I love it when the highest lexicographical authority acknowledges that many words are intrinsically, nonarbitrarily expressive of their meaning. But was even the original snort-in-the-night blurt onomatopoeic in the usual sense? OED defines onomatopoeia two ways. First: “The formation of a word from a sound associated with the thing or action being named; the formation of words imitative of sounds.” Second: “The use of echoic or suggestive language, esp [ecially] onomatopes, for rhetorical effect.” In the second definition, it’s hard to see why onomatopes adds anything, since OED defines onomatope as “a word formed by onomatopoeia.” The definitive example of onomatope that OED cites is Noah Webster’s in 1828: “a figure in which words are formed to resemble the sound made by the thing signified; as, to buzz, as bees … A word whose sound corresponds to the sound of the thing signified.”
Because onomatopoeia is narrowly associated with imitative sound, it can’t do justice to blurt, or spurt, much less, say, finagle. Perhaps my grandchildren will see the day when OED acknowledges the kinephonic concept of sonicky.
body
No other language has a word like this one. Old High German botah and potah had the same meaning, but etymology cannot link that word to our body, and it died out of German many centuries ago. In English, as OED puts it, “body remains as a great and important word.”
It would be interesting to make a study of all the English words, like body, that go back to earliest print and seem to come from nowhere. Others include curse, guilt, and dog. The groundbreaking nineteenth-century etymologist Walter W. Skeat compared body to a Sanskrit word and said the original, Old English sense related to bondage—the body “considered as confining the soul.” Etymologists don’t believe that anymore.
Is it just me, or does body sound more emotive, and fleshier, than any of the various forms of the Latin corpus in Romance languages and German? More emotive, fleshier, and also more embracing: “the whole material organism viewed as an organic entity” (OED). The physical self rolled into a ball.
See bubble and beauty, depth of.
boo
In the sixties it was a term for marijuana. Maybe from taboo, suggested an article in High Times. Now it means boyfriend or girlfriend. Perhaps an alteration of beau, suggests OED. Old Slavic for loved one was l’ubu, if that’s any help.
To scare someone, people used to go bo. A “combination of consonant and vowel especially fitted to produce a loud and startling sound,” says OED.
Now people go boo. (Ghosts put more o’s into it, more syllables, even.)
People used to go boo to sound like cows. Which is why audiences started going boo to express disapproval of a performance. Boo birds—people who get off on expressing disapproval—may also hoot like owls or hiss like geese or snakes, or they may utter catcalls (OED: “From the nocturnal cry, or ‘waul’ of the cat”) , which were originally produced in English theaters by means of a special squeaking instrument.
Or they may jeer. Nobody knows where jeer comes from. Weekley hazards a perhaps: corruption of the Dutch den gek scheeren, to make a fool of someone, gek meaning fool.
OED says bah! was probably picked up from modern French. Not from sheep, then.
To sound like cows these days, people generally go moo (or in German, muh; French, meuh; Spanish, mu; Russian, mu; Lithuanian, m; Latvian, mau).
Back to hiss. Charles Lamb, the illustrious nineteenth-century British essayist, wrote a play, a farce, which he titled Mr. H. “How simple! how taking!” he wrote to a friend before opening night: “A great H sprawling over the play-bill, and attracting eyes at every corner.” Mr. H. was hissed off the stage. Lamb wrote to another friend:
Mercy on us, that God should give his favorite children … mouths to speak with, to discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to encourage warmly, to counsel wisely, to sing with, to drink with, and to kiss with, and that they should turn them into mouths of adders, bears, wolves, hyaenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse and vilify the innocent labors of their fellow-creatures who are desirous to please them! Heaven be pleased to make the teeth rot out of them all, therefore!
Lamb had thought it would go over so cool, how subtly he had set up the disclosure (the reveal, a screenwriter would say) that the H of Mr. H. stood for Hogsflesh.
books, randomly readable
“I won’t begin in any particular spot,” said Mark Sanford, governor of South Carolina, to kick off a press conference about having got himself into a spot by going to Argentina to see “the woman who I’ve been unfaithful to my wife with.”
Would whom have been too punctilious there? Perhaps. I just thought Sanford’s opening would be a good way to start an appreciation of the sort of book that you can open up at any page and plunge into. One of these is Lo! by the collector (and perhaps example) of unexplained phenomena Charles Fort. Here is what I have just turned to in Lo!:
Louth, Lincolnshire, England, May 29, 1920—the River Lud, which is only a brook, and is known as “Tennyson’s Brook,” was babbling, or maybe it was purling—
Out of its play, this little thing humped itself twenty feet high. A ferocious transformation of a brook sprang upon the houses of Louth, and mangled fifty of them. Later in the day, between banks upon which were piled the remains of houses, in which were lying twenty-two bodies, and from which hundreds of the inhabitants had been driven homeless, the little brook was babbling, or purling.
See purl.
boy
According to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, the latest etymological theory connects this word to the Old French embuier, fetter. In English, boy originally meant male servant or churl. Anatoly Liberman in An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, however, says the Modern English boy is a “blend of an onomatopoeic word for an evil spirit … and a baby word for ‘brother.’” (Sounds about right.) For many years, especially in the segregated South, white people invidiously called black men “boy.” But by the fifteenth century, boy had come primarily to mean a young male, unpejoratively, and if there weren’t something engaging about the sound of the word, a rapper would never refer to his entourage as “my boys” and people of both genders would never exclaim “Oh boyoboyoboy!”
In his book Try and Stop Me, Bennett Cerf told a story about Herbert Bayard Swope, who in the twenties, thirties, and forties was an enormously self-important and yet widely enjoyed newspaper editor and man of affairs:
One night a Broadway friend and his blue-eyed babe taxied Herbert Swope home from a theatrical party. Swope, as usual, carried the conversational ball. “The era of the economic royalists and predatory robber barons went out with the Hoover administration,” he boomed. “I have told Franklin and I have told Wendell—I’m sure you agree with me—that if they ignore the portents and pussy-foot back to the tenets of the McKinley era, I will not be responsible for anything that happens to them.” The little lady sitting next to him gazed at him in wide-eyed wonder and said softly, “Hey, hey, Big Boy.”
See gillie, girl.
bubble
No evidence has been found, we are told, to link bubble etymologically to any of the words for bubble, similar as they are, in other languages: Latin bulla, Swedish bubble, Dutch bobbel, Danish boble, German dialect bobbel. “As likely as not,” says John Ayto, “the whole family of bubble words represents ultimately an attempt to lexicalize the sound of bubbling, by blowing through nearly closed lips.”
Hmm. I have been sitting here for twenty minutes trying and failing to make anything like the sound bubble by blowing through nearly closed lips, with spit or without.
OED is much closer to the mark, saying of all these versions of bubble, “it is not clear how far they are related to each other, or are merely parallel imitative words, suggested either by the sound of bubbles forming and bursting, or by the action of the lips in making a bubble.”
But why “merely”? What is so mere about a series of l
etters managing to convey an evanescent material object? It’s wonderful. It’s damn near too marvelous for words.
And when words across several languages are so similarly sonicky, why can’t they be called “related”? They may have cropped up unaware of one another, but they all go way back, they all may be seen to evince the lips of the same species, and as soon as they encountered one another, they knew.
And can’t we readily imagine that bulb and boil and ball and bowl and bob and buoyant and belly and bulge (and maybe, just maybe, body) are all to some extent rooted in the oral evocation of roundness? I don’t know. I’m just asking.
See blob; bum.
buckra
In every source I’ve found, this old derogatory African-American term for white people is said to be from an African word, bakra or mbakara, meaning white man, European, or master. From a verb, kara, meaning to encompass or master. I wonder whether buckra was influenced, at least, by a word that goes back to the thirteenth century in English and appears right after buckra in most dictionaries: buckram, as in (AHD) “a coarse cotton fabric heavily sized with glue, used for stiffening garments and in bookbinding” and “resembling or suggesting buckram, as in stiffness or formality.” (Some say probably from Bukhara, Uzbekistan, whence the fabric was imported, but OED says that won’t wash.)
bum
Let’s concede this one to the UK: bum is a better, plumper, more affectionate term for the human posterior than American butt, which is too hard sounding, like what a goat does, or ass, which sounds inherently crass—a quality which, to be sure, improves the following anecdote that I remember from the autobiography of Lauren Bacall:
At a big reception somewhere, the shah of Iran danced with her. Was smitten by her. Told her, “You dance divinely, Miss Bacall.”
She responded, “You bet your ass, Shah.”
But there’s something grating about ass. Even when bum has negative connotations, as in expressions like bum leg and bummer, it has a down-home warmth (can this be related to the M’s in me and mom and yum and hum and home?) that comes through in the old antisalvationist hobo song, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.”
OED calls bum “probably onomatopoeic, to be compared with other words of similar sound and with the general sense of ‘protuberance, swelling.’” (Or as some might say, it’s sonicky. See blurt and bubble.)
In Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” a smarty-pants student sticks his bare bottom out the window so that a dumb cluck, mistaking it (again) for the face of the lady with whom the student is dallying, will kiss it. But the cluck has got wise. He pokes the student with a hot iron. Here’s how the story ends in the original:
And Nicholas is scalded in the towte.
This tale is doon, and God save al the rowte!
Towte is a long-obsolete term for the buttocks; rowte, for an assemblage of people. (From the latter we get rout meaning an army’s disorderly flight, and by extension an overwhelming defeat in sports.) The best modern translation I have seen of those two lines is Nevill Coghill’s:
And Nicholas is branded on the bum
And God bring all of us to Kingdom Come.
How would we do that in American?
And Nicholas is branded on the ass.
Such things God knows do sometimes come to pass.
And Nicholas is blistered on the butt.
Good Lord! Next time he’ll keep the window shut.
Why do Brits say arse and Americans ass? Well, for one thing, Brits don’t say arse, they say something more like ahss, which strikes me as a bit haughty—a quality that, to be sure, adds something to the expression “disappear up one’s own arse,” meaning, according to OED, “to become excessively self-involved, pretentious, or conceited.” OED provides this nice example, from a novel by Peter Marshall (I might mention, though, that when I clicked on P. MARSHALL on OED.com—which incidentally I love—I was transported to a bibliography that did not include Peter Marshall, so I had to do quite a bit of surfing before I ran him to ground): “You see, logic cannot stand the application of logic. Under such an application, logic will disappear up its own arse.”
In ass for arse there must be a parallel in American cuss for curse, bust for burst, and hoss for horse: if the English don’t pronounce r’s, why should we spell ’em?
In the late sixties when I was covering baseball for Sports Illustrated I heard a story that comes to mind here. When Masanori Murakami joined the San Francisco Giants in 1964, becoming the first Japanese-born player in the American major leagues, his English and his acquaintance with American baseball rituals were limited. Two veteran Giants, Bobby Bonds and Jim Ray Hart, fun-loving African Americans, took him aside and gave him a helpful tip about how to show respect. So the first time Murakami came to bat, he bowed to the plate umpire and said ceremoniously, “You can kiss my big black ass.”
Fanny for bottom is American. In British English, fanny means, as OED puts it, “the female genitals.” Origin unknown, though OED is willing to suggest, tentatively, that the British fanny meaning “a tin for holding anything to be drunk” might come from “the female name,” and AHD is willing to hazard a speculation that the American fanny comes from that same name, a nickname for Frances.
Another nice word is rump, but it also has derogatory applications, as in rump parliament. Tush, like the Yiddish tuchus from which it springs, has a friendly sound.
Fundament isn’t bad—a bit formal, but that quality lends something to Mark Twain’s observation that “by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo on the fundamental sigh.”
Buns, from the shape, I guess, seems apt. Nates is, like so many words from the Latin, boring. The German Arsch is almost unpronounceably harsh. Keister, which originally meant suitcase and whose origin is unknown, is too cold for me, and so is can, and so is prat, from which we get pratfall. The origin of this prat is unknown, but it goes back at least to the sixteenth century, and I’m wondering, just on my own cognizance, whether this prat can have sprung from a sardonic allusion to the Old English adjective prat meaning “cunning, astute,” related to pretty. Derrière is perky French from the Latin de retro meaning “from the back.” Once on The Wire, Herc, the dumb cop, was wearing a T-shirt that said, over an outline map of Wisconsin, “Smell That Dairy Air.”
See tutu’s, the two.
but
In the forties movie Blue Skies, Joan Caulfield prods Bing Crosby into admitting he’s in love with her.
“Yes,” Bing intones (croons, almost), while holding the lovely Joan close, “I guess I am. But—”
“But. What an unpleasant word,” says Joan.
“You know me, I’m just not the marrying type,” says Bing.
Maybe that exasperating little exchange provides context for all the aunts and English teachers who have adjured young people (or so a number of them, now grown, have informed me) to avoid the word but because “it’s a defensive word.” Poppycock. It’s a useful word, a word that sounds like what it means. I see a lot of but-avoidance in the press. Why would AP write this, about the usually affectless Phillies pitcher Roy Halladay’s having smiled and high-fived after pitching a perfect game: “Ordinary stuff for most people, although for Halladay, such signs of emotion may have as well been considered a wild party”?
Forget the bizarre lameness of “may have as well been.” Why although? Surely that sentence calls for a simple but.
I also see a lot of yet’s that ought to be but’s. Yet shouldn’t be brought out until you need something stronger than but. It means nevertheless. If you say, “I called you, yet you didn’t call back,” then what have you got left for, “You told me you had called me three times last night, yet somehow, my phone didn’t ring”? Yet may be the new but, because yet slides off the tongue, whereas but may strike an idiot as bumptious, or something.
Yet but can even be a romantic word, as in “I’ll be loving you” (and here I paraphrase lest I
wind up owing an arm and a leg to the estate of Irving Berlin), not for just a season, not for just a reason …
But always.
The word but was formed, we are told, as early as the eighth century, by combination of be meaning “by” and ut meaning “out.” Originally, it was only a preposition, as in “I need nothing in my system but roughage and love,” or an adverb, as in “Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Father Coughlin, and Tokyo Rose, to name but a few.” Not until 1000 was but used as a conjunction, as in
She’s got freckles on her
But she’s pretty.
By scholarly consensus, but is etymologically unrelated to the butt that means thick end or human posterior. What’s more, that butt is unrelated to butt as in the butt of a joke (which however may be related to butte). And none of these are related to the verb meaning to bump with the head. But however but and the several butt’s differ in provenance, they take after one another at some level. “Only in rock-solid marriages,” writes Richard Ford in Independence Day, “can you hope to hear that you’re a sweet man without a ‘but’ following along afterward like a displeasing goat.”
See and and though, the lazy.
c · C · c
From Sesame Street, we know that a C is a cookie from which the Cookie Monster has taken a large bite. A cookie-cutter shark, according to OED, is a small one that “takes distinctive, non-lethal bites from large prey.” Cookie derives not from cook but from Dutch koekje, little cake. An attractive woman said “See ya, Cookie” to me once, and it felt like a nibble, but I was in a relationship, as they say, with another, who never called me “Cookie.” That’s the way it crumbles.
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