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(The first word was larrup.)

By Anatoly Liberman

Lunker seems to be well-known in the United States and very little in British English.  Mark Twain used lunkhead “blockhead.” Lunker surfaced in books later, but lunkhead must have been preceded by lunk, whatever it meant.  In today’s American English, lunker has several unappetizing and gross connotations, and we will let them be: one cannot constantly deal with turd and genitals.  Only two senses bear upon etymological discussion: “a very big object” and “big game fish.”  From the meager facts at my disposal I am apt to conclude that “big fish” is secondary, so that the word hardly arose in the lingo of fishermen.  Also, lunkhead probably alluded to someone with a big head “typical of an idiot,” as they used to say.

In dictionaries I was able to find only one conjecture on the origin of lunker.  The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (RHD) suggested that it might be a blend of lump and hunk.  Unless we know for certain that a word is a blend (cf. smog, brunch, motel, blog, gliberal, Eurasia, Tolstoevsky, and the like), it is impossible to prove that some lexical unit is the product of merger: for instance, squirm is perhaps a blend of squirt and worm but perhaps not.  I suspect that RHD’s idea was suggested by The Century Dictionary, which, although it offers no derivation of lunkhead and does not list lunker, refers under lummox “an unwieldy, clumsy, stupid fellow” (“probably ultimately connected with lump”) to British dialectal lummakin “heavy; awkward.”  Lump turned up first only in Middle English.  It has numerous cognates in Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages and seems to have developed from the basic meaning “a shapeless mass.” No impassable barrier separates lunk- from lump-, for n and m constantly alternate in roots, and final -p and -k are also good partners (see the previous post).  German Lumpen means “rag,” and a rag may be understood as a shapeless mass or something hanging loose.  It is the semantics that complicates our search for the etymology of lunker: we need cognates that mean “a big thing,” and they refuse to appear.  Lump does provide a clue to the history of lunker; by contrast, hump may be left out of the picture: we have enough trouble without it.

Joseph Wright included lunkered (not lunker!) in The English Dialect Dictionary, but without specifying his sources or saying, as he often did: “Not known to our informants.”  His definition is curt: “(of hair) tangled; Lincolnshire.”  He also cited several other similar northern (English and Scots) words, of which especially instructive are lunk “heave up and down (as a ship); walk with a quick uneven, rolling motion; limp” and lunkie “a hole left for the admission of animals.”  Unlike larrup, discussed in the previous post, lunker did find its way into my database.  A single citation occurs in The Essex Review for 1936.  The Reverend W. J. Pressey quotes a 1622 entry in a diary: “Absent from Church, and for ‘lunkering’ a poor woman’s house in great Sampford, to the great fear and terror of the said poor woman.”  He comments:

“This word is derived from the Scandinavian.  ‘Lunkere

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By Anatoly Liberman

In lieu of an introduction
The best way of finding out whether “the world” is watching you is to err.  The moment I deviate from the path of etymological virtue I am rebuffed, and this keeps me on my toes.  Even an innocent typo “causes disappointment” (as it should).  Walter W. Skeat: “But the dictionary-maker must expect, on the one hand, to be snubbed when he makes a mistake, and on the other, to be neglected when he is right” (1890).  Apparently, this blog does not exist in a vacuum, though I would welcome more questions and comments in addition to rebuttals and neglect.  Among other things, I noticed that my angriest opponents are those who have no facts (just opinions) at their disposal.  For example, I once stated that contrary to the loss of endings or changes in the word order in the history of English, sentences like if a tenant is evicted, it does not mean they were a bad tenant were promulgated and enforced by overzealous social engineering, rather than being a product of natural development.  I was immediately told that such constructions had flourished since the days of Chaucer, if not since the reign of King Alfred.  I am still waiting for evidence from Old and Middle English.  (Peter Maher has recently sent me the sentence: “Officials believe that it were Dissident Republicans opposed to the peace process who carried out the bombing.” This is another example of enthusiasm running away with common sense.  They so say in German (es waren…), where the link verb (copula) agrees with the predicate, but English is not German, is it?)

Some time ago I read a vitriolic comment on my post titled “Death of the Adverb” (the writer from Australia was quite “incensed” by it).  While discussing the phrase do it real quick, I maintained that hardly any speaker of American English would use either really or quickly for real and quick in it.  First of all, it was pointed out that having Oxford University Press in New York (where this blog was founded) is an oxymoron (no need to fear the American conquest like the Viking raids or the Norman Conquest of 1066: branches of OUP are situated in many places, while Oxford is still in England, and may it stay there for another million years).  Second, Americans were advised to leave English alone.  This is familiar advice.  Thus, at the end of the 19^th century bitter complaints were voiced about (over?) “…the unlicensed liberty of speech by which some American public men are wont to recklessly debase our common English tongue”; the tongue is common, but don’t you dare paw it over. (Here I cannot refrain from the remark that in British English wont is homophonous with won’t, whereas in American English it is indistinguishable from want, but this is by the way.)  Now what about real quick?  Here my opponent, who reveals his age (“fifty odd years”) suggested that adjectives and adverbs simply merged in those words and yielded identical forms.  I am afraid that during (over?) the last half-century the writer has not had a chance to study the history of English.  Mergers are common.  For instance, fast (adjective) and fast (adverb) were different in Old English (the adverb had -e at the end), but when unstressed vowels were shed in Middle English, the two words became homonyms.  Occasionally tangles are produced, and then we observe division of labor, as between hard and hardly.  Nothing simi

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By Anatoly Liberman

Habit, in additions to the meaning that is universally known (“settled disposition of mind and body”), can also designate “apparel,” even though in restricted contexts, such as monk’s habit or riding habit.  At first sight, these senses do not belong together, and yet they do.  The word is, of course, a “loan” from French.  (I have mentioned more than once that linguistic loans are permanent, for they are never returned, except when, for example, an ancient Germanic, that is, Franconian word traveled to Old French—note the similarity of Franconian and French—and then returned to English or more rarely to German so changed that even philologists sometimes have trouble recognizing the prodigal son.)  Both Latin habitus and its continuation Old French habit already combined the two meanings retained in English; English only borrowed both.

Since habitus was the past participle of habere “to have,” it could refer to almost anything that was “had,” including dress and mental makeup.  Less predictable is the meaning of Latin habitare “to have in permanent possession, keep,” whence “to stay put; dwell,” from which English has, again via French, inhabit and habitat.  Habitare is the frequentative form of habere.  A frequentative verb describes a regularly occurring action: for example, we can wrest an object from an opponent’s grip and wrestle continually with a problem: wrestle is frequentative, as opposed to wrest.  Habitat is a curious bookish word that surfaced in English only in the 18^th century.  Those who know some Latin will immediately see that habitat is the 3^rd person singular of habitare, that is, “he dwells.”  Here I cannot do better that quote The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology: “…derived from its use in [Latin descriptions of] floras and faunas to introduce the natural place of growth or occurrence of a species (e.g. ‘Common Primrose.  Habitat in sylvis’ [grows in woods].”  Thus, a Latin verb was transformed into an English noun.  Inhabit goes back to Latin inhabitare, literally “indwell.”

Some other derivatives and borrowings with the same root, such as the legal term habendum, the phrase habeas corpus (both pure Latin), habitual, habituate, and habitué, hardly deserve our attention.  But it is worthy of mention that French, like Spanish and Italian, lost initial h quite early in its history.  When we see Spanish hay or Italian ho, we know that h is a graphic symbol devoid of phonetic value.  French borrowings have taught us to treat h- with caution.  Engl. hour, ultimately from Latin hora, is a homonym of our (the Spanish cognate is still spelled hora, like French heure, but the Italian for hour is ora!).  Engl. habit is the product of medieval and Renaissance scholarship: the learned, who took themselves too seriously, loved to spell English words etymologically and sometimes suggested such silly variants as abhominable because they derived the adjective from ab and hominem, while in fact it is related to omen.    Later the written image of habit, humble, and so forth affected the way they were pronounced.  Fluctuations are still possible. Herb is herb in England but ‘erb in American English, in which Herb is only a name,

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THE HAPPY END: FROM BOOZE TO MILK

(THE WORD BEESTINGS)

By Anatoly Liberman

The word beestings once had its day in court.  About half a century ago, American linguists were busy discussing whether there is something they called juncture, a boundary signal that supposedly helps people to distinguish ice cream from I scream when they hear such combinations.  A special sign (#) was introduced in transcription: /ais#krim/ as opposed to /ai#skrim/.  The two crown examples for the existence of juncture in Modern English were nitrate versus night rate and beestings versus bee stings.  I remember asking myself: “What exactly is beestings?”  Well, it is “first milk from a cow after calving,” considered a delicacy in some quarters, for example, in Iceland, as an old dictionary informs us, and perhaps elsewhere; colostrum is its Latin synonym and gloss.  More or less along the same lines the nonexistent difference between wholly and holy in oral speech bothered phoneticians.  If I am not mistaken, unprejudiced informants treated the members of such pairs as homophones, and the term juncture disappeared from linguistic articles and books, the more so as around that time about everybody agreed that most of pre-Chomskyan linguistics had been a sad aberration, and the terminology that dominated the previous period lost its relevance.  In this drinking bout, bee stings and beestings are connected in a rather unpredictable way: mead played an important role in my discussion (and mead is inseparable from honey and, consequently, from stinging bees), while beestings may share the root with booze and, according to a bold hypothesis, also with beer.

Obviously, -ings is a suffix in beestings, a word that has been attested in numerous similar-looking shapes.  Old English already had the forms with the suffix (bysting) and without it (beost), and beest has wide currency in modern British dialects.  The German, Frisian, and Dutch cognates of beest are unmistakable: they sound alike and mean the same.  A probable Norwegian (dialectal) cognate has also been discovered.  The most authoritative dictionaries call beestings and the related forms words of unknown origin, but, as always, everything depends on how we define “unknown.”  Some words are so impenetrable that nothing at all can be said about their past, while others are obscure to varying degrees.  As a rule, numerous conjectures have been put forward about the derivation of hard words, and, even if the problem remains unsolved (the most common case), some contain the proverbial grain of truth.  “Origin unknown” is a loose concept.  This also holds for beestings.

Early attempts to connect beest with an Old Romance word for “curdled” (such as Provençal betada “clotted” and 17^th-century French caillebotes “curds”) have been abandoned, and indeed, Old Engl. beost and betada resemble each other by chance; nor is the resemblance impressive.  A more serious riddle is whether Old Engl. beost has anything to do with Gothic beist “leaven, yeast” (Gothic is a dead Germanic language, recorded in the 4^th century).  Many lexicographers combined them (some even us

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By Anatoly Liberman

Booze is an enigmatic word, but not the way ale, beer and mead are.  Those emerged centuries ago, and it does not come as a surprise that we have doubts about their ultimate origin.  The noun booze is different: it does not seem to predate the beginning or the 18^th century, with the verb booze “to tipple, guzzle” making its way into a written text as early as 1300 (which means that it turned up in everyday speech some time earlier).  The riddles connected with booze are two.

First, why did the noun appear so much later than the verb?  A parallel case will elucidate the problem. The verb meet is ancient, while the noun meet is recent, and we can immediately see the reason for the delay: sports journalists needed a word for a “meeting” of athletes and teams and coined a meet, whose popularity infuriated some lovers of English, but, once the purists died out, the word became commonplace (this is how language changes: if a novelty succeeds in surviving its critics, it stays and makes the impression of having been around forever).  But the noun booze is not a technical term and should not have waited four hundred years before it joined the vocabulary.  Second, the verb booze is a doublet of bouse (it rhymes with carouse, which is fair).  Strangely, bouse has all but disappeared, and booze (sorry for a miserable pun) is on everybody’s lips.  However, it is not so much the death of bouse that should bother us as the difference in vowels.   The vowel we have in cow or round was once “long u” (as in today’s coo).  Therefore, bouse has the pronunciation one expects, whereas booze looks Middle English.  In the northern dialects of English “long u” did not become a diphthong, and this is probably why uncouth still rhymes with youth instead of south.  Is booze a northern doublet of bouse?  One can sense Murray’s frustration with this hypothesis.  He wrote: “Perhaps really a dialectal form” (and cited a similar Scots word).  It is the most uncharacteristic insertion of really that gives away Murray’s dismay.  His style, while composing entries, was business-like and crisp; contrary to most people around us, he preferred not to strew his explanations with really, actually, definitely, certainly, and other fluffy adverbs: he was a scholar, not a preacher.

Whatever the causes of the modern pronunciation of booze, one etymology will cover both it and bouse.  So what is the origin of bouse?  This word is surrounded by numerous nouns and verbs, some of which must be and others may be related to it.  First of all, its Dutch and German synonyms buizen and bausen spring to mind.  Both are rare to the extent of not being known to most native speakers, but their use in the past has been recorded beyond any doubt.  Most other words refer to swelling, violent or erratic movement, and noise: for instance, Dutch buisen “strike, knock” and, on the other hand, beuzelen “dawdle, trifle,” Norwegian baus “arrogant; irascible” and bause “put on airs” (which partly explains the sense of Dutch boos and Germa

By Lauren Appelwick, Blog Editor

Yesterday I was sitting at my desk, pondering…normal things that bloggers ponder…when my friend Cassie shared this link with me.  If you haven’t seen the “Friday” music video, then perhaps the forecast just seems silly, but it inspired me to think about how fast the senses and connotations of words change. For most people, Friday is just the name of a day of the week, but for the moment it’s also the source of many inside jokes and references to Rebecca Black. She is, obviously, a big fan of Fridays because it marks the end of her school week and the beginning of the weekend. We have such acronyms to show our love for the day as TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday), and what seems to be a widespread distaste for Mondays. (*Ahem* Garfield. *Cough* Office Space.)

So the question is: did people always like Friday? Did we choose Friday as the end of the work week because it was already well-loved?

{ASIDE: I was just beginning my research when fellow blogger Levi Asher (Literary Kicks) teased me with this Wikipedia link, encouraging that I “meet [his] friend Frigg.” To this I replied, “How long have you been friends?” and he answered, “Since Thor’s Day.” Well played, Levi. Well played indeed.}

We begin with the OED.

Friday, n.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈfrʌɪdeɪ/ , /ˈfrʌɪdi/ , U.S. /ˈfraɪˌdeɪ/ , /ˈfraɪdi/

1. The day following Thursday and preceding Saturday, traditionally regarded as the sixth day of the week, but now frequently considered as the fifth, and also as the last day of the working week and (especially in the evening) the start of the weekend. In the Catholic Church, Friday, along with Wednesday and Saturday, has traditionally been observed as one of the days for abstaining from eating meat, fish being the popular alternative. In Judaism, sunset on Friday marks the beginning of the Sabbath, which ends at sunset on Saturday.

So far, pretty simple. We see that Friday’s position in the week is appears to be most strongly connected to Judeo-Christian traditions. I didn’t really expect to discover anything spectacular, I was just satiating my own curiosity–and why bother the Oxford Etymologist with such small queries? But then I noticed a sense that was new to me.

Friday-look, n.
now rare (Eng. regional in later use). a serious or gloomy face or expression (cf. 0 Comments on A short (and incomplete) history of Friday as of 1/1/1900