By Anatoly Liberman
For this essay I have to thank Walter Turner, who asked me about the origin of larrup. The verb means “beat, thrash, whip, flog.” Long before my database became available in printed form as A Bibliography of English Etymology, I described in a special post what kind of lexical fish my small-meshed net had caught. (Sorry for the florid style. I remember a dean saying in irritation to one of the speakers at the Assembly: “Can you stop speaking in metaphors?” I mean that our team read a lot of articles and marked the places where anything pertaining to etymology turned up, without missing even the most trivial remarks.) After some of the words had been gathered in a mini-thesaurus, I observed with surprise the number of synonyms for “beat, strike.” Baist, bansel, clat, dozz, keb, lase, polch, starn, and what not. Needless to say, my knowledge of the language and of the ways of the world did not go beyond bang, buffet, lick, trounce, whack, and the like. And let me repeat: the database includes only such words about whose origin something has been said in the articles I have read, so, by definition, a small fraction of the existing literature. Later in Notes and Queries an exchange titled “Provincialisms for ‘To Thrash’” came my way, with mump, clool, wheang, and more of the same enriching my passive vocabulary. Among other things, in elementary school “‘thimble-pie’ was a serious letting down. It was administered with the dame’s thimble finger,” and (the author adds), “as I remember, was very much past a joke.” All the northern correspondents knew skelp, but no one mentioned larrup, though, according to Joseph Wright’s The English Dialect Dictionary, it is recognized in every part of England. It is also widespread in the United States, even if less so (see Dictionary of American Regional English). What then is its etymology? Larrup does not occur in my database, which means that I have not run into a single article or note in which its history is mentioned. And yet, as happens so often in etymological studies, its origin was, if not explained, at least elucidated, almost a century ago; only no one has paid attention.
The OED lists larrup (the earliest citation there goes back to 1823) but offers no etymology. It only quotes an 1825 publication, in which lirrop (not larrup) “to beat” is followed by a short remark: “This is said to be a corruption of the sea term, lee-rope.” Larrop and lirrop, as pointed out in the OED, are, naturally, variants of larrup. As to lee-rope, we need not bother about this exercise in folk etymology. The Century Dictionary also has an entry on larrup and says: “Prob. [from] D[utch] larpen, thresh with the flails; cf. larp, a lash. The E[nglish] form larrup (for *larp) may represent the strongly rolled r of the D[utch]: so larum, alarum, for alarm” (in linguistic works, an asterisk before a form means that it has not been attested). This statement can be found verbatim in several later dictionaries. From time to time I write about “unsung heroes of etymology.” Charles P. G. Scott, the etymologist for The Century Dictionary, is one of them. He can always be relied upon; yet I do not know where he found the words larp and larpen. The Great