A Whimsical Etymology of a Whimsical Word
By Anatoly Liberman
Old codger is a phrase most speakers of American English still understand (in British English it has much greater currency), but cadger is either obsolete or dead. Yet the two words are often discussed in concert. A cadger was a traveling vendor, whose duties may have differed from that of a hawker, a peddler (the British spelling is pedlar), or a badger, but all those people were street dealers of sorts. The OED defines cadger so: “a carrier; esp. a species of itinerant dealer who travels with a horse and cart (or formerly with a pack-horse), collecting butter, eggs, poultry, etc., from remote country farms for disposal in the town, and at the same time supplying the rural districts with small wares from the shops.” This meaning was recorded as early as the middle of the 15th century. Derogatory senses like “a person prone to mooching” surfaced in books much later. Also late is the verb cadge “beg,” believed to be a back formation from the noun (like beg from beggar). The origin of cadger is unknown, and I have nothing to say on this subject, except for guessing that it must have been influenced by badger and citing a very old opinion, according to which in the days of falconry the man who bore the “cadge” or cage (a perch for the hawk) was called cadger. This etymology has little to recommend it.
The word that inspired the present post is codger “stingy (old) man,” “grumpy elderly man,” or simply “man” (like chap, fellow, or guy). It appeared in books only at the very end of the 18th century, and dictionaries say that it may be a dialectal variant of cadger. This is possible, but, to my mind, unlikely. Other etymologies are not even worth considering: from Engl. cottager, Engl. cogitate, German kotzen “to vomit,” Spanish, Turkish, Irish Gaelic, or (particularly silly) from the phrase coffee dodger. I am surprised no one derived codger from kosher. On January 18, 1890, Notes and Queries published the following letter by the OED’s editor James A.H. Murray, who was at that time working on the letter C: “Todd explains this [the word codger] as ‘contemptuously used for a miser, one who rakes together all he can’, in accordance with his own conjectural derivation from Sp[anish] coger, ‘to gather, get as he can’. Later dictionaries all take this sense from him (Webster with wise expression of doubt), but none of them gave any evidence. I have not heard it so used, nor does any suspicion of such a sense appear in any of the thirty quotations sent in for the word by our readers. Has Todd’s explanation any basis? A schoolboy to whom I have spoken seems to have heard it so used; but he may have confused it with cadger, which many take as the same.” Todd was the editor of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (1818).
Several people responded to Murray’s query. The luckless schoolboy was derided for his incompetence, and almost everybody insisted that codger, unlike cadger, is a term of endearment, but one letter writer pointed out that in the fifties of the 19th century in Derbyshire (the East Midlands) “codger or rummy codger had been constantly used when alluding to persons of peculiar and eccentric ways, as well of others of doubtful character, or of whom mistrust was felt. A bungler of work was termed a codger, and it was the fate of every little lass who did sewing at school to cadge her work, that is, make an unsightly mess of the stitching. A piece of bad sewing