Words, words, words…

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John Dierdorf, dierdorf@prismnet.com

Introduction

WORD:

[OE. word str. n. = OFris., OS. word, MDu. wort (Du. woord), OHG., MHG., G. wort>, ON. orth (Sw., Da. ord), Goth. waurd OTeut. *wurdom pre-Teut. *wrdho-; cf. Lith. vardas name, Lett. wards word, forename, OPruss. wirds word, OIr. fordat “inquiunt”.
Indo-Eur. werdh- is generally taken to be a deriv. of wer-, were-, which appears in Gr. wereo I shall say, wretor speaker, L. verbum word, Skr. vratam command, law, etc.]
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition

ENGLISH:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
James D. Nicoll

I began this web page a few years ago to note a few odd or amusing word derivations I had encountered in my trips through the dictionaries, and to put the matter kindly, the process has gotten somewhat out of hand.

In response to many complaints (well, three or four complaints) that I change this site too often and in random places, so it’s difficult to find the new material spread through the old, I’ve begun to date my changes in the form ddmmmyy before the item. For instance, a search for “Mar07” should find all the changes to a section made in that month. To reduce clutter, only changes in the last year are shown. If you haven’t read this page for a year or more, you need to start at the beginning anyway.

Here are some notes about a few stylistic quirks, as well as a couple of disclaimers. If you don’t care, feel free to skip directly to the word derivations.

Words standing for themselves, used in constructions like ‘It is well-known that “algebra” is Arabic’, are usually within quotation marks [inverted commas] as shown, unless the meaning is quite clear in context. (Without the quotation marks, the reader has no way of knowing if I meant the word or the subject was Arabic in origin.) Because of this, I follow the British custom of placing punctuation outside quotation marks unless the quoted material is itself a sentence.
A stand-alone letter or digraph referring to itself, used in constructions like “The sound of English /TH/ is rare among the world’s languages,” or “The British sometimes don’t pronounce /R/,” is marked as shown.
I don’t use periods in initialisms such as USA, PhD, AM, PM, etc. A few are consistently shown in small capital letters, mainly ie for “Indo-European”, oe for “Old English”, ce and bce (see below), and oed for the Oxford English Dictionary.
The first time a word under discussion appears in a particular section, it is shown in bold sans-serif or bold italic, depending on whether it is English or foreign. All such emphasized terms are in the index on the left.
This document is not constrained by political correctness. In the discussion of word meanings, I sometimes talk about words that are offensive to some people, whether obscenities (shit, fuck), blasphemies (God damn it, Jesus Christ!), or ethnic slurs (Nigger, Dago). My defense is that these are words just like any other, and that euphemisms like “excrement”, “goldarn it”, or “the N-word” would be ridiculous in context. If this concept is bothersome, you may wish to click here and get it over with.
I have tried hard to keep the document religiously neutral. English obviously has more words derived from the Judeo/Christian tradition than from, say, Islam or Buddhism, and such terms need explanations, but I hope the discussions of all such words are equally objective. Many authors who wish to avoid being “Christian-centric” use bce (Before Common Era) and ce (Common Era) instead of bc (Before Christ) and ad (Anno Domini, Year of the Lord) for dates, and I follow that usage here.
In some cases (particularly regarding ethnic or racial terms), I’ve had to pick a preferred usage. For example, I consistently use “Black” instead of “Colored”, “Negro”, or “African-American”. Ditto, I use “American Indian” and not “Native American” or “Indian”, because that’s the way the tribes themselves seem to prefer it. Usually I’ll say “a Gypsy” but collectively use “the Roma”. I’ve tried to consistently use “English” only when speaking of the language or these living in England, and “British” otherwise. (Note the distinction in the previous paragraph about stand-alone letters.) When I say “American” I normally mean a resident of the United States — I’ll use “North American” or “South American” for the general cases. Some places I probably have “Russian” as a convenient shorthand for “citizen of the former Soviet Union”, without any implication that Ukrainians, Chechens, Khazars, and so on are invisible. In no cases am I implying anything derogatory, and if you think I should be using a different term, please let me know.
Last but not least, I am not a professional lexicographer or linguist, and this page isn’t aimed at such. Many times I will say things like “clock is the same word as cloak”. This is usually gross over-simplification — what I really mean is “clock and cloak are derivatives of the same ancestral word through different paths and/or languages.” Sometimes the experts have competing theories on where a particular term originated, in which case I’ll usually pick the one I like the best and ignore the other. In a few cases I will claim a relationship that the best authorities insist is not there, usually because I think the ancient languages had a lot more puns than said authorities are willing to admit to.
Sometimes two versions of a word have drifted so far in form that the reader’s eyebrow might be raised. A classic example is that to exact and to squat are almost identical. (The Latin basis of “exact” is ex-actus, driven out, while “squat” is from ex-co-actus, driven out together or compressed, by way of Old French esquatar, to crush. The oed has a quotation about squatting someone’s brains out.) I normally won’t go into this amount of detail, so you’ll just have to trust me. When I say “Surprisingly, word A is the same as word B” (“evil” is the same as “over”, for example), I mean it surprised me — maybe you always knew it.
01Feb12 Even though I try to be entertaining, I also have tried hard to avoid the “ben trovato” (well found) legends that crop up about words. (For example, posh is not an acronym for “Port Out, Starboard Home” describing comfortable ship accommodations to the Orient, fuck is not “for unlawful carnal knowledge”, a waitperson’s tip is not “to insure promptness”, shit is not “ship high in transit” from the guano trade, a hooker is not named for the general of that name, babble has no relation to the similar-sounding biblical tower, a programming bug is not a descendent of a particular insect found gumming up the works of a 1940’s computer, and the sirloin was not knighted by any king, however hungry.) I have seen at least one book that solemnly swears that some dogs are called hounds because that’s how the Anglo-Saxons pronounced “hunt”. No, Nono, Nonono. On the other hand, there are a few “too good to be true” derivations that really are correct — for examples see the discussions of spic, sneeze, Jehovah, twerp, bunk, piker, and Naugahyde.
If by some chance you are a real expert who has wandered onto this site, please, please take a few minutes to let me know about the inevitable mistakes you encounter here. My email address is dierdorf@prismnet.com.

If you got to this page directly from elsewhere on the web, you can backtrack to my home page if you wish.