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Describing the very ‘beginning’ of the Universe is a bit of a problem. Quite simply, none of our scientific theories are up to the task. We attempt to understand the evolution of space and time and all the mass and energy within it by applying Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This theory works extraordinarily well. But when we’re dealing with objects that start to approach the infinitesimally small – elementary particles such as quarks and electrons – we need to reach for a completely different structure, called quantum theory.

The post Where did all the antihadrons go? appeared first on OUPblog.

News broke in July 2015 that the Rosetta mission’s Philae lander had discovered 16 ‘carbon and nitrogen-rich’ organic compounds on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The news sparked renewed debates about whether the ‘prebiotic’ chemicals required for producing amino acids and nucleotides – the essential building blocks of all life forms – may have been delivered to Earth by cometary impacts.

The post How did life on earth begin? appeared first on OUPblog.

By Anatoly Liberman

Dregs, like dross, begins with dr- and means “refuse,” which, theoretically speaking, means nothing at all as far as their etymology is concerned (remember drop and dropsy from the previous post), but the two words are indeed related. Dregs surfaced in English texts relatively late (in 1300), a circumstance that along with the final “hard” g suggests Scandinavian provenance. Native English words usually look like edge, tow, and draw, whereas borrowings from Scandinavian end in g, like egg, tug, and drag. Some difficulties in the reconstruction of the history of dreg(s) arise because in early Modern English both dragges with its telltale Scandinavian g and dredges with a typical “English” consonant occur. We may ignore the question whether the verb and the noun dredge have anything to do with dregs. Nor is the ultimate source of Engl. dregs (native or Scandinavian?) important for solving its etymology, since dreg is certainly akin to Old Norse dregg “yeast.”

To a modern English-speaker dregs, unless it is used in the figurative sense “the basest portion,” means “sediment, lees,” but the earliest meaning of Old Icelandic dregg (singular; dreggjar, plural) was “yeast,” and here a digression on yeast is in order. Etymology is all about digressions, for one word hails another, an interlace structure is formed, and intelligent rambling becomes the trademark of the discipline. The most ancient application of yeast seems to have been to brewing, so that in dealing with it, we should think of brewer’s yeast. Several ideas inspired those who invented a name for it, and two roots seem to have merged in the process: one refers to something that stays at the bottom (the sediment), the other to a substance that causes foaming and seething. Other associations were also possible. Thus, the German for “yeast” (Hefe) is related to the English verb heave (German heben). Likewise, Engl. leaven goes back to Latin levamen “means of raising” (Latin levare “raise,” whence also lever, levy, along with levitation and levity). The tie between yeast and rising needs no explanation, but here we are interested only in “staying at the bottom” and “seething.”

The reconstructed root of dreg(g) is drah- ~ drag-, which corresponds to the Slavic root of the word for “yeast” (Russian drozhzhi, and so forth). Its Indo-European base is believed to have sounded approximately like dher- and meant “muddy; darkness.” Several suffixes have been added to it, as evidenced by numerous nouns in English and elsewhere in Germanic. Draff still graces comprehensive dictionaries of Modern English, while drast did not outlive the 16th century (no connection with drastic, a Romance word). Dutch draf, Icelandic draf, as well as German Treber and Trestir, are living words; German Drusen is closer to a technical term. With minor variations all of them mean “dregs, refuse, lees.” Sometimes the reference is to husks and sometimes to the sediment, whether of distilling or brewing. (A note to anticipate questions: lees, a Romance word from Celtic, is related to Engl. lie, so that the reference is again to a position at the bottom; husk means “a little house.”)

Thus, dregs has led us to yeast. (Can a

Pierre Assouline is a journalist and writer whose columns appear regularly in Le Monde and L’Histoire. His book, Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin, translated by Charles Ruas, offers a candid portrait of a man who revolutionized comics.  In the excerpt below we learn about the origins of Tintin.

Tintin and Snowy were born on January 10, 1929, in Le Petite Vingtième. On that day the supplement for young readers in Le Vingième Siècle first published a comic strip under the title “The Adventures of Tintin, the ‘Petit Vingtième’ Reporter, in the Land of the Soviets,” the first two places of a weekly comic strip that would eventually number 121 in all.

These are the bare facts, but we are left with the question of why and how Tintin and Snowy came into being. According to Hergé, it was very simple: “The idea for the character of Tintin and the sort of adventures that would befall him came to me, I believe, in five minutes, the moment I first made a sketch of the figure of this hero: that is to say, he had not haunted my youth nor even my dreams.  Although it’s possible that as a child I imagined myself in the role of a sort of Tintin.”

Tintin has a prehistory.  Hergé made a sketch of a character resembling Tintin in the Totor series, which was a sort of trial run.  This period of trial and error in the creation of a character is far from exceptional.  To cite only two examples, Mickey Mouse was first called Mortimer, and Inspector Maigret in a previous life was Agent No. 49.

Hergé never denied it.  When pressed to explain the origins of Tintin, he admitted that he was conceived of as the younger brother of Totor, the troop leader of the June Bugs.  Tintin wore plus fours because Georges Remi sometimes wore them, and they might distinguish Tintin as easily as Chaplin’s vagabond’s baggy trousers did him.  Hergé also gave him a tuft of hair that stood straight up on his forehead (first seen during a car chase in Land of the Soviets), drawing it as seen full face.  If Tintin is shown in profile or three-quarters to the left or to the right, the facial features are only barely sketched in.  The figure is in harmony with the face, the result being neutral, without dissonance.  Everyone can identify with him because he is everyman.

Tintin was born at fifteen and therefore never had a childhood.  What did Georges Remi look like at that age?  Probably like Tintin – like him had the appearance of an intrepid Boy Scout – except that Remi combed his hair flat, he was thinner and taller, and his face was not as round.  It has been said that Hergé had unconsciously taken the traits, attitudes, and gestures of his younger brother, Paul.

In terms of graphics, there is nothing simpler than Tintin. He is as uncomplicated as the story line.  Tintin is a journalist or, rather, a reporter, which means the contrary of sedentary.  He is less often shown writing at the typewriter than out in the field.  In his eyes, the investigation of something, not the resolution, is the basis of his profession.  Tintin seems to suggest that he is in fact a great reporter, a member of a select group of legendary journalists such as Albert Londres, Joseph Kessel, Édouard Helsey, Henri Béraud, and others.  Of course Remi himself had wanted to become one of them – and he would, by proxy.  Tintin would accomplish his dream.  For one of the youngest people on a newspaper’s staff, belonging to this select group represented the ultimate promotion.  For Remi it also symbolized a quest for adventure.

The transformation of Totor to Tintin would continue.  Though a reporter, Tintin never loses the spirit of a Scout.  On the contrary, he expresses it in his face, his attitudes, and his actions.  It could be said of Tintin, as Voltaire said of Candide, that his face revealed his soul.  Hergé’s constant dilemma was how to make Tintin lose his naïveté while remaining pure.

Here are Tintin’s vital statistics: he is Caucasian, lacks a first name, an orphan, without a past, a native of Brussels (as opposed to Belgian), about fifteen years old, obviously celibate, excessively virtuous, chivalrous, brave, a defender of the weak and oppressed, never looks for trouble but always finds it; he is resourceful, takes chances, is discreet, and is a nonsmoker.

…

What Made the Crocodile Cry? 101 Questions about the English Language is the latest book from Countdown’s word expert Susie Dent. The questions in the book have been submitted by Susie’s Countdown viewers, by readers of her weekly Radio Times column, and also from the many visitors to the Ask Oxford website. Supported by Oxford’s dictionary research programme, Susie has set about researching a selection of some of the hundreds of questions posed, even if for some there is no definitive conclusion. Below are four of those 101 questions.

Word fans might also like to know that Susie Dent will be announcing her words of the year on November 26th.

Is it true that the modern gym has something to do with naked men?

The first gyms go back some 2,500 years, where they played an important role in ancient Greek society. Gymnasia served both as training arenas for public games and as venues for socializing: people would go there to listen to lectures on philosophy, literature, and music. They were, inevitably, men only affairs, and the word gymnasium reflects this. It comes from the Greek verb gumnazein meaning ‘to exercise naked’, and that is because athletes of the time competed in the nude as a tribute to the gods and in aesthetic appreciation of the male body.

Gymnasia sometimes hosted other, more spectacular, events too. Mock sea battles were among the most popular, for which the central arenas would be flooded. According to the historian Oscar Brockett, the most ambitious was staged in AD 52 on the Fucine Lake east of Rome; some 19,000 participants.

I’ve heard that the original peeping Tom spied on Lady Godiva. Is that true?

Yes, it is—at least partly. Thomas, and its abbreviation Tom, has been a generic name for a male for over a thousand years. Other words and phrases featuring the name include tomfool, tomboy, Tom Farthing (a fool or simpleton), and Tom, Dick, and Harry. The latter phrase, meaning a large 150 number of undistinguished people, comes from an eighteenth century song that featured the line ‘Farewell, Tom, Dick and Harry, Farewell, Moll, Nell, and Sue’.

The character of Peeping Tom appears in the well-known story of Lady Godiva, who according to legend rode naked through the streets of Coventry in protest against her own husband’s oppressive taxation of the people. Lady Godiva, whose name is attested to in the Domesday Book, is said to have issued a public proclamation that all doors and windows be shut. Peeping Tom is the name given to a prying tailor who is said to have been struck blind (or, in some versions, struck dead) after defying the order and watching Lady Godiva secretly.

The ‘partly’ equivocation at the beginning of the answer comes from the fact that ‘peeping Tom’ fi rst appears in the city accounts of Coventry in 1773, some 600 years after Lady Godiva is thought to have made her infamous journey. It was around this time too that the first mention of Godiva’s hair protecting her modesty appears. Incidentally, the belief that Peeping Tom was the first person tomutter the oath ‘God blind me’, the origin of ‘Gorblimey’ and ‘blimey’, is almost certainly unfounded. Those two mild expletives don’t appear until the end of the nineteenth century.

Why do we call false sentiment crocodile tears? Can crocodiles really cry?

To shed crocodile tears is to put on an insincere act of being sad. The expression is very old, dating back to the mid-sixteenth century. An account of the life of Edmund Grindal, the sixteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury, quotes him as saying, ‘I begin to fear, lest his humility . . . be a counterfeit humility, and his tears crocodile tears.’ It stems from the ancient belief that crocodiles, in order to lure their prey, would weep. The unsuspecting prey would come close, only to be caught and rapidly devoured, again with a show of tears. The crocodile’s reputation for weeping is recorded as early as 1400, as in this quotation from the Oxford English Dictionary from a travel narrative: ‘In that contre . . . ben gret plentee of Cokadrilles . . .Theise Serpentes slen men, and thei eten hem wepynge’ (roughly translated as ‘In that country . . . are plenty of crocodiles. These serpents slay men, and then eat them weeping’).

But can a crocodile really weep? The experts say yes: they have tear glands just like most other animals. And zoologists have recorded alligators, close relatives of crocodiles, shedding tears while they’re eating. This parallel may be signifi cant—rather than being an emotional response, the shedding of tears probably happens because of the way crocodiles and alligators eat: when eating their prey they will often huff and hiss as they blow out air, and their tear glands may empty at the same time.

The idea of crocodile tears being false was used both in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and in Shakespeare’s Othello. They provide just two of the many allusions in literature that have cemented the idiom in the language.

Incidentally, the word ‘crocodile’ means, literally, ‘worm of the stones’. It is from Greek, and is a reference to the croc’s habit.

As a fan of the Errol Flynn movies from the 30s and 40s, I’ve often wondered about the word swashbuckler: was it someone who ‘swashed’ a ‘buckle’, and if so what on earth were they doing?

The traditional swashbuckler, described by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a swaggering bravo or ruffian; a noisy braggadocio’, was, indeed, someone who ‘swashedhis buckle’. To ‘swash’, in the sixteenth century, was to dash or strike something violently, while a ‘buckler’ was a small round shield, carried by a handle at the back. So a swashbuckler was literally one who made a loud noise by striking his own or his opponent’s shield with his sword.

Errol Flynn also had roles as both a buccaneer and a musketeer. The origin of musketeer is quite simple: a soldier who fought with a musket. But a buccaneer may surprise. It originally meant someone who hunted wild oxen, because boucaner in French was to dry or cure meat on a boucan: a barbecue, in the manner of the Indians. The name was first given to the French hunters of St Domingo, who prepared the flesh of the wild oxen and boars in this way. This included hunters at sea: pirates who lurked off the West Indies, and so over time a buccaneer became a byword for a hostile sea rover.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning the Jolly Roger. Some linguists believe this name for a pirate’s flag, featuring a white skull on a black background, originated in the French words jolie rouge, meaning ‘pretty red’ for originally pirates used red flags as frequently as black ones. Supporting this theory is the fact that during the Elizabethan era ‘Roger’, was a slang term for beggars and vagrants and was also applied to privateers who operated in the English Channel. There are other theories too, including one plausible one that the term derives from a nickname for the devil, ‘Old Roger’: jolly perhaps because of the skull’s grin.

By Anatoly Liberman

In October 1860, an otherwise undistinguished old bachelor, who resided in the country and told this story himself, volunteered to walk with his nineteen-year old niece to her father’s house, two miles or so away. They had not gone a hundred paces when they were suddenly overtaken by a young gentleman of their acquaintance. The man remarked that he was heading in the same direction and with their permission accompanied them. Since the young people “seemed very much taken up with one another,” the uncle did not pretend to be part of the group and ambled peacefully behind. When the company reached their destination, the gentleman bid them goodbye, and the young lady informed her uncle that she could not thank him enough for being so kind and doing gooseberry. The old man had no idea what she meant and inquired around. All his friends laughed at his ignorance.

In dialectal use, to play gooseberry was first recorded in 1837. As we can see, even two decades later not everybody understood it. The OED gives several citations for gooseberry “chaperon” but does not try to explain its origin. The musings offered below will be of little help, but they may provoke a comment from someone better informed about such matters than I am. In some places, it was customary to send a young boy to accompany lovers. The boy, whose instructions were (proverbially) “to pick daisies” but who would be smart enough to understand what the grownups expected from him, must have enjoyed the role of a family spy and done everything in his power to spoil the fun. He was called a daisy picker. (The Germans, at least at that time, called such an implacable buttinsky killjoy elefant “an elephant.”) All this makes sense, but why and how was daisy replaced by gooseberry and daisy picker by gooseberry picker? According to one conjecture, gooseberry pickers (grandmothers, aunts, uncles—not necessarily young boys) hurt their hands by dealing with prickles while the lovers were having a good time. This is a far-fetched hypothesis. A search for a “proto”-story in which an innocent old relative was picking gooseberries, unaware of the events a few yards away, did not yield any results.

Just how gooseberry is connected with goose is also unclear. Associations between plant names and the names of birds and beasts are as common as they are puzzling: compare cranberry, that is, crane-berry (what do cranberries have to do with cranes?). I won’t discuss the origin of gooseberry here because the main competing suggestions can be found in any good modern dictionary. More enigmatic are Old Gooseberry “devil” (no citations before 1797 in the OED) and gooseberry fool “gooseberries stewed and pounded with cream.” Dimwits, devils, and geese have merged in our etymology, and disentangling them will be no easy matter.

For some inexplicable reason, birds are supposed to be stupid. Goose, dupe, and booby (all three are bird names) mean “silly person.” Gawk and possibly geek are cognates of Engl. dialectal yeke (Icelandic gaukur, German Gauch, and so forth) “cuckoo,” but cuckoos have had a bad press for centuries. In addition to gull “sea mew” (“Adieu, adieu! My native shore/ Fades o’er the waters blue;/ The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,/ And shrieks the wild sea-mew”—what a pity that Byron has fallen out of favor!), there is gull “unfledged bird, especially gosling,” the root of the adjective gullible and the dubious etymon (source) of gull “to dupe.” Geese may have been treated with contempt because they were eaten in great quantities and did not seem to deserve a better fate. Gaggling is an occupation of little worth, and being gaga brings little joy. But the other birds?

Fool “dish made with cream” turned up in 1598. The earliest citation for gooseberry fool in the OED does not antedate 1719, and Old Gooseberry (with a small g) surfaced in a dictionary of slang only in 1796. We have no way of ascertaining how long all of them had been current in dialects or among “the lower classes” before they reached print. Of the comparable names of the devil Old Nick, Old Harry, Old Scratch, and Old Bogey come to mind, but there are many more, and the origin of Nick, Harry, and the rest is far from trivial. I wonder whether Old Gooseberry could emerge as Old Goosebury. The noun bury “manor,” well known as the second component of place and family names (compare Bunbury), also occurred with the spelling berry. Goosebury would mean “goose-place; a place where fools live.” Considering how often the devil is outsmarted in folklore, Old Fool would not be an improper name for him. Additionally, Old Goosebury/berry would be hard to understand and thus an ideal taboo name. Gooseberry fool seems to have existed for quite a few centuries. If Old Gooseberry ever stood for Old Goosebury with the sense I ascribed to it, gooseberry fool means “fool-fool or fool’s fool,” a phrase reminiscent of tautological compounds to which at one time I devoted a detailed post (courtyard = “yard-yard,” lukewarm = “warm-warm,” etc.). Be that as it may, judging by the name of the dish, gooseberry and fool combined easily. Is it improbable that doing gooseberry arose with the meaning “going on a fool’s (the devil’s?) errand, playing the role of a dupe in somebody else’s game”? A vague guess about a connection between doing gooseberry and gooseberry fool was offered many years ago. The history of the idiom and of the devil’s odd name is obscure, but we will not find the answer to our riddles as long as we concentrate on the qualities of the berry called gooseberry.

This is all I can offer, but for the amusement of those who think that etymology is the most peaceful pastime in the world, I will quote a passage from Walter W. Skeat’s response to his opponent (December, 1887): “It is thus proved to the hilt, that your correspondents prefer to criticize me without having read what I say. The shame is theirs. I am quite indifferent to such criticisms, except in so far as they bring criticism into contempt. To myself it matters little; for my articles will be read long after these carpings have been forgotten.” Exegi monumentum.

By Anatoly Liberman

Linguists, historians, journalists, and well-meaning amateurs have offered various conjectures on the rise of the word ghetto, none of which has won universal approval. Even the information in our best dictionaries should be treated with caution, for not all of them contain the disclaimer that whatever is said there reflects the opinion of the editor (who has rarely studied the vast literature on the subject) rather than the ultimate truth. The only uncontroversial facts are that the first Jewish ghetto appeared in Venice in 1516 and that in the Pope’s bull of 1562 the enclosure assigned to the Jews in Rome was called ghectus. (In parentheses: the Jews were expelled from England in 1290. Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice around 1594; he never saw a Jew in his life. The drama is based on a widespread folklore plot of outsmarting the devil.)

Before turning to the etymology of ghetto, I would like to answer the question given in the title of this post. We don’t know whether ghetto is a Hebrew, Latin, Italian, or Yiddish word (in order not to complicate matters, I’ll refer to all the varieties of the Jewish language in the Diaspora as Yiddish, in contradistinction to Hebrew). In linguistic reconstruction, it is customary to move from the center of the enquiry to the periphery. Since the first ghetto was built in Venice, we should first look for the word’s origin in some Italian, preferably the Venetian, dialect. If this attempt fails, a Hebrew or Yiddish etymology should be tried. If we again draw blank, we will be bound to explore the vocabulary of some other language that could have influenced the coining of ghetto. Although this is a natural approach to reconstruction, it need not be confused with the natural order of things in language or anywhere in life. If I go from point A to point B, a straight line will be the shortest distance between them. But on my way I may meet a friend and go an extra mile with him, get cold and drop into a bar for a drink, or do any other unpredictable thing. Retracing my route according to the laws of geometry or logic is a dangerous enterprise. We expect an Italian origin of ghetto, but why shouldn’t the Jews have used their own word for the hateful enclosure, or why shouldn’t a foreign name for such a place have been used? After all, the word ghetto entered most European languages, including English, and it is a borrowing in all of them.

Reference books often cite the Hebrew noun get (pronounced approximately like Engl. get) “a bill or letter of divorce.” Allegedly, ghetto goes back to it and stands for “separation.” In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Jews believed that this is how the word came into being. But this connection seems to owe its existence to folk etymology, for a change from “a bill of divorce” to “a place of forced isolation” is hard to imagine. The Yiddish hypothesis makes much of ghectus understood as the Latinized form of gehektes “enclosed.” However, the spelling ghectus has little value for reconstruction. Since Latin ct became tt in Italian (compare Latin perfectus “perfect” and Italian perfetto), it was customary to give medieval Italian words a pseudo-Latin appearance. Finally, one of the oldest conjectures traces ghetto to the Latin neuter Giudaicetum “Jewish.” This etymology is indefensible from a phonetic point of view and from almost every other. The Hebrew-Yiddish search for the origin of ghetto should be abandoned.

While evaluating a dozen or so mutually conflicting theories, one should not be swayed by authority. Some of the least persuasive conjectures stem from the works of distinguished scholars. Such is the derivation of ghetto from Latin Aegyptus. The Jews were often looked upon as foreigners, but it is inconceivable that the Venetians trading with half of the world could have confused the Jews with Egyptians. Later the author of this derivation thought better of his proposal, but it found a safe haven in the most solid German dictionary and reemerged in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, a fact worthy of regret. Nor are the other suggestions, all of which have been given short shrift above, the products of ignorance. The same holds for the etymology that the OED chose for want of a better one, namely, ghetto as being the second half of the Italian word borghetto “little town.” Clipping is ubiquitous in English: doc, math, lab, and their likes are universally used words. A name can lose either its first or its last syllable: Fredrick is Fred for some and Rick for others. Suburbs shrank to burbs. In Italian, ghetto (or Ghetto) “district; street” exists despite the fact that this type of word formation is much less productive, but it has been applied to numerous places unrelated to the segregation of the Jews. It is not specific enough for our purposes. Italian, like French, has two e’s: open and closed (compare the pronunciation of Engl. man and men, though the difference between the Romance vowels is smaller than in English). This difference complicates the relation between ghetto and the suffix -etto. However, the question of phonetics can be passed over here. The Venetian ghetto had a wall built around it. Christian guards closed the gates at a certain hour, so that no one could enter or leave the place. From time to time Old French guect “guard” is pressed into service: the word resembles ghectum, mentioned above, and has been cited as the etymon (source) of ghetto. The supporters of the guet etymology did not explain why a French word was used for the designation of an Italian “institution.” Those are all fruitless guesses. To remain realistic, I think we should agree that the word from which ghetto was derived denoted a certain place. Borghetto does denote a place, but referring to it is a shot in the dark.

In Italian, the first sound of ghetto is identical with g- in Engl. get, and the spelling gh- makes the pronunciation clear. In older documents our word sometimes appears with initial g- and sometimes with gh-, but gratuitous variation is so typical of medieval and early modern texts, that no conclusions can be drawn from the coexistence of ghetto and getto. In all likelihood, the 16th century Italians pronounced ghetto as we do. The Spanish and Portuguese exiles could have used the form jetto. Yet even if they did, this circumstance is of no consequence for the etymology of ghetto. The gh-g difference is the main stumbling block in the etymology that traces ghetto to the Latin verb jactare “to throw (about)”: Latin j- would not have become g-. Jactare has been conjured up because the island where the Jews were made to live at one time supposedly had getti glossed as “foundries,” and ghetto, according to an often-repeated hypothesis, received its name from getto “foundry.” Despite many attempts this hypothesis has been unable to overcome the g- ~ gh- hurdle. Getto was certainly derived from gettare “to cast (metal),” an Italian continuation of jactare, but getto is not ghetto. One also wonders whether any area would have been called “foundry” rather than “foundries.” To make matters worse, there is no certainty that getto ever meant “foundry” in the Venetian dialect. A variant of the getto-ghetto etymology connects ghetto with Old Italian ghetta “protoxide of lead.” The reference is to the verb ghettare “to refine metal by means of ghetta.” The plot thickens without bringing us closer to the denouement.

At a certain moment, I decided that all the etymologies of ghetto are wrong and was pleased to find an ally in Harri Meier, a Romance scholar, who published an article on this question in 1972. He attempted to derive ghetto from Latin vitta “ribbon,” and I liked his suggestion no more than I did those of his predecessors, but I think he was right to abandon foundries, Egyptians, borghetto, and alloys and to look for the etymon in some word meaning “street.” All over Europe, one finds a nook called Jüdische Gass(e) or its translation into the local language, that is, “Jewish Street.” Gasse is a southern German form related to Icelandic and Swedish gata (Norwegian gate, Danish gade) “street”; for the regular ss ~ t alternation compare German Wasser and Engl. water. Gata is an obscure word. Its unquestionable Gothic cognate is gatwo, but the origin of w in it has not been explained (Gothic was recorded in the 4th century). By contrast, the similar-looking Engl. gate (originally, “opening”) should probably be separated from gatwo/gata. The speakers of Old Germanic did not have towns and, consequently, did not have streets. When they needed an equivalent of “street” in Greek or Latin, they resorted to borrowing or chose a native word meaning “area” (public space) or “market.”

Surprisingly, Latin jactare will now return to our narrative. Via French, English has jetty, a derivative of this verb. Enigmatic things happened in its history. All of a sudden it seems to have developed the variant jutty. No one has even tried to explain this change that lacks analogues. The verb jet is of the same origin. It too acquired the variant jut. Jutty is restricted to dialects, but jut out is a respectable form of Standard English. The meaning of jetty also poses problems. We are familiar with jetty “pier,” but in central and northern England it means “a passage between two houses” (per The English Dialect Dictionary by Joseph Wright). In 1882 a certain A. H. G. wrote in Notes and Queries: “In rambling about Warwickshire I found the name jetty locally applied to narrow thoroughfares consisting of ancient houses, just such quarters as Houndsditch [a street in the City of London], and which might be plausibly assigned to Jews in the Middle Ages. The edifices are quite old enough for this ascription, and it may be in the power of some readers of “N. & Q.” to say if jetty is a probable corruption of ghetto, or if it is correctly spelled and used as jetty in this sense.” 126 years after A. H. G.’s query appeared I want to respond to it. I suspect that in some parts of the Romance speaking world a slangy borrowing from Germanic existed, a word traceable to gata and meaning “street,” perhaps even “narrow street,” and that it had some currency in several forms, with initial g-, as in get, and with initial j-, as in jet, with the vowel a and with the vowel e, a common situation in slang. Ghetto will then emerge as an Italian variant of that word. I suspect that from the beginning it had a derogatory meaning (“poor, miserable quarters”), the right place for the exiled Venetian Jews. Folk etymology influenced the word more than once: some people remembered that in old days cannons had been made on the Jewish island, whereas the Jews associated ghetto with separation. If I am right, the regional English sense of jetty is the most ancient; “pier” came later. In history, jutty possibly predated jetty. “It may be in the power of some readers” of this blog to develop my idea or to refute it. Whatever the result, I will be overjoyed if we succeed in making even one step toward demystifying the intractable word ghetto.

By Anatoly Liberman

The Speed of Semantic Change. I am well aware of akimbo being used about legs and fingers, though I have no way of ascertaining whether Tom Wolfe is responsible for this extended usage. Mollymooly’s comment addresses the well-known fact that despite all the recorded intermediate stages in the development of meaning, the end result following hence in historical dictionaries often comes as a surprise. Language historians face two models: incremental change versus change “by a leap.” On the one hand, at any given moment we have either entity X or entity Y; on the other, observation shows that the movement from X to Y is nearly always gradual. The resolution of this paradox lies in the coexistence of the conservative and the avant-garde styles. In the vocabulary, individual authors (especially poets) and children sometimes effect leaps. A five-year old has heard the phrase full tilt, generalized it with the vague meaning “very much,” and explains that he hates mosquitoes full tilt. Numerous changes of meaning are of a similar nature. Others are more puzzling. For example, it is clear from the inner form of the adjective handsome that at one time it referred to things (and people) handy, serviceable, dexterous; its development to “convenient, becoming,” and “decorous” (handsome manners, handsome style) seems natural. We may not object to the next step (“generous, liberal”: a handsome present, apology; handsome is that handsome does), for bounty depends on the hand of the giver, and “ample” (a handsome sum of money), but then we are confronted by the fateful hence “(graciously) generous,” hence “pleasing to the eye, good-looking.” Hence? Really? No development in language is predetermined: if something has occurred, the provisos for the event should be taken for granted, but the change is seldom, if ever, inevitable: in a neighboring language and even in a neighboring dialect X becomes Z, rather than Y, or stays intact.

Words and Idioms. Coat: Why is it not spelled cote? A more difficult question is why cote is not spelled coat. Middle English had two long o’s, that is, two distinct vowels with the approximate value of non-Midwestern aw in today’s awning: one was closed, the other open (pronounced with the mouth opened more widely). Closed o, the continuation of Old Engl. long o, was usually designated by the letter o. The wider vowel developed from short o lengthened in native and French words, and, to mark its open character, scribes used the digraph oa. Coat, from French, had an originally short vowel; consequently, the spelling oa is justified. However, cote also has a lengthened vowel and should therefore have ended up with oa. Modern English spelling is an unreliable guide to etymology. Float has a history similar to that of coat, but roam should have been spelled like home. Such inconsistencies are numerous. That is why people who fight Spelling Reform for fear of losing ties with history usually do not know what they are talking about. Camshaft. The question was asked in connection with my remark that -kim- in akimbo can hardly be traced to Gaelic cam “crooked.” Our correspondent wonders why the origin of cam in camshaft is said to be unknown, for at least here it must be from Gaelic. None of the dictionaries I consulted doubts the origin of camshaft. A camshaft is a shaft supplied with cams, and cam “projection on a wheel” goes back to Dutch kam “comb.” So here too there is no need to refer to Gaelic. Fit as the past tense of fight. This form has been widely attested in both British and American dialect speech. Joseph Wright (The English Dialect Dictionary) mentions it among about a dozen others (Old Engl. feaht “fought” has spawned amazingly many forms), and so does DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English). The OED calls it dialectal or vulgar (in this context, vulgar means “popular; in the manner of vulgus “people”).

Jaywalk. Dr. Douglas G. Wilson, a member of the American Dialect Society, sent me an instructive letter and a link to his database, for both of which I am grateful. In my previous “gleanings,” I noted that jaywalk cannot be a sum of jay and walk because in Modern English there is no model for deriving such verbs: jaywalk must be a back formation from jaywalker. But Dr. Douglas is right that, once such a verb has been coined, it may begin to serve as a model for other verbs and cites to duck-walk. (I would add that “functional change” should also be reckoned with: if the noun duck-walk had any currency, the emergence of the verb duck-walk can be expected. Compare the noun phone, from telephone, and the verb to phone derived from it.) His citations include several nouns like jay rider, jay driver, and jay cyclist. In his opinion, jay driver was the first of them. Like his predecessors, he believes that jay in those words means “hick.” Yet if the old suggestion to the effect that jaywalker originated in Kansas is right, the problem of origins is solved, for Jayhawk and Jayhawker are the traditional nicknames of an inhabitant of Kansas. Only then the whole is based on a pun: from the bird name (as in jay hawk) to jay “hick.”

Straight as the crow flies. I mentioned in passing that crows do not fly in a straight line, and the question was where the idiom comes from. This I do not know, and, characteristically, with a single exception, none of the numerous books devoted to the etymology of idioms features it. According to a current explanation, crows, highly intelligent birds, fly to their food in a straight line. Crows are not birds of prey and look for carrion (compare ravens, the birds of battle in Old Germanic poetry). As a rule, they do not attack, and why should any hungry beast or bird, regardless of its intelligence, meander before coming to the point? The French speak about the flight of a bird, without specifying the oiseau. In any case, the idiom does not seem to have popular roots. Dialect dictionaries mention neither the idiom nor the compound crow flight, and the earliest citation in the OED is unexpectedly late (1800).

Calf rope “surrender.” Calf ~ holler rope, an exclamation known to children in many regions of the United States, but especially in the South, is well documented in DARE, which calls the origin of the phrase uncertain. Instead of solid data on calf rope, I have a few ideas, a dangerous development in etymological studies. In Shakespeare’s Henry the Sixth, Act 1, Scene 3, we witness an altercation between the Protector (Gloucester) and the Bishop (Winchester). Winchester defies the Protector, but his men are beaten. Win. Gloucester, thou’lt answer this before the pope. Glo. Winchester goose! I cry a rope! a rope! Rope in this line is cited in the OED and has been explained as a derisive cry attributed to a parrot. However, every word in Gloucester’s reply contains a multilayered insult. Winchester goose was a proverbial name for a syphilitic swelling in the groin. Besides, goose meant “prostitute,” and here it echoes Gloucester’s earlier taunt that Winchester sells indulgences to whores. Parrots were indeed taught to cry rope, presumably, an allusion to a hangman’s halter. Some scholars believe that rope in the Protector’s speech means “a dysfunctional penis.” This interpretation cannot be excluded, but there is a danger to out-Gloucester Gloucester. Now comes my first fanciful idea. Is it not possible that in the 1590’s, when Shakespeare’s play was written, cry rope already meant “to give up, surrender”? (Holler rope is, obviously, a later substitution.) The pun would then be on cry “a rope!” and cry rope. If so, Gloucester, in addition to everything else, exclaims in mock despair: “I give up! What an awful threat!” True, no one thought of this nuance, but then none of the commentators, as far as I can judge, grew up Tom Sawyer-like, fighting other children and occasionally crying rope in humiliation and tears. Some of our idioms with the word rope (for example, to know the ropes) go back to the days of sailboats. Couldn’t cry rope also have originated in sailors’ language? From a syntactic point of view, cry rope resembles cry wolf and cry uncle. I believe that rope! belongs with exclamations like boatmen’s westward-ho! land-ho! Yet, contrary to westward-ho, it must have been a signal of a particularly dangerous situation.

My second fanciful idea concerns calf. It is known from the history of the verb to cave in that cave in it stands for calve. The original form was calve ~ cauve. After the sound l was lost in calve, calve and cave became (near) homophones. A piece of the wall was said to fall down like a calf “dropped” by a cow (“to calve in”). The collocation cave in was presumably borrowed from Low (= northern) German or Frisian, but to cave (without in) looks like a continuation of a form with l; it was a cognate of the continental verb. Cave can be intransitive (“fall”) and transitive (“let fall, tilt”). Although its earliest attestations are from American books, its home seems to be British dialects, supposedly East Anglia. I assume that calf rope goes back to calve rope (that is, cave rope) and meant “drop rope” in the situations in which sailors cried “rope!” Cry rope and calf ~ calve ~ cave rope coexisted as synonyms. The weak points of my reconstruction are obvious: an imposing structure has been erected upon the sand, but our correspondent (whose early years were spent in the state of Mississippi) asked whether I had any thoughts on the idiom, and here they are. An idiom with such a meaning does not augur well.

On this self-effacing note (which in a moment will turn into a self-congratulatory one) I will finish this post and see off the third year of my blog. It came into being in the early spring of 2005. Many happy returns of the day!

By Anatoly Liberman

Straw is preceded by fresh green grass. For this reason, I will begin with grass widows. Nowadays a woman is called a grass widow whose husband had to leave home (for example, obliged to work far away from his family). Alternatively, she may be a divorced woman or a woman living apart from her husband (so in American English). In all those cases she is not really a widow, but not quite a married woman either. Why grass? A definite answer does not exist, but a few things can be said with confidence. First of all, we have to get rid of folk etymology, according to which, grass in this phrase goes back to French grace, with the whole allegedly meaning “courtesy widow.” This etymology (one can find it in respectable old dictionaries and in letters to the editor) should be ignored because exact equivalents of Engl. grass widow exist in German, Dutch, and Danish, whereas the French idiom is veuve de paille, that is, “straw widow.” In English, the most recent sense (“a woman living away from her husband”) surfaced only in 1859 with reference to India. Hence the often-repeated conjecture that the first grass widows were the wives of servicemen: while the men sweated in the heat, the women waited for them on “greener pastures.” In older texts, none of which, however, predates 1528 (OED), grass widow had a much coarser meaning, namely “a woman who lost her virginity before the wedding” and “a deserted mistress.” (Compare the definition from a 1700 dictionary; repeated in 1725). “One that pretends to have been married, but never was, yet has children.”) In this context, many European languages use the word straw. So we have three riddles. Why straw, why the substitution of grass for straw in English (Engl. straw widow has never had any currency), and why the change from “deserted mistress” to “wife temporarily separated from her husband”?

As always, one finds some suggestions in Notes and Queries. This is what Thomas Ratcliffe (sic) wrote in 1884. He said that if a man had to work for months on end at a long distance from home and his wife’s conduct “was not circumspect enough,” she was said “to be ‘out at grass’; and when her behavior was such that her next-door neighbors could not any longer bear it, a besom, mop, or broom was put outside the front door, and reared against the house wall” (the spelling has been Americanized). Nothing is more venomous than the wrath of the virtuous. We will restrain our indignation but keep in mind the allusion to being “out at grass.”

Our most solid evidence comes from Germany, where Graswitwe “grass widow” competes with Strohwitwe “straw widow.” Strohwitwe surfaced only in 1715 and has the meaning of Engl. grass widow. As noted, the earliest English citation of grass widow has been traced to 1528, while in a German document addressed to pastors, straw brides (those who cohabited with a man before the wedding) are first mentioned in 1399. Since the word for straw bride is used casually, we can assume that everybody understood it. In most probability, Germany is the country where phrases like straw widow and straw bride originated. Other languages must have borrowed it from German. The brides who came to the altar after losing their virginity (and this is the situation discussed in the 1399 document) were made to wear a straw wreath. In some places, demeaning punishments were also extended to the men (“straw bridegrooms”) who dishonored their brides. But straw wreaths are secondary: the idea of putting them on the head of a sinner came from the notion of the straw widow.

Those who thought that straw (or a bed of straw) symbolized extramarital sex, as opposed to the family bed, were probably right. A meeting between two lovers in a meadow, “out at grass,” a secret tryst, whose witnesses are the sun, flowers, and a little bird that knows how to keep secrets, is described in one of the most famous 13th century German lyrics. It contains a triumphant monologue by a love-swept maiden. We are not told about the consequences of that rendezvous. A meadow is a place of pleasure. Reference to straw deprives the situation of all its charm. The “straw widow’s” path was from joy on the grass to intercourse on a bed of straw, the humiliation of wearing a straw wreath (a relatively happy end), but more often to lifelong ostracism, exile, and occasionally death by a member of the woman’s own family (a brother, for instance), as documents show.

The riddle of grass versus straw is not insoluble. While researching the history of the word strawberry (see it in my book Word Origins…), I discovered a little known article that offers a plausible explanation of that puzzling name, attested only in English and locally in Swedish. In English dialects, straw was not too rare a synonym for grass, so that strawberry seems to have meant “grassberry, berries growing in the grass.” Regardless of whether this etymology is right, it provides a clue to the interchange between German Strohwitwe and Engl. grass widow. When English-speakers took over the German word (apparently, in the 16th century or some time earlier), they replaced straw with grass. There was no need to do so, for the noun straw would have served the purpose equally well. Perhaps the borrowing occurred in an area in which straw “grass” occurred with some regularity. Such details are beyond reconstruction. The rise of the word strawberry was also unnecessary. The most frequent name of this berry in the Germanic languages is like German Erdbeere “earth berry,” and its counterpart in Old English existed but yielded to the rare synonym that continues into the present.

Meaning can deteriorate or be ameliorated. As a rule, words meaning “girl; woman,” if they change, tend to acquire negative connotations, for example, from “the loved one,” “maiden,” or “lass” to “prostitute.” This is what happened to whore (that is, hore, for w was never pronounced in it, and the modern spelling, modeled on what, when, where, which, why, is absurd: compare German Hure), a cognate of Latin carus “dear.” But unexpectedly, grass widow went up rather than down: from “discarded mistress” to “woman living away from her husband.”

We should now throw a quick glance at straw man. In English books, it turned up at the end of the 16th century and designated “scarecrow.” The development from “scarecrow” to “a figure of straw; a sham substitute for a real man” poses no problems. It has been suggested that straw widow, in its German guise, derives from straw man, for German Strohmann also exists. According to this hypothesis, to the extent that a straw man is not a real man, a straw widow is not a real widow. But chronology militates against this idea: Strohwitwe precedes Strohmann by many centuries. In numerous rituals, human-looking figures made of straw were burned and thus substituted for real persons. French homme de paille “man of straw” may have served as a model for the Germanic word. It appears that straw man and grass widow (or even “straw widow”) have nothing to do with each other. This is fine. In our liberated times, grass widows are supposedly quite happy the way they are.

By Anatoly Liberman

A word, some scholars say, can have several etymologies. This is a misleading formulation. Various factors contribute to a word’s meaning and form. All of them should be taken into account and become part of the piece of information we call etymology, because words are like human beings. Someone we know had two parents and inherited their traits, along with those of many generations of his ancestors, then grew up in an environment that partly reinforced and partly suppressed those traits, changed his habits under the influence of his domineering wife, and took her last name, to spite his parents. He has recently celebrated his 100th birthday. Words too come from a certain source, begin to interact with their neighbors (some mean nearly the same, and the newcomer either tries to stay away from them or drives them out of existence; others sound like it, and their closeness affects its meaning or stylistic coloring), grow old and dull or join a disreputable gang, and perhaps die. Each event deserves the attention of a language historian, but it is better not to speak of the multiple etymologies of one word.

In other cases, two or three sources look like a word’s probable etymons. Only one of them was its true parent, but we have no way of recognizing it. Both situations seem to be relevant to the history of akimbo. Among the conjectures about its origin some are reasonable. It is also possible that, regardless of the real etymon of akimbo, the word may have succumbed to the lures of folk etymology, a process that usually obliterates ancestral traits. This is the reason the most cautious dictionaries say “origin unknown.” But theirs is not the ignorance born of the lack of evidence. It is akin to the dilemma that faced Buridan’s ass, which, being placed between two equally appetizing stacks of hay, starved to death, unable to choose the best one. Those who can visualize the position called “with hands (or arms) akimbo” will agree that invoking the image of that unhappy animal could not be more apt.

There is the Italian phrase a sghembo “awry, aslope,” and it has been proposed as the etymon of the English word. Several factors weaken this idea. Someone who suggests borrowing should show in what circumstances the lending language shared its resources and why people from another country decided to accept the gift. If these conditions are not met, the hypothesis has no merit. We know why English took over a multitude of musical terms from Italian, but why akimbo? Were Italians famous for having their “hands on the hips and the elbows turned outward,” to quote an admirable dictionary definition? The worst thing about this etymology is that the Italian phrase has nothing to do with the position of the arms. Consequently, the English are supposed to have borrowed a sghembo and endowed it with a sense remote from the original one. As we will see, this argument will also prove deadly for another attempt to trace akimbo to a foreign source. An etymology killed with such heavy artillery may not need a few additional bullets, but we cannot help observing that Italian gh designates “hard g” (as in Engl. get), whereas akimbo has k. The parallel form a schembo (sch = sk), was dialectal, so that its popularity among English-speakers could not have been significant at any time.

Akimbo surfaced as in kenebowe (1400). More than two centuries later the variants a kenbol(l) ~ a kenbold appeared. For their sake, and perhaps not without some regrets, we will leave Italy for Scandinavia. The Icelandic words kimbill, kimpill, and kimbli “bundle of hay; hillock,” once compared with akimbo, exist. According to some old dictionaries, they mean “the handle of a pot or jug,” but they do not. Their root is related to Engl. comb and was used in Germanic for coining the names of fastenings, barrel staves, and so forth. However, similar words (kimble, kemmel, and many others), designating various vessels (not handles), are current in modern British English and Swedish dialects. For this reason, Ernest Weekley set up Middle Engl. kimbo “pot ear, pitcher handle.” The metaphor, from a pitcher with two handles to a person with hands akimbo, is perfect and widespread. In kenebowe may have been a conscious translation of the French phrase en anses “on the handles,” as Weekley says, but why is it so different from present day Engl. akimbo, especially if we remember that Middle Engl. kimbo has been reconstructed rather than recorded and that 17th century authors knew kembol(l). What happened to final -l? Weekley did not provide an answer to those questions. Akembol could not develop from in kenebowe in a natural way. More likely, it was a product of folk etymology, perhaps indeed under the influence of the names of pots and jugs.

A third putative source of akimbo is Gaelic cam “bent, crooked”; the English adverb kim-kam “all awry, all askew” has been attested. Since -bowe in kenebowe means “bend” and is identical with -bow in elbow and rainbow, kimbo, from ken-bow ~ kin-bow ~ kinbo, emerges in this reconstruction as “bent bend,” a tautological compound (both of its parts mean the same), like many others in the Indo-European languages. Compare Engl. courtyard, pathway, etc. and numerous place names, which, when deciphered, yield “white white water,” “hill-hill,” and so forth. While reading the entry akimbo in Skeat’s dictionary, I discovered, much to my surprise, his passing statement on the popularity of such compounds, as though this fact were the most obvious thing in the world. It is not, and few researchers are aware of them. The suggestion that just one component of akimbo is Celtic has little to recommend it. In sum, akimbo would be easy to explain, if its earliest form were not kenebowe. Lost among Italian, Gaelic, Icelandic, and English, we will return to Scandinavia.

Another form that allegedly might generate akimbo is Icelandic kengboginn “bent into a crook.” British dialectal kingbow looks like a variant of it. This etymology is given in most dictionaries as final. A late 14th century English word could have been borrowed from Scandinavian, but Italian a sghembo hastens to take its revenge. Kengboginn never meant “akimbo,” and a change from “bent, crooked” to such a highly specific meaning (“with one’s hands on the hips”) is suspect. Also, keng- in kengboginn, like kimble, bears little resemblance to kene- (-bowe, is not incompatible with -boginn, however). Once again we wish there were no kenebowe.

At first blush, kene- in kenebowe is the adjective keen. If so, in kenebowe must be understood as “in keen bow,” that is, “in a sharp bend, at an acute angle, presenting a sharp elbow” (such are the glosses in The Century Dictionary). In Middle English, keen “sharp-pointed” “was in common use as applied to the point of a spear, pike, dagger, goad, thorn, hook, anchor, etc., or to the edge of a knife, sword, ax, etc.… In its earliest use, and often later, the term connotes a bold or defiant attitude, involving, perhaps, an allusion to keen in its other common Middle English sense of ‘bold’,” The quotation is from the same dictionary, which calls all the previous explanations erroneous.

Skeat defended the kengboginn etymology and kept repeating that Middle Engl. kene was not used to denote “sharp” in such a context. He never elaborated on his phrase in such a context. Despite Skeat’s objection, the etymology of kenebowe defended in The Century Dictionary seems to be the least implausible of all, assuming that the first vowel of kenebowe was long; the vowel in keen undoubtedly was. This is not too bold an assumption, for kene- with short e has no meaning. Later, this e must have been shortened (a usual process in trisyllabic words, to which we owe short o in holiday, as opposed to long o in holy, for example), and the change destroyed the tie between kene- and keen. The second e was shed—another common process in Middle English. The new form (let us spell it kenbow) began to resemble words for vessels with two handles and in kennebowe became akingbow, akingbo, akimbo, and so forth. In the disguised compound akimbow, the idea of a bow also disappeared (even an association with elbow did not save it); hence the spelling -bo. The influence of Gaelic cam need not be invoked in the history of akimbo.

Faced with many hypotheses, none of which should be dismissed as untenable, we are still not quite sure where akimbo came from, but “origin unknown” would be an unnecessarily harsh verdict. In 1909, the first edition of Webster’s New International opted for keen-, the second (in 1934) cited kingboginn, and the third (1961) gave the earliest form (kenebowe) and stopped. This is what I call the progress of the science of etymology.

By Anatoly Liberman

The Internet and language change. The question I received can be summarized in two points. 1) Will texting and the now prevalent habit of abbreviating whole phrases (the most-often cited example is LOL “laugh out loud”) affect language development in a serious way? 2) Will the unprecedented exposure to multiple dialects and cultures that the Internet provides result in some sort of universal language? Linguistic futurology is a thankless enterprise, but my inclination is to answer no to both questions. Every message is functional. Texting, like slang and all kinds of jargon, knows its place and will hardly escape from its cell-phone cage. Some abbreviations may become words, and a statement like she lol’ed when I asked her whether she would go out with me is not unimaginable. Countless acronyms like Texaco, BS, UNO, and snafu clutter our speech; if necessary, English will survive a few more. It is the collapse of reading habits and the general degradation of culture that threaten to reduce our vocabulary to lol’able basics. As to the second part of the question, I would like to point out that the Internet is only one component of globalization. It ignores borders, but new Compuranto, destined to replace our native languages, is not yet in the offing.

Disappearing words. The question runs as follows: “For years I’ve wondered if spell-check is responsible for the disappearance of the word pled (as in he pled guilty vs. the current he pleaded guilty) and similar words that were in common usage until about twenty or so years ago. Other words that seem to have disappeared are knelt, sunk, etc.” I wonder what our readers will say. As far as I can judge, all those words are still around. In student newspapers, which reflect the poorly edited and unbuttoned-up usage of the young, I see almost only pled guilty. If anything, it is pleaded that gave way to pled in the legal phrase, probably under the influence of bled and fled. (I am not sure how many people have gone over to we pled with her but in vain). In American English, sunk seems to be the most common past tense of sink, and once, when I used sank in this blog, I was taken to task and then forgiven, when it turned out that the OED “allows” the principal parts sink—sank—sunk, like shrink—shrank—shrunk. Knelt seems to be the preferred form in British English. In any case, it is felt to be more elevated, though the OED gives both forms (knelt and kneeled) without comment. In a few other cases, American English has also chosen regular weak preterits: thus, burned, learned, spelled rather than burnt, learnt, spelt. Whatever the cause of the variation, it is clearly not the spell-check.

A family name. What is the origin of the family name Witthaus? Both witt- and haus are common elements of German family names. Strangely, Witthaus did not turn up in the most detailed dictionaries of German family names or of American last names of German descent. However, I will venture an etymology. Haus is clear (”house”). Witt- can have several sources, but, most likely, in this name it means “white” (if so, the form is northern German, Dutch, or Frisian). The European ancestors of the Witthaus family must have lived in or near a house painted white.

The origin of separate words. Handicapped. I am copying the information from The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, which offers a curtailed version of what can be found in the OED. The word appeared in English texts in the middle of the 17th century and meant a lottery in which one person challenged an article belonging to another, for which he offered something in exchange, an umpire being chosen to decree the respective values. In the 18th century, the phrases handicap match and handicap race surfaced. They designated a match between two horses, in which the umpire decided the extra weight to be carried by the superior horse. Hence applied to the extra weight itself, and so to any disability in a contest. Presumably, from the phrase hand i’ (in) cap, the two parties and the umpire in the original game all depositing forfeit money in a cap or hat. Shampoo. From a Hindi verb meaning “press!” (The original reference was to massage). Meltdown. Amusingly, the earliest recorded form in the OED refers to ice-cream (1937). The word acquired its ominous meaning in connection with accidents in nuclear reactors and spread to other areas; hence the meltdown of the stock market. As our correspondent notes, it has become a buzzword (and therefore should be avoided, except when reactors are meant). Hoi polloi. From Greek. It means “all people, masses.” Sun dog. Judging by the earliest citations in the OED, in the thirties of the 17th century the word was already widely known. However, its origin is said to be “obscure.” I can offer a mildly intelligent guess. Considering the superstitions attending celestial phenomena, two false suns sometimes visible on both sides of the real one could have been thought of as dogs pursuing it. The idea of two wolves following the sun and the moon, both of which try to escape their enemies and constantly move on, occurred to the medieval Scandinavians. Even the names of the wolves, Skoll (Anglicized spelling) and Hati, have come down to us. When the world comes to an end (a situation described in great detail in Scandinavian myths), the wolves catch up with and swallow their prey. As regards sundog, the missing link would be a theological or astronomical treatise that introduced and justified the use of the word. In their absence all guesses are hot air. If it is any consolation, I can say that the origin of dog days and hot dog is not obscure. The etymology of hot dog required years of painstaking research.

A few Americanisms. Conniption. Everybody seems to be in agreement that it is a “fanciful formation.” However, this phrase simply means “an individual coinage.” The question is who coined conniption and under what circumstances. I wonder whether a search for some short-lived popular song or cartoon will yield any results. Such words often come from popular culture. At the moment, we can only say that despite its classical look, conniption, which does not trace to Latin or any Romance language, must have been modeled on such nouns as conscription, constriction, conviction, and so forth. Whether a conniption fit, that is, a fit of rage or hysteria, is “related” to nip is anybody’s guess. Jaywalk. This is an equally opaque word. The verb jaywalk is a back formation on the noun jaywalker, because no other model of derivation produces English compounds made up of a noun followed by a verb. In similar fashion, kidnap is not a sum of kid and nap, but a back formation on kidnapper, another Americanism (from kid and napper “thief”), a cant word, stressed originally, like the verb, on the second element; the reference is to the people, not necessarily children, decoyed and snatched from their homes to work as servants or slaves in the colonies; such servants were often called kids: compare boy in colonial English, busboy, and cowboy, as well as the title of Robert L. Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped). It is also clear that the reference in jaywalker cannot be to the bird. Crows do not fly in a straight line, “kiddies” do not cut corners (kiddy-corner ~ cater-corner), and jays do not walk. Jay is one of the many words for a country bumpkin, along with hick, hillbilly, hayseed, redneck, and others. It has been suggested that people from rural areas (jays) came to town and, ignorant of street lights, crossed busy streets in an erratic way. Those were allegedly jaywalkers. The foundation of this etymology is shaky, since jay has never been a widespread word for a rustic. Other suggestions are even worse, and the literature on the word is all but nonexistent. Jukebox. Also a crux. Several meanings of juke have been attested, one of them being “roadside inn; brothel,” allegedly an Afro-Caribbean word. Juke refers to things disorderly and noisy, and jukeboxes were installed in saloons and other cheap places. Since jukebox originated in Black English, its African etymology is not improbable. But I would like to point out that the sound j often has an expressive function in English, whether it occurs word finally (budge, fudge, grudge, nudge) or word initially (job, jog, jig, jazz). It is perhaps a coincidence, but note that both jaywalker and juke begin with this sound. Haywire. From the use of hay-baling wire in makeshift repairs; hence “erratic, out of control.”

Hunyak. A derogatory term for a person of non-western, usually central or eastern, European background; a recent immigrant, especially an unskilled or uneducated laborer with such a background. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), which has citations for these words going back to 1911, makes a plausible suggestion that hunyak (sometimes capitalized and alternating with honijoker, honyak, etc.) is perhaps a blend of Hun or Hunk “Hungarian” and Polack. There may be no need to posit a blend, for -ack is a common suffix in Slavic; it could have been added to hun-. DARE gives multiple citations of Hunk ~ hunk ~ hunks (with reinforcing -s) ~ Hungy, and so forth. Stupnagel. “Moron.” I risked a conjecture that proved to be correct. First, I rejected any connection with Hitler’s general Fr. von Stupnagel, who was not a fool (the opposite is true) and not a familiar figure in the United States. As with conniption, I suggested that the word had emerged in popular culture (a sketch, a show, or a series of cartoons) and reconstructed a character whose name was made up of stup- (from stupid) and -nagle, from finagle. Mr. Nathan E. J. Carlson, an assistant at DARE, has kindly sent me the information provided by Dr. Leonard Zwilling, that in 1931 a radio program in Buffalo, NY featured two idiots: Stoopnagle (so spelled) and Buddy. In 1933 a film was released with those characters, the first of them becoming Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle. There must have been a good reason for the change, because Lemuel is the first name of Swift’s Gulliver. I do not know what made the author introduce Stoopnagle, but my etymology (a blend of stupid and finagle) looks good. The author could also have been inspired by the German word Nagel “nail” (compare stud “nail,” with its obscene meaning, and the hero of Farrell’s novel Studs Lonigan) or perhaps wanted one of the characters to be a German, to invite a few cheap laughs. But the word stupnagle almost certainly goes back to that radio program. Judging by what one finds in the Internet, the word, but not its origin, is well-known.

A few comments on comments. Buzzwords. A fellow professor agrees with my negative attitude toward academic clichés like cutting edge and interdisciplinary, for which I am grateful. Those words shape our thought and pretend to disguise our shallowness. No grant can be received without brandishing a cutting edge, as though it were a bare bodkin, and proving one’s interdisciplinary ability to sit between two stools. Every elected official is “proud and humbled,” administrators (a vociferous chorus) rail against “an overblown sense of entitlement” by constantly promoting it, eagle-eyed journalists see the simplest things only through a “lens,” and no ad in the sphere of education will dare avoid the adjective diverse. What a dull new world! When asked about verbs like to Blagojevich, I said that verbs derived from last names seem to be rare. Several correspondents sent me what they believed to be such verbs; however, with one exception, they remembered words having suffixes (like macadamize). The exception is to Bork. Bork, a monosyllable, lends itself naturally to becoming a verb. I was glad to read that my post on Swedish kul, published in the middle of an inclement winter, warmed the cockles of a Swedish teacher’s heart (I pointed out that kul is not a borrowing of English cool), and it was interesting to read another late 19th century example of the superlative degree coolest (cool “impudent”). The correspondent who thinks that the phrase that’s all she wrote has nothing to do with Hazlitt’s time (because the contexts are different) may be right, but the old citation shows that the model for such phrases existed long before World War II.

Note. I received a question about the origin of akimbo. This word needs more than a few lines of discussion. See my post on it next Wednesday.

By Anatoly Liberman

I received many questions from our correspondents and from those who listened to my talk show on Minnesota Public Radio (“Midmorning”), January 1. (Is 9 AM on such a day really midmorning?) Some questions were not posted on OUP’s blog but came to me by email. Those I will repeat or summarize. Today I’ll be able to touch on less than one third of what I have. More next Wednesday.

Etymology and Etymologists. In my post on serendipity and luck in etymological studies, I noted that researchers’ conclusions are sometimes influenced by their knowledge of one group of languages. Those who are well versed in Scandinavian linguistics tend to find the etymons of English words in Icelandic and Norwegian, specialists in Romance discover the etymons of the same words in French dialects, and so on. Miracles of omniscience turn up rarely, and because few people display the mastery of even one foreign language comparable to that of their mother tongue, solutions about the origin of obscure words depend partly on our limitations. A correspondent calls my attention to Hester Thrale Piozzi, who traced all words to Welsh. He concludes his letter so: “Some of us once thought of bringing out a book entitled Etymology by Hester Thrale with nothing but well-known, but quite false derivations, including hers, of course. Others, before us and after us, have accomplished that without trying.” He also writes: “I hope you will one day devote a blog to the etymologists whose narrow focus caused these people to overlook more compelling solutions…. I would be interested in seeing these people collected in one place, perhaps with examples and your solutions.”

I would love to write such a book, rather than a blog, on this subject (I devoted only a few lines to etymology and obsession in Word Origins… and How We Know Them; the subject has been explored more fully in my dictionary). Such a book with a coy title like Matchless Incendiaries or Convicted by Their Convictions would be a joy to write and become a national bestseller. Here a few remarks will suffice. Ernest Weekley, the author of several excellent books on English words and of an English etymological dictionary, called those who attempted to trace all words to one language monomaniacs. Not all of them have been tarred with the same brush or cut out of the same cloth. For many centuries it was customary to derive one language from another: Latin from Greek, German from Gothic, and so forth. All of them were supposed to go back to Hebrew, the language Adam and Eve allegedly spoke in Paradise. No one remembers hearing Adam and Eve; consequently, opinions regarding their language differed. Perhaps the most famous guess (famous for its craziness) identified it with Dutch. The curious thing is that enough similar-sounding words exist in Dutch, Latin, Greek, and even Hebrew to boost the most bizarre hypothesis of origins.

Later, political monomaniacs, inspired by patriotic feelings, moved center stage. In English studies, Celtomania flourished for a long time. John Cleland wrote not only a memorable book about Fanny Hill, a woman of pleasure, but also a learned work on English etymology. Unlike his novel, it is unrewarding reading: English words are derived in it from fanciful Celtic roots. Even more notorious was Charles MacKay, an erudite 19^th-century scholar, the author of good books on English vocabulary, but a slave of the idea that most words of English and other languages go back to Irish Gaelic. Monomaniacs who believe that the bulk of the vocabulary of modern European languages is traceable to Slavic, Arabic, or Hebrew are still active and have a sizable following. Singleness of purpose and ignorance form durable and dangerous unions.

A last group is comprised of excellent scholars who make worthwhile discoveries but overuse their expertise and tend to search for the sources of obscure words in the material they know best. This is where Scandinavian and Romance come in. It is not hard to dig up a specious ancestor of an English word in some neighboring language, be it Welsh, Irish, French, or Icelandic. There is no recipe against blunders in this area, and perhaps only an instinct akin to the instinct that saves an experienced chess player from making a wrong move can rein in an etymologist’s enthusiasm. On the other hand, as I mentioned in my blog on serendipity and luck, familiarity with some language, especially a good grasp of one’s native language, can provide valuable associations closed to others. All in all, an author planning a book about the etymologists who went astray will not run out of material. A tragedy in five acts with an interlude and an epilogue is also possible.

Spelling. A correspondent from India asks why English spelling has not been made strictly phonetic if a close sound to letter correspondence is possible for other languages. Many books have been written on the subject of English spelling. At one time the written image of English words did reflect their pronunciation with some accuracy. After 1066 (the Norman Conquest), French scribes imposed their rules that ran counter to the phonetic reality of English. It took centuries for a writing system obligatory for all to be accepted, and the norm that emerged turned out to be inconsistent and conservative. No radical reform of English spelling has so far gained enough public support. As a result, we often spell words according to medieval rules, and English abounds in homographs like bow “bend” and bow (to play a string instrument) and homophones like slow and sloe. It is hard to find another language in which four words are spelled differently—write, rite, right, and Wright/wright (as in playwright)—but pronounced the same. This blog has existed for nearly three years, and eleven posts have dealt with what I called “The Oddest English Spelling”; two more addressed Spelling Reform.

English versus German. An argument arose in which one side insisted that German was a better medium of thought than English because English, with its multiple homophones, often obscures the message, while in German such cases are nonexistent. How true is this statement? I don’t think it is true, even though English has numerous words like sloe and slow. Punning is indeed easier in English and French than in German. Other than that, homophones present no danger to communication because context disambiguates them (to use a technical linguistic term). Even in a piece of constructed nonsense like not everything is right in the drama on the rite of spring that Mr. Wright, a rightwing playwright, promised to write hardly anyone will misunderstand the meaning despite the cacophony. And some homophones also exist in German, for example, denen (a pronoun) and dehnen “prolong, lengthen,” Rhein (the river) and rein “clean,” and so forth. I would in general object to any statement to the effect that a certain language serves it purpose inadequately. Language is a self-regulating system, and especially in the vocabulary sphere it borrows from various sources, gets rid of deadwood, produces synonyms, and develops new ways of derivation, so that at any moment it is both “perfect” and open to change.

Shakespeare’s pronunciation. How should the word eisel be pronounced? This question came one day after I submitted my previous set of gleanings, and I hope that someone getting ready to play Hamlet or read out loud excerpts from the play will still be able to profit by my answer. The word eisel “vinegar,” from Old French (ultimately from Latin), was recorded as early as the 13^th century but barely survived Shakespeare’s well-contented day. We remember it because it occurs in Hamlet’s passionate questions hurled at Laertes in the churchyard: “’Swounds, show me what thou’lt do: / Woo’t drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile? / I’ll do’t” (V, 1: 295-99). And in Sonnet 111, we read: “Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink/ Potions of eisel ‘gainst my strong infection.” In old editions, the word also occurs in the forms esill, esile, and eysell. Today no one knows how it was pronounced (this is the reason the OED gives no transcription), but the spellings suggest that two variants competed (assuming that Shakespeare’s vowels had more or less the same realizations as today): one must have been homophonous with our easel, the other began with ay as in ay, may, nay. Both can be heard. It seems that in the United and Canada eezel predominates, while in England actors usually say ayzel.

Separate words

Weird. Long ago it was a noun meaning “fate.” It had cognates (also nouns) in all the other Old Germanic languages. In the middle period, English lost a verb related to this noun but preserved, for example, in German (werden “become”; originally “happen, come to pass”). Its trace exists in the formula woe worth the day, but today few people will recognize this formula and even fewer will guess that worth is the ancient subjunctive of the once common verb (“may woe befall the day,” that is, “let the day perish”). Since Fates were supposed to control our destiny, the phrase werde sisters arose in the 14^th century. It would probably have been forgotten but for Shakespeare’s weird sisters in Macbeth. Nowadays weird turned into slang for “odd” (“he is so weird”), and the noun weirdo was coined, a far cry from the dignified wyrd that dominated Old English poetry, with its fatalistic view of life and death. Schadenfreude. This German word meaning “joy felt at someone’s misfortune, vindictive glee” has become so common that like angst it is no longer italicized in our books and can be found in English dictionaries. It is made up of two German nouns: Schaden “harm” and Freude “joy.” Willy-nilly. This is a contraction of the phrase wil I nil I “I am willing, I am unwilling”; nyl goes back to Old Engl. nyllan, that is, wyllan “will” preceded by ne. Cater-corner ~ kitty corner. Most probably, from a Scandinavian word for “left” (hence “not right, not straight; going across”), rather than from French quatre “four” (see a long entry on this word in my dictionary). Dickens “devil.” From a proper name (Dick, Dickon, Dicken), a common case (compare Old Nick, Old Harry, and Rob/Hob), with reinforcing -s.

To be continued.

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 here, each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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The dashboard in a car has taken on something of the meaning of an instrument panel. So much so that Microsoft, Apple and others have at one time or another come out with software dashboards that you can fiddle with on your computer.

But the dashboard in a car is named after the dashboards of an earlier time.

In 1846, when the word first appeared in the printed record a dashboard was a barrier between the riders of a sleigh or wagon and the flying mud and water coming from a horse’s hooves.

Although a horse and sleigh might be dashing through the snow it wasn’t the meaning of “moving with speed” that made dash applicable to the board that kept riders clean and dry.

At first, back in the thirteenth century the word dash meant to hit violently or to break something into pieces.  In this dash was pretty close in meaning to smash although smash didn’t appear in English until 400 years later.

This is why we still sometimes hear people saying that their hopes were dashed.

The reason we call a broken pencil line a dashed line is because editors violently removed words from manuscripts by striking them out with a dash of their red pencil.

By the 1500s to dash something could also mean “to throw it violently” and by the late 1600s this included throwing water.

So dash had become synonymous with splash, also a word that was only just coming into the language by the early 1700s.

Thus a dashboard was at first really a splashboard.

It was in 1904 that the dashboard appeared in a car and it did so as a sort of analogy to those boards that stood in front of the passengers of a horse drawn vehicle, since in an automobile there would be no hooves to dash water and mud at the riders.

Furthermore when cars were a new phenomenon there were too few of them to worry about water or mud from a car ahead of you.

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

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

The word fiasco reached the European languages in the 19th century: in Germany Heine introduced it from French (1837); in Sweden it appeared ten years later; in England in 1854, and so on. Although an Italian word meaning “bottle,” fiasco, along with its cognates in the other Romance languages, is, most probably, of Germanic origin, so that Engl. flask and German Flasche may be native (by contrast, flagon, from flacon, from some form like flascon, originated in France and went to England from there). The reasons fiasco keeps baffling etymologists need not cause surprise: it emerged as slang, and the sources of slang are usually hard to trace.

Three moments complicate the search. First, despite the fact that fiasco is, undoubtedly, Italian, the phrase far fiasco spread to other languages from French. (In texts, the phrase far fiasco turned up before the bare noun fiasco “mistake.”) Second, if far fiasco means “to make a bottle,” with a later change to “make a mistake and fail,” it is unclear why fiasco “bottle” has no article. Third, as far as we can judge, the phrase was first used only with reference to actors’ bad performance, a fact that leaves us wondering where bottles come in: bad eggs and rotten tomatoes would be more in place.

Far fiasco has no medieval roots. Therefore, occasional mentions of Roman customs, failed conspiracies (the hero of one of them was Count Giovanni L. Fiesco, 1547), and the like need not bother us. Only one of the more reasonable guesses, from Stainer and Barrett’s Dictionary of Musical Terms, may be quoted for completeness’ sake: “The fistula pastoricia was blown by the Romans to signify their dissatisfaction and it is possible that the present term arose from the similarity between the shape of a flageolet (flaschinet), and a flask.”

The literature on the origin of fiasco is not vast, but not negligible either: entries in the explanatory and etymological dictionaries of most European languages and about a dozen notes and articles. Some conjectures are copied from book to book, but all authors hasten to say that no definitive solution exists. Fiasco aligns itself with the words I have discussed in the recent past: their meaning is so discouraging (the posts were devoted to charade and charlatan) that etymological frustration should be taken for granted: these words “have a reputation to live up to.” As a rule, fiasco is referred to the production of Venetian glass. Allegedly, when a glassblower spoiled some beautiful object, it was made into a common bottle. Or when an apprentice ruined his assignment and ended up with a pitiful bottle instead of what he had hoped to produce, the outcome was a fiasco. Or a stupid tourist would witness the work of professional glassblowers and decide that the process was easy. He would be allowed to use the tube, but the result would be only nondescript pear-shaped bottles, much to the merriment of the bystanders, who would shout fiasco! at every new attempt. No evidence supports the idea that the phrase far fiasco originated in Venice. Unlike sports and art, glass blowing is a field whose professional secrets mainly interests only those involved, and a technical phrase known to insiders would be unlikely to travel far and wide. Nor has it been documented that workers ever turned spoiled objects into primitive bottles or destroyed them.

Another line of inquiry emphasizes the fact that the verb far does not have to mean “do, make”: it can be a substitute for some more concrete verb. This is true enough. To make one’s bed does not mean to produce it. To make head against something “resist an obstacle successfully” does not involve the manufacturing of a head. Make can even be a kind of link verb (for example, I made bold to mention this fact). The phrase appiccare un fiasco “to hang a bottle round someone’s neck” (appiccare “attach, fasten”) was a legal formula, and a substantial body of material has been produced to show that in the Middle Ages and later various objects—including bottles—were hung around miscreants’ necks. However, “to inflict a penalty” and “impose a punishment” are hardly synonyms for “fail as the result of a mistake.” At first sight, more promising seems to be the consideration that the names of hollow objects are often used as metaphors for “an empty head” and “fool.” Both German Flasche and French bouteille can mean “dummy,” but Italian fiasco cannot, so that this path also leads nowhere.

As pointed out above, fiasco became known in Italy and other lands as slang current in theaters. It may have originated elsewhere, but the stage was the center from which it spread through the languages of Europe. An ingenious reconstruction refers to the period in the 18th century when Italian comedians performed in France and became bitter rivals of native actors. This approach purports to explain how the now obsolete French expression faire une bouteille “make a mistake” became far fiasco and why the Italian phrase appeared in France before the Italians began to use it. Even if this is how the events developed, the problem of the indefinite article remains unsolved. Although far un fiasco and far il fiasco have been recorded, they have never been the main variants of the idiom and look like later rationalizations of far fiasco. Bottle is a countable noun, and it remains a puzzle why, in translating faire une bouteille, une was left out. Similar cases, with articles missing after faire ~ make, exist, but they are not many. The French idiom faire face a, roughly synonymous with make head against, had some currency in English guise (make face to); for example, Washington Irving used it. Here neither language needs the indefinite article before face, which is typical: compare save face. One can understand how face acquired an abstract meaning or how the same process affected way (make way), sail (make sail = hoist sail), and penny (at one time, the phrases make penny of something or make a penny of something enjoyed some popularity). But bottle? To us fiasco is abstract (“failure; disaster),” but nothing can be more concrete than Italian fiasco “bottle.” And this circumstance brings me to a last (surely, not the last) hypothesis on the origin of this intractable word.

Perhaps fiasco is connected with bottles less directly than is usually believed. In southern French dialects, the phrase faire flist “to lose courage” occurs. Flist, flast, and so forth are sound imitative words, and the phrase in question means approximately “to go flop.” One can imagine that for fun actors reshaped some French word like flast into Italian fiasco. This hypothesis is not unknown, but etymologists, in the rare cases they touch on it, do so in passing and with great diffidence, for too many missing links invite caution. In the world of words, old age (and flask has been around “forever”) is no proof against an onomatopoeic origin; the opposite is true. Since Germanic f- goes back to earlier p-, the protoform of flask must have begun with plas- or plos-, a typical sound imitative complex: compare Engl. plash ~ splash-. Perhaps the type of bottle called “flask” got its name for the sound the liquid it contained went plas-plas or plos-plos. Bottle (originally a wine sack or a leather flask?) is a Romance word and may be related to Engl. body and other nouns denoting “swelling.” B-d and b-t words are also sound imitative. Latin ampulla “bottle” was frequently used to designate inflated and noisy objects. If flask arose as an onomatopoeic word in antiquity, it could cross the path of another onomatopoeia centuries later. All this is interesting but rather fruitless guesswork.

However slippery our ground may be, research has shed some light on the derivation of fiasco. Contrary to what popular books keep telling us, the word did not arise in the lingo of Venetian glassblowers. It probably owes nothing to the barbarous punishments of the Middle Ages and beyond. Despite the obvious Italian connection, it has French roots (not to be confused with a French root). Other than that, the bottle refuses to be cracked.

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When a new edition of a dictionary is published, you never know what people are going to pick up on as noteworthy. Last week, when the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was officially launched, much of the surrounding publicity had to do with the all the brand-new material: the 2,500 new words and phrases and 1,300 new illustrative quotes. But what’s gotten just as much attention is something that’s missing. The hyphen, that humble piece of connective punctuation, has been removed from about 16,000 compound words appearing in the text of the Shorter. The news has been making the rounds everywhere from the BBC to the Wall Street Journal. “Hyphens are the latest casualty of the internet age,” writes the Sydney Morning Herald. “Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on,” a Reuters headline bleakly reads. A satirical paper even warns of a “hyphen-thief” on the loose. But don’t worry, hyphenophiles: the punctuation lives on, even if it’s entering uncertain terrain in the electronic era. (more…)

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