I receive questions about the origin of words and idioms with some regularity. If the subjects are trivial, I respond privately, but this week a correspondent asked me about the etymology of the verb loiter, and I thought it might be a good idea to ...
I receive questions about the origin of words and idioms with some regularity. If the subjects are trivial, I respond privately, but this week a correspondent asked me about the etymology of the verb loiter, and I thought it might be a good idea to devote some space to it and to its closest synonyms.
Words for worthless activities tend to emerge in slang and seldom have “respectable” ancient roots. Some of the synonyms of loiter belong to that “plebian” group. Such, for instance, is the verb to gad about, which surfaced in English in the fifteenth century. According to some authorities, it looks like a borrowing of Scandinavian gadda “to goad,” while others connect it with the obsolete noun gadling “companion,” later “wanderer.” Even though the second derivation looks more promising, the specific sense “to wander idly” suggests that perhaps we are dealing with an item of scamps’ self-characterization. The origin of even less mysterious monosyllabic words (dig, put, and kick among them) is no less problematic: they are easy to coin, easy to borrow, and hard to trace.
Dawdle is another synonym of loiter. Unlike gad, it was recorded only in the 1660s. It has such synonyms (or variants?) as daddle, diddle and doddle—thus, a frequentative verb with the suffix –le, as in babble, giggle, fiddle–faddle, and their likes. One of course also remembers doodle. Some such verbs have a curious history. Ramble is one of them. Rams are famous for their sexual power, and German rammeln does mean “to copulate.” In Dutch, the same verb was used about cats, rabbits, and other animals. English ramble looks like a variant of rammeln, but its meaning is quite innocent: “to wander about”—thus, another synonym of loiter. Is such a development (from copulate to wander) probable?
Loiter, a fourteenth-century verb, sounds quite unlike the monosyllables mentioned above. It appeared in Middle English in the form lotere and then in a 1440 English-Latin dictionary as loytre. Still later, the spelling leutere ~ leutre turned up. It is not improbable that “loiterers” (vagabonds) from the LowCountries were the originators of the verb (another case of self-characterization?). However, Leo Spitzer (1887-1960) thought otherwise. I often refer to that outstanding and prolific philologist, but usually with a mild caveat. He wrote dozens of short etymological etudes. A Romance scholar (journalist, literary critic, and dialectologist, among other things), he fled to Turkey and then to the United States from Hitler’s Germany (Spitzer was a Jew), and as of 1936, Baltimore (John Hopkins University) became his home.
In his lifetime, Spitzer was more notorious than famous, but in the literature on him I could not find an explanation for where he, a native speaker of German and a Romance philologist, learned such faultless English. His notes on English etymology are numerous and always inspiring. However, they display a noticeable bias: for every hard word Spitzer invariably found a French etymon. This bias is typical. I have more than once observed that linguists’ expertise tends not only to guide but to determine their conclusions. (At one time, I researched the life and work of the outstanding Icelandic philologist Stefán Einarsson. He always found the root of everything in Icelandic.)
Not unexpectedly, Spitzer thought that the etymon of loiter was not a Middle Dutch but an Old French word. He cited the verb loitroner, current in Anjou “to walk slowly, etc.” and identified it with French lutiner “to behave impishly,” from lutin “imp who visits people at night.” The word goes back to the name of the god Neptunus, who, along with the other pagan divinities, was reduced in the Middle Ages to a demon or devil, or imp. Spitzer went on to account for the difference between the initial n in Neptunus and l- in the verband added many details to his reconstruction, all of which I’ll skip. One thing is clear: the French verb lutiner is not of Dutch origin. Though the semantic match between lutiner and loiter is perfect and the problem of the diphthong in the root finds a solution, Spitzer did not trace the path of the French verb to England. The question remains open, but in dealing with a word of dubious origin, the more information the researcher has, the better, so that a dissenting view cannot harm anyone. The French hypothesis does not seem to have been noticed. Long before Spitzer, Ernest Weekley, another first-rate French etymologist, supported the Dutch derivation, and so did Skeat before him. If loiter is indeed a borrowing from Dutch, the English adjective little may be related to it.
A postscript on toad
I have once again consulted the most authoritative sources on the etymology of the Greek word for “toad.” Unlike the English noun typewriter, the Greek word is, most certainly, not a compound, and its origin is unclear. The other comment on the same post was from a reader who stated that the Old Chinese name of the toad looks remarkably like the English one. I won’t venture any hypotheses. Words, seemingly related in Indo-European and Chinese, are known. Whether toad is one of them is not for me to decide. The problem is that toad is limited to Germanic. If, however, toad is sound-imitative, as I suggested, its Chinese counterpart may have the same origin.
A few phrases
More than a month ago, I began publicizing some curious idioms from my database that were not included in my recent book Take My Word for It. Today, I will cite a few more in the hope that our readers may have heard them or can say something about their use and origin.
A crow’s age. Crows do not live too long: just eight or twelve years. Why then did even Horace say to Lyce that he may live as long a crow’s age (IV Od. xiii: 24-25). And in 1887, a man from Nottinghamshire (England, the East Midlands) said: “Why, Bill, it’s a crow’s age sin’ I seen ya.” The wording surprised the correspondent of Notes and Queries, who had never heard the idiom. The American phrase I have not seen you in a coon’s age is known very well. Coon is of course “racoon” (no offensive connotations). But why were the crow and the racoon, two rather short-lived creatures, chosen as the best examples of longevity? No alliteration, no rhyme—nothing to endear those similes to native speakers of English.
Paws off, Pompey. Many phrases exist only as part of adults addressing children. Has anyone heard pawsoff, Pompey, said to children when they put arms on the table? (asked in England in 1907). Who is Pompey? A dog? The phrase is slightly reminiscent of to make a long arm “to help oneself to something far from the place where one is sitting.” It was once known to many people in England and on the East Coast in the United States. Perhaps it still is.
For many years, I have been trying to talk an old friend of mine into writing a popular book on Skeat. A book about such a colorful individual, I kept repeating, would sell like hotcakes. But he never wrote it. Neither will I (much to my regret), but there is no reason why I should not devote another short essay to Skeat. In 2016, Oxford University Press published Peter Gilliver’s book The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, a work of incredible erudition. Skeat is mentioned in it many times, and I decided to glean those mentions, to highlight Skeat’s role in the production of the epoch-making work.
Twenty-six years separated the day on which the idea of the dictionary was made public and the appearance of the first fascicle. Countless people contributed to the production of the OED, but the public, if it knows anything about the history of this project, has heard only the name of James A. H. Murray, its first and greatest editor. This is perhaps as it should be, but in the wings we find quite a few actors waiting for broader recognition. One of them is Walter W. Skeat, a man of incredible erudition and inexhaustible energy. I have lauded him more than once (see, for example, the post forNovember 17, 2010, reprinted in my book Origin Uncertain….). However, today I’ll use only the material mentioned in or suggested by Peter Gilliver.
Walter W. Skeat Image by Elliot & Fry, Cassell’s Universal Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Skeat was not only the greatest English etymologist of his time (in a way, I think, of all times, despite the progress made by this branch of linguistics since 1912, the year he died). In 1873, he also founded the EnglishDialect Society and remained active in it as secretary and later director until 1896 (in 1897, after fulfilling its function, the society was dissolved). He edited the numerous book-length glossaries published by the society; attended its meetings wherever they were held, and without him Joseph Wright’s work The English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), still a source of inspiration to students of English, would probably not have been completed.
Among very many other things (!), he was a founding member of TheEarly English Text Society, and in 1865, he became a member of its committee. Neither post was “ceremonial,” for it presupposed a lot of work. Last but not least, Skeat was a generous man, a rare quality in scholars. For instance, he contributed a large sum of money to the Dialect Society at its inception, and much earlier, in 1885, he loaned Murray £1,660 for the purchase of a house in Oxford, the location of the future famous Scriptorium. Curiously, to this day, it is often the philanthropists who subsidize historical linguistics.
In the early eighteen-seventies, some influential people suggested that Skeat should become the main figure in the production of what became the OED. Fortunately, he concentrated on editing medieval texts and writing his etymological dictionary. He would not have become a second Murray, but by way of compensation, no one else would have done so much for the study of word origins and early English literature. Amazingly, Murray, a wonder of erudition, had little formal education and no university degree, while the Reverend Skeat’s background was in the classics. As individuals, Skeat and Murray represented different psychological types. Skeat was impatient and ready to bring out a book, not yet quite perfect, in the hope of a revised version. He would have been satisfied with a much smaller OED, while Murray made no concessions to haste (his invariable goal was absolute perfection, a wagon hitched to a star) and advised Skeat to wait for the completion of the OED before publishing his etymological dictionary. Fortunately, his suggestion fell on deaf ears, but Skeat’s readiness to agree that the text of the OED might be shortened infuriated Murray. (The episode was the result of a misunderstanding, and Skeat apologized.)
At that time, all thick dictionaries appeared in fascicles, which presupposed a good deal of competition among the lexicographers, the more so as a relatively small circle of publishers was involved. The people whom we know only from the names on the covers of their works were often not only colleagues and even friends but also rivals. At a certain moment, Skeat concluded that the Clarendon Press had declined to take on the OED and turned to the Press with an offer of his own etymological dictionary. As it happened, the two projects ran concurrently and did not get into each other’s way. Skeat’s work appeared in 1882, two years before the first fascicle of the OED came out. Murray once commented on Skeat’s dependence on the research at the OED, but Skeat responded rather testily that the OED had also had access to his findings. Yet Skeat remained Murray’s trusted friend and often maneuvered among various projects, to prevent other publishers from interfering with the OED. Though also hot-tempered, he was more diplomatic than Murray, and the relations between the two men remained friendly and even warm for years. To James Murray, Skeat’s death in 1912 was a heavy blow. He survived Skeat by three years. (Skeat: 1835-1912, Murray: 1837-1915.)
Throughout his life, Skeat supported the OED by his reviews (today it seems incredible that once not everybody praised Murray’s work) and kept chastising his countrymen for their ignorance and stupidity when it came to philology. He never stopped complaining that people used to offer silly hypotheses of word origins, instead of consulting the greatest authority there was. He also tried to encourage Murray, who often felt exhausted and dispirited. This is the letter he wrote to Murray, when he was working on cu-words: “I could find enough talk to cumber you. You could come by a curvilinear railway. Bring a cudgel to walk with. We will give you culinary dishes. Your holiday will culminate in sufficient rest; we can cultivate new ideas, & cull new flowers of speech. We have cutlets in the cupboards, & currants, & curry, & custards, & (naturally) cups. […] Write & say you’ll CUM!” Nor did Skeat stay away from the least interesting part of the work connected with the OED and often read the proofs of the pages before they went into print.
Frederick James Furnivall Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
Gilliver states that Skeat’s support for the Dictionary and its editors in so many ways places him alongside Furnivall and Henry Hucks Gibbs. Gibbs was “a wealthy merchant banker (and director of the bank of England) who would go on to become one of the Dictionary’s greatest supporters… He had been reading for the Dictionary at least since July 1860.” And the somewhat erratic Frederick James Furnivall (1825-1910) earned fame as a central figure in the philology of his day, even though today only specialists remember him.
A picture of Furnivall can be seen on p. 12. Gibbs appears sitting in a comfortable armchair on p. 43, and on p. 67, an entry for rebeck “a rude kind of fiddle” (among other senses), subedited by Skeat, is photographed. Quite a few more bagatelles of this type can be produced by an attentive reader of Peter Gilliver’s monumental book, but for the moment, I’ll stay with Skeat.
Header: James Murray photographed in the Scriptorium on 10 July 1915 with his assistants: (back row) Arthur Maling, Frederick Sweatman, F. A. Yockney, (seated) Elsie Murray, Rosfrith Murray. Reproduced by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press.
Do names really mean anything, even when they seem to? Individuals in present day America called Smith, Jackson, Washington, or Redhead are not usually smiths, sons of Jack, residents in Washington, or red-haired. The disconnect between sense and usage in these particular names is mainly the result of hereditary surnaming back in England and Scotland, but this is not its only source. Names change their shapes, get borrowed into different cultures, and are sometimes re-interpreted to mean something other than what they originally meant. The frozen food company, Birds Eye, took its brand name from the founder’s surname, Clarence Frank Birdseye II of Montclair, New Jersey. His family had migrated from England to Connecticut in the seventeenth century, and the name’s meaning as a nickname looks obvious. But when it is traced back in English historical records, Birdseye turns out to be a habitational name, an altered form of the Lancashire gentry surname Bardsley, which migrated to Buckinghamshire, England, in the fifteenth century and was simplified there from the sixteenth century onward to Bardsey, Berdsey, Burdsey, and Birdseye.
The underlying cause for the disconnect is that names, unlike words, don’t have to stay meaningful in order to do their job of identifying individuals or groups of people. In fact, most American family names make no sense at all today and it is fascinating to uncover their original meanings and what they tell us about the history of the people who bear them. Hereditary surnames are especially vulnerable to changes in pronunciation that obscure their original senses. Starbuck, for example, seems to be an altered form of Tarbuck, which is recorded in the thirteenth century as the surname of the family who were lords of Tarbock in Lancashire, England. In the 1630s, Edward Starbuck, a coloniser from Derbyshire, England, set up a whaling company on Nantucket Island. Herman Melville borrowed the surname for the chief mate of the whaling ship Pequod in his novel Moby Dick to give his incredible story an appearance of local veracity. It is this fictional character that the coffee chain is arbitrarily named for.
Absence of sense enables names to migrate easily from person to person and into other languages, where they can be further mangled or re-interpreted, nowhere more prolifically than in the United States. American family names have a unique diversity, the living evidence of a country founded on colonization, forced transportation (especially of West Africans), and influxes of refugees and economic migrants from across the globe. The latest edition of the Dictionary of American Family Names explains over 80,000 of them and includes 35 introductory essays written by experts from countries across the world.
Names as gateways into world history are full of surprises. Trump is a surname from Bavaria in Germany, where in medieval times the now obsolete word trumpe, “drum,” was adopted as a name for a drummer. (Donald Trump’s Scottish connection is on his mother’s side.) Biden probably derives from the place called Baydon in Wiltshire, England, and has been a family name in neighbouring Hampshire since the early fourteenth century. (Joe Biden’s Irish connection is on his mother’s side.) Mancini is from Italian mancino, a nickname for a left-handed person. Wang is chiefly Chinese, from a Romanized spelling of Mandarin and Cantonese words of many senses, including “king, royal” and “yellow, gold.”
Some family names have been created in America itself, where individuals whose own culture had no tradition of surnaming found themselves legally required to have one. Migrants from Muslim countries and from parts of the Indian subcontinent have commonly opted for one of their own personal names. The Dictionary explains that the surname Abdullah, with over 8,000 bearers in the 2010 US census, is an Arabic personal name ‘Abdullāh, “servant of God.” Murthy, with 1,268 bearers in 2010, is from southwest India, where it is a personal name from the Sanskrit mūrti, “manifestation, image,” that of one of the gods, Rama or Krishna.
Among Native Americans, a different solution was to use their personal name in an English translation. The Cheyenne Mo’ohnah’evaoo’etse, “Elk stands with his wife,” refers to the habit of elks standing shoulder to shoulder, and was Americanized as the surname Elkshoulder. The most common American surname actually in a Native American language is Begay, with 17,533 bearers in the 2010 census. It is an Anglicized spelling of the Navajo word biye’, “his son,” which was originally part of a longer personal name, coming after the father’s name. It was imposed on Navajos by white officials, who mistook it for a surname. Some Native Americans adopted the surname of a colonial administrator. Abeyta is a Hispanic surname mostly found among the Pueblos of New Mexico, where in the 1690s a Spaniard, Diego de Abeytia (or de Beitia), was involved in its recolonization. His surname referred to a place called Beitia in Biscay, Basque Country, in northern Spain.
But most Native Americans assimilated to Anglo-American culture by doing what most of the freed slaves of West African heritage did—borrowing an existing, commonplace surname like Smith or Johnson. An alternative strategy favored by African Americans was to take the surname of an admired figure, such as Lincoln, Jefferson, Jackson, or Washington. The Dictionary reveals time and again that the Englishness of an American surname is not a safe guide to the ethnicity or heritage of its bearers. Immigrants, too, often adapted to their new country through the translation or assimilation of an existing non-English name into an English near-equivalent. Yet more sources of Smith are Dutch Smit, German and Jewish Schmidt, and Slavic Koval. Dutch Timmerman was sometimes translated into the English Carpenter, French Boulanger into Baker, and German Goldwasser into Goldwater.
The Ashkenazic Jewish name Kaplan, from German Kaplan or Polish kapłan, “chaplain, curate,” was already a translation of Cohen, from Hebrew kohen, “priest,” before it was assimilated in the American composer’s family to Copland, an English habitational name from either of two northern English place-names. Assimilated name-forms have created countless similar examples of misleading appearances. Sharkey is usually Irish, a shortened, Anglicized form of the Gaelic Ó Searcaigh, “descendant of Searcach,” from a nickname meaning “beloved,” but it is also an American garbling of French Chartier “carter.”
Family histories can resolve some of the uncertainties. Morton looks English or Scottish, a habitational name from one of the places so named, and it often is. George Morton of Nottinghamshire, England, was one of the Mayflower pilgrim fathers. But, as the Dictionary explains, the name has several other origins as an Americanization of Swedish, Finnish, French, and Jewish names. John Morton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, had a Finnish grandfather called Martti Marttinen—“Martin Martin’s son”— who moved to Sweden, where his name was Scandinavianized as Mårten Mårtensson, pronounced Mortenson, and then to America, where his surname was shortened to Morton.
Another way in which the Dictionary disambiguates the origins of a family name is to note the forenames associated with it in US telephone directories. Lee, with nearly 700,000 bearers in the 2010 census, is the standout instance of an English habitational name that was re-purposed to assimilate names from other languages. They include one each from Irish and Norwegian and six from Romanized forms of Chinese and other Southeast Asian languages in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. The surname is famous as that of a Shropshire family that migrated from England to Virginia in the early seventeenth century and whose descendants were prominent in the American Revolution and the Civil War. But some of its forenames in America—Young, Sang, Jae, Jong, Jung, Sung, Yong, Kyung, Seung, Dong, Kwang, Myung—alert us to other histories, of later migrations from Southeast Asia.
Is it ever safe to take an American family name at face value? Often yes, even if all you can be sure of is that the name, whatever its original sense, belongs to a specific group of people. But, as you have seen from the names I’ve picked out for discussion, appearances can be very deceptive.
I did not intend to write an essay about toad, because a detailed entry on this word can be found in An AnalyticalDictionary of English Etymology (2008), but a letter came from our correspondent wondering whether the etymology of toad is comparable with that of frog (the subject of the previoustwo posts), and the most recent comment also deals with both creatures. Therefore, I decided to address this question. In the 2008 book, almost nothing is said about frog.
“‘Big and ugly, fat and loathsome she is,’ said the young green frogs. ‘And her brats are getting to be just like her!’ ‘May be so,’ said Mamma Toad, ‘but one of them has a jewel in its head, if I don’t have it myself.’” This exchange occurs in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Toad,” a late tragic version of “The Ugly Duckling,” with an ending echoing that of “The Little Mermaid.” However, “life is so beautiful,” as H. C. Andersen’s Toad said, and etymology is so impersonal that we are justified in making our simple story fully unemotional.
Like frog, the word toad was recorded in Old English, and the form was nearly stable, except that the root vowel could be short or long. In Middle English, both tadde and tāde (ā, as in Modern English spa) occurred too. However, two of their lookalikes, both meaning “frog,” also existed, namely, Old English tosca and tocsa (it is really the same word with sc ~ cs alternating by metathesis, a phonetic process, discussed earlier in connection with frog). A few Scandinavian and Low German forms, such as tudse, tossa, and Tutze, resemble both tosca and to some extent, pad ~ padda, the English names of the frog (pad and paddock), also familiar from the previous post. This overlap is not surprising, because, as we already know, frogs and toads often share the same name.
Toads play an outstanding role in folklore and superstitions (much more so than frogs), and no one is in a hurry to notice a jewel in the toad’s head (the aging H. C. Andersen was the rarest exception). Toads are held to be both ugly and poisonous. They are associated with witchcraft and various diseases, from warts to angina pectoralis. Therefore, taboo is prominent in the names of the toad, a circumstance that may be partly responsible for the opacity of Latin būfō and others.
In their search for origins, etymologists always try to find similar words in the language under investigation and in other languages. Greek toxikós “poisonous” has been sometimes cited in connections with toad, but this guess leads nowhere. The same holds for the by now familiar attempts to compare toad with several verbs meaning “to swell.” Equally unpromising is the comparison between tudse and Old High Germanzuscen “to burn.” (What do toads and burning have in common? Our Germanic ancestors were not familiar with the dangerous cane toad! Or is the reference again to warts?) By contrast, Old Icelandictað “dung” (ð has the value of th in English the) may have some potential as a cognate of toad. Surprisingly, dung will soon reemerge in our discussion.
The greatest difficulty in reconstructing the early history of Old English tāde (see this form above) is the long vowel in the root. In Old English, the source of ā is invariably the diphthong ai (compare Gothicstains and Old English stān “stone”). A form like tudse is incompatible with taide (if taide ever exited!), because u and ai never alternated in the same root. For this reason, toad ended up in the by now familiar swamp of words of unknown origin.
Yet it would be a rare coincidence if tāde and tudse, both meaning “toad,” were unrelated. Therefore, in the 2008 dictionary, I suggested (and my suggestion still seems reasonable to me) that under the influence of taboo or emphasis (considering the treatment of toads in old societies) the originally short vowel in tadde was lengthened. The only two common Old English words with spontaneous lengthening (that is, not caused by any phonetic regularity) have an expressive meaning: wēl “well” and fraam “bold.” Dung, to which I promised to return, smells bad. Is this why Old English goor “dung” had an unexplained long vowel? Another expressive word? Such hypotheses cannot be proved. Very few proposals in etymology can be “proved” the way it is done in mathematics, as I keep repeating from essay to essay. At best, one can call them reasonable, credible, probable.
If the root of toad was tad– (with an original short vowel), we find ourselves on familiar ground. English t-d words are numerous. Two weeks ago, I mentioned only tod and toddle, but similar words crop up everywhere, even though most of them are either regional or if “standard,” little-known. Consider tad “child,” tid– in tidbit (or tit-, if you prefer titbit); another tod ~ toddle “a small cake,” tid “a very small person,” tit ~ tid “teat,” and quite a few others. The interjection tut-tut looks like part of that series. In English, some such words are native, while others were borrowed from German or Scandinavian. Most of them are of northern origin. For whatever reason, in Germanic, tattlingand toddling of all kinds suggests pettiness.
Toads have nothing to do with toadstools. Image via PickPik, CC0.
Toad with a historically short vowel joins the club, along with Danish tudse and Swedish tossa (apparently, from todsa). Perhaps the toad was thought of as a small round creature. Or its warts gave it its name. Equally probable is that the toad’s manner of moving in short steps (toddling or tottering) provided the sought-for connection. Regardless of whether my reconstruction is credible, one should avoid searching for some ancient (Proto-Germanic or Indo-European) root, from which all such words have allegedly developed over the centuries. It seems that the complex tid/ted/tod/ tad varying with tit/tet/tot/tat is always available for engendering more and more words. Someone teds (“lifts and separates”) hay, while someone else needs a tad more salt in the soup for hungry toddlers (tiny tots, also known as tuds, are so choosy!). Life is governed by the tit for tat principle. Some toads have jewels in the head, while others don’t, but the reproduction of short expressive t-d/t-t words seems to be constant.
Nor do tadpoles interest toads: unlike human beings, they don’t care for their future. Image: Pacific Tree Frog Tadpoles (Pseudacris regilla) by Greg Schechter, via Flickr, CC2.0.
The word toadstool reflects people’s uncalled-for abhorrence of toads. The structure of the word is obvious, even though toads never touch this poisonous mushroom. Tadpole, from tāda + pole, is the opposite: the creature is known to all (I’ll leave it to our readers to search online for the many slangy senses of tadpole!), but the word’s structure is less clear. Pole is here another spelling of poll “head,” probably a borrowing from thirteenth-century German (and again, I’ll leave it to the curious to find out why we “take a poll”), but tad– is toad with a short vowel, not the one I reconstructed in the prehistory of toad, but from a shortened one (this shortening occurred in old trisyllabic words: compare holy and holiday). Toadies are abhorrent, but you could not expect a derivative of toad to be given a fair hearing. I am now saying goodbye to my amphibians from Greece to England and beyond, unless new questions provoke new essays. Questions and comments are always welcome.
Featured image: Hans Christian Andersen by Franz Hanfstaengl, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Last week, I discussed a few suggestions about the origin of the English word frog. Unfortunately, I made two mistakes in the Greek name of this animal. My negligence is puzzling, because the play by Aristophanes lay open near my computer. I am grateful to our correspondent for pointing out the error, but is the etymology he offered his own? He referred to an online explanation of the Greek noun. Yet no hint of his hypothesis can be found in it. The Greek word is either sound-imitative, like the Latin one (rāna), or of unknown origin. What he suggested is an example of folk etymology. Even less trustworthy is his idea that the Germanic name of the frog goes back to Greek. Why should it?
In the previous part of this essay, I mentioned two attempts to account for the origin of frog and its cognates elsewhere in Germanic and argued that the word cannot be traced to the idea of the frog’s skin being slimy or to the frog’s ability to jump. Yet I did not mention a third hypothesis, which derived the name of the frog and the toad from the Indo-European root “to swell.” This reconstruction allowed some etymologist to trace Greek br– and Germanic fr– to the same ancient root. Only the images in the post referred to that idea. At the end of the essay, English pad “frog” or “toad” (!) came up for discussion, and I suggested that pad is a sound-imitative word, with reference to the animal’s going pat-pat or pad-pad.
It will be remembered that the Old Germanic languages had several names of the frog. Even in Old Icelandic, three words competed: froskr, frauki, and frauðr (read ð as th in English the). They look like different names, rather than phonetic variants of the same word. Apparently, as long as the group fr– remained in place, the speakers felt that the frog had received its due. The call of the frogs’ chorus in Aristophanes is brekekeks-koax-koax. Incidentally, when an ugly toad abducts Thumbelina, Hans C. Andersen makes “her” say: “Koaks, koaks, brekkekekeks,” straight from the Greek comedy. There is some reason to believe that frog and its lookalikes elsewhere are sound-imitative words, with cr- ~ kr, br-, and fr– serving the same purpose. By the way, the German for “toad” is Kröte! The oldest recorded forms of Kröte were krete ~ krede, krota, and krade. An onomatopoeic origin of Kröte is worthy of consideration.
The general impression is that the name of the frog was a popular, playful word without “respectable” Indo-European ancestry. A curious case is dialectal (Low German) Pogge, resembling both Middle Dutchpadde and English pad. (Old Icelandic had padda; German Padde could designate both a frog and a toad.) In 1990, the German philologist Norbert Wagner suggested that Pogge is a pet name of frogga. He noted that in pet names, fricatives (that is, consonants like f and þ/th) are regularly replaced by the stopsp and t. Theodore becomes Ted, Philip becomes Pip (as in Dickens’s Great Expectations), while Frisian Franz and Italian Francisco emerge as Panne and Paco.
Here is Dickens’s Philip, known to the world as Pip. I entreated her to rise by F. A. Fraser, The Victorian Web. Public domain via GetArchive.
Wagner’s idea looks appealing in light of the fact that in many parts of Eurasia, the names of the toad and the frog tend to be expressive. English pad is not a variant of Pogge, but if Pogge goes back to frog, the reference to the expressive nature of pad receives some reinforcement, and the attempts to trace frog to some ancient root meaning “slimy, frothy” or “jump,” or “swell” lose the small appeal they may still have to some etymologists. To reinforce the idea of playfulness in naming toads, I’ll cite the words designating this animal in several modern German dialects: Ütsch, Pädde, and Quadux. The first, almost certainly, and the third not improbably, are expressive.
Incidentally, Ütsch resembles English ouch (an exclamation perhaps of German descent). Indeed, you see a toad and exclaim in a totally uncalled for outburst of disgust: “ütsch!”—don’t you? (What is so wrong with the poor toad?) If my guess about the connection between Ütsch and ouch is correct, I may be the first to have suggested such an exotic solution and swell with pride, because discovering a new etymology is hard, and ouch is such an important word. As Albert Einstein once said, ideas occur so seldom. By way of conclusion, I should express my strong disagreement with William Sayer’s paper: “The Etymology of English toad: Effects of the Celtic Substrate.” Nothing in the history of toad testifies to a foreign influence. The article is available online.
As is well-known, the word frog has numerous senses, unconnected with the animal. Frog refers to objects that hold things in place: a certain fastening, a loop, and a device on a rail. In the body of a horse, frog denotes a pyramidal substance in the sole of the hoof. One can also cite a few German analogs. The motivation for calling each of such things a frog is usually said to be unknown. Yet of crucial importance is the fact that the Finnish Sampo “the pillar of the world” shares its root (sampa) with sammako “frog.”
The picture all over Eurasia yields the same result: the world was believed to stand on the back of a primordial animal: a frog, a fish, or a whale. The literature on this subject is huge. Finnish scholars have been especially active in studying the connection between frog “animal” and frog “a supporting device,” while English and German etymologists have hardly referred to Eurasian myths in trying to explain the many senses of frog ~ Frosch. (Note that a frog is found in the foot of the horse.) Yet my knowledge of the relevant literature is superficial. It would be tempting to show that frog “device”–-from “the support of the pillar of the world” to “part of the horse’s anatomy”—goes back to ancient folklore. Is such a hypothesis feasible? The late attestation of frog “device” in English and German poses an almost insurmountable problem in this reconstruction.
Don’t despise frogs. They are princes and princesses in disguise. Image by MCAD Library, CC2.0 via Flickr.
Frog “a hoarseness in the throat” may refer to croaking, but a tie between frogs (and especially toads) and diseases, such as angina, may again go back to ancient myths. An evil toad on the breast is a familiar image in folklore. Yet frog folklore is varied. Every year, the Nile was expected to overflow its banks. When it did, countless frogs appeared in the fields. The Egyptian goddess Hequet (or Heket) was worshipped, because she was believed to guarantee fertility (frogs lay between 20,000 and 25,000 eggs). This fact may go a long way toward accounting for the appearance of an animal spouse in folklore (in our case, a frog prince in German and a frog princess in Russian) if we assume that the Egyptian beliefs became known in Ancient Greece and later in Rome, from where they spread and mutated in the rest of Europe. In any case, frogs played a role in the initiation of Dionysus, a god of fertility.
Such is my tale. Comments are welcome.
Featured Image: Biblical illustration of Book of Exodus Chapter 9 by Jim Padgett, Distant Shores Media/Sweet Publishing. CC3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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