What Is The Origin Of (194)?…
Curmudgeon
Are all old men curmudgeons? I mentioned this word en passant last time out as the only example of a word in the English language ending in -mudgeon.
It is a wonderful word and is used today to describe someone who is gruff, grumpy, cantankerous, stubborn, set in their ways, and generally old. Curmudgeons, as is the modern way, even have their own day – 29th January which marks the birth of that self-confessed practitioner of the art of curmudgeonry, W C Fields.
But the commonly accepted usage of a curmudgeon is a fairly recent Americanism, I regret to say. On this side of the pond its primary sense was that of a miser rather than someone lacking in social graces. A churlish miser was described as “a clownish curmudgeon” in the late 16th century and the word was sufficiently well-known, in certain circles at least, for Philemon Holland in his translation of Livy’s history, published in 1600, to attempt a rather lame play on words. He described someone who hid or hoarded corn as a “cornmudgin.” Collapse of stout parties, indeed.
The Right Honourable Henry, Earl of Monmouth, found the time to translate I ragguagli di Parnaso by the Italian satirist, Trajano Boccalini, into English in 1656. In it we find the passage, “certain greedy curmuggions, who value not the leaving of a good name behind them to posterity.” Avarice is their principal character trait. By the time Samuel Johnson set about compiling his eccentric and entertaining Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, cantankerous was used to describe an “avaricious churlish fellow; a miser; a niggard; a churl; a griper.” Clearly in his mind the love of money was the foremost characteristic.
Johnson, though, can be a little unreliable when it comes to matter etymological. He took at face value a suggestion from an unnamed correspondent that the origin of the word was “a vitious manner of pronouncing cœur méchant,” another case of the English mangling a French phrase, perhaps. A coeur méchant was a bad or evil heart and vitious was an archaic spelling of vicious. Most etymologists these days think that Johnson was sorely misled but the entry did have one amusing consequence.
John Ash drew heavily upon Johnson’s work when he was compiling his own New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language, which saw the light of day in 1775. Ash followed Johnson’s etymological theory but made a hash of it by translating Coeur as unknown and méchant as correspondent, an error which cast doubt on the reliability of his lexicon.
Perhaps the good doctor should have sought advice from his mate, James Boswell, because there is a strong suspicion that the word, or at least its last two syllables, has a Scottish origin. In Lowland Scots we find murgeon which means to mock or to grumble and mudgeon which means to grimace. If there is anything to this theory, then the first syllable, cur, would be what the grammarians call a reinforcing prefix which strengthens and emphasises the word that it precedes. Ker in kerfuffle and ca in caboodle serve this purpose and it may be that cur is a variant of this prefix. It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with a dog or a rogue.
So it could be that the original curmudgeon was a big mudgeon, someone who grumbled a lot whilst sitting on his pile of cash. It was only in the middle of the 20th century that the American sense of a curmudgeon, a cantankerous old so and so, supplanted the British meaning, which, alas, sank into obscurity.
