In March 2006, Anatoly Liberman joined OUPblog, “living in sin” as the Oxford Etymologist. Every Wednesday for the past five years he has delighted us with theories, research, and amusing anecdotes about words and language, and today we celebrate with beer! Professor Liberman, we raise our glasses to you. Cheers! Long live the Oxford Etymologist!
I’m raffling off a free copy of Word Origins to celebrate. If you’d like to enter, just leave a comment, sharing your favorite Oxford Etymologist post and why. While you’re at it, feel free to ask the professor a question. The winner will be contacted early next week.
By Anatoly Liberman
At the beginning of the previous post, I promised to say more about some strange names of beverages. The time has come to make good on my promise. In a note dated December 1892, we can read the following: “Shandygaff is the name of a mixture of beer and ginger-beer…, and according to evidence given at the recent trial of the East Manchester election petition, a mixture of bitter beer and lemonade is in Manchester called a smiler.” Shandygaff and especially its shortened form shandy are still well-known words (like smiler, shandy can also contain lemonade), but it would be interesting to hear from Manchester whether smiler is still current there. The older the word, the more respect it inspires in us, and we forget that language has always flourished on the rich garbage of human communication, which includes jokes, slang, and all kinds of word games. Scholars make desperate efforts to find Hittite, Greek, and Germanic roots preserved in the most ancient form of ale, while it may have been some funny coinage like shandygaff or smiler. Although etymologists exist to remove the accumulation of dust from modern vocabulary, they needn’t treat every speck of that dust as a sacred relic.
To remind modern readers that in England ale never had the ceremonial glamour associated with it in medieval Scandinavia, I would like to call their attention to the obsolete (thank heavens, obsolete) word ale-dagger “a weapon used in alehouse brawls.” Here is a passage from Sir John Smythe’s 1590 Certen Discourses concerning Weapons. I will retain the orthography of the original (the words, like certen in the title, are easy to recognize): “Long heavie daggers also, with great brauling Ale-house hilts (which were never used but for private fraies and brauules, and within lesse than these fortie yeres), they doo no waies disallow.” Good grief! Heavy daggers with great hilts, designed for the purpose of settling private disputes were “in no way” disallowed! Speak of the Second Amendment and the right of an individual to bear firearms for self-defence! In the middle of the 16th century “citizens” did not carry guns in pubs and had to look, speak, and use only daggers. Primitive, backward people. Brawls in alehouses were already mentioned in Old English laws. Human behavior changes slowly, if at all.
After so much etymological ale, we can now tackle beer. Unlike ale, recorded in all the Old Germanic languages except Gothic, beer is at present a West Germanic word (German, English, Dutch, etc.). Its Old Scandinavian cognate is usually believed to be a borrowing from Old English; yet no decisive arguments have been adduced in support of this i