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By Anatoly Liberman

The terrible word slough
Some time ago, in my discussion of English spelling, I touched on the group ough, this enfant terrible of our orthography; slough figured prominently in it. One slough, the verb meaning “shed the skin,” rhymes with enough. The other is problematic and had a tortuous history. John Bunyan, the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (the last quarter of the eighteenth century), made the Slough of Despond famous. He was not sure of the word’s written image, and in his book we find They drew near to a very Miry Slough…. The name of the Slow was Despond. It is not for nothing that rough and bough look so much alike. The group ough could develop into a diphthong (many people say dipthong—a habit worth “sloughing”) or yield uff. Someone who has never seen the word clough “ravine” will not know whether is rhymes with bough, cough, or through.

If I am not mistaken, in Standard British English, slough “mire” (and the surname Slough) rhymes with bough, but in American English it rhymes with through. I am not sure because I never hear this word and can rely only on the evidence of dictionaries. The Century Dictionary, published in the United States around the year 1900, says that slough “a hole full of deep mud or mire; a quagmire of considerable depth and comparatively small depth of surface” rhymes with bough, while when it has the sense “a marshy hollow; a reedy pond; also, a long and shallow ravine, or open creek, which becomes partly or wholly dry in summer [Western U.S.],” it is spelled slue, slew, or sloo and rhymes with through. Other dictionaries either state that the variants are interchangeable or give only one pronunciation, namely sloo. Sloo is well-known in British dialects, from where it came to the New World. As usual, it will be interesting to read the comments of our readers from different parts of the English-speaking world. One thing is clear: a snake “sluffs” its skin.

The pronunciation sloo could not be immediately predicted from the noun’s past. In such words, the usual variants are “uff” (rough, tough, and so forth) or “ow” (bough); cough is regular but exceptional. Occasionally both variants coexist, as in enough ~ enow or sough “rushing or murmuring of the sea,” which some people rhyme with enough and others with enow. Sloo goes back to sloh (with a long vowel in Old English). For some reason, final h in this noun could be lost, and, when it was, slo developed like school and other words with long o (that is, with the vowel of Modern Engl. awe). The only analog of sloo I can think of is through, but prepositions are usually unstressed, so that in through the loss of final h in Middle English causes no surprise.

An authentic cluck-ma-doodle. (An impish face carved on St. Mary’s 14th century font, Knaith. Photo by Richard Croft. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

How old is the now common British pronunciation foiv for five and the like?
In London, this pronunciation is not very old. At the end of the nineteenth century, Skeat noted that in his youth no one heard it. Dickens’s characters like Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp (Sairey Gamp), the ultimate Cockney speaker in Martin Chuzzlewit, do not say noin and foiv, though Oi for I turns up in many Victorian novels. It is often contended that Dickens was not a reliable observer of Cockney speech. This accusation cannot be taken seriously: Dickens’s ear for sounds was splendid, as, among many other things, his reproduction of American speech in the same novel and of the Yorkshire accent in Nicholas Nickleby shows. Incidentally, he himself never quite got rid of some peculiarities of Cockney. Foiv for five is undoubtedly dialectal, but it came to London relatively late, probably around the time of Dickens’s death (1870) and is not an ancient feature of Cockney. Its adoption by educated speakers is amazing, but people do not hear what they say, and most are sure that their pronunciation is the same as that of their grandparents. (In my memory, British oh no has turned almost universally into eu neu.)

Ukraine once more.
The place name Ukraine cannot be a cognate of Latvian Ukris, if Ukris is a native word. Ukraina, related to Russian okraina, has a prefix (u- ~ o). The root is krai- “region,” n is a suffix, and -a the ending of a feminine noun. In Ukris, as I understand, ukr- is the root.

Fighting against who? or whom?
I keep cutting out sentences in which writers try desperately to decide whether they should say who or whom. But this is like speaking a foreign language: one can never be absolutely certain that the chosen variant is correct. A caption:

“J.J., right, with sister S., who she had been visiting in XX.”

Someone writing for the Associated Press and quoting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (in an English translation):

“The key to toning down the situation in our view is ending military operation against protesters. Then, I am convinced, these people who you call separatists will take reciprocal action.”

And now to the most sacrosanct source of them all, The New York Times:

“The government has offered amnesties before that did not lead to the release of the tens of thousands of people whom human rights advocates say have been detained or imprisoned during the unrest in the country.”

The last sentence is the worst of them all.

To be sure, if the writers had studied a language like German or Russian, or Latin, all of which have cases, they would have understood that there are such things as the nominative, the genitive, the dative, and the accusative. It would have become clear to them that despite the erosion of the who-whom distinction in American English, the educated norm still requires the nominative who and the oblique case whom, except when the Standard has abolished the difference (Who are you referring to?). Or they may have compared he/him with who/whom. But grammar is not fun, as has been repeated many times. So we meet people whom we thought were dead and meet people who we try to avoid.

Folk etymology at large
In my book on word origins, I devoted a few pages to words like frigmajig “a toy; a trifle; anything that moves or works about.” Last week, I ran into a letter to the editor published in 1930. It was about a self-recording barometer with the words click ma doodle on it. According to a story told at Elderline, the inhabitants found washed ashore a body of a man with a watch in his pocket, still going. None of them had ever seen or heard of such a thing. Finally, a wise man residing in the district arrived. He too was ignorant of the object but did not want to confess it and shouted “It’s a Click-ma-doodle! Kill it!” And it was smashed with stones. This is allegedly the origin of the trademark (many seaside towns had or still have barometers with the same words). I am sure that click ma doodle was coined on the model of other dialectal words like frigmajig, but the story (a hundred percent apocryphal?) is not devoid of interest as a record of human ingenuity when it comes to word origins.

Unless I receive many queries and comments before 15 July, read the next “gleanings” on 24 September 2014.

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

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The post Monthly etymology gleanings for June 2014, part 2 appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Anatoly Liberman

A Happy New Year to our readers and correspondents! Questions, comments, and friendly corrections have been a source of inspiration to this blog throughout 2012, as they have been since its inception. Quite a few posts appeared in response to the questions I received through OUP and privately (by email). As before, the most exciting themes have been smut and spelling. If I wanted to become truly popular, I should have stayed with sex, formerly unprintable words, and the tough-through-though gang. But being of a serious disposition, I resist the lures of popularity. It is enough for me to see that, when I open the page “Oxford Etymologist,” the top post invites the user to ponder the origin of fart. And indeed, several of my “friends and acquaintance” (see the previous gleanings) have told me that they enjoy my blog, but invariably added: “I have read your post on fart. Very funny.” I remember that after dozens of newspapers reprinted the fart essay, I promised a continuation on shit. Perhaps I will keep my promise in 2013. But other ever-green questions also warm the cockles of my heart, especially in winter. For instance, I never tire of answering why flammable means the same as inflammable. Why really? And now to business.

Folk etymology. “How much of the popular knowledge of language depends on folk etymology?” I think the question should be narrowed down to: “How often do popular ideas of language depend on folk etymology?” People are fond of offering seemingly obvious explanations of word origins. Sometimes their ideas change a well-established word. Shamefaced, to give just one example, developed from shame-fast (as though restrained by shame). Some mistakes are so pervasive that one day the wrong forms may share the fate of shame-fast. Such is, for example, protruberance, by association with protrude. Despite what the OED says, it seems more probable that miniscule developed from minuscule only because the names of mini-things begin with mini-. Incidentally, from a historical point of view, even miniature has nothing to do with the picture’s small size. Most people would probably say that massacre has the root mass- (“mass killing”), but the two words are not connected. Anyone can expand this list.

Sound symbolism. A correspondent has read my book on word origins and came across a section on words beginning with gr-, such as Grendel and grim. Since they often refer to terror and cruelty (at best they designate gruff and grouchy people), he wonders how the word grace belongs here. It does not. Sound symbolism is a real force in language. One can cite any number of words with initial gl- for things glistening and gleaming, with fl- when flying, flitting, and flowing are meant, as well as unpleasant sl-words like slimy and sleazy. But green, flannel, and slogan will show that at best we have a limited tendency rather than a rule. Besides, many sound symbolic associations are language-specific. So somebody who has a daughter called Grace need not worry.

Grendel attacking Three Graces.

Engl. galoot and Catalan golut.  More than four years ago, I wrote a triumphant post on the origin of Engl. galoot. The reason for triumph was that I was the first to discover the word’s derivation (a memorable event in the life of an etymologist). Just this month one of our correspondents discovered that post and asked about its possible connection with Catalan golut “glutton; wolverine.” This, I am sure, is a coincidence. In the Romance languages, we find words representing two shapes of the same root, namely gl- and gl- with a vowel between g and l. They inherited this situation from Latin: compare gluttire “to swallow” and gola “throat.” English borrowed from Old French and later from Latin several words representing both forms of the root, as seen in glut ~ glutton and gullet. As for the sense “wolverine” (the name of a proverbially voracious animal, Gulo luscus), it has also been recorded in English. By contrast, Engl. galoot has not been derived from the gl- root, with or without a vowel in the middle. It goes back to Dutch, while the Dutch took it over from Italian galeot(t)o “sailor” (which is akin to galley).

Judgement versus judgment. This is an old chestnut. Both spellings have been around for a long time. Acknowledgment and abridgment belong with judgment. Since the inner form of all those word is unambiguous, the variants without e cause no trouble. The widespread opinion that judgment is American, while judgement is British should be repeated with some caution, because the “American” spelling was at one time well-known in the UK. However, it is true that modern American editors and spellcheckers require the e-less variant. I would prefer (though my preference is of absolutely no importance in this case) judgement, that is, judge + ment. The deletion of e produces an extra rule, and we have enough of silly spelling rules already. Another confusing case with -dg- is the names Dodgson and Hodgson. Those bearers of the two names whom I knew pronounced them Dodson and Hodson respectively, but, strangely, many dictionaries give only the variant with -dge-. Is it known how Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland, pronounced his name?

Zigzag and Egypt. The tobacco company called its products Zig-Zag after the “zigzag” alternating process it used, though it may have knowingly used the reference to the ancient town Zig-a-Zag (I have no idea). Anyway, the English word does not have its roots in the Egyptian place name.

Lark. I was delighted to discover that someone had followed my advice and listened to Glinka-Balakirev’s variations. It is true that la-la-la does not at all resemble the lark’s trill, and this argument has been used against those who suggested an onomatopoeic origin of the bird’s name. But, as long as the bird is small, la seems to be a universal syllable in human language representing chirping, warbling, twittering, trilling, and every other sound in the avian kingdom. It was also a pleasure to learn that specialists in Frisian occasionally read my blog. I know the many Frisian cognates of lark thanks to Århammar’s detailed article on this subject (see lark in my bibliography of English etymology).

Bumper. I was unable to find an image of the label used on the bottles of brazen-face beer. My question to someone who has seen the label: “Was there a picture of a saucy mug on it?” (The pun on mug is unintentional.) I am also grateful for the reference to the Gentleman’s Magazine. My database contains several hundred citations from that periodical, but not the one to which Stephen Goranson, a much better sleuth that I am, pointed. This publication was so useful for my etymological bibliography that I asked an extremely careful volunteer to look through the entire set of Lady’s Magazine and of about a dozen other magazines with the word lady in the title. They were a great disappointment: only fashion, cooking, knitting, and all kinds of household work. Women did write letters about words to Notes and Queries, obviously a much more prestigious outlet. However, we picked up a few crumbs even from those sources. The word bomber-nickel puzzled me. I immediately thought of pumpernickel but could not find any connection between the bread and the vessel discussed in the entry I cited. I still see no connection. As for pumpernickel, I am well aware of its origin and discussed it in detail in the entry pimp in my dictionary (pimp, pump, pomp-, pumper-, pamper, and so forth).

Again. It was instructive to see the statistics about the use of the pronunciation again versus agen and to read the ditty in which again has a diphthong multiple times. If I remember correctly, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, and others rhymed again only with words like slain, though one never knows to what extent they exploited the so-called rhyme to the eye. Most probably, they did pronounce a diphthong in again.

Scots versus English, as seen in 1760 (continued from the previous gleanings).

• Sc. fresh weather ~ Engl. open weather
• Sc. tender ~ Engl. fickly
• Sc. in the long run ~ Engl. at long run
• Sc. with child to a man ~ Engl. with child by a man (To be continued.)

Happy holidays! We’ll meet again in 2013.

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 him care of [email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”

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Image credit: (1) Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Three Graces, 1531. The Louvre via Wikimedia Commons. (2) An illustration of the ogre Grendel from Beowulf by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall in J. R. Skelton’s Stories of Beowulf (1908) via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Monthly etymology gleanings for December 2012 appeared first on OUPblog.

Marc Palatucci, Intern

In my family, there is a story that has been told and retold countless times over the past few decades. It involves my grandfather Oscar. As the story goes, a young, robust Oscar climbs the ladder to the high dive at the local public swimming pool with a lit cigarette tucked firmly between his lips. Eventually he makes his way to the lofty platform, and approaches the edge. At this point he pauses, and with his hands at his sides, manipulates his mouth in such a way as to flip the still burning cigarette backwards, gripping the butt between his teeth, clenching his lips shut, and leaving the ember hovering precariously above his tongue.
He then leaps from the diving board, holding his breath along with the onlookers as he plummets, eventually plunging into the water below. Upon surfacing, he spins the cigarette back out of his mouth, and exhales a triumphant billow of smoke, to the delight and awe of the spectators. Now, as the years have passed, I cannot help but question the veracity of this story. Of course any tale that travels by word of mouth will develop certain idiosyncrasies with each telling, but even the facts of this account seem hard to believe. Nevertheless, I see it as an heirloom of sorts, and I tell it fondly, if incredulously.

Along with the family lore, another inheritance of mine is an avid love of words. During my childhood, dinner table conversation was rife with obscure vocabulary, lighthearted debates on grammar and usage, and inevitably the stories of how words and phrases came to be. These stories, or etymologies, were always fanciful, and revealed to me the boundless level of imagination embedded in our language. With this sense of fascination about linguistic histories instilled in me from a young age, I was instantly curious when David Wilton’s book Word Myths landed on my desk. I was at once enthralled and repelled. You see, throughout my studies and conversations on linguistics, I had heard whispers here and there that certain of the etymological tales that had delighted me as a child were not entirely accurate. Now here was a book, a legitimate, well researched book, designed to discount those stories. The integrity of my childhood was at stake! Nonetheless, my curiosity prevailed, and I dove in. Much to my relief, the dear recollections from my youth were not corrupted or denatured. Rather, the book was teeming with captivating linguistic legends, with some of the substantiated anecdotes proving more whimsical than those that were fabricated. Alas, I could no longer believe in good conscience that Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, as I had been told, but all was not lost. It turns out some Eskimo languages do have many words for snow, in the same way English has many words for water (ocean, sound, brook, rivulet, cascade, and so on). Thus, there was some kernel of truth at the heart of the myth.

It turned out the doubts I had feared about the fictitious etymologies were no more damaging than my doubts about the legend of my grandfather’s aquatic feat. The mere bounds of reality simply cannot detract from stories so great. With words and stories both, there are no fine lines or distinct boundaries of meaning. That is the very source of their wonder. Stories are not always intended to convey facts, but to stimulate the mind. Myths are invented to explain and describe the unfathomable and ineffable, swapping fact for metaphor. It is a debate of the scientist versus the poet, but my allegiance lies somewhere between the two. A day will come when I sit around the dinner table with children of my own, and I will most certainly let my imagination get the better of me. Yes, I will regale them with tales of their great grandfather’s high dive daredevilry, and I will probably cite some statistical hyperbole on Eskimo linguistics for good measure. I will not be lying to them, I will be entertaining them, enthusiastically so, and without pause, taking solace in the fact that the best stories are always, quite literally, incredible.