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The polar bear is now on the threatened species list. Global warming can be such a bummer.

By Anatoly Liberman

Hubba-hubba is dated slang, a word remembered even less then groovy and bobby-soxer. To my surprise, even my computer does not know it. And yet it was all over the place sixty and fifty years ago. Its origin attracted a good deal of attention soon after World War II and then again in the eighties. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

I keep receiving letters and comments on the spelling reform. When I broached this subject more than a month ago, I was aware of the fact that some groups on both sides of the Atlantic still believe in the possibility of the reform. Thanks to several responses, I now know more about their activities. They organize conferences and publish books on simplified spelling. I am full of sympathy for their work, even though their voices are weak and the wilderness is vast. There is no need to repeat the arguments of the opponents, for they, like the arguments of the advocates, have not changed since the middle of the 19th century. I will only dwell on two. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

I have once written about ragamuffin and its kin, including Italian ragazzo “boy,” which I think is a member of that extended family. Dealing with rag-devils had inured me to the dangers of demonology. (Pay attention to the alliteration. I am so used to writing notes on literary texts that I could not pass by my own sentence without a comment.) Those who know who Puck is remember him from Shakespeare. He is a mischievous sprite in Elizabethan comedy, and the modern adjective puckish also refers to mischief. Folklorists have studied this character extensively; among others, there is a book titled The Anatomy of Puck. Now that Puck has been dismembered, a historical linguist can fearlessly approach his body and draw a few tentative conclusions. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

People constantly wonder why understand means what it does. The concept of understanding is highly abstract. It is much easier to say I see (implying that now everything is clear), and I grasp (suggesting that the object is now mine in the literal or figurative sense) than I comprehend the nature and significance of a phenomenon or message. The briefest survey of other languages shows that words for observing (seeing) and seizing (grasping) are often used to express the ideas of comprehension and acquiring knowledge. The idea of “understanding” may also come from “separation”: we sift a mass of things and by sifting discern what they are made of (discern, from Old French, ultimately from Latin dis-cernere, is “to separate”). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

First I would like to respond to the comments on my discussion of spelling reform. I was aware of the continuing efforts by some groups to simplify English spelling, but I think their chances of success are slim, because there is no public awareness of the damage done by our erratic spelling system. We need respelling bins, similar to the now ubiquitous recycling bins. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

People always try to learn the origin of things, but the world and even most human institutions arose so long ago that our reconstruction can seldom be secure. Language is also old, and we know next to nothing about the circumstances in which it arose. The age of words differs greatly: some were coined millennia ago, others are recent. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Our civilization has reached a stage at which together we are extremely powerful and in our individual capacities nearly helpless. We (that is, we as a body) can solve the most complicated mathematical problems, but our children no longer know the multiplication table. Since they can use a calculator to find out how much six times seven is, why bother? Also, WE can fly from New York to Stockholm in a few hours, but, when asked where Sweden is, thousands of people answer with a sigh that they did not take geography in high school: it must be somewhere up there on the map. There is no need to know anything: given the necessary software, clever machines will do all the work and leave us playing videogames and making virtual love. The worst anti-utopias did not predict such a separation between communal omniscience and personal ignorance, such a complete rift between collective wisdom and individual stultification. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Everybody seems to resent buzzwords, and everybody uses them. It may therefore be of some interest to look at the origin of those universally reviled favorites. Language consists of ready-made blocks. When we want to express gratitude, we say thank you. The reaction is also predictable, even though the formula changes from decade to decade. At one time, people used to respond with if you please, don’t mention it, or not at all. All three yielded to you are welcome, and now I constantly hear no problem, which irritates me (of course, no problem).

(more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Etymologist, working sub specie aeternitatis, that is, routing among withered but durable leaves and dead (immortal?) roots, has seasonal stirrings. Of course, every month there are gleanings, but how much can a tiller, an inhabitant of a northern state, glean from barren furrows in December? Yet one more post and the year will be over—something to celebrate. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Strange things have been observed in the history of the verb shine, or rather in the history of its preterit (past). To begin with, a reminder. Verbs that change their vowels in the formation of the preterit and past participle are called strong (for instance, sing—sang—sung, shake—shook—shaken, smite—smote—smitten), in contradistinction to verbs that achieve the same results with the help of -t or -d (for instance, shock—shocked—shocked, cry—cried—cried). For practical purposes this division is almost useless, for weak verbs can also change their vowels, as in sleep—slept, and mixed types exist (the past of strew is strewed, but the past participle is usually strewn). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Countless unnatural things happen in the history of language. Coincidences, as bizarre as in Dickens’s novels, encounter us at every step. For example, it turns out that Modern Engl. un- is a symbiosis of two prefixes. One has broad Indo-European connections and is the same in English and Latin. It occurs in adjectives, adverbs, and participles, such as unkind, unkindly, undaunted, and can be appended with equal frequency to Germanic words (unwise, unfair, unfit, unheard-of) and to words of Romance origin (unable, unpromising, undaunted, unimaginable). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

A correspondent found the sentence (I am quoting only part of it) …stole a march on the old folks and made a flying trip to the home of… in a newspaper published in north Texas in 1913 and wonders what the phrase given above in boldface means. She notes that it occurs with some regularity in the clippings at her disposal. This idiom is well-known, and I have more than once seen it in older British and American books, so I was not surprised to find it in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). To steal (gain, get) a march on means “get ahead of to the extent of a march; gain a march by stealth,” hence figuratively “outsmart, outwit, bypass; avoid.” The earliest citation in the OED is dated to 1707. As far as I can judge, only the variant with steal has continued into the present, mainly or even only in its figurative meaning. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

The etymology of the adjective pretty has been investigated reasonably well. Many questions still remain unanswered, but it is the development of the word’s senses rather than its origin that amazes students of language. The root of pretty, which must have sounded approximately like prat, meant “trick.” Judging by the cognates of pretty in Dutch, Low (Northern) German and Old Icelandic, the adjectives derived from this root first meant “sly, crafty, roguish, sportive.” Before us is evidently a slang word that has been current in Northwestern Europe since long ago, a circumstance that can perhaps account for some of the vagaries of its history. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

It is of course snuck that will interest us, but the origin of this illegitimate form should not be handled in isolation. We can begin with sneak, a verb whose recorded history is relatively short. The earliest examples with it turned up about four hundred years ago. Old English had snican “creep,” with short i, and this form could have yielded sneak, just as Middle English crike, from Scandinavian, yielded creek. But for snican to become sneak, it had to pass through the stage sneek (such is the phonetic regularity), which has not been attested. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Bishop John Wilkins (1614-1672), a renowned man who regularly preached before the king himself, had multifarious sensible ideas, as one can judge by reading his works. A discovery of a new world, or, A discourse tending to prove that ‘tis probable there may be another habitable world in the moon: with a discourse concerning the probability of a passage thither… (we, postmodernists, love “discourse,” don’t we?) and Mercury, or, The secret and swift messenger shewing, how a man may with privacy and speed communicate his thoughts to a friend at any distance (this is what I do every Wednesday with the help of this blog). However, our readers are probably familiar only with his treatise Of the principles and duties of natural religion. Bishop Wilkins believed that English spelling is an appendix to the curse of Babel, and many wise and learned people shared his opinion. The very spelling shewing proves him right. (Shew survived the 19th century. Among the famous modern writers G. B. Shaw never wrote show. The reason for this strange spelling will be explained at some other time). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Etymologists constantly lament their fate: either the word to be explained was not recorded early enough (a typical case with vulgarisms and slang) or it is isolated (some monster like catawampus), or it has a sufficient number of allied forms but they are so similar that their semantic history cannot be traced (this circumstance—to give one example—handicaps the research into the origin of dwarf: like their English cognate, German Zwerg, Swedish dverg, etc., denote a short person, but how this combinations of sounds acquired its meaning is hard to decide ). The list is long enough for composing a full-fledged elegy “The Etymologist’s Complaint.” By contrast, an overwhelming amount of material may also pose problems. A case in point is the children’s verse of the eena—meena—mina—mo type. It has been recorded in numerous countries from east to west—naturally, in different form, but the first word is more or less the same everywhere. Although eena and its kin resemble one, they are too far from it to be qualified as its “garbled” or “corrupted” variants. Nor are meena, mina, and mo less obscure than eena. Why some human or beast has to be caught by the toe is equally puzzling but will not concern us. I will touch only on the English word eena and its analogues.

Our first sojourn will be in the Yorkshire Dales, where sheep are (or were at the end of the 19th century) scored as follows: yain, taien, tethera, (m)ethera, pi(m)p (the first five numerals). Another variant is eina, peina, para, pattera, pith. The origin of those numerals has been subjected to a long and fruitful discussion, whose main result is that we observe here a relic of an ancient British (Celtic) system of counting. Since to modern speakers yain, taien, etc. are meaningless words, their form is unstable and tends to vary from region to region. Some of the lists are mere gibberish, with English words replacing the original numerals, and rhyming words invented by informants. Complications arise when we cross the ocean and discover a similar string of numerals in use among the native population in North America, for example, een, teen, tother, fither, pimp, with the variant eeny, teeny, tuthery, fethery, fip. The American (Wawena) numerals were published in 1867. According to an informed opinion, those scores should be regarded as tally-marks rather than numbers; they were used in counting by fives, tens, or twenties. Presumably, they were “brought to New England by English colonists and used by them in dealing with the Indians in counting fish, beaver skins, and other articles of traffic. When the memory of their origin was lost, the Anglo-Americans believed them to be Indian numerals, and the Indians probably believed them to be good English.”

According to other hypotheses, the home of the phrase eena, meena, mina, mo is French Canadian or a language spoken on an island off the West Coast of Africa. Both hypotheses are fanciful. One should never tire of repeating that the idea of borrowing has value only when the way of penetration is known. In the world of words, tales, and customs, seeming convergences abound. Some words, plots, and rituals often have close analogue in different regions. It is easy and tempting to suggest borrowing. Positing loans without identifying intermediaries is a waste of time. The Celtic origin of sheep scoring is nearly certain. Incidentally, not only sheep and not only in Yorkshire are counted this way. The unresolved question is the connection between the American list and eena, meena, mina, mo. The resemblance between the rhyme and eina, peina, para, pattera; yain, taien, tethera, (m)ethera; eeny, teeny, tuthery, fethery is minimal. Only the first word is almost the same, and, as pointed out, it is such everywhere. Far from the English speaking world, Russian girls begin their games with the words eniki, beniki (eni-, pronounced like Engl. any). The second words (meena and beniki) must have been coined as rhyming partners of eena and beniki, but where did the first ones come from? The Old English for one was pronounced an (with a as in father), in Middle English it changed to on (with o as in British pawn); neither can be called a phonetic variant of eena. Equally slight is the similarity between eniki (after we subtract the meaningless ending -ki) and Russian odin “one” (stress on the second syllable; its older form began with ted- or yed-). Referring eeny to some “ancient British numeral” like eina suggests itself (obviously, a reasonable solution), but why wasn’t the entire sequence reproduced? Why only the first word? Children’s folklore often preserves remnants of ancient incantations, but no such incantation has been found. As far as we can judge, no magic formula ever began with eeny or eniki. Russian etymological dictionaries do not discuss eniki; the OED calls eena a nonsense word. To be sure, all is nonsense that we do not understand. Folklorists believe that the English counting out rhyme is relatively recent. If this is true, the emergence of eeny and its closeness to words like eniki makes the riddle of its origin even harder.

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By Anatoly Liberman

Thanks to the correspondents who commented on the earlier posts. Some time ago, in discussing the origin of Georgia cracker, I could only refer to some inconclusive derivations of this slang phrase. Craig Apple writes: “My understanding (and I absolutely can not document this) was that a ‘cracker’ was a turpentine distiller, the process of rendering turpentine from pine tar being analogous to the cracking of crude oil to produce, say, gasoline. Crackers… went off alone into the woods for months to boil pine tar—they came out with a wagon full of casks…. So, like ‘redneck’ it became a general term of opprobrium for poor rural whites.” (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Even a quick look at the history of words meaning “break” shows how often they begin with the sound group br-. Break has cognates in several Germanic languages. The main Old Scandinavian verb was different (compare Modern Swedish brytta, Norwegian brytte, and so forth), but it, too, began with br-. A verb related to brytta existed in Old English (breotan). (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

I wish I could write something called “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” but, unfortunately, a similar idea occurred to someone who lived before me. So I’ll write “The Curmudgeon and the Catawampus” instead. Who is a curmudgeon? The word has been around in English books since 1577 (OED). Samuel Johnson, the author of a famous 18th-century dictionary, defined the gentleman in question as “avaricious churlish fellow,” but in British usage a curmudgeon’s first quality (love of money) is more prominent than the second (lack of social mores). A British curmudgeon is preeminently a miser. Nearly all lexicographers agree on that point. Only Henry Cecil Wyld, in his A Universal English Dictionary, says “a churlish, cross-grained, surly, ill-tempered, cantankerous fellow.” (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Part one of this essay can be found here.

Faggot “bundle of firewood,” which can be spelled with g or with gg, came to Middle English from French. Modern French has fagot (with the same meaning) and fagoter “tie up (wood, etc.) in bundles.” Italian fagotto “bassoon,” ultimately of the same origin (or so it seems), spread to many languages. (more…)

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By Anatoly Liberman

Even though etymology rests on the solid foundation of the comparative method, its conclusions are tentative, like those of all sciences dealing with reconstruction. Knowledge of sound correspondences and historical facts may prevent researchers from making silly mistakes, but it often fails to point the way to the best solution. In tracing the prehistory of words, serendipity and inspiration still play (and will always play) a role. The next two essays on this blog owe their existence to a happy coincidence. In some British dialects, pimp means “small bundle of firewood.” This fact (recorded in the OED) has been celebrated, to use a trendy word, in several books on language, though I am not aware of anyone’s attempt to explain the second meaning. Nor did I intend to delve into this problem, but, when I read about pimp “bundle,” I decided, out of curiosity, to look it up in several dictionaries. One definition struck me as nearly incredible: pimp “faggot.” Faggot, it will be recalled, besides being an insult, means “bundle of sticks.” How could one opprobrious word become the definition of another? This is what made me study both of them. My conclusions have a few holes, but perhaps they will partly dispel the obscurity enveloping the etymology of pimp and faggot. At the moment, all dictionaries say: “Pimp. Origin unknown.” (more…)

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My submission for this week's Illustration Friday prompt. It's a personal painting I did last year during my senior year at art school, greatly inspired by a beautiful polar bear photograph you may have seen before. I called it "The Family Ursus Martinus," as it represents the dynamic of my own family...