When I read slowly, I’m a somewhat easily distracted reader. I might ponder an idea, puzzle at a phrasing, or admire elegance and style. Sometimes, though, it is unexpected words that cause me to stop and wonder about their origins. OUPblog - Academic ...
When I read slowly, I’m a somewhat easily distracted reader. I might ponder an idea, puzzle at a phrasing, or admire elegance and style. Sometimes, though, it is unexpected words that cause me to stop and wonder about their origins.
Here are a handful of expressions that have sent me to the dictionary: “shades of,” “craned her neck,” “sported a new hat,” “madcap kids,” “stool pigeon” and “moniker.” They all put my reading on pause. When I encountered them, I pondered a bit, jotted down the words so I’d remember to research them, and got back to what I was reading.
Here’s what I learned.
Shades of is related to shadows and to shadow-like nuances. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, from about 1818, shades of was used, “in humorous invocation of the spirit of a deceased person,” with the implication that the deceased person would be horrified or amazed at what was going on. The dictionary notes that it is no longer exclusively humorous and can now refer to some person or thing that is reminiscent of a present happening. So to say “shades of Bruce Springsteen” would be to invoke the Boss’s image or music as a point of comparison.
To crane one’s neck is from 1799, according to the OED, and means “To stretch (the neck) like a crane,” and it even has the variant to crane one’s head. The crane in question is the bird, of course, though cranes for lifting have been around for millennia (think Archimedes or the Egyptian pyramids). But the mechanical ones have only been called cranes since 1487, also getting their name from the bird.
The verb to sport is fearsomely complicated and has nothing to do with football. It wends its way back to disport, meaning “to divert, amuse or entertain” often with a reflexive. Over time sport came to refer to the act of amusing oneself or frolicking, often outdoors. Sport also developed the meaning of “to display” something ostentatiously or to say something publicly. Since about 1778, it could mean “to wear”, and the OED gives the example of “Some macaroni Barristers [who] have presumed to sport Bags and Pig-Tails.” “Macaroni barristers” refer to ones wearing fashionable Italian and French styles—eighteenth century hipsters.
Madcap, it turns out, began as a noun, with a first citation from 1589, meaning a madman, and within a few years the word was also used as an adjective. The suggested etymology is mad + cap, where cap has the metaphorical sense of “head.” And the OED points us to such similar uses as goose-cap, huff-cap, and fuddle-cap for a simpleton, a swaggerer, and a drunk. All are now obsolete.
When I hear stool pigeon, I think of a criminal who snitches on cohorts to make a deal. But it turns out to refer back to the practice of using a decoy bird tied to a moving stool to attract its fellows. The OED treats stool pigeon as US usage from about 1804 to indicate first a literal decoy and later an informer. An 1804 citation refers to a turtle “exhibited like a stool pigeon to a parcel of geese, in expectation that it would encrease the flock” and in 1844 we find “Those secret partners, by gamblers, are termed ropers, or stool-pigeons: their business is to delude the inexperienced into their dens of iniquity.” A few years later, we get an 1850 citation that “The senior high constable of Philadelphia … recollected that Harry White … who he had been lately using as a ‘stool pigeon’, or secret informer, had informed him … that ‘a big thing’ was coming off shortly.”
Moniker is still a bit of a stumper to me. The OED gives it as “origin uncertain” with an earliest citation from 1851. One suggestion is that it arose from a slang usage for eke-name (meaning nickname). Other ideas relate it to the words monarch or monogram. The scholar R.A.S. Macalister, in The Secret Languages of Ireland (1937), suggests its origin can be found in the mixed language Shelta (sometimes called Tinker’s Cant or simply The Cant). Macalister posits the Shelta word munika meaning name, and this idea is developed further in a 2007 essay by William Sayres called “Moniker: Etymology and Lexicographical History.” That’s the latest word on moniker.
Since I started writing this piece, I’ve come across new words and phrases to puzzle over and research: cheapskate, right as rain, beck and call, chockful, and bespoke. I’m off to the dictionary again.
The word good does a lot of work in English. Aside from its garden-variety sense (as in “good game” or “good job” or “good dog”), we find the word has a number of extended uses. For example, it shows up in the funky expression “good and …” which means “very” when connected with short adjectives (“good and smart,” “good and hot,” “good and ugly”).
The expression “I’m good” is especially interesting. As a reply to “How’re you doing?” it can be a replacement for “I’m well,” “I’m fine,” or “I’m okay” (acceptable to all but the snarkiest of prescriptivists). “I’m good” also has a related sense in which it expresses satiation or satisfaction and implies refusal. When a server brings more coffee around or the bartender points to your empty glass, you might hold up a palm and say “I’m good.” Here “I’m good” is an indirect way of saying “No, thanks.”
In fact, “I’m good” is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary with the sense “no thank you; I’m not in need of anything.” The OED gives it as originally a US usage, with a first citation from 1966 in John Ball’s novel The Cool Cottontail. Asked if he wants another beer, detective Virgil Tibbs replies, “I’m still good, thanks.”
“I’m good” can also indicate a negative reply to a suggestion, as in this 2003 OED example from the Toronto Star:
‘Try these on Paige,’ says Emma, holding up the smallest pair of pink shorts I’ve ever seen in my life.
‘Thanks, I’m good!’ I tell her, laughing.
That was a definite “No” on the pink shorts. But sometimes “I’m good” seems to signal agreement. If you are planning to meet someone, you might propose a time by saying “Can we meet at 7:30?” and get a reply that “I’m good.” This may be a reduction of phrases like “I’m good with that.” Similarly, if you are inquiring of a friend or significant other whether they are prepared to do something. you might ask “Are you just about ready?” A possible reply (one of many), might be “I’m good.” Again this could be a reduction of “I’m good to go” or a response to an implied disjunction “Are you ready or do you have to go to the bathroom?” In the latter case, “I’m good” can indicate “No, I don’t need more time.”
Sometimes the meaning of “I’m good” is in the eye of the beholder. The linguist John Rickford recounts an incident involving two African American sisters who were on a bus that was being checked by Drug Enforcement Agency agents. When an agent asked if he could search their bags, one sister said yes. When he asked the other sister if he could search her, she said “I’m good,” which the agent took as “Okay.” He discovered some drugs and arrested the woman. She contested the search, and Rickford presented a long deposition giving evidence about the meaning and frequency of “I’m good” to mean “No, thanks.” The case ended in a plea deal with time served—two years. So the next time you say “I’m good,” stop to consider what you might be saying.
I miss a lot of things about the decline of paper newspapers, especially the comic strips. The comics were verbal humor with pictures and recurring characters, and the language of the comics provided a window into how spoken language was represented in print.
I was particularly taken with the swearing symbols known as grawlixes. That’s a term coined by Charles D. Rice of This Week magazine, and popularized by the Beetle Baily creator Mort Walker. Typically, Walker’s grawlixes came from blustery Sarge, cursing at his men for being slackers. As an artist, Walker didn’t limit himself to punctuation marks, sometimes adding hand-drawn lightning bolts, stars, squiggles and jagged lines as well. For those of us who are not artists, a grawlix is typically made from the characters on top of the number row of a keyboard: the at-sign (@), the pound sign (#), the dollar sign ($), the percent sign (%), the ampersand (&), and the asterisk (*), along with the exclamation mark.
Symbol swearing didn’t begin with Mort Walker or Charles Rice. Examples have been traced back to newspaper comics around the turn of the turn-of-the-(twentieth)-century like The Katzenjammers Kids, by the German immigrant Rudolf Dirks, and the Lady Bountiful strip by Gene Carr. And the Belgian comics historian Thierry Smolderen spotted an even earlier use in a 160-page book from 1877 called Lightning Flashes and Electric Dashes: A Volume of Choice Telegraphic Literature, Humor, Fun, Wit & Wisdom. Grawlixes made their way to comic books as well as strips, particularly under the Comics Code Authority which lasted from 1954 till 2011. In an early issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, Daily Bugle editor J. Jonah Jameson complains that he doesn’t have “one %$!!?#$#!* photographer” to cover a big story. Along with their use in comics and comic books, grawlixes have also shown up in book and television show titles. There was the short-lived CBS comedy $#*! My Dad Says, adapted from the 2011 book Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern.
Grawlixes, or obscenicons as linguist Ben Zimmer has dubbed them, call to mind the so-called minced oaths of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists: gadzooks for “By God’s hooks” and zounds for “By God’s wounds,” or the replacement forms gosh darn, heck, fudge, and so on. And they serve the same purpose as abbreviations like SOB and WTF. Such replacements simultaneously pretend to protect readers from being offended and protect writers from stepping over a line. Sometimes propriety is maintained by replacing all but the first letter with a hyphenated –word, as in the title of Jesse Sheidlower’s splendid study The F-Word. On occasion you can see the label censored replacing a bit of swearing, or in some older journalistic practice the phrase [expletive deleted].
We probably don’t want to consider a single * to be a grawlix, but rather a redaction, and the * is pretty common in book titles. There is Adam Mansbach’s book Go the F*ck to Sleep, whose cover replaces the missing vowel with a moon, Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, andMelissa Mohr’s Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing.
Grawlixes like $#*! or replacements like sh*t sometimes need to be read aloud. $#*! My Dad Says was referred to as Bleep My Dad Says on air, but the full word was used in the audiobook. The same is the case for Go the F*ck to Sleep and Holy Sh*t. It’s hard to imagine pronouncing the *s.
Redacted forms and grawlixes also offer some complications to indexers as well. The Guidelines for Alphabetical Arrangement of Letters and Sorting of Numerals and Other Symbols put out by the National Information Standards Organization advises alphabetizing symbols before numbers and letters (and putting numbers before letters). But practices seem to vary. The index to Micheal Adams’s In Praise of Profanity, indexes shit before s**t and fuck before both f–k and f**k. However, the very first entry in that index is @#%&*! Smilers, a reference to the 2008 album by singer-songwriter Aimee Mann. Grawlixes and redactions are increasingly rare, but there’s a lot to them. No $#*!
A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate course on “Cons, Cults, and Conspiracy Theories,” exploring the connections and parallels among those phenomena. Many of my students had some experience with cons, often from work in the service industry. Several also had relatives who had been in cults of various ilks. However, students were overwhelmingly skeptical of conspiracies theories. As we explored the three c’s, I found myself struggling with the term “conspiracy theory.” The term “theory” lends a patina a of scientific thought and rigor that is often lacking in fabulist conspiracy narratives.
The term “conspiracy theory” has a long history. It is sometimes erroneously attributed to the US Central Intelligence Agency, but, according to Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, the term can be found in nineteenth-century press accounts of trials and in the coverage of the assassination of US President James Garfield.
In academic use, the term “conspiracy theory of society” was popularized by Karl Popper in a pair of papers delivered in 1948, and later in the second edition of his book The Open Society in 1952. Popper described it as
the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed) and who have planned and conspired to bring it about
—Popper, The Open Society, 1952, 94
Popper’s discussions sparked spirited commentary among other philosophers, part of which hinged on the distinction between a particular account of something as due to a conspiracy (the 1969 moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, the September 11th attacks, the COVID pandemic, etc.) and the more general tendency of looking for cabals of hidden conspirators behind all sorts of historical events.
As my students and I talked though the distinction and poked at it in various ways, we started to use the term conspiracism to refer to the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories. Some studies, such as those of Stephen Lewandowsky and colleagues, refer to this as “conspiracy ideation,” and scholars have studied the attitudes and mindset that go along with it. I found myself preferring “conspiracism” to “conspiracy ideation” because it is more concise and is parallel with other -isms—and because it suggests the self-deluding aspect of many believers in conspiracy theories. “Ideation,” like “theory,” feels academic and reasoned.
In addition, the term “conspiracy theory” itself is problematic in other ways, as scholars such as Jesse Walker (and my undergraduates) have noted. The term is loaded with negative connotations as well as positive ones. Today, “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” suggest tinfoil-hat beliefs in the wildest counter-factual narratives and the fuzziest thinking. And to make matters even more complicated, there are actual conspiracies in the world—political, criminal, business—and before they are confirmed as actual conspiracies, there might be “theories” about what happened. Once the conspiracy is confirmed, we tend not to refer to it with the word “theory.” No one talks about the conspiracy theory of Watergate, for example. Rhetorically, there are conspiracies, theories about conspiracies (which are subject to evidence constraints), and “conspiracy theories” (which are not if you are a conspiracist).
A friend of mine once suggested that such unfalsifiable “conspiracy theories” be treated as fan-fiction about history and current event. That’s a bit unwieldy and does a disservice to fan-fiction, I think. But the notion underscores the way in which conspiracy theories typically have key fabulists and promoters and a dedicated fan base of believers. Maybe we should start referring to them as “conspiracy fiction.”
As a linguist, I know that I can’t control usage other than by example, but I’m going to start referring to “conspiracy fiction” and “conspiracism.” Maybe the terms will catch on.
It sometimes seems that the greater the exposure of a body part, the greater the chance of its having an ancient (truly ancient!) name. This rule works for foot, partly for eye and ear, and also for heart (even though the heart isn’t typically open to direct observation), but it breaks down for finger, toe, and leg. In any case, beards cannot easily be hidden, even with our passion for masks. Moreover, through millennia, beards have played a role far in excess of their importance, and beard is indeed a very old word. A beard used to manifest virility and strength in an almost mystical way. We remember the story of Samson: once deprived of his beard, he became a weakling and had to wait until the hair grew again on his chin, to wreak vengeance on his enemies. The earliest example of clean-shaven in The Oxford EnglishDictionary (OED online) goes back to 1863 (in a poem by Longfellow!), while beardless was usually applied to boy and young man.
Five years ago, I discussed, among other things, the origin of the idiom to go to Jericho, roughly synonymous with to go to hell. Judging by what turns up on the Internet, today, the origin of the phrase is known to those who are interested in etymology, but Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912) claimed that he could not find any explanation for it and referred to the Old Testament (2 Sam. X. 5 and 1 Chron. X. 5). He appears to have been the first to explain the phrase.
The story runs as follows: after the death of the king of the Ammonites, David sent his envoys to Hanun, the son of the deceased king, to comfort him. But Hanun’s counselors suspected treason, seized the envoys, had half of their beards cut off, and sent the men back. This incautious move resulted in a protracted war and the defeat of the Ammonites. When David’s envoys, deeply humiliated and almost beardless, returned home, David advised them to “tarry at Jericho till their beards were grown.” In their present shape, they were “emasculated” and could not be seen in public.
This is all that remains of Jericho today. Photo by Bukvoed. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The Scandinavian god Thorr. Image: Thor, Hymir, and the Midgard Serpent, 1906. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Reference to the absence of a beard is familiar from various sources. Thus, Njál, the protagonist of the most famous Icelandic saga, was wise and virile but had almost no hair on his chin, and this defect became an object of obscene jokes. By contrast, the great Scandinavian god Thor (Þórr) did have a huge beard. More about the Scandinavians will be said below.
English beard has a few immediately recognizable cognates in Germanic, such as Dutch baard and German Bart. The Slavic and Baltic words sound nearly the same. Latin barba, despite some inconsistency in the correspondence between the final consonants, seems to belong here too. But barbarian does not. Barbarian was a Greek coinage (the Greek name for beard is quite different) and referred to foreigners and their incomprehensible babbling. Those people did say something (barabara), but who could understand them, and who cared? Perhaps it should be added that the Old Celtic name for the poet (bard) has nothing to do with beards either.
As usual, a list of cognates may not tell us anything about the ultimate origin of the word (in this case, beard), and as happens so often, we find ourselves in a linguistic desert. It is not for nothing that while discussing beard, our best dictionaries list several related forms and stop. There was indeed the Old Icelandic noun barð “edge, verge, rim” (ð has the value of th in English the), but whether it is cognate with beard is unclear. It may be: the affinity between “beard” and “edge” is obvious. If so, the association that gave rise to the coining of beard stops being obscure. (Though Icelandic barð “beard” also existed, it might be a later loan from German.)
The only other Germanic name of the beard occurred just in Icelandic, and its cognates continue into Modern Scandinavian. The word was skegg, related to Old Englishsceacga “rough hair or wool.” Its modern reflexshag still exists, but most will remember only the adjective shaggy, related to Old English sceaga “thicket of underwood and small trees; coppice, copse,” almost a doublet of sceacga, cited above.” (In my experience, no one recognizes the word coppice, and even the spellchecker does not know copse; hence my long gloss.) We have seen that in some societies, a beardless man was not really considered to be a true male, and in light of this fact we are not surprised to find that Old Icelandic skeggi meant “man” (boys of course waited for the time when they became men). Yet the famous Romans (as far as we can judge by the extant statues) were beardless, while the Greeks had sizable beards. No custom is or was universal.
George Bernard Shaw saved the word shaw from oblivion. Image: Shaw, 1911. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Coppice and copse are almost dead words in Modern English, and the same holds for shaw “thicket,” the modern reflex of sceacga, though still common in dialects and place names. The word owes its fame to GeorgeBernard Shaw. No need to feel surprised at the existence of such a surname: don’t all of us know the family name Wood?
One of the curiosities of English is the verb beard “to oppose,” remembered, if at all, only from the idiom “to beard the lion in his den.” Is the implication “to face the enemy (beard to beard)” or “to catch the opponent by the beard”? An example of this phrase also occurs in the Authorized Version of the Bible, and again in connection with David. Beards, it appears, were famous, but they had to be cut and trimmed. Thorr was an obvious exception (but in the figurine that has come down to us, his beard merges with his male organ and emphasizes his potency, which is fair: an ancient thunder god was responsible for fertility). Having paid reference to shaggy males, let us also remember barbers. Today, a barber more often cuts hair than trims beards, but the etymology of barber is obvious. The Barber of Seville immortalized the profession. Long live Beaumarchais and Rossini!
Featured image: the Florida Grand Opera presents The Barber of Seville. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
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