Fizzogs and visages. Folk etymology (2)
Fizzog and its other spellings (phisog, physog, phyzog in the OED, phizzog, not), as you probably already know, mean “face” or “facial expression.”
The question is, how did that happen?
Well, thereby hangs the tale below, supplied by a reader in response to an older version of this post.
“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.’”
We all love a good yarn.
And who isn’t fascinated by where words come from?
And who doesn’t like a bit of history, especially if it’s glamorous or romantic in some way?
The explanation of the origins of fizzog above is very satisfying in all those ways. It evokes a mythicised, romantic history of Normans and Vikings, thus coming close to historical fiction. It then adds the cachet and romance (both French words) of French. Finally, the author refers to their part of Ireland, thereby appealing to a cultural and linguistic tradition that several readers will share, or, conversely, providing a folkloric perspective for outsiders.
In particular, scientific certainty is bestowed by the wording: “Clearly a derivative of the French visage, fizzog…” Both words have two syllables, true. And the f of fizzog is the voiceless counterpart of the v of visage. And the s of visage sounds like a z, so all in all, it is demonstrably clear that fizzog comes from visage.
Except it doesn’t.
The fizzog story satisfies all our story-telling and story-listening cravings, but “story” it certainly is: it’s a folk etymology in the sense of “a popular but erroneous conception of the origin of a word.” (Collins)
For a start, it’s a nineteenth-century word, so it dates from several centuries after any possible Norman influence in Ireland. It derives not from the French visage but from the word physiognomy, which, admittedly, does have a part-French pedigree.
I can’t comment on how current the phrases quoted are, but fizzog itself is a word I’ve known most of my life. My mother – Welsh, not Irish – used it to refer humorously 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.
Localism is another feature of stories about language. People often take great pride in a word or phrase they believe peculiar to their part of the world when, on proper inspection, it turns out not to be. Fizzog appears in various nineteenth-century dialect dictionaries (“North Country”, Nottinghamshire, South Cheshire) before turning up in Wright’s 1905 dictionary.
Where does fizzog come from?
In fact, fizzog is only the most recent descendant of physiognomy. Which raises the question, how do you get from the five syllables of physiognomy to the two of fizzog?
The OED provides the clue by suggesting you compare fizzog with physiog. Physiog first appears in 1791 in a letter by Coleridge:
Middleton has not the least acquaintance with any of Jesus [sc. College], except a very blackguardly fellow, whose phisiog: I did not like.
[image error] In Xanadu did Kubla Khan…
At the same time, the OED references an earlier (1687) more brutal shortening of physiognomy to a single syllable in the shape of phiz and several variant spellings. In the late seventeenth century, clipping words was fashionable. Phiz has not survived, but mob (1688, short for mobile vulgus, “the fickle crowd”) and wig (short for periwig) have.
Oh had you then his Figure seen, With what a rueful Phis and meine.*
* = mien, i.e. here probably “facial expression”; or “general appearance and manner”.
1687 H. Higden Mod. Ess. 10th Satyr Juvenal 27
Phiz went on being used even into the twentieth century
The OED currently (“currently” because the entry is still to be updated) records fizzog’s first appearance 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.
It and its variants subsequently appear 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.
Some “popular but erroneous conceptions of the origin of a word” are so popular that they are part of “common knowledge.” For example, many (older) 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.
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.
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.
The post from which the folk mythology of fizzog is taken has other interesting language.
Fizzog etc has had peaks and troughs in popularity, as shown by Google Ngrams. The spelling fizzog seems to be winning.
Note: This is an updated version of a post originally posted in 2017.
