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Hobnobbing with a hillbilly

It is unimaginable how many denigrating names people have invented for our breadwinners and shepherds! Those names were, I assume, coined by city dwellers who did not want to soil their hands with earth and manure. Urban dwellers are urbane and genteel, while dwellers in villages are villains. Right? To be sure, those are the most extreme traces of the medieval (feudal) attitude toward the populace, but our more modern vocabulary is neither more tolerant nor gentler.

A look at some of the better-known synonyms for hillbilly is worth an effort. One such word is hayseed, a late sixteenth-century metaphor, now, at least in the US, mainly remembered as meaning “comical rustic.” (Rustics, except in the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, are comical by definition, aren’t they?) Now, what is wrong with the inconspicuous, tiny hayseeds, “grass seeds obtained from hay,” as dictionaries very properly inform us. Yet a hayseed is also one of the names for a country bumpkin. The suffix –kin in bumpkin is Dutch (as in mannikin, napkin, Wilkins, and the unforgettable bare bodkin), so that the entire noun bumpkin is probably also of Dutch origin. It seems to mean “a little tree” (implying a blockhead?).

Wood has not fared well in our metaphors. For instance, Russian dubina “a big wooden stick” (stress on the second syllable; the word more or less rhymes with English farina) means “idiot.” The root bump– in bumpkin ends in an excrescent sound (that is, a sound added without etymological justification: see the post for last week) and means “wood,” as do English beam and German Baum. The implication seems to be clear, because wood is neither gentle nor genteel. A wooden smile will hardly meet with a sweet response. Nor is a wooden gait graceful. However, a bumpkin does not have to be a country dweller. Oliver Goldsmith introduced a rather endearing spoiled brat and trickster Tony Lumkin in his play She Stoops to Conquer. The name, modeled on bumpkin, became proverbial. Tony was not a “hayseed.”

Back to the countryside, where one is expected to meet numerous hicks and rubes. Surprisingly, hick is Hick, a doublet of Rick (Richard), just as Hob is a doublet of Rob, and Hodger of Roger. The union of h and r has a long and interesting history, but it is anybody’s guess why just Hick became a synonym for bumpkin. We may also ask why our genteel restroom is called john and sometimes jenny, while Shakespeare’s contemporaries used a jake for the same purpose. Words from names are countless, and you need a historical linguist, rather than any Tom, Dick, and Harry, to explain their origin. Modesty prevents me from discussing dick, but Richard arrived at Dick by way of its rhyming partner Rick (who, as we have seen, is also Hick). Hick is as good a synonym for “country bumkin” as any other.

More words like bumkin? Take joskin. It sometimes seems that any name, supposedly or really common, might acquire the sense “hayseed.” Yet most peasants were never called Hick! The same holds for Rube, briefly mentioned above. Rube is short for Reuben. According to the story known from the Old Testament, Reuben came to a sad end, but to repeat, Reuben/Rube was never among the most popular names in the English-speaking world, and especially in the countryside. Why then are hicks also called rubes? Just to commemorate a man cursed by his father and to transfer the guilt to an uncultivated villager? Incidentally, some of the names mentioned above are rather recent, a fact that complicates our story even more.

The stock of names for hayseeds and their ilk is almost inexhaustible. Louts and lubbers (the latter as in landlubber) join this motley, nondescript company. Lout is supposedly related to a verb meaning “to bend” (by way of “clown”?). No one takes this derivation seriously, but every dictionary mentions it with a question mark. Lubber is also problematic. Its Old French lookalike does mean “swindler,” but though Middle English may have borrowed such a word from French, more likely, lobur ~ lobeor ~ lobre was part of the Common European slang of the lower classes and criminals (such words existed; this jargon or argot, is called Gaunersprache and Rotwelsch in German).

Another etymology traces lubber to Middle Dutch lobben “clown” (again clown!) with reference to words for “lump.” More probably, the French, Dutch, and English nouns are indeed part of thieves’ (wandering traders’, strollers’) late medieval jargon, used in several parts of Europe. The very word slang may have a similar origin. See the post for September 28, 2016 (“The origin of the word ‘slang’ is known”) and the comments.

The king of hayseeds is probably the hillbilly. The etymology of hillbilly is of course clear, isn’t it? By no means! To this subject the entire next post will be devoted.

POSTSCRIPT

1. Last week, I mentioned William Bates, the author of an excellent essay on the origin of limerick in Notes and Queries, and expressed my regret that I could not find any information about him. As usual, my colleague Dr. Stephen Goranson came to the rescue. This circumstance did not surprise me. Over the years, I have often witnessed his uncanny ability to ferret out all kinds of well-hidden information. This time, he sent me an obituary of Dr. Bates (1821-1884) from the Birmingham Daily Post, an important regional newspaper. Willian Bates, a surgeon, was also well-known in the world of art and literature. The short obituary made a special mention of his contributions to Notes and Queries. A century and a half ago, permanent association with NQ might make one famous or at least distinguished. Those were days! I may add that my database of English etymology features fifteen contributions by William Bates to word origins. No doubt, he also wrote on other subjects. Incidentally, I, too, searched for William Bates and found two celebrities called this, but not the one unearthed by Stephen Goranson.

2. I have a rich database of obscure proverbs and idioms. Here is one of them: “Those that eat cherries with great persons shall have their eyes sprinkled out with stones.” Its analogues have been recorded in German, Romanian, and in a famous medieval Dutch poem. Such an elaborately picturesque and seemingly usleless proverb! Does anyone know its source? Perhaps Dr. Wolfgang Mieder, our great specialist in this area, will enlighten us. Anyway, enjoy a peaceful image of eating cherries below.

_{Featured image: A group of farmers harvesting paddy in Bangladesh. Photo by Zaheed Sarwer Khan. CC-BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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A tortuous journey: the word <i>pamphlet</i>

In English, pamphlet is synonymous with booklet, brochure, but in some other modern European languages, a pamphlet makes one rather think of its synonym lampoon. The word surfaced in writing in 1415, and only two things are clear about its origin: pamphlet did not carry political overtones when it was coined, and it must have had a foreign source (or, because of its spelling with ph, was at least understood to be a loan from Latin or Greek).

It is astounding how often and how passionately scholars and amateurs at one time discussed the origin of pamphlet in the popular press. The main vehicle was, as usual, Notes and Queries, but no old etymological dictionary missed the word. The OED online presents a clear picture of the history of the word and supports a well-argued etymology, which was first offered in 1874 by the great French philologist Gaston Paris in Revue Critique, for September 26, 1874, p. 107. The full OED volume with the letter P appeared in 1909.

These are the main old hypotheses about the derivation of pamphlet. Perhaps the etymon is the French phrase par un filet “(held together) by a thread,” with reference to a single occurrence of the word written as paunflet (as though panflet, with u inserted) and an additional reference to French brochure “brochure” (brocher “to stitch together”; see a picture of a relatively old brochure in the heading). This etymon has been offered and rejected many times, because pamphlets contained a page or two, without a cover, and did not have to be connected by means of a thread.

Another suggested source was papyrus, and I might have passed it by as devoid of interest if it had not been defended by Frank Chance, a talented philologist. In some form this hypothesis can already be found in Stephen Skinner’s 1671 etymological dictionary of English. Chance believed that in a word like papyrus the consonant m might easily be inserted (another insertion!). He cited a few analogs of this phenomenon but not English empty: this adjective goes back to ǣmtig. Also,sumpter “packhorse” developed from Old French som(m)etier; in it the entire group mp is excrescent (that is, added without etymological justification). The Old Dutch noun pampier meant “paper.” Frank Chace believed that pampinus and papyrus “got mixed up.” There is a cruel law of etymology: the more complicated the proposed derivation, the greater the certainty that it is wrong. Not without regret, I have to dismiss Chance’s hypothesis as unrealistic.

A somewhat similar guess was offered in 1889 by Richard Stephen Charnock, a good folklorist but a totally unreliable word historian: “…from Spanish papeléta, diminutive of papél paper from which, with an infixed m, pamphlets might have been formed.” Why the infix, and why Spanish?

Naturally, Walter W. Skeat did not stay away from this discussion either. He reconstructed the date when papyrus probably turned up in English texts and came to the conclusion “that the word must be French, with a Greek root.” And here the Greek historian named Pamphila appeared on the scene (she was discovered long before Skeat in this context). Pamphila lived in the first century CE and enjoyed great popularity. Her multiple works are, it appears, lost. As far as our word is concerned, the posited way must have been from the author’s name to a common noun. The process is common. For instance, we may say that travelers take a Baedeker when they go abroad. Yet in the latest edition of A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Skeat wrote: “Etymology quite uncertain. We find French pamphile, the knave of clubs, from the Greek name Pamphilus. Similarly, I should suppose that there was a French form *pamphilet [the asterisk denotes here and below a reconstructed form] or Late Latinpamphilētus, coined from Latin Pamphila….” At the end of the entry, he added a noncommittal reference to Gaston Paris.

Pamphlets were erotic (“amatory”) tracts, and as early as 1344, Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and a great bibliophile, recollected in his book Philoliblon (“The Love of Books”) that the youths of his generation had cared more for fat palfreys than for leanpanfletos (sic). In those days, students were advised to stay away from pamphlets! Surely, the learned Pamphila need not interest us in this context. Such was also the opinion of Hensleigh Wedgwood, Skeat’s main predecessor in the area of English etymology. Another Pamphila, responsible for the manufacture of silk, enjoys renown. She cannot be the heroine of our tale either.

The most detailed summary of older views on the history of the word pamphlet will be found in an article by William Bates (Notes and Queries 3/V, 1864, 187-169; see also NQ 3/IV, 1864, 325). I am sorry that I could not find any information about this extremely knowledgeable man.

The second edition of The Century Dictionary summarized some of the attempts to explain the derivation of pamphlet and listed four main hypotheses: 1) from a supposed Old French *paum-fueillet (as though “a leaf of paper held in the hand”), 2) from a supposed Medieval Latin *pagina filata “a threaded (sewed) leaf,” 3) from a supposed use of French par un filet “by a thread,” and 4) from a supposed Old French *pamfilet, Medieval Latin *pamfiletus, resting upon a name Pamphilus or Pamphila, of Greek origin. And here is the corollary at the end of the entry: “The last conjecture is plausible (compare the like personal origin of donet, a grammar, from the name Donatus, and of French calepin, a notebook, from the name Calepinus), but historic proofs are lacking.” My reference to Baedeker is less exotic. Yet I tend to agree with the conclusion by the Century Dictionary.

These are the reasons for my uncertainty. It is usually believed that pamphlet emerged in French, made its way into English, and was later retranslated by French. Perhaps so. I can only add that though words from names and titles are fine, no one, not even the knave of clubs, was called Pamphlet! It is understood that –et in pamphlet is a French suffix. English, –let (as in rivulet, bracelet, and their likes) seems to have emerged in English a century and a half later than the word that interests us. It seems that in 1415, no one in England would have divided pamphlet into pamph-let, but the new noun may have sounded vulgar. Sound groups like pump, pomp, pimp are sound-imitative (the German noun Pumpf means “a fart”). Perhaps this circumstance contributed to the word’s popularity among students. And as for the sound f after m in pamphlet, compare English humph, with its exotic spelling ph!

POSTSCRIPT

1. After the reemergence of this blog, two of our readers expressed their joy that THE OXOFORD ETYMOLOGIST is back on track. I am deeply grateful for their comments.

2. In connection with my derivation of yeoman, a reader reminded us of the British river yeo and suggested that the earliest yeomen might be recruited from that area. I could find no evidence of this connection, while the existence of another word with yeo– (which I mentioned) and of the Dutch cognate of yeo– seem to point in another direction.

3. In commenting on the history of limerick (see the previous post), Stephen Goranson pointed out that during the Civil War in the US, the phrase come to Limerick meant “get to the point, come to terms,” in connection with the Treaty of Limerick (1691). This is a most welcome reference. Search the Internet for THE TREATY OF LIMERICK.

_{Featured image: Pamphlet, “Adieux de madame la duchesse de Polignac aux francois,” 1789. Photo by Eliasdo, CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}

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Bob Turvey, a student of limericks

I have recently read two books by Bob Turvey: The Secret Life of Limericks (Ithaca, NY, 2024. 286 pp.), and Why Are Limericks Called Limericks: An Etymological Detective Story (Bristol, England: Waldegrave Publishing, 2025. 295 pp.). The first book was sponsored by The Mad Duck Coalition, about which I know nothing and am not certain whether it should be featured among the publishers. This, however, matters little, because what really matters is the author’s career and achievement. Last week, I promised to write about his books and am happy to be able to keep my promise.

The author’s career is certainly worthy of mention. Bob Turvey has a doctorate from Cambridge University. As a research chemist he worked in many countries and now lives in Bristol, England. He devoted forty years to studying the history of limericks, spared no money on buying old and recondite books, and never stopped learning more and more about his subject. Probably no one in the world knows half as much about limericks as he does, and therefore, I first envisaged a limerick in his honor, composed in my best Bristol fashion. “A limerick, new, for Bob Turvey?! / Indeed, but it went topsy-turvy. / Neither reason nor rhyme. / I am not in my prime, / Though still unabashedly vervy.” Too bad! I mean the self-effacing admission, but at least this is the first occurrence of the adjective vervy in English. Does the OED take note of blogs?

The earlier of the aforementioned volumes contain the history of eighteen famous limericks. By the way, according to Turvey, here is the most often translated limerick ever: “There was an old man of Boolong/ Who frightened the birds with his song/ It wasn’t the words/ Which astonished the birds/ But the horrible dooble-ontong.” This masterpiece is now almost forgotten, or perhaps it has fallen into temporary desuetude. One wonders what there is to study, while dealing with this or any limerick. Many, many things. First of all, the references. For example, what is and where is Boolong? Is it Boulogne? And why is French entendre pronounced in this ridiculous way? It turned out that such was indeed the way people pronounced the French group –endre when, for example, Dickens and Thackeray were active. No, it did not “turn out”: the fact had to be discovered and documented.

And who composed the limerick? We are not delving into the epoch of Homer or even Shakespeare: no limerick predates the nineteenth century. But popular limericks are almost folklore, and finding their authors is like chasing the author of “Little Red Riding Hood.” (By the way, as Jack Zipes has shown, this tale did probably have an individual author!) And here I am coming to one of the main points of my report.

The first printed version of nearly all limericks appeared in students’ magazines at Oxford/Cambridge or in newspapers. Bob Turvey sifted through tens of thousands of pages in British, American, Canadian, and Australian magazines and newspapers, many of which can now (fortunately) be found online, and sometimes (!) he ran into what seemed to be the first occurrence of the printed text. (I know only too well this labor of love, though in hunting for articles and long-forgotten notes on etymology I limited myself to journals and popular magazines. I realized that I would drown in newspapers, with their word columns and answers to the readers’ queries, and stayed away from this inexhaustible source.) But even the seemingly secure result may not be final. Thus, the author of the Boolong limerick remains undiscovered, though at least two viable candidates have emerged as such.

Is this labor worth the trouble? To my mind, certainly. To give an example from another area. Recently, a piece of music has emerged, with the notes written by Chopin. The piece has been known for years, and yet the discovery was hailed as a great sensation. And quite rightly so: Chopin’s own hand! Limericks are a noticeable part of the culture of the English-speaking world, and their history deserves the attention of those who care for culture. Unfortunately, “history” is made up of tiny details. Only later may they be assembled to produce an impressive whole. Bob Turvey collected countless fragments, and the mosaic he produced is impressive. I should add that he is often satisfied with negative results: he might not be able to find the exact date and the sought-for author, but always succeeded in rejecting fanciful hypotheses. Once again I see a parallel to my work. Sifting through numerous hypotheses of a word’s origin, I often manage to get rid of silly or fanciful conjectures but fail to discover the truth. Such is the way of all reconstruction, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

Note my reference above to the culture of the English-speaking world. Limericks can also be produced in other languages, but only English speakers compose them by the hundreds. Bob Turvey noted how hard it often is for foreigners to understand the funniest limericks. He ascribed this fact to the specific English sense of humor, but his examples feature the people whose knowledge of English is inadequate for detecting a pun or a hidden reference. Though the English (French, Jewish) sense of humor certainly exists, we still don’t know why Edward Lear’s 1846 The Book of Nonsense was such a success. Limericks, though not called limericks, existed before him.

As noted, Turvey’s second volume is titled Why Are Limericks Called Limericks? But the book is also about when and who. The earliest mention the word limerick Bob Turvey dug up goes back to 1879, that is, at least a decade earlier than what one could find in old dictionaries. Now 1879 is also the date given in the OED online. Rather probably, limericks were called limericks because they were sung between verses of a song whose chorus included the name Limerick and typically invited the listener “to come to Limerick.” Why come to Limerick? The question remains open. For comfort, you will see a view of that town in the heading of this post. Anyone with a better derivation of the word limerick is welcome to contest this hypothesis. Limerick is certainly not a “corrupted” form of Learick.

You expected a sensation and received a reasonable hypothesis. That’s because the author of the books discussed above bases his conclusions on facts and is not interested in sensations. He is a true scholar.

POSTSCRIPT

I have recently received two questions. Since I am not sure when I’ll be able to post the next issue of my traditional gleanings, I’ll answer both right now. 1) Some people believe that the idiom chock a block is a loan from Turkish, in which an identical word means the same. This conjecture looks unconvincing, because their proponents are unable to show how the Turkish idiom reached English. In chock a block, the word chock is the same as in chockfull. 2) Another correspondent cited a Polish word, whose Russian cognate is diuzhii “strong,” and asked me whether I know it. Yes, I do. It is a cognate of English doughty and German tüchtig, whose origin has been explained quite well.

_{Featured image: King John’s Castle in Limerick by Eric the Fish. CC-by-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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This old <i>house</i> and these old <i>houses</i>

I don’t recall the first time I noticed the pronunciation of houses as HOWsiz with a voiceless s sound rather than HOWziz with a voiced z. But I remember thinking: “That’s weird. I wonder if houses is becoming regularized. Historically, the word is one of those nouns whose singular and plural stems alternate between voiceless and voiceled sounds. The most prominent examples of such alternations involve f and v, as in singular/plural pairs like wife and wives, life and lives, leaf and leaves, etc.

With the f/v alternation, the sound change is reflected as a spelling change, but not so with house and houses. The pair house/houses is the only example of an s/z alteration between the singular and the plural, though there are other s/z alternations in English, like louse and lousy, lost and lose, useful and use, et. cetera.

I checked to see what dictionaries had to say about house and houses. The online Merriam Webster Dictionary gives the pronunciation ˈhau̇-zəz also -səz, where the “also” indicates a less common pronunciation. The online American Heritage Dictionary (based on the 2011 5^th edition) gives both houʹ zĭz and houʹ sĭz for the plural, also recognizing the new pronunciation. 

The Oxford English Dictionary, however, gives British English /ˈhaʊzᵻz/ and U.S. English /ˈhaʊzəz/, both with the z sound, and just differing in the height of the final vowel. Webster’s Third (from 1963) gives hau̇z͘ ə̇z and flags hau̇s ə̇z as “chiefly substandard.” Going back a few decades, the 1934 Webster’s Second only gives the z pronunciations.

The difference in transcriptions systems notwithstanding, what all of this suggests is that in the mid-twentieth century the HOWsiz variant was common enough to be noticed but had not yet been sanctioned by elite pronouncers. Webster’s Second ignored it, Webster Third shakes a finger at it, and today’s Merriam.com is fine with either variant. 

So what happened? Most other nouns ending in –se don’t change their pronunciation in the plural (horse, case, blouse, course, excuse, lease, base, purse, vise, etc.), so perhaps houses is undergoing some analogical leveling (as we linguists call this regularization). Even though house is a fairly common word, and such words tend to preserve their irregularity, houses has finally come around. Reinforcing the contrast with the verb house, which ends in a z-sound, could also be a factor. And what about the possessive forms, like that house’s color? For me, the first s of house’s is voiceless and most dictionaries don’t address the issue. (Webster’s Third, curiously enough, lists both options for the possessive.)

It’s worth noting too that house is not the only voiceless/voiced alternation that is not reflected in spelling. It’s just the only one with an s. A smallish number of words ending in th also show alternation between singular voiceless th (as in thin) and plural voiced th (as in then): mouth and mouths, baths and baths, wreathe and wreathes often show alternation of the two variants ofth. 

In a 2018 article in the journal Language Variation and Change, titled “Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð∼θ]s of change,” linguist

Laurel MacKenzie of New York University reported on the frequencies of devoicing in more than 2,000 tokens of words in spoken corpora. MacKenzie looked at a number of factors, such as the age and gender of the speaker, the surrounding sounds and morphemes, and more. She found that houses was pronounced with a stem-final s about 50% of the time, with younger speakers leading the way: the voiced z pronunciation was present for about 65% of speakers born in the 1940s but dropped to a rate of 38% among speakers born in the 1980s. The voiceless/voiced alternation of th is also being lost. And as one might expect, the words where spelling reinforces the alternation (like knife and knives) are have better retention of the voiceless/voiced alternation. 

When I first noticed the HOWsiz pronunciation, it was already pretty robust. I may not switch my pronunciation of houses, but I’m going to be listening more carefully to these plurals.

_{Featured image by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash.}

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Labor and luck in etymology

The blog is back on track, and I’ll begin where I left off in August. I am now reading two books on the history and etymology of limerick by Mr. Bob Turvey. He spent forty years researching the subject, and I’ll devote a special post to his work, but at the moment, I can offer only “point counter point”: this short essay is about how worthwhile conclusions come as a reward for an unpredictable encounter or chance knowledge. All the examples are from my own experience, and I have written about them in the past, but they will perhaps make a stronger impression when collected in one place.

An especially enigmatic English word (enigmatic with regard to its origin) is yeoman, which surfaced in written texts in roughly the middle of the thirteenth century (obviously, it existed in speech some time before it was recorded). The riddle is yeo-. The etymology, half-heartedly (?) supported by the revised OED (the entry was touched up last in 2025), traces yeo– to young. I assume that my hypothesis is more realistic, because, for phonetic reasons, yeo- cannot be traced to young.

Now back to coincidence and luck. In my research, I look through numerous books, on the off-chance that they may contain some information I need. In an obscure book on Dutch linguistics, I came across a detailed discussion of the English dialectal noun yeomath “a second-year crop of grass,” which, predictably, the OED also records, and the entry contains a sagacious guess about yeo– that provides a good but not final clue to this enigmatic sound group. Young grass? No, the prefix means “additional.” With regard to the details, see the post for June 17, 2009. A yeoman was, quite probably, understood as an “added man.” In nearly seven years since 2009, neither Wikipedia nor etymonline (both are sensitive to new hypotheses) has commented on my suggestion, and I decided to repeat it here. I also contributed an essay on yeoman to an excellent Festschrift, but alas, the scholarly climate has changed dramatically since the nineteenth century. Such volumes, honoring retired and still active philologists, are now so numerous that even specialists have a hard time following them.

Watch one more attack on grassroots. English fog means “thick mist,” but in dialects, fog also refers to “second-year crop.” This time, it was a different kind of luck that provided a clue to the riddle. How can “fog” and “grass” be connected? By an accident of birth, my native language is Russian, and I know the Russian words par “steam, vapor” and par “field left under steam/vapor.” Both have the root meaning “to become damp, moist.” Fog, with its final g, is almost certainly a word of Scandinavian origin (English words, like sedge. ridge, bridge, and so forth, end an affricate). Related to this fog is, quite probably, German feucht “damp.” The same semantic thread connects Russian par¹ and par² as the two English nouns. If I did not know Russian, this analogy would never have occurred to me.

Another reward for knowing Russian may not impress too many of our readers, because that key word is Icelandic, rather than English. Yet the case is curious. Icelandic glenna refers to all kinds of open spaces, from “a ray of sunshine” and “a deceptive move in wrestling” to “a clearing in the forest” and “perineum” (hear, hear!). It also means “joke” and all kinds of trickery. Given enough ingenuity, semantic bridges can be built between any two concepts, but still, “joke” and “perineum”?

I decided to look up Russian shutka “joke” in etymological dictionaries and discovered that its Bulgarian cognate means “vagina.” This sense left Bulgarian researchers nonplused. But Icelandic glenna explains everything. We remember “perineum,” don’t we? In the past, shutka referred to a quick motion, leap (with the legs spread wide!), and the like. Henceanytype of opening. The sought for connection becomes clear when we look at all the old senses of shutka and the word’s related forms. But who knows Icelandic, Russian, and Bulgarian?

Until roughly the 1870s, most specialists in comparative philology were Germans. As we have seen, to connect glenna and shutka, an inquisitive linguist should be aware of the relevant Russian and Icelandic words and “accidentally” note the otherwise hidden connection. Too bad, I have never studied Welsh, Ewe, and Japanese. What precious associations must be left fallow in them, as far as I am concerned! A few historical linguists of old, Jacob Grimm and Antoine Meillet among them, knew many languages. Today, their peers are rare. To exacerbate the situation, famous polyglots, those who can talk glibly in thirty or more languages, are seldom endowed with great analytic abilities. As St. Exupéry’s Fox remarked sadly, nothing in the world is perfect.

My most amusing discovery, which I have celebrated more than once in my publications, concerns the origin of the noun pimp. See also the post for June 7, 2007. The word did not interest me, but while reading an old dialectal dictionary, I ran into the entry “pimp ‘faggot’.” I was surprised by the proximity of two infamous nouns with sexual connotations and discovered that the origin of pimp is “contested.” It is “contested,” because older English etymologists did not know the German word Pimpf, while German scholars had no idea of English pimps. Pimpf refers to a youth and specifically, to a member of the youth organization under Hitler. Like Engl. pimp and pimple, it has a root meaning “to swell” (faggots, that is, bundles of sticks, are, it follows, big pimps!).

Finally, galoot “an awkward fellow.” Like pimp, it revealed its history to me by chance. An article on Italian seafaring terms made me aware of the Italian noun galeotto “galley slave; scoundrel.” The rest was plain sailing. My etymology, proposed first in the post for July 23, 2008, has had some recognition, but alas, Webster and the OED keep saying “origin unknown.” I am patient. Everything comes to him who waits, and I hope that the tie I suggested will one day gain wider recognition.

Luck? To be sure. But to quote Tchaikovsky, inspiration never visits the lazy.

_{Featured image: Yeomen of the Guard, in procession to St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, for the annual service of the Order of the Garter. Philip Allfrey, CC-by-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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