How to use this Page

Tweet

By Anatoly Liberman

The origin of plant names is one of the most interesting areas of etymology.  I have dealt with henbane, hemlock, horehound, and mistletoe and know how thorny the gentlest flowers may be for a language historian. It is certain that horehound has nothing to do with hounds, and I hope to have shown that henbane did not get its name because it is particularly dangerous to hens (which hardly ever peck at it, and even if they did, why should they have been chosen as the poisonous plant’s preferred victims?).  On the face of it, the word foxglove makes no sense, because foxes do without gloves and even without hands.  The scientific name of foxglove is Digitalis (the best-known variety is Digitalis purpurea), apparently, because it looks like a thimble and can be easily fitted over a finger (Latin digitus “finger”).  See more about it below.  The puzzling part is fox-.  It was such even in Old English (foxes glofa, though the name seems to have been applied to a different plant), so that nothing has been “corrupted,” to use one of the favorite words of 19^th-century etymologists, both professional and amateurs.

It is amusing what fierce battles have been fought over the origin of the word foxglove.  Walter W. Skeat broke many a spear defending the simplest etymology (foxglove is fox + glove), but neither he nor anyone else has been able to explain how the Anglo-Saxons came by this name: why fox?  Regardless of the solution, reading Skeat is always a pleasure, and I will probably devote a post to a selection of quotes from his letters to the editor.  With regard to foxglove, he remarked: “…everyone writes on etymology, more especially such as do not understand it.”  How true, how very true!  Among other things, Skeat produced an impressive list of Old English plant names with obscure references to animals in them, for example, fowl’s bean, cow-slip (not cow’s lip!), ox-heal, catmint, and hound’s fennel.  And we know dog rose and wolfsbane, to mention just a few oddities.   Each of them needs an explanation, and I think Skeat pooh-poohed the question too hastily.  He wrote: “… [to us] such names as fox-glove and hare-bell seem senseless, and many efforts, more ingenious than well directed, have been made to evade the evidence.  Yet, it is easily understood.  The names are simply childish, and such as children would be pleased with.  A child only wants a pretty name, and is glad to connect a plant with a more or less familiar animal.  This explains the whole matter, and it is the reverse of scientific to deny a fact merely because we dislike or contemn [sic] it.  This is not the way to understand the workings of the human mind, on which true etymology often throws much unexpected light.”  Unfortunately, the Anglo-Saxons were not children, and though, like us, they certainly enjoyed playing with language and inventing “pretty names,” those names cannot be written off as silly or irrational.  So let me repeat: foxglove does go back to a word that means exactly this (fox-glove), and all attempts to explain it as a “perversion” of some other compound or phrase are misguided, but the reason for endowing the flower with such an incomprehensible name has not been discovered.

The idea to trace foxglove to folk’s (or folks’) glove is relatively recent.  It may have gained popularity after the publication of the book English Etymologies by William Henry Fox (!) Talbot (1847).  We read the following in it: “In Welsh this flower is called by the beauti

By Anatoly Liberman

The British journals of the Victorian era are an inexhaustible source of elegant phrases, which arouse in me sometimes envy and sometimes amused wonderment. Therefore, while remaining true to that style, I will say that I follow the comments sent to this blog “with appreciative interest, leavened in some cases by knowledge” (a gem from an 1889 article).

Three linguists called geniuses. My innocent conclusion to the post on the origin of the words sea and ocean called forth a few humorous remarks. I said that, in my opinion, Jacob Grimm (1785-1853) was a genius, one of three linguists who deserved such an honor. So who are the other two? It is like the famous question about three common English words ending in -ry: the first two are angry and hungry—what’s the third? (Answer: The third does not exist; the question is a hoax.) But I really meant three. After Grimm came the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who, at the age of 21 (at this age, our undergraduates still need a spellchecker to tell them how to write a lot: one word or two?), offered a reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European vowel system that changed Indo-European studies forever. Later he gave a series of lectures on general linguistics at the University of Geneva. After his death, his students, who had made copious notes (as students should), brought them out in book form. Since their publication, general linguistics and, to a certain extent, all the humanities have never been the same. Finally, N.S. Trubetzkoy (1890-1938), a Russian émigré, who taught most of the time he spent in the West at Vienna University, founded a branch of linguistics called phonology. His achievement influenced the development of 20th-century humanities almost as strongly as de Saussure’s. Close to those three are the German Eduard Sievers (1850-1932) and Trubetzkoy’s friend and collaborator Roman Jakobson (1896-1982). Jakobson also emigrated from Russia after the 1917 revolution, and following the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, where he lived, fled to Sweden and a short time later to the United States. This is my ranking of the greatest greats. I left out Jean F. Champollion (1790-1832), who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics. He was certainly a genius, but not exactly a linguist in the modern sense of the word. Neither among the dead nor among the living can I find anyone approaching those three or five, but as I said in the post, linguistics is unlike music or mathematics, and the contours of genius there are blurry. Other nominations to this Hall (Club) of Fame are welcome.

No questions left behind? It depends. A journalism student sent me a series of questions (eight, to be precise) about the power of words, their change, and so on. She also explained that the answers were needed for a paper (she is not generic: there was a signature). I am accosted along these lines all the time, and I am sorry to inform the questioners that I refuse to write papers for students. I believe they should do their research themselves, and also I am afraid of disgracing myself. Rachmaninoff helped his niece (I think it was a niece) to harmonize a short piece for her studies at the Conservatory. The assignment received a C, the only time Rachmaninoff got a grade below an A or A+. He was tickled to death by the result, but I am touchy and do not want to get either the poor girl or myself into trouble.

Generic they/their. No one has asked me anything about this pronoun in recent weeks, but I have two examples in my archive that I find particularly silly. I think I have once quoted the first of them; however, a good joke bears repetition. “As someone who has been pro-life all their life, I believe life begins at the point of conception…” In principle, their with someone is fine, but the syntax is muddled, and the writer (this time a male) seems to have been stultified to the point at which “they” don’t dare use even the pronoun his and my about “themselves.” The second quotation stresses the importance of knowing everything about one’s bedfellows: “If your friend told you they were going to have sex with someone they ‘knew pretty well,’ you’d probably tell them to be careful.” Very reasonable. Always make it clear to those you sleep with on any occasion how wide-awake you are. The advice comes from the student paper of my university, which is predominantly interested in peace, sports, diversity, and condoms.

The change of er to ar in English and French. The change of er to ar in early Modern English is well-known, and I have touched on it in the past while answering a question from one of our correspondents. The anthologized examples are person ~ parson, university ~ varsity, clerk ~ Clark, Derby ~ Darby, and their likes. I even proposed a tentative explanation of the change. During the time Engl. er, ir, and ur merged into the vowel we now hear in fern, fir, and fur, in some words the group er, as I suggested, escaped the merger by going over to ar (hence parson, and so forth). Such movements regularly occur in phonetic systems. But the weak point of such explanations is that identical changes have been recorded in dissimilar languages. The question from our correspondent concerned the French family name Vardun. Assuming that it goes back to the place name Verdun (and there can probably be no doubt about it), are we justified in reconstructing the change of er to ar in French? The answer is yes. As early as the 13th century, rhymes of the sarge (the name of the fabric serge)/ large type and spellings like sarpent (= serpent) occur. Villon (the middle of the 15th century) rhymed terme and arme, among others. French historical linguists tend to account for the broadening of er to ar by the altered articulation of r. If they are right, an explanation of the same type may perhaps be sought for the change er to ar in English, but little is known about the pronunciation of Engl. r half a millennium ago, though its modern realizations, both southern British and American, are not ancient.

WORD ORIGINS
Cobbler and clobber. I received two comments on clobber, for which I am grateful. Here I would like to add something to what I said in my post. Skeat has a note on clopping, which I have known for a long time but did not include in the original discussion. Clop, a phonetic variant of clap, meant and still means (in dialects) “to adhere, cling to.” On the other hand, clop ~ klop is a sound imitative verb (to go clop-clop), related to Dutch kloppen and German klopfen “to knock.” Clob and clop may be variants of the same word, as are cob and cop in some of their meanings, while clobber “a black paste used by cobblers to fill up and conceal cracks in the leather of boots and shoes” seems to have something to do with “adhering.” If there were homonyms clop ~ clob meaning “adhere, stick to” and “knock,” they were probably often confused, and then clobber becomes rather transparent. Perhaps (if we accept the idea of metathesis, that is, a transposition of sounds in lob ~ obl) those words throw a sidelight on cobbler (the designation of someone who knocks on nails and makes parts of leather adhere to one another) and cobble.

Cockney. I will reproduce the question. “At the Greenhill Oak pub, Cuckney, Nottinghamshire, amongst other historical claims, notices state that in the reign of Edward III, the duke of Portland had incompetent men looking after the King’s horses (palfreys). They regularly shoed them badly, and the Duke was obliged to supply others costing 4 marks each. So Cuckney became used as a term for idiot, and changed to Cockney. Local tradition or just whimsy?” (I knew only shod as the past tense of the verb shoe, but the OED reassured me that shoed, though rare, also exists. This, however, is beside the point.) The story looks as though it were cut out of the whole cloth. The initial meaning of cockney was “pampered child, weakling,” not “simpleton, fool.” The Greenhill pub anecdote has no currency outside its walls, and if there were a grain of truth in it, etymologists would have investigated it long ago. Besides, cockney never had u in the first syllable. In my etymological dictionary, a long entry is devoted to the origin of this difficult word. It did indeed surface in the reign of Edward III and may have been borrowed from French. Its native homonym meant “cock’s egg” (that is, “a bad egg”).

Mirror. Is it connected with German Meer “sea”? No, it is not. Its root also occurs in admire and miracle, which means “to look.”

Opaque names. “Do we know when English people stopped recognizing the etymology of given names, that is, when did the English no longer recognize Edward, Edith, etc, as meaning ‘Wealth Guard,’ ‘War Wealth’, etc.?” The problem with such names is the same as with all so-called disguised compounds. As time goes on, their elements change phonetically and/or alter their meanings, so that their initial signification can no longer be recognized. Sometimes the change is slight. Those who rhyme Sunday with Grundy are one step away from sun + day. Monday is worse, because mon- is far removed from the modern pronunciation of moon. Cupboard is still worse, and if it were spelled cubbard (like Hubbard), no one would be able to guess its origin. Bon- in bonfire is a shortened form of bone, but who will believe it without consulting a dictionary? In Edward, -ward still resembles ward(en)/guard(ian), but ed- goes back to ead “property.” Since the word has not continued into Modern English, the sum has become obscure. Edith contains two lost words: ead, as in Edward, and guth “war, battle” (does the whole mean “war wealth”?). English is full of disguised compounds, including such short words as barn (originally “barley house”) and bridal, which at one time was not an adjective but a noun meaning “ale drunk at a wedding.” Names do not have to change so radically (compare Wolfgang), but they most often do.

I will answer some of the questions “left behind” on the last Wednesday (Othin’s/Odin’s day) of November, in the next set of “gleanings.”

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.