and so forth. The causes of such changes reflect the societal attitudes that are known only too well. But the recent history of squaw is a unique case: ignorant people explained to native speakers that the word of their mother tongue is an ethnic slur. Some evidence exists that in English (but not in Mohawk!) squaw was used in a disparaging way. This happened because some people chose to treat the Indians as unworthy of respect. Compare nigger (which, like Negro) means simply “black”), pickaninny (perhaps from Portuguese; the original meaning is approximately “a small one”), and zhid (a slur for a Russian Jew, probably from Italian giudeo, from Latin judaeus “belonging or pertaining to Judea”). All of them are racist terms despite their innocuous etymology. Depending on the mores of a given society, squaw had the potential of becoming offensive. Compare madam “a woman who manages a brothel” or villager acquiring in the Middle Ages the connotations of villain, whereas things urban, naturally, became urbane. If squaw had to be ostracized, it should not have happened for etymological reasons.

Anyone with an interest in this problem will find abundant material in the Internet, in the magazine Native Peoples, and other sources. The article “The Sociolinguistics of the ‘S-Word’: Squaw in American Placenames [sic]” by William Bright was published in the periodical Names (vol. 48, 2000, 207-216) but is also available online, and so is the passionate defense of the word by Marge Bruchac.

Although the line between shame and guilt is sometimes blurred, the two differ clearly: guilt points to wrongdoing, whereas shame is the feeling of disgrace. In some communities it is shame that determines people’s behavior, in others it is guilt; hence the division of societies into two groups. In the previous post, I retraced the paths on which language historians hoped to find the root of the Germanic word for “shame,” and we saw how little they know about it (from being uncovered and exposed? from the “scanting” of honor? or was there a more direct way from private parts—so again exposure—to shame?). Guilt, one would think, will be more transparent, for guilt is a legal, rather than moral, category, but look up this word in almost any dictionary, and you will read: “Of unknown origin.” Even entries on shame, a word of rare obscurity, are more informative.

The first citations of guilt in the OED go back to the end of the 10^th century, that is, to the Old English period. At that time, the word was spelled gylt and pronounced like German Gült. The OED states that no “equivalent forms” are known in any other Germanic language. This statement should be taken with a grain of salt, for German offers an exact equivalent, namely Gült (from Gült), though in extant texts it does not predate the 13^th century. Gült(e) designated a specific tax levied on people in the Middle Ages. The German word provides less help that we need, but it has been around for a long time and its origin poses no problems: it is related to the verb gelten “pay.” Taxes exist to be paid. The English cognate of gelten is yield. However, a formidable obstacle prevents us from interpreting guilt as something to be yielded: the noun should have become guild (or yield); final t in guilt has no explanation.

Guild is a legitimate English word. It seems to have come to English from northern German (gilde) or Dutch. Some details remain obscure, but they won’t interest us here. Suffice it to say that a guild probably meant an association of persons contributing to a common object. Since guilt appeared in English long before guild, its pronunciation has nothing to do with an attempt to stay away from the newcomer (such cases are not too rare, for, although homonyms do not endanger communication, occasionally words choose to keep their distance from obtrusive neighbors): it always ended in -t. As regards the meaning of guilt, the OED appears to be a bit too harsh in its assessment. The earliest senses of Old Engl. gylt were “offence; crime; responsibility.” They are not incompatible with the idea of paying the price for a transgression. The OED says (I have expanded the abbreviations): “From the fact that Old Engl. gylt renders Latin debitum in the Lord’s Prayer and in Matt. XVIII. 27, and that is gyltig renders debet in Matt. XVII. 18, it has been inferred that the substantive [noun] had a primary sense ‘debt’, of which there seems to be no real evidence….” All this is true, but, if Engl. guilt had d at the end, the semantic difficulties would not have deterred anyone from comparing it with yield.

Sometimes, when sounds do not match, the idea of borrowing saves the day. Yet nothing supports the suggestion that Old Engl. gylt, a noun recorded several hundred years prior to its German “equivalent,” came to Britain from the continent, the more so because, as the OED points out, the ancient meanings of the two words do not overlap (it is “crime” in English and “tax” in German). One could fantasize that in the 9^th or 10^th century northern Germans had gylt “payment; tax” and that it was carried to the land of the Anglo-Saxons, where it changed its meaning to “crime,” with the only vestige of the original sense “payment; that which is due; debt” preserved in ritual texts (the Bible). Not only does the absence of this word in Old High German texts make such a hypothesis improbable. Phonetics also militates against it. The German language of that period lacked a vowel rendered in writing by Old Engl. y and by Modern German u with the umlaut sign.

To nonspecialists such an infinitesimal detail as t versus d may seem sheer pedantry, but the situation is familiar: “For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost,/ And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!” Etymology (a vulnerable kingdom) approached something that can be called science only when it began to pay attention to phonetic correspondences. Every time this criterion fails us, we should either explain the deviation or concede defeat. German t corresponds to Engl. d: compare German reiten and Engl. ride. There remains a feeling that guilt and yield are related despite the fact that we failed to break the magic circle around the English noun, but it will remain just this: a feeling with a bitter aftertaste. Incidentally, the first consonant is not a problem: g- instead of y- can be ascribed to the northern norm, as in the verbs get and give, which, if they had developed as expected, should have “yielded” yive and yet, but, when the entire structure collapses, who will rejoice at the sight of a relatively unimpaired roof?

We can only seek comfort in the fact that the cause of the odd spelling (gui-) is known. In today’s English the reading of g before i and e is always a problem. One should tread gingerly with all kinds of gills, and never assume that one knows how Mr. Gilson pronounces his name. Gill of Jack and Jill’s fame had to change the spelling of her name to avoid misunderstanding. The spellings gui- and gue- were introduced on the French model to clarify matters. Now gest- in digest, gestation, and gesticulation won’t be confused with guest. Right? Well, not quite. English spelling has never been reformed consistently. As a result, we struggle with get and jet, gig and jig, give and gyve (y is a redundant letter having the same value as i), and even guilt coexists with gilt; the last two words are homophones but not homographs. Thus we will live on with a sense of shame that an army of learned linguists has not solved the etymological mystery of guilt. But this is not their fault: something is really wrong with this word.

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Long ago, after this blog had barely come into being (Spring 2006), I wrote an essay titled “Living in Sin.” It was about the origin of the word sin. Such abstract categories as sin, shame, and guilt develop from thinking about situations in which people realize that they have done something wrong or covered themselves with disgrace, and every now and then the inner form of the words coined for such purposes is transparent. The idea of sin in its Christian sense was alien to the Germanic peoples before the conversion, and in Gothic, a language mainly known to us from a 4^th-century translation of the New Testament, the word for “sin” is frawaurhts, literally “misdeed” (fra- is a prefix of “destructive semantics,” as in Engl. forgo “relinquish,” and -waurhts is akin to Engl. wrought). Nor does transgression, from Old French, ultimately from Latin, pose any problems: it means overstepping what is allowed. But sin is a short word, and how it came to mean what it does is unclear, the more so because the speakers of Old English had forwyrht, an exact cognate of the Gothic noun. Apparently, sin (at that time, syn or synn) and forwyrht referred to different things. Those who are interested in knowing some conjectures on sin are welcome to read my old post. Shame and guilt are no less opaque than sin; shame is especially hard.

Native English words with sh- once began with sk-, and, indeed, the Old English for shame is scamu. The last sound (u) was an ending, while m could be a suffix because sca-m-u had a close synonym sca-nd-u. Scandu and its cognates have continued into modern languages; Germans still say Scham und Schande to express their disgust. Modern English lacks its reflex (if we disregard the archaic participle shent “ruined, disgraced”), but, by way of compensation, in the United States scam appeared in the sixties of the 20^th century, as if from nowhere. All dictionaries dismiss it demurely as being “of obscure origin.” If we are unable to trace such a recent coinage to its source, how good is the chance of success in dealing with an ancient word? The chance is probably not very good, but sometimes the remoter the period, the easier it is to advance hypotheses. For example, if scam had emerged in Middle English, there would have been no doubt that it was a borrowing from Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish have skam “shame”), and the meanings could have been aligned without much difficulty (“scam is a shameful thing”). 17^th-century scam would have been more problematic since the best period for absorbing Scandinavian words was the Middle Ages. Present day Engl. scam leaves us stranded: it is definitely not a continuation of a word from the language of the Vikings! Hence the unanimous verdict “of unknown/uncertain origin.” Even sham, originally “trick, fraud,” which is clearly English (it begins with sh-), baffles researchers. Although it sounds like shame, it may have nothing to do with it. Despite all such hurdles there is no harm in trying to guess how shame acquired its meaning.

Since shame refers to the diminution of honor, it has been compared with the Old English adjective scam “short” (what an etymon for our scam!), from whose Old Norse cognate skamt English has scant. However, a much more popular hypothesis looks for a different root. In the old Indo-European languages, the prefix s- existed. It was an evasive entity. Roots existed with and without it, and its presence did not affect the word’s meaning. The same almost parasitic s (called s-mobile “movable s”) has been recorded in modem English dialects: some people say climb, others say sclimb. The main sound change that separates all the Germanic languages from its other Indo-European neighbors is the so-called First Consonant Shift: compare Latin pater, tres, and quod (that is, kwod) versus Engl. father, three, and what (from hw-). The quod/hwat pair shows that Germanic h corresponds to non-Germanic k. But in the group sk the consonant k was not affected by the shift. For instance, Latin had scabere “scratch,” and its Gothic cognate was skaban “shear.” As a result, some words going back to different languages sound nearly alike: scabies is from Latin, scab is from Scandinavian (Germanic), and their English siblings are shabby and shave. This digression was necessary to show that if a Germanic word begins with sk-, it may have variants with initial k- (the same root minus s-mobile), while its non-Germanic cognates may begin with h- (k regularly shifted) and sk- (in which k avoided the shift). This is why prefixed words like Old Engl. -hama “covering” and Gothic -hamon “get dressed” have been suggested as cognates of scamu “shame.” The idea was that the Germanic word for shame expressed the embarrassment of being naked.

Such a development is probable. A person could not experience a greater indignity than being caught by his enemies and stripped of his clothes. The god Othin (Odin) says in a mythological poem from medieval Scandinavia: “When I saw two scarecrows in a field,/ I covered them with clothes;/ they looked like warriors when they were dressed/—who hails a naked hero?” In the Slavic languages, styd- “shame” is related to stud- “cold,” which seems to give support to the scamu—hama etymology. But if hama (to stay with Old English forms) is a cognate of scamu, could it not be expected to mean “clothes”? Yet we have a huge zigzag: from “clothes” to “unclothed” and to the disgrace caused by not having anything to wear, all of it within the narrow confines of a short root. The phonetic part (hama ~ scamu) is flawless, but the semantic leap is “scarcely credible,” as dictionaries say in such circumstances. Another possibility is to compare scam- and Gothic hamfs “maimed,” a word that has an impeccable Greek cognate, though mutilation need not presuppose shame.

The inevitable conclusion appears to be “origin uncertain/debatable,” but I cannot finish my story without one more reference. The Italian scholar Vittore Pisani pointed to the noun eskamitu in an inscription on an Inguvian table (we are dealing here with an ancient Indo-European language of Italy). It means “genitals,” and Pisani compared it with the Germanic word for “shame.” The obscure Italic word may provide a clue more reliable than any other. Shame and genitals form an indissoluble union from time immemorial (this has been, of course, what gave rise to the “dress” etymology: the horror lay in being fully exposed). We may never be able to find out why the sound complex skam- came to designate what it did, but, if eskamitu has been interpreted correctly, reconstructing the development from “private parts” to “shame” looks like our best choice.

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Everybody must have heard the phrase to go berserk, but not everybody is aware of the fact how little is known about berserks and how obscure the word berserk is. Berserks were mentioned for the first time in a poem commemorating King Harald Fairhair’s victory in a battle that occurred around the year 872. The language of the poem is, consequently, Old Norwegian. For that period, Old Norwegian means the same as Old Icelandic. All we learn from the relevant lines is that “the berserks roared, the battle was in full swing, the wolfskins howled and shook the irons.” It is hard to decide whether wolfskins is a synonym of berserks or whether there were two groups of warriors (one roared, the other howled?) and on whose side the berserks made noises. Be that as it may, the information on the original berserks is admittedly scanty. Perhaps the poet (Old Scandinavian court poets were called skalds) coined the word berserk himself, but it may have existed in the language before him. Contrary to expectation, it occurs most rarely in later poetry, and, when it does, it means “warrior,” without any specification, and only with reference to the heroes of old. Once we hear that the great god Thor fought berserks’ brides. Since Thor’s main opponents were giants, berserks’ brides probably meant “giantesses.” Female monsters were feared more than superhuman males (thus Beowulf overpowered Grendel, a mighty “troll,” but nearly perished by the hand of Grendel’s vengeful mother), so that Thor cannot be accused of attacking defenseless girls.

The greatest Old Icelandic historian was Snorri Sturluson. He lived in the 13^th century, and we owe several priceless books to him. One of them treats the history of the kings of Norway. As was common in those days, Snorri began his work with a mythological introduction, for royalty needs divine origins, and in a short chapter he said that Odin (the Old Norse form is Othin, rather than Odin), the main god of the Scandinavian pantheon, had a retinue of fearful warriors who “fought without armor and acted like mad dogs or wolves. They bit their shields and were strong as bears or bulls. They killed people, and neither fire nor iron did them any harm.” This he adds, “is called berserk rage.” In English we say going berserk (like going amuck), but we too know what rage is, though more often on the road than in battle.

Snorri’s description comes as a great surprise. In addition to his magnificent history of the kings of Norway, he wrote a book called the Edda, a collection of ancient Scandinavian myths. Odin figures prominently in it, but his wild retinue is not mentioned a single time. He is usually depicted as traveling alone or accompanied by two other gods at most. Nor was the word berserk of any importance to Snorri. The source of this passage is a mystery, and no one can tell why berserks failed to appear in the Edda. In the absence of facts theories purporting to explain the role of Odin’s berserks are many. I also have a theory, but it runs counter to those proposed by many eminent scholars, for which reason it found little support. Yet, like a true berserk, I roar and howl and stick to my guns (or should it be spears, slings, and arrows for the sake of preserving the local coloring?).

Berserks reemerged in Icelandic sagas (prose narratives), recorded mainly in the 13^th century, when Snorri was active. But there they are gangs of vagrant marauders, intimidating farmers, raping women, and killing everybody who dares oppose them. It is in the sagas that they bite shields, fall to the ground, with their mouths foaming and frenzy making them allegedly invulnerable to fire and iron (they cannot be killed with a sword, but a cudgel does fine), and practice other stage effects. I suspect that, while writing an introduction to The History of the Kings of Norway, Snorri borrowed the portraits of berserks from the literary clichés flourishing in his lifetime. Real, not epic, berserks certainly existed, though they were exterminated in both Norway and Iceland before Snorri’s birth. Nobler berserks, the choicest warriors of kings, are mentioned in the so-called legendary sagas, and it seems that a vague memory of such bodyguards went back to at least the 8^th century. Later bandits may have called themselves berserks, to aggrandize themselves, or perhaps the population called them this. It matters little who gave them such a name, for they did not resemble their predecessors of King Harald’s epoch. If Snorri had heard or read myths about Odin’s berserks, he would have retold them in the Edda. Apparently, he did not. So I assume that he knew none and, in his history, modernized the god’s image under the influence of literary tradition.

The problem is complicated by our ignorance of the etymology of the word berserk. We remember that Snorri mentioned berserks’ custom of fighting without armor and roaring like bears. The second part of the noun berserk (-serk) means “shirt,” but the first is ambiguous: it may mean “bear” (which accords well with roaring) or “bare” (in reference to throwing off armor in battle; however, being without armor is not the same as being naked), for in Old Norse the words for bare and for some forms of bear are as close as they are in Modern English. (Has anyone seen a pin I saw in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the mid-seventies: “Bare with me”? It was worn by a grinning female. No one seemed to be paying attention.)

Bears play an outstanding role in the history of Germanic cults. On the other hand, medieval sources, both Scandinavian and Irish, describe scenes of heroes fleeing in a panic when women expose themselves to them. No superstitions are connected with male nudity. Thus, either interpretation (“bareshirt” and “bearshirt”) makes some sense. Until the middle of the 19^th century Icelanders had no doubt that “bareshirt” is correct. Then an influential Icelandic scholar opted for “bearshirt,” but seventy years later the original theory again found an excellent supporter. I think he was right. Recapitulating his arguments here would take me too far afield. The main of them is that berr “bear” did not exist in this form in Old Norse, and other compounds with ber- “bear” as the first element have not been recorded either (a single exception is dubious). It is also unclear whether serk- was current as a technical term for “skin” or “shirt” as early as the 8^th century.

Those who will delve into the berserk problem will find numerous things, intriguing but largely irrelevant. Did berserks form unions? If so, did those unions have a religious character? Did berserks consume poisonous mushrooms and, intoxicated like hashish eaters, attack their enemies? Were berserks akin to wervolves? Both agony and ecstasy fill the pages of the works devoted to those semimythological creatures. Little is known, a lot has been surmised. Some medieval Scandinavian warriors were certainly called berserks. They started as kings’ bodyguards. Theirs was a dignified name. With the dissolution of early feudal retinues like King Harald’s, those groups degenerated into plundering riffraff, their members turned into brigands, and the word acquired negative connotations. (The same happened to the word Viking.) Odin was hardly surrounded by berserks, Snorri’s evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. It is more likely that berserk first meant “bareshirt” (that is, someone who fights with nothing but a shirt on) even if berserks roared like bears in battle. Anyone who would try to go to battle with a bearskin on will find himself easily overheated and incapacitated. A few of my pivotal statements can be and have been contested, and herein lies the beauty of scholarship. Some people, as Snorri put it, make mistakes and others correct them, so that everybody has something to do.

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Today every English-speaker probably knows pinkie “little finger,” but it is amazing how little is said about it in the OED. The word appears in the entry pinkie “anything small, specifically little finger,” with the first example going back to 1808. The Century Dictionary (an American product) does not feature it at all, and this is even more surprising. Yet pinkie was discussed in Notes and Queries in 1872-1873, recurred there in 1916, made its way into dialectal and slang dictionaries, and in the thirties of the 20^th century prompted Frank H. Vizetelly, the editor of the rubric “The Lexicographer’s Easy Chair” in The Literary Digest (I wrote about him about two years ago; sometimes he called his rubric “The Lexicographer’s Uneasy Chair”) answer questions about its origin at least twice. Those who dealt with pinkie invariably noted that it had come to English from the Netherlands and that in a new home it settled in Scotland and the United States. The word’s provenance has never been called into question; yet there is more to it than meets the eye. The meaning of the allusion to the eye will be revealed below.

Pink and pinky ~ pinkie designate all kinds of diminutive things. Among others, there is a fishing boat called this, but whether the reference is to the vessel’s small size is a matter of debate. The verb pink means “pierce” (the other senses are extensions of the main one), and the idea of piercing and pricking (whence small holes and narrow slits) seems to underlie most of the words spelled pink and their neighbors on the dictionary page. Dutch has the verb pinken “to blink, wink,” and in Standard English the adjective pink “half-shut” was common not too long ago, as follows from the song in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra II: 7, 121: “Come, thou monarch of the vine,/ Plumpy Bacchus, with pink eyne!” (eyne “eyes”). Engl. dialectal pink-eyed “having narrow or half-closed eyes” corresponds to late Middle Dutch pinck oogen “small eyes.”

We find an assortment of short and sharp things called pink in both Dutch and Frisian, for instance, little finger, a sausage, gut, and penis. Old Engl. pynca (pinca) meant “point,” and it has been suggested that the flower pink owes its name to the delicately cut, or pinked, edges of the petals. If so, the color pink would be a derivative of that name. Pinch, punch, pin, and pen are of Romance origin, but all of them resemble pink. Those interested in the Romance part of the story will find many interesting things in etymological entries on puncheon, pungent, punctual (punctilio, punctuate, etc.), and point, as well as on Italian pinco “a small fishing boat,” “penis.” The sound complex pink seems to suggest a jabbing movement and the impression it makes on the ear. Old Engl. pyncan had the doublet pyngan, and Modern Engl. ping expresses an abrupt ringing sound, whereas the verb pink imitates the note of the chaffinch. Such words can be expected to emerge anywhere at any time, and this circumstance makes it hard to decide how they are related across the Germanic-Romance border. To exacerbate matters (as highbrows like to say), Indo-European makes wide use of the so-called infix n. Pink looks like a “nasalized” variant of pick, a twin of French piquet. Since a pick is a pointed tool, and to pick means “to probe with a pointed instrument,” from an etymological perspective the difference between pick and pink almost disappears. The relation between pick- and pink- is the same as between dick- (as in dicky bird) and dink- (as in dinky ~ dinkey). Even for “penis” we find pink (see above) alongside Engl. dick. The d- words also mean “something small.”

Pinkie “a small sharp thing” contrasts nicely with thumb, whose root is the same as in thousand and tumor (“to swell”); thus, “a thick, swollen object.” As is well-known, p in Latin and other Indo-European non-Germanic languages corresponds to f in Germanic (the anthologized example is Latin pater ~ Engl. father). Strange things happen in the closest surroundings of pinkie. The Proto-Indo-European form of the numeral five is usually reconstructed as penkwe. Its resemblance to pinkie is striking, and pinkie is indeed the fifth finger, if the counting begins with the thumb. But, given the correspondence p ~ f, pinkie should have become finkie!

Europe has not been inhabited by the Indo-Europeans forever. The most ancient languages of those who lived in the country we today call the Netherlands are lost, but their remnants in Modern Dutch (and, by implication, perhaps in Frisian) could have survived, and scholars vie with one another in trying to unearth them. The language that existed before it was submerged by that of the newcomers is called substrate. Substrate words may give themselves away by not conforming to regular sound correspondences. If pinkie is one of them, its initial p- finds an explanation. However, it would be rash to ascribe great antiquity to pinkie, which, after all, may be a sound symbolic word nurtured by North Germanic soil.

A near doublet of the nonexistent finkie is finger. Is finger related to that ghost? Finger, though recorded in all the Old Germanic languages, has doubtful antecedents. I doubt that it is allied to German fangen “catch, seize, grasp,” for nothing can be grabbed by one finger. Its kinship with the reconstructed penque should not be dismissed out of hand, so to speak. Yet here too one wonders why the word for an individual finger should have been associated with “five.” (An unquestionable congener of five is fist, which once had n after the vowel, and this connection makes sense.) Fingers are for fingering, and I find realistic the suggestion that in the Germanic word we have a nasalized variant of the root present in German ficken (that is, a form with the infix n, as above), a cognate of the Engl. F-word, whose initial meaning is “to move back and forth.” Be that as it may, pinkie does not seem to be related to either the numeral five or the noun finger. One thing is clear: pinkie is a loan from Dutch, originally a provincialism, now part of the standard language. In Dutch it is, in all probability, an expressive word, like many others of a similar phonetic shape in Germanic and Romance.

A good deal of folklore is connected with pinkies almost all over Europe. In the Midland counties of England boys link their little fingers and say: “Ring finger, blue bell, / Tell a lie, go to hell,” after which, if either failed to perform, the little finger would be sure to divulge (recorded in 1873). This incantation has many variants, for instance: “Pinky, pinky bow bell,/ Whosoever tells a lie/ Will sink down to the bad place/ And never rise up again.” In Russia, only girls interlock the little finger of each other’s right hand and repeat: “Peace, peace forever/ Quarrel, quarrel never.” Unfortunately, even the most powerful charm will not help us guess the exact origin of pinkie.

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Jeffrey Graf published, on the website of Indianan Notes and Queries, an exhaustive survey (revised in February, 2007) of the surmises about the nickname Hoosier. In 1995 William D. Piersen, and in 2007 Jonathan Clark Smith devoted articles to Hoosier’s early days (both appeared in the Indiana Magazine of History), and I am returning to this chestnut mainly because all three authors, though extremely well-informed, missed a work that, in my opinion, deserves attention.

The starting point for everyone interested in the history of Indiana’s nickname is a brochure with the title The Word Hoosier By Jacob Piatt Dunn and John Finley By Mrs. Sarah A. Wrigley (His Daughter). Indiana Historical Publications, volume IV, number 2. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1907, 29pp. John Finley was the author of the poem The Hoosier’s Nest (1833) that seems to have made the soubriquet recognized by a wide audience. The poem takes up three pages of small print. The painstaking research was carried out by Dunn, who knew most of the silly conjectures, as well as the few plausible hypotheses, on the etymology of Hoosier and offered an explanation of his own. He had a healthy attitude toward etymological folklore, for he realized how little trust one can be put into stories of the type “I was there and know the facts.” Thus, in 1929 Oscar D. Short brought out his recollections in the Indiana Magazine of History (volume 25) that begin so: “There has been a tradition in our family, which I have known since boyhood, that Aaron Short, an older brother of my grandfather, gave to the inhabitants of Indiana the name ‘Hoosier’.” The story appeared four years after Dunn’s death, but, if he had read it, he would have found nothing new for himself in it: a very strong man, so Short recounts, was victorious in a fight, jumped up, and shouted: “Hurrah for the Hoosier” (perhaps he tried to say: husher or hussar). Both versions—of Hoosier going back to husher or being a “corruption” of hussar—were familiar to Dunn. The editors of the Indiana Magazine of History had no illusions about the verisimilitude of Short’s recollections; yet they decided to add a new piece of legendary material to the Hooseriana. The authors of fibs like Short’s believe in them wholeheartedly, but such is all folklore. Even the storytellers who know the most fantastic fairy tales, when asked whether they think that enchanted castles and boys becoming ravens at the will of an evil stepmother exist, tend to answer evasively that, of course, such things do not happen here, but at one time and elsewhere…

Smith accords Short’s story a measure of respect. However, Hoosier, as far as we can judge, has always been pronounced with the vowel of hoo. For this reason alone, the suspicious word husher “stiller” (a person so strong that he can “hush, still” anyone) is an unlikely etymon (source) of Hoosier, and could hussar have been such an active word in the man’s vocabulary that he would recall it in midair? It is also Smith’s contention that Hoosier reflects “local pride” rather than “southern scorn.” The OED quotes from a letter allegedly written in 1826, the first extant text believed to have the word in question. As it seems, the date is wrong, and we have to accept Smith’s conclusion that there is no documented use of Hoosier prior to the thirties. But his other contention, namely, that Hoosier emerged with reference to the Indiana boatmen and, far from being a “slur,” showed how people reveled in being called Hoosiers, is harder to accept.

The traditional theory has it that Hoosier originated in the South as a term of contempt, a word like yokel, hayseed, rube, bumpkin, hillbilly, clodhopper, jake, backwoodsman, and dozens of others; that in Indiana it lost its offensive connotations; and that it retained its negative sense outside the state. This reconstruction agrees with what we know about such situations. Peripheral areas usually preserve archaic features, be it phonetics, grammar, or vocabulary. The adoption by political parties and religious groups of the opprobrious names that in the beginning their enemies and denigrators coined in contempt has often been recorded: such is the history of Tory, Whig, and Quaker. The ties of Hoosier to the rest of the South are too numerous to be ignored, and outside Indiana references to those who are called Hoosiers are never complimentary.

Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) treats the word in depth, and Graf has, naturally, consulted this work. Hoosier can mean “a rustic, especially in such combinations as country hoosier and mountain hoosier; an unmannerly or objectionable person; a White person considered to be objectionable, especially because of racial prejudice; an inexperienced or incompetent person among those skilled in a particular field, especially logging.” The verb hoosier “to be a farmer” and hoosier up “to work incompetently; to slow down or shirk on a job, usually on purpose” also exist. According to Smith, Hoosier came to mean “an inept person, a bad worker, etc.” later, and it is true that the word’s pejorative uses in written and printed documents do not antedate 1836. Yet the time gap is minimal, and slang makes its way into books and letters sporadically. Also, the connection between Hoosier and “Indiana boatman” will appear strong only if we disregard all other contexts. On the whole, it is easier to accept the fact of late attestation than of the development from “a doughty boatman” to “hillbilly; jerk.”

Several times those who investigated the origin of Hoosier have mentioned a similarly sounding family name and made it responsible for the rise of the Indiana nickname. Their hypotheses (Piersen is among the most recent advocates of one of them) do not go far and carry little conviction. But in 1999 R. Hooser published an article in Eurasian Studies Yearbook, pp. 224-231, and this is the article even Graf missed. The author documents the history of his extended family. The Hausers came to the United States from Alsace. In their dialect the diphthong designated in spelling by au had the value of Engl. oo in hoo. Consequently, Hauser and Hooser are variants of the same name. According to R. Hauser, the Hoosers migrated to Indiana from Salem, NC and were mocked for their beliefs and customs. He does not explain under what circumstances the nickname was extended to the rest of the inhabitants of the state, why the meaning of the slur was forgotten exactly where it should have been best remembered, and why such an obvious origin did not occur to the people who wrote about the subject in the thirties of the 19^th century, but all etymologies of Hoosier are marred by similar inconsistencies (hence the never-ending debate). Especially baffling is the circumstance that even in Finley’s days no one knew why Hoosiers are called this, unless we “buy” the husher theory. Nicknames are invented to belittle or tease their bearers, even when applied to kings: consider such cognomens and Harald Bluetooth and Charles the Bald. The case is certainly not closed, but, if the first Hoosiers were the Hausers and “foreigners,” we begin to understand why there was no love lost between them and their new surroundings, why they chose Indiana as their place of residence, and why other southerners stick to what seems to be the word’s original meaning.

It is not for an outsider to solve the question that puzzled so many specialists in Indiana history, but if this publication makes R. Hauser’s article part of the debate, it will have served its purpose. I will add only a few phonetic details. DARE records the following spelling variants of Hoosier: hoogie, hoojy, hoodger, hoojer, hushier, and hooshur; from older sources hoosher has come down to us. They reflect two pronunciations: hooser and hoosier (-sier as in hosier). If the etymon is Hooser, a third variant emerges. All three can be reconciled. The use of sh for s is old in the history of English. The roots of banish, nourish, bushel, and so forth had final s in French, but they were borrowed with sh. This alternation can also be observed in living speech. In Minnesota, people say groshery for grocery. The same alternation affects the voiced partners of s and sh. For instance (drawing on what one hears in Minneapolis), Fraser is pronounced Frasier (we have Fraser Hall on campus, so that Fraser is a high frequency word where I live). It takes an effort to convince students that the name of Sir James Frazer, the author of The Golden Bough, should rhyme with razor. Hooser, that is, Hoozer, would have become Hoosier, as Fraser became Frasier.

Dunn’s attempt to derive Hoosier from a word recorded in Cumberland, with the resulting meaning “a large man,” has little to recommend it: the connection is tenuous, and the original Hoosiers hardly got their name for their physique. The other explanations rarely go beyond exercises in folk etymology. I very much hope to get numerous responses to this blog. They will probably attempt to demolish my cautious defense of the Hooser theory. This is fine; etymology is a battleground. But, if I dare, I would like to ask my prospective opponents not to write anything before they have read the articles mentioned above. The easiest way to find Graf’s survey is to Google Hoosier (the work will appear at once) or to use the website of the journal Indiana Notes and Queries: http://www.indiana.edu/~/librcsd/internet/hoosier.html (this journal, I believe, is an occasional online publication).

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By Anatoly Liberman

All words must have been coined by individuals. This statement surprises and embarrasses not only the uninitiated but also some language historians. We are used to thinking that “people” created ancient language and art, but what is people? (This question, though in another guise, will recur below.) A group of activists working together and producing in chorus meaningful sound complexes like big ~ bag ~ bug ~ bog? Or a committee like those on which we sit, organs of collective wisdom? As a rule, every novelty that does not die “without issue” passes through a predictable cycle: someone has something to offer, a small group of enthusiasts surrounding the inventor adopts it, more adherents show their support, the novelty becomes common property, and (not necessarily) the originator is forgotten. We have no way of tracing the beginning of the oldest words, and even some neologisms remain etymological puzzles, but the names of some “wordsmiths” have not been lost. For instance, Lilliputian was coined by Jonathan Swift, gas by J.B. van Helmont, and jeep (which later became Jeep) by E.C. Segar. As a rule, inventors use the material at hand. Swift seems to have combined lil, the colloquial pronunciation of little and put(t) “blockhead,” a slang word common in the 18^th century. Van Helmont was probably inspired by the Dutch pronunciation of chaos. Jeep is sound imitative, like peep. In similar fashion, we have no doubt about the structure of the noun folklore (folk + lore), but the story of its emergence is worth telling.

William John Thoms (1802-1885) began his literary career as an expert editor of old tales and prose romances. He also investigated customs and superstitions. Especially interesting are his studies of popular lore in Shakespeare: elves, fairies, Puck, Queen Mab, and others. They were published in the forties, the decade in which he met his star hour. Special works on Thoms are extremely few (the main one dates to 1946), and the archival documents pertaining to him remain untapped, but he related some events of his life himself. It was not by chance that California Folklore Quarterly printed an article about him (“’Folklore’: William John Thoms” by Duncan Emrich, volume 5, pp. 155-374) in 1946. A hundred years earlier a letter signed by Ambrose Merton appeared in the London-based journal The Athenaeum. Those who have leafed through its huge folio volumes probably could not help wondering how the subscribers managed to find their way through such an enormous mass of heterogeneous materials. Yet that weekly had a devoted readership, and its voice reached far.

The 1846 letter is available in two modern anthologies, but outside the professional circle of folklorists hardly anyone has read it, so that I will quote its beginning and end. “Your pages have so often given evidence of the interest which you take in what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature (though by-the-by it is more a Lore than a literature, and would be most aptly described by a good Saxon compound, Folklore,—the Lore of the People)—that I am not without hopes of enlisting your aid in garnering the few ears which are remaining, scattered over that field from which our forefathers might have gathered a goodly crop. No one who has made the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc., of the olden time his study, but must have arrived at two conclusions:—the first how much that is curious and interesting in those matters is now entirely lost—the second, how much may yet be rescued by timely exertion…. It is only honest that I should tell you I have long been contemplating a work upon our “Folklore” (under that title, mind Messes. A, B, and C,—so do not try to forestall me);—and I am personally interested in the success of the experiment which I have, in this letter, albeit imperfectly, urged you to undertake.” Not only did the editor of The Athenaeum welcome the letter. He opened a special rubric for “folk-lore,” and “Ambrose Merton” (this was Thoms of course) became its editor.

The letter was followed by an injunction, part of which is so much to the point that it must be reproduced here: “We have taken some time to weigh the suggestion of our correspondent—desirous to satisfy ourselves that any good of the kind which he proposes could be effected in such space as we are able to spare from the many other demands upon our columns; and have before our eyes the fear of that shower of trivial communication which a notice in conformity with his suggestion is likely to bring. We have finally decided that, if our antiquarian correspondents be earnest and well-informed and subject their communications to the condition of having something to communicate, we may… be the means of effecting some valuable salvage for the future historian of old customs and feelings…. With these views, however, we must announce to our future contributors under the above head, that their communications will be subjected to a careful sifting—both as regards value, authenticity, and novelty; and that they will save both themselves and us much unnecessary trouble if they will refrain from offering any facts and speculations which at once need recording and deserve it.”

Thoms may have regretted the fact that he wrote his letter to The Athenaeum under a pseudonym, for a year later, in another letter to the same journal, he disclosed his identity. He more than once reminded his readers that it was he who launched the word folklore. From time to time somebody would derive folklore from German or Danish. As long as he lived, Thoms kept refuting such unworthy rumors (he also suffered from the neglect of his Shakespeare scholarship); after his death others defended him. The word found acceptance both in the English speaking world and abroad. German, Austrian, and Swiss scholars eventually borrowed it with its original spelling (Folklore), though the German for folk is Volk. By the end of the eighties folklore had become an accepted term in Scandinavia, as well as in the Romance and Slavic speaking countries. The British Folklore Society, which was also formed largely thanks to Thoms’s efforts, adopted the title Folk-Lore Record for its journal (now it is called simply Folklore), and Thoms was elected the Society’s director. In the introduction to the first volume he noted, perhaps not without a touch of irony, that the word he had coined would make him better known than the rest of his professional activities.

As we have seen, the “Saxon” term folklore was applied to the vanishing “manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc.” Thoms did not realize how ambiguous his agenda was. For more than 150 years, researchers have been arguing over whether the subject of folklore is only “survivals” (does modern folklore exist?), who are the people, the “folk” to be approached, and whether folklore is the name of the treasures to be collected and described or of the science (“the lore”) devoted to them. Today folklore is often understood as a study of verbal art, but not less often it passes off as a branch of cultural anthropology. In 1846 folk meant “peasantry,” which excluded urban culture. One also spoke vaguely of common people, of story tellers nearly untouched by the advance of civilization, and of the working people in the “byeways of England” (the phrase, spelling and all, is from The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1885). Railways were the main bugaboo of those who watched the rural landscape disappear under the wheels of the devil, the steam engine. Being run over by a train became a literary motif.

In 1849 an event of great importance happened in Thoms’s life: he began publishing his own weekly that, after rejecting many titles and ignoring the advice of some well-wishers, he decided to call Notes and Queries. His old appeal to the readers to send ballads, tales, proverbs, descriptions of customs, and so forth brought many responses, and Thoms was loath to start a rival periodical, for fear of undermining The Athenaeum, but he received the editor’s blessing. The new journal turned into a main forum for letters that Thoms had invited correspondents to send to The Athenaeum. The rubric on “folk-lore” in both periodicals made the term familiar, and later the derivatives (folklorist and folkloric) emerged. Before resigning as editor, Thoms told the story of his magazine in a series of short essays and published them in Notes and Queries for 1871 and 1872. In 1848 Dombey and Son appeared. One of the novel’s most endearing characters is the one-armed Captain Cuttle. Like so many other personages brought to life by Dickens, the good captain has a tag: he likes to repeat the maxim “When found, make a note of.” Thoms used this catchphrase as a motto for his journal, and it was printed on the title page of each issue.

I have already written about the value and the worldwide success of Notes and Queries. This magazine is one of a kind. Personally, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to it, for suggestions on word origins were (and still are) common in Notes and Queries, and I have nearly 8000 of them in my database. Some words have been discussed only in its pages, and some first-rate specialists sought no better exposure of their ideas. The man who invented the word folklore and founded Notes and Queries deserves to be remembered, and I am sorry that no one has written a book about him. The reason may be that he was neither a professor nor a madman. Perfectly sane and of humble origin, he was survived by his wife and nine children.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Many thanks to those who commented on my recently published dictionary and to the listeners of MPR (“Midmorning News with Kerri Miller”). Some of the words about whose origin I was asked (copasetic and quiz among them) have been covered in my earlier posts, and I will not dwell on them again. But I hasten to undeceive our correspondent whose family believes that it invented the noun quiz: it did not. Quiz emerged in the 19^th century as university slang.

SPELLING REFORM. English is indeed a global language, but I fail to see a connection (suggested by our correspondent) between this fact and the conservative character of English spelling. If knock loses its k-, it will lose it globally, much to the world’s gratification. Consistent phonetic English spelling is a utopia. Vowels are realized differently in English dialects. This is the reason it would be better not to meddle with Mike, make, and so forth. But spelling till with one l, quake as kwake, dependent and redundant with -ent, etc. (the main thing is to define the scope of the etc.) won’t hurt anyone. Hence my suggestion to reform English spelling slowly and gingerly, rather than introducing revolutionary measures. The same hold for the etymological criterion. Words of Modern English cannot and should not reflect their past (we no longer speak Old English, do we?), but some morphological ties should probably be retained. This explains my proposal to drop k- in knock but not in know, for knock is isolated, whereas know is related to acknowledge (which I would prefer to spell aknowlege).

Fare fico ~ fare fiasco again. Words that sound alike and have a similar structure (so-called paronyms) are often confused and regularly affect one another’s meaning. My suspicion remains that, whatever the modern understanding of fare fico, it has nothing to do with the origin of fiasco. Is there an equivalent word to phallic to imply something that looks like female genitals? My experience tells me that there is a word for everything, but I am not aware of the female counterpart of phallic, and the reason it does not occur in dictionaries and thesauruses is easy to explain. Phallic was coined to be used in combinations like phallic figure and phallic cult. It is mostly an ethnographic term. Statues and figurines of fertility goddesses and of patronesses of sexual intercourse abound. They usually have many breasts or a conspicuously enlarged vulva. Apparently, a generic term like phallic for describing them is not needed, but I won’t be surprised if such an adjective lurks somewhere in the depths of the OED. Let us wait for the comments on this post.

The origin of jankety “in poor shape.” No slang or regional dictionary of Americanisms I have consulted features it, though the Internet produces the impression that the word is known to many. Perhaps it originated in Black English, but I have only anecdotal evidence to support this claim and can at best offer an intelligent guess about its sources. Janky “lousy, phony” exists too and shows that -et- in jankety is a suffix (jank-et-y, not janket-y), unless janky as a back formation of jankety. Almost all slang words with initial j- (jog, jerk, jig, and so forth) are expressive; many of them designate quick or abrupt movement. Equally expressive (sound symbolic rather than sound imitative) are some native words ending in -ank, for instance, crank, prank, and especially yank. Jank, which, like jerk and yank, may, as I have been told, mean “to pull violently,” aligns itself easily with them. Verbs meaning “to pull” often have gross sexual connotations, and jank “male groin area” confirms my conjecture that neither janky nor jankety was coined as an elegant word. Whether adjectives like rickety and junky have influenced the meaning of jankety cannot be decided, but such influences are not improbable. I should add that practically all the words mentioned above in connection with jankety are also of unknown or uncertain origin.

The phrase to go haywire. Sometimes we stumble across a word that seems to be yesterday’s slang, but it turns out to have been around for several centuries. In other cases a word that looks as though it has been in the language forever can be shown to have sprung up in recent times. To go haywire is such a familiar idiom that the date of its first occurrence in printed sources (1917) comes as a surprise. Haywire is indeed the wire used in hay bailing; hence its association with makeshift and insecure arrangements and its figurative meaning. Apparently, haywire is of American provenance. Push the envelope goes back to aviation slang. The original reference was to graphs of aerodynamic performance. How offensive is the British slang word pikey? In recent time this word has been used so loosely (not only for vagabonds but also for all kinds of outsiders) that it has nearly lost its negative connotations. But, obviously, if used about an Irishman or a Gypsy, it is an ethnic slur.

Drat “damn, darn it” is sometimes explained as od-rat, in which od is a euphemism for god (God without the initial consonant) plus rat, a dialectal variant of rot—not a particularly convincing etymology. Conversely, drot may be (G)od rot it! Drat has the doublet (d)rabbit (for example, rabbit the child! drabbit the girl!). This enigmatic drabbit was first traced to French rabattre “to beat down.” Its variant rat it! drat it! may have been due to rat substituted for rabbit. We do not know whether drat is a contraction of drabbit or drabbit is an extension of drat. Curses often contain disfigured words, for taboo and euphemisms play a significant role in them. As a result, their origin becomes hopelessly obscure.

Gallivanting. This seems to be a playful word, as Ernest Weekley put it: perhaps a blend of gallant and levant “to decamp, steal away, bolt.” But for some reason, it usually occurs in its participial form (gallivanting), a peculiarity that has never been explained. Some connection with gallant is probable.

Heebie-jeebies: “Coined by W.B. DeBeck (1890-1942), American cartoonist, in his comic strip Barney Google” (The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition). Vet is a clipped form of veterinary (surgeon) (compare doc, prof, math, lab, etc. from doctor, professor, mathematics, and laboratory); hence the verb to vet “to subject to professional examination.”

Silly continues the phonetically regular form seely, with cognates in all the Old Germanic languages. Its original meaning was “blessed, happy.” It is amazing how many paths lead to the idea of stupidity. Someone who is happy is stupid (for what is there to be happy about?), and so is someone who thinks too much of himself (the Romance root of fool means “inflated”). The root of daft means “fitting” (consequently, too docile); by way of compensation, its doublet deft exists. The semantic base of words for “stupid” may be “stunned,” “pitiful,” “lacking support,” “unsociable,” “blissfully unaware of the surrounding world,” “too trustful,” “too accommodating.” You are damned if you are too friendly, and you are damned if you are a social moron. Language reflects this attitude most faithfully. In a tale well-known in the East, a boy, an old man, and a donkey go on their way. Whether the old man rides the donkey, with the boy following him on foot, or the boy rides, with the old man walking, or both ride or walk, or whether the old man carries the donkey on his back, those around mock them: every combination is wrong. Lief means “beloved, dear” (compare German lieb). The archaic phrase I would as lief can be glossed as “I would rather.”

I cannot say anything new on the word regionalism. It appears to have been coined some time around the eighties of the 19^th century by journalists, for the earliest citations are from newspapers. At that time regionalism meant only “localism” in politics. It gained popularity after World War I. As a linguistic term (“a local word or feature”) it does not antedate the fifties. Today regionalism is used widely, but the numerous spheres of application have not changed its original meaning.

Two phonetic questions. 1) Education pronounced as ejucation. The sound we hear at the beginning of the letter name u (it is called yod), when it follows t and d, tends to merge with them and produces ch and j. This is why we say picture and verdure the way we do. The same assimilation can be observed in living speech: did you and what you become diju and watchyou and even student sometimes sounds as s-chudent. A similar process can be observed when s, z and yod meet: note how most people pronounce bless you and as you like it. In very careful speech t, d, s, and z retain their individuality before the yod, so much so that snobs rhyme literature with pure. It follows that ejucation is admissible and does not betray the speakers’ lack of education. 2) Dwarfs versus dwarves. From Old English we inherited alternations of the shelf ~ shelves, wolf ~ wolves type. When r, rather that l, preceded f, as in scarf and dwarf, the alternation was the same, but its modern reflexes are inconsistent. It is due to chance that the British norm chose dwarfs, while Americans usually say dwarves. In British English, scarfs seems to be more common, while in America scarves predominates. Wharf and wharves have a similar distribution.

A RETROSPECT. 1) At some time, I cited an amazing number of verbs meaning “to beat, thrash.” A similar, but shorter, list from British dialects was offered in Notes and Queries for 1876. Here are five most colorful ones: mump, beneil, welt, twilt, and skelp. 2) I have a gnawing suspicion that some people do not read this blog or, if they do, refuse to profit by it. One of my posts was devoted, among other things, to the ugly fillers actually and you know. Could those in the highest echelons of society have missed that post? In any case, this is the exchange quoted in newspapers a few days ago. “In an interview last week with ABC, Ms. Bush [Laura Bush] said: ‘I think she probably meant ‘I’m more proud,’ you know, is what she really meant’… ‘…I was touched by it,’ Ms. Obama [Michelle Obama] said. ‘And that’s what I like about Laura Bush. You know, just calm, rational approach to these issues. And you know, I am taking some cues.’’’

Read the next gleanings on August 27.

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By Anatoly Liberman

At the beginning of June, on the technological campus of Coventry University the British Simplified Spelling Society, now called Spelling Society, with Simplified expunged from the title, celebrated its centennial (centenary). As the theme of the conference the organizers suggested “The Cost of English Spelling.” The society and its ally the American Literacy Council were founded at the peak of public interest in spelling reform. Between 1908 and 2008 many edifying publications came out, and some of the best linguists on both sides of the Atlantic showed the weakness of the arguments repeated again and again by the opponents of the reform. However, a century passed, and despite all those activities English spelling has undergone only a few cosmetic changes (like hyphenation in American English), so that there is nothing to celebrate. And yet there may be a glimmer of hope.

The cost of teaching English spelling is enormous. The money spent on drilling the most nonsensical rules in any modern European language and on remedial courses could have fed and educated a continent. (I have the statistics but will skip the numbers.) Although Spelling Society has lost the game, the world at large has not won it. The establishment refused to institute changes, and, as a result, speakers (native, immigrant, and foreign, both young and old) have become less proficient in reading and writing than ever. Now we are dealing with several generations of the illiterate offspring of illiterate parents.

Since the end of the Second World War life in the West has changed dramatically, partly for the better, partly for the worse. Today more than ever in the recent history of our civilization popular culture has the ascendancy over “high” culture. It is not only our age that witnesses the triumph of popular (low) culture: such is the law of all social development. If it were otherwise, we would still be wearing wigs and using declensions and conjugations of the type known from Latin. In language this trend can be observed in both big things and small. For example, the swift substitution of -s for -th (comes for cometh, and the like) signified the encroachment of vulgar speech on the time-honored literary norm. In Shakespeare’s plays, Falstaff’s boon companions use this ending. Even the Authorized Version of the Bible was unable to suppress this novelty. Today no one cometh and no one goeth.

In recent memory (George Babington Macaulay would have said within the memory of men still living) jeans with a prefabricated rent at the knee became fashionable and more expensive than elegant and unimpaired trousers (pants). The vilest language is allowed in songs, on the screen, and in printed production, whereas in 1908 one could not pronounce the words pregnant and underwear with women around. Highbrows made careers explaining to the eager public the profound goals of the hippies and the surpassing value of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. Bras and ties were abolished along with other signs of bourgeois hypocrisy. Only our orthography stands like an impregnable rock in this ocean of change. But the “masses” did not remain indifferent to the preservation of this last relic of the past, and here I come to the subject of the moral cost inflicted on learners by conservative English spelling.

The first point on the list can be called serene resignation. When provoked by the most egregious misspellings in students’ papers, I chide the culprits gently (ever so gently), the answer usually is: “Oh, I know, I am an awful speller.” It is sad to teach people who have never taken geography at school or are, to quote one of my listeners, “lost in space and time” on hearing the word crusades, but the pilot will take passengers to their destination without asking them for directions, and the Middle Ages ended before we were born. In contrast, one has to write something all the time. Yet our orthography is such that people are happy to admit that they are dummies. A state-sponsored inferiority complex is a rather high moral cost for sticking to antiquated spelling.

Point two is the opposite of the previous one. The world in which college graduates are unable to distinguish between principle and principal and think that the past tense of lead is lead has produced its ugly antidote, namely the spelling bee. The contestants cram hundreds of useless words and come away empty-handed because in the last tour they may miss bogatyr “a Russian epic warrior” (the word is not in the memory of my computer). Wouldn’t it have been more profitable to read Russian fairy tales rather than wasting the brain cells on the words one will never see or use? It is an open secret that the most ambitious parents hire coaches to prepare their children for collecting bitter spelling honey. Prestige and prizes are involved in this losing game.

The masses, as I said, have been reduced to the state of blissful illiteracy and will support spelling reform. They have already abbreviated everything. University is simply U. I teach at the U. of M. (University of Minnesota), students in Salt Late City go to the U. of U. (the University of Utah), and if u (= you) want to move south, hire a truck with the sign “U Haul” (that is, “You Haul”) and go there (their) real quick. U Haul to the U. of U., jingling all the way! Text messaging (called texting in British English) and so-called emotics follow the same route. BRB “be right back” cannot be misspelled. Ads vacillate between two extremes: they play on fake nostalgia and invite us to visit their “shoppe,” as in good “olde” times, but also offer lite beer and donuts (curiously, dictionaries now recognize donut as a variant of doughnut—a revolution from below). Simplified spelling is with us, unless you have noticed it. If Spelling Society succeeds in harnessing the energy of popular culture and steers clear of its excesses, it may eventually turn the tide.

However, there is a fly in the ointment. The reformers have always tried to achieve all at once, forgetting the fact that educated people are averse to rapid shakeups of spelling. Any reform that writes giv and hav on its banner is doomed to failure: it will be rejected unanimously by the left and right. Initial changes should be almost surreptitious: first persuade the powers that be (I have no idea where, in the absence of language academies, such powers hide) to abolish the difference between till and until, spell and dispel. Then remove k- in knob and knock (but retain it in know, to preserve its union with acknowledge). Get rid of c in scythe, as well as in excellent, acquaint, and their likes. Dispense with final -b in dumb (pretend that it is a back formation of dummy) but retain it in numb and thumb because of their weakly sensed affinity with nimble and thimble. It is only the underhand “donut way” that may guarantee success: chip away at one word after another. The process will take several decades, if not longer, but, once people agree that change is needed, they will allow the reformers to introduce proksimity, telephone, and perhaps even krazy (not a Romance word!) and wipe out the difference between descendent and descendant.

Necessity has taught us to recycle all kinds of products. Pubs have gone smoke free. We are saving energy, albeit on a small scale. People do all such things, for they realize that they either comply or perish. There is no joy in raising children who know that they are dum(b) and see no means of improving their status. Nor do we want all words being reduced to capital letters. WBA (it will be awful). Investing money in teaching English spelling as it exists will have the same effect that investing millions in Soviet collective and state farms had. But drawing on the experience of that country, we should beware of repeating its other mistake. Post-communist reformers preached that one cannot jump over a chasm in two steps: democracy, market, and privatization—all overnight. A jump indeed presupposes a single effort. But why not build a bridge over a chasm? If spelling reform becomes reality, the English speaking world will emerge from a dark cell into dazzling daylight. This can be accomplished only by passing through many intermediate stages. Lite beer and donuts are the right sustenance on this way.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Hermaphrodites are born rarely, and it is far from clear why their mythology achieved such prominence in Antiquity. Reference to cross-dressing during certain marriage rites does not go far, but the cult of Hermaphroditus is a fact, and Ovid’s tale of the union in one body of the son of Hermes and Aphrodite is well-known. Perhaps this myth reflects the eternal desire to be sexually self-sufficient and thus never bother about a lover, faithlessness, and divorce. In art, Hermaphroditus was portrayed as a youth with developed breasts or as the goddess Aphrodite with male genitals. It is even less clear what the oldest speakers of the Germanic languages knew about hermaphrodites. Characteristically, the modern word (hermaphrodite) is unabashedly Greek with an obvious mythological tinge. But this is so in present day English.

In Frisian, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages, the main (and sometimes the only) word for hermaphrodite has the inner form that can be rendered as “of two sexes” or “with two tools.” German has Zwitter, from earlier zwitarn. Zwi- is related to zwei “two”; the meaning of -tarn or -arn is obscure (a suffix or a remnant of a longer noun?). Medieval Germanic scribes occasionally ran into Latin hermaphroditus, which they had to gloss, that is, to translate into their languages. When we are able to decipher the words they used, we come up with “castrated man,” “effeminate person,” “bad creature” (the adjective bad seems to be the root of such a noun) and even “devil” (for instance, Old Engl. scritta), rather than “a person with two sets of reproductive organs.” Some glosses were probably nonce words, formations coined on the spur of the moment, like Modern Engl. willgill ~ willjill. Most scribes had a vague idea that something was wrong with a hermaphrodite and knew that the flaw pertained to the sexual sphere, but were at a loss to find an exact equivalent. On the other hand, they could know the exact term from dealing with the natural world. Thus, in a Low (= northern) German dialect the word helferling occurs; it is a term used in pigeon breeding, and its affinity with Engl. half is not in doubt. Such formations could have existed a millennium and even two ago. Perhaps zwitarn is one of them.

A brave effort was once made to detect a term for “hermaphrodite” in a 14th-century German legal code titled Sachsenspiegel (-spiegel “mirror”). The term is altvile (plural). Dwarves, cripples, and altvile were not allowed to inherit movable property or fief. The disenfranchised were the people who could not defend themselves, and this explains the exclusion of the handicapped and dwarves, the more so as stunted growth was looked upon as a mental disease rather than a physical, bodily deficiency. But hermaphrodites? How many hermaphrodites could there be in medieval Germany, to justify a special clause? Altvil, analyzed as al-tvil, appears to contain a cognate of two. Or we could be dealing with alt-vil, which resembles the phrase all zu viel “too many” (presumably of organs). Those who copied the Sachsenspiegel in the 14th century did not know more about this matter than we do, for the word turns up in numerous forms, a sure sign of scribes’ perplexity. The Sachsenspiegel was several times translated into Latin, and the original manuscript has splendid illustrations. However, neither the Latin glosses of the German words nor the pictures make it clear what altvile means. More likely, the division is al-tvile, and the word has nothing to do with hermaphrodites. It may have meant “madmen,” with -twil being related to Dutch dwaes “foolish” and its Old Engl. cognate. Defending this interpretation will take me too far afield and is not relevant (not germane, as one of my colleagues likes to say) to the present discussion. A certain Markwart Altfil is known to have lived in 1180. I think he was Markwart dolt. Medieval soubriquets, some of them used about royalty, were unbelievably offensive, and few topics are more intriguing than the attitudes of a society in which one could kill and be acquitted for a scurrilous allusion but would tolerate the most demeaning nickname.

A legitimate question is whether Germanic mythology preserved tales of hermaphrodites. The answer is not really. The Roman historian Tacitus, who in the second half of the 1st century C.E. left an all-important description of the southern ancestors of Rome’s Germanic neighbors, mentioned Tuisto, or Tuisco, the spouseless father of the god Mannus, but nothing is known about his appearance. Only his name suggests “two of something.” The 13th-century Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson tells a story of how Ymir, the primordial giant of the Scandinavian creation myth, fell into a sweat while he slept, whereupon a man and a woman grew under his arm. Also, one of his legs got a son with the other. In such myths, children are usually born to a great spouseless progenitor, but this does not mean that he was a hermaphrodite. Ymir has been compared with Latin gemini “twins.” More likely, it means “howler,” a typical name for a giant. In Scandinavian myths, giants were not particularly huge, and dwarves were not small. They were distinguished by their function: the gods maintained law and order, the dwarves provided them with the treasures that assured their ability to govern (a hammer, a sword, a magic ship, and so forth), and the giants were the forces of chaos. For that reason, giants and dwarves often had the same names. One of them was Billingr, which appears to have meant either “twin” or, less likely, “hermaphrodite” (in regional Swedish and Nynorsk, billing means “twin”). But this is a piece of speculative etymology, not a myth, for we know nothing about either the giant or the dwarf called Billingr: all that has come down to us are their identical names.

Roman and Germanic mythology share numerous tales, but there is no Germanic counterpart of the story told by Ovid or statuettes resembling the pictures on ancient vases. Although the ancestors of the modern speakers of the Germanic languages were apparently not ignorant of hermaphrodites, all our insights come from linguistic forms (glosses and names), poor substitutes for narrative and visual art.

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By Anatoly Liberman

All historians who purport to reconstruct the past are detectives; consequently, some mysteries are bound to remain unsolved. Those who do not study etymology for a living (the majority of the world population) have no idea how word origins are discovered. To become a professional in this area requires years of training, but all too often expertise and acumen fail to provide the coveted answer: “Where did such and such a word come from?” Every now and then we stumble upon the right solution by chance. To be sure, only persistent players can expect to meet with such a chance, for, as Tchaikovsky put it, inspiration does not visit the lazy. Yet luck and serendipity are not uncommon factors in linguistic pursuits. I can think of three situations.

The policy of scorched earth, or a reward for diligence. When more than twenty years ago I began work on a new etymological dictionary of English, my goal was to become acquainted with everything that had ever been said about the origin of English words and their closest cognates. The authors of the existing English dictionaries mention the works of their predecessors in exceptional cases, partly due to the limitation of space, partly because they have little knowledge of the myriad articles and books that might have made their search more fruitful. Nor is it easy to find the relevant literature, and this is why my mill accepted all kinds of grist, regardless of its quality. Among the 18,000 odd titles I have amassed, many could have been dispensed with, but telephone books and bibliographies cannot afford being choosy. Long ago I obtained through Interlibrary Loan and read an old commentary on the language of the Gothic Bible. Gothic was recorded in the 4^th century, and its forms are of great value for comparative Germanic linguistics.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I had seldom read a more useless book. But in one of the footnotes, of which there were hundreds, the author remarked that, in his opinion, thrutsfill, the Gothic word for leprosy (I am using simplified spelling), and its Old English cognate thrustfell have the same root as Engl. thrush, the name of infants’ disease. The idea seemed much more illuminating to me than the universally accepted one, according to which Gothic thruts- is related to words for “swelling” (like Engl. throat); in Old English, the group -st- (thrustfell) was believed to be an alteration of the more ancient -ts- (thrutsfill). The name of the disease (thrush), a word distinct from the bird name, has been explained satisfactorily, even though some dictionaries hedge on this point: the almost indubitable cognates of thrush in the Scandinavian languages mean “rotten.” The symptom caused by thrush (multiple white spots in a baby’s mouth) was likened to rot. Fell, the second component of thrustfell, meant “skin,” as it still does in Modern English (“an animal’s hide or skin with hair on it”). It follows that thrustfell should be understood as “rotten skin” rather than “swollen skin” and that the consonants were switched in Gothic, not in Old English. To my mind, this etymology is excellent. I did not discover it myself, but, if I had not read that otherwise useless book from cover to cover, no one would have known it today, so, in a way, I am its coauthor. And here is my point. I might have spent my whole life trying to find the origin of the Old Germanic name for leprosy and would have drawn blank. The answer turned up where no one could expect to find it.

Rarely taught languages, or a reward for unpredictable knowledge. English etymologists have trouble understanding the connection between two meanings of the word fog: “deep mist” and “a second growth of grass” (this is what was originally called aftermath, that is, “after-mowing”). I happen to know Russian, a language that few Germanic scholars can read fluently, let alone speak. My knowledge of Russian is an accident of nature; I have not done anything for it. In Russian, a field left unsown (“to rest”) is called pod parom, literally “under vapor,” so that an association between moisture (mist, fog) and new grass seems natural to me. Therefore, I can offer a sensible explanation of two fog’s in English. If I knew Irish or Albanian as I know Russian, I would undoubtedly have been able to solve some other riddles of English etymology, for in a study of word origins a parallel is often all one needs to make a possible solution probable.

Delectable rambles, or pure serendipity. Like fog, the English word pimp also has two meanings: one is universally known (“a provider of prostitutes”), the other is dialectal (“a bundle of wood”). When I saw the second pimp in a dictionary, I was struck by its definition: “Pimp. Faggot.” How can it be, I asked myself, that two words related to sex have found themselves in such an unusual union? Greatly puzzled, I began to investigate the etymology of pimp. If its definition were only “a bundle of wood” (and this is what a faggot is), I would hardly have thought of the connection. Two of my previous posts in this blog were devoted to pimp and faggot, so here I will only say what gave me the best clue to their history.

Our students, like students at most American colleges, in order to graduate, are supposed to write senior projects. At Minnesota, those in the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch with an interest in language rather than in what is nowadays called culture on our campuses usually end up as my charges. One of them said that he wanted to write a work on the vocabulary of the Nazi time. I told him that our library had a sizable collection of newspapers published in Germany in the thirties and advised him to read some of them, in addition to the many books on the subject. But first I went to the periodical room and read a few issues myself.

In one of the newspapers the word Pimpf (“a small boy; a member of a youth organization under Hitler”) attracted my attention. I had known it before, but it was not active in my German. I immediately thought that Pimpf and pimp must be related, and so they turned out to be. This idea had not occurred to the great etymologists of the past because Pimpf was a rare word in 19^th-century German, and even some native scholars, let alone English-speakers, did not know it. People like Friedrich Kluge and other famous German etymologists rarely spoke English They could probably make an eloquent oration in Old English but would have been unable to communicate the simplest thought in the modern language. Pimp, predictably, does not occur in Beowulf; nor was it a permissible word in elegant Victorian literature. To be aware of its existence, one had to live in England, but they lived in Germany. Later dictionaries mainly copied and repackaged older works. This is why the obvious comparison pimp—Pimpf fell between the cracks. If that student had not come to me with his subject, the etymology of pimp would have remained undiscovered.

The next example was also discussed in one of my old posts, but I will mention it because it fits the subject so well. The librarian who at that time was in charge of our Special Collection (“Rare Books”) saw me once reading an 18^th-century journal and inquired whether I was the local etymologist who had reportedly explained the origin of the F-word. When I answered in the affirmative, he asked: “Do you know that we have a bunch of letters of James A. H. Murray and Henry Bradley, the first editors of the OED?” The result of his tip was my publication “James Murray at Minnesota.”

Here is my advice to etymologists. Do not despise the trashiest books, learn foreign languages, advise students who are interested in linguistics, and associate as much as possible with the librarians of your institutions. If you follow this advice, you shall have your reward. (The things I recommend are good to do even if you are not an etymologist.)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Spelling reform and genitals will keep the rubric “gleanings” afloat forever. In connection with my series of posts on the oddest English spellings (which will be continued), I received several questions about dyslexia and orthography. Since I am unacquainted with the neural aspects of dyslexia, I cannot have a professional opinion on this subject, but the main divide seems to be between alphabetic languages and those using hieroglyphs (such as Chinese) rather than between languages like Finnish, in which the word’s aural Gestalt and visual image correspond remarkably well, and languages like English, in which the spelling of numerous words is unpredictable (bury, build, bosom, choir, till ~ until, and so forth), for different parts of the brain control our mastery of letters versus symbols (in this case, pictures).

Now to the genitals. Thanks to the correspondent who provided a quotation of dildoes from John Donne’s “Elegy 2: The Anagram” (1599). Those lines confirm the fact that the word was well-known in Shakespeare’s days. While our British correspondent was watching “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” an idea occurred to her that the opprobrious sense of knob had existed for centuries. My information on this subject is sparse. Knob “penis” was indeed known in the second half of the 17th century, but neither Shakespeare nor his younger contemporaries, whose language is often coarser than his, seem to have used it, even in puns, while reproducing the speech of their time. Nor do I find it in the old classical dictionaries of slang. Apparently, it reemerged after a long period of underworld existence only in the 20th century.

By way of compensation, I will add a note to my old post on the origin of Engl. brain. I suggested in it that brain is akin to bran and that the earliest meaning of the word was approximately “refuse,” not too different from “gray matter.” At that time I did not remember that 400 years ago the brain was supposed to produce semen, because both substances look rather similar. Hence the allusion to “brains between legs.” As regards Italian fiasco, I am sure that, contrary to a guess of our correspondent, far’ fico and far’ fiasco are unrelated. Some discussion of the Italian word (in connection with Engl. fig) can be found in my An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction; fig is mentioned in the entry on the F-word. To the best of my knowledge, far’ fiasco had no scurrilous overtones when it was coined. Fiasco (this is an answer to a different question) can, of course, have entered English directly from Italian, but if an Italian word (except for art terms and those pertaining to Italian realities) is also current in French and if the chronology does not militate against such a conclusion, it is safer to suggest that English took it over from French rather than Italian. I will return to fiasco in a different context.

In my etymological database, only one citation on poontang turned up. G. Legman wrote in the journal American Speech 25, 1950, p.234: “The Southern term poontang, for sexual intercourse ‘especially between Negro & white’ (Wentworth), is popularly and mistakenly believed to be a Negro word, perhaps of African origin. Actually, as pointed out by the well-known translator Keene Wallis, poontang is merely a heavily nasalized Creole pronunciation of the French word putain, whore, and undoubtedly spread through the South from French-speaking Louisiana. Wallis reports it as current in Missouri about ‘1915’.” This is followed by twelve quotations (but not from Wallis), three of them from Look Homeward, Angel (1929; Poon Tang). Few words are more detrimental to an etymology than undoubtedly and doubtlessly, but the derivation from putain is not bad, and the southern provenance of poontang seems to be correct.

A question was asked about the adverb yet. It concerns usage, but the development of yet also has a historical dimension. Our correspondent finds the sentence “Has Lucy come yet?” strange. It sounds perfectly idiomatic to me. In Modern English, yet has numerous meanings, and in two situations it alternates with “substitutes.” One is still: he is still here ~ he is not here yet. The other is already: he has already come ~ has he come yet? Apparently, the latter alternation is not universal; otherwise, there would have been no query. A few things about past usage may be of interest. Still is an adjective (“quiet, motionless”) and an adverb, as above. In Shakespeare’s language still meant “always” (“Thou still hast been the father of good news”). In some British dialects, yet occurs as still was in the 16th and 17th century. Consequently, it may be that in Wordsworth’s sonnet addressed to Milton: “So didst thou travel on life’s common way / In cheerful godliness, and yet thy heart / The lowliest duties on herself did lay,” yet is misunderstood by modern readers, for Wordsworth may have meant “and always (ever) thy heart.”

Extinction of Languages. The disappearance of every language, like the disappearance of every species, is an irreparable loss, and it is a good thing that in the 20th century many languages have been saved from extinction and in a few cases even revived (Hebrew is an anthologized example). But it is also a fact that languages, and not necessarily endangered ones, those with few speakers left, have been dying throughout history. Take Hittite, Hunnish, and Gothic. They were spoken by tens of thousands of people forming powerful tribal unions. What is left are a heap of clay tablets, a few biblical fragments, and the like, while from preliterate societies (to which the Huns belonged) almost nothing has remained. Vandals have a bad press, though at one time they were not worse than, say, the Goths. The Vandals are gone, and, but for a few names and words recorded by the Romans, we would have had no idea of their language. History is cruel; however, it is also unpredictable: it sometimes spares the weak and destroys the strong.

Etymologies. How are Engl. bold and Old Icelandic ballr related, considering that the Icelandic word meant “frightful, dangerous, fatal?” Adjectives often refer to a quality possessed by an individual and the effect this quality has on others. Here we deal with courage and its results: a stout-hearted person is “bold,” whereas his boldness is “dangerous” to others. Can Engl. evil be related to Latin evilescere “to become vile, worthless, despicable,” and, if such a possibility exists, can certain conclusions be drawn with relation to the writings of early English saints? Our correspondent is correct in isolating the root of vilis “vile” in the Latin verb (e- is a prefix). This structure excludes its affinity to evil, but any influence of this relatively rare Latin verb on the Old English adjective should also be ruled out, because the original form of evil was yfil (the modern pronunciation of the stressed vowel is a “Kentism”) and because its cognates, beginning with Gothic, already had the meaning it has today. A medieval scholar would have been delighted to catch at the similarity between evil and evilescere, but by the time umlaut changed u in ubil- (the reconstructed but secure protoform of evil) to y, let alone by the Middle English period (when Old Engl. long y yielded e), all the works cited in the letter had been written and become canon. Ubil-, though pronounced with -v-, did not sound like Latin evil- and would not have inspired even the most ingenious thinker of the Middle Ages. The literature on counting-out rhymes is vast. As always, I am grateful for every tip, but, while writing about eena-meena, I included among my references only those works that deal with the origin of the relevant words, and such works are not many

Pronunciation and grammar. (I won’t repeat the questions, for they can be guessed from the answers.) Unless the norm has changed in recent years, the first vowel in Coventry has the value of o in on. It is true that the o in womb is not identical with its counterpart in woman. But since I do not use phonetic symbols in this blog, I disregarded the vowels’ respective duration. Food and foot are distinguished in the same way (the first oo designates a longer sound). I doubt that anyone acquainted with Emily Bronte’s novel pronounces wuthering, as in Wuthering Heights, with the vowel of strut, though the name Wuthering does have such a vowel. It was good to hear that the OED allows shrank, my past tense of shrink, to exist. I am aware of the fact that in American English the common past form of shrink is shrunk but feel quite comfortable with my slightly idiosyncratic grammar. There is no way I can keep abreast of the times. Most people around me say shined where I say shone (my shone used to rhyme gone, and when I finally made it rhyme with lone, it was too late: shined replaced both). Likewise, I refuse to say plead-pled and stick to pleaded. Little restaurants in my area post the coy apology: “Excuse us: we are slightly old-fashioned.” I am afraid I should carry a board on my breast with a similar message.

Antedatings and contested etymologies. Thanks to Stephen Goranson for his information about the first occurrences of fiasco and snob. Snob remains a word that reached London around the 1770’s. The story connecting the introduction of fiasco with a bad performance by Biancolelli, the harlequin, has been repeated many times, and I knew it. I cannot disprove it, but long experience has taught me to treat such tales with great distrust. When it comes to etymology, they usually turn out to be wrong. One can imagine that far’ fiasco had existed before the actor’s poor performance and that he deliberately carried a bottle around his neck, a good precautionary measure for all of us, whether comedians or etymologists.

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By Anatoly Liberman

There is a folk etymologist in all of us. We expect sever, severe, and severy (“compartment of a roof”) to be cognates and resent the fact that they are not. Poets and punsters connect such words, while etymologists, these dry-as-dust killjoys, ruin native intuition. It is a pity that rhyme has fallen into desuetude, for rhyme is a great uniter. Consider the following. English love is gentle, almost heavenly, because love rhymes with above, dove, and, to a certain extent, move (we will disregard shove for the sake of argument). French love never ends, for otherwise, why should amour have rhymed with toujours “always”? Russians are a different matter, as follows from the triad liubov’ “love,” krov’ “blood,” and vnov’ “again.” German young people of both sexes (sexes, not genders, for German has three genders) have been a model of propriety since the beginning of creation: consider the time-honored rhyme Jugend “youth”/ Tugend “virtue.” A good deal has been written about such convergences, but it is equally interesting to observe how easily language drives a wedge between closely related words. One small phonetic change suffices to obliterate the ties between related words. A few examples come to mind.

Batch, to quote Skeat, is as much as is baked at once; hence, a quantity. This is right; yet we no longer associate batch and bake. In Modern English, the consonants designated in spelling by k and ch respectively alternate with some regularity. Not infrequently, the k-forms are northern, and the ch-forms southern: compare kirk and church, mickle ~ muckel (both regional) and much. Occasionally both forms belong to the Standard, and the gap between them is not too great. For instance, we are ready to agree that seek is a cognate of beseech. The two verbs have strayed apart, but not as far as bake and batch, even though their preterits are different: sought versus beseeched (besought also existed but in the speech of the majority gave way to the more productive type). Another pair whose affinity has been destroyed in our consciousness by the alternation k ~ ch is wake and watch. The etymological meaning of watch is “to be awake.” Today watch means “to look carefully, to observe,” but those who watch for an opportunity must be wakeful, that is, wide awake. The difference in vowels (short in watch, long in wake) also contributed to the rift between those doublets.

A striking example of a how a minor change of a vowel can make the origin of a word impenetrable is trade. Trade, which was borrowed in this form from Middle Low (that is, northern) German in the 14th century, meant “a path, a track,” hence “a beaten track; regular business; buying and selling.” It is related to the verb tread. Middle English had trede “a tread, a step” and trod “a track.” Not only do we dissociate tread from trade despite their material closeness; the etymology of trade comes to the uninitiated as a surprise.

Sometimes grammar, in conjunction with phonetics, plays havoc with “family ties.” Today hardly anyone realizes that truce is, from a historical point of view, the plural of true. Yet what can be more obvious? In the 13th century, when truce first turned up in English texts, it was spelled trewes, trews, and trues, the plural of trew “pledge, promise.” The meaning of the ending was forgotten or disregarded (compare the modern names of sciences like physics : physics is), the pronunciation trues changed to truce, and the form we now know emerged. Similar adventures have been recorded elsewhere. Sometimes final -s has been misinterpreted in foreign words as a plural ending. The anthologized examples are Engl. pea, which evolved from pease (Old Engl. pise, late Latin pisa), cherry (compare French cerise), skate, abstracted from Dutch schaats (whose plural in Dutch is schaatsen), and (the most outrageous of them all) Chinee, from Chinese. However, the history of truce has parallels. Pence (a variant of pennies in compounds like twopence) is still plural, but it is neither spelled nor pronounced like pens. Dice should have been a homophone of dies, but the ending, again in a collective noun, was devoiced (z changed to s). Bodice is a disguised spelling of bodies, with the ending devoiced, as in pence, and body meaning “part of a woman’s dress above the waist” (compare corset, a diminutive of Old French cors “body”). Nowadays, when even bras have been discarded along with other appurtenances of bourgeois priggishness, the word bodice is hardly ever used, but the antiquated phrase a pair of bodies “bodice” and the still familiar (from literature) a pair of stays make the derivation of bodice from bodies sustainable, as at the moment everybody says instead of satisfactory, usable, acceptable. Some etymological solutions look like circus stunts, but no less often the indubitable etymology is right there, for anyone to see, and only a slight quirk dims our vision.

What else is there to say? The ultimate source of sever is Latin separare, so that sever and separate are doublets. Severe goes back (via Old French) to the Latin adjective severus. Severy, a word revived in the 19th century, is a doublet of ciborium “canopy; a vessel for the Eucharistic bread.” Truant is not related to true or truce, cherry and cherish are not congeners, and pea jacket has nothing to do with peas. Peanut, however, is indeed pea + nut.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Words can be related in more ways that one. 19th-century language historians discovered so-called sound correspondences. For example, French has trois, while English has three, and a “law” regulates the t ~ th alternation between French and English. This law works so well that if words in both French and English begin with t, they cannot be true cognates. And indeed, Engl. touch and French toucher are not siblings: the English verb is a borrowing of the French one, not its congener. Similar correspondences have been found between vowels. But language is not arithmetic, and words are not soldiers on the march. Time and again we seem to be dealing with related words despite the fact that they violate sound correspondences. Engl. cob, in any of its numerous meanings, looks as though it is connected with cub; yet no “law” covers the alternation of o and u in Modern English. Hundreds of words look like members of a club rather than of a family (club members recognize one another and dine together but have different parents) or the children living in the same orphanage (identical clothes and similar habits, but the union is artificial), or even mushrooms growing on a stump (no common root despite the unmistakable ties). Scholars feel insecure when faced with this situation: once they step outside the green zone of regular sound correspondences, the door opens to arbitrary etymologizing. They suddenly find themselves in the 18th century (at the latest), when no control for comparing look-alikes existed. At that time, god was derived from good and rabbit from rub or rough-foot, and such derivations aroused no protest. As we will see, the origin of snob is not particularly complicated, provided we agree to remain in a word orphanage rather than in a family.

Even an approximate age of the noun snob is beyond reconstruction, for no citation of it predates 1776. Judging by the records, it originated in the north of England, which neither means that it is a loan from Scandinavian into Middle English nor makes such a conjecture improbable. Some Scandinavian words that had been current in the north since the Vikings’ raids reached the Standard unexpectedly late. One of them is slang, whose history, contrary to the history of snob, has been traced in detail. The attested meanings of snob are as following (the dates in parentheses refer to their first known appearance in print); “shoemaker; cobbler’s apprentice” (1781); “a townsman, anyone not a gownsman (that is, a student) in Cambridge” (1796); “a person belonging to the ordinary or lower classes of society; one having no pretensions to rank or gentility; one who has little or no breeding or good taste, a vulgar or ostentatious person” (1838, 1859); “one whose ideas and conduct are prompted by a vulgar admiration for wealth or social position” (1846-1848). Snob “cobbler” is still a living word in some dialects, but most English-speakers remember only the last-mentioned meaning.

The word snob and its derivatives (snobbery, snobbish, snobbishness; rarely snobbism) owe their popularity to Thackeray, who first published his essays on various snobs in Punch and later collected them in a book. His snobs are not always vulgar and ostentatious people: some are insufficiently refined, and their manners are ridiculed only because of the pressure of society, which slights those whose manners violate certain rules. A reader of older English literature may wonder what is meant when snob turns up in the text. Long ago, an annual called The Keepsake (the predecessor of Christmas books) was published in the United States. In the annual for 1831, the following verse appeared: “Sir Samuel Snob—that was his name—/ Three times to Mrs. Brown/ Had ventured just to hint his flame,/ And twice received—a frown.” We applaud Sir Samuel’s perseverance but would like to know why his surname was Snob. Most definitely, he was not a cobbler. I suspect that he lacked breeding, for otherwise he would not have accosted a married woman in such an ungentlemanly way.

Some tie connects snob and nob. The latter has a doublet knob, and the two are often impossible to distinguish. Among other things, nob/knob means “head.” Cobblers (“snobs”) deal with people’s feet, not their heads, but nobs did not make hats or bonnets. Snobs and nobs are said to have arisen among the internal factions of shoemakers. (Here and below, I am using shoemaker and cobbler as interchangeable synonyms, but originally the cobblers claimed control over the soles of boots and shoes, and shoemakers over the upper leathers.) Allusions to “two great sections of mankind, nobs and snobs” turn up occasionally in 19th-century fiction and the popular press. According to an 1831 newspaper statement (again 1831!), “the nobs have lost their dirty seats—the honest snobs have got ‘em.” A hundred years ago, in British provincial English a strikebreaker, or scab, as such an individual is known in the United States, was called knobstick, blacknob, knob, and nob. Here “nobs” are again represented as dishonest. Although in regional speech the sound s- is often added to all kinds of words (hence the secondary bond between slang and language, for example), nothing suggests that the etymon (source) of snob is nob, with s- prefixed to it. Both snob and cobbler contain the group -ob-, but this coincidence is probably of no importance either.

It does not follow that “cobbler” is the original meaning of snob because it is the earliest one in our texts. More likely, the starting point was “a vulgar person,” with “cobbler” chosen as the epitome of vulgarity. Students at Cambridge must have had that connotation in mind when they, the gownsmen, showed their contempt to the townsmen. At Eaton and Oxford, townsmen were called cads. Cad is a shortening of cad(d)ee, that is, of caddie “cadet” (cadet is a French word), and it meant “an unbooked passenger on a coach; assistant to a coachman; omnibus conductor; confederate,” in dialects also “the youngest of a litter; an odd-job man” before it acquired the meaning “townsman” and “an ill-bred person.” Cobblers and their apprentices are no more “vulgar” than conductors and their assistants.

The question is why snob, whatever its age and provenance, came to designate a person deficient in breeding and how it was coined. In the Germanic languages, the consonantal group sn- is sound symbolic, and in this respect it shares common ground with gl- (which often turns up in words for “glitter” and “glow”) and sl- (which is frequent in words for “slime” and things slovenly and sleazy). Initial sn- occurs in numerous words designating cutting (compare snip, snap, and snub) and sharp objects, including “nose” (compare snout) and its functions (compare sneeze, snooze, snort, sniff, and snuff). Among the Scandinavian words resembling snob, especially prominent are a few meaning “fool, dolt, idiot,” but they have the structure sn-p. The connection between cutting/snapping/ sniffing and stupidity is not immediately obvious, but one can be called a fool for so many reasons that guessing would be unprofitable. People may have called the sn-p man a fool because he was of stunted growth (“snubbed” by nature) or had an ugly “snout.” A snotty person produces too much mucus in his nose, but snotty is also “arrogant, supercilious.” Perhaps snotty “arrogant” is a variant of snooty “snouty,” unrelated directly to snot; however, one cannot be certain. Old Icelandic snotr “clever, wise” has cognates in other Germanic languages and continued into Modern Icelandic (snotur). The etymology of snotr remains a matter of debate. In any case, a person who has a sensitive nose smells things others miss and becomes clever in the process. In historical semantics, as in life, the distance between “wise” and “stupid” is short.

Welcome to the sn-club. Snob belongs to it, but its origin is partly obscure. When it emerged, it seems to have designated a person whose social status was low. Although, apparently, a northern word, snob does not sound exactly like any Scandinavian noun or verb and could be coined on English soil. It correlates with nob but was not derived from it, and its association with cobblers is more or less fortuitous. Snob may be a cognate of snub, but their kinship does not explain how it was coined. According to a legend, whose earliest version was offered in 1850, snob is an abbreviation of either s(ine) nob(ilitate) or s(ub) nob(ilitate). Allegedly, those words were written in the matriculation documents at either Cambridge or Oxford, or Eaton if a graduate was not an aristocrat. This legend, as Skeat, himself a long-time professor at Cambridge, put it, is a poor joke.

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By Anatoly Liberman

All those who pose as experts in etymology tend to receive questions about certain popular words, with exotic slang and obscenities attracting the greatest attention. (The F-word is at the top of the list. Is it an acronym? No, it is not.) Beginning with my old post on copasetic, I tried to anticipate some such questions, and for a long time I have been wondering how to tell the story of OK, an object of undying interest. The excitement of this oft-repeated story has long since worn off, and only the thought that perhaps I can add nuance (as highbrows say) to the OK epic and thus partly avoid the otherwise inevitable triviality allows me to continue.

OK has been traced to numerous languages, including, Classical Greek, Finnish, Choctaw, Burmese, Irish, and Black English (Black English caught the fancy of many journalists, who in the sixties “rediscovered” Africa without going there and gained the reputation of radicals at no cost). The literature is also full of suggestions that the sources of OK have to be sought in German, French, or Danish. This guessing game presents interest for two reasons. First, it shows that many people do not realize the importance of research in historical linguistics. Not only do they risk offering conjectures without as much as a cursory look at the evidence: they do not even take the trouble to get acquainted with the views of their equally uninformed predecessors. One constantly runs into statements like: “I am surprised that it has not occurred to anyone…”, whereupon an etymology follows that was offered fifty years earlier and rehashed again and again. (Compare the review I once read of a performance of The Swan Lake. The reviewer said that this was the best performance of the ballet he could remember. I concluded that it was either the first time he had seen The Swan Lake or that he suffered from amnesia.) In my database, I have 78 citations for OK, mainly from the press, and this number could have been doubled or tripled if I had made the effort to collect all the letters on the subject printed in newspapers; I availed myself of only some of them. Variations on the same hypotheses keep surfacing again and again. Second, even specialists may not always realize that in dealing with a word like OK, a plausible derivation presupposes two steps. OK spread through the United States like wildfire in the early 1840’s and stayed. Regardless of whether the lending language is believed to be Choctaw or Finnish, the etymologist has to explain why OK became popular when it did. A similar approach is required for all slang and for many stylistically neutral words. Any innovation, be it bikini, recycling, a redistribution of voting districts, or a neologism, comes from a smart individual and is either rejected or accepted by the public. If a word has been rejected, we usually know little or nothing about its history (a stillborn has a short biography). But if it has survived, we should explain where it originated and what contributed to its longevity. Suppose OK is Greek. Why then was its radiation center the United States? And why in the forties of the 19th century? No etymology of OK will be valid while such questions remain unanswered.

In our case, the answers are known. Today we confuse one another with cryptic acronyms like LOL “laugh out loud” and AWOL (here a gloss is not needed). Linguistic tastes do not seem to have changed since the 1830’s. Facts give credence to the belief that OK stands for oll korrect, but not to the legend that this was the spelling used by Andrew Jackson. Although the 7th President of the United States would not have been hired as a spelling master even by a rural school, anecdotes about his gross illiteracy have little foundation in fact. The craze for k, as it was called (Kash, Kongress, and so forth), added to the staying power of the abbreviation OK. But OK would probably have disappeared along with dozens of others if it had not been used punningly by the supporters of Van Buren, the next president, born in Old Kinderhook, New York. To be sure, it could still have vanished once the campaign was over, but it did not. It even became the most famous American coinage, understood far beyond the borders of the United States. This is the account one finds in dictionaries, but dictionaries, quite naturally, do not dwell on the history of the search, which entailed decades of studying documents, broken friendships, and the making of a great reputation.

It was Allen Walker Read who reconstructed the Old Kinderhook link in the rise of OK, and his discovery became a sensation: first The Saturday Review published an article by him (1941), and years later an interview devoted to OK appeared in New Yorker. Read is also the author of many other excellent works, but few people outside academia have heard about them. At the end of one of his article on OK (he brought out four major articles on the subject and several addenda, all of them published in the journal American Speech), Read expressed his surprise that the origin of OK, which everybody must have known in Van Buren’s days, was forgotten so soon. However, the case is not unique. People regularly forget the pronunciations that were current only a generation ago and the events that led to the coining of words.

Read had to dispose of the possible pre-1839 existence of OK. And this is where personal animosities came in. One of the editors of the Dictionary of American English was Woodford A. Heflin, an excellent specialist, whose contributions clarified a good deal in the emergence of OK. But he put too much trust in the following line found in the journal of William Richardson, a businessman from Boston. In his detailed description of a journey to New Orleans (1815), Richardson wrote: “Arrived in Princeton, a handsome little village, 15 miles from N Brunswick, ok & at Trenton, where we dined at 1 P.M.” The ok & part makes no sense. Richardson may have begun a sentence that he did not finish, or a scribal error may have occurred. The amount of interlining and correction in the manuscript is considerable. Even if the sentence can be understood without emendation, the mysterious ok need not mean what it means to us, for the well-educated Richardson would hardly have infused a piece of low slang after mentioning N Brunswick. This was Read’s conclusion, but Heflin insisted that the 1815 occurrence of OK was the earliest we have. The strife that ensued soured the relations between the two scholars. Heflin went public and fought what he called an incorrect etymology of OK in the pages of American Speech. Read responded (the journal showed laudable impartiality and let both opponents express their views). The battle was fought in the sixties, long after Read’s initial article appeared in The Saturday Review.

Read examined the manuscript of Richardson’s journal, but to the best of my knowledge, he never mentioned the fact that he had not done it alone. This is what Frederic C. Cassidy wrote in 1981 (American Speech 56, 1981, p. 271): “After many attempts to track down the diary, Read and I at last discovered that it is owned by the grandson of the original writer, Professor L[awrence] Richardson, Jr., of the Department of Classic Studies at Duke University. Through his courtesy we were able to examine this manuscript carefully, to make greatly enlarged photographs of it, and to become convinced (as is Richardson) that, whatever the marks in the manuscript are, they are not OK. The Richardson diary does not constitute evidence for the currency of OK before 1839.” What an anticlimax! I only don’t understand why Read did not say all of it himself. In 1981 he was an active scholar guarding his priority most carefully, and there is no doubt that if Cassidy’s report had not been accurate, he would have made his disagreement known.

Here ends my story of OK, nuance and all.

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By Anatoly Liberman

On seeing the second line of the title, some experts in Shakespeare’s diction may have jumped to the conclusion that they are in for another essay on a scurrilous topic. Not quite, unless the subject English spelling is considered obscene by definition. How is it possible for a single vowel letter to have so many values? “Elementary, my dear Watkins,” as Sherlock Holmes did not say in any tale told by Conan Doyle. (Supposedly, the phrase was first used in 1915 by P.G. Wodenhouse in his novel Psmith Journalist. In Conan Doyle, the exchange between Watson and Holmes runs as follows: “’Excellent!’” I cried. “’Elementary’,” said he”. Those famous familiar quotations that everybody knows! They are like the proverbs of Alfred and the sayings of King Solomon. Dozens of works on word history open with Voltaire’s witticism that in etymology vowels count for nothing and consonants for very little. Yet it does not turn up in any of his written works.)

Unless counterbalanced by drastic reforms, long tradition usually makes spelling appear at best antiquated and at worst irrational. “This happens in all languages. For example, let us take English,” to quote a linguist of my acquaintance. We will follow his advice and “take” the letter o. Consider the following list:
bosom, Boleyn, woman;
love, dove, above, come, done;
move, prove;
on, gone;
one, none;
so, toe, nose.
On and nose (the short and the long of it) are taken for granted (so and toe are, in partly like nose), but the others?

I’ll begin with woman. The Old English for woman was wifman. Its long i designated a sound comparable with Modern Engl. ee in wee. Later that vowel underwent shortening, so that the word’s pronunciation began to resemble Modern Engl. wifman, rather than weefman, whereupon f was assimilated to its neighbor and wifman first turned into wimman (with regard to assimilation, compare lem’me go from let me go and leman “lover” from leofman) and then into wiman, for, as time went on, English lost long consonants. Contrary to professors of elocution, “common people” mispronounce words, slur as much as they can, and in general do not care about their delivery. Otherwise they would not have allowed wifman to degenerate into wimman. But they did not stop there. To articulate w, speakers protrude their lips and are not always in a hurry to spread them again. The result of this laziness was that Old Engl. widu “wood,” for instance, yielded wudu. Likewise, wiman became wuman. In the Middle English period, scribes disliked the sequences wu, um, mu, un, nu, and uv (because of too many vertical strokes the letters were hard to separate in reading, the more so as the usual signs for v and w were u and uu respectively) and substituted o for u. This is how uuuman became uuoman, that is, woman. Present day English has no words spelled with initial wu-. The few exceptions are dialectal forms recorded by linguists centuries after the phonetic processes mentioned here had been completed, and the only one most of us know is wuther, thanks to Emily Bronte’s title Wuthering Heights. In the early modern period, short u, except in the north of England, changed to the vowel of Standard English one now hears in shut up. Hence love, dove, above, come, and others. The story of done is more complicated: the change from long o (as in the modern paw or pore) to long u (as in the modern school), the shortening of that u, and the last step to the vocalic value of u in shut up. Womb and woman, which also have o contiguous to w, are still pronounced with the vowel of wuther. The original sound remained intact under the influence of w-.

The lips are active not only in the production of w but also in the production of p and b, and this is why pull and bull are pronounced the way they are. However, sometimes p- and b- could not save the following vowel from change, and alongside put, pull, and bull we have putty, pulp, and bulb. Unfortunately, the pernicious habit of designating the vowel in words like womb with the letter o resulted in the modern spelling bosom. The long stressed vowel of Old Engl. bosom (again as in Modern Engl. paw, pore) changed to long u (the equivalent of Modern Engl. oo), underwent shortening, and has been preserved. Boozom, boozam, or buzom would have made sense. Bosom reminds us of the word’s image that has not existed for at least half a millennium, and this is its only virtue. Anne Boleyn’s name was also spelled Bullen, but the unnatural variant has triumphed. When a word of Modern English is spelled with oo, we may assume that in the past it had a long vowel, regardless of whether its today’s reflex is long (as in food, mood) or short (as in good, hood). But the vowel of wood hardly ever was long. It is often said that conservative English spelling comes students in good stead, for it provides a window to the history of the language. It does, but those who look out of that window should be warned that the glass distorts the picture more than once.

It is now clear why prove and proof are spelled differently. The digraph oo in proof causes no surprise. Prove joined the words with v after o. The difference between prove, move and love, dove is that in the first group the vowel has remained long. Had love and dove withstood shortening, the four words would have rhymed, as they probably did in Shakespeare’s days. Today love/move is a so-called rhyme to the eye—a fact of no importance, since rhyming poetry is all but dead.

Old Engl. an “one” (with long a, as in Modern Engl. father) should have developed like stan, which is now stone, and it did, judging by the pronunciation of only (from anlic) and alone (a fusion of two words). In Middle English, an became on (on as in today’s awning). The rest is less clear. At that time, long vowels and diphthongs behaved similarly in that they could be pronounced with stress on the beginning and on the end, and this is why leosan, for instance, existed in two variants: leosan and leosan. As a consequence of this alternation, Standard Engl. lose, the reflex of leosan, has a dialectal variant lease, which continues leosan. This is also the reason show has a competing spelling shew (among the greats G.B. Shaw used only shew). If choose had sheared the fate of lose, today we would be asked “to cheese/chease our cheese.” Apparently, Middle Engl. on, that is, oon could be oon or oon, depending on the rhythm of the sentence. The variant oon was pronounced uon and won, rhyming with on. Several other dialectal variants of the same type have also been attested. Won became wun and later won, indistinguishable from the past tense of win. The pronunciation wonly was already known in 1570. As is usual with phonetic novelties, educated people first rejected the “vulgar” pronunciation of one with initial w- but were overwhelmed. The result is that today one is not a homophone of own. Most language historians trace the novelty described here (from oon to wun and won) to the British southwest, but it is hard to understand why the local pronunciation of such an important word should have been adopted by the Standard. Perhaps the forms with w- developed in the London area in the “allegro speech” of the capital (a great melting pot at all times) or under the influence of the “lower classes.” Once and none have aligned themselves with one. Spelling passed this tempest by.

The conclusion is obvious: the letter o has so many values because spelling has not caught up with the history of English sounds. Language retaliates sluggishness by producing spelling pronunciations. The fairly recent innovations often and fore-head are not the only examples of this type. Those who know about Coventry only from books sometimes pronounce Cov- as in cover. And indeed, who won’t be lost among Coventry ~ cover ~ over? Other people think that the name of the poet Donne, a homophone of done and dun, should be pronounced with the vowel of on. We can pity the naïve foreigner who missed the difference between worsted, the past tense of the verb worst, and worsted, the fabric, but sad is the lot of a native speaker who so often feels like a foreigner at home.

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