It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup- and the suffix -er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word. OUPblog - Academic ...
It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup– and the suffix –er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word. People spoke of the morning meal, midday meal, and evening meal. The word for “meal” was mete “meat,” whose ancient meaning “food; meal” is still heard in the idiom meat and drink, the compound sweetmeats “candies, etc.,” and the obsolete greenmeat “fodder.” As far as I can judge, sweetmeats is a dead word in American English (that is, no one even understands it), while greenmeat is so little remembered that even my computer does not recognize it. Be that as it may, supper exists (see the header!) and has been an English word since the thirteenth century. It was borrowed from French, but the root of the French noun is Germanic. This means that at one time the speakers of Old French took over the word sup from their neighbors, while later, those neighbors added a Romance suffix to it! Quite a journey, but such hybrids are not too rare.
Now, what is sup? Never mind sup for “what’s up.” Sup means “to sip,” and it seems to occur only in the context of imbibing alcohol. Yet it is an old “respectable” word with well-known cognates, for instance, Dutch zuipen, German saufen, and Icelandic súpa. Once we begin to wonder where sup– came from, we are sucked into a vortex of similar-sounding verbs. I used and even highlighted suck for a purpose: this verb is part of a sizable group of s-words, referring to liquids. All of them seem to be “obscurely related” to one another, as dictionaries characterize this situation.
Sup is not the same as sip, and neither is a synonym of suck, but the affinity is obvious. Let us first look at sap (from which we have sapling). The word is old and has cognates all over the Germanic-speaking world (for example, German Saft “juice”). Etymologists, naturally, reconstruct the most ancient form, common to several languages, and come up with the ancient noun sapam or sappam.
Butterfly sipping sap. Photo by Sandipoutsider. CC-BY-SA 4.0 International via Wikimedia Commons.
However, the sounds refuse to play the expected game, because we also remember Latin sapa “grape juice, boiled until it is thick” (Italian sapa or saba is the continuation of that word), obviously a member of the same family, but it too has p in the root, and it is well-known that Latin p should correspond to Germanic f (as happens in Latin pater versus English father). Another borrowing? Who borrowed what from whom? The most cautions sources admit that the origin of the word is unclear. Indeed, it seems that we have a group of words, either sound-imitative or somehow (how?) reflecting the words’ sense, that is, sound-symbolic. All of them refer to the way we deal with liquids: sip, sap, sup, and sop.
It pays off to have a look at those verbs individually. So far, we have examined only sup. Sip is a late fifteenth-century addition to English. Similar verbs exist elsewhere in Germanic. Etymologists seem to agree that sip, though “allied” to sup, is a weaker version of it. This verdict sounds convincing, because sip and sup do seem to be cognate in at least some way. Can seep throw light on this group? Not really. Old English sipian, along with its lookalikes with a long vowel in the root, have been recorded, but none of them would have become seep. Even if the progenitor of sip were found, we would still remain with the same group of similar-sounding verbs describing the movement of liquids.
There also is sop “a piece of bread dipped in liquid” (and compare milksop “a timid male, a pushover”!), which is universally recognized as a member of the family we are discussing, even though its ultimate origin is as obscure as of that of the verbs we have examined. Sip, seep, sop, sup…. Finally, what about sap “juice”? It has a secure German cognate Saft (the same meaning (f in Saft goes back to p, and final t was added to saf only in the fourteenth century). A good old word, but it is unable to solve our puzzle. We should resign ourselves to the conclusion made above: all the words belonging to the complex s-p with a vowel in the middle in some way imitate the noise made in the process of drinking.
Though we realize that multiplying the words belonging to this group will hardly result in a revelation, perhaps soup is worth mentioning here. Sop, we remember, was borrowed into English from French in the seventeenth century, and the story of soup sounds familiar: Latin suppa, the ancestor of soup, seems to be a word of Germanic origin! I am happy to report that so is soap.
Soup of Germanic origin. Photo by Takeaway. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Incidentally, Latin also had the word sapor “taste, flavor,” which (by way of French) ended up as English savor. To repeat: the words describing the “activity” of the mouth tend to depend on the complex sp– not only in Germanic but also outside it. The British scholar John Rupert Firth (1890-1960) was especially interested in such complexes (he called them prosodemes, a rather unfortunate label), but though he has, or at least had, a sizable following at home, he is little known in the US and elsewhere, which is a pity.
Once we become aware of the “mouthy prosodeme” sp-, we are beginning to wonder whether spit, spew, and even speak belong to our story. No doubt, sp- is at least partly sound-imitative, and once it established itself, it acquired a symbolic meaning, and many words, vaguely belonging to the same sphere, came into being. Since people spit and “sup” in the same way all over the world, it is no wonder that we have quite a few verbs sounding alike even in unrelated languages. A supper with an etymologist is rich but leaves you hungry. Sorry!
POSTSCRIPT: A question and a comment
QUESTION. What is known about the etymology of the word core?
The answer is: “Next to nothing.” The word surfaced in the early fifteenth century in the form we still have today. Its earliest recorded sense was also familiar: “the core of an apple”. The word has always been spelled with final e, which indicates that this sound was not mute. The French word for “heart” did not have this e. Core supplanted the dialectal (northern) word colk (the same meaning). But both core and colk also referred to what is today called coke, another dialectal word of unknown origin. One wonders who needed a special little-known word for the core of a fruit! Obviously, we are dealing with a regionalism, a technical term, whose origin we’ll probably never be able to discover. The fact that core sounded somewhat like French cœur “heart” may have contributed to its longevity (mere guessing). The verdict remains: “Of unknown origin,” and it is to be regretted that some dictionaries do not make this verdict sufficiently clear.
A Lover’s Complaint
A correspondent who is very particular about good usage was shocked to read a politician’s phrase less than fulsome information, in which fulsome means “full.” Many people like language history, but no one wants to be part of it. Fulsome did once mean “full,” but then “deteriorated” and stayed mainly as part of the phrase fulsome praise, that is, “excessive and insincere praise.” However, language has always changed under the influence of the uneducated, who don’t care whether what they say is correct or wrong from professors’ point of view. For many years, most of our young people have been reading only pulp fiction and one another’s emails. If troublesome means “full of trouble,” and if the main epithet for all situations is awesome, then fulsome obviously means “quite full.” This change has been going on for decades. Too bad! The same man dislikes the pronunciation gerrymandering with g, as in get. Incidentally Governor Elbridge Gerry did pronounce his last name with hard g. Thus, our “correct” pronunciation is wrong! Now those who have never heard the word mispronounce it, without knowing that Mr. Gerry would have been happy. Inscrutable are the ways of language. What is wrong is correct, and what is correct is wrong.
Featured image: Photograph by Lewis Hine. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
This royal dog is called Rex. Quite appropriate. Photo by Altaf Shah. Public domain vis Pexels.
It is amazing how many words Indo-European languages have for “supreme ruler; potentate.” In English, the main one is king. But outside English, a host of others exist. Two of the best-known examples are Latin rex (which also meant “priest”; see a variation on this theme below!) and Hindi raja(h). Rex and raja(h) share an ancient root, but those two venerable titles are rather isolated in their royal splendor. Only Irish ríg belongs with them, even though the same root turns up in some other common words—for instance, English right (its cognates are, among others, Latin rēctus and German recht). English region is also related. According to a plausible explanation, the ancient REX traced out the line for cities (!), regiō “region” being the point reached out in a straight line. This explanation will come as a surprise to many.
Engl. rich also belongs to our story, and so does its German cognate reich (the same meaning). In both German and English, this adjective once meant “powerful, great”; hence “having abundant means.” (Power brings wealth, does it not?) The German noun Reich “empire, realm,” as in Hitler’s infamous Third Reich, meant to last a thousand years, returns us to the same root. As regards the names for rulers, we recall the English word basilica “church built on the model of a royal palace,” from Greek. Basileús is still another word for “king.”
Incidentally, the plant name basil goes back to an adjective meaning “royal” (because of its fragrance?), and the name of the fabulous reptile basilisk is a rendition of Greek basilískos. According to Pliny, the name is due to a crown-like spot on the reptile’s head. Since no one has ever seen the creature, we needn’t contest this explanation. By contrast, the lizard basilisk is quite real and in one respect exceptional: it can run on water (hence its other name the Jesus Christlizard!). The proper name Basil and Slavic Vasily belong here too.
Basil in its full glory. Photo by Jelena Juhnevica. Public domain via Pexels.
Usually, when the origin of an old Germanic word is discussed, the first form dictionaries cite is Gothic. This is natural, because the Gothic Bible (part of the New Testament) is the earliest long consecutive text we have in any Germanic language. But the Goths did not know the word king! The Gothic for Greek basileús was þiudans (þ has the value of th in Engl. thick). Other Germanic languages retained exact cognates of this noun. For instance, in Old English, it meant “ruler, lord” and even “God.”
Most probably, the Goths had no kings in the sense known later to the rest of the Germanic-speaking world. Þiudans is most often used about Jesus, though some earthly kings are also called thatin their text of the New Testament. It must have been the speakers of West Germanic (to which Old English belongs) that began to use the word kuningaz in the sense familiar to us today (that is, king).
To us king is “a sovereign ruler of the state,” but when this word and its synonyms were coined, the implication must have been approximately “tribal leader,” with the emphasis on tribal. King is, obviously, related to kin. At present, we are no longer aware of this connection. But when fifteen or sixteen centuries ago, people said cyning or still earlier kuningaz (the original form of king, mentioned above), that connection must have been clear to the speakers.
Several words for “kin; people” existed in Germanic. One of them was þeod– ~ þiud (to repeat, þ has the value of th in Engl thick). We can still detect it in the German word Deutsch “German,” originally, “related to the people” (its d goes back to þ). The Goths also had a cognate of English cyn “kin,” but in translating the Greek word for “king” chose its synonym (we cannot decide why).
In any case, the Gothic word for “tribal chief; king” (þiudans) had no analogs among the other Germanic tribes, while cyning sounded almost the same in Old Saxon (kuning; some such form became Modern Dutch koning), Old High Germanchuning (in German, this word died without issue), and Old Norsekonungr. The Germanic forms spread far and wide. Finnish has kunningas, and Russian has kniaz’. The Russian form has changed almost beyond recognition, but it is undoubtedly of Germanic origin. Isn’t it curious that in the Russian phrase Kniaz’ Vasily “Pince Vasily” the first word is Germanic and the second is Greek! Beware of nationalism.
This is a non-mythological basilisk. Photo by Atlantic Ambience. Public domain via Pexels.
The derivation of king from kin seems obvious, and one wonders why so many researchers tried to find another etymology for this rather transparent word. The difficulty is not in the word but in the concept. The oldest Germanic speakers had no kings in the modern sense of this term. And we have seen that no one followed the Gothic choice (þiudans “king”). The northerners did have a cognate of king, namely konungr (borrowed from their neighbors?), but their main word for the person we would call “king” was dróttinn (drótt meant “the military chief’s bodyguard”). To give another example: those people knew the word Caesar but had no analog for it; hence German Kaiser, a borrowing.
The less known attempts to explain the origin of the word king are ingenious but sometimes fanciful. Konungr (the Scandinavian form) from kven-ungr (kvenna “woman,” ungr “young”)? Or indeed from kin (in its oldest form) but with reference to the king as one specially born, perhaps as a being of divine origin. Or perhaps –ing goes back to the name of an earth god as the progenitor of the human race? Old Norse konr “sexual partner” exists. Does king refer to it? With this word we are returned to the previous hypothesis.
Finally, think of the English word ken “knowledge,” for example, as it is used in the phrase “beyond one’s ken.” German kennen means “to know.” Is it possible that the root of king contains reference to this root and thus has nothing in common with kin? Germanic chiefs were supposed to be also priests and possess arcane knowledge. This etymology has an influential modern supporter. I find his approach unprofitable. A few more exotic conjectures along similar lines are hardly worth mentioning. All this being said, most probably, –ing is the suffix we find in words meaning “descended from,” while the root of king is the same as in kin.
The history of king is instructive in several ways. We have a word with multiple cognates in old texts, we seem to understand what it meant, but its meaning has changed in a subtle way from antiquity to the modern period, because the social milieu behind the word has changed. The king of today is not what the word designated two thousand or even fifteen hundred years ago. I have once referred to the theme “Words and Things” in etymology. The history of king is a good example of how the “thing” refuses to give a definite answer to the question about its earliest meaning of the word. Hence our uncertainty concerning its origin. Yet the simplest etymology is probably correct. Long live simplicity! Long live the king!
Featured image: Image by Alexey Komarov. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The term “binomial expression” sounds very math-like, and it is. It refers to a mathematical expression with two terms connected by an operator. So 3a + b is a binomial, as is 2x3 + 6x. In algebra, binomials are used to solve equations, often by converting more complex polynomial expressions to a binomial. For example, x2 − 7x + 10 = 0 can be expressed as the binomial (x − 2)(x − 5) = 0, leading to the conclusion that either x = 5 or x = 2.
But enough math. Binomials also occur in language, and where they refer to expressions like chicken and egg, by and large, in and out, cut and dried, or peace and quiet. Often, and perhaps usually, such expressions occur in a fixed A and B order: we don’t hear egg and chicken, large and by, out and in, dried and cut, or quiet and peace. Those word orders should make your head hurt worse than the math did.
English has hundreds of such expressions, and the scholarly literature on them numbers dozens of articles. Modern interest in binomials goes back to the mid-twentieth-century work of linguists like Yakov Malkiel (in a 1959 article called “Studies in Irreversible Binomials”) and Dwight Bolinger (whose 1962 article, “Binomials and Pitch Accent,” looked at the metrical structure of binomials). Later work by William Cooper and John Robert Ross (in a 1975 paper called “Word Order”) proposed that the terms which occurred first tended to be those closer to a speaker’s experience (an idea they called the Me First Principle). They also stressed the relevance of phonological and semantic properties of words. Other scholars have proposed that word frequency plays a role, with more frequent words tending to be in the first position. For an excellent overview, consult Sarah Bunin Benor and Roger Levy’s 2006 article, “The Chicken or the Egg.”
Some fixed phrases may have idiosyncratic explanations: black and white, as in “it’s right there in black and white,” gets its order from the foregrounding of lettering on the backgrounded page. Come and go suggests a temporal precedence: you have to come before you can go, but what about stop and go?
In addition, many binomials can be reversed: beer and wine seems as likely as wine and beer, and peppers and onions as likely as onions and peppers. To me, left and right, on and off, and night and day seem fine in either order. But cheese and crackers does not work nearly as well as crackers and cheese, and a cheese and ham sandwich sounds downright odd. Tables and chairs seem natural if you are shopping for furniture, as in “We were looking at new tables and chairs” rather than “new chairs and tables.” But if you are writing a novel and describing a brawl, you might have a character step carefully among the overturned “chairs and tables.” And as Benor and Levy noted, even fixed binomials can be reversed, when necessary, as in the Billy Joel song “Piano Man,” with its barfly “making love to his tonic and gin.” The reversal of the libation completes the rhymes with “the regular crowd shuffles in.”
Reversal of a fixed binomial can also be a forensic tell. When the terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, wrote his anti-technology manifesto in the 1990s, he used the outdated binomial expression “eat your cake and have it too” rather than the more common “have your cake and eat it too.” That idiosyncratic reversal was one of the clues that led to his identification and capture.
The readers of this blog may have noticed that I usually try to stay away from the oldest words in English, those with ancient Indo-European roots. I do so, because, when it comes to such words, I seldom have any ideas worth sharing, that is, such as cannot be found in easily available sources. (Incidentally, considering the richness of the Internet, this is not always an easy task!) I feel more comfortable with baffle, pebble, and peevish (see the latest two posts about them) and among adzes, heifers, and pimps, all done to death in my etymological dictionary. But perhaps someone among our readers is especially interested in the hoary antiquities? If so, write me a note. In any case, today’s post is about the words brother and sister. Both are very old, really as old as the most ancient hills around us. The question is the same as always: Why do those words mean what they mean to us today? I wish they were sound-imitative, but unfortunately, they are not.
All men are brothers. Image by Thirdman via Pexels. Public domain.
Brother is an especially amazing word, because its multiple cognateshave practically the same form, the predictable phonetic differences notwithstanding, all over Indo-European: English brother, Latin frater, Russian brat, and so forth (an extremely rare case). The Indo-European protoform must have begun with bh-. We can state with confidence only one thing: namely, that brothers received their name not because they were the sons of the same parent(s). Rather, they were members of a certain unit, afraternity, asit were. For instance, the Ancient Greek phrāter belonged to a phrātria, “a brotherhood,” a social, political, and religious group that had nothing to do with kinship. This is not surprising. In the remotest past, males were responsible for hunting and warding off enemies. Being the offspring of the same parents mattered less or not at all. Of course, such was no longer the situation in recorded history and in Greece, where boys did know their fathers, and the word for “brother” in our sense existed (Greek adelphós “from the same womb”; as regards the root of the word, think of Delphi, literally “womb,” the seat of Apollo’s famous temple in a gorge).
Ancient “brothers” must have belonged to a certain group. What group was it millennia ago? If we could discover the answer, the etymology of the word brother would have become clear. According to a very old suggestion, the root of brother is the same as in the verb bear. But brothers did not receive their name because they were the sons of the same parent. That’s the whole point. And reconstructing some root beginning with br– takes us nowhere.
Even the most detailed etymological dictionaries offer only lists of cognates for brother and state flatly: “Origin unknown.” Yet I might mention at least one hypothesis, to illustrate the state of the art. Jost Trier (1894-1970), a German linguist, believed that many words of Indo-European had been coined in the process of weaving, making fences, and so forth. In his time, Trier had an enthusiastic following. A few of his etymologies look plausible; others are fanciful. He reconstructed the ancient root bher “to weave, plait,” which he detected in numerous words, including brother and bride. To be sure, “connecting, binding” is a concept that underlies both kinship and marriage, but as always, it is the details that count. A bird’s eye view of kinship terms rarely pays off. The etymology of both bride and brother is enveloped in total obscurity, and comparing two words of unknown origin in an attempt to kill two evasive birds with one little stone (“pebble”) is a risky endeavor.
Such then is the sad end of the first part of today’s essay. By this time, it must have become clear why I choose to stay away from the depths of Indo-European. As a pearl-diver, I don’t like to come to the surface empty-handed.
In some languages, a nurse is called sister. Image by RDNE Stock project via Pexels. Public domain.
Despite numerous disagreements among scholars, the etymology of the word sister seems to be less opaque. Before citing the solution that one can find in all recent dictionaries, I may mention a curious detail. We seem to be wandering in darkness, and yet some ancient kin terms are amusingly transparent. For instance, Old Norse (that is, Old Icelandic) lifri is one of several words for “brother,” and it means “of the same liver.” Also, in Old Icelandic, we find blóði, literally “blood brother,” hlýri “brother, (!) friend,” literally, “of the same cheek.” The already cited Greek adelphós means “of the same womb” (no connection with Adolph, despite its misleading ph at the end: Adolph is a German name meaning “old wolf”), and the Sanskrit word for “brother” had the same inner form. But as we have seen, brother did NOT mean “of the same womb,” and we are at a loss to decipher it.
We can assume that millennia ago, people coined words that were fully transparent to the speakers, but with time those words changed beyond recognition, and we are hard put to reconstruct the original form. Or the association that was once clear to everybody has been lost. The Germanic designations of “sister” are similarly all over the map: Gothicswistar, Old Englishsweostor, and so forth. (Gothic, it will be remembered, has come down to us in a fourth-century translation of the New Testament from Greek. Later Gothic is all but unknown.)
It is now usually believed that the oldest Indo-European word for “sister” was a compound containing the elements swe- “one’s own” and sōr “woman,” the reference being to the woman of one’s own extendedfamily, in contrast to such terms of kinship as Latin uxor “woman from outside the extended family.” The competing etymology, explaining sister as “being of one’s own blood,” has been rejected or ignored by most specialists in Indo-European kinship terminology.
Old Germanic was full of words designating various family groups. For instance, in the Gothic translation of the New Testament, we find the noun broþrahans. It renders the usual Greek plural of the word for “brother” but presumably meant “those dealing with one another in a brotherly manner.” To us the text in Mark XII: 20 hardly suggests such a nuance (“Now there were seven brethren; and the first took a wife, and dying left no seed”). Be that as it may, the odd-looking suffix has secure counterparts in Icelandic and elsewhere.
Delphi. This is what is left of the once famous temple of Apollo in Greece. Photo by Berthold Werner via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA 3.0.
To repeat: few words are harder to interpret than the terms of kinship in the languages of the world. The Modern English system is simplicity itself: grandmother, brother, sister, cousin, uncle, in-laws, and so forth, but even we have monsters like cousin twice removed. The old system was intricate and to us mind-boggling. So let us stay with moms and dads and make merry.
Editor’s note: for administrative reasons, The Oxford Etymologist’s column will not appear next week, July 29. The next post will be on August 5.
Featured image: Image by Jason Hu via Pexels. Public domain.
The readers of this blog must have noticed how often I suggest solutions connected with sound imitation. Time and again I say that a certain noun or verb owes its origin to onomatopoeia. In the previous post (July 8, 2026), I used this approach while discussing the verb baffle. Today we’ll encounter a similar situation.
Etymological solutions are often intelligent guessing. Many of our readers will remember that a special branch of linguistics deals with iconicity. It studies the ways in which the form of words in some way mirrors their meaning. Barf-barf, oink-oink, and bonkers (boinkers, as it were) are the most obvious examples of iconicity (the header features a picture of our iconic idol), but iconicity goes far beyond sound imitation. Consider the compounds tip-top, wishy–washy, ping-pong, and phrases like tit for tat. They always begin with short i. Top-tip and washy-wishy are unthinkable, because we instinctively begin the enumeration with something small, and short i as in ping and tip indeed suggests smallness. This is not a law: the adjective big has a “wrong” vowel, but consider the phrase big bang.
When we learn the meaning of the words jerk, jig, and jog, we almost sense that they mean what they are expected to mean. Last week, I tried to show that baffle is a sound-imitating (iconic) word. Now think of another situation. A stone falls into a river, we watch it go down and say “plop.” This is non-controversial, but when we are told that Latin plumber, as in Engl. plumb, has a similar origin (suggested by the great linguist Otto Jespersen), doubts arise. Really, is this possible? Latin plumbum?! Why not? Plop ~plum(b) goes a piece of lead. After all, plumbum is a word “of obscure origin.”
Consider the noun pebble, recorded in a great number of forms: popple, pipple, pyppel, and puble, among others. It also resembles bubble, whose imitative origin no one doubts. Is pebble from Old English papol a sound-imitative word, like Jespersen’s plumbum? You throw a small stone into water, and it goes pipley ~papol ~ pebble ~ pipley. Boulder may be sound-imitative (see the post for February 22, 2017), and so may pebble. The problem is that nothing can be proved once we leave the safe haven of oink-oink and flip–flop. Serious etymologists recognize iconicity but treat it with caution.
Peevish but not repugnant. Image by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels. Public domain.
The origin of pebble does not interest me too much (though I suspect that the word is indeed sound-imitative). I cited it as an introduction to the story of peevish. This adjective surfaced in English at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and like, for example, pawky “cunning, shrewd” (of Scandinavian origin?), it was probably slang. The meaning of peevish has changed over the centuries. We cannot decide what exactly the word meant in the early sentences at our disposal. Here is a shortened succession of glosses (from 1400 to 1669) in the original OED: “silly, senseless, foolish; malignant; spiteful.” The 1963 OxfordDictionary of English Etymology lists “spiteful, malignant; perverse, obstinate; querulous, fretful.” Most of those senses are obsolete. The OED online begins with “perverse, obstinate, skittish.”
Apparently, the exact connotations of peevish in those sentences are not quite clear to us (just something bad or unpleasant). Peevish is still “unpleasant” but no longer “repugnant,” because today, people who are peevish are grumpy and fretful, rather than perverse or malignant. This change is called the ameliorationof meaning(as opposed to the deterioration).
A clue to the origin of the word pebble? Photo by Ron Lach via Pexels. Public domain.
The OED online gives Latin perversus as the etymon, that is, as the ultimate source of peevish. This may be correct. However, the way from perversus to peevish via Old French is not smooth. The French adjective had two quite audible r’s, while peevish has neither. Ernest Weekley (in his etymological dictionary) also derived peevish from perversus but did not discuss the phonetic details. The adjective perverse emerged in English at almost the same time as did peevish. Was the French adjective borrowed twice, once by the uneducated and some time later by those who could pronounce French, without mutilating it?
There is another suggestion about the etymology of peevish. Walter W. Skeat: “The leading idea seems to be whining, making a plaintive cry,” with reference to the bird name pewet, peewit. From the phonetic point of view, the match is perfect (the bird makes a high-pitched wailing pee-wee sound, from which it received its name and which I find rather disturbing), and indeed, peevish resembles an onomatopoeicword. Yet it is far from clear whether the earliest senses of peevish refer to that whining sound. Skeat’s glosses are “fretful, whimpering.” I agree with the OED: “Origin uncertain.” But I would add Skeat’s hypothesis in a note. It has some merit. It may even be correct.
This is Skeat’s bird. Listen to it. A northern lapwing by Alexis Lours. CC-BY-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
And now, as promised last week, a short biography of Frank Chance, compiled by Dr. Stephen Goranson. I would be happy if this brilliant nineteenth-century researcher had at last re-emerged in our etymological studies from his undeserved obscurity.
Frank Chance was born at Highgate, the fourth son of Robert Lucas Chance, a Birmingham glass manufacturer. After two years in his father’s factory, he studied chemistry for a year at King’s College, London, and for two further years at Paris and Berlin. He went up to Trinity, Cambridge, in 1850, and thence, having taken his B.A. in 1854, to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital for his clinical training, graduating as M.B. in 1854. While at Cambridge he gained the Tyrwhitt Hebrew scholarship, and the study of languages became the chief interest of his life. He translated Virchow’s Cellular Pathology, at the author’s request, in 1863, and edited H. H. Bernard’s Commentary on the Book of Job in 1864. A year later he retired from practice. From 1875 to 1884 he was a member of the committee for the Revised Version of the Old Testament. He was a fluent linguist in German, French and Italian, and familiar with several other languages. He married in 1857 Jane Susan Katharine, daughter of James Brewster of Huntingdon, and had one daughter. He died at Nice.
Featured image: Image by Brett Sayles via Pexels. Public domain.
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