Do American family names make sense?

Do names really mean anything, even when they seem to? Individuals in present day America called Smith, Jackson, Washington, or Redhead are not usually smiths, sons of Jack, residents in Washington, or red-haired. The disconnect between sense and usage in these particular names is mainly the result of hereditary surnaming back in England and Scotland, but this is not its only source. Names change their shapes, get borrowed into different cultures, and are sometimes re-interpreted to mean something other than what they originally meant. The frozen food company, Birds Eye, took its brand name from the founder’s surname, Clarence Frank Birdseye II of Montclair, New Jersey. His family had migrated from England to Connecticut in the seventeenth century, and the name’s meaning as a nickname looks obvious. But when it is traced back in English historical records, Birdseye turns out to be a habitational name, an altered form of the Lancashire gentry surname Bardsley, which migrated to Buckinghamshire, England, in the fifteenth century and was simplified there from the sixteenth century onward to Bardsey, Berdsey, Burdsey, and Birdseye.

The underlying cause for the disconnect is that names, unlike words, don’t have to stay meaningful in order to do their job of identifying individuals or groups of people. In fact, most American family names make no sense at all today and it is fascinating to uncover their original meanings and what they tell us about the history of the people who bear them. Hereditary surnames are especially vulnerable to changes in pronunciation that obscure their original senses. Starbuck, for example, seems to be an altered form of Tarbuck, which is recorded in the thirteenth century as the surname of the family who were lords of Tarbock in Lancashire, England. In the 1630s, Edward Starbuck, a coloniser from Derbyshire, England, set up a whaling company on Nantucket Island. Herman Melville borrowed the surname for the chief mate of the whaling ship Pequod in his novel Moby Dick to give his incredible story an appearance of local veracity. It is this fictional character that the coffee chain is arbitrarily named for.

Absence of sense enables names to migrate easily from person to person and into other languages, where they can be further mangled or re-interpreted, nowhere more prolifically than in the United States. American family names have a unique diversity, the living evidence of a country founded on colonization, forced transportation (especially of West Africans), and influxes of refugees and economic migrants from across the globe. The latest edition of the Dictionary of American Family Names explains over 80,000 of them and includes 35 introductory essays written by experts from countries across the world.

Names as gateways into world history are full of surprises. Trump is a surname from Bavaria in Germany, where in medieval times the now obsolete word trumpe, “drum,” was adopted as a name for a drummer. (Donald Trump’s Scottish connection is on his mother’s side.) Biden probably derives from the place called Baydon in Wiltshire, England, and has been a family name in neighbouring Hampshire since the early fourteenth century. (Joe Biden’s Irish connection is on his mother’s side.) Mancini is from Italian mancino, a nickname for a left-handed person. Wang is chiefly Chinese, from a Romanized spelling of Mandarin and Cantonese words of many senses, including “king, royal” and “yellow, gold.”

Some family names have been created in America itself, where individuals whose own culture had no tradition of surnaming found themselves legally required to have one. Migrants from Muslim countries and from parts of the Indian subcontinent have commonly opted for one of their own personal names. The Dictionary explains that the surname Abdullah, with over 8,000 bearers in the 2010 US census, is an Arabic personal name ‘Abdullāh, “servant of God.” Murthy, with 1,268 bearers in 2010, is from southwest India, where it is a personal name from the Sanskrit mūrti, “manifestation, image,” that of one of the gods, Rama or Krishna.

Among Native Americans, a different solution was to use their personal name in an English translation. The Cheyenne Mo’ohnah’evaoo’etse, “Elk stands with his wife,” refers to the habit of elks standing shoulder to shoulder, and was Americanized as the surname Elkshoulder. The most common American surname actually in a Native American language is Begay, with 17,533 bearers in the 2010 census. It is an Anglicized spelling of the Navajo word biye’, “his son,” which was originally part of a longer personal name, coming after the father’s name. It was imposed on Navajos by white officials, who mistook it for a surname. Some Native Americans adopted the surname of a colonial administrator. Abeyta is a Hispanic surname mostly found among the Pueblos of New Mexico, where in the 1690s a Spaniard, Diego de Abeytia (or de Beitia), was involved in its recolonization. His surname referred to a place called Beitia in Biscay, Basque Country, in northern Spain.

But most Native Americans assimilated to Anglo-American culture by doing what most of the freed slaves of West African heritage did­—borrowing an existing, commonplace surname like Smith or Johnson. An alternative strategy favored by African Americans was to take the surname of an admired figure, such as Lincoln, Jefferson, Jackson, or Washington. The Dictionary reveals time and again that the Englishness of an American surname is not a safe guide to the ethnicity or heritage of its bearers. Immigrants, too, often adapted to their new country through the translation or assimilation of an existing non-English name into an English near-equivalent. Yet more sources of Smith are Dutch Smit, German and Jewish Schmidt, and Slavic Koval. Dutch Timmerman was sometimes translated into the English Carpenter, French Boulanger into Baker, and German Goldwasser into Goldwater.

The Ashkenazic Jewish name Kaplan, from German Kaplan or Polish kapłan, “chaplain, curate,” was already a translation of Cohen, from Hebrew kohen, “priest,” before it was assimilated in the American composer’s family to Copland, an English habitational name from either of two northern English place-names. Assimilated name-forms have created countless similar examples of misleading appearances. Sharkey is usually Irish, a shortened, Anglicized form of the Gaelic Ó Searcaigh, “descendant of Searcach,” from a nickname meaning “beloved,” but it is also an American garbling of French Chartier “carter.”

Family histories can resolve some of the uncertainties. Morton looks English or Scottish, a habitational name from one of the places so named, and it often is. George Morton of Nottinghamshire, England, was one of the Mayflower pilgrim fathers. But, as the Dictionary explains, the name has several other origins as an Americanization of Swedish, Finnish, French, and Jewish names. John Morton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, had a Finnish grandfather called Martti Marttinen—“Martin Martin’s son”— who moved to Sweden, where his name was Scandinavianized as Mårten Mårtensson, pronounced Mortenson, and then to America, where his surname was shortened to Morton.

Another way in which the Dictionary disambiguates the origins of a family name is to note the forenames associated with it in US telephone directories. Lee, with nearly 700,000 bearers in the 2010 census, is the standout instance of an English habitational name that was re-purposed to assimilate names from other languages. They include one each from Irish and Norwegian and six from Romanized forms of Chinese and other Southeast Asian languages in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. The surname is famous as that of a Shropshire family that migrated from England to Virginia in the early seventeenth century and whose descendants were prominent in the American Revolution and the Civil War. But some of its forenames in America—Young, Sang, Jae, Jong, Jung, Sung, Yong, Kyung, Seung, Dong, Kwang, Myung­—alert us to other histories, of later migrations from Southeast Asia.

Is it ever safe to take an American family name at face value? Often yes, even if all you can be sure of is that the name, whatever its original sense, belongs to a specific group of people. But, as you have seen from the names I’ve picked out for discussion, appearances can be very deceptive.

_{Featured image by Joshua Hoehne via Unsplash.}

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A Q & A on English and all its varieties [interactive map]

With the rise of English as the world’s lingua franca, countries have adopted English in their own unique and fascinating ways. It is therefore more important than ever to record these words and phrases. We decided to talk to Dr Danica Salazar, the World English Editor for the Oxford English Dictionary, who takes care of projects relating to the varieties of English around the world.

What are World Englishes?

World Englishes are localized or indigenized varieties of English spoken throughout the world by people of diverse cultural backgrounds in a wide range of sociolinguistic contexts.

What is the World English programme and its importance?

One of the most interesting developments in the recent history of English is its rise as a global lingua franca. English is now used by billions of people in many different places on earth, and this is reflected by the many new words that make it into English from this amazing variety of people and places. Oxford Languages’ World English Programme aims to accurately and authentically document as many of these words as possible in our dictionaries and lexical datasets, including the historical Oxford English Dictionary and our dictionaries of current English.

Can you tell us about some of the different Englishes spoken across the world?

The World English programme covers a wide range of varieties of English. We document the vocabulary of countries where English is spoken as a majority first language, such as Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland, but also that of postcolonial nations where English is generally spoken as a second language and/or has some official status, like Nigeria, Singapore, and Sri Lanka. We look at varieties that characterize specific countries, but also wider regions such as the Caribbean and East Africa. We record words used by large English-speaking populations, such as those in India and South Africa, but also words used by much smaller Anglophone communities, such as that in Bermuda. We work on dialects determined by geographical boundaries, but also on sociolects spoken by different linguistic communities such as African American English and Hispanic Englishes spoken in the United States. We also include words from non-English-speaking countries, such as Japan and South Korea, which nonetheless have had a significant influence on the English lexicon.

There are a few exciting projects in the works at the moment. Could you tell us about the Oxford Dictionary of African American English?

The Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE) is a dictionary based on historical principles documenting the lexicon of African American English (AAE). The dictionary will be based on examples of African American speech and writing spanning the whole documented history of AAE. A team of lexicographers based in different parts of the United States are currently working on this landmark scholarly initiative, with input from an Advisory Board composed of renowned experts on African American language, history, and culture.

The ODAAE is a collaborative project between Oxford University Press and the Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, funded by the Mellon Foundation.

What resources are available on the OED’s dedicated World English Hub?

The OED’s World English Hub is a section of the dictionary’s website that is dedicated to different varieties of English spoken around the world. It is publicly accessible and serves as a central repository for the content and resources related to varieties of English in the OED. There, one can find free articles, videos, teaching resources, pronunciation information, and more. There are also links to academic publications and news features, as well as a submissions form that people can use to suggest World English terms for inclusion in the OED.

The Hub features individual pages for most of the varieties covered by the OED, which contain even more information and resources specific to each variety.

What have you loved most about working on the World English programme?

I love working on the World English programme because, whatever variety we’re doing—whether it’s words from India, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Africa, the Caribbean, or the United States—I feel that I learn something new every day, not only about the words themselves, but also about the language, culture, and history of the people who use them. Each word I work on is like a little window into the everyday realities of English speakers all over the world, who adapt English vocabulary to accommodate their own traditions and values.

I also love that my work gives me the opportunity to travel and to work with experts from around the English-speaking world. I find it very rewarding working with people on documenting the varieties they speak natively or do research on, as this enables me to see the English language from different perspectives and opens my mind to new ideas. I find that this enriches not only my work but my life in general. 

For more information about different Englishes spoken across the world, check out these titles:

• The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes, edited by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Devyani Sharma
• The Oxford Handbook of Irish English, edited by Raymond Hickey
• The Oxford Handbook of Southeast Asian Englishes, edited by Andrew J. Moody

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How to define 2022 in words? Our experts take a look… (part four)

A tumultuous quarter—our experts choose the words for the final few months of 2022

October

We mentioned in our previous blog that mini-budget was the only word not related to the death of Queen Elizabeth II among the top ten words in our corpus that were significantly more frequent in September than the preceding months.

Taking place on 23 September 2022, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini-budget” sparked a series of economic events that were quickly called a doom loop—our word for October.

The term doom loop dates back to at least the 1980s in reference to a self-perpetuating downward spiral (broadly synonymous with vicious cycle). It is still often used in this sense. Examples in the corpus include:

• “Increasing wildfires create a doom-loop that increases atmospheric carbon levels that risks worsening the next fire season” (The Hill, Oct 2021)
• “Those who apply for roles in real estate… are asked for experience before they are considered, creating a doom loop of rejection” (Personnel Today, June 2022)

However, the term is increasingly used in economic contexts, as was the case last year. Usage of the word dramatically spiked in October 2022, largely with reference to the consequences of the UK government’s mini-budget in September. For example:

• “Sterling crashed past $1.11 for the first time since 1985. Yields on UK government bonds, or gilts, blew out as their value collapsed, necessitating an emergency intervention by the Bank of England to stop a ‘doom loop’ of forced selling by pension funds” (Sunday Times, 2 Oct 2022)
• “A doom loop in the debt markets became so scary that the Bank of England had to make a massive emergency intervention for fear that some pension funds were about to go bust” (The Guardian, 2 Oct 2022).

In this context, doom loop was almost eight times more frequent in October 2022 than at the same time the previous year. Other words related to doom loop that also spiked include mini-budget, gilt, unfunded, anti-growth, and Trussonomics, a word very occasionally used before 2022 but which shot up in prominence last year.

November

Moving onto November 2022, we saw the global spectacle that was the FIFA Men’s World Cup.

The tournament—eventually won by Argentina following a 3-3 draw and dramatic penalty shoot-out against France—was not without controversies. This included the treatment of migrant workers working to build the infrastructure for the competition and the treatment of LGBTQ+ people in Qatar, the host nation.

Our word for November is OneLove, a term that started life as the name of an anti-discrimination campaign by the Dutch Football Association in 2020. It is synonymous with rainbow-coloured armbands worn by team captains bearing its logo.

Before September 2022, the word did not have much of a presence in our corpus, but its prominence skyrocketed in November as the tournament drew nearer and attention towards anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the host nation grew.

In particular, the word was associated with reports that some teams planned to wear the OneLove armbands during games as a sign of protest, but this was abandoned after a very late warning from the governing body that any players doing so would be given a yellow card.

December

Last year’s severe weather events were not limited to the summer. The UK experienced heavy snow and freezing temperatures in December, and 10 days later across the pond a huge winter storm swept over large parts of the US and Canada.

This led to a large spike in use of the term bomb cyclone. Our word for December, bomb cyclone was over 23 times more frequent in December 2022 than December 2021.

The term dates to at least the early 2000s. For instance: 

• “Bomb cyclones have characteristics similar to hurricanes in their power and precipitation intensity… However, there are many major differences between the two storm types… Bomb cyclones have cold air and fronts associated with them, which hurricanes do not, and indeed, cold air is an essential ingredient for a bomb cyclone, while it kills a hurricane.” (The Halifax Daily News (Nova Scotia), 6 Dec. 2004)

Before that, use of the word bomb to refer to a rapidly-developing, severe storm can be traced back to the 1940s:

• “Nature flipped a weather bomb at Ohio today, catching the state unprepared for the worst snowstorm of the year.” (Norwalk (Ohio) Reflector-Herald, 11 Mar. 1948)

The first use of bomb in a more specific weather sense—describing a rapidly developing severe storm in which barometric pressure at the centre of the storm drops by at least 24 millibars over a 24-hour period at or north of 60˚  latitude—appeared in  1980, in a paper written by Frederick Sanders and John R. Gyakum (“Synoptic-Dynamic Climatology of the ‘Bomb’”, Monthly Weather Review, October 1980). 

Although the bomb cyclone is not a new phenomenon, the effects of climate change have led extreme weather events such as this to increase in frequency and severity, where previously they might have been once-in-a-generation occurrences. 

December’s North American winter storm arrived on the heels of COP27 in November, an international climate conference which focused on ways to adapt to a changing global environment. Discussions of climate justice, climate reparations, and loss and damage also resulted in an increase in the usage of those terms. 

A year in words

And that concludes our look back at 2022 in words. It was certainly an eventful year and through it all our ever-changing language helped us to make sense of the world around us and brought us together. At Oxford University Press we continue to monitor the English language—we look forward to seeing what trends emerge this year…

Catch up with part one, part two, and part three of the Word of the Year 2022 blog series.

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Women in the history of linguistics—from marginalization to recognition

Women’s History Month raises issues of erasure and marginalization, authority and power which, sadly, are still relevant for women today. Much can be learnt from the experience of women in the past. We find inspiring stories of women who overcame prejudice and constraints of all kinds and who sometimes managed to gain recognition from their peers, only to be excluded from the history of their discipline. 

In the field of linguistics, this marginalization relates to some extent to what is today considered part of linguistics and the current valuing above all of theoretical work. Words matter: a broader definition of linguistics allows women across the centuries to be included in this scholarly field. Given the cultural and practical limitations imposed on their access to education across all cultures, we need to look outside more institutionalized and traditional frameworks to discover the contributions made by women to the study of language structure and function.

Classic histories of linguistics, very rarely, if ever, include women scholars. We set about uncovering the contribution of women linguists—from European and non-European traditions— and their ideas and writings to give them the recognition they deserve. A group of equally motivated and determined scholars joined us in our quest. We looked for names, works and ideas, especially in those liminal spaces not reached by official historiography, that is, outside institutions, universities, and academies in more private and domesticated spaces. We decided to challenge categories and concepts devised for male-dominated accounts and expands our field of enquiry: we turned our attention not only to pioneers and exceptional women, but also to those non-exceptional women who nevertheless quietly moved forward our knowledge of languages, their description, analysis, codification and acquisition. Painstaking research in archives and libraries, looking at manuscripts and printed sources, gradually unearthed rich, fascinating, and often unexpected evidence of women’s contribution. 

For the earlier periods, it was difficult to find women who published grammars or dictionaries, but they did exist. Marguerite Buffet in seventeenth-century France wrote a volume of observations on the good usage of French specifically aimed at women (Nouvelles observations sur la langue françoise, 1668). Similarly, in 1740, Johanna Corleva published a Dutch translation of Port-Royal’s celebrated general and rational grammar. In Portugal, in 1786, Francisca de Chantal Álvares produced a compendium of Portuguese grammar for female pupils in convent schools, the Breve Compendio da Gramatica Portugueza para uso das Meninas que se educaõ no Mosteiro da Vizitaçaõ de Lisboa, at a time when the majority of women did not have access to formal education. Further afield, women missionaries were also active in the field. Gertrud von Massenbach joined the Sudan Pioneer Mission in 1909, as a teacher of mathematics in Aswan, in Nubian territory. Her linguistic interests led her to publish a dictionary with a grammatical introduction of Kunûzi Nubian (Wörterbuch des nubischen Kunûzi-Dialektes mit einer grammatischen Einleitung, 1933) and a collection of Nubian texts (Nubische Texte im Dialekt der Kunuzi und der Dongolawi, 1962).

But there is much more. Women were, for instance, the intended audience or dedicatees of some of the earlier vernacular grammars in Europe. The Gramática de la lengua castellana (1492) by Antonio de Nebrija, the very first printed grammar of a vernacular language in Europe, was commissioned by Queen Isabella I of Castile and, according to Juan de Valdés, was meant to be of benefit, “para las damas de la sereníssima doña Isabel” (“for the ladies-in-waiting of Her Very Serene Highness Queen Isabel”). Women were translators, language teachers, collectors of data on endangered languages, and creators of new scripts. In Jiangyong county (Jiāngyǒng xiàn) of Hunan (Húnán) province in China, a rural territory surrounded by mountains, the nǚshū script (“female script/writing”) was used and transmitted among village women for at least one and a half centuries: a variant of the Chinese script, it represents a significant example of Chinese women’s contribution to character invention and development. 

Women also assisted male members of their families, or male colleagues, in their work as linguists. Lucy Catherine Lloyd (1834-1914), the sister-in-law of the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek, was his most important collaborator. Together they created the nineteenth-century archive of ǀXam and !Kung texts (today called the Digital Bleek and Lloyd), an invaluable resource for linguists working on Khoisan languages. Cinie Louw followed her husband Andrew Louw to South Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe) to work on the Morgenster Mission, learning the local language, Karanga, a Shona dialect, and becoming a fluent speaker. Their 1919 translation of the Bible into Karanga was a joint effort, preceded in 1915, by an important manual of the Chikaranga Language. 

Other women’s linguistic work has been neglected or overshadowed, the men with whom they collaborated reaping the benefit of their efforts. The young Chiri Yukie (1903–1922) helped codify the oral tradition of the Ainu people of Hokkaido in northern Japan. Thanks to her bilingual and bicultural knowledge she was able to collect a wide range of oral performances, preserving them for posterity and making them accessible by translating them into Japanese. Her invaluable work ultimately ended up promoting, instead, the career of a prominent male academic who was awarded the Imperial prize for his work on the Indigenous language. 

What came to light, piece by piece, through reading their personal stories, was the challenges women had to face in male-dominated academia. Women’s personal and professional life cannot be separated in a way that has been possible for male scholars across the centuries. Theirs are often tales of perseverance and determination. Take the example of Mary Haas, a stalwart of twentieth-century American Indian Linguistics and a central figure in the Boas-Sapir tradition, which laid the foundation for current language documentation practices. Haas found her marriage in 1931 to Morris Swadesh limited her opportunities both within linguistics and with respect to employment generally. Given the scarcity of academic appointments, she considered getting a teaching certificate to teach in public schools in Oklahoma to support herself and her fieldwork on Native American languages. However, as a married woman she was unlikely to get hired in a public school. Undeterred, she wrote to Swadesh asking for a divorce so that she might be able to support herself. Swadesh agreed. Their divorce was meant to allow Haas to pursue more avenues of employment, although her plans were ultimately interrupted by World War II. 

Uncovering such stories proved complicated, but extremely rewarding. And the more we found, the more we have become convinced that there is still so much more to discover.

Read a free chapter from Women in the History of Linguistics on Oxford Academic.

_{Featured image from the cover of Women in the History of Linguistics by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Helena Sanson.}

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How to define 2022 in words? Our experts take a look… (part three)

Heatwave, cost of living and queue—summer 2022 in words

From booster to Platty Joobs, we’ve explored the first half of 2022 in words. The second half of the year was marked by a series of disasters—natural and economic—and our experts have taken a look at the words that sum up this turbulent time.

July

The extreme weather of July 2022 led to a surge in use of the word heatwave. In Portugal, temperatures reached 47°C in mid-July, while usage of the word spiked in British English sources as the UK experienced record temperatures of up to 40°C.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) first quotation of heatwave is from 1842. When it was first used, it normally referred to a wave of hot weather passing from one place to another. Now, we use it to describe a period of abnormally hot weather.

In July 2022, the word was almost 4.5 times more frequent in UK sources than the previous month.

The rest of the world experienced extreme weather events too, with catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, and wildfires and droughts around the world. These events were seen as a stark reminder of the impact of climate change and the unpredictability it is causing in global weather systems.

August

Our term for August 2022 is cost of living.

The term is first recorded in the OED in 1796 and defined as “the general cost of goods and services viewed as necessary to maintain an average or minimal standard of living (such as food, housing, transport, etc.)” with a specific economics clause referring to “the average cost of such goods and services as measured by a representative price index.”

Frequency of the term gradually rose throughout 2022, with its usage increasing more than four-fold between December 2021 and August 2022, and levels staying high for the remainder of the year.

This increase was down to the economic situation that much of the world found itself in, with many people struggling with the cost of fuel and the price of basic necessities rising. Headlines included: “Fun is out as cost of living soars” (Courier Mail, 1 Aug 2022) and “Cost of living: How to cope with the rise in prices” (Independent, 31 Aug 2022).

That this situation was playing out around the world is reflected in the term’s usage too, which was geographically widespread and not restricted to any particular country or region.

A number of other terms related to the cost-of-living crisis saw increases in usage throughout the year, including energy crisis, fuel poverty, fuel crisis, permacrisis, and warm bank. 

September

After the passing of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022, it was announced that Her Majesty’s coffin would lie in state for five days to allow mourners to pay respects to the late monarch.

This initiated the longest queue—our word for September—in British history, as more than 250,000 people waited patiently to make their way to Westminster Hall.

The queue caught the attention of the British and international media, with a live feed from the Palace of Westminster tracking its length and #TheQueue trending on Twitter. The word queue was used around 3.5 times more frequently than the previous month and year.

As a word, queue is borrowed into English from Anglo-Norman and Middle French, and derives from the Latin word cauda, meaning a tail (of an animal). It was first recorded in English in the fifteenth century with reference to ribbons or bands of parchment bearing seals and attached to a letter.

The earliest quotations for the queue that we all know today—“a line or sequence of people, vehicles, etc., waiting their turn to proceed, or to be attended to”—are found in a French context. Thomas Carlyle provided our first clearly English citation, writing in 1837 “That talent… of spontaneously standing in queue, distinguishes… the French People.” Since then, however, this has become a distinctively British word for what users of North American English would call a line.

Many of the words seeing a significant increase in usage in September 2022 were references to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Monarch and monarchy, coffin, mourning and mourner, coronation, respects, corgi, and queen, which was recently chosen as the Oxford Children’s Word of the Year 2022, were all in the top ten words in our corpus which were significantly more frequent in September than the months before. Lying-in-state and catafalque (a platform on which a coffin is placed) saw a significant increase in usage too. 

The only item in the top ten words for September not to relate to the death of HM The Queen is mini-budget. More to come on this word shortly…

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How to define 2022 in words? Our experts take a look… (part two)

From partygate to Platty Joobs, we continue our look through 2022 in words

In the first blog post of our A Year in Words series, we looked at some of the words that dominated our conversations and rose in usage during the first quarter of 2022: from booster to Ukraine, via the less well-known monobob.

Now, our experts look at April to June and what the language we used can tell us about these eventful months.

April

A defining moment in Boris Johnson’s premiership came with a linguistic twist: partygate.

Referring to a series of social gatherings held in 10 Downing Street and other government buildings during the national COVID-19 lockdowns, this political scandal ran through much of 2022.

The word partygate began to crop up in December 2021, with its usage increasing dramatically in January and February and then peaking in April, as the nation waited for the publication of civil servant Sue Gray’s report into the parties.

Although a very British scandal, the word partygate reflects the influence of the United States in the language of politics around the world. Partygate is one of a large and varied group of words taking the suffix -gate, which denotes an actual or alleged scandal and often an attempted cover-up. These scandals take their name from the 1972 Watergate scandal where people connected with President Nixon’s Republican administration were caught breaking into, and attempting to bug, the national headquarters of the Democratic Party (in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C.) during a presidential election campaign.

And this isn’t the first time a scandal involving controversial celebrations has been dubbed partygate.

The word goes back to at least the late 1990s, with a 1997 article in the South China Morning Post suggesting a senior politician had used public money to fund a private party and calling the affair “Partygate.”

From then on, the word has been used intermittently to refer to a variety of unconnected scandals, all flaring up then disappearing. Time will tell if 2022’s partygate will become the word’s definitive moment.

May

While the partygate headlines rolled on into May, this month was also marked by an outbreak of monkeypox, leading to the word being used nearly 300 times more than in May 2021, and almost 600 times more than in April 2022. 

The Oxford English Dictionary’s (OED) earliest evidence of the word monkeypox—“a disease resembling smallpox which affects various species of rodent, monkey, and ape, originally in western and central Africa, and which is transmissible to humans”—is from 1960, two years after it was first identified among laboratory monkeys in Copenhagen, Denmark. 

In May 2022, words such as virus, symptoms, outbreak, infection, and spread were among those found near monkeypox, with others such as skin-to-skin, contact, and vaccine increasing in visibility as the outbreak progressed and focus shifted to public health attempts to limit its spread.

Its usage continued to grow before reaching a peak in August 2022, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) invited submissions for an alternative name for the disease. They were seeking to mitigate a rise in racist and stigmatising language associated with the disease, as part of an ongoing effort to ensure that the names of diseases do not create or reinforce negative associations or stereotypes. Our lexicographer Danica Salazar has written more on major health crises and language with Richard Karl Deang from the University of Virginia. 

In November, it was announced that the WHO would phase out monkeypox in favour of mpox and urged other agencies to do the same. 

June

One of the biggest events of the summer was Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee—the first and only time a British monarch has reached the milestone of 70 years on the throne.

The Jubilee, celebrated over the first weekend of June 2022, was marked in the UK by a two-day bank holiday enabling four days of street parties, parades, concerts, and services of thanksgiving. 

This event prompted the creation of a new term—Platty Joobs.

This term burst onto the scene on 20 April 2022 when the actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe, one of the stars of the BBC sitcom Ghosts, tweeted:

“I dunno about you man gassed for Lizzies Platty Joobs. I don’t even know what it is but i’m READY. Might make some trainers on Nike ID 🎯💯 🤞🏾”

A month later, towards the end of May, it began to appear as a hashtag on Twitter. 

While anticipation for this unprecedented celebration undoubtedly drove the use of Platty Joobs, discussion of the phrase itself also helped its spread. 

Twitter users were divided on whether they loved or hated the playful abbreviation. Even those opposed found it hard not to succumb to what proved to be a lexical earworm. On 25 May, journalist and author Caitlin Moran tweeted:

“The Platinum Jubilee being called “The Platty Joobs” might be the worst thing to have ever happened in my lifetime. And yet … I’ve started whispering it to myself.”

The mid-year mark

We’re halfway through the year, and both politically and linguistically what a busy six months it was. Over our next two instalments we’ll cover the rest of 2022, with words relating to the extreme weather we experienced, the economic crises around the world and, of course, the passing of the UK’s longest-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II.

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How to define 2022 in words? Our experts take a look… (part one)

Now the dust has settled on another eventful year, it’s time to look back on some of the words that characterised 2022.  

In December, we announced goblin mode as our Word of the Year for 2022, decided by public vote for the first time ever. A type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations, goblin mode captured imaginations globally, with Stephen King joining in on Twitter, a discussion on the Late Late Show with James Corden, and online conversations spanning Europe, Asia, and America. While the lifting of pandemic restrictions was a relief for many, for some people, the social pressures like going out and returning to the office that came along with it were less welcome, and the idea of goblin mode captured a desire to escape those pressures as society returned to a new and different “normal.” 

But when our experts analysed our corpus of 19 billion words, as well as finding candidates for the 2023 Word of the Year, they also looked at trends in how certain words were used at different points throughout the year. 

Over this series of articles, we will take a month-by-month look at the words—excluding the three candidates for Word of the Year: goblin mode, metaverse, and #IStandWith—that captured a moment and saw peaks in usage in 2022.

From existing words that surged in popularity, like booster and queue, to brand-new words, such as Platty Joobs, and others making a comeback (did you know the word partygate was first used in the 1990s?), the language we use can tell us a lot about the last 12 months, the issues that have resonated, and the experiences we have shared.

January 

Cast your mind back to this time last year and it was COVID-19 vaccinations that dominated the headlines. Our Word of the Year for 2021 was vax, and this conversation rumbled on into the New Year, with healthcare at the forefront of our minds in the wake of the pandemic and continuing to shape the language we use.  

With that in mind, our experts have chosen booster as the word that best represents January 2022.  

By no means a new word, booster was first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in 1890, with the sense “a dose or injection of a substance that increases or prolongs the effectiveness of an earlier dose or injection” first recorded in 1950. 

It experienced a spike in frequency in December 2021 and January 2022 and was used more than 12 times more frequently in January 2022 than the same time the previous year.  

Unsurprisingly, this increase in usage was caused by the push to ensure people across the world had received a booster jab of the COVID-19 vaccine. We can see this from looking at the other words used near booster. In January 2021, these showed the variety of its uses: morale booster and rocket booster for instance, alongside vaccine-related terms such as booster dose. In January 2022, however, while other uses were still prevalent, they were overwhelmed by vaccine-related terms, such as receive a booster, eligible for a booster, booster programme, and many others.  

February 

From a well-known word that exploded in use to a hardly-known word bursting back onto the scene, our word for February is monobob.  

Monobob is the first-ever female-only Winter Olympic sport, introduced at the Winter Olympics last year in Beijing. It is a solo version of bobsleigh, and it has significantly increased women’s participation in the sport.  

Usage of the term monobob can be dated back to at least the 1930s in reference to a one-person bobsleigh. A dramatic entry in The Daily Telegraph on 18^th January 1935 commented:  

“The mishap occurred at a turn. Mr. Dugdale was on a mono-bob and it was noticed that he took the turn wrongly. His bob swung rapidly from side to side and he was thrown off.” 

But the inaugural Olympic monobob competition led to a spike in usage of the term, with monobob used almost 12 times as much in February 2022 than February 2021.  

The term monobob was used all around the world, but we saw two nations adopt the term more than others: Canada and Jamaica. The spike in Jamaican usage reflects the popularity of bobsled sports on the island nation: the unexpected entry of a Jamaican team in the 1988 Winter Olympics inspired the 1993 film Cool Runnings. Over 30 years later, Jamaica remains one of only three Caribbean nations to send bobsled teams regularly to the Winter Olympics, qualifying for a record three competitions last year, and sending Jazmine Fenlator-Victorian to compete in the new monobob event. The increase in Canadian usage might reflect the fact that Canada’s Christine de Bruin took Bronze in Bejing, coming behind US gold and silver medallists in the new event.

March 

Following the country’s invasion by Russian forces at the end of previous month, the word for March unsurprisingly was Ukraine.  

The word Ukraine was used over 75 times more frequently in March 2022 than the previous year, and over 5.5 times more frequently in March 2022 than February 2022.  

There is no denying that this spike in usage was due to the invasion, as shown by a number of other words experiencing an uplift in usage, relating both to the situation—invasion, invade, bombardment, besieged, unprovoked, and war-torn—and the international reaction—humanitarian, sanction, and oligarch. 

In the past, the name Ukraine was frequently used in English with the definite article—the Ukraine—but this usage decreased after the country gained independence in 1991 after the dissolution of the former Soviet Union. Usage of the Ukraine, in proportion to overall uses of Ukraine, dropped further from March last year as the media and the public took conscious action to avoid using Russo-centric language to describe the region—a trend also seen with the media (for the most part) referring to the capital using the Ukrainian Kyiv rather than the Russian Kiev.  

Coming soon  

That’s all for this first instalment of the year in words. Keep an eye on the blog as we explore the rest of 2022 in words, including partygate, monkeypox, and more…  

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A Q&A with Bryan Garner, “the least stuffy grammarian around”

The fifth edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage has recently been published by OUP. I was happy to talk to Bryan Garner—who has been called “the least stuffy grammarian around” and was declared a “genius” by the late David Foster Wallace—about what it means to write a usage dictionary. 

What possesses someone to undertake a usage dictionary?

“Possesses” is a good word for it. In my case, it was matter of falling in love with the genre as a teenager. I discovered Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage (1942) and immediately felt that it was the most fascinating book I’d ever held. Partridge discussed every “problem point” in the language—words that people use imprecisely, phrases that professional editors habitually eliminate, words that get misspelled because people falsely associate them with similar-looking words, the common grammatical blunders, and so on. And then Partridge had essays on such linguistic topics as concessive clauses, conditional clauses, elegancies, hyphenation, negation,   nicknames, and obscurity (“It may be better to be clear than clever; it is still better to be clear and correct.”).

At the age of 16, I was going on a ski trip with friends, and the book had just arrived in the mail as I was leaving for New Mexico. I stuck it in my bag and didn’t open it until we arrived at the ski lodge. Upon starting to read it, I was hooked. In fact, I didn’t even ski the first day: I was soaking up all that I could from Usage and Abusage, which kept mentioning some mysterious man named Fowler.

So when I got home, I ordered Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2d ed. 1965), and when it arrived I decided it was even better. By the time I was 17, I’d memorized virtually every linguistic stance taken by Partridge and Fowler, and I was thoroughly imbued with their approach to language. By the time I’d graduated from high school, I added Wilson Follett, Bergen Evans, and Theodore Bernstein to the mix. I was steeped in English usage—as a kind of closet study. I spent far more time on these books than I did on my schoolwork.

I suppose in retrospect it looks predictable that I’d end up writing a usage dictionary. I started my first one (A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage) when I was 23, and I’ve been at it ever since. That was 41 years ago, and it ended up being my first book with Oxford University Press.

There must be a further backstory to a teenager who suddenly falls in love with usage books. What explains that?

You’re asking me to psychoanalyze myself? Okay, it’s true. When I was four, in 1962, my grandfather used Webster’s Second New International Dictionary as my booster seat. I started wondering what was in that big book.

Then, in 1974, when I was 15, one of the most important events of my life took place. A pretty girl in my neighborhood, Eloise, said to me, with big eyes and a smile: “You know, you have a really big vocabulary.” I had used the word facetious, and that prompted her comment.

It was a life-changing moment. I would never be the same.

I decided, quite consciously (though misguidedly), that if a big vocabulary impressed girls, I could excel at it as nobody ever had. By that time, my grandparents had given me Webster’s Second New International Dictionary, which for years had sat on a shelf in my room. I took it down and started scouring the pages for interesting, genuinely useful words. I didn’t want obsolete words. I wanted serviceable words and remarkable words. I resolved to copy out, by hand, 30 good ones per day—and to do it without fail.

I soon discovered I liked angular, brittle words, such as cantankerous, impecunious, rebuke, and straitlaced. I liked aw-shucks, down-home words, such as bumpkin, chatterbox, horselaugh, and mumbo-jumbo. I liked combustible, raucous words, such as blast, bray, fulminate, and thunder. I liked arch, high-toned words, such as athwart, calumny, cynosure, and decrepitude. I liked toga-wearing, Socratic-sounding words, such as eristic, homunculus, palimpsest, and theologaster. I liked mellifluous, polysyllabic words, such as antediluvian, postprandial, protuberance, and undulation. I liked the technical and quasi-technical terms of rhetoric, such as asyndeton, periphrasis, quodlibet, and synecdoche. I liked frequentative verbs with an onomatopoetic feel, such as gurgle, jostle, piffle, and topple. I liked evocative words about language, such as billingsgate, logolatry, wordmonger, and zinger. I liked scatological, I-can’t-believe-this-term-exists words, such as coprolalia, fimicolous, scatomancy, and stercoraceous. I liked astonishing, denotatively necessary words that more people ought to know, such as mumpsimus and ultracrepidarian. I liked censoriously yelping words, such as balderdash, hooey, pishposh, and poppycock. I liked mirthful, tittering words, such as cowlick, flapdoodle, horsefeathers, and icky.

In short, I fell in love with language. I filled hundreds of pages in my vocabulary notebooks.

In the end, I decided that I liked the word lexicographer better than copyist, so I tried my hand at it.

What about Eloise? Did she respond well?

I was trying to impress her, it’s true. I never called her. I just started using lots of big words. It took me about two years to realize that big words, in themselves, have no intrinsic value in attracting females. Perhaps the opposite.

But that’s okay. By the time I was 17, I had this prodigious vocabulary. I thought of SAT words as being quite elementary. I had a larger vocabulary then than I do today. You can see why, at the ski lodge in early 1975, this particular teenager was absolutely primed to relish the work of Eric Partridge and H.W. Fowler.

You’re not limited to English usage, are you? You’ve written other language-related books—what, 28 of them with different publishers?

That’s true. But it all began with words and English usage. Then I moved to legal lexicography and other language-related topics.  

Many if not most lexicographers today are interested in slang, in current catchphrases, and in jargon—the more shifting and volatile parts of language. (Always something new!) I’m different. I’ve always been interested in the durable parts. In my usage book, I tackle the difficult question of what, precisely, constitutes Standard Written English. In any era, that’s a complicated question or series of questions. And so I’ve answered it in a 1,200-page book, word by word and phrase by phrase. It’s intended for writers, editors, and serious word lovers.

Within Garner’s Modern English Usage, you intersperse essays of the kind you mentioned earlier, don’t you?

Of course. I’m very Fowlerian and Partridgean in my mindset. Though all my essays are original, some bear the same category-titles as Fowler’s (for example, “Archaisms,” “Needless Variants,” and “Split Infinitives” ) or Partridge’s (“Clichés,” “Johnsonese,” and “Slang” [yes, that]). Meanwhile, I’ve created new essay-categories of my own, much in the mold of my admired predecessors: “Airlinese,” “Estranged Siblings,” “Hypercorrection,” “Irregular Verbs,” “Skunked Terms,” “Word-Swapping,” and the like). I have a dozen new essays in the fifth edition, including “Irreversible Binomials,” “Loanwords,” “Prejudiced and Prejudicial Terms,” “Race-Related Terms,” and “Serial Comma” (a big one). These essays are some fun.

You also have lots of new short entries, don’t you? Didn’t I read that there are 1,500 of them?

Yes, something like that. Consider an example. Note that an asterisk before a term denotes that it’s nonstandard:      

  tic-tac-toe (the elementary game in which two players draw X’s or O’s within a pattern of nine squares, the object being to get three in a row), a phrase dating from the mid-1800s in AmE, has been predominantly so spelled since about 1965. Before that, the variants *tick-tack-toe, *ticktacktoe, and even *tit-tat-toe were about equally common. The British usually call the game noughts and crosses. 

                   Current ratio (tic-tac-toe vs. *tit-tat-toe vs. *tick-tack-toe vs. *ticktacktoe): 96:4:3:1

There are thousands of such entries. As you can see, a usage-book entry is entirely different from a normal dictionary entry.

At the ends of your entries, you include ratios about relative frequency in print.

Yes. Those are key. I’m capitalizing on big data, which makes GMEU entries empirically grounded in a way that earlier usage books couldn’t be. This is a great era for lexicographers and grammarians: we can assess word frequencies in various databases that include millions of published and spoken instances of a word or phrase. By comparison, the evidence on which Fowler and Partridge based their opinions was sparse. In my case, opinion is kept to a minimum, and facts come to the fore. Sometimes that entails inconveniently discovering that the received wisdom has been way off base.

Some people ask why we need a new edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage after only six years.

I’ve heard that. It’s a naive view. For one thing, the empirical statistics on relative word frequencies have been updated from 2008 to 2019. The language has evolved: email is now predominantly solid. There are thousands of updated ratios, and some of the judgments differ from those in past editions. For example, overly and snuck are now declared to be unobjectionable.

Every single page of the book has new material. It’s a big improvement. The six years have allowed for much more research.

People who say they’re sticking to the original Fowler might as well be driving an original Model-T.

Here’s something reference books have in common with medical devices. There’s no reason for a new one unless it’s a significant improvement over its precursors. That’s how the field gets better and better.

The book has been praised as “a stupendous achievement” (Reference Reviews) and “a thorough tour of the language” (Wall Street Journal). You’ve been called “David Foster Wallace’s favorite grammarian” (New Yorker) and “the world’s leading authority on the English language” (Business Insider). That’s heady stuff, isn’t it?

I’m just a dogged researcher. That’s all. Research is simply formalized curiosity, and I seem to have an inexhaustible curiosity about practical problems that arise for writers and editors. I certainly wouldn’t call myself “the world’s leading authority on the English language.”

I’ve also been helped by generous scholars, especially by John Simpson, the Oxford lexicographer, and Geoffrey K. Pullum, the Edinburgh grammarian. And then I had a panel of 34 critical readers who minutely reviewed 55-page segments for suggested improvements. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the contributions of all these erudite friends.

In any event, a lexicographer must be especially adept at delayed gratification. You labor for years and then wait. You’re lucky, as Samuel Johnson once said, if you can just “escape censure.” That some people have praised my work, after all these years of toil, is certainly pleasing. But for me, the real pleasure is in the toil itself: asking pertinent questions and finding useful, fact-based answers to all the nettlesome problems that arise in our wildly variegated English language.

Find out more and buy Garner’s Modern English Usage, Fifth Edition →

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Oxford World English Symposium 2022 recap [podcast]

With over 1 billion speakers—and that’s a conservative estimate—English is an incredibly diverse language. Dozens of countries around the world have their own varieties, many of which have not historically seen adequate representation in English dictionaries.

This past April, the Oxford English Dictionary hosted the Oxford World English Symposium 2022, a two-day event featuring a series of parallel sessions and panels on topics relating not only to varieties of English, but language prejudice, colonialism, and context-based English language teaching, among others.

On today’s episode, we’re featuring Lisa Lim, Phillip Louw, and Michael Proffitt, three of the Symposium’s participants, in the form of a follow-up panel hosted by Dr Danica Salazar, World English Executive Editor for Oxford Languages.

Check out Episode 72 of The Oxford Comment and subscribe to The Oxford Comment podcast through your favourite podcast app to listen to the latest insights from our expert authors.

_{Featured image: @anniespratt, CC0 via Unsplash.}

Recommended reading

The recordings of the World English Symposium sessions are available to view on OED Online. They include panel discussions on dictionaries and the decolonization of English, language corpora and research resources, dictionaries, World Englishes, and ELT, and the spectrum of variation in English.

In 2021, Danica Salazar wrote a chapter for the edited volume Research Developments in World Englishes called “Documenting World Englishes in the Oxford English Dictionary: Past Perspectives, Present Developments, and Future Directions”, which offers a chronological overview of the OED’s coverage of world varieties of English.

In this 2021 post for the OED Blog, Michael Proffitt talks about the OED’s focus areas and goals, including World Englishes.

Lisa Lim is the co-author of Language in Contact and The Multilingual Citizen.  Her column “Language Matters” is published fortnightly in the South China Morning Post’s Sunday Post Magazine.

Phillip Louw worked on OUP South Africa’s flagship dictionary, the Oxford South African Concise Dictionary, which is now in its second edition.

You can also check out The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes, which investigates the astonishing diversity in structures of English around the world.

Additionally, you can visit the OED’s Varieties of English hub for content and resources related to varieties of English on the OED website, and information on the contributions made by the dictionary’s extensive network of consultants and partner institutions across the globe. There is also the opportunity to suggest a World English term for inclusion in the OED.

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Lost for words? Introducing Oxford’s “Words of an Unprecedented Year”

Bushfires. A global pandemic. Lockdown. Economic recession. Racial injustice. International protests. A pivotal election. For over a decade, we have selected a word or expression that captures the ethos, mood or preoccupations of the last 12 months, driven by data showing the ways in which words have been used. But this year, how could we pick a word, or even a shortlist, to summarize the ways in which we’ve been continually knocked off our axis?

Instead, today we released a comprehensive report entitled “Words of an Unprecedented Year” which tracks some of the new words and most significant language trends to have emerged across a truly unique year. The report shows how “Covid-19” spread across the world, not just epidemiologically but through our language, becoming one of the most used nouns of the year, despite only being coined in February. It maps how we went into ”lockdown” in some countries and were asked to “shelter-in-place” in others, while “circuit breakers” made their way from Singapore to Western Europe. It marks the moment in which the term “Black Lives Matter” surged back into our collective consciousness and “Karens” made a name for themselves, while the use of “systemic racism” increased by 1,623%, compared to last year. And, as the year ground on, our conversations shifted to the political, with words such a “mail-in” increasing by 3000% during the run-up to and uncertainty of the US election.

The report makes for fascinating reading, but how do we go about selecting these words? Like all of our lexical efforts, the process is driven by data. We observe how people wield their words, how they flex them and merge them, how they pick them up and drop them again, and we record all of this objectively. We analyse huge corpus databases to understand how words are being used, when new words are being born, and when others are slipping out of popular use. This data captures real word uses of English around the world, whether in North America or the Caribbean, East or West Africa, Southeast Asia, or Australia, and helps our expert lexicographers to identify trends. We then examine these trends to identify which words truly encapsulate the events of the year.

To be considered for Word of the Year, we’re looking for words where the evidence shows it has emerged, changed, or grown in a significant way in this year in particular, and which captures a certain collective feeling about the time we’ve just experienced. For example, in 2016, when “post-truth” was named Word of the Year, we’d lived through a year in which fake news was hitting the headlines, quite literally, and public trust in institutions was plummeting. It’s always difficult to whittle down a shortlist of words that capture the breadth of events that take place within any given year. This year, our data showed us that the way we use certain words and the new words that emerged were so radically different and prolific that we have a much more detailed story to share.

And that story paints a picture: Imagine a historian in 50 years’ time—to understand what 2020 was about they would need to look no further than our language. They would see “coronavirus” replace “time” as the most commonly used noun in the English language, they would see “social distancing” become the norm, and the hope of “re-opening.” They’d see the growth of “cancel culture,” the political tension surrounding elections the world over, and thoughts turn to environmental sustainability and the future as we turn our attention to rebuilding. By releasing this longer form piece of language research, I’m hopeful that we can bring a greater understanding of both the language and our global experience to this unprecedented year.

If you’d like to know more, I invite you to join me and my colleagues, Fiona McPherson and Kate Wild, for a webinar on 10 December where we’ll give an overview of our corpus analysis-based approach to monitoring language, and this year’s particular challenges of keeping track of rapid language developments.

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How ancient Christians responded to pandemics

Ancient Christians knew epidemics all too well. They lived in a world with constant contagion, no vaccines, medieval medical practices, and no understanding of basic microbiology. Hygiene was horrendous, sanitation sickening. People shared “toilette paper”(a sponge-on-a-stick). Besides that, in the second and the third centuries CE, two pandemics rocked the Roman World. The first, the so-called Antonine Plague, was perhaps a strain of smallpox that, with intermittent outbreaks, persisted for decades (ca. 165-189 CE). It was said that in Rome, a city of roughly a million people, 2,000 often died a day. Those who could, practiced social distancing by retreating to the countryside. Those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, escape were instructed by doctors to fill their nostrils and ears with sweet-smelling perfume and herbs, which would expel the polluted air. If only it were that easy. Across the Roman world, the usual rhythms of life were interrupted as people fled—or died. Tax revenues dried up. Building projects broke off midway. The economy froze.

The second pandemic, two generations later, was perhaps worse. Thought to have been a filovirus — a zoonotic pathogen causing hemorrhagic fevers (think Ebola) — one source records that in Rome and in cities of Greece up to 5,000 men died a day. This Plague of Cyprian, named after the Christian bishop who witnessed and wrote about it, lasted for over a decade (ca. 249-262 CE). It must have felt like an eternity. The empire, according to one historian, never fully recovered.

In both pandemics, Christians were afflicted like everyone else. But based on the writings that have come down to us, their responses were largely defensive.

For people in antiquity, public health was an extension of religion. Honoring the Roman gods was a duty that ensured stability in the natural world. Even if Christians usually abstained from worshipping Roman gods, generally everyone got along. But when a plague erupted, Christians then appeared — to some — as irreverent, irresponsible, and more threatening to all. It seemed like Christians didn’t care about their civic duty.

At best, the result was social and political wrangling over the cause of, and response to, the plagues. In the face of such relentless mortality, tensions were high. People looked for answers, cast blame, and scapegoated. At worst, Christians could be easy targets. Christians cause calamities because they do not worship the Roman gods, the accusation went. Local persecutions sometimes followed.

Christian apologists responded in kind. No, they countered, you worship demons. And it’s because you don’t worship our God that we all suffer from the pestilence. Tertullian of Carthage even argued that the human race has always deserved the malice of God anyway, but actually the disasters now are lighter than in previous ages, thanks in part to Christians — God’s gift to the world. To blame Christians, Tertullian said, is counterproductive. In the midst of the third-century pandemic, Cyprian bishop of Carthage touted apocalyptic explanations. Well, the earth is old. It’s declining, Cyprian reprimanded the governor of Africa. Plus, this is the sentence that God has passed on the world: that evils should be multiplied in the last times. Judgment day is near. The plagues are God’s stripes and scourges. So stop your superstitious nonsense and worship the one true God, says Cyprian, before it’s too late.

For some Christians, though, the pandemic raised doubts. Despite Cyprian’s own ideas about the true cause of the plague, it was disturbing that believers died just like nonbelievers. How can that be, they asked, especially if the ‘heathen’ don’t worship God? Unfortunately, Cyprian tried to console them, while we are here in this world, everyone will be equally afflicted—Christians more so since they are already weakened by fasting. But Cyprian, apparently, was not completely callous. His biographer Pontius says the bishop instructed his churches to care for the sick — whether Christian or not. Some surely did.

Others were less sympathetic. During the same pandemic, bishop Dionysius of Alexandria circulated a letter among Egypt’s brethren, boasting about how Christians were caring for fellow Christians, even though they also became infected. Many then died. Such a fate was second only to martyrdom, he said. By contrast, Dionysius claimed, the heathen (literally, “gentiles”) were heartless, casting the sick into the roads half-dead and leaving their corpses to rot. Whether the Christians in Alexandria ever thought to nurse the heathen as well as the brethren, Dionysius doesn’t say.

He probably didn’t care. If he needed to, he could justify stepping over the sick heathen dying on the street (Matthew 10:5-8). He had it out for them already. Earlier he had been forced to flee to the desert for his refusal to worship their gods.

Dionysius was a partisan. And to what extent Christians actively sought to care for nonbelievers during the pandemics is unclear. Outside of Matthew 5:43-48 and Luke 6:27-36, the blueprint from Christian scripture is ambiguous. In the gospel of Mark, Jesus is known for curing his own people (Mark 1:29-45; 2:1-12; 5:24-34). Healing one gentile woman was the exception (Mark 7: 24-30; Matthew 15: 21-28). In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples to not heal the sick among the gentiles (Matthew 10:5-6; compare Luke 9:1-6), whereas in the gospel of Luke, Jesus is much more open to healing gentiles (Luke 7:1-10; 10:25-37).

If anything, Dionysius’s report weakens a common narrative today: Because Christians cared for their sick — as well as perhaps the pagans, too — outsiders noticed and converted. And in the long run, the two pandemics helped spread Christianity in the Empire. In Africa, at least, the opposite seems to have been true. Cyprian vents his frustration to the governor because people don’t convert when they should.

On balance, Christians would have had various responses to the pandemics, running the gamut from self-preservation to self-sacrifice — responses not too different from their non-Christian neighbors.’ In such crises, each group turned to their god(s) for help. We can only wonder what their responses would have been if we could tell them that such a massive scale of death was due to submicroscopic particles of RNA or DNA, coated with protein and capable of self-replication within the cells of an organism, where its effects are often pathogenic — in short, if we could tell them that it was a virus. Maybe instead of being at each other’s throats they would have shown more solidarity.

Featured Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Why war stories could reinjure those affected

When my mother was born, the Federal Republic of Nigeria was less than one year old. Language barriers, and eventually death, prevented me from asking my grandparents what life under the colonial rule of the Royal Niger Company had been like, their fates twisted and tugged by the company’s board of directors in London. I wish I had been able to ask them, as my mother’s birth drew near, what the increasing internal demand for self-governance had sounded like. My grandfather was a fishmonger, but who is to say that judging the price of fish and intuiting the departure of British ships from your harbors aren’t the same thing?

More often, however, I am able to get from my mother impressions of what life was like in the old country. And occasionally she will remark offhandedly about being a teen in 1970s Nigeria when it was full of Koreans and Sri Lankans. Or how, during a civil war that brought apocalypse to her childhood, her family had fled into the forest to live for some time before finding safety.

I started writing my third novel, War Girls, because of that story. As the son of immigrants, I’m not alone in feeling this sense of wonder and enchantment at the world the previous generation inhabited.

In conversations with my Somali-American friends, my Vietnamese-American friends, my Korean-American friends, my Palestinian-American friends, there are shades of that same admixture of feelings. But another colors the underbelly of the thing. In so many of our stories—that is to say, our parents’ stories—is war. Calamity. Our parents were refugees or war orphans or collaborators or freedom fighters or witnesses to untold horrors. Sometimes their parents were. Which makes our fascination with these all the more macabre. Therein lies the plight with which so many first-generation American writers suffer: are we exploiting the trauma our parents and grandparents endured for profit or fame or whatever it is that drives a person to write a book? Are we re-injuring them?

To this day, I don’t know the answer to that question. I just know that I am drawn, as the penitent is drawn to the church sanctuary, to those stories.

Those non-Westerners—those people from places the American consciousness has refused to consider or know much about; people from places who, by dint of White intervention, have suffered through national paroxysms of intercommunal violence or political upheaval—theirs, to me, is the most interesting story. Theirs is the story I find myself looking for on the shelves of bookstores and libraries.

Perhaps those stories are being told, just not in America. They aren’t being promulgated by a publishing industry that, according to a 2019 Lee & Low Books survey, is 76% white. At the executive level, that number is 78%. At the editorial level, 85%. Among both book reviewers and literary agents, the percentage of respondents who identified as white was 80%. From those representing the storytellers to those acquiring the stories to those hired to write about those stories, the ice cream in the cone is almost entirely one flavor. Such that even those tales of that history that still feels too close to be called history are cut through with baking soda or vanilla extract or rat poison, the narcotic diluted and adulterated by the White Gaze.

Two years ago this past March, I had the privilege of seeing Uzodinma Iweala read from his latest novel, Speak No Evil. He was doing an event with Neel Mukherjee, whose catholic The Lives of Others had enacted quiet and lasting change on my spirit when I read it. They were introduced by Marlon James. All in all, to me, it was like attending the American Music Awards the year Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, and Prince were all up for Favorite Soul/R&B Album. Before the reading started, I took my seat next to Uzodinma’s father, and we spent about twenty minutes laughing and chatting and I saw in the man so many of the familiar contradictory joys and fears contained within Nigerian parents of sons who become writers. We talked of Umuahia, where he had come from, as had my father. “Where in Umuahia?” he asked me, as though maybe one day they might have passed each other on the street or maybe attended secondary school together.

To my knowledge, the two men never met. Nor, at the time, would they have known my mother. So many of these things happen only after the dust has settled and the displaced awake on foreign shores. But I like to imagine, sometimes, their adolescent/teenaged/early adult quotidiana, their presents unexpected, their inner lives impossibly rich.

It is not always war and tragedy with them. Sometimes, it is this other thing too.

I hope I am able to remember that.

Featured Image Credit: by eko hernowo via Pixabay.

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What good writers do

In his novel Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez writes:

Florentino Ariza moved through every post during thirty years of dedication and tenacity in the face of every trial. He fulfilled all his duties with admirable skill … but he never won the honour he most desired, which was to write one, just one, acceptable business letter.

Plenty of authors in the humdrum world of business writing seem to share Señor Ariza’s difficulty. Standard letters and emails are sometimes decently written, which suggests the presence of editorial oversight. But one-off responses to customers’ questions and complaints rarely make sense, are full of grammatical and spelling mistakes, and use robotic jargon in which authors “reach out” while “touching base;” “address challenges” instead of “tackle problems;” and use “going forwards” whenever they want to talk about the future. Semiliterate responses from organizations great and small have become normal.

Take this muddled and meaningless letter signed by the chief executive of a leading eye hospital, responding to a complaint about a cancelled appointment:

Your appointment for the 26th January had to be cancelled because there were no clinics running that day. It is normal practice for access to all clinics for this day being denied, however this was not possible on this occasion due to the outreach clinics still running.

And this email from the John Lewis store is gibberish:

Further to our conversation this morning regards the estimates for blinds I have sent for the Make of Roman blinds I have spoken to my Manager regarding your comments.

In my experience, such examples are usually written by native English speakers with British-sounding names and, if I phone them, British accents—so we’re not talking about non-native speakers.

A common mistake is not knowing that a full stop or semicolon is usually the correct punctuation at a sentence boundary, something you’d hope authors would have learnt by the age of eleven. The error occurs six times in this email from Hoover/Candy, which was responding to a complaint that they’d reneged on a call centre’s promise to replace a broken appliance free of charge or at a large discount. I’ve put an [X] where all the full stops should be, but ignored other errors including loose for lose.

Thank you for your feedback[X], please note the contact centre staff are not aware that we factor a discount based on the age of the current appliance on a sliding scale[X] the newer the appliance the bigger the discount etc.

The appliance in question is over three years old[X] the discount applied is considered to be good[X] however, when you add VAT and carriage this is what takes the amount over the recommended RRP on our website.

We would not like to loose your mother as a customer[X] hence, on this occasion we are willing to add further discretionary discount based on the offer of model PU71/PU01001 current RRP of £89.99[X] the new price to you will be £64.99.

Hoover/Candy are not minnows. No doubt they have a training budget. Why don’t they spend some of it on improving staff writing skills?

Good writers exist somewhere in most organizations. When responding to complaints, they tend to do the same things and make it look deceptively easy:

• They assess the problem and decide what they want to achieve.
• They plan, which gives them a clear structure. In longer letters, they use subheadings.
• They use simple sentences (average 15–20 words), everyday language, and good punctuation. They know enough about modern English that they’ll begin sentences with But and So when needed. They also know that nobody’s worried about split infinitives any more.
• They put themselves in the reader’s shoes, and they deal with all the relevant problems the customer has raised.
• They re-read what they’ve written for sense and logical flow.

Companies can get it right if they try. Last year, after months of dismal ineptitude over a cooker repair, a senior official at Aga Rangemaster finally realized what had gone wrong. Suddenly, there emerged an email with coherent English, proper punctuation, some empathy, and a settlement worth several hundred pounds:

After reviewing the details of the case I can appreciate the frustration you have felt in trying to get the appliance repaired. I would like to reiterate my apologies on behalf of AGA Rangemaster for the service you have received. As a gesture of goodwill to try and restore your faith in AGA Rangemaster and demonstrate that we can improve, we would like to offer you two free years on the AGA Care Plan.

This kind of quality matters, because a company’s reputation rides out with every letter and email it sends. Writing well is hard work and often people need training to do it. There should be a pride in writing well, even about workaday things. Clear, well-expressed documents help to build and restore customer confidence. Ultimately, they pay off.

Feature Image Credit: Startup Stock Photos via Pixabay

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Bring—brought—brought

Soon after the previous gleanings (February 26, 2020) were posted, a correspondent asked me to clarify the situation with the “prefix” br– in breath and bring (see the post on breath for January 22, 2020). I mentioned this mysterious prefix in connection with Henry Cecil Wyld, who accepted its existence in bring but doubted its validity in breath. From a historical point of view, we have two different components, even if both go back to Indo-European bhrē-. James A. H. Murray thought that br- in breath is a remnant of the root meaning “burn,” as in breed ~ brood, while br– in bring traces allegedly to the zero grade of the verb bear (zero grade is a term of ablaut; in this case, no vowel stands between b and r in br-; hence, “zero”); so Wyld, though, as we will see, the idea was not his. By contrast, in the full grade, as in bear, from Old Engl. beran, the syllable is supported by a vowel. Thus, b^hr-¹ and b^hr-², if those entities are more that figments of etymologists’ imagination (as they may well be), have different histories. But one feature unites them: if br-eath and br-ing consist of two parts each, both are blends, like Lewis Carrol’s galumph (gallop + triumphant) or Oxbridge (Oxford + Cambridge).

In the recorded texts of the oldest Indo-European languages, blends turn up most rarely, but in 1937 the German scholar Rudolf Blümel cited a few good examples in Classical Greek, and in 2019 Ryan Seaberg (the University of Minnesota) defended a dissertation on blends in Greek and Latin. Similar “portmanteau words,” typical of colloquial speech, must also have existed in the remotest past, for words have always tended to merge, and there is no great difference between blending and compounding.

It may be instructive to throw a quick look at the etymology of some verbs having nearly the same meaning as bring. Bring can be synonymous with take, as when we TAKE an object away from our location but BRING it to the place where we are. Engl. take is a borrowing from Scandinavian (German nehmen is the verb, whose cognate English has lost; today, only its semi-obliterated traces can be detected in nimble and numb). Scandinavian taka meant “seize, receive,” etc. Then there is carry, another borrowing, this time from Old French; its main sense must have been “to move.” Fetch is English; it is a cognate of German fassen “to seize, grasp.” Conduct, convey, and transport will add nothing new to what we have seen above. The origin of German tragen “to carry” (cognate with Engl. drag ~ draw) is obscure. Those examples will suffice to show that, though the basic meaning of bring is rather vague, it usually refers to getting hold of and moving an object. Verb-adverb collocations like bring up and bring out show how pliable the verb bring is.

The origin of bring remains a riddle. The earliest etymologists of English, German, and Dutch had nothing to say about it. Later dictionaries cited the unquestionable congeners (cognates) and stopped there. Bring has related forms in all the Germanic languages (including Gothic, a dead language, known from a fourth-century translation of the New Testament), except, for some reason, Old Norse. A breakthrough happened in 1901, when Karl Brugmann, a famous German scholar, offered an imaginative etymology of this verb. But before discussing his hypothesis, I would like to mention the musings of Ludwig Laistner, another German philologist. He is remembered for his works on myths, but almost (or even entirely) forgotten as an etymologist. Although he hardly discovered the origin of the verb bring, his suggestions going back to 1888 are worth recalling.

The Gothic verb meant not only to “to bring” but also “to get something done,” approximately like Modern German vollbringen (voll “full”). Elsewhere in Germanic, bringan, the oldest recorded form of bring, must have given speakers grief. There are pairs like Engl. sit and set. Set is a so-called causative verb; it means “to make someone or something ‘sit’.” Bringan also had a causative twin, namely brengan (apparently, from brangjan), which, surprisingly, meant the same as bringan! As a result, the Modern Dutch for bring is brengen. Laistner emphasized the reference of the Germanic verb to accomplishment, regardless of whether the result was good or bad. He cited Gothic –praggan (gg = ng) “to oppress” and German Pranger “pillory,” as opposed to Prunk “splendor” (!). All of them seem to go back to the idea of bringing things to the surface. In those words, initial p alternated with b. Thus, Middle High German brunken meant “to show, expose,” and ge-brunkel can be glossed as “sheen of armor.” In the history of German, b and p constantly played leapfrog, but a Gothic non-borrowed word beginning with p is a great rarity, even an anomaly. As far as I know, since Laistner’s days, no one has thought of bring in the context of –praggan, Prunk, brunken, gebrunkel, and the rest, and yet his observations deserve attention. It seems that the ancient meaning of bring was indeed “to expose,” rather than or at least in addition to, “move an object from place to place.”

Several things are “wrong” with bring(an). First, the alternation b ~ p in the words that may be related to it. Second, its local spread. Perhaps some Celtic forms are akin to bring, but their affinity is open to doubt. Bring has no unquestionable Indo-European relatives and did not make it to Old Scandinavian. Third, the presence of a semantically redundant causative verb. And finally, its conjugation. All old verbs that rhyme with bring are strong, that is, their forms are governed by ablaut: spring—sprang—sprung, sing—sang—sung, etc., while bring is weak (bring—brought—brought, like seek—sought—sought). We seem to be dealing with an anomaly and a linguistic misfit.

Even if brunken is discounted as a false cognate, brengen, from brangjan, shows that bring took part in the ablaut game. The past form brang did occur, but it is usually explained away as an analogical formation. Was it really? In any case, weak verbs were not supposed to have vowel alternations by ablaut. The old verb meaning “to carry (from place to place)” is bear—bore—borne. Who needed bringan? As usual in such cases, some etymologists suggested borrowing from a substrate language. Yet it is better to stay away from the mysterious substrate, even though bring(an) does look like an intruder, for the reason bring made its way into Germanic remains unsolved. Are we dealing with Old Germanic slang? Perhaps, though reference to slang is not an etymology.

I am now returning to Brugmann. He suggested than bringan was a blend of two roots: b^her-, as in bear “to carry” and enké– or (e)nek– “to reach” (the second root has been preserved in Greek and can be detected in Engl. e-nough, from ge-nōg ~ ge-nōh). If such was the formation of bringan, this blend was, most probably, slang. Brugmann’s reconstruction does not account for the meaning “to expose,” but at least it makes clear why the verb has no indubitable cognates (very Old Germanic-Celtic slang is quite probable, but, as noted, the Celtic forms are not watertight) and why this verb is anomalous in so many respects. Another etymology exists. Bringan might be beran “to bear” with n inserted into the root: compare Engl. sting and Latin (in)stīgare “to instigate.” However, this scenario is less likely: too many features in the history of bring require an explanation, so that the idea of a slangy blend looks more promising.

Such is the shortest history of br- of bring and breath: not a solution, but at least a reasonable hypothesis. There is some irony in the fact that English has the phrase to bring to bear. Brugmann did not speak English, but he could read it, and, if he had known the idiom, he would have appreciated it as an unexpected tribute to his sagacity.

Feature credit image: Small mouth black bass. Public domain from Flickr.

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The architectural tragedy of the 2019 Notre-Dame fire

Sometimes it takes a catastrophic loss for us to realize how important historic architecture and cityscapes are to our lives. For instance, repairs are still ongoing following a 2011 5.8 magnitude earthquake that caused more than $30 million dollars’ worth of damage to the National Cathedral in Washington, DC.  And on 15 April 2019 a cataclysmic fire brought massive destruction to the Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, including the loss of its soaring spire and its centuries-old wood roof structure. There followed an international outpouring of grief for the loss of one of the icons of Western architecture. People from innumerable walks of life and countries around the world mourned the loss of a building that represented the aspirations, creativity, and sheer labor of mostly nameless artists, architects, and workers. The restoration campaign likely will take years, perhaps even a decade or more.

Around the globe, wars and natural disasters—not to mention modernization and development—threaten the built environment. Globally, more than half of the world’s population (according to the United Nations Population Division) now lives in cities, and by 2050 about 70% of the earth’s population will be urban. We can only imagine what the implications of this growth will be for historic cities and buildings and hope that heritage preservation and conservation will keep pace.

It’s not just iconic monuments and buildings by famous architects that we have to be concerned about: historic architecture and urban environments are mostly the work of unnamed (vernacular) builders and craftspeople—not professional designers. All sorts of builders and buildings will be affected in this period of urbanization and development. To become effective preservation advocates, we will all have to become knowledgeable about a wide range of buildings and environments.

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), the nineteenth-century restorer of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, made the connection between modernization and preservation in his Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (Dictionary of French Architecture from the Eleventh through the Sixteenth Centuries) published beginning in 1854. The author began his entry on “Restoration” by saying “The word and the thing are modern.” This seemingly paradoxical statement contains a kernel of truth that is as apt now as it was in the mid-nineteenth century: Although preservation (or restoration, in his terms) is concerned with retaining buildings that represent the past, the very need to do so is a function of modernization.

Just like twenty-first century urban dwellers, Viollet-le-Duc lived in a period of enormous change in the city where he lived: Paris. Starting in the 1850s, a massive campaign of rebuilding—called “Haussmannization” for its principal architect, the Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809-1891)—entailed the demolition of great swaths of the city’s ancient fabric, and the construction of new broad avenues, grand apartment blocks, and splendid monuments like the Paris Opéra. Today’s urbanites would find familiar some of the regrettable consequences of Haussmannization, such as a sort of gentrification in which working-class residents of the city center were displaced to its periphery. Viollet-le-Duc wasn’t explicitly criticizing urban modernization in his writing, but he did effectively connect two apparently distinctive phenomena: the expansion and reconfiguration of built landscapes (which took place throughout Europe and North America in the nineteenth century) and increasing public and private support for preserving or even reconstructing historic buildings.

Viollet-le-Duc’s concept of restoration, as expressed in his dictionary and elsewhere, had an enormous impact on the restoration of Notre-Dame which he undertook in collaboration with architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807-1857) in the 1840s. Unlike today’s restorers who would try to bring back a building as much as possible to its original appearance, or to the way it was documented as having looked later on, Viollet-le-Duc believed that restoring a work of architecture meant giving it an imagined completeness which may never have existed.

Thus, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which had never had spires atop the two towers of its façade, Viollet-le-Duc at one point imagined with those elements reconstructed, and the demolished tower that had risen over a point above the main altar, rebuilt. He never carried out that ambitious project, but he did rebuild the one destroyed spire which was completed just before 1860. In the absence of much documentation of the original spire, Viollet-le-Duc’s version was a creative design.  It paid homage to the great importance attached to the spire which soared above the cityscape to mark the location of the cathedral of Paris.

When the burning spire crashed to the roof below in April 2019, it ignited a debate about whether it should be replaced and, if so, with what?  Many observers believe that Viollet-le-Duc’s spire—the result of the cathedral’s nineteenth-century restoration—should be reconstructed. The fervency of the calls for Notre-Dame’s restoration underscore how important older buildings and environments still seem, even as cities grow and transform.

Featured Image Credit: Rohan Reddy via Unsplash.

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How academics can leave the university but stay in academia

When “quit lit,” the trend of disillusioned PhDs writing personal essays about their decision to leave academia, hit its peak around 2013, I was just finishing my own PhD coursework. It seemed that every day, as I revised my dissertation proposal and worked on recruiting potential field sites, there was another column about the scarcity of tenure-track jobs, the plight of adjunct faculty, the ostracism faced by people who went alt-ac—the chance that the light at the end of the tunnel just might be an oncoming train.

When I read these pieces, I felt validated.

I had entered a PhD program in linguistics as a career changer, hoping to explore questions raised during my years as a language teacher and assessment developer. I never aspired to be a professor, but to conduct research that would feel relevant and useful to teachers in the classroom; I used to say, “I have questions that I want to work on, and I don’t care who signs my paycheck.” At a certain point, I realized that if the tenure track wasn’t my Plan A, I certainly wasn’t going to end up there as Plan B, and I focused my job search on nonprofit and government jobs. And I became a vocal advocate for career diversity within my department and social networks, reminding anyone who would listen that they shouldn’t assume every PhD candidate was an aspiring professor. I became the smug cousin to the doomed mouse in the Kafka fable that Rebecca Schuman retold for PhDs, asking my colleagues, why not just turn and walk the other way?

By engaging with these issues, though, I became more and more concerned about issues that were specific to the university. I started getting more engaged with my professional association to create better programming for grad students. I was even writing a dissertation where one of my field sites was a university classroom! I may have decided not to be a professor, but I still cared about higher education.

As it turned out, I found a job that allowed me to stay engaged with these topics: I’m director of education and professional practice at the American Anthropological Association where, among other things, I manage the association’s academic relations function. I present at scholarly meetings, write for academic publications, and I’ve even taught at a local university. The stark choice that was implicit in the quit-lit program—stay in academia for adjunct pay and the slim hope of a tenure line, or leave the profession altogether—turns out to have been a false dilemma. At the same time, I now have a better sense of the systemic pressures that keep so many PhDs in contingent academic positions, and having once considered that route myself, I can use my platform to contribute to their advocacy efforts.

Not only have I found a place for myself in this gray area between academia and professional practice, but in the course of my work with anthropologists, I have come to know a number of university-based colleagues who work in the same liminal space. Some work on environmental or urban youth programming, and bring their students along. Others write reports on Ebola or climate change, not just for publication in journals, but to support evidence-based policymaking. Still others apply their ethnographic insight to improve the functioning of their business—which happens to be a university. Sometimes these people are librarians or instructional designers or program directors, but more often, they’re professors.

I’ve also learned about academic departments that have found ways to value their faculty’s work outside the university, either as engaged scholars or from previous careers in practice settings. Some tenure and promotion guidelines allow a broad selection of work products such as technical reports, consulting work, service on community- or government-based committees, appointment to government agencies, public lectures, and testimony before federal or state legislatures. Traditional academic work still maintains its prestige; public engagement is typically considered service rather than research, and technical reports may need to be accompanied by peer-reviewed publications. Nevertheless, there seems to be a growing acceptance within academia of the diverse work products beyond scholarly teaching and publishing that may be produced in the course of a productive career.

There is a lot of talk about how to raise awareness among PhD students of the diverse career opportunities they have, and this is an important conversation, but the fact is that there’s a lot to like about research and teaching, and once they’ve gone so far as to write a dissertation, many people are understandably reluctant to give that up. My point is that you don’t have to. For all that we talk about a split between theorist academicians and professional practitioners, that view couldn’t be more oversimplified. Academics solve problems, practitioners build theory, and there’s a whole range of professional life histories that aren’t easily categorized as the one or the other.

CC by 4.0 by Stefano Ricci Cortili via Wikimedia Commons.

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Agency in Gerwig’s Little Women – but for whom?

Summing up nineteenth-century American literature as Moby Dick and Little Women, Greta Gerwig, writer-director of the newest film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, argues that the latter is “one of our great works of American literature, but because it’s a women’s novel, it’s treated like an asterisk.”

Little Women came into being because others had recognized gendered divisions in American literature. In 1867, Roberts Brothers editor Thomas Niles, noticing the success of boys’ books by Oliver Optic and Horatio Alger, encouraged Alcott to write something comparable for girls. Alcott warmed to her work only after casting it as a tribute to her sisters and mother, but she became more enthusiastic as she completed the volume: “It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it.”

Published 30 September 1868, Little Women was widely read and praised for its authentic American voice. Readers immediately demanded a follow-up volume, published in April 1869; sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886) eventually ensued. Alcott’s saga has inspired plays, films, radio and television performances, operas, dolls, stamps, cookbooks, spin-offs and other artifacts. Countless public figures have expressed appreciation, including Teddy Roosevelt, Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Smith, Laura Bush, J. K. Rowling, and John Green.

Little Women addresses coming of age, artistic ambition, family dynamics, romantic love, and vocation. Adaptations, including RKO’s 1933 film, starring Katharine Hepburn; MGM’s 1949 feature, starring June Allyson; Columbia Pictures’s 1994 production, starring Winona Ryder; the 2014-15 transmedia series, The March Family Letters; BBC’s 2017 miniseries featuring Maya Hawke; and a 2018 contemporary film with Lea Thompson as Marmee, each grapple with these themes. Adaptors respond to the novel but also to its adaptation lineage. Jo’s status as a writer is increasingly emphasized, with the two most recent adaptations immediately situating her in academic communities or publishing offices. Gerwig’s version extends this motif, giving Jo considerably more agency in negotiations with her publisher.

Earning rave reviews and strong box office receipts, and featuring a stellar cast, including Saoirse Ronan as Jo and Meryl Streep as Aunt March, Gerwig’s film innovatively emphasizes the second part of the novel, as the maturing March sisters sound their depths, expand their horizons, and discover their vocations. Gerwig highlights structural and thematic parallels in and across the first and second volumes, aligning Meg’s experience at Vanity Fair with Beth’s admission to the Palace Beautiful or, more poignantly, contrasting Beth’s adolescent and adult health challenges. Themes such as the economic realities for nineteenth-century women of a certain class or the ongoing rivalry between sisters (for genius, for success, for love) are given additional heft. A common refrain in Gerwig’s film is others’ praise for Jo’s talent as a teacher, which culminates in her realization that she would like to open a school. (In the 1994 film, Marmee dictates that Jo should open a school.)

Alcott’s unconventional ending and Jo’s marital status remain challenging. Viewers may need to re-watch the new film’s final scenes to decide what actually occurs—see Adam Chitwood’s consideration of Gerwig’s “radical change” or Marissa Martinelli and Heather Schwedel’s debate about her “Inception-Style Ending.” Gerwig wanted to give Alcott “an ending she might have liked” by emphasizing “how we . . . tell and retell the story of how we became who we are,” as she said when interviewed on The Director’s Cut podcast. While her film’s conclusion celebrates Little Women’s author, it fails to register the nuances of Jo March’s actual character trajectory.

Gerwig owes an apology to Niles, the editor who nudged Little Women into being and encouraged Alcott to accept its copyright in lieu of a lump sum payment. Mr. Dashwood in Gerwig’s film may be a comic foil, but as Alcott herself reflected, Niles’ sincere advice made all the difference: “An honest publisher and a lucky author, for the copyright made her fortune, and the ‘dull book’ was the first golden egg of the ugly duckling”.

Featured Image credits:  Wikimedia Commons

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Seven events that shaped country music

Developed from European and African-American roots, country music has shaped American culture while it has been shaped itself by key events that have transformed it, leading to new musical styles performed by innovative artists.

1. 1927, Bristol, Tennessee: country music’s “Big Bang”

In late July of 1927, New York producer Ralph Peer arrived in a Bristol, Tennessee, to find new country artists to record. Among the many acts he discovered were a young ex-railroad brakeman and guitarist named Jimmie Rodgers, and a rural tree salesman named A.P. Carter, who travelled with his wife Sara and sister-in-law Maybelle from rural Virginia for the opportunity to record. The presence in one place of these two seminal acts—representing two important country styles—has been called country music’s “big bang.” Rodgers’ blues-influenced singing embodied one strand of the country sound, drawing on traditional African-American music; while the Carters represented the other, the older Anglo-American traditions.

2. 1934: Tulsa, Oklahoma: Bob Wills launches the Texas Playboys

In the 1930s, country musicians incorporated pop instruments like the accordion, the electric steel guitar, and even bass and drums into their performances. The new style wed elements of pop, jazz, and old-time fiddle music and became known as Western Swing. Vocalist/fiddler Bob Wills was the best known of the Western Swing bandleaders. Wills’s band had two distinctive elements: the newly introduced electric steel guitar and Tommy Duncan’s smooth singing. By the end of the decade, the group had grown to include a large brass section, rivaling the popular big bands of the day in size and sound.

3. 1952, Nashville, Tennessee: Kitty Wells records “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”

After World War II, honky tonks were gathering places where men could come after work to enjoy a few beers and listen to music. Performers adopted electrified instruments to be heard over the considerable din. Songs about drifting husbands, enticed into sin by the “loose women” who gathered in bars, and the subsequent lyin’, cheatin’, and heartbreak created by their “foolin’ around,” became standard honky-tonk fare. While many honky tonk performers were men, there were also female singers who rose to the challenge. Kitty Wells’s “It Wasn’t God that Made Honky Tonk Angels” asserted that men had to share the blame for the fallen women who frequented these rough-and-tumble backwoods bars. The song shot up the country charts, establishing Wells’s popularity and paving the way for other women to be country performers.

4. 1968, Nashville, Tennessee: Tammy Wynette records “Stand by Your Man”

In the 1960s, as American society was undergoing great changes, country music became increasingly conservative. The women’s liberation movement was particularly disturbing to the country audience, which was dominated by white, working-class men. Recognizing that women’s role in family life was changing, producer Billy Sherrill encouraged Tammy Wynette to record “Stand by Your Man”—which like Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” reflected Nashville’s discomfort with a changing world. Wynette’s song would resonate years later when Hillary Clinton used it derisively to emphasize her independence from her husband.

5. 1971, Baltimore, Maryland: Gram Parsons meets Emmylou Harris

Country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons was looking for someone to sing backup for him on his first solo album when he heard for the first time Emmylou Harris. However, when he first saw her in a folk club, he wasn’t sure if she could cut it as a country singer. He tested her by asking her to sing the hardest duet he could think of, George Jones and Gene Pitney’s “That’s All It Took.” “She sang it like a bird,” Parsons recalled, “and I said, ‘Well, that’s it.’” After Parsons’s death, Harris became a champion of country‑rock. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Harris employed many musicians who would later become well‑known on their own, including Rodney Crowell, Ricky Skaggs, and Vince Gill. Despite some occasional returns to a more rock-oriented style, Harris has continued to be an icon in country circles, inspiring countless other female performers.

6. 1973, Dripping Springs, Texas: Willie Nelson’s first picnic

After struggling for a decade to establish himself in Nashville as a performer, successful songwriter Willie Nelson returned to his native Texas where he knew he could make a living performing at the state’s honky tonks and fairs. To thank his fans, he threw the first of what became legendary picnics on the 4^th of July weekend on a ranch in rural Dripping Springs, Texas. Besides Nelson, the lineup featured many other stars of the so-called out-law country movement, songwriter/performers who brought a new sensibility to country music. The picnics themselves attracted a huge audience that combined Texas rednecks with young hippies, showing how country music could cross cultural lines. Although ultimately these huge gatherings became too unwieldly to continue, Nelson went on to become a huge star both on the country charts and in major Hollywood films.

7. 1997, Nashville, Tennessee: Shania Twain launches a new era for women in country music

A new era for country-pop crossover—and for women—was launched by Shania Twain in the later 1990s. Born in the small town of Timmins, Ontario, Twain began singing at the age of three, performing on Canadian television from her early teens. By her late teens, she was performing in a Vegas-style revue. However, after her parents were killed in a car accident, Twain decided to move to Nashville in search of a career. She was quickly signed to record, hitting it big with songs marked by a spunky forthrightness that appealed strongly to women, while their non-threatening messages made them attractive to men. She had her greatest success with her next album, Come On Over. Although a country album in name, it was really mainstream pop in the style of singers like Gloria Estefan or Celine Dion. The album sold over 18 million copies, becoming by Billboard’s estimation the best-selling recording by a female artist of all time, in any genre.

Truly the voice of the people, country music expresses both deep patriotism as well as a healthy skepticism toward the powers that dominate American society and has long been a marker of American identity.

Featured Image Credit: Grand Ole Opry by Todd Van Hoosear. Public Domain via  Flickr

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Monthly gleanings for August 2019

Grammar and glamour

As is known, glamour is a spelling variant of glamor even in American English. The question I received was about the connection between glamour and grammar. The word glamour appeared in printed books only in the 18^th century.  It occurred in Scottish ballads and meant “magic, enchantment.” If Walter Scott had not picked it up and made famous, most of us may never have heard about its existence. (Incidentally, both English and German owe to the Romantics the revival of many obsolete and regional words.) Those who consult old dictionaries may have read that glamour goes back to Glámr, the name of the most famous Icelandic ghost (actually, revenant), described in The Saga of Grettir, or glámr, the Old Icelandic poetic name of the moon, allegedly, the chief producer of illusions. This etymology is wrong. But the true one is a bit puzzling.

Glamour is undoubtedly an alteration of grammar. Under the term grammar were formerly included all areas of linguistics, and later, “learning” acquired the sense “magic, enchantment.”  The word that interests us has been recorded in the forms gramary, gramery; glamery, glamour, and so forth. They reached Scotland from France. The change of gr– to gl– in glamour has never been explained, and this is the puzzling element. Not inconceivably, some words like gleam and glow contributed to the change, but this is guesswork.

Nowadays, grammar has been all but banished from schools, because, allegedly, it provides no fun, and everything in our educational system is supposed to be fun in its most primitive form. I have taught grammar all my life and can testify to the fact that its enchantment is strong, and, once students realize the magic of cases, moods, tenses, and the rest and begin to notice the use of grammar for the niceties of style, they always ask for more. (Here is one example. Everybody knows that the progressive, or continuous, tense describes an action happening right now, for example, I am standing in front of you, as opposed to I always stand while lecturing. It is rewarding to watch the outburst of curiosity when I ask why then it is possible to say I am always losing my key.) But, of course, to be able to provide a feast, one needs a group of hungry guests.

Three words for “flat”

Those are Engl. flat and German flach and platt. Platt is the easiest to explain. It is a borrowing of a French adjective. Engl. plate, plateau, platypus (the latter a bookish formation from two Greek words), and platitude have this root, widespread in Latin and Greek. Flach is related to Latin plaga “flat surface,” which is akin to neither plague nor plagiarism. Flat is the hardest case. The first root of platypus, mentioned above, reproduces Greek platús ”broad” (compare Plato, whose name meant “broad-shouldered”). As though to tease us, the first consonants in flat ~ platús correspond nicely (Germanic f to non-Germanic p, as in Latin pater versus Engl. father), but where Greek has t, we should expect Engl. th (compare Latin trēs and Engl. three). The numerous attempts to obviate this difficulty have left the riddle unsolved. This is a parade example of how comparative phonetics works. Before the nineteenth century, platt, flat, and flach could have been compared without much trouble, but we avoid the easy solution, and with much wisdom comes much sorrow.

The origin of the word beaver

There are more than three etymologies of beaver. Some of them are old and fanciful. The one mentioned in the comment was offered by Eric Hamp (Indogermanische Forschungen 77, 1972, p. 164). The reference can be found in my Bibliography of English Etymology. Hamp believed that the reconstructed Germanic root b^heb^hru– must go back to a verbal root. “Is it too bold to suggest that the beaver was so called because he carried (b^hher) wood to make his dam?” This conjecture has not been discussed in later works, and probably for good reason. Even though the beaver indeed carries logs, sometimes from afar, this feature does not look prominent enough for calling the animal “carrier.” (For comparison: no beast of burden has such a name.) Those who have an idea of Hamp’s output know that he has written several thousand notes. Any idea that occurred to him immediately appeared in print. Many of his notes are one paragraph long. If someone happened to point to an inconsistency in his reasoning or to a fact that contradicted his conclusion, he tended to agree with his critic. In my opinion, his etymology of beaver is one of such rather insubstantial ideas.

Sn– and sm-words

German nörgeln “to moan; cavil; grumble, schnarchen “to snore,” and many others like them certainly belong with the sn-words I have discussed in my post. Some of them begin with n, rather than sn– because of s-mobile (about which see the post for last week). German schnurz in mir ist es schnurz, a synonym of mir ist es schnuppe “I cannot care less; it is all the same to me,” is obscure, but both words are probably sound symbolic and may be vaguely connected with the concept of the nose (my subject was snuff). The long nose figures prominently as a derogatory gesture, though some gestures are unpredictable: as Ian Ritchie noted in his comment, the Italians tap the right side of the bridge of one’s nose to indicate cleverness. Also, schnurz rhymes with Furz “a fart.” As usual, when sound symbolism comes in, sound imitation (onomatopoeia) is not far behind.

No, I don’t think that smell is from smoke. The words are so different that neither can be the etymon of the other. At best, the same “sound-symbolic idea” unites them, and, if there is any truth in this reconstruction, “smell,” I believe, is primary.

Pig’s eye

I am grateful for both comments. I did know that pig’s eye once meant “ace” in slang, and even toyed with the idea that here we have a bridge to asshole. But of course, there is no way to substantiate such an idea. In a way, I am sorry that I rushed in where serious specialists prefer to tread gingerly. Matthew Goff asked me whether I could say something about pig’s eye in connection with the history of St. Paul, and I used my database for the answer. But my materials payed me false. I now know that the whole of St. Paul was never called Pig’s Eye and that the famous grog shop was not called that either.  Mr. Goff thanks me graciously for taking up this subject, but it would have been better if I had not done so. Yet what I said about pig’s eye as a term of endearment and a flower name is correct.

American idioms

I read with great interest the comments on seven-by-nine politicians. Obviously, the phrase seven-by-nine acquired a life of its own. I have also received a letter on let George do it. My view of the origin of such idioms is rather melancholy. The choice of names in them often seems to be arbitrary. Roger, meaning “received,” and Roger in Jolly Roger could probably have been Richard (now Romeo has supplanted Roger!). And think of the countless uses of jack, jenny, and dick (the latter returns us to Richard), not to forget about peter and tom in tomcat and tomgirl.

Mangle

The post for July 24, 2019 was on the history of the word mangle. Some of our readers dealt with the mangle I described when they were young. Their experience is instructive. Justin T. Holt told an amusing story of the mangling of his German etymological dictionary. He owns the 21^st edition of Kluge-Seebold. The latest is the 25^th, but there is very little difference between the two. The entry on the noun Mangel provides the usual information; the verb mangeln is compared with Latin mancare, as mentioned in my post. The text is the same in all the editions.

Spelling Reform

The work on the Reform continues. Many proposals have been sifted and analyzed, and early in 2020 we may expect a second meeting of the Spelling Congress.

Feature image credit: A pirate flag by Oren neu dag. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Some American phrases

This is a continuation of the subject broached cautiously on July 17, 2019. Since the comments were supportive, I’ll continue in the same vein. Perhaps it should first be mentioned that sometimes the line separating language study from the study of history, customs, and rituals is thin. For example, there was (perhaps still is) the British English phrase to hang out the broom. It meant “to invite guests in the wife’s absence,” while in other situations the same phrase referred to a working girl’s desire to get married.   (See the post of February 10, 2016 on it.) There is nothing here for the linguist to do: all the words are clear, and the meaning is known. One has to discover why the custom of hanging out the broom indicated such unexpected things. This is what so-called antiquaries try to do. In fact, most idioms, unless they contain incomprehensible words like brunt and lurch, are of this type.

Consider the phrase blue plate lunch(eon). Wikipedia has an article about it, but I can add something to what it says. Blue plate special first referrred to a low-priced meal that usually changed daily. The name “may well have come from the over-popular ‘willow pattern’ of the chinaware.” (All my quotes have been borrowed from Notes and Queries and American Notes and Queries.) It still remains somewhat unclear “when designers introduced the theoretically excellent, but actually disturbing, practice of dividing a large luncheon plate into compartments.”

A correspondent, who sent a letter to ANQ in 1945, wrote that the source of this expression may perhaps be found in the description of Forefathers’ Day, a New England tradition first observed in December, 1798. It later became customary to eat from huge blue dinner plates specially made by Enoch Wood & Sons of Staffordshire. One can see that here, as in the case of hanging out the broom, we deal with a custom. Yet both phrases are indeed idioms, because the knowledge of their components won’t help an outsider to understand the whole.

Many years ago, we rented a cabin in northern Minnesota. The owner was a handyman who owned an establishment called “Let George do it.” His name was indeed George, and I found the sign ingenious and clever. Only much later did I learn that the phrase let George do it means “let somebody else do this work.” I’ll now reproduce part of the letter from the New York Public Library, addressed to Notes and Queries in 1923. The expression “has in the last ten or dozen years become current in America. Especially during the [First World] War was it in common use. We are interested to learn if there is any foundation to the statement that this phrase is of English origin. We know that the French have employed for several centuries a very similar expression, ‘Laissez faire à George, il est home d’âge’ [‘Let George do it; he is a grownup man’], which they trace back to Louis XII. Has such an expression been used in England, and if so, is there any explanation of its origin known to you or your readers?”

The question has never been answered. The OED found the first occurrence of the phrase in print in 1909. This is exactly the date the letter writer had in mind. By the way, while working on my prospective dictionary of idioms, I made a list of questions in Notes and Queries that produced no replies. The list is instructive. I still have no idea whether let George do it is an Americanism or whether it only flourished on American soil (if so, why so late?), and what it has to do with its French analog. It does not appear in English dictionaries of familiar quotations. On the Internet, one can find some informative correspondence about the origin of the phrase. But the sought-after etymology is lost. Perhaps some of our readers know something about the matter. Their suggestions are welcome.

If I am not mistaken, the next two phrases are not in the OED. As I read in a 1909 publication, “the American phrase seven by nine is generally applied to a laugh or smile of latitude more than usually benign, as if meaning the length and width thereof and at the same time playing upon the word benign.” (Is the reference to benign an example of folk etymology?) I would like to mention a problem with words and expression called American in dictionaries. They produce the impression that all English speakers in the United States know them. Yet this term is a trap into which unwary foreigners who try to learn “real American” from books often fall. They use such words and idioms and don’t realize that they may have stumbled upon a piece of local or forgotten usage or slang. For example, now, more than half a century after the radio show “Let George do it,” young people seldom recognize the collocation.

In any case, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the American phrase a seven by nine politician existed. Here is a commentary from a Connecticut Yankee, if I may plagiarize Mark Twain. The phrase is said to apply to a man “of too limited abilities, force, or outlook to cut much of any. [It] refers to the old-fashioned windowpanes, before the time when glass filling the whole or half of the sash was common; these were ‘seven by nine’ in hundreds of thousands of farm or village houses…. Its nearest synonym is ‘peanut’ politician, that is, bearing the same relation to large political ideas and plans as a peanut vendor, or huckster of peanuts and roast chestnuts in a pushcart, does to large mercantile activities. Neither name implies a low position or importance: only the pettiness of the issues which can form the staple of the activities…. Similar names are ‘two-cent’ or ‘two-for-a cent’ (‘ha-penny’ comes just between) or huckleberry (‘whortleberry’) politician: the last having the same implication as ‘peanut’—one peddles huckleberries by the quart.”

What a rich display of dated slang! Peanuts do not fare too well in American English: cheap payments are “just peanuts,” and peanut politics, that is, “petty politics” (often with reference to corruption) is a phrase one can still hear around. The explanation quoted above may very well be correct, but I notice with some unease that seven and nine are the favorites of numerous idioms and folklore, and here they occur in what was known a hundred years ago, and in an entirely different context, as entente cordiale. See the posts for April 6, 2016 and June 19, 2019. Does the phase seven by nine really have an ascertainable foundation in reality, or is the use of seven and nine in it as mysterious as in nine tailors make a man and seven-league boots?

The unresolved riddle of the phrase let George do it again reminds us of the fact that many typical American words and expression were coined in England, came into desuetude there, but survived in the New World. That is why the definition of an Americanism is often ambiguous. Compare what I wrote about the idiom to get down to brass tacks in April 15, 2015.

I would like to repeat that, if my discussion of American idioms presents interest, I may perhaps write one more such essay in the nearest future.

Feature image credit: Daderot, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Monthly gleanings for July 2019

As always, many thanks to those who left comments and to those who sent me emails and asked questions.

Notes on animals

Beaver

Rather long ago, I wrote four posts on the etymology and use of the word brown (see the posts for September 24, October 1, October 15, and October 22, 2014). The origin of the animal name beaver was mentioned in them too. Here I’ll say what I know about the subject. Beaver has immediately recognizable cognates in many languages and, apparently, goes back to Indo-European. The Germanic languages have similar forms: Dutch bever, German Biber, Icelandic bjórr, etc. The ancient Germanic etymon must have sounded as bebruz. The relevant words in Latin, Slavic, and Baltic are fully compatible with the Germanic ones. The Greek name of this animal is known to most of us from the myth of the “Gemini” Castor and Pollux. Some other animal name may have had the same root in Classical Greek, but the beaver was called differently (hence Castor).

The form bebruz, with its b occurring twice, is a telltale sign of what linguists call reduplication. Reduplication is ubiquitous. Consider the name of the disease beriberi; cucurri, the perfect of Latin cúrrere “to run,” and Engl. so-so and tut, tut, among dozens of others, to say nothing of phrases like it is very, very good. The main witness in the etymology of beaver is Sanskrit babhrús “brown, great ichneumon (a kind of mongoose),” and the traditional explanation has it that the beaver got its name from the color of its skin (“brown-brown”). But though repeated in the best dictionaries, this etymology need not be taken for God’s truth, because the color name may go back to the animal’s name! Some hypotheses on the origin of brown will be found in my posts mentioned above. None of them is definitive.

The once very active American etymologist Francis A. Wood connected the animal’s name with Sanskrit bhárvati “to gnaw, chew” (related is Latin fōrma “mold, shape,” from which we have form). I don’t think anyone has discussed, let alone accepted, this conjecture. When mentioned, it is left without comment.

Pig’s eye

Our correspondent is interested not in the phrase itself but in its historical connections with St. Paul, Minnesota, for the town (the capital of the state) was for some time called Pig’s Eye. This was the nickname of Pierre Parrant, the first non-indigenous inhabitant of what later became St. Paul. Reportedly, he was blind in one eye. The phrase goes back to Middle English piggisnye (nye stands for an eye, that is, a neye, an example of misdivision (also called metanalysis), as in nanny from mine Annie, and the like). The word first occurs in Miller’s Tale (Chaucer; see the OED). At that time, it was a term of endearment. Pigs have small eyes, and possibly the association was between them and tiny but precious jewels. There is also a flower called pig’s eye. Parrant used “Pig’s Eye” as the name of his bar. Perhaps he suggested that his establishment was precious, but by the nineteenth century, the phrase pig’s eye had acquired a negative meaning and developed into a vulgar word.

Pig’s eye also became a synonym of pig’s ear as an expression of disbelief. In rhyming slang, pig’s ear meant “beer.” Again, we cannot decide whether Parrant was aware of Cockney slang. In any case, he sold liquor, and pig’s eye could very well become the name of his brand, regardless of British usage. I have read somewhere (but I cannot find my note) that at one time pig’s eye meant “anus.” No source I have consulted records it, but all the best dictionaries of slang include the phrase in a pig’s eye, synonymous with in a pig’s ear (an emphatic expression of disbelief). The sense “anus” would go a long way toward the amazing deterioration of meaning: from “my precious one” to a swear word. I suspect that Parrant knew just that sense and that his customers enjoyed the rudeness or perhaps the ambiguity of it. Be that as it may, there is still a park in St. Paul called “Pig’s Eye,” and a brand of beer also bears this name.

Idioms

Pig and whistle

I was delighted to see the positive comments on my posts devoted to American idioms and will definitely write more about them. My prospective dictionary of idioms is expected to be published in 2020, and I hope it will sell like hotcakes. At the moment I have two things to say.

Above, I made a few inconclusive statements about pig’s eye. By way of compensation, I mined my database for pig and whistle. This is the name of a tavern sign. (Did Parrant know it? Probably not.) The literature on such signs is a pleasure to read. The occasional phrase gone to pigs and whistles seems to have meant “ruined with intemperance,” but, if so, why did it? The inspiration must have come from the pub. Ebenezer Brewer, the main nineteenth-century authority on the origin of idioms, connected pig “a small bowl” (compare piggin “a small wooden pail”) with whistle, being a variant of “wassail,” and his explanation has often been repeated.

He was wrong by definition, for who would have put together two garbled words to produce the phrase in question? The entire phrase should be accounted for: etymologizing it word by word looks like a forlorn hope. Even the great scholar Max Müller succumbed to this temptation and traced pig to Danish piga “girl” (why?!) and whistle to the same wassail (wassail was an old salutation—wæs hāl! “be whole/ healthy!”). A reasonable hypothesis sounds so: “The phrase originated in order to explain the way in which the wood of some soft-grained tree, instead of being devoted to the formation of some permanently useful valuable article of furniture, was used up by boys and youth in the whittling of pegs and whistles. That is to say, gone to pigs and whistles means ‘reduced to some mean and trifling service’.”  The alternation of short i and short e in dialects is common, so that peg could easily be confused with pig and become the source of the joke. (Signs are supposed to be memorable, not logical: compare Dickens’s “Magpie and Stump”).

In a brown study

In the posts on brown, I discussed this idiom, which means “in deep meditation.” At one time, I came to the conclusion that the phrase in a brown study had not crossed the Atlantic Ocean. I was wrong. Moreover, we should assume that it was widely known even among the lower classes. Of all people, Huck Finn says (close to the end of Chapter 41): “She judged she better put in her time being grateful we was alive and well and she had us still, stead of fretting over what was past and done. So she kissed me, and patted me on the head, and dropped into a kind of brown study.”

Slav and slave

Jon Cowan adduced two examples of an ethnic name being used for coining the word for “slave.” Both are too marginal to create a pattern, but of course, the existence of such an equation could be expected somewhere in the world. However, in the history of the Eurasian Middle Ages, similar cases are either non-existent or vanishingly rare.

Numerals

Thank you for calling my attention to the sources on the origin of numerals. I knew them both. In connection with the exchange in the comments, I can only add that of all the old Indo-European words the numerals are among the most hopeless from an etymological point of view. None of them goes back directly to Greek, even though they have cognates in Greek. Their obscurity is astounding because such primitive words could be expected to have rather obvious origins. But none of them is transparent, and the reconstructed roots sound like eeny, meeny, yield no meen’ing and leave us in the dark.

Feature image credit: D. Gordon E. Robertson, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Mangling etymology: an exercise in “words and things”

We read that Helgi, one of the greatest heroes of Old Norse poetry, sneaked, disguised as a bondmaid, into the palace of his father’s murderer and applied himself to a grindstone, but so bright or piercing were his eyes (a telltale sign of noble birth, according to the views of the medieval Scandinavians) that even a man called Blind (!) became suspicious. He said that such eyes became a warrior. To make matters worse, the “bondmaid” ground a bit too hard, because the stand under the mill was splitting. The Icelandic word for the stand, or support, of the grindstone is möndull or möndultré (tré means “tree”).

Möndull is the oldest recorded name of the object called “mangle” in Present-day English. However, in English, we also find the word mandrel with several senses, two of which are “a shaft in a lathe” and “a miner’s pick.” Both mangle and mandrel were recorded only in the eighteenth century. Their etymology is sometimes said to be unknown, but French has mandrin “a punch, mandrel,” and Classical Greek has mándra “an enclosed space, sheepfold,” also used to designate the bed in which the stone of a ring is set, “much like Engl. mandrel,” as Walter W. Skeat explains. Finally, there is Oscan mamphur “part of a lathe.” (Oscan is an extinct language of southern Italy.) It seems that the Germanic ancestor of Old Scandinavian möndull and Engl. mandrel reached Germanic speakers from the south, perhaps from Greece via Italy.

All this information can be found in dictionaries, but it will be fair to say, that the most detailed history of the noun mangle comes from the German scholar Rudolf Meringer, a brilliant representative of the movement known by its German name Wörter und Sachen (“Words and Things”). He also edited a journal called Wörter und Sachen, which is a pleasure to read, because it printed numerous illustrations, and what’s the good of the book without pictures?

In retrospect, there is nothing revolutionary in the ideas of that school. Obviously, in order to discover the etymology of the word, we have to know the construction of the thing this word denotes. Yet even today one runs into attempts to explain the name of some fish as “streaked” (this is a random example), and it becomes clear that the linguist has never seen the fish in question (because it has no streaks). In 1906, Meringer investigated all the words and all the objects connected with the mangle.

Anyone can see that mangle and mandrel (we’ll disregard the suffixes) differ in one important respect: the first word has g, while the other has d in the root. Those who like novels about the Middle Ages (alas, my students have never read a single work by Walter Scott) will remember that military expeditions occupy a prominent place in them. Castles are constantly besieged, and one of the machines used to destroy them is the mangonel, a kind of catapult. The origin of the machine’s name poses no problems. The English word, first recorded in the thirteenth century, came from Old French. The etymon is Latin, but its ultimate source is Greek mágganon (gg has the value of ng). There is no nd in the root of that word.

To turn to more peaceful pastimes: the main function of the mangle is to roll and press laundered clothing. It may be useful to quote an explanation added to the definition of mangle in The Century Dictionary: “In the older form an oblong rectangular wooden chest resting upon two cylinders and loaded with stones was moved backward and forward by means of a wheel and pinion, the rollers being thus made to pass over and press the articles spread on a polished table underneath.” The construction of the mangle and the mangonel is in some respects similar.

It was believed that the pressing machine had borrowed its name from the war engine. But Meringer had a good point: the mangle, a household device, must have been the older contraption of the two, so that the mangonel was probably named after the mangle, rather than the other way around. The Greek word also meant “magical object,” and magic, as we know, can be used for both good and bad purposes. Latin mango did not necessarily denote a swindler, an unreliable dealer; as Meringer pointed out, initially it referred to any trader. In all English compounds, from whoremonger and warmonger to costermonger and fishmonger, monger goes back to the Latin word, of most probably Greek origin.

When Old Germanic mandel and the borrowed mangel met, it appeared that they denoted similar objects, and an expected fight between two near-homonyms, which happened to be near-synonyms, ensued. Scandinavian stayed with –nd-, while West Germanic (English, Dutch, and German) switched to –ng-.The plot thickens when we approach the English verb to mangle “to mutilate, crush, injure” and German mangeln “to lack.” Engl. mangle looks like a natural cognate of the word for the war machine invented for demolishing walls. This verb appeared in texts in the fourteenth century, early enough to be related to the noun, which, as noted above, though undoubtedly old, was recorded about four hundred years later. Mangonel goes back to the 1200s. The chronology is confusing and does not seem to be of much relevance in this case.

Whatever the origin of the English verb, it must have been influenced by the meaning of the noun. However the main point is this: according to what looks like scholarly consensus, mangle (verb) and mangle (noun) are unrelated. The English verb is believed to go back to Anglo-Norman mangulare, whose origin is unknown (that is, we have no idea what the reconstructed root ment- and its variant met- designated). Both maim and mayhem are its probable derivatives.  Old French mahaigner meant “to cripple.”

Related forms have been found in numerous languages, including Old Slavic, Lithuanian, and Sanskrit. They mean “to disturb, irritate; embarrass; whip butter, press, etc.” Neither met nor ment resembles a sound-symbolic or an onomatopoeic formation, so that there have been attempts to connect men– with min– as in mini– (compare diminish). German mangeln “to lack” does not quite align itself with that lot, unless we bring mini into play. Its oldest forms meant the same as today: “to lack, do without.” Is this the reason no one wants to connect it with the name of the pressing machine? Elmar Seebold in his edition of Kluge’s etymological dictionary says without any discussion that mangeln is a borrowing of Latin mancare “to mutilate.” But don’t we need “to lack”?

It would be nice to incorporate the verbs (mangle and mangeln) into the presser ~ catapult’s family and declare them related, but no one is ready to do so, and for the moment we too will stay slightly embarrassed and at the unready.

Feature image credit: The Siege of Eger in 1552 by Béla Vizkelety. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Did Caravaggio paint Judith Beheading Holofernes?

A disconcerting exclusion of alternative views and scholarship has marked the very carefully choreographed two-year long build-up toward the most controversial sale of a seicento picture this year—that of the so-called Toulouse Judith Beheading Holofernes, ascribed to Caravaggio.

The arguments presented in its favour look compelling. A contemporary document refers to it in Naples in 1607; a copy of it by Louis Finson can be found in Naples; scientific data match the imprint of Caravaggio’s Neapolitan work; and its provenance—despite many blanks—seems to match. Caravaggio scholars have been looking for a lost Judith Beheading Holofernes for years and the spectacular context of the painting’s discovery in an attic in April 2014 after having been lost for decades made the entire story even more alluring. “Leaning against a wall, it had been completely hidden behind old box springs and mattresses,” recalled auctioneer Marc Labarbe. Following its display in Paris, London, and New York in preparation for the auction slotted for 27 June this year at the regional Labarbe auction house in Toulouse, it was pulled unceremoniously a few days before the planned action sale after being snatched up by an anonymous buyer.

In fact, the analysis of documents and texts, technical and connoisseurship considerations paint a different picture. The attribution to Caravaggio has been strongly challenged and dismissed on a number of occasions, including during two Scholars Day events held in front of the painting at the Pinacoteca di Brera (February 2017) and the Musée du Louvre (June 2017). My view was clear in both instances. The painting is not by Caravaggio.

Caravaggio scholarship is somewhat divided on this picture. This is not new or strange. There have been similar debates for decades regarding a couple of other paintings that have entered Caravaggio’s story on controversial grounds. Some paintings hang on tenaciously and feature in exhibitions and catalogues. Others get dismissed more rapidly.There’s nothing wrong in this, because ultimately this is one of the great fascinations of connoisseurship and scholarship.

The Toulouse Judith Beheading Holofernes is a fascinating painting that throws significant light on the context of Caravaggio’s short but intense first Neapolitan stay, from September 1606 to June 1607, before his very unexpected departure for Malta. The traditional narrative is of the artist as a loner, working in isolation, jealously guarding his methods, and averse to artistic exchange. In reality, he most likely worked in a context of colleagues walking into their fellow artists’ workspaces to exchange views and help each other. That Caravaggio disliked rivals in Rome is well known, but he also had many artists who were close to him. Caravaggio clearly needed help in Naples; he required studio space, materials, carpenters, and manpower to (at the very least) stretch the large canvases of paintings such as the Virgin of the Rosary (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), the Seven Works of Mercy (Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples), Crucifixion of St Andrew (Cleveland Museum of Art) and the Flagellation (Museo di Capodimonte). It seems that he got particularly close to the workshop of the Flemish painter Louis Finson, who had settled in Naples in 1605 (or shortly before), and most probably established a working relationship with him.

The Toulouse painting, more than anything else, seems to emerge from this context. It has the undeniable aura of Caravaggio’s ‘presence’, of being painted by someone who knew Caravaggio’s manner and technique well, and by someone who probably interacted with the artist regularly.  On the other hand, it lacks the strength of Caravaggio’s Neapolitan works, the sheer power of narrative, the striking surety of brushwork, the dramatic vigour of approach, and the intensity of his characters.

Its sale in June coincided with the notable exhibition Caravaggio Napoli (12 April – 14 July 2019) at the Museo di Capodimonte (and the Pio Monte della Misericordia) where his Neapolitan masterpieces were placed in close proximity.  In the halls of that show, one could not fail to note that the Judith (absent for obvious reasons) would not have made the mark as an autograph work by the Lombard artist.    In many ways, it should have been there, because the exhibition also explored the immediate context around Caravaggio and the works of those who were instantly impacted by the power of his brush.   Had the painting been in the exhibition, it might have been pulled from the auction for a different reason.

Featured Image credit: Caravaggio’s original Judith Beheading Holofernes, painted between 1598 and 1599, now held at the Palazzo Barberini. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Idioms: the American heritage

Idioms, especially if we add proverbs and familiar quotations to them, are a shoreless ocean. Especially numerous are so-called gnomic sayings (aphorisms) like make hay while the sun shines, better safe than sorry, and a friend in need is a friend indeed. Their age is usually hard or even impossible to determine. Since most of them reflect people’s universal experience, they may be very old. In contrast, such undecipherable phrases as kick the bucket, put a spoke in someone’s wheel, or cut the mustard are fairly recent. At least they presuppose the existence of buckets, spokes, wheels, and the cultivation of mustard.  (This type of reasoning is called relative chronology and sometimes yields useful results.)

More important is the fact that in the Germanic languages (and English is one of them) metaphorical sayings, like an extensive use of metaphors in general, are relatively late. There were few of them before the Renaissance. And yet, now that they are with us, we seldom know where they came from. To put a sock in it “to pacify someone, to make one quiet down” is, or so it seems, a British twentieth-century invention (with sock being rather enigmatic), while it blew (knocked) my socks off appears to be a late Americanism. Obviously, our conclusions about the chronology of such sayings depend on their occurrence in books, newspapers, or some other written sources. The time gap between coining and recording them may but needn’t be too long.

In my etymological database of approximately 1,500 idioms, about sixty are probably or certainly Americanisms. Perhaps a quick view of them will be interesting to our readers. The New World provenance of some needs no proof. Such are, for example, honest injun, recorded very early (1676), Lynch Law (1811), and almighty dollar. The first of them makes us wince. It means “my word of honor,” and its derogatory sense is likely, for the suggestion must have been that an Indian is never to be trusted (an honest Indian is thus a wonder). Mark Twain’s characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn regularly use this American equivalent of British honour bright, but there is no way of knowing to what extent his novels contributed to the popularity of the expression. In any case, the southerners Tom and Huck did not learn it from books.

The origin of even such seemingly obvious idioms is not always clear. For example, is the interpretation given above (an honest native is a wonder) correct? Lynch Law sent historians looking for the true Lynch. Some studies of this subject are excellent, but the identity of Mr. Lynch is still not entirely clear. Almighty dollar (1836) has been traced to Washington Irving, possibly modeled on almighty gold. In dealing with idioms, one often wonders whether the phrase in question is worth considering. For instance, does the phrase the American way exist? It probably does, but how idiomatic is the locution the American way of life?

Also, some phrases referring to places have become proverbial. Such are White House (Washington D.C.), Downing Street 12 (London), and perhaps Sleepy Hollow, the latter immortalized by Washington Irving.  One hesitates to call them idioms, because they are fully transparent. However, take Foggy Bottom. As an area, the term applies only to a relatively small section of Northwest Washington between White House and Georgetown. But as a political term it refers to the State Department only, rather than to government in general. It was presumably coined on analogy with Whitehall (the main residence of English monarchs in the sixteenth and the seventeenth century) and Quai d’Orsai (the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs is situated on that embankment in Paris). To be sure, the name does not sound complimentary.

One author wrote: “My personal recollection associates the term as well with the gas works and its emanations, which until recently [1962] were distinguishing qualities of Foggy Bottom.” Another correspondent suggested the following: “A friend who lived in Washington D.C. mentioned FB as an area district name. This would take it to 1915 and earlier. I assume that bottom is a reduction of bottomland, and that foggy refers to the morning miasma of the Potomac or its eastern branch, the Anacostia.” The origin of place names is a branch of etymology in its own right. However, at the moment we are not interested in geography. Clearly, Foggy Bottom has gained such popularity as a political term because of its association with the State Department.

No one will doubt that honest injun is an American coinage. The same, we would think, must be true of the antislavery slogan a man and a brother, but it is not. The phrase was adopted as a seal by the Anti-Slavery Society of London. In 1768, Josiah Wedgwood produced a medallion showing a Negro in chains, with one knee on the ground and both hands lifted to heaven. In the printed book (1799), the design of the seal of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery was modeled by William Hackwood under Wedgwood’s directions and was laid before the committee of the Society on October 16, 1787. It was approved, and “a seal was ordered to be engraved from it. In 1792 Wedgwood, at his own expense, had a block cut from the design as a frontispiece illustration for one of Clarkson’s pamphlets.”

Two more American phrases with names in them may be worth mentioning. One is Annie Oakley “a pass to circus and other performance after it is punctured.” It commemorates Annie Oakley, famous for sharpshooting achievement. One of her tricks was to cut out the pips on a playing card. She was the star of a once popular show. Is Annie Oakley an idiom? Another item from my database is Bronx cheer “a sound of derision made by blowing through closed lips with the tongue between them.” I’ll quote the entry in full: “The same as British blowing a raspberry. Some say the cheer originated at the old Fairmount Athletic Club in the Bronx; others associate it with the Yankee Stadium, also in The Bronx.  Mr. Clarence Edward Heller, in our Sunday Visitor, a Catholic publication, once traced the origin back to the thirteenth century, in the south of Italy. His point was later confirmed by an editor of an Italian paper (published here in the United States), who said that the mouth salute has long been somewhat common in that region. Damon Runyon says the cheer (that is, the vulgar form) was discovered and titled by Tad [Thomas A. Dorgan, 1877-1929], the great cartoonist, a matter of thirty years ago. It came about, he states, when Tad made a trip of exploration to the Fairmount Boxing Club in the Bronx” (American Notes and Queries 2, 1942, 106-107). The OED dates the phrase to 1929. The Internet (“The Phrase Finder”) offers some discussion of Bronx cheer. It is different from what is said above, but my conclusions are limited, because they derive entirely from my modest database. Yet I do consult dictionaries of the why do we say so? type. Not to put too fine a point on it, some suggestions in them should be taken with a grain of salt.

If this post invites questions and comments, I’ll perhaps continue with the subject.

Feature image credit: Whitehall, via Leonard Bentley on Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0.

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From rabbits to gonorrhea: “clap” and its kin

Three years ago, I discussed the origin of several kl– formations, all of which were sound-symbolic: kl- appeared to suggest cleaving, cluttering, and the like. In this context, especially revealing is the etymology of cloth (see the posts for June 29, 2016 and August 10, 2016). The problem with such consonant groups is that there is rarely anything intrinsically symbolic in them. Why should kl- suggest clinging and clustering, rather than cloying or clobbering? Actually, it does both. In this hunt, one never knows where to stop, and researchers are often carried away by the tempting similarity of numerous words that may or may not have anything in common.

Yet this is probably how language originated. No one strove for consistency. Words were born out of chaos. Ancient people’s erratic habits keep language historians busy. To complicate matters, sound-symbolic formations are more or less universal and do not obey so-called phonetic laws (correspondences). Finally, even if we have explained the first two sounds of the word correctly, we still have to account for the rest of them. Granted, cl– in clover (one of the words I discussed) makes sense, because the juice of the plant is sticky, but what about –over? The same question should be asked about every word under discussion.

Since groups like kl-, gl-, pl-, and the rest do not mean anything in and of themselves, they can be used for many purposes. We are on safer ground when it comes to sound imitation (onomatopoeia). Our vowels and consonants are not suited to reproduce coughing, hiccoughing, sneezing, giggling, roaring, barking, and the rest, but we do what we can. Evidently, kl– ad gl– have been chosen for rendering loud noises. Clap is one of such words. It goes back to Old English and has close cognates all over the Germanic-speaking area. Modern German kläffen “to yap” is almost the same word. To be sure, flap, slap, rap, tap, lap (up), and even larrup “to thrash” might have been chosen to mean “give a sharp, forcible, or resounding noise.” Crap would perform this function even better, and another final consonant would do the work equally well (compare the obviously sound-imitating clatter). But, for some reason, the Germanic complex klap– won the day and even spread all over the Romance-speaking world.

It is curious to observe how far the recorded meanings may deviate from the initial sound-imitating idea. Allegedly, some people think that pigs grunt klap-klap while eating; hence the dialectal French noun clapon “pig.” Shoes go clop-clop; hence French chapin (borrowed from Spanish) “shoe” (not a common but characteristic word). Yet, as noted, one should tread lightly, rather than rush clop-clop, here, for a lot can be suggested but little can be “proved” in this area. English dialectal clapholt designates small boards of split oak, cut to make barrel staves (the modern Standard word is clapboard). In northern Devonshire, a clapper is a wooden bridge across a stream. When we deal with splitting, a loud noise is natural. Clap “to strike” is also behind claptrap, originally a “trap” devised for causing applause.

Then we find Scots clappers “rabbit warren,” explained as being “sometimes formed merely of heaps of stones thrown loosely together.” Stones, naturally, tend to fall or come in contact with one another with a lot of noise. Strange, as it may seem, rabbits bring me to clap “gonorrhea.” In 1887, the German scholar Hermann Varnhagen published an informative article on the use of the Germanic root klap in Romance. His material is excellent and in my exposition, I have of course drawn on his results, but sometimes he seems to have let his enthusiasm carry him too far. Here is one more of his examples.

In his opinion, rabbits’ fertility gave rise to Old French clapoir “brothel” and the venereal disease clap. Words for “brothel” are many and ingenious (see the post for January 15, 2014). Perhaps Varnhagen guessed well (compare cathouse “brothel”), but there may be a less complicated approach to the word. Clap “to strike,” like strike itself, was used in the Elizabethan days as a synonym for “copulate.” Assuming that similar usage enjoyed enough popularity in France, the name of the venereal disease would emerge as a result of sexual activity. Dictionaries trace the English word to Old French, cite the obsolete Dutch cognate, and conclude: “Of uncertain origin.” The origin looks rather obvious.

In Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, we read that soldiers and officers used to go to different brothels. At the end of the story, the hero (Lieutenant [Tenente] Fred Henry) and Catherine have one of their staccato conversations: “What are you thinking about now?”  “Nothing.” “Yes you were. Tell me.” “I was wondering whether Rinaldi had the syphilis.” “Was that all?” “Yes.” “Has he the syphilis?” ”I don’t know.” “I am glad you haven’t. Did you ever have anything like that?” “I had gonorrhea.” “I don’t want to hear about it. Was it very painful, darling?” “Very.”

OF course, Hemingway could not care less for the etymology of the word, even though he knew the origin of the disease, and we needn’t trouble him any longer. Rather, we should return to my gleanings of August 29, 2018 (and don’t miss Stephen Goranson’s comments). In that post, in connection with the work jiffy, I wrote about a series of articles by the famous German philologist Wilhelm Braune and retold one section in the latest of them. Today I have to mention his early (1896) essay. I also suggested that Braune, most probably, had never seen Hensleigh Wedgwood’s works. But, strangely, he does not seem to have referred to Varnhagen’s well-known contribution either (Braune’s text is so dense that it is easy to miss something; hence my cautious tone), though his analysis runs along the same lines. In any case, both scholars examined not only kl– but also some gl-words denoting noises, and concluded that Engl. yelp is one of them. Old Engl. gielpan (pronounced as yielpan) once began with “real” g, as do all its cognates. There is nothing revolutionary in such a conclusion. Whoever has dealt with words like Engl. call (a borrowing from Scandinavian) and Hebrew kol “voice” agreed that the complex gol ~ kol denotes noise almost everywhere. In the world of onomatopoeia, the difference between kl and gl is of little importance.

Cliff, the last word to be discussed today, is the most controversial one, and the literature on it is huge. For some reason, the German analog of cliff is Klippe, and the problem of –f(f) ~ -(p)p has never been resolved. A mountain of research has not given birth even to the smallest viable mouse. At cliff and Klippe, dictionaries say only “origin unknown (uncertain).” Some scholars trace both nouns to the substrate: allegedly, the ancient Germanic inhabitants of Europe borrowed this word, along with many others denoting the features of the terrain new to them, from the native speakers of the area.

Since that language is lost, there is nothing to say about it. Braune believed that the words are Germanic and designate a huge piece of broken rock (compare clapboard and clappers, above, which Braune did not cite). If Braune guessed well, the difference between final p and f is as insignificant as the difference between initial k and g in kol ~ gol. I am not ready to take sides here, but have to say two things. First, a few seemingly inscrutable etymological riddles sometimes have embarrassingly easy solutions. Second, it does no one any good to ignore existing conjectures, even if they run counter to conventional wisdom, for, as history shows, a good deal of wisdom turns out to be folly.

Featured image credit: Photo © Richard Knights (cc-by-sa/2.0)

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