Jeremy Butterfield's Blog, page 20

“American” words in English: where would we be without them? They own the bulk of the shares

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“There is no such thing as the Queen’s English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!”

Mark Twain said that as far back as 1897 (Following the Equator, Chapter XXIV). While many Brits continue to entertain the attitude typified (or satirized) by Max Beerbohm:

“He held, too, in his enlightened way, that Americans have a perfect right to exist. But he did often find himself wishing Mr Rhodes had not enabled them to exercise that right in Oxford.”

Zuleika Dobson, 1911

all of us (i.e. English-speakers) use U.S.-coined words some – if not all – of the time.

Oscar Wilde’s quip “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language” really does not apply to so very many words – though the differences between British and U.S. English as indefatigably explored by Lynne Murphy, are still legion.

Twentieth-century “new” words

As mentioned in an earlier blog, I’m having great fun looking at words that “came into the language” year by year from 1900 onwards, and tweeting one or two a day. To find them, I use “advanced search” in the OED specifying “headword” and a given year. Each year there are usually round 500 such words, and in some years rather more (e.g. 1900: 686), but very occasionally rather fewer (e.g. 1913: 451). [Note that very careful use of fewer, ;-)]

That search excludes words which [yes, oh Word grammar checker, it’s fine to use “which” in a defining clause] acquired new meanings in any year. So, what I end up with is a list of completely new “visitors” (in bird terms) to our language. For each year, I generally look at the first 100, ordered by frequency, and then select 20 or so according to criteria explained in the earlier blog.

Now, while doing this (at the time of writing, I had got up to 1915), I found myself wondering more and more insistently just how many emerged in British English and how many in U.S.English. I was expecting U.S. English to produce the greater number, but my little sample surprised even me.

A 50-word personal sample

I chose 20 words from 1909 and 30 from 1913, thus giving me a nice round figure of 50 to do easy percentages with. The OED lists a few of them as “Orig. U.S.” and variants on that theme. But I had a suspicion that more of them were U.S. than that labelling suggested. I decided to look at the written source which the OED had tracked down as the first record of the word: was it an American journal/newspaper/book, or a British one?

The totals are as follows: U.S. = 33; Brit = 16; other = 1

i.e. 66% of words are first cited in U.S. sources.

Some caveats are in order, of course.

First, several of the OED entries have not been revised for the third edition; different dates and sources may therefore be found.

Second, the fact that a word first appears in a U.S. source does not prove conclusively that it is an American coinage, though it does point strongly in that direction.

And, third, my sample is neither random, nor large enough to prove anything. But it is, to my mind, very suggestive, given that most of these words must surely be considered part of everyday language, rather than technical.

I also labelled the words with a subject field. “Modern life” is a bit of a cop-out, to avoid too many labels; “General language”, as you will see, includes several informal or (once) slangy terms.

“Bull” does not mean what you might think

Hopefully, the abbreviations in the list of sources are self-explanatory. “Bull.”, by the way, means “Bulletin”. Newspapers figure as the first citation for ten words; three appear first in dictionaries.

Finally, some of the first citations are piquant: Winston Churchill for seaplane, Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street for lav, P.G. Wodehouse for fifty-fifty, and Arnold Bennett for turn-round. The relevant citations follow the table.

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Words are in order of frequency as listed in the OED. Finally, quite why piggy bank first appears in the Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette for March 1913 is anyone’s guess.

Headword
Year
Country
Source
Field

gene
1909
US
Amer. Naturalist
science

movies
1909
US
Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican
entertainment

cinema
1909
Brit
Tragedy of the Pyramids
entertainment

trade-off
1909
US
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
business, economics

coke
1909
US
Coca-Cola Bottler (Philadelphia)
modern life

air conditioning
1909
US
Useful Information Cotton Manufacturers
modern life

exponentially
1909
US
Cent. Dict. Suppl.
science

libido
1909
US
Freud Sel. Papers on Hysteria
psychology

fuselage
1909
Brit
Flight
transport

empathic
1909
US
Lect. Exper. Psychol. Thought-processes
psychology

multi-party
1909
Brit
Englishwoman
politics

mindset
1909
US
Philos., Psychol. & Sci. Methods
psychology

rite of passage
1909
Brit
Folk-Lore
anthropology

neo-cortex
1909
Brit
Arch. Neurol. & Psychiatry
psychology

counter-offensive
1909
Brit
Daily Chronicle
warfare

xenophobia
1909
Brit
Athenæum
politics

socialite
1909
US
Oakland (Calif.) Tribune
general language

scrounge
1909
US
Webster’s New Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang.
general language

gaffe

Brit
Pall Mall Gaz.
general language

bakelite
1909
US
Jrnl. Industr. & Engin. Chem.
modern life

isotope
1913
Brit
Nature
science

close-up
1913

US
Technique Photoplay
entertainment

Salmonella
1913
Brit
Pract. Bacteriol
medicine

project management
1913

US
Nevada State Jrnl
business, economics

behaviourism
1913
US
Psychol. Rev.
psychology

superconductor
1913

Proc. Sect. Sci. K. Akad
science

big picture
1913

US
Titusville (Pa.) Herald
entertainment

comic strip
1913

US
Altoona (Pa.) Mirror
entertainment

streamlined
1913
Brit
Aeroplane
transport

not-for-profit
1913

US
Ann. Amer. Acad. Polit. & Social Sci.
business, economics

talkie
1913
US
Writer’s Bull.
entertainment

petrochemical
1913
US
Chem. Abstr.
science

record player
1913

US
Waterloo (Iowa) Times-Tribune
entertainment

seaplane
1913

Brit
Hansard Commons
transport

turn-round
1913
Brit
The Regent
general language

stooge
1913
US
Sat. Evening Post
general language

person-to-person
1913

US
Lincoln (Nebraska) Daily Star
general language

anti-freeze
1913

US
Dict. Automobile Terms
transport

pre-eclampsia
1913
Brit
Lancet
medicine

fifty-fifty
1913
US
Little Nugget
general language

once-over
1913
US
N.Y. Evening Jrnl
general language

lav
1913
Brit
Sinister St
general language

pep talk
1913

US
Colorado Springs Gaz.
general language

intelligence quotient
1913
US
Psychol. Bull.
psychology

parsec
1913

Brit
Monthly Notices Royal Astron. Soc.
science

reflexology
1913
US
Med. World
medicine

sexologist
1913
US
Pract. Treat. Causes, Symptoms & Treatm. Sexual Impotence
medicine

admin
1913
US
Trans. 15th Internat. Congr. Hygiene & Demography
general language

headcount
1913
US
Motion-pict. Work
general language

piggy bank
1913
US
Dietetic & Hygienic Gaz
general language

seaplane: Hansard Commons, 17 July – We have decided to call the naval hydroplane a seaplane, and the ordinary aeroplane or school machine, which we use in the Navy, simply a plane. (Churchill)

lav: Sinister St. I. vii. 99 – Tell the army to line up behind the lav. at four o’clock. (Mackenzie)

(lav is marked as “Chiefly Brit” and “colloq.” in the OED)

fifty-fifty: Little Nugget vi. 121 – Say, Sam, don’t be a hawg. Let’s go fifty-fifty in dis deal. (Wodehouse)

turn-round: The Regent x. 291 – She’s going to do the quickest turn-round that any ship ever did… She’ll leave at noon to-morrow.

Filed under: Word origins Tagged: 20th-century words year by year, Mark Twain, Oxford, US & British usage

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Published on April 21, 2017 02:38

Where does the word television come from? Twentieth-century words: the first quinquennium.

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A 1900 word that had to wait over 25 years to be instantiated. (Yup, that’s a word too — from 1949.)

A few days ago, I started a daily tweet with two, or occasionally three, words per year for every year of the twentieth century, starting in 1900. I tweet them with their first citation from the OED, which is the source I extracted them from/from which I extracted them [strike through according to taste].

I can hardly claim that this is a unique or novel approach, but it is fun and illuminating in several different ways. You never know what you will find until you find it, if you see what I mean. A bit like online dating — or so they tell me — but without the risk.

What I will do here is list the pairs or triplets of words selected for 1900-1904; provide more information about one of them, namely the gogglebox; and mention others that I didn’t tweet about.

(The full list of my entirely subjective selection is at the end.)

Selecting according to how often the words are used

For any given year, the OED records hundreds of “new words”. For instance, for 1900 there are 686. (That is, extracting “headwords”, rather than “lemmas” or “meanings”.)

How to choose?

They come ordered alphabetically – Hello! The OED is a dictionary — which means that the first one for 1900 is abiologic = abiological – hardly a vocable to set this word buff’s pulses racing.

I had to find a quick and dirty way of identifying potentially interesting ones. The OED rescued me: it helpfully indicates how often a word is used nowadays by means of a series of eight frequency bands, full details of which you can see here.

Sorting words for 1900 by current frequency banishes the worthy but boring abiologic and enthrones…television.

“What!” I hear you say. “TV hadn’t been invented back then.” Correct, it hadn’t. But something/someone does not necessarily have to exist just because there is a word or phrase for them (think unicorns, phlogiston, Bertrand Russell’s teapot, the Philosopher’s Stone, basilisks, Aphrodite, mirages, and, probably, God, to name just a few).

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Smog: first named and shamed in 1905. The Big Apple looking very mysterious and Whistlerian.

Reality imitates language

The divine Oscar paradoxed that “Life imitates art more than Art imitates life.”

It is similarly true that Reality sometimes imitates, or at least catches up with, Language, particularly the language of science and science fiction. H.G. Wells’s coined atomic bomb in 1914, decades before it became reality. Television also nicely illustrates this same phenomenon.

The first 1900 citation speculates excitedly and futuristically. It is from the June issue of The Century Magazine, an illustrated monthly US publication started in 1881 that lasted nearly half a century. The second is from The Electrician, which, no, is not yer average sparky, but an august and earnest London publication billed by Wikipedia as “the earliest and foremost electrical engineering and scientific journal”, and published for nigh on a hundred years.

Through television and telephone we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face.

[GASP!]

(One day it will finally dawn on inveterate texting addicts that you can actually SPEAK face to face on a mobie)

At the afternoon sitting on Friday, M. C. Perskyi read a communication on ‘Television’, describing a number of apparatus based on the magnetic properties of selenium.

31 Sept. 822/2

The OED revised (3rd edn) definition for television goes as follows: “A system used for transmitting and viewing images and (typically) sound; the action of transmitting and viewing images using such a system (now rare). In later use: esp. such a system used for the organized broadcast of professionally produced shows and programmes.”

The Electrician citation presumably refers to “the action of …” mentioned in that definition.

Yes, but what about how the word was coined?

As the OED puts it, “Formed within English, by compounding. Etymons: tele– comb. form, vision n.”

That “combining form” tele– is probably otherwise best known from telephone, and is from Classical Greek τηλε-, meaning “far”. Television, therefore, could be interpreted as “far seeing”, (which is how German deals with it in Fernsehen). French had an influence: according to the OED, some of the earliest tele– words were created in French, and, it seems, that what Mr Perskyi had in mind in his “communication” noted above was the Gallic télévision.

“Meanwhile”, Modern Greek calques, possibly English, by repossessing the Classical τηλε- element and adding to it the word for “vision, sight”, όραση, to produce τηλeόραση [tī-le-O-ra-sī].

Why did I choose the words?

Having sorted by frequency, I then looked at the first 100 or so for each year. Thereafter, it was whim, dear lady, pure whim. Yeah, no, seriously, my criteria were:

• Does the word have some currency or resonance now? (single currency, racism)

• Did it historically? (suffragette)

• Has it some cultural heritage/baggage/clout/oomph, etc? [“Cultural” in its widest sense] (Dubliner, psychoanalysis)

• Is it so much part of everyday language that it might be difficult to conceive of its ever having been “invented”? (trivia, hormone)

• Was it a (major) discovery/invention? (radio, escalator, chemotherapy)

• Wow! Was it really coined that long ago? (re-evaluate, packaged, Ms., sportswear, eatery)

• Wow! You mean it didn’t exist before! No way! (Dubliner again)

• Did sex come into it? [I’m only human – allegedly – after all.] (voyeur, Tantric)

• Was/is it slangy?

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This stands for “airport”. I’m old enough for TWA to mean something, a bit like BOAC. Both “initialisms”, technically, btw.

Come to think of it, those are post hoc justifications [NB: Latin phrases never hyphenated] , and “whim” is about right. My method is evolving as I go along, while the number of words I list per year before selecting my lucky pair (emboldened below) also varies. For what they’re worth, here are my shortlists.

A couple of words of caution. First word: these earliest citations sometimes refer to a meaning that is not the main current meaning. Second word: some of these entries have not been revised by the OED. It is therefore possible that, when they finally are, an earlier “first date” might be found.

1900:

television

egocentric

dorm

escalator

physiotherapy

hill-billy

Dubliner

voyeur

single currency

ping-pong

motorcyclist

come-hither look

sleuth

Bramley apple

1901:

• Ms.

hospitalize

• noble gas

• eatery

• arty

• chink (i.e. Chinese)

1902:

• airport

• garage

• suitcase

• paranoid

• audio-visual

• limousine

• number two(s)

• trivia

• skoda

• terrazzo

1903:

• basically

• radio

• clone

• landfill

• man on the Clapham omnibus

• to neuter

• sportswear

• Pepsi-Cola

• fandom

• racism

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Could this be the elusive “Man on the Clapham omnibus”. To me, he looks more like a toff from a first-class train, but never judge a book, etc. I can remember my father wearing a bowler hat to work (and some clothes, as well).

1904:

• comic book

• back-track

• demo

• meaningfulness

• chiropractor

• preadolescent

• paedophile

• speedometer

• telecommunication

• hip

Filed under: Word origins Tagged: 20th-century words year by year

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Published on March 23, 2017 11:25

Pancake Day and Shrovetide: a pancake recipe linguistick

It was the day whereon both rich and poor

Are chiefly feasted with the self same dish,

Where every paunch, till it can hold no more,

Is fritter-filled, as well as heart can wish;

And every man and maid do take their turn,

And toss their pancakes up for fear they burn;

And all the kitchen doth with laughter sound,

To see the pancakes fall upon the ground.

From Pasquils Palinodia, 1619, by William Pasquil

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Olney Pancake Race. With maids and a man pretending to be a maid.

Shrovetide

Nowadays, if they think of Lent at all, most people in our post-Christian society will associate it with what is known in Britain and elsewhere as Pancake Day [aka Shrove Tuesday], the day before Ash Wednesday that ushers in Lent.

In the past, in different parts of Britain, the three days up to and including Shrove Tuesday were called Shrovetide, a time for letting off steam and letting one’s hair down before the enforced rigours of Lent. Stephen Roud’s fascinating The English Year tells me that it was the season of the year when, in a sort of Mary Whitehouse avant la lettre rampage, apprentices traditionally wrecked any bordellos (from Italian) in their neighbourhood:

It was the day, of all days in the year,

That unto Bacchus hath his dedication,

When mad brained prentices, that no men fear,

O’rethrow the dens of bawdy recreation.

Pasquils Palinodia

And a jolly good thing, too, say I!

Someone more cynical than I might say a) ‘this is merely cutting off your nose to spite your face‘ or b) ‘they do protest too much, methinks.’

(Btw, note that that clause in the third line ‘that no men fear’ might trip you up. It does not mean that ‘no men fear the apprentices’, but rather that the apprentices fear no men: it tinkers with the normal SVO order of English for the sake of rhyme.)

All manner of weird and wonderful pastimes and ‘entertainments’ used to take place at Shrovetide. Fortunately, the ‘sport’ (Ha!) of cock-throwing (gentle US readers, read ‘cockerel’) was banned long ago.

However, the general nasty and brutish hurly-burly that was football before FA rules neutered its joyful testosteronic orgy was a favourite, and still lingers on, for example, in the ‘football’ played for example at Alnwick in Northumberland or Ashbourne in Derbyshire, which the millionaire ponces of modern Premier League football would no doubt despise.

Meanwhile…, back at Pancake Day, there are pancake races, the most famous being the one at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, which, as you will see if you follow the link, has its own website.

I’ve been digressing bigly, so let’s get to the point, shall we? Words to do with pancakes.

Butter…eggs…milk…flour…water…sugar…lemon. Those are the basic ingredients of and garnish for a pancake (thanks Delia!) — the water is unusual, though.

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To me, from the glum faces and the averted eyes, this looks like the morning after a domestic. But, hey, this is Dutch, so there must be an edifying moral allegory lurking somewhere. ‘Cooking pancakes’, c.1560 Pieter Aertsen (1507 or 1508-1575). Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Oil on panel 33.86 in x 66.93 in.

Simple, everyday words, but ones with complex histories that illustrate why English is such a succulent concoction of so many other languages.

If we look at where those words ultimately come from–simplifying considerably–what do we discover?

• butter (Greek)

• eggs (Old Norse)

• milk, water (Germanic)

• sugar, lemon (Arabic)

And if you also use syrup, that’s another word from Arabic.

Each has a curious story to tell.

(Flour has too, but it’s a different tale: it’s a specialized spelling of flower.)

Let’s look at a couple of these words in more detail.

Fine words butter no parsnips

…but butter is essential. if not to make the pancake batter (from French, btw), at least to cook your pancakes with (I don’t recommend lard [Old French] or goose fat).

How on earth did ‘butter’ come all the way from Ancient Greece?

Like this. The Ancient Greeks seem not to have used butter for cooking, but they knew of its existence. The fifth-century (BCE) historian Herodotus wrote the earliest account, describing how “the Scythians poured the milk of mares into wooden vessels, caused it to be violently stirred or shaken [image error]by their blind slaves, and thus separated the part that arose to the surface, which they considered more valuable and more delicious than that which was collected below it”.

Hippocrates, the ‘father of medicine’, he of the Hippocratic oath, also mentioned butter several times, and prescribed it externally as a medicine. He too described the Scythians making it, and wrote that they called it βούτυρον (bouturon).

Folk etymology or loanword?

The 1888 OED entry states that this ‘Greek [word] is usually supposed to be βοῦς [bous] ox or cow + τυρός [turos] cheese, but is perhaps of Scythian or other barbarous origin.’ In other words, the derivation from Greek might be a folk etymology, and the Greek word might in fact be a loanword.

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What the Romans did with butter
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Alma-Tadema’s soft porn masquerading as classicism. Exquisitely painted, though!

Greek βούτυρον was borrowed by the Romans as butyrum. They, like the Greeks, did not use it in cooking either, but as an ointment in baths (yuck!) or for medicinal purposes, such as mixing it with honey to rub on mouth ulcers or to ease the pain suffered by teething infants.

Finally, the word reaches Britain

Old English had borrowed it at least by the year 1000 CE, when it appears in Anglo-Saxon medicine in the form butere as a remedy for swellings or boils.

English is technically a ‘West Germanic‘ language, and its cousins German, Frisian and Dutch all also borrowed the word for ‘butter’ from Latin, which is why the modern German is butter, and the Dutch boter.

Beware of Vikings bearing eggs

Another of the ingredients of current English is Old Norse words brought over by the Vikings during their incursions into the British Isles and Ireland from the late eighth century onwards.

Many of them are basic to our vocabulary: words to do with the body, such as ankle, calf, freckle, scab and skin; or basic verbs such as get, give, take and want. These words often replaced earlier Old English words, and **egg is a Norse interloper (the -loper part of which is from Dutch).

The older word was **ey, (plural eyren) derived from Old English ǣg. It seems that the two different words were used concurrently, but by people from different parts of Britain.

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One of the best-known illustrations (or “iconic moments“, if you want to be kitschy) of the history of English concerns these lexical twins.

In his prologue to his translation of The boke yf Eneydos… translated oute of latyne in to frenshe, and oute of frenshe reduced in to Englysshe by me Wyllm Caxton (i.e. a paraphrase of what we know as Virgil’s Aeneid), Caxton wrote:

Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren? Certaynly it is harde to playse every man by cause of dyversite & chaunge of langage.

(What should a man in these days now write, egges or eyren? Certainly it is hard to please every man because of the diversity of and change in language.)

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Caxton was echoing the uncertainty about how to write words at a time when English spelling was becoming a very pressing issue because of the spread of printed books. Dialects within Britain varied far more than they do today, and for Caxton it was important to choose words and spellings that would be understood by as many people as possible.

His remark follows a piquant story

Some merchants—presumably from the north of England, since one is called Sheffield—being becalmed on the Thames and unable to set sail for Holland, want to have something to eat and try to buy eggs from a woman dahn sahf (down south).

The merchants use the Norse and northern English version egges; she uses the southern version eyren. She either was unable to understand, or, like many a south-easterner even today (‘The North begins at Luton’), decided to wind up the northerner by pretending not to, ;-). She added insult to injury by taking him for that worst of all things…a Frenchman!

And that comyn Englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother…and specyally he axyd after eggys. And the goode wyf answerde that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry for he also coude speke no frenshe but wold haue hadde egges and she understode hym not. And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren. Then the good wyf sayd that she understood hym wel.

(Modern English version at the end of the blog.)

What about pancake?

Simples! It’s a straightforward, Middle English combination of pan (related to German Pfanne, and perhaps also ultimately from Latin) + cake (again, like egg, from Scandinavia).

**The Old Norse is echoed in the modern Scandinavian languages: Icelandic & Norwegian egg, Swedish ägg, Danish æg; the Middle English ey(e) in modern German and Dutch ei.

In present day English:

‘And that common English that is spoken on one shire differs from another…And he asked specifically for eggs, and the good woman said that she spoke no French, and the merchant got angry for he could not speak French either, but he wanted eggs and she could not understand him. And then at last another person said that he wanted “eyren”. Then the good woman said that she understood him well.’

Filed under: Loanwords, Word origins Tagged: Zen to Aardvark

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Published on February 27, 2017 04:27

Cabin fever (and artichokes). What kind of cabin is that? Folk etymology (3/3)

Just to recap on the last couple of blogs, we’ve been talking about ‘folk mythology’ in both its meanings: a) a story people tell about where a word comes from (e.g. posh = ‘port out starboard home’) or, as the online Oxford dictionary puts it, b)

‘The process by which the form of an unfamiliar or foreign word is adapted to a more familiar form through popular usage.’

(In this context, ‘popular’ should be interpreted as ‘of an idea, believed by many people’ rather than as ‘liked by large numbers of people.’)

I wonder if you’ve ever indulged in a bit of folk etymology. I know I have. Cabin fever: interpreting it as the longing to escape from confinement or cramped quarters, I related it to ships’ cabins. The story I told myself was that in the long voyages to India from Britain people must have become extremely frustrated at having only their cabin as a private space.

Baloney! (A word that is itself, probably, a folk etymology.) In fact, the cabins in question are of the log persuasion, the kind in which people might find themselves cooped up over the US or Canadian winter.

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It seems to be a standing visual pun.

The OED defines cabin fever as ‘lassitude, restlessness, irritability, or aggressiveness resulting from being confined for too long with few or no companions’, which covers a multitude of scenarios.

The word first appears in a novel called…Cabin Fever: A novel, penned by one ‘Bertha Muzzy Bower’

The mind fed too long upon monotony succumbs to the insidious mental ailment which the West calls ‘cabin fever’.

Meaning b) above [‘The process by which the form of an unfamiliar or foreign word is adapted to a more familiar form through popular usage’] has two aspects: ‘unfamiliar’ and ‘foreign’.

(Of course, foreign words are initially unfamiliar precisely because of their foreignness, but ‘native’ English words can be unfamiliar too, as e.g. deserts with the second syllable stressed in just deserts, which then becomes just desserts.)

This process of folk etymology has resulted in the transformation over decades or even centuries of a small number of not uncommon words that we use unblinkingly. Loanwords are–or were–prone to undergo this process, as the next example illustrates:

(globe) artichoke: (Cynara scolymus) English borrowed this from the Italian articiocco (which was a borrowing from Spanish alcachofa, which was a borrowing from Arabic al-ḵaršūfa…). On its first appearance in English, it was already being reshaped, as you can see from the quotation below.

1531 MS. Acc. Bk. in Notes & Queries 2 Feb. (1884) 85/2

Bringing Archecokks to the Kings Grace.

What follows are a few choice quotations, showing the vagaries of its spelling, leading up to its first appearance in its current spelling, in 1727, i.e. almost two centuries after first landing on these shores.

1542 A. Borde Compend. Regyment Helth xx. sig. K.i

There is nothynge vsed to be eaten of Artochockes but ye hed of them.

1577 B. Googe tr. C. Heresbach Foure Bks. Husbandry ii. f. 63

The Hartichoch…is a kinde of Thistel, by the diligence of the Gardner, brought to be a good Garden hearbe.

1727 Swift Pastoral Dialogue Richmond-Lodge in Wks. (1735) II. 375

The Dean…Shall…steal my Artichokes no more.

The OED comments sagely on parallels with English that might have driven such changes:

‘Similarly, many of the English forms reflect reanalysis of the word by folk etymology. Forms with initial hart– are apparently influenced by association with heart, while the second element was apparently reanalysed as choke n.1 or choke v. from an early date. This has been variously explained as resulting from the belief that the flower contained an inedible centre which would choke anyone attempting to eat it (compare choke n.1 5), or resulting from the plant’s rapid growth which would quickly ‘choke’ anything else growing nearby (compare e.g. quot. 1641 at sense 2).’

The OED extract above mentions the stories which, from the original Archecokks, developed the cultivar artichoke: that you could choke on the centre of the plant, or that it would choke out other plants.

[image error]

Artichok– ‘…a kind of thistel…’ and a wonderfully architectural plant, to boot.

Another vegetable shares the name but is unrelated botanically: the Jerusalem artichoke. The ‘Jerusalem’ part is another example of folk etymology at work: it is an anglicisation of girasole, the Italian word for ‘sunflower’, which is the genus to which the Jerusalem artichoke belongs.

Enjoying this blog? There’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up (in the right-hand column, above the Twitter feed, if you’re reading this on laptop, and under the blog if you’re reading it on a tablet, mobile, etc.) and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, writing tips, and–occasionally–Spanish.

And I also copy-edit a wide range of texts, from books to websites to theses. So if you need some help, don’t hesitate to contact me.

I’ve blogged elsewhere about how cockroach and alligator, originally from Spanish, morphed from cucaracha and el lagarto respectively.

Here are some other folk etymologies, with hyperlinks to their definitions, of some well-known examples of loanwords adopting an English-friendly guise because of assumptions speakers made about them: belfry (nowt to do with bells, originally); blunderbuss, crayfish (nowt to do with fishy-wishies, originally), salt cellar (diddly-squat to do with the place you store your vintage Bordeaux).

My second bit of folk-etymologising concerns Benidorm, in Spain: SELF-EVIDENTLY, it is related somehow to the Spanish dormir for ‘sleep’, and bien for ‘well’, meaning you would sleep well there.

Complete tosh, of course; the origin of the name is Arabic.

What’s your folk etymology?

I’m not sure when I first ate artichoke, but it must have been in a French or French-inspired restaurant, because it was done in the traditional, dining etiquette-testing way. Fortunately, I must have been with someone who helped me avoid making a fox’s paw. The whole flower head is presented to you, vaguely in the manner of St John the Baptist’s head, on its own plate, with the individual scales or petals adroitly loosened through cooking. It then becomes a supreme test of your table manners to detach them one by one, delicately suck the flesh off each, and gracefully discard each armadillo-like scale, until you reach your culinary El Dorado, the heart.

[image error]

If you fancy trying them at home–I can’t say I ever have–here’s a Delia.

Filed under: Confusable Words, Meaning of words, Word origins

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Published on February 25, 2017 05:04

Free rein or free reign? shoo-in or shoe-in? Folk etymology (2/3)

[image error]
Eddie Mair’s fizzog

My previous blog on ‘false etymology’ related to this one was about fizzog, a word I hadn’t seen or heard in yonks.1 Of course, it was then inevitable that I should immediately stumble across it. In the Radio Times of 21–27 January, the velvet-voiced British broadcaster Eddie Mair wrote in his entertaining hebdomadal column: ‘Basil Fawlty would rightly have enquired of my disappointed fizzog,…’

Google Ngrams for phizzog/fizzog in British English show a rather erratic pattern.

A second kind of folk etymology

The ‘false’ etymology or folk etymology I was prattling on about in the previous blog is essentially a cosy form of storytelling. Another word for it, as Michael Quinion has pointed out, is ‘etymythology’2.

The kind of ‘folk etymology’ I’m looking at today answers to a different definition.

As the 1897 (i.e. unrevised) OED entry puts it, in suitably constipated style:

‘usually, the popular perversion of the form of words in order to render it apparently significant’.

(I had to read that phrase more than once to relate ‘it’ back to ‘form’, because, when I read ‘words.’ I anticipated some backwards reference [anaphora] to it later on—but that might just be me.)

It’s hard to tell how much weight of thunderous disapproval and tut-tutting ‘perversion’ drew down upon itself in 1897, or whenever the entry was first drafted: however, it is worth bearing in mind that Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis had been published in 1894.

I digress–bigly.

The OED currently provides only one citation for folk etymology by an eminent Victorian Scandinavianist and runologist (I only added that factoid because I have never before written the word runologist, and am unlikely to do so ever again.)

Back to the definition of folk etymology that I started talking about before I so rudely…

[image error]

Free-rein is a management style. A non-native speaker gets the allusion.

The point about that kind of etymology is that, not content with telling tall stories, it actually changes language: enough people tell themselves the same story about a word to ‘operationalize’ that story by modifying, or agreeing to the modification of, the form of a word or phrase.

That seems perfectly normal and understandable. We want to make sense of the world and of our language. When we encounter a word or phrase whose form seems nonsensical, we will torture it into a different shape to extract a confession of meaning.

The process is one that produces–obviously–visible results. Often it happens with words borrowed from other languages. However, it often also affects ‘native’ English phrases.

For instance, to give something or someone free rein is a phrase that has been around since at least 1640, building on a rein idiom that goes back to Caxton’s day. It means ‘to allow total freedom of expression or action to someone or something’. Here is Caxton:

Caxton tr. G. de la Tour-Landry Bk. Knight of Tower (1971) vi. 19

She [sc. a mother] had gyuen her [sc. her daughter] the reyne ouerlong [Fr. lui avoit laissié la resne trop longue] in suffryng her to do all her wylle.

The rein in question is the strap of leather attached to a horse’s bit or bridle by means of which the rider controls his (or in the UK, at any rate, usually ‘her’) mount’s movements.

[image error]

The metaphor in to give free rein to seems may seem blindingly obvious to some. It certainly does to me, and it’s not even as if I’m horsy (though the persistent stiffness in my right shoulder reminds me that I long ago incurred frozen shoulder by once incompetently falling off a gee-gee.) If you give a horse free rein, you hold the reins loosely to allow it to move freely.

Here’s a modern example:

My boss gave free rein to his well-trained sarcasm as he chastised me, but in the end he thought my ineptitude was so funny that he decided not to fire me.

There are other colourful idioms that use the word, such as to keep a tight rein on something or someone, and the reins of power.

If you are enjoying this blog, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up (in the right-hand column, above the Twitter feed, if you’re reading this on laptop, and under the blog if you’re reading it on a tablet, mobile, etc.) and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, writing tips, and–occasionally–Spanish.

And I also copy-edit a wide range of texts, from books to websites to theses. So if you need some help, don’t hesitate to contact me.

However, that metaphorical link with an essential piece of tack has been lost on many people in our non-equestrian society: the form to give free reign to something is now quite common—although exactly how common depends on where you look.

Confusion reigns–or does it rein?

Ngrams shows a rise over the decades in reign and a corresponding drop in rein. The Corpus of Contemporary American has 82 (22.5%) examples of free reign vs 283 (77.5%) for rein (This includes variants of the phrase such as allow free reign, have free reign, etc.) In the Oxford English Corpus, rein occurs about 38% of the time.

[image error]

‘I wonder what “to give free reign” to something means…’

The folk etymology involved in reign presumably runs something like this: ‘during a ruler’s reign they exercise power, which can range from limited to total. So, if they have free reign, their power must be unlimited’. Extending that interpretation to the metaphor then makes complete sense.

(And, as the Oxford words blog points out, the confusion affects not only free reign, but also, e.g. You mentioned Castro’s illness. Obviously, he turned the X reigns of power over to his brother, because…)

The rein/reign substitution is easy because both words sound identical. That homophony also explains shoe-in for the original shoo-in.

If someone is a shoo-in for a job, election, award (Oh, no! Not flippin’ Adele again!) or whatever, they are certain to get it, barring acts of God.

[image error]

This jolly chap, in the Horse of the Year Show at the tender age of 3, must surely be destined to hold the reins of power.

While the metaphor involved in free rein is still transparent to many, and must once have been so to all, the semantics of shoo-in are not immediately clear, although they too are horsy.

Going one step back from its equine origins, think of the noises you make as drive away your neighbour’s mangy cat, hens, etc., ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ , while you flap your hands wildly, kick out, and spit and growl (well, I do, anyway) at the unwelcome intruder.

From that comes the verb to shoo, which can mean ‘to frighten something away’, but can also mean ‘to move someone or something in a desired direction’:

I do not churlishly flatten her on to the sofa nor shoo her downstairs.

1973, M. Amis Rachel Papers, 150.

From that comes the phrasal verb to shoo in, originally US slang, meaning ‘to allow a racehorse to win easily’:

There were many times presumably that ‘Tod’ would win through such manipulations, being ‘shooed in’, as it were.

1908 , G. E. Smith Racing Maxims & Methods of ‘Pittsburgh Phil’, ix. 123

And then that verb is nominalized:

A ‘skate’ is a horse having no class whatever, and rarely wins only in case of a ‘fluke’ or ‘shoo in’.

1928, National Turf Digest (Baltimore), Dec. 929/2

[image error]

Awww! A cynophilist’s little self-indoggence.

Given that almost Abrahamic succession of meanings, is it any wonder that people plump for shoe-in? Here’s my folksy definition, for what it’s worth.

If you or someone are a shoe-in for something, you can ease into it as easily as you can ease your feet into a shoe (with or without the help of a shoehorn) or into a pair of comfy slippers.

Obvious, really.

In CoCA, shoo-in appears nine times, eight of them in spoken data; shoe-in appears 44 times, 31 of them in spoken—, which, of course, raises the issue of transcription error. However, the 13 that are not spoken but written still outnumber the 9 of shoo-in.

Other well-known folk etymologies of this type (standard version first) give us

fazed (phased)

bated breath (baited breath)

just deserts (just desserts)

strait-laced (straight-laced)

to name just a few.

In the next blog, I’ll come back to some other changes wrought by folk etymology.

1 The OED dates yonks to the 1960s. It’s a bit of a memento mori to think that I can remember it coming in, and discussing with my chums/father/brother (not sure which) where it came from.

2 A term, I now discover, thanks to Ben Zimmer, the Sherlock Holmes of the linguistic microcosm, coined in 2004 by a linguist at Yale.

Filed under: Confusable Words, Meaning of words, Word origins Tagged: Ben Zimmer, Eddie Mair

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Published on February 14, 2017 02:16

Folk etymology: free rein or free reign? shoo-in or shoe-in? (2/3)

[image error]
Eddie Mair’s fizzog

My previous blog on ‘false etymology’ related to this one was about fizzog, a word I hadn’t seen or heard in yonks.1 Of course, it was then inevitable that I should immediately stumble across it. In the Radio Times of 21–27 January, the velvet-voiced British broadcaster Eddie Mair wrote in his entertaining hebdomadal column: ‘Basil Fawlty would rightly have enquired of my disappointed fizzog,…’

Google Ngrams for phizzog/fizzog in British English show a rather erratic pattern.

A second kind of folk etymology

The ‘false’ etymology or folk etymology I was prattling on about in the previous blog is essentially a cosy form of storytelling. Another word for it, as Michael Quinion has pointed out, is ‘etymythology’2.

The kind of ‘folk etymology’ I’m looking at today answers to a different definition.

As the 1897 (i.e. unrevised) OED entry puts it, in suitably constipated style:

‘usually, the popular perversion of the form of words in order to render it apparently significant’.

(I had to read that phrase more than once to relate ‘it’ back to ‘form’, because, when I read ‘words.’ I anticipated some backwards reference [anaphora] to it later on—but that might just be me.)

It’s hard to tell how much weight of thunderous disapproval and tut-tutting ‘perversion’ drew down upon itself in 1897, or whenever the entry was first drafted: however, it is worth bearing in mind that Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis had been published in 1894.

I digress–bigly.

The OED currently provides only one citation for folk etymology by an eminent Victorian Scandinavianist and runologist (I only added that factoid because I have never before written the word runologist, and am unlikely to do so ever again.)

Back to the definition of folk etymology that I started talking about before I so rudely…

[image error]

Free-rein is a management style. A non-native speaker gets the allusion.

The point about that kind of etymology is that, not content with telling tall stories, it actually changes language: enough people tell themselves the same story about a word to ‘operationalize’ that story by modifying, or agreeing to the modification of, the form of a word or phrase.

That seems perfectly normal and understandable. We want to make sense of the world and of our language. When we encounter a word or phrase whose form seems nonsensical, we will torture it into a different shape to extract a confession of meaning.

The process is one that produces–obviously–visible results. Often it happens with words borrowed from other languages. However, it often also affects ‘native’ English phrases.

For instance, to give something or someone free rein is a phrase that has been around since at least 1640, building on a rein idiom that goes back to Caxton’s day. It means ‘to allow total freedom of expression or action to someone or something’. Here is Caxton:

Caxton tr. G. de la Tour-Landry Bk. Knight of Tower (1971) vi. 19

She [sc. a mother] had gyuen her [sc. her daughter] the reyne ouerlong [Fr. lui avoit laissié la resne trop longue] in suffryng her to do all her wylle.

The rein in question is the strap of leather attached to a horse’s bit or bridle by means of which the rider controls his (or in the UK, at any rate, usually ‘her’) mount’s movements.

[image error]

The metaphor in to give free rein to seems may seem blindingly obvious to some. It certainly does to me, and it’s not even as if I’m horsy (though the persistent stiffness in my right shoulder reminds me that I long ago incurred frozen shoulder by once incompetently falling off a gee-gee.) If you give a horse free rein, you hold the reins loosely to allow it to move freely.

Here’s a modern example:

My boss gave free rein to his well-trained sarcasm as he chastised me, but in the end he thought my ineptitude was so funny that he decided not to fire me.

There are other colourful idioms that use the word, such as to keep a tight rein on something or someone, and the reins of power.

If you are enjoying this blog, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up (in the right-hand column, above the Twitter feed, if you’re reading this on laptop, and under the blog if you’re reading it on a tablet, mobile, etc.) and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, writing tips, and–occasionally–Spanish.

And I also copy-edit a wide range of texts, from books to websites to theses. So if you need some help, don’t hesitate to contact me.

However, that metaphorical link with an essential piece of tack has been lost on many people in our non-equestrian society: the form to give free reign to something is now quite common—although exactly how common depends on where you look.

Confusion reigns–or does it rein?

Ngrams shows a rise over the decades in reign and a corresponding drop in rein. The Corpus of Contemporary American has 82 (22.5%) examples of free reign vs 283 (77.5%) for rein (This includes variants of the phrase such as allow free reign, have free reign, etc.) In the Oxford English Corpus, rein occurs about 38% of the time.

[image error]

‘I wonder what “to give free reign” to something means…’

The folk etymology involved in reign presumably runs something like this: ‘during a ruler’s reign they exercise power, which can range from limited to total. So, if they have free reign, their power must be unlimited’. Extending that interpretation to the metaphor then makes complete sense.

(And, as the Oxford words blog points out, the confusion affects not only free reign, but also, e.g. You mentioned Castro’s illness. Obviously, he turned the X reigns of power over to his brother, because…)

The rein/reign substitution is easy because both words sound identical. That homophony also explains shoe-in for the original shoo-in.

If someone is a shoo-in for a job, election, award (Oh, no! Not flippin’ Adele again!) or whatever, they are certain to get it, barring acts of God.

[image error]

This jolly chap, in the Horse of the Year Show at the tender age of 3, must surely be destined to hold the reins of power.

While the metaphor involved in free rein is still transparent to many, and must once have been so to all, the semantics of shoo-in are not immediately clear, although they too are horsy.

Going one step back from its equine origins, think of the noises you make as drive away your neighbour’s mangy cat, hens, etc., ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ , while you flap your hands wildly, kick out, and spit and growl (well, I do, anyway) at the unwelcome intruder.

From that comes the verb to shoo, which can mean ‘to frighten something away’, but can also mean ‘to move someone or something in a desired direction’:

I do not churlishly flatten her on to the sofa nor shoo her downstairs.

1973, M. Amis Rachel Papers, 150.

From that comes the phrasal verb to shoo in, originally US slang, meaning ‘to allow a racehorse to win easily’:

There were many times presumably that ‘Tod’ would win through such manipulations, being ‘shooed in’, as it were.

1908 , G. E. Smith Racing Maxims & Methods of ‘Pittsburgh Phil’, ix. 123

And then that verb is nominalized:

A ‘skate’ is a horse having no class whatever, and rarely wins only in case of a ‘fluke’ or ‘shoo in’.

1928, National Turf Digest (Baltimore), Dec. 929/2

[image error]

Awww! A cynophilist’s little self-indoggence.

Given that almost Abrahamic succession of meanings, is it any wonder that people plump for shoe-in? Here’s my folksy definition, for what it’s worth.

If you or someone are a shoe-in for something, you can ease into it as easily as you can ease your feet into a shoe (with the help of a shoehorn) or into a pair of comfy slippers.

Obvious, really.

In CoCA, shoo-in appears nine times, eight of them in spoken data; shoe-in appears 44 times, 31 of them in spoken—, which, of course, raises the issue of transcription error. However, the 13 that are not spoken but written still outnumber the 9 of shoo-in.

Other well-known folk etymologies of this type (standard version first) give us

fazed (phased)

bated breath (baited breath)

just deserts (just desserts)

strait-laced (straight-laced)

to name just a few.

In the next blog, I’ll come back to some other changes wrought by folk etymology.

1 The OED dates yonks to the 1960s. It’s a bit of a memento mori to think that I can remember it coming in, and discussing with my chums/father/brother (not sure which) where it came from.

2 A term, I now discover, thanks to Ben Zimmer, the Sherlock Holmes of the linguistic microcosm, coined in 2004 by a linguist at Yale.

Filed under: Confusable Words, Meaning of words, Word origins Tagged: Ben Zimmer, Eddie Mair

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Published on February 14, 2017 02:16

What is folk etymology or false etymology? Why fizzog is not French visage (1/3)

[image error]

“The Long Story” by William Sidney Mount, 1837. Corcoran Gallery of Art, US.

Who doesn’t love a good yarn, egh? (It’s a rhetorical question [RQ for short] so don’t tell me, please, “Quite a lot of people.”)

And who isn’t fascinated by where words come from? (Which is etymology, or, for the unwary, “entomology”.)

And here’s another RQ: Who doesn’t want to write a book? (The leader of a course I once attended claimed that wanting to write a book was second- or third-top New Year Resolution, but I can find no evidence for that.)

So, how better to satisfy that writerly urge than by scribbling about where words and phrases come from (much as I am doing)?

Of visages and fizzogs

The other day, the A Word A Day word of the day word (don’t you just love the iteration you can do with language– makes me think of the legendary Bufffalo buffalo Bufffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo) was visage–pronounced, as any fule kno [Molesworth] VIZidge /ˈvɪzɪdʒ/ or audio here.

But when did you last hear the word? Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it uttered by a normal human being, i.e. not by a thesp in a play, etc.

[image error]

“Polonius behind the curtain” by Jehan Georges Vibert, 1868.

(e.g. ‘Tis too much prov’d, that with devotion’s visage | And pious action we do sugar o’er | The Devil himself; Polonius in Hamlet, III, 1).

Which made me wonder how someone who had only ever read it might think it should be pronounced; for example, a bit à la française like the US pronunciation of garage as guh-RAAZH?

(I was also remembering a self-educated friend who could never forget being ridiculed when they [sic, singular they, so there] came out with banal pronounced like anal).

Incidentally, I seem to be on the way in this blog to beating my own record for bracketed asides, so…GET A GRIP, Jem.

I tweeted my musings about the said pronunciation, and in reply was proffered a classic piece of folk etymology, which I post here, with the original author’s permission. It illustrates the charm such etymologies can have.

“Fizzog, n. I am from a part of Ireland which was heavily influenced by the Norman, as well as the Viking, invasions. A lot of words and family names in my part of Ireland are therefore taken from French, and fizzog (along with its related term vizzard, see below) is one of those. Clearly a derivative of the French visage, fizzog basically means ‘face’, but used mainly in a pejorative sense. So, if you were in a bad mood, someone might say to you ‘What’s the fizzog on you for?’, which means ‘Why the long face?’ or ‘You’ve some fizzog on you,’ which means, in a roundabout backhanded way, ‘cheer up.’”

That claimed origin of fizzog is, it seems to me, satisfying in many ways that help explain why folk etymologising is popular. First, it appeals to a shared, potentially mythicised, romantic history of Normans and Vikings, and enters the territory of historical fiction. It then adds the cachet and romance (both, of course, French words) of French. Finally, the author refers to their part of Ireland, thereby appealing to a cultural and linguistic tradition that a number of readers will share, or, conversely, providing a quaint, folkloric perspective.

I can’t comment on the currency of the delightful phrases quoted, but fizzog itself is a word I’ve known most of my life: my mother–Welsh, not Irish–used it, if I remember well, to refer to her own face, e.g. “I’m just putting some make-up on my fizzog.” So, no colourful phrases like the Irish ones, just an informal synonym for face.

In fact, fizzog, is just the most recent slang descendant of physiognomy (OK, ok, that word is partly French, and partly Latin). The OED currently records its first appearance as a headword in the 1811 Lexicon balatronicum: a dictionary of buckish slang, university wit, and pick pocket eloquence, 1st edition, 1811, London:

Physog, the face. A vulgar abbreviation of physiognomy.

Its variant forms include phisog, physog, phyzog, and it subsequently appears, inter alia, in Kingsley’s Alton Locke, a Wilfred Owen letter, the Opies’ classic The lore and language of schoolchildren, and in this extraordinary quotation:

There was something fanatical and weightless about his long leg inside the expensive trousers and his ineffably Gallic phizog and the lank quiff à l’anglaise.

Mirror for Larks, V. Sage, 1993.

Fizzog’s parent is phiz, and several variant spellings, a word that goes back to a 1687 translation of one of Juvenal’s Satires.

Oh had you then his Figure seen, With what a rueful Phis and meine*.

H. Higden

* = mien, i.e. here probably “facial expression”; or “general appearance and manner”.

So, what is folk etymology, then?

The term refers to two different things.

As the Online Oxford Dictionary defines it, folk etymology is “A popular but mistaken account of the origin of a word or phrase”.

[image error]

Some “accounts” are so popular that they have become self-perpetuating urban myths. For example, British readers are probably familiar with the notion that posh is an acronym for “port out, starboard home”, that is, the preferred—because shadier and cooler—side of a P&O liner to have your cabin on when travelling to India. My mother travelled to India by ship, just after the war, to join my father, who was stationed there, and I suspect that I first heard this folk etymology from her or him.

If you are enjoying this blog, there’s an easy way for you to find out when I blog again. Just sign up (in the right-hand column, above the Twitter feed, if you’re reading this on laptop, and under the blog if you’re reading it on a tablet, mobile, etc.) and you’ll receive an email to tell you. “Simples!”, as the meerkats say. I blog regularly about issues of English usage, word histories, writing tips, and–occasionally–Spanish.

And I also copy-edit a wide range of texts. So if you need some help, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Another example is the pleasingly Magrittean suggestion that “to be raining cats and dogs” comes from said animals being flushed out of thatched roofs, where they were huddling during violent rainstorms (if you’ve ever given a thatched roof a more than cursory glance, you will immediately see that such felines and canines would have to be paper-thin so to huddle).

[image error]

“Golconda” by René Magritte, 1953. The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas.

Yet another one is the supposed “rule of thumb” origin, which claims that English law allowed a man to beat his wife with a stick, provided it was no thicker than his thumb.

As for “the whole nine yards”, alleged origins include the length of cloth required to make a sari or a dress kilt, the number of plots in a New York city block, the cubic capacity of concrete mixers (yet, simultaneously, the capacity of a soldier’s pack), the volume of a wealthy person’s grave, the length of a hangman’s noose…and so on, and so on.

It’s easy to see the charm and the interest of such stories—for that is what they are. For a comprehensive debunking of some of them, it’s worth looking at Michael Quinion’s Port Out Starboard Home, or David Wilton’s Word Myths.

While such stories don’t affect the forms of language, a different definition of folk etymology does.

But that’s for the next blog post.

Filed under: Meaning of words, Word origins Tagged: Shakespeare

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Published on January 27, 2017 00:35

What is folk etymology or false etymology? Why fizzog is not French visage (1/2)

[image error]

“The Long Story” by William Sidney Mount, 1837. Corcoran Gallery of Art, US.

Who doesn’t love a good yarn, egh? (It’s a rhetorical question [RQ for short] so don’t tell me, please, “Quite a lot of people.”)

And who isn’t fascinated by where words come from? (Which is etymology, or, for the unwary “entomology”.)

And here’s another RQ: Who doesn’t want to write a book? (The leader of a course I once attended claimed that wanting to write a book was second- or third-top New Year Resolution, but I can find no evidence for that.)

So, how better to satisfy that writerly urge than by scribbling about where words and phrases come from (much as I am doing)?

Of visages and fizzogs

The other day, the A Word A Day word of the day word (don’t you just love the iteration you can do with language– makes me think of the legendary Bufffalo buffalo Bufffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo) was visage– pronounced, as any fule kno [Molesworth] VIZidge /ˈvɪzɪdʒ/ or audio here.