What connects Ghent with John of Gaunt, and are lubber and loblolly related? Anatoly Liberman answers two readers’ questions about names, sounds, and word origins. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
This week’s post is devoted to answering two questions from readers. Do you have a question you’d like me to answer (hopefully not with origin unknown)? Feel free to leave a comment or send an email to blog@oup.com!
Ghent, gaunt, and John of Gaunt: what is the connection, if any?
John of Gaunt (1340-1399) was indeed born in Ghent (Dutch Gent, Belgium) but never used this extended name as an adult. If Shakespeare had not called him John of Gaunt in his tragedy KingRichardII, no one would probably have remembered that ancient soubriquet today. (“Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old”; this is the beginning of Act II, and the dying duke keeps playing with the word again and again in the next eight lines.)
This is Ghent/Gent today. Photo by Alvesgaspar via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.
It is usually believed that Ghent is a Celtic place name going back to ganda “confluence of two rivers.” A few other hypotheses on this score need not concern us here, because the ancient origin of Ghent has no bearing on the present discussion.
Gaunt is a doubletof Ghent, and we are, naturally, interested in how “the linguistic confluence” happened. Bear with me, as they say, because, probably for the first time ever, I am going to discuss some niceties of sound change. The spelling gh has an obvious reason: h prevents English speakers from pronouncing Ghent as Jent. The problem is the vowel: why eif the etymon was Ganda? Not a single book on the history of Dutch seems to have explained the change. Only one thing is obvious: there was no umlaut in the word that would have turned a into e.
So, why e? My idea needs some explanation, but I’ll state it dogmatically, without going into detail.
Part 1: Dutch.OldGermanic languages had many palatalized consonants; l’ and n’ (the apostrophe denotes palatalization) were common. To give an example, palatalized l and n are the sounds we hear in the Italian words famiglia “family” and compagnia “company.”
Those who have studied Russian know that palatalized consonants are called soft in that language. Such sounds are also widespread in modern German and Dutch dialects. They often affect the preceding vowels by moving them to the front. For example, [a] becomes [e]. This is probably how Gant, which, I suppose, had “soft n,” became Gent in Dutch. I would be grateful for approval or refutation.
Part 2: English. In Anglo-French, which was spoken in England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the vowel [a] before m and n was often pronounced like [au] in Modern English out. The medieval spellings comaunder, Caumbrigge, and so forth were ubiquitous. In many words, this au became the sound we today hear in haunt and vaunt. The adjective gaunt, discussed in the previous post, most probably, did not come from French but joined haunt, vaunt, and the rest. This is also how the place name Ghant became G(h)aunt. The modern English spelling Ghent is “correct” but late. It was introduced to conform to Dutch Gent.
For a long time, people associated gaunt with the town of Ghent in today’s Belgium. Hence also the idea, cited in the previous post, that running the gauntlet and the word gauntlet originated in Flanders, though this punishment was first used in the Swedish army, as also explained last week.
Are lubber and loblolly related?
There can be no clearcut answer to this question, because we are or seem to be surrounded by a host of expressive words. This is obvious in dealing with loll-. Consider loll “to drop, dangle,” lollop “to lounge,” and lollipop, which is almost loblolly in reverse. Loblolly once meant “thick gruel” (so in the sixteenth century, when the word first surfaced in English texts). Some time later, it acquired the sense “country bumpkin” (compare chawbacon “hick, yokel”: from simple food to a derogatory term, or beefeater “Yeoman of the Guard”). We’ll return to loll– later
Expressive and thought-provoking. Photo by teofanutza05 via Pixabay. Public domain.
Lob– (in loblolly) reminds us of lubber “clumsy man,” today known mainly from landlubber “someone ignorant about the sea and all matters nautical.” It has a root, similar to that of love (Old English lufu)! Lubber and love have nothing in common, except that both are expressive. (The statement that love is expressive probably needs no proof.) That’s the arrow they share, but the target is unpredictable, and there is of course no way of explaining why l-v, rather than m-v or n-v, should possess emotional connotations: none of them is sound-imitative.
For whatever reasons, the sound complex lab/laf ~ lub/luf seems to evoke more or less similar emotions in speakers from all corners of the earth. For instance, Russian lafa (pronounced as la-fa, stress on the second syllable) means “great luck.” The word reached Old Russian from the East: the source is Arabic and Turkish. It may amuse you to know that the German verb loben “to praise” has no secure etymology, though cognates, certain and putative, are numerous. They sound very much alike, but, naturally, throw no light on the origin of the verb. Another expressive word like love?
The OED suggests that lubber reached English from French and that French may have borrowed it from German. This is of course possible, but, while dealing with such a universal sound complex, one never knows for sure who borrowed from whom or whether each language coined the word independently.
In my old posts, I often referred to the Swiss linguist Wilhelm Oehl, who compared dozens of similar-sounding words from various languages and referred to the process he called primitive creation. If you search for Oehl, my posts will turn up at once. Oehl is now all but forgotten, but many of his ideas deserve attention. It appears that laf/lab is indeed a “primitive complex,” evoking two dissimilar ideas: one of awkwardness and another of something pleasant.
When one deals with bare roots, it sometimes happens that they refer to incompatible, even opposite phenomena. This circumstance need not worry us. A list of Indo-European roots looks like very serious linguistic algebra, but, for example, four Indo-European homonymous ter‘s and seven (!) per‘s have been reconstructed!
We can now turn to –lolly, the second component of loblolly. There is (or was) the regional noun lolly “tongue.” Its “expressive” origin cannot be doubted. The verb loll (as in “don’t loll about all day doing nothing” and “the dog’s tongue lolled out of his mouth”) belongs here too. Finally, the verb lollop “to walk with lounging gait, etc.,” mentioned at the beginning of this essay, also exists. Hensleigh Wedgwood compared loblolly and lollipop long ago. Other etymologists agreed with him.
This is Oblomov, the hero of a famous novel by Ivan Goncharov. He used to loll about all day doing nothing. The book is certainly worth reading. Image by K. N. Chichagov via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Where are we then with the questions about lubber and loblolly? Are they related? Of course, the basis of comparison is only lub– and lob-. In the discussion above, lolly has been thrown in for good measure. We have seen that all three components of those words are expressive, or sound–symbolic. Their relationship is of a special kind. By way of analogy, consider jag, jig, and jog. Are they related? Lub– and lob– belong together, which does not mean that they are cognate in the same way in which live and life, write and writ, wine and vinegar, or Engl. love and German Liebe (the same meaning) are. We should rather refer to affinity than relationship. This then is the answer to the question in the heading.
NOTE: I’ll be at a conference next week. See my next essay two weeks from today. Send us questions and suggestions. It has been years since I received so many queries that I could produce regular monthly (!) gleanings. I long for the largess of old days.
Last week, I finished my story with a brief reference to all kinds of gloves. A few days later, a query came about the word gauntlet. What is its origin, and is there any connection with the adjective gaunt? (See my answer to two more questions at the end of this essay.)
Gaunt surfaced in English texts in the fifteenth century and could also be pronounced as gant. Since no reliable information has been discovered about its origin (no cognates or comments from contemporary authors), the word might be newfangled slang, whose etymology was as unclear to speakers six hundred years ago as it is to us. If so, the chances of discovering its origin are close to zero (however, see below). The oldest etymologists (John Minsheu, Stephen Skinner, and Franciscus Junius) provide no information and offer no conjectures, though they were a bit closer to the time when the word originated.
The only bold conjecture about the etymology of gaunt goes back to the undeservedly forgotten dictionary by Eduard Mueller, who mentioned Old French jaunet “yellowish, sickly” and the Scandinavian words for “stick; thin person.” Walter W. Skeat knew that dictionary and treated it with respect. He “compared” gaunt with Norwegian dialectal gand “a thin stick, a tall and thin man, an overgrown stripling” and Swedish, also dialectal, gank “a lean, half-starved horse” but called his comparison doubtful. Doubtful it certainly is. I may add that early etymologists often invited us to “compare” words, but it remained unclear how to proceed with such “comparisons.”
Rocinante was certainly a gaunt stallion. Image by Louis Surugue, after Charles Antoine Coypel, via Wikimedia Commons. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0 1.0.
In the Scandinavian languages, words with the root gant– most often mean “fool, foolishness,” rather than “emaciation.” Also, a fifteenth-century borrowing from some Scandinavian dialect into Early Modern English is unlikely. No post-Skeat hypotheses about the origin of gaunt have been offered, and several dictionaries repeat it as being at least worthy of interest. There may be a grain of truth in Mueller’s wanderings between Old French and Scandinavian.
Having disposed of gaunt, we may procced to gauntlet. That word went a long way before the object it designates found its peace on English hands, also in the fifteenth century. The story (again!) begins with a Scandinavian word. It must have sounded like wantuz. In Old Icelandic, we find vöttr; Modern Norwegian has vante. From medieval Scandinavia the word migrated to Romance, obviously, with the object. There must have been something in that object that favored its travel across Europe.
The current etymology of vante (though always accompanied by the word probably or possibly) suggests that the word’s root is the verb wind. This idea may be true (a woven glove?), but there is a hitch. The great medieval English historian, known as the Venerable Bede (672/673-735), wrote that the Gauls (!) wore hand coverings called vantos. If the word was Celtic, even its most ingenious Germanic etymologies are wrong by definition.
The Venerable Bede. Image by Bartolomé Román via Wikimedia Commons. Museo del Prado. Public domain.
Coverings for the hand had many different forms and shapes; hence numerous ideas for giving them names. For instance, mitten, from some Romance form like medietāna, referred to a cut in the middle. Human ingenuity has no limits, as shown by the history of words for “glove.” More (much more!) surprising is the early prestige of gloves. Last time, I mentioned the Old English proper name Hond-scio “glove,” literally “hand-shoe.”
It occurred only in Beowulf, but, however fanciful, it probably did not sound odd to the audience of the poem, because also Vöttr existed as a man’s name in medieval Scandinavia. This puzzling name giving antedated by many centuries the rite of throwing down the gauntlet. And we are not in Greece or Rome, where gloves were a sign of social prestige, or among medieval knights. Why then call male children this? Little Boy Thumb makes sense, but Little Boy Glove? A warrior called Glove? Suggestions from our readers on this subject are invited.
The bottommost image in the previous post referred to the cannibal Grendel, the monster destroyed by Beowulf. Grendel stored his victims (or rather the “leftovers”) in a glove (Old English glōf). That “glove” might be a pouch. In any case, some gloves were probably big, even huge. The Old Germanic word lōfa meant “palm,” and it is possible that g- in glōf is a remnant of an ancient prefix, as is, for instance, g- in Modern German glauben “to believe.” In any case, this is the only probable etymology of the word there is.
Finally, something should be said about gauntlet, the metal-plated glove of medieval armor. With it we are back where we were at the beginning. Articles of clothing and their names, as stated above, travel from land to land. Old French gantlet meant “a little gant,” that is, “a little glove,” and gant is our Old Scandinavian acquaintance vöttr, changed beyond recognition. The object was large, despite the misleading diminutive suffix –let (as in islet, kinglet, and so forth).
However, running the gauntlet has nothing to do with gloves. It was known long ago that the second component (let) of the now familiar noun had been changed beyond recognition from Swedish lopp “run” under the influence of gauntlet, with which it has nothing in common. But the first component remained less clear. My database contains several old suggestions on this score. From Gant, another name of Ghent (!), where running the gauntlet was, allegedly, first executed? Or from German Gasse– “street”? The last-mentioned (fanciful) conjecture was well-known, because it appeared in Brewer’s popular Dictionary of Word and Fable. Actually, the etymon of gauntlet is Swedish from beginning to end: gat-lop “lane run” became gantlope. The punishment, where the culprit ran between two rows of men who struck him with sticks or knotted cords, originated in the Swedish army.
Is it possible that I succeeded in antedating the examples in the OED? In any case, Notes and Queries (7/XII, Dec. 12, 1891, p. 476) gives two quotes, sent by Edward Peacock, from 1647 and 1648.
Questions
Ampersand. I have nothing new to say about this symbol and can only state that the questioner’s information about it is correct. The silly phrase and by itself and (Latin et per se et) degenerated into the gibberish ampersand. In cursive writing, the Latin word et became the by now familiar sign &. The ampersand was indeed for some time treated as the 27th letter of the English alphabet, but this addition has never been canonized.
Dung and dungeon. I think the term for this connection is “false affinity.” False affinity plays a certain role in changing the affected words’ meaning and is an important source of folketymology. Dung was discussed in my post “Unsavory etymologies.” It is a word of Germanic origin, while dungeon is Romance. Those interested in other “false friends” of etymology may look up the origin of the word demijohn.
Below, I’ll speak about the amazing history of the word dung “manure.” In broad outline, the story is known, but some details are seldom discussed in dictionaries. I should also mention another reason I turned my attention to dung. Probably few people outside the tiny group of professional etymologists realize that dung is related to dingy, as in “a rundown and dingy alley; a shabby, dingy coat,” not necessarily “foul” or “ill-smelling” but certainly unattractive (“shitty,” if I may). Note the vowels of dung and dingy! We will return to the alternation u ~ i at the end of this essay.
Surprisingly, dung is a word that goes back to Old English (surprisingly, because we seldom associate antiquity with manure, excrements and their likes: temples and sarcophagi are another matter). By contrast, dingy surfaced in printed texts only in the seventeenth century, though it may have been current in oral speech much earlier. Dung, unlike dingy, has cognates all over the Germanic-speaking world. Closely related to itis German Dung (the same meaning).
DINGY! Photo by Kevin Jones, Vancouver, Canada. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
TheOxford Dictionary ofEnglish Etymology (1965) followed the original OED and wrote about dung “of unknown origin.” Apparently, the editors of that otherwise excellent work missed the rich literature on the word, a mistake the OED online, not unexpectedly, avoided. The entry in the online version discusses the problem in detail, makes suggestions, and finally says “of uncertain origin.” Though the origin of dung may indeed be uncertain, below, I’ll cite a few arguments that may throw light on the problem.
But first, a few facts, culled from easily available sources. As noted, dung has close cognates in other Germanic languages. German Dung is also known from very early texts. Apparently, the word was not offensive anywhere: just a neutral and useful name for what it designated. The same holds for Old Frisian and Middle Dutchdung. Old Icelandic had dyngja “heap; dung.”
Closer to home, we find Engl. ding “to knock, dash down.” Whether this verb is a loan from Scandinavian (Old Icelandic dengja meant “to whet a scythe”) makes little difference, because we are dealing with a Common Germanic group of words. The verb ding,I suppose, emerged as a sound-imitative word (think of ding-dong, a complex representing the sound of a knock on a hard body). However, it joined the vocabulary of English as a strong verb, that is, it had its three principal parts like those in sing ~ sang ~ sung.
This type of vowel alternation is called ablaut, and verbs displaying ablaut are called strong. The other type, as in pick ~ picked ~ picked is known as weak. Yet the line is sometimes crossed. To those who say sneak ~ snuck ~ snuck the verb is strong, and to those who prefer sneak ~ sneaked ~ sneaked it is weak.
Only old, inherited verbs displayed ablaut, and that part of the history of ding comes as a surprise. Wasn’t ding a funny, colloquial newcomer fifteen or so centuries ago? Apparently, not, because ding never behaved like a recent formation. Ding ~ dang ~ dung joined ring ~ rang ~ rung (which, incidentally, acquired this type of conjugation late!).
As a rule, newcomers of this type are weak. Think of the relatively late English verb to wing (as in the bird winged its way across the lake and winged words). It would have been odd to have the sequence wing ~ wang ~ wung! I may add that bing“to pile up,” another onomatopoeia, also existed, and its past tense was of course binged. Thus, whatever the distant origin of ding, the verb was strong (ding ~ dang ~ dung), and therefore, nothing objects to its affinity with the noun dung. The vowel alternation followed the rule of ablaut.
The works postdating the OED volume with dung pay special attention to the Old Icelandic noun dyngja “women’s underground quarters” and Old English dung “prison.” It has been suggested that the meaning underlying those words is “a cover.” Modern Icelandic dyngia refers to all kinds of elevated structures: volcanoes, heaps, nests, and so forth. Therefore, it is perhaps more likely that such was also the original sense of both “women’s quarters” and “prison”: people produced an underground structure that stuck out. Some sort of roof over it might exist, but being covered does not seem to have played a role in naming those places.
In sum, dung, it appears, is related to the strong verb ding “to strike.” A dung was something that was piled up with an effort (hence “strike”). Other than that, one could build a dugout and heap earth on top. The structure could be used for all kinds of purposes: from isolated living quarters to a place of confinement.
It may have come as a surprise that dung is related to a verb meaning “to strike,” but language is full of surprises. Here is another one. The German for “dung” is Mist, also a word of great antiquity. Related forms exist all over the Germanic-speaking world and mean “to drizzle” and “urinate.” Its Old English cognate meox has survived (in a changed form, to be sure) only in some British dialects.
Every English speaker learning German asks whether Mist and mist are related. Yes, the root of both nouns means “to drizzle, urinate.” The underlying idea is wetness. Isn’t it amazing how the same root produced “muck,” and “light fog”! But after all, mist is a collection of thin drops, and “urine” seems to be a tolerably good base for both. The substance denoted by German Mist is not necessarily wet, but let us not be too particular when it comes to the development of meaning. (Incidentally, muck also refers to urination!)
Historical phonetics is governed by certain tolerably accurate regularities. Historical semantics is not quite capricious either, but the explorer of meaning encounters many more dangerous corners. Human ingenuity has no limits. Above, we have traced the path of two roots for the words meaning “manure”: Engl. dung and German Mist. One path was unpredictable, the other quite logical. Let us be pleased with what we have.
POSTSCRIPT
In connection with the most recent post “Boots (or Rather, Shoes) on the Ground” (September 2, 2026) Mr. Nicholas Dobson called my attention to the German word Handschuh “glove,” literally, “hand-shoe.” The word makes it clear that shoe once meant “cover.” It existed all over Germanic, and one of Beowulf’s warriors was called Hond-scio. The history of glove and mitten is also not quite devoid of interest, but at the moment I have nothing to say about it.
The monster Grendel had such a glove for storing his victims. Photo by Ludovic Sauvage. Public domain via Pixabay.
See also a most curious comment by Mr. Israel Cohen following that post!.
Few words are harder to trace to their sources than the names of clothing articles. Those names travel with the things to which they belong, and the sources are easily lost sight of. As regards such travels, consider the global success of the word jeans. Today, my object is the etymology of the word shoe, but the origins of boot, stocking, and sock are also worthy of note. They provide a useful background for the main story, and as regards boots on the ground, see the header.
An ideal piece of clothing in the modern world. Photo by Patherb via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Let me begin with boot. The most detailed entry on this word will be found in Henry CecilWyld’s The Universal English Dictionary. He admits that the history and the origin of the word, which seems to have originated in Germanic, are obscure. Late Latin, we are told, probably borrowed it from German, and from Latin it passed into most of the Romance languages. The early senses were “barrel, tun, leather bag” and later “leather flask; bottle.” We are of course interested in boot “covering for the feet and legs.” Here German Bottich “tub, barrel” (from bottaha) and (!) English body turn up in the entry, along with Old Englishbyden “tub, barrel” and byte “leather bottle, wine-skin.” Thus, boot refers us to body and bottle.
Are all those words related? Perhaps. But surprisingly, at body, the same excellent dictionary makes no mention of the words listed above. The etymology of body is said to be very uncertain. “Its usage and origin may be exclusively English.” Some authorities connect body and Greek, apotēkē “storehouse” (think of Engl. apothecary). Most other sources state bluntly that the origin of the word is unknown.
Unfortunately, the entry on bottle sheds no additional light on boots. It is a pity that some dictionary makers do not check their cross references. Be that as it may, the entry on boot gives us food for thought. According to the chronology available to us, Engl. boot was borrowed from Old Norse. Perhaps so, but this fact tells us nothing about the distant origin of the word. So much for boot (a meager harvest). Apparently, it referred to a receptacle, rather than a covering.
Stocking is outwardly clear: stock + ing, but what is –ing? Our revered authority Walter W.Skeat says: “Stocking is a diminutive form of stock, used as short of nether-stock. … stock means a piece or stump, a piece cut off.” Stock is clear, but a diminutive suffix –ing does not and did not exist! Stockling would have been perfect, but stocking? What then does “a diminutive form of stock” mean? The word has been in use since the sixteenth century, and we could expect its structure to be more transparent. Great expectations: it is hard to disagree with the verdict “of obscure formation.”
Sock is both less and more problematic that the words briefly discussed above. The word and its cognates have existed all over Germanic since the oldest period. The word emerged with the sense “light shoe” and only much later developed into “half-hose.” The source is undoubtedly Latin soccus, from Greek. Dictionaries say: “of Oriental origin” or more precisely, “from Asia Minor.” Somebody somewhere in (?) Asia Minor invented this foot covering, gave it an easily remembered name, and it spread all over half of Europe.
The most famous shoe ever. Cinderella sheet music cover art, unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
By this time, it won’t come as a surprise that the origin of shoe remains partly undiscovered. Shoe is a Common Germanic word. It occurred even in the fourth-century Gothic text of the New Testament, where it meant “sandal.” Incidentally, sandal, like sock, is, most probably, a word of Asiatic origin!
The oldest form of shoe must have been skōh-, and numerous attempts have been made to detect its ancient root. An old verb meaning “to go” sounds somewhat like the root of skōh-, but it is most unlikely that a name designating a covering for the foot should have been derived from the idea of moving or going. Then there was a word meaning “cover, surround,” whose sense fits the idea of “shoe” much better, and some authorities cite this word (though without much enthusiasm) as the source of shoe. The reference is not specific enough: a shoe is not a kerchief or an overcoat, and this etymology does not sound like an ideal solution to our problem.
What was meant by that ancient skōh? What kind of “footwear” (to use the commercial term that Henry Cecil Wyld detested) did it designate? “Sandal” is fine for the biblical text, but the speakers of Gothic, Old Norse, or Old English certainly did not wear sandals. We can notice some similarity between soccus, the afore mentioned etymon (source) of sock, and skōh-. If shoe and sock are indeed related, we are back in Asia but not an inch closer to the origin of the words that interest us. We may, if we wish, reconstruct the ancient root of both, but only historical linguists will be happy with this result. As always, we want to know the human impulse behind word formation. For instance, sweater owes its form to sweat, hood is related to hat, and shirt is a cognate of short, but shoe seems to be a migratory word, a loan from afar, whose etymology is now beyond reach.
Such is the situation with most articles of clothing. Look up jacket, coat, cloak, and so forth! It is also amazing that nearly all such words in English are loans from foreign languages. And this is true not only of such exotic words as chemise and kimono. Cap (of somewhat unclear origin) is from Latin, dress is from French, breeches from Irish, pants ultimately from Italian, sandals from Greek (and there, most probably, from Asia), and so it goes. The word is either foreign or of undiscovered origin, and when it is foreign, its derivation in the lending language is often also obscure. Such is the linguistic price for globalization.
Sandals might be good for Hermes in the air but not for Germanic warriors or farmers. Artwork attributed to the Tithonos Painter, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0.
A curious detail. An inherited name for “shoe” existed: Old English hrifeling, Old Norse hriflingr, Latin crepisculum, and Greek krēpís, with broad connections elsewhere, but, surprisingly, just this ancient word has not stayed even in the conservative Modern Icelandic. The ways of language are hard to predict, and a historical linguist’s shoe is too often on the other foot.
Photo by Lance Cpl. Michael Nerl via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
When I’m reading or listening to a book, I sometimes find myself momentarily drifting away from what the author is saying and worrying about words and phrases I encounter. If there is a pen nearby, I’ll make a note, saving the word or phrase for a quiet afternoon of researching.
For example, a writer discussing literary criticism was complaining about “smarty-pants intellectuals.” I could see why the genteel author chose “smarty-pants” rather than “smart-ass intellectuals,” but why is the seat of smarts in the seat of the pants? And where do “smarty-pants” and “smart-ass” come from? “Smarty-pants,” it turns out, is attested from the early 1900s as a term for a know-it-all and “smarty” (sans pants) goes back to the mid-1800s. It shows up in Mark Twain, for example, where Tom Sawyer refers to a “St. Louis smarty” who thinks too highly of himself. Smart-ass comes later, arising in the mid-twentieth century and similarly referring to a smug display of knowledge. Perhaps it comes from the earlier smart-alecky, which was used in the 19th century.
In another book, a thriller featuring a lawyer who gave up her career as a mixed-martial artist, I fixed on the phrase “cleaned my clock.” It’s a bit of American slang referring to a thorough physical thrashing, and by extension any overwhelming defeat. Since we talk about the face of a clock, the underlying metaphor here is clear: a sound defeat, say in the boxing ring, could involve having one’s features rearranged. The phrase sometimes showed up as “fixed one’s clock” or “stopped one’s clock”, and the earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1895, describes an avicide:
The man approached the bird and struck it a deadly blow with the stock of his gun…‘Old Frank [sc. a heron] ha’ done me out of many an eel—the warmint—but I ha’ cleaned his clock now.’
The present-day meaning is thankfully less fatal.
In a review of another noirish suspense novel, I spotted the phrase “hard-bitten,” used to describe a world-weary protagonist. Is it supposed to refer to someone who has been bitten hard by life? It turns out that “hard-bitten” was first used of dogs that were resolute in their biting, a usage from the 17th century. By the early 19th century, the phrase could refer to people who were “tough,” “resolute,” “hardened by experience,” or “cynical.” A citation from 1819 refers to “Some hard-bitten fellow [who] assailed the orator with a line from Swift, ‘Fine words—I wonder where you stole ’em’,” and another from 1857 described some cricket players as “such hard-bitten, wiry, whiskered fellows, that their young adversaries felt rather desponding [sic] as to the result of the morrow’s match.”
Hard-bitten carries a sense of having been chewed up by life, and I wondered how it compared with “hard-boiled.” That phrase, of course, originated with eggs, and has been used that way since the late 16th century (and later in the 19th century to refer to hard-boiled peas, hard-boiled pudding, and hard-boiled dumplings). In the early 19th century, we find ideas referred to as “hard-boiled” and, by the late 19th century, people as well, including those who were tough, cynical, ruthless, or callous. By 1928, we find examples like this blurb from Century Magazine: “A hard-boiled, two-fisted, super-sleuth of the secret service tells the story of his adventurous dealings with the underworld of all nations.” I think of the contrast this way: hard-boiled is cynical toughness and a world-weary detachment; hard-bitten is a toughness arising through struggles.
One final puzzler (for now) is the phrase “eat your heart out.” Cannibalistic zombies aside, it can be a boastful expression (“eat your heart out, bro”) or can be used to indicate actual grief. In English it originally meant the latter: to suffer pangs of longing, regret, and envy, a usage that goes back to the 16th century and seems patterned after a Greek expression. So we find this from 1651: “A man that eats out his heart with worldly cares, will never sleep an happy sleep.” And in this example from 1707, without the out, we find: “He eat his valiant Heart to see the Prey He thought his own, so bravely snatch’d away.” By the late 1950s, a U.S. variant had emerged indicating that the addressee is likely to be annoyed or envious, as in this from 1958: “The boy, after noting my pained expression after his good run, yelled over to me: ‘Eat your heart out, coach.'” The meaning and point of view of the phrase has shifted from an indication of anguish to an expression of triumph.
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