by Kory Stamper
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*1 Those definitions in small caps are what we call synonymous cross-references. They are synonyms of the meaning in question, and so fuller analytical definitions can be found at the cross-referenced entry. Unsurprisingly, they are a space-saving hedge that allows us to use single words as definitions (verboten per the Black Books).
*2 Florio translates the Italian fóttere and its derivatives with register-appropriate slang: “to jape, to sard, to fucke, to swive, to occupy.” One must consider the possibility that Florio’s patrons were so overwhelmed by his praise in the five dedications that prefaced A Worlde of Wordes that they perhaps never made it to F. Or maybe they just expected such profanity from Italian.
*3 Charles II’s court was notoriously ribald as a reaction against the Puritan reign that came before. John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester and an infamous libertine—and given the era, that’s saying something—was one of the foremost poets of the age. His poetry mentions masturbation, dildos, homosexuality, incest, and uses the word “fuck” liberally. Take that, Puritans.
*4 For more on the soap-opera-worthy relationship between Joseph Worcester and Noah Webster, skip over to the chapter “Marriage.”
*5 “Damn,” “hell,” and “ass” (referring to the donkey) aren’t considered profanity by Worcester. They’re in the Bible and so perfectly holy words. The “stupid person” sense of “ass” isn’t in the Bible, but it is in Shakespeare, which is a close second.
*6 This isn’t even taking the verb “bitch” into account—a verb that began life in the sixteenth century and, by 1900, meant everything from “to go whoring” to “to spoil something” to “to complain” to “to drink tea.”
*7 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans (here referring to either transsexual or transgender), queer, intersex, and asexual. The initialism is still expanding and in flux.
Posh
On Etymology and Linguistic Originalism
A person’s cubicle is, in some ways, like a storefront church. It’s clearly got its purpose—come worship at the altar of the Almighty Nine-to-Five. But because it’s not hidden away and anyone can walk past and peer in to see what we’re about, we trick it out with little cultural markers that tell the passersby something about the religious inside. The main place of devotion, the desk, is occupied primarily with the tools of our worship: computer, books, files. Around the periphery are the things we carry with us to remind us and our fellow clerics that work is not all that we are: totems and fetishes that we arrange (intentionally, ritually) to advertise the essence of what’s inside us. Steve and Madeline both have an abundance of plants in their cubicles; one of our cross-reference editors has set up pictures of her cats (and other people’s cats) along the long banked bookshelf each of us has to keep multiple dictionaries open at once. Dan has a few desk toys and some Far Side cartoons; Emily has a few artistic photographs and postcards within her view to balance out the feng shui of the giant, inflatable Collegiate Dictionary with arms and legs that she won at a company luncheon and that sits on her bookshelf, overseeing her duties like Pharaoh watching the children of Israel.
And then there’s Jim Rader’s cubicle. Jim’s cubicle is not an altar to language but a terrarium of language, a place where language slowly, slowly grows, breathes, takes shape. It’s also a marvel of space-time. There is no way that much paper can fit inside a six-by-six-foot work space and allow a human to comfortably work in there, yet all you need to do is walk by and peer over the piles of dictionaries to confirm that, no, Jim’s in there, leaning back in his chair, even. One wall of his work space is a high bookshelf, stuffed to overflowing with titles like Alt-mittledeutsch Etymologisches Wörterbuch and Old Frisian Etymological Dictionary; his standard-issue desk is literally (sense 1) buried underneath a static wave of loose papers, a good number of them covered in a fine scrawl of Proto-Indo-European roots. There are stacks of books on, near, and under his desk that are micro-feats of engineering, the sorts of constructions you hold your breath around for fear of toppling them, but Jim swivels in his chair without regard for them. He will lean back and plop his feet on his desk in a clear spot that wasn’t there when he began to unfold, or reach out for a book buried under a sheaf of papers and find it comes neatly into his hand. The rest of us gawp, as if Jim were an alchemist or magician, a Level-Ten Word Mage. He is, in a sense: he’s an etymologist.
If logophiles want to be lexicographers when they grow up, then lexicographers want to be etymologists. Etymology is the study of the history and origins of words, lexical genealogy, and etymologists are the practitioners of it. Lexicographers love the nerdy intricacies of a language, trading esoteric factoids like baseball cards, but etymologists master the nerdy intricacies of language, not just a language—language morphology, phonology, and history as a whole. The amount of information they know is almost superhuman. A while ago, after a trip to Finland, I brought in Finnish candy to share with the office. Jim stopped by my desk. “Finland,” he said. “Puhutko suomea?” Do you speak Finnish?
I blinked. It’s rare to meet a Finnish speaker outside Finland, and especially one in your own office. “En puhu paljon suomea. Puhun vähän,” I answered. I don’t speak much Finnish. Just a little. “Entä sinulla?” And you?
“Ei,” he said, shaking his head. “En puhu suomea.” No, he said in Finnish. I don’t speak Finnish.
This isn’t peculiar to Jim. Steve Kleinedler recounted listening to Eric Hamp, one of the more famous etymologists of the modern era (insofar as there are any famous etymologists of any era), explain what a Pan-Scandinavian pronunciation of “Häagen-Dazs” would be, respecting the umlauts and everything, though the ice-cream brand’s name is definitely not Scandinavian and so can’t really be pronounced in any of the Scandinavian languages. Then Eric talked for half an hour about the Albanian word for “milk.” Patrick Taylor, one of the etymologists for The American Heritage Dictionary, is in some remote part of central Asia learning Kurmanji—for no other reason than learning an obscure language. “Some of his etymologies take things back to Middle Chinese or Akkadian,” notes Steve. “He’s crazy. I love it.”
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Part of why people love etymology is because it tells a story about English and a word’s place in it, and sometimes that story tells you something about the culture or time period in which that word blossomed. It makes words literally relatable: “virulent” is just a dumb SAT word that means “malignant” or “intolerably harsh or strong” until you find out that its root word is the Latin virus, “poison,” the same word that gave us “virus” (no surprises there) and that is akin to the root words for “bison,” “weasel,” and “ooze.”*1 From that point forward, “virulent” is no longer the province of pundits and English teachers eager to get you into the best colleges; it becomes the hoity-toity East Coast cousin at the weird Virus family reunion, keeping its distance from its muskier relatives.
English is full of these delights, and we eat them up like penny candy. They’re not only fun but informative: Why do we call them “sideburns”? It’s a play on the name of the Civil War officer who made them popular, General Burnside. Why do we call practical and unflappable people “phlegmatic”? Because we used to believe that they were unexcitable because they had an overabundance of phlegm in them. Why do we say that someone’s “worth their salt”? Because in the ancient world salt was such a valuable commodity that we used to pay people in it (and this is why you also get a salary). Ah! we cry, and e-mail this factoid to all our friends: see, there’s a reason!
This is also what makes etymology dangerous. It’s easy to assume that no matter how convoluted and ridiculous English seems to be today, it can be straightforward and logical if we trace it back to its beginnings. It’s a beguiling idea: that there’s a golden plumb line of logic that English follows, and we just need to snag it to unravel the mysteries of this language. Noah Webster himself succumbed. The etymologies given in his 1828 dictionary are based on a complex etymological system he devis
ed himself that assumes all words in all languages stem from one common source language—a language he calls Chaldee.
Webster’s push to relate all words was not a linguistic one but an existential one. The section of his American Dictionary’s introduction that is titled “Origin of Language” gets right down to brass tacks: “We read, in the Scriptures, that God, when he had created man, ‘Blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, &c.’ ” Webster goes on to explain that as the Bible says, we all must have spoken one language from creation onward until our innate dickishness (my paraphrase) played out at the Tower of Babel, when God punished our hubris by making us speak different languages—all of which are equally ancient even if they have undergone some changes over the years. Everything, for Webster, should be able to be traced back to an ancient Semitic language, Chaldee. And trace things back he did:
BECK, n. A small brook. Gray. This word, Sax. becc, Ger. bach, D. beek, Dan. bæk, Sw. back, Pers. bak, a brook or rivulet, is found in the Ir. Ar. Ch. Syr. Sam. Heb. and Eth., in the sense of flowing, as tears, weeping. Gen. xxxii. 22 It is obsolete in English, but is found in the names of towns situated near streams, as in Walbeck; but is more frequent in names on the continent, as in Griesbach, &c.
According to modern scholarship, just about every part of that etymology is wrong. “Beck” comes from Old Norse, which is not listed here, and “beck” is not found in Irish, Arabic, Chaldee, Syriac, Samaritan, Hebrew, and Ethiopic in the sense of “flowing, as tears.” There are words in German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish that look a lot like “beck” and refer to a small brook, but that’s likely because all those words are probably from Old Norse as well. Even his claim that the word is obsolete in English is wrong: it’s used in Britain.
This problem with Webster’s etymologies underscores an important point about etymology. As Anatoly Liberman, one of the etymologists for the OED, has said, “Everything in etymology is conjecture and reconstruction.” Webster’s etymologies were hit or miss, but they were based on a mostly coherent system that, if you look at it through Webster’s lens, is completely logical. “He had the notion that derivations can be elaborated from one’s own consciousness,” said James Murray, the first editor of the OED, and this is the tack that many language lovers and armchair etymologists today take. If the forms match and they seem logical, then how can it be disputed? I had one correspondent tell me that we were incorrect in saying that “sushi” is Japanese: The correspondent’s family was Polish, and their grandmother used to eat raw fish and call it szukajcie, and this was long before sushi became popular. “Sushi” is close in sound to the Polish szukajcie, so the origin of “sushi” must be Polish.
I tell Jim about this theory, and he actually laughs out loud. Ridiculous, he says, and here is where rubber hits the proverbial road, where the difference between the amateur and the professional is laid bare. The earliest uses of the English word “sushi,” he tells me, come from travelogues written by Westerners traveling to Japan in the late nineteenth century, which makes sense because there was rising interest in Japan, which had been closed to Western contact for hundreds of years but reopened during the Meiji dynasty, after Matthew Perry’s 1853 voyage to the nation. English speakers had consistent contact with Polish speakers as far back as the sixteenth century through trade, and though there was an influx of Poles seeking asylum in England in the mid-nineteenth century, Polish just didn’t lend as many words to English as Japanese did. Besides, he finishes, szukajcie is the second-person plural imperative form of szukać, which actually means “to seek,” not “raw fish.” He’s nonplussed. “This is settled,” he says. “Why would this person think otherwise?”
I shake my head, not so much in answer to his question as in wonder at his answer.
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The process of finding a word’s etymology is about as abstruse as lexicography gets, which is pretty damned abstruse. Etymologists begin their process by working backward. They start pawing through the written record until they’ve found the earliest Modern English use of the word in question. Then they use a combination of education, research, and (frankly) hunches to move even further back. If the word goes back to Early Modern English, around 1500 or 1600, then the etymologist looks at the context, the spelling, where and who and how the word was used. “Specter,” for instance, goes back as far as 1605 in English—nothing earlier. But the etymologist also knows from their training that because of its orthography “specter” is likely not a native English creation. That initial sp followed by that ct—those are the morphological marks of an Italic language, not a Germanic language (of which English is one). It’s very well-known that the Italic language that English speakers have historically had the most contact with is French; the etymologist doesn’t have to poke too far to find the sixteenth-century French spectre, which means “specter,” and the Latin spectrum, which means “appearance” or “specter.”
Like the language itself, etymology isn’t fixed. New scholarship, new sources, new ideas, come to light. People assume that etymologies are either so self-evident that they don’t need study or so opaque that the etymologist is literally creating the history out of nothing. Some incantations, a little hand waving, some adverbs, and hey, presto: out of nowhere appears the etymology of “ghost.” The books in Jim’s cubicle are not for show: he actually refers to the Old Frisian Etymological Dictionary to try to find cognates of words that might be coming into the language. And he’s always scouring the Internet and other sources for new information. Can you prove that the hairstyle-specific word “mullet” predates the Beastie Boys’ 1994 song “Mullet Head”? That sort of information could have etymological implications.
Etymologists give all words their due, and sometimes even more than their due, no matter what the subject matter. In one of the early batches for the Unabridged Dictionary, Jim wrote some extensive etymology notes for words like “blephar-” (a scientific prefix meaning “eyelid”) that began like this:
Eric Hamp (in Glotta, vol. 72 [1994], p. 15) suggests *gʷlep-H-ro- from the base *gʷlep- (whence blépein). The variants in initial gl- found in Doric—glépharon for blépharon—are explained by Hamp as outcomes of word-initial *gʷl- with syllabification of the -l-, yielding *gul-, reduced by analogy to *gl- (see his earlier article “Notes on Early Greek Phonology,” Glotta, vol. 38 [1960], p. 202).
He also left equally scholarly notes at entries like “twerking” (“The hypothesis suggested therein that twerk is altered from work does not seem convincing. Expressive deformation of a neutral word is not a customary method of English word formation and hence is a rather ad hoc explanation in this case”), the MDMA meaning of “molly” (“In the United Kingdom a parallel name for a powder or capsule form of the drug is mandy, which bears somewhat greater resemblance to the initialism MDMA. There appears to be no compelling reason to take molly as a clipping of molecular”), and “asshat,” which drily mentions the movies Raising Arizona and City Slickers before offering a final etymological analysis: “The current meaning of asshat may be a reanalysis, perhaps in part based on the expression ‘have one’s head up one’s ass’ (meaning ‘to be obtuse, be insufficiently conscious of one’s surroundings’), perhaps in part due to simple phonetic similarity to asshole. A more precise history will depend on the location of further attestations.”
It’s not all “molly” and “asshat.” The etymologies of some words are, for the lexicographer and average joe alike, boring. (“Father” comes from the Old English word fæder, which means “father”—big whoop.) But the words that excite etymologists rarely excite anyone else. While working on the Unabridged Dictionary, Jim reviewed the etymology for the word “chaus,” a word that refers to an Old World cat and that gets very, very little use. Jim dug into the files, and then dug some more, and some more. It turned out that “chaus” stemmed ultimately from a misreading in one manuscript tradition of a word in Pliny�
�s Historia naturalis of the word chaum. The correct reading is probably chama. “Chaum—the -ma was read as -um. I actually found some manuscripts of Pliny.” He pauses. “Yeah, I really got into this.”
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Prior to the Unabridged, the etymology of “chaus” was listed as “origin unknown,” which is the wide-open field where armchair etymologists frolic. There are many assumptions about what “origin unknown” means, and none of them are right. To the etymologist, “origin unknown” means that while there may be theories regarding a word’s origin, there’s no direct evidence that those theories are true. But to most people, “origin unknown” seems to mean “Please send us your best guess as to where this word came from, because we are idiots.”
Nowhere is this more evident than in the correspondence we get on the word “posh.” The adjective is first attested to in English in the beginning of the twentieth century, meaning “elegant” or “fashionable,” and its earliest use appears in a book called The British Army from Within: “The cavalryman, far more than the infantryman, makes a point of wearing ‘posh’ clothing on every possible occasion—‘posh’ being a term used to designate superior clothing, or articles of attire other than those issued by and strictly conforming to regulations.” This suggests military slang, perhaps, but scholars can find no use of an adjective “posh” prior to this. The record seems to drop off a cliff.