vim
“Commonly,” says OED, vim is regarded as the accusative singular of Latin vis, strength or energy. The OED’s “commonly,” there, must refer to the high-school Latin teacher (if any still exist) in the street. That estimable but perhaps predictable manner of person would presumably expect OED to plump for what looks like slam-dunk Latinism.
But no. OED flashes an openness to the sonicky by noting an 1850 adverbial usage of vim (“He thought of his spurs, … an’ drove them vim into the hoss’s flanx”), which “suggests a purely imitative or interjectional origin.”
Aha. And how is the pronunciation of vim imitative of spurring a horse? It’s a quick word, vim, but more forceful than, say, the word quick. Vim generates force by starting, v, with both labial and vocal-cord vibration, simultaneously in the front and the back of the oral appartus. Then ih thrusts that force forward from down deep, and the m, up front but still with laryngeal backup, slams it home.
vowel
OED: “A sound produced by the vibrations of the vocal cords; a letter or character representing such a sound (as a, e, i, etc.).” So why does the word start with a consonant? Because v revs up those vibrations (as in va va voom). So why isn’t v a vowel? Because it is produced by vibrations of the lips, with vocal-cord backup.
Speaking of backup, OED follows its definition with this quote, in smaller type, from “Sweet Primer of Phonetics,” which is not where Tennessee Williams got the idea for Sweet Bird of Youth: “A vowel may be defined as voice (voiced breath) modified by some definite configuration of the super-glottal passages, but without audible friction (which would make it into a consonant).” For a view, indeed a tour, of the superglottal passages, see E.
The word said to have the most consecutive vowels in it is Hawaiian: hooiaioia. It means “certified.” Looks to me more like something someone would say after sitting on something drastically unexpected. In a certain tone of voice I guess it could sound like a stamp of approval, but how can anyone sustain a certain tone of voice through that many vowels? In English, the record holder for consecutive vowels is said to be queueing. Records are made to be broken. How about queueiary? The English are a queueiary race. Or queueial. A sporting event in which people lined up competitively might be called a queueo, but that would only tie queueing, not exceed it, vowelly—which is how OED spells the word for “having many vowels; characterized by vowels,” though its most recent example, from a Chicago newspaper of 1883, drops a consonant: “In their soft, vowely tongue.”
Vowel is from the Old French vouel, from Latin vocalis, voiced. Seems fitting that English dispensed with the hard c. Too consonantal, like a crack in a record, a catch in the throat.
One of the pleasures of reading baseball box scores in an especially narrow-columned newspaper is seeing players transformed into alien beings when their vowels are squeezed out. C. Guzman becomes CGzmn; Zimmerman, Zmmn; Willingham, Wlngh; Alb. Gonzalez, AlGnzlz; DavMurphy, DvMrp. In each of these cases there is room for a couple more letters, so if by chance some human hand was involved in setting the box score in type, the setter must have been trying to see how short he or she could make a name without blowing people’s minds.
w · W · w
The mustache of Kaiser Wilhelm II was his monogram. In the early 1890s, as the dashing young emperor of Germany and king of Prussia, he “was constantly photographed,” according to Miranda Carter’s George, Nicholas and Wilhelm. “Even his moustache—teased into the shape of a wide up-thrusting w—was so famous it acquired a name: ‘Er ist erreicht!’ ‘It is achieved!’” The achievement was made possible by “the miracle of pomade—its key ingredient the remarkable new product, petroleum jelly.” Later, caricaturists exaggerated Wilhelm’s trademark to make him look foolish and sinister.
Once when I turned on a hotel room TV, it was tuned to a religious channel. The show’s host, signing off, was giving out the URL that people should go to for further spiritual counsel: “www—or as I call it, ‘wubbly wubbly wubbleyoo’ …”
I swear to God.
wasp
Not a bad word for the insect in question, but vespa, the Latin and Italian (and also the modern Icelandic), has more buzz, more sting (and works for pesty motor scooters). The Lithuanian, szirszu, is better still.
French for wasp is guêpe. I don’t think so. For Wasp, maybe.
wavelet
Want to read a masterly definition? OED’s of wave:
A movement in the sea or other collection of water, by which a portion of the water rises above the normal level and then subsides, at the same time travelling a greater or smaller distance over the surface; a moving ridge or swell of water between two depressions or “troughs”; one of the long ridges or rollers which, in the shallower parts of the sea, follow each other at regular intervals, assuming an arched form, and successively break on the shore. Sometimes the word is applied to the ridge and the accompanying trough taken together, and occasionally to the concave curve of the surface between the crest of one ridge and that of the next.
But the word wave, in this sense, falls short, kinephonically. Originally, the noun wave was waw, which gets at the swelling and the looming aspect. Here comes another one: waaawwww. A sixteenth-century example in print: “The water of the river … was so troublous of wawe, that the brydge therwith was all to shaken.” Wave replaced waw owing to the popularity of the verb wave meaning “move to and fro or up and down.”
Wavelet, on the other hand—pretty little word, isn’t it?—sounds better than wawlet would. Run wavelet through your mouth and it gravely washes or laps back on itself.
I always thought eddy (from the Scots ydy), from the sound of it, meant a wavelet, but I come to find out it’s a whirlpool! So let’s gear down to ripple. Rhymes with nipple and stipple, and is unrelated to rip as in riptide, according to OED, which confesses that it does not know where this ripple comes from, this ripple defined as “a light ruffling of the surface of water, such as is caused by a slight breeze; a wavelet.”
“As the train pulled out I jumped up and down and hollered ‘Good-bye, you fine, sweet thing! And do you love me?’ and she peeked out the window and gave me this little, aw, man, this little wavelet.”
Weekley, Ernest
We may not think of etymologists as flesh and blood. But they are. Ernest Weekley, 1865–1954, author of The Romance of Words and An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, was a big, robust fellow, an athlete in youth, in maturity described by a colleague as “a man of distinguished presence and natural dignity of bearing.” But when, in 1912, his wife ran away with D. H. Lawrence, Weekley wrote to his mother-in-law: “Please Mama, make her understand what a state I’m in: I cannot see her handwriting without trembling like a cripple.”
He had fallen head over heels for Frieda von Richthofen, a distant relative of the Red Baron, when he ran into her while hiking in Germany. They married when she was twenty and he thirty-four. She was full figured and had long, untamable wheat-colored hair. “I only wish, for her sake,” Weekley wrote in another letter, “that I could offer her a more brilliant future than that of being the wife of a plain English professor: she ought to be an empress.”
Over the years Frieda set down several accounts of their wedding night. “In spite of his age and strong passions,” goes one of them, “he had never let himself go. His love had been of the ideal, pure adoration kind, sex he had not let enter consciously. How he suffered now!,” as they rode by train to their honeymoon hotel.
In their room, he told her, “I must tell you we aren’t married yet,” as if she didn’t know. When she sat on his knee, she could feel his legs trembling. “Go to bed, my child,” he said. “I’ll go and drink something, then I will come and say good-night to you.”
That wasn’t what this child had in mind. Eager to lose her virginity, she undressed and climbed up on a big oak armoire, “beautifully carved with a stiff Eve and an ape-like Adam.” By one of her accounts, when Ernest returned she sat there with her
legs dangling. By another of her accounts, she jumped on him, naked, from the armoire. It should be said that on the spectrum of irresistible women, Frieda was well toward the fleshy end. Still, by all of Frieda’s accounts, Weekley responded far less readily than we would wish him to have done to her hearty availability. “He was horrified.” Two hours later Frieda herself “was in an unspeakable torment of soul. It had been horrible, more than horrible.”
But it got better. Frieda was soon pregnant with the first of their three children. Judging from the character based on Weekley in Lawrence’s autobiographical novel Mr. Noon, Weekley became a passionate, and for some time a satisfying, lover of his wife. He tended, though, to be sarcastic. And in Nottingham, where Weekley taught, there was nothing going on to match the aristocratic life Frieda had lived in Germany. In 1912, when the Weekleys had been married for thirteen years, and Ernest’s first etymological book, The Romance of Words, was just out and attracting excellent reviews, he happened to take D. H. Lawrence on as a part-time French student. At twenty-seven Lawrence was six years younger than Frieda and four inches taller but looked smaller. He was working class and had not yet become an important writer. He was obsessed with sex. He and Frieda eloped to Germany.
In letters, Weekley threatened to kill him, her, and the children. Then he settled on demanding that she give him a righteous divorce—“We are not rabbits”—and forsake all access to their children. Over the years Frieda tried surreptitiously to see her children but managed only a few moments with them until they were grown.
Lawrence had guilty visions of Weekley as Christ. Frieda didn’t. “I rather like Christ,” she told Lawrence. Lawrence wrote to Weekley, “Mrs. Weekley is afraid of being stunted and not allowed to grow, and so she must live her own life. All women in their natures are like giantesses.” To someone else, later, Lawrence wrote, “What is interesting in the laugh of the woman is the same as the binding of the molecules of steel or their action in heat; it is the inhuman will … that fascinates me.”
If only somewhat of Lady Chatterley, Frieda was distinctly the model of Ursula in The Rainbow. Under her influence Lawrence wrote more rhapsodically, blurred his characters’ boundaries. She had affairs with other men but was still married to Lawrence when he died. In a letter defending his first great novel, Sons and Lovers, she wrote, “I have heard so much about ‘form’ with Ernst [sic], why are you English so keen on it … I hate art, it seems like grammar, wants to make a language all grammar, language was first and then they abstracted grammar.”
Weekley never married again. In 1921 his etymological dictionary was published. The first thing it says about horn is that it is “connected with betrayed husband in most Europ. langs., perh. from the practice of grafting spurs of capon on the bird’s comb, where they become horns.” He cites the Byzantine Greek keparthopos, cuckold, literally horn bearer. And he quotes from Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida:
“He was tho glad his hornes in to shrinke.”
Here’s what is up at that juncture in Chaucer’s long poem: the heretofore cooling-it Troilus has realized how deeply in love he is with Cressida—just as she begins to look at him slightly askance. Before, he had let his eyes drift to other women—the horns in question allude to a snail’s eyes on their stalks—but now they are shrunken and fixed on her, so that he hardly knows how to look or wink. And now she is not so into him. Before, he had scorned those who spoke of the pains of love. Now Cressida has given him a look that makes him realize how she loved him before, and how she doesn’t anymore. Her look kills the spirit in his heart. And she dumps him for the Greek warrior Diomede.
At cuckold, Weekley quotes Chaucer again: “Who hath no wyf he is no cokewold.”
At husband, Weekley quotes the Wycliffe Bible: “Gif the housbonde man wiste in what houre the theef were to cumme.”
Weekley defines wittol as “husband conniving at wife’s infidelity.” Apparently “from witewal or woodwale, the green woodpecker, from a belief that it hatched the cuckoo’s eggs and reared the cuckoo’s young as its own. No doubt the application of the nickname was partly determined by a punning allusion to wit, knowledge.”
Weekley’s next entry is wivern, which he calls a heraldic term for “dragon.” OED doesn’t recognize wivern.
Weekley had written to Frieda, “Are you not worse than a prostitute?” At whore, Weekley cites the Anglo-Saxon hor, adultery, cognate with Latin carus, dear. This is slightly out of keeping with other etymologies. John Ayto is so brash as to begin, “A whore is etymologically a ‘lover,’” going back to the link with carus (“source of English caress and charity”), but he doesn’t connect the word to adultery at all. OED notes whore’s PIE root in common with carus, but while it gets around eventually to the Old Norse hór, adultery, it cites no such Anglo-Saxon word. Only Weekley puts adultery and dearness together and leaves the roots of whore at that.
Frieda’s roots were in Saxony. At Saxon, Weekley quotes an Irish bishop: “The filthy compound of burglary and murder, and sodomy, bigamy and infidelity, child-murder, divorce and sexual promiscuity that covers the standing pool of Saxon life.”
OED cites Lawrence 1,653 times, of which thirteen are for various combinations with sex, from sex-anger to sex-compulsion to sex-thrill. Weekley rates forty-five citations. The closest to spicy is his suggestion that boloney was “influenced perhaps by the contemptuous sense associated with the German wurst.”
When Weekley died, after a long, distinguished academic career, his children found in his desk a photograph, which had been cut to fit a pocket watch, of Frieda, in her first pregnancy, and him together.
See ling, lit, don’t invite ’em.
well
Headline in The New York Times: THREE MEN DIE IN SEWAGE WELL, OVERCOME BY TOXIC FUMES. How can there be such a thing as a sewage well? According to Robert D. McFadden’s report, a man and his son and an employee “apparently [fell] one after another into the Stygian gloom of a putrid, manhole-size, 18-foot-deep well they were trying to vacuum.”
The accident occurred in an industrial neighborhood of Queens that is “crowded with waste collection companies and adrift in noxious odors that suggest rotting food and oil. The avenue is littered with oil stains, broken glass and dirty piles of something resembling eggplant.”
First the son went down into this well and passed out into its depths. Then the father, a native of Israel, went down to save him. Then the employee, a native of El Salvador, went down to save them both. They were all found floating in “four feet of murky water.” They had succumbed one after another to lethal levels of hydrogen sulfide, “a common byproduct of the decomposition of organic matter.”
Well. Let’s take off our hats to (multicultural, incidentally) altruism. You would go down into such a hole after your son, your heart in your throat, but the worker who went down there after his boss and the son of his boss went above and beyond. Otherwise, what a horrible story. A malevolent well—it’s bad enough to think of drowning in a well, or drinking out of a poisoned well, but a well of poison is like an evil mom. Next to air, water is the primary thing we need to live, and we need to count on a well (as millions of people in the world, to be sure, cannot) as a source of clean water. We wish into a well. In The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser refers to Geoffrey Chaucer’s work as “the well of English undefiled.”
Between well as in a source of water and well meaning healthy or in a good manner, etymology has found no connection. Both well’s (one as wel, one as wall) date back to earliest written records, but they come from two different roots spelled wel-. The water well comes from a wel- (the connection to bubbling, the boiling up, of spring), which also produced various words involving turning and rolling: waltz, wallow, revolve, and vulva. The healthy well comes from a wel- whose offspring involve wishing and willing: wealth, will, voluntary, gallant, gallop, and well, the verb, as in “tears may—may well—well up in our eyes as we read that story in the Times.”
Yet surely at some level of the m
ind the two well’s are well acquainted. (As are ear and hear, which also lack a common root.) As far back as Old English, well was an interjection, an expression of surprise or of turning something over in one’s mind:
Ah, well. Well, I don’t know. Well, well, well. Well, then. Well!
Which wel- do those well’s bubble up from? The health-related one, says OED: “Employed without construction to introduce a remark or statement, sometimes implying that the speaker or writer accepts a situation, etc., already expressed or indicated, or desires to qualify this in some way, but frequently used merely as a preliminary or resumptive word.” Sounds a bit like the bubble-up well at work, doesn’t it? At any rate, well is a comfort sound, relaxing to pronounce.
If I had any influence over the waste business, I would urge it to call a repository of sewage a pit, not a well. A well isn’t a dump; it’s a source: an oil well, of oil; an inkwell, of ink; a wheelwell, of wheels. The well in your boat where you keep fish you’ve caught has freshwater coming into it, so the fish won’t spoil.
Behind the sewage pit in question, reports the Times, are bays “where the trucks pull up with materials to be sorted for recycling. Signs indicate the types: ‘Putrescible’ and ‘Non-putrescible,’ separating solid wastes from those that are likely to become rotten.”
There’s an ugly word, putrescible. From putrid, from Latin putretre, “to rot.” From the PIE pu-, “to rot, stink.” Quite natural, but p-u.
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