Alphabetter Juice

by Roy Blount, Jr.

  The reporter (or copy desk) may have been thinking of aye, which Etymonline.com calls “perhaps a variant of I, meaning ‘I assent,’” or of the Middle English yai, meaning “yes”; or that aye may derive from the other aye, which means “always, ever.” Both those aye’s are pronounced like eye, as in “Aye, aye, sir.” But “Ay, ay, ay” is A, A, A.

  See A.

  ingenuity

  Etymologically, ingenuity ought to mean ingenuousness: candor, artlessness. Instead, it means ingeniousness: cleverness, imaginative skill, which is pretty much the opposite.

  Before we dare to imagine how such a thing can have happened in an upstanding language such as English, let’s look at the core that ingenious and ingenuous share. Many English words incorporate this gen, whose roots relate to birth—generate, congenital, genesis—and by extension to kind or nature—genus, gentry, gene. According to Etymonline.com, the early meaning of ingenuous evolved from “with the virtues of freeborn people” into “honorably straightforward.” (More recently, perhaps owing to a rise in cynicism, or to the dramatic influence of ingenue, we are likely to think of ingenuous as meaning about the same as naïve—which also derives from gen via Latin words meaning innate, natural.)

  Ingenious, on the other hand, comes from the Latin for “gifted, with inborn talent.”

  But people have for centuries confused ingenuous with ingenious. As a result, ingenuity long ago came to mean ingeniousness. And however ingenious we may be, there’s nothing we can do about that now.

  We can, however, slip into our loose-speculation shoes and try to figure out what caused the confusion. To the eye, ingenious and ingenuous look a lot alike, but to the ear, i/u isn’t the only difference. The e in ingenious is long, forceful, as in genial, genius, genie, gee! (The i, which sounds like a long e itself, seems to bring out the beast, so to speak, in the preceding e.) The e in ingenuous is short—soft, we might call it, as in gentle, or reassuring, as in genuine, or anyway impartial, as in general, gender. This difference between the e’s is appropriate to the different meanings.

  But then when you try to turn ingenious into an -ity noun you get ingenity. Now the i following the e is pronounced ih, not ee, and ingenity wants to rhyme with serenity, amenity, lenity. The e that was ee becomes eh.

  On the other hand, when you turn ingenuous into an -ity noun, you get ingenuity. The stress shifts from the soft e to the oomphy u. “Ooo! What ingenuity!” sounds in accord with “Gee! That’s ingenious!” The ingenuity of the ingenious tongue and ear defy etymological consistency.

  (If ingenious had been ingeneous, the noun could have been ingeneity, as in homogeneous and homogeneity. But ingeneous might have been reduced to ingenous—as homogeneous has largely been replaced, in popular usage, by homogenous. The influence of homogenize has probably had a lot to do with the latter shift, and there’s no such word as ingenize. Visually, though, ingeneous might have been too close to igneous, which has to do with fire.)

  “Is the pope fallible?,” alternatives to

  Has a cat got a climbing gear?

  Does a fat dog fart?

  Would a fifty-pound bag of flour make a big biscuit? (No good anymore, been co-opted by TV commercial.)

  Does the pope wear a funny hat?

  See zythum.

  itch

  This seems such a natural word, you’d think it occurred early on to Adam. But at one point in Middle English it was yekth, and an old Scots form was yuke or yeuk (“When I get that dry yeukin’ in my thrapple”). OED’s first citation of the intransitive verb itch as we spell it today is from Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: “I would thou didst itch from head to foot, and I had the scratching of thee.” Quite possibly a romantic sentiment, between the two lovers. But no, it’s Thersites—“I would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece,” he continues—exchanging insults with Ajax.

  Here’s a poignant note: in one form or another, according to OED, itch goes back to circa 1000, but scratch didn’t arise until the sixteenth century! Sure, before scratch there were scrat and cratch, both of which carried the meaning of scratch—but the violent, aggressive meaning. Not until the sixteenth century does OED find an example of scrat meaning to scratch for pleasure, “To rub lightly with the finger-nails, etc., to relieve itching or the like.” By that time, scratch was taking over. OED says scratch was probably a “confusion” of scrat and cratch. Okay, I’m going to get romantic again: Don’t you think maybe the s- from scrat softened cratch, and the -ch from cratch connected scrat to itch? The language itched, and itched, and finally found its scratch.

  Oh, thrapple is throat.

  j · J · j

  On the face of it, “naked as a jaybird” is a mystery. Some of our pinker feathered friends might evoke human nudity, but you’d have to really want them to, and surely you don’t. “Barefooted as a yard dog” speaks for itself, but a jaybird looks overdressed if anything.

  First of all, why jaybird? A jay is already a bird. Is there a parallel in tuna fish? No, tuna fish applies specifically, as AHD puts it, to “the edible flesh of tuna, often canned or processed.” I don’t know what other processed form of tuna there is, than canned. Liquified and bottled? But never mind that. Is tuna fish some kind of crazy euphemism, so we don’t have to say “tunaflesh sandwich”? No. We don’t say “salmonflesh croquettes.” (Germans do however call pork Schweinefleisch.)

  You know how I think tuna fish arose? I can’t prove it, but see if this doesn’t make sense: a parent opens a can of tuna. A child looks inside and says, “What is that?”

  Parent: “Tuna.”

  Child (backing away): “What … is … tuna?”

  Parent: “It’s fish! Don’t worry about it!”

  But we’re talking primarily about jaybird, here, and I don’t know anyone who has eaten, or been served, jaybird in any form.

  So. Where does jay come from? AHD and many other sources (OED, though, says origin obscure) assert, or suggest, that (like martin and robin, from those English personal names), it’s from the Latin personal name Gaius. Even if this is so, nobody calls a robin a robinbird. Nor is jaybird like johnboat or tomcat, because john doesn’t stand alone as a boat, nor does tom (quite) stand alone as a cat. Jay does stand alone as a bird, without the -bird.

  As to the derivation of jay, I don’t see how etymologists can ignore the fact that the blue jay’s most common cry, according to the Sibley Guide to Birds, is “a shrill, harsh, descending scream jaaaay.” Granted, a blue jay by the same authority can go toolili on occasion, and shkrrr when attacking a raptor.

  And a Steller’s jay most commonly emits “a harsh, unmusical, descending shaaaar” and sometimes “a rapid, popping shek shek shek shek” and “a clear whidoo.”

  And a western scrub jay “a harsh, rising shreeeenk” and a wenk wenk wenk or kkew kkew kkew, also “a harsh, pounding sheeyuk sheejuk” and “a low chuckling chudduk.”

  And a Florida scrub jay “a distinctly lower, harsher, flatter, less rising kreesh” and “a low, husky kereep.”

  And a Mexican jay “a rather soft, musical, rising zhenk or wink.”

  And a green jay “a harsh, electric jeek jeek jeek jeek” and “a high, mechanical slikslikslikslik” and “a nasal been” and “a high, nasal unneeek-neek or grreen-rren” and a “drawn-out clicking ree urrrrrrrr it.”

  And a brown jay “an intense, clear bugling keerg or paow.”

  And a pinyon jay delivers “a soft, conversational series hoi hoi hoi … or single hoya” and “a series of harsher rising notes kwee kwee kwee … and loud, clear, nasal waoow.”

  And a grey jay “generally soft, whistled or husky notes … from clear weeoo and weef weef weef weef to musical, husky chuf-chuf-weef and very rough, dry kreh kreh kreh” (also “a screeching jaaay reminiscent of,” and in fact perhaps imitative of, a blue jay).

  So, what, it’s a coincidence that blue jays go jaaaay? They found out they were called jays, so they started calling jaaaay?

  I don’t know. I
do know that, based on years of observing blue jays whether I wanted to be observing them or not, that if a jaybird were naked, it would strut around ostentatiously representing nudism. Telling all the other birds—squirrels, even—they should only look so good so naked. A jaybird is naked as in the expressions “naked aggression,” “naked power,” “naked censorship” (as opposed to subtle governmental pressure on the media), “naked avarice.” Expressions that, come to think of it, we don’t hear much anymore, perhaps because people are jaded.

  Does jay have intrinstic value? It has the abruptness of Hey! or Say! It’s at home in hip-hop culture: Dee Jay, Jay-Z, Jay Smooth, Dr. Jay’s, triple j, Jay Rock, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and so on. Then, until he died of “cocaine toxicity with alcohol as a contributing factor,” there was punk rocker Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr., who performed as Jay Reatard.

  A jay is a joint, and vajayjay is slang for vagina. A popinjay—the English adaptation of, ultimately, Arabic babgha, which was probably imitative of the bird’s call—is a parrot and by extension a vain, gaudy person. A jayhawker was a guerrilla/pillager in Bloody Kansas before, during, and after the Civil War; presumably the free-state cutthroats in question came on as bold as jays and as deadly as hawks. (Today, they might drink Jägermeister.) Before it managed to wedge its way into the English alphabet, the very letter J, which was often represented as an I but with the soft-g sound, was regarded as a crass interloper. OED quotes this sixteenth-century huff: “Now as concerning I consonant, which oftentimes vniustly vsurpeth the sound and place of G: me thinke it hath small reason: or rather I may say it is verie absurd, and much against both Art and reason.”

  Probably owing to jaybirds’ uncool image, in the United States beginning in the nineteenth century, jay meant hayseedy, hicky, bumpkinish, ill adapted to urban ways—as in the Irving Berlin song, sung by Jimmy Cagney as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy, “Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway”: “Oh what a fine bunch of rubens, / Oh what a jay atmosphere.” Hence jaywalker, a person who has no more sense than to walk out into traffic. Today in Manhattan, hip pedestrians jaywalk advisedly, going not by lights but by their feel for street flow, but try that in Dallas and you’ll get a ticket. (God knows Dallas is jay.)

  Jack

  The quintessential English male nickname. On both sides of the pond we use it generically, as in I’m All Right, Jack, “Hit the Road, Jack,” jumping jack, every man jack, lumberjack, steeplejack, you don’t know jack, jack-of-all-trades, Jack Frost, jack-o’-lantern, Jack the Ripper, Jack and Jill.

  Jack is the common man, and by extension a nonroyal face card, or a mechanical fellow laborer: a jackknife, a jackhammer, or just a jack. Here’s a democratic tip of the hat to a nation that calls its flag the Union Jack.

  How Jack arose as a diminutive of John is not clear. It may have been influenced by Jacques, which however is the French equivalent of James (from which we get jimmy, as to jimmy a lock). It is clear that jack has a snappy charge to it, from the energizing j through the fast bright a to the quick stop of ck.

  Money is jack, and in baseball a home run is a jack, from the verb to jack, as in “jack it out.”

  I hope some of you out there are old enough to remember Jack Benny. On radio and TV, he portrayed himself as a skinflint. He once asked his factotum, Rochester, who is sharpening a pencil, “Roch, would you mind sharpening that in the fireplace?” Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky. He was still unestablished in show business, and was calling himself Ben K. Benny, when he joined the navy during World War I. In those days, all sailors called each other “Jack.” That’s how he came up with his stage name. Jack Benny. It’s as bouncy as Bob (born Leslie) Hope, Bing (born Harry) Crosby, or Jim Dandy.

  jejune

  An inapt-sounding word, since it means barren (or as OED puts it expansively, “Unsatisfying to the mind or soul; dull, flat, insipid, bald, dry, uninteresting; meagre, scanty, thin, poor; wanting in substance or solidity”) and has june in it. Jejunity may, regrettably, be bustin’ out all over, but you don’t want to think about a jejune bride.

  Well, jejune was borrowed from Latin ieiunus. Latin had no j. Latin’s i was originally a y sound. Yeyune sounds more like jejune ought to.

  The pronunciation of jejune given in Chambers, jijün, is a rare occurrence of five dots in a row.

  joke, linguists’, which I don’t get either

  From Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log, the linguistics blog:

  Q: Two linguists were walking down the street. Which one was the specialist in contextually indicated deixis and anaphoric reference resolution strategies?

  A: The other one.

  juice

  The word juicy would be juicier—over-the-top juicy, too literally mouth-watering—if it were jucious, as in luscious, delicious, scrumptious, lubricious, squishy, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Early English spellings of juice (when i could stand for a j sound) include iuyshe, iwisch, iuwys, and iwse. All were attempts to adapt French jus.

  Jus just wouldn’t work in English, because of children.

  “Drink your orange jus.”

  “Yuck. Rhymes with—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  Hence the -uice, which looks odd the more you stare at it, but it’s like the -uit in fruit, the -uise in bruise. We must concede to French jus a juicier j. But juice will do, by golly, juice will do. Sometimes I squeeze a little more out of it by saying “j (y)oose,” to rhyme with deuce.

  See Dionysian, Apollonian, blended, briefly and -sh, sh-.

  jump

  Good basic English word. How would you define it? And can’t use your feet. OED is on it:

  To make a spring from the ground or other base by flexion and sudden muscular extension of the legs (or, in the case of some animals, as fish, of the tail, or other part); to throw oneself upward, forward, backward or downward, from the ground or point of support; to leap, spring, bound …

  You think that’s that? No, OED knows there’s a distinction to be made:

  … to leap with the feet together, as opposed to hopping on one leg.

  Okay. But was jump with us from jump, or the jump, or jump street, that is to say from the jumping-off point, the get-go, the beginning? No. There was leap, there was spring, but there was no jump until the sixteenth century. And no one knows where it jumped in from. John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins says “etymologists fall back [so to speak] on the notion that it may originally have been intended to suggest the sound of jumping feet hitting the ground (the similar sounding bump and thump are used to support this theory).” The ump part, yeah, but how about the j? Maybe intended to suggest the kind of kinetic energy that gets words like jab and Jack and jig and jerk and juke under way?

  And leap, somehow, is relatively high-flown. Would leap ball or leap blues or leap cut or leap shot or leap start have the requisite charge? Spring is tight, all right, and yet it borders on the lah-di-dah. Feeling springy and feeling jumpy are different things. We needed jump. So we summoned it from our vocal apparatus.

  k · K · k

  When, ironically enough, people are treating fuck as ineffable, they speak of “the f-word,” of “effing.” But a great deal of the word’s kick is in its final letter. Try saying, “What the fub?” or “Let’s go somewhere and fud” or “I will fuff you up” or “We fummed ourselves silly” or “Fur ’em if they can’t take a joke” or “When desperate housewives fuv around, they don’t fuv around.”

  And in West Side Story, the delinquents did not sing, “Officer Frupfe, frupf you.”

  kick

  John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins calls this “one of the mystery words of English. It first appears towards the end of the 14th century, but no one knows where it came from, and it has no relatives in the other Indo-European languages.”

  Well, it sounds right. Its first uses in English are attributed to the dissident Catholic theologian and translator John Wycliffe, or people associated with him (called Lollards). In a tract publish
ed around 1380, the author tells “secular lords” they should get right with Jesus, because (my modernized paraphrase) “It is too hard to kick against the spur—you should know that this harms you. For it takes away soul-help from you and your people.” Around 1382, Wycliffe and his circle produced the first English translation of the Bible. In the ninth chapter of Acts, Saul is on his way to Damascus, bent upon arresting any Christians he can find there, when a blinding flash of light brings him to his knees, and a voice asks, “Why persecutest thou me?”

  “Who that?” asks Saul.

  “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest; it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” By “hard for thee” is meant “hard on thee.” In other words, when you kick back against the prick of a spur or a goad—as is the natural reaction of a horse or an ox—you just make it worse for yourself than if you go along with the divine guidance that the prick represents. Christ has been prodding Saul into becoming a Christian himself, and to fight back is folly. Saul converts on the spot and goes on to become the Apostle Paul.

  Did Jesus use words like kick and prick? Maybe not. The foregoing direct quotations are from the King James Version, which retained the Wycliffian “kick against the pricks” expression. The Wycliffe version was a translation of the Latin Vulgate version, durum est tibi contra stimulum calcitrare, the antepenultimate word meaning a cattle prod, sometimes used against slaves, and calcitrare (from which English gets recalcitrant) meaning, according to Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, “to strike with the heel, kick” or “to resist obstinately” or “to writhe the feet about, at death.” Heel in Latin was calx, spur was calcar, so calcitrare derives from the way animals, not humans, kick, except when humans are riding an animal and wearing spurs.