When official history falls silent, who remembers the war? This question lies at the heart of Lebanon’s troubled relationship with the memory of its Civil War (1975–90). More than three decades after the conflict ended, the war remains a deeply ...
When official history falls silent, who remembers the war?
This question lies at the heart of Lebanon’s troubled relationship with the memory of its Civil War (1975–90). More than three decades after the conflict ended, the war remains a deeply contested part of Lebanon’s past. Lebanon has had no comprehensive state-led truth commission or national reconciliation process, and the Civil War remains largely absent from the official history curriculum. Memories of the conflict therefore remain fragmented across communities, families, political affiliations, and generations.
But silence does not mean that the past has disappeared. When official history falls silent, other forms of remembering emerge. Novels, poems, paintings, films, photographs, and testimonies become archives of experiences that institutions have failed—or refused—to preserve.
Arab women, including the Syrian novelist Ghada al-Samman, the Lebanese-born poet, novelist, and visual artist Etel Adnan, and the Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki, have created some of the most powerful alternative archives of the Lebanese Civil War. They refuse to let the conflict disappear into historical silence. Their works expand what it means to remember war. Sometimes, remembering means recording a nightmare, preserving a fragment, painting a ruined landscape, or making people laugh in the face of sectarian violence.
When everyday life becomes an archive
Ghada al-Samman’s Beirut Nightmares, written during the Civil War, takes us away from the conventional battlefield and into the intimate space of a woman’s home. The protagonist is trapped in Beirut during the siege. Snipers, shelling, hunger and fear transform the apartment from a place of safety into a prison. Yet the novel does something more than document the violence surrounding the protagonist. It records what war feels like in the body: insomnia, terror, hunger, exhaustion, and the constant anticipation of death. Conventional histories of war tend to privilege battlefields, political negotiations, military leaders, and armed combatants. Yet Al-Samman asks us to look elsewhere. The protagonist’s manuscript, written under siege, becomes an alternative archive, preserving experiences that might otherwise disappear. The home becomes a site of resistance, while the female body becomes a record of a war that official narratives cannot fully capture.
When a broken story tells the truth
Etel Adnan approaches the problem of remembering differently. Her Sitt Marie Rose, The Arab Apocalypse, Of Cities and Women, and her visual art refuse to offer a single, coherent version of the Lebanese Civil War. Instead, Adnan gives us fragments, contradictions, symbols, and ruined, blood-red landscapes. Her work captures the experiences of living through violence when the familiar structures that make life intelligible—home, city, community, language, and identity—are themselves fractured.
In Sitt Marie Rose, Adnan recounts the story of Marie Rose Boulos, a Christian educator who worked with Palestinian refugees. Marie Rose’s commitment to crossing sectarian boundaries places her in direct conflict with the patriarchal and sectarian logic of the war. Her murder exposes how women’s bodies and choices become battlegrounds for competing ideas of community, loyalty, and nation.
In The Arab Apocalypse, Adnan takes fragmentation even further. Language itself seems to break apart. Words, images and symbols collide, while recurring suns and ruined landscapes replace the orderly historical timeline we might expect.
These works create another way of remembering. Adnan’s fragments resist the demand to make war appear coherent, reconciled, or safely contained in the past. Her art keeps the wounds visible. The result is an archive without the appearance of an archive: no official monument, no single narrative, no authorised voice. Memory survives instead through images, fragments, landscapes and voices that refuse to settle into one version of history.
Can humour remember war?
Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now? takes yet another approach. The film is set in an unnamed Lebanese village divided by sectarian tensions. Its women are determined to prevent the men from turning those divisions into violence. But they do not confront the men through conventional political power. Instead, they destroy radios, manipulate religious symbols, hire Ukrainian dancers to distract the men, and even drug their meals to keep weapons out of their hands. The scenes are absurd and often genuinely funny. But the humour conceals a serious question: who carries the responsibility for remembering what war does to a community?
Labaki’s women know what another cycle of violence will cost. While their interventions are acts of care, they are also acts of historical resistance. They try to prevent the past from becoming the future. The film therefore turns women’s everyday labour—mourning, caring, organising, persuading, protecting—into political action. Its unnamed village also transforms the story into a wider reflection on communities divided by violence: what happens when neighbours become enemies, and when the wounds of one generation become the inheritance of the next?
Beyond preserving the past
What connects Al-Samman, Adnan, and Labaki is not simply that they write about the Lebanese Civil War, but how they remember it.
Al-Samman records the war through the female body and the domestic space. Adnan fragments its history through literature, symbols and visual art. Labaki transforms remembrance into tragicomedy, showing women attempting to interrupt the repetition of violence. Together, their different forms create what I call “alternative archives”: cultural memory that exists outside official institutions and challenges the silences surrounding the conflict. They challenge official institutions’ authority over what counts as history and reshape our understanding of feminist resistance; for these women are not simply adding women’s experiences to an established history of the Lebanese Civil War. They question how history is produced, showing that women’s fear, grief, survival, creativity, care and resistance are not secondary to the “real” history of war; rather, they are history itself. A monument can preserve a name; a textbook can preserve a date; an archive can preserve a document. But a novel can preserve a feeling; a painting can preserve a wound; a film can preserve a gesture; and a woman’s testimony can preserve what an official history leaves behind.
When official history falls silent, remembering becomes more than looking backwards. It becomes a struggle over who has the right to tell the story and, ultimately, who has the right to imagine what comes next.
Revision, I’ve been told again and again, is the key to effective writing. Yet sometimes I find myself making an essay or chapter worse when I revise it. I introduce new errors, garble sentences or paragraphs that once seemed clear, and add whole paragraphs that I later decide to cut.
Here’s what I’ve noticed myself doing:
Making new typos. When I see something that needs to be fixed, I type what I think will fix it, often glancing down at the keyboard. Then I move on to the next problem, forgetting to proof the correction and thus introducing new problems. I need to slow down.
Overlooking the obvious. Autocorrect catches the most egregious typos, like “fpor” for “for” or “teh” for “the.” But it does not correct word substitutions, for example when you type “work” for “word.” Errors may be almost too simple to notice because you are reading what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote. You might miss a substitution like “iconically” for “ironically” or “principle” for “principal” (or vice versa). I once mistakenly referred to The Elements of Style authors Strunk and White as Stunk and White, an error overlooked by the copyeditor and proofreader as well. We were all processing the word we predicted to be there rather than what actually was on the page.
Trying to satisfy everyone. In terms of content, I sometimes make things worse when I forget who my audience really is and try too hard to satisfy particular comments by reviewers, editors, or beta-readers. This can result in my over-explaining certain points or adding tangential asides. When I re-revise, I find myself wondering, Why did I add that? It helps to keep your eventual ideal reader in your head (or at least over your shoulder) and resist the impulse to go along with every suggestion.
Fussing too much with syntax. On more than one occasion, I’ve noticed myself revising a sentence to (try to) make it clearer but leaving in an extra word or ending from the earlier version that turns the new version into word salad. Writing about early twentieth-century scientists’ speculation about the Martian canals, I wrote that they were once believed to be “a means for transporting water.” My revision read that they were believed to be “a means for Martians to transporting water.” Oops. When I revised the phrase “the study’s aim is to clarify perceptions of dialect,” my revised version read “the aim of the study is to undercover the average person’s perception of dialect.” I had “undercover” rather than “uncover.” And when I try to resolve the reference of vague pronouns by adding in names, I sometimes forget to double-check the spelling, so Schultz becomes Shultz, and Carlsen becomes Carlson.
Understanding strengths and weaknesses. Over the course of my career, I’ve noticed that my writing gets more convoluted when I am expounding on a theoretical or technical point as opposed to when I am narrating a story. So now I pay particular attention to clarity in places where I write about abstractions rather than about people and actions. Make a list of your own strengths and weaknesses and use it to focus your revisions.
Two suggestions. The track changes feature looks messy, but I suggest leaving it on as you revise so that you can do targeted reproofing of your revisions and corrections. Or better yet, read your work aloud so you don’t fall into the trap of seeing what you think you wrote.
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!.
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