. Why are jig, jog, and jug such etymological nightmares, and where did I'll be jiggered come from? Anatoly Liberman chases a few sound-imitative j-words, then answers readers who asked who needs spelling reform in the age of spellcheck and AI. OUPblog ...
As a general rule, native English nouns, adjectives, and verbs are not supposed to begin with j. And indeed, many of them are loans: consider joy, jealous, join, and their likes. However, sometimes the initial letter of words, borrowed from French or Latin, happens to be g (as in gentle, genealogy, germane, and others). A few g-words are confusing. Benighted foreigners never know how to pronounce the likes of –gin and also wonder why gilt is a homophone of guilt and why the second syllable of begin and the liquor gin are pronounced differently if they are spelled alike. Those who have read my last week’s post on reforming English spelling will remember what I am talking about.
The unforgettable Mr. Jingle. Image viaWikimedia Commons. Public domain.
As far as etymology is concerned, we often know that a word is of Romance origin, but its early history is obscure or even beyond reconstruction. Jag, jog, jug, jeer, jump, and most probably, jig are native, and yet they are etymological nightmares. One also runs into juggins (slang) “simpleton,” about whose history nothing is known. Onomatopoeic? Probably. And remember Mr. Pickwick’s foil, the unforgettable Mr. Alfred Jingle, with his bizarre speech habits. He did not bear his name for nothing.
The regular readers of this blog must be sick and tired of my never-ending references to emotional, sound symbolic, and sound-imitative words. But if they have a better explanation of the origin of jig ~ jag ~ jog, I’ll be grateful for a tip. Some such words, jazz and jowl, among them, have been discussed many times, with slender success, as nineteenth-century British authors liked to say. Even the etymology of jaw is obscure (see the post “Cheek by Jowl” from August 21, 2022).
My database contains a small selection of notes, published in 1894-1895, on the phrase I’m ~ I’ll be jiggered. (I am jiggered up “I am done” is also known.) I’ll be jiggered surfaced in an 1837 book but acquired popularity after it occurred in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). In Dickens’s days, even boys were warned against profuse swearing. Those who did not dare utter the unpronounceable “I am buggered” used jiggered, a permitted substitute. And the timidest among them said sugared. (Today, regardless of your age, you can enjoy the fourth edition of Jesse Sheidlower’s book The F-Word: a marvelous collection of examples. Read and learn. The publisher is OUP.)
Some people derived jigger from snigger “to giggle,” which is a synonym of snicker. (Incidentally, snigger and niggardly are NOT offensive words, but you never know who is listening, so use both carefully.) Snigger, which has nothing to do with jigger, is a variant of snicker. Both verbs are sound-imitative. In Admiral Smyth’s 1867 Sailor’s Word-Book (wonderful reading!), jiggered up is cited as meaning “used up, exhausted” (slang; here jigger is the name of a small tackle or a wooden bandsaw, a homonym of jigger “to snicker”). A word like jig or jigger will mean what you want it to mean, very much in the spirit of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland. In England, a hundred and fifty years ago, jigging it also meant “playing the truant,” and Old French giguer meant “to romp around, play wanton tricks,” a homonym, rather than the source, of English jig.
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. Image by John Tenniel viaWikimedia Commons. Public domain.
To add even more confusion to this story, I should add that also a jigger flea exists. The creature is sometimes known as “chico,” but jigger perhaps does more credit to the pest’s alacrity. Russian chik-chik means “clip-clip, snip-snip.” Obviously, jig–jig and chik-chik imitate a quick movement equally well, but jig is more expressive, because it begins with a voiced sound.
Spelling Reform Again
I’ll now return to my already mentioned previous post on Spelling Reform, because it called forth several responses. In addition to the comments, published a week ago, I received a friendly letter asking me who needs the Reform, given our spellchecks and AI, now that technology has made thinking almost redundant. I should also refer to my post of July 6, 2022, which called forth several friendly comments.
Let me make it clear: those who have mastered English spelling do not need the Reform: itcan benefit only the youngest among us and future generations. Indeed, spellchecks and AI are wonderful, but they exist for those who can already write English and know, for example, that write begins with w and is different from rite, right, and wright.
The first responders to my recent post mounted such a high horse that I feel overawed. Allegedly, I speak tongue in cheek. No, I made my suggestions in dead earnest. Another scornful question was: “What has the Spelling Society learned in 150 years of its existence?” It has learned a good deal. First, that the literate public will always oppose the Reform. Second, that such a reform is possible, as the history of countries from Russia to Spain and from Germany to Iceland has shown. Third, that though the most stubborn opponents of the Reform have no idea of what they are talking about, their obduracy has successfully killed the change that might benefit us all. Finally, that reforming irrational English spelling in one fell swoop is a utopian project, but the idea of moving at a snail’s pace may have potential.
One of the most often repeated and least convincing arguments against the Reform is that it will sever etymological ties between and among words. What ties? Latin had honor, Old French had (h)onor and (h)onur, Middle English had both honor and honour. What was lost when Webster changed honour to honor? Honor without its initial h will look odd to us. Let it stay for a while, though the Italians don’t mind onore!
The letter h has etymological justification in exhale, exhaust, exhibit, exhilarate, exhort, and exhume. But how many speakers of Modern English know anything about –haust, –hibit, and the rest? And how many of them recognize even the tie between exhilarate and hilarious? Incidentally, h in those words even does some harm, because it suggests the pronunciation ks, rather than gz, after e. In any case, isn’t it more reasonable to teach Latin by offering courses in Latin than through English spelling? And I dare ask: What do today’s learners and most of their English teachers know about etymology? Ladies and gentlemen, what century is it outside?
Every single objection to the Reform was known and refuted a hundred and fifty years ago. Our opponents have no idea of this history, have never read even Skeat (to mention the most famous name: see the end of this essay) and can only say contemptuously: “A bad idea. Nonsense.” What about some informed and honest polemic?
Proceedings of the British Academy, 1905-1905. Image via the author.
I agree with the remark that the more common a usage, the harder it is to change it. Hence the idea of first making such changes as may or even should not irritate anyone. The problem is to persuade the public that their children and millions of children all over the world, including those still unborn, will benefit from at least some simplification of our irrational, maddeningly hard spelling, which is not worthy of learning. The main thing is to find influential supporters. It is not the money that we are talking about. Believe me: an old fighter for the Reform, I am jiggered.
And here is a passage from Skeat’s 1906 speech: “I remember very well… meeting with a passage in the works of so popular an author as Bulwer Lytton… in which modern English spelling is frankly declared to have been the invention of the devil; because it is unlikely that any other being could have hit upon a system which, to all appearances, is so chaotic, so inconsistent, and so contradictory in many instances to common sense.”
Like Mr. Micauwber, I have thrown the gauntlet to the bedeviled society. Will anyone pick it up?
The English Spelling Society was founded in 1908. This was a good time for the reformers. Great people, like G. B. Shaw and Walter W. Skeat, among quite a few others, supported the movement and hoped that it would be possible to make English spelling look more humane. But time worked against the reformers. The World War, the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, and the triumph of the Nazis in Germany, followed by another, even more devastating war, pushed many worthy projects into the background.
An almost invisible inconvenience. Photo by Jesse Rorabaugh via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0 (public domain).
Among the chaos of the twentieth century, the ills of the irrational English spelling began to look like almost invisible inconveniences. Still later, computers came into being, spellcheckers were invented, and then AI speedily outsmarted the best of us. Against that background, the Reform lost appeal even to the few remaining enthusiasts. But the Society did not die. Nor did the problems, once addressed by people like Shaw, Skeat, and their allies go away.
Now, perhaps more than at any time in the past, English spelling cries to be reformed, because most of the world uses English as a vital means of communication, and people from east to west learn to read and write English. EVERYBODY will gain if we dispense with c in acquire, the second m in communal, and the second f in sufficient. I have of course cited only a few egregious examples, to illustrate my thesis.
Last week, the Spelling Society, of which I am President (an honorary post; all the work is done in the UK), convened a congress in London, and it would be wrong to say that the mood was invariably upbeat. The Devil’s Advocate even suggested that the Society should be disbanded, because no progress had been achieved since 1908, and it is unclear whether the future looks rosier than the past. Yet I am pleased to report that the Society will continue its activities and address not only spelling but also literacy in the broadest sense of the term. This, I believe, was a good decision.
Writing is inseparable from reading in the time-honored concert of three R’s. Paradoxically, though today more people are literate than ever, fewer read books. The young live in a digitalized cloud, glued to their mobile phones. Though some teachers are horrified, as always, the larger world has more pressing business to attend to. Yet its indifference to spelling is not the only obstacle in the way of the Reform. There is no unanimity among the members of the Society in what direction and how far theReform should go. And here I will risk offering a few suggestions. As I understand, quite a few members of the Society share my views, and some of them have put forth similar proposals before.
To repeat: those who have mastered the intricacies of English spelling tend to resist the idea of a sweeping change and possibly of any change. Literate people have spent years learning the spelling of leaden and its likes and will be reluctant to admit that if the adjective acquires the form leden, their troubles were not worth the effort. In my opinion, our only hope to make progress is to adopt a minimalist program, trying to reach the desired goal by alienating no one and taking one small step after another over possibly several decades.
This is where I think we should begin. Get rid of the letters whose absence few will regret: co(m)munity, mis(c)e(l)lany, ca(n)nibal, co(r)ruscate, su(f)ficient, and their likes. If image bothers no one, scrimage with one m may also be acceptable to everybody. (Note my careful emphasis on everybody!) It is also reasonable to leave alone horrors like the borrowed words conscientious, colonel, and fuchsia, along with the native monsters through, laugh, eerie, and their ilk. Their time will come.
This is fuchsia. The word fuchsia cannot be respelled, because it commemorates the Renaissance botanist Leonard Fuchs (1501-1566). Left: Photo by Dominicus Johannes Bergsma via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. Right: Image by Heinrich Füllmaurer via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Images combined.
Here are a few more stray examples of the losses no one should rue: dumb, numb, thumb, succumb. Climb is more controversial, because clim is out of the question, and clime will collide with its homonym. (Who expects consistency in the erratic world of English spelling!) One more important case. I am convinced that wherever possible, we should suggest regularizing g before the i ~ e and introduce j in the likes of gibberish. Changegin (liquor) to jin and enjoy the beauty of James Joyce’s phrase jejune Jesuit.
Open the bottle and let the jinnie out! Photo by ismaellabrador via Pixabay. Public domain.
I am not ready to lay out an extensive list of words in need of respelling. At this stage, our modest goal is, as I believe, to change at least something without offending anyone. Not only dyed in the wool conservatives will be up in arms if we suggest respelling come, gone, eight, sure, and sugar. However, most will perhaps tolerate occupy with one c and succumb also with one c and without b. Let us appease the conservatives. The next step will (I hope) turn scullion and scrub into skullion and skrub and introduce other relatively non-traumatic changes, but this is not the time to envision a distant future. Let me repeat: the problem is how to talk the world into starting the reform. If some members vote against any version of the minimalist program, we may go ahead without their consent.
Help to the Society won’t come from high legislative bodies. MP’s, congressmen, and senators are too busy to notice us. Who then is interested? Teachers, including teachers of special education. This means that their organizations may join our fight for the Reform. It makes sense to explain to them that we are their close allies and that we need a campaign from them in support of our efforts, rather than their money. Foreigners from all over the world. The groups to contact are the people who teach English as a second language and perhaps a few friendly embassies.
Media. Couldn’t we talk to the editors of magazines like Playboy, Newsweek, VanityFair, and so forth into joining our push for the Reform? They might place pictures of an unhappy child, trying to spell occurrence or wondering why quiz is not kwiz? (By the way, some European languages have abolished the letter q.) Our “influencers” and idols (rappers, comedians, producers, and eccentric billionaires) might perhaps be talked into helping an organization (I mean us, our Spelling Society) that does not need their funds but would be grateful for publicizing a worthy effort. Fun conquers the world. Vulgar? Not a bit. Just common sense. The English-speaking world has no official bodies to regulate spelling. We may achieve progress only with the help of popular culture.
Spelling reforms, drastic or moderate, overcame the resistance of opponents in Russia, Germany, France, and most recently, in Spain. Useful updates have been made in all the Scandinavian countries, including Iceland. Noah Webster modified American English spelling. We, English spelling reformers, should move slowly and probably stop discussing grand and grandiose projects. Nor is consistency our goal. Full and fill are spelt with two l’s, but fulfil wisely ignores this circumstance! English spelling will never achieve the finish and finesse of Finnish. Let us achieve what we can.
In the header you will see an image of G. B. Shaw’s play Androcles and the Lion. Search the Internet to find out what this image has to do with today’s story.
Featured image: Androcles and the Lion, staged at Indiana University, from “Arbutus” (1921). Public domain viaWikimedia Commons.
Older dictionaries sometimes informed their readers that Modern English has two different verbs: bid “to ask for something” (also “to command”) and bid “to pray.” This statement is hardly true: bid “to pray” is obsolete and forgotten. The principal parts of bid (bade, bidden) are rather rare, and most of us probably bade farewell to them long ago (my computer even told me to avoid bade). Bidden is recognized, if at all, only in the phrase (translated from Latin) “bidden or unbidden, God is present.” By contrast, forbade and especially forbidden are very much alive.
Enjoy a good view of a monk wearing a cassock. Photo by Sion30001 via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
The history of the verb bid and its family is full of surprises. For example, those who never studied Old English may not know that the noun bead is related to bid. Yet if you think of the aforementioned bid “pray” and the phrase telling beads, things will fall into place. The earliest evidence for the word bead in texts does not antedate the fourteenth century. In the plural, it meant “prayer” and by extension, “rosary.” Curiously, the tautological phrases to bidbeads “to tell prayers” and bidding prayer existed. My students in the course “German and European Culture to 1700” never heard or saw the word cassock. Perhaps rosary is an equally unfamiliar word to the young? If so, have a look at the header. Another image (below) features a cassock.
In one of my recent posts (Sept 16, 2026), you could see a portrait of the Venerable Bede. As must be clear by now, the monastic name Bede (Beda) meant “prayer.” Unfortunately, nothing is known about the early childhood of this great man. Even his birth name has not come down to us.
Why should bid have combined the seemingly irreconcilable senses “offer” and “pray”? The situation becomes clear when we look at German. There we find two (!) different verbs: bieten “to offer” and beten “to pray.” In English, their cognates (the forms related to them) merged. It follows that if we want to explore the origin of bid, we should study the history of two words, and this is what we will now do.
For the sense “offer” (Old English –bēodan) Gothic, that is, the fourth-century Gothic Bible, had an exact cognate, namely –biudan (I have left out the prefix). Similar cognates abound all over the Indo-European languages, and probably the original sense of this ancient verb was “observe; wake.” We don’t know why the sound complex b-d had this sense: there is nothing “symbolic” or sound-imitative about it. However (small comfort), we can explain why forbid has its modern meaning “disallow.” The prefix for– often points to rejection, repudiation, and destruction: compare get and forget, swear and forswear. Even fordo “to destroy, wreck” once existed, alongside several other equally fear-inspiring verbs.
Let us now look at the history of beten “to pray” (the other of the two German verbs, related to our subject) and its cognates. The sense “pray” is late: it does not antedate the conversion of the Germanic speakers to Christianity. The original sense was mundane: “to ask for something.” The related Gothic and German nouns also meant “prayer,” but the Gothic noun with the same root translated Greek prosaítēs “beggar,” which makes the verb’s original, nonreligious sense (that is, “ask”) obvious.
Once again, we cannot help wondering why the root b-d held that attraction to speakers millennia ago. Yet we also find it in the verb meaning “to wait.” English bide is probably remembered only in the phrase “to bide one’s time.” Its cognates meant “to request; compel, exercise a moral constraint,” “compel” probably being the oldest sense. The related Russian noun beda “misfortune,” stress on the second syllable, means “misfortune.” The spectrum of the Slavic cognates (from “calamity” to “danger”) derives naturally from the basic sense “to compel.” We seem to be dealing with a word having broad Indo-European connections.
Another English verb belonging to this family is bode, remembered, if at all, only in the phrases “it does not bode well” and “it bodes ill.” But at one time, it meant “to announce” and was formed from the root of Old English boda “messenger” (the German for “messenger” is still Bote). Bid, one of whose senses is “to command,” forms a weak semantic bridge between it and boda. Semantics is like ivy: words crawl all over the place, cling to one another, or get disconnected, and the original ties between and among them are often hard to reconstruct.
Bid “ask, pray” is obviously not a synonym of bid “to command.” Its Gothic cognate was bidjan (the same meaning). In Modern German, we find bitten “to request.” And indeed, as concerns etymology, this verb has nothing to do with those mentioned above. (Forbid is related to bid as forget is to get; see above).
Here is a big BAD wolf. Bad is a b-d word, but has nothing to do with our story. Photo by christels via Pixabay. Public domain.
We may again ask ourselves what magic the root b-d contained that so many words stemmed from it. To repeat, it was obviously not sound-imitative: just two voiced consonants. Vowels varied in them according to the rules of Old Germanic and served grammar, rather than etymology (from the present to the past, and so on). Nor can we detect any “symbolic” value in them. Or did a combination of two voiced stops in quick succession (b/d/ b/g, and their likes) all kinds of emotions? There is no one to ask, and we are not likely to solve the riddle that bothers me. Too bad. (Bad has nothing to do with the words discussed above!)
Questions
1. British versus American English
Here is a sentence from a newspaper: “In [place name deleted] one in seven children live in poverty.” This grammar has always struck me as odd. Doesn’t the subject one require the singular lives? I asked AI, and the answer surprised me. AI said that in American English lives is the only accepted form, while in British English live is correct. I often encounter such sentences in American newspapers (the only ones I read), and, contrary to AI’s statement, the form I see is always plural! Isn’t everybody’s experience the same? What form prevails in British English? Can our readers from the UK enlighten me? I also think that “one OF seven children” would never be followed by a plural verb. Does IN emphasize the idea of multitude, while OF stresses exclusion?
One of/in seven dwarfs is/are in love with Snow White. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
This comic strip is about Ruthie, her brother, and her playmate James, among others. Here is a typical sample: “And look—see here! She done left me gold coins.” “James, it’s chocolate inside.” “Hey, I ain’t complainin’!”
Is this version of English “cute”? Ruthie is six years old. James is probably her age. He “speaks funny.” But she takes Zealand for ceilin(g) and pirate for parrot. She was much smarter several years ago. What has happened? Like Rosa Dartle, I ask merely for information. (Incidentally, it was Dickens, rather than Oscar Wilde, who coined this unforgettable phrase.)
Words beginning with shr- ~ schr- ~scr– have bothered me for years, partly because of German Schreck “horror.” Three of my old posts are devoted to this fear-inspiring group: consider shrimp, shrew, and scram (the posts for April 18, 2012,May 2, 2012, andJuly 29, 2020). Of those, only shrimp turned out to be peaceful. English shr– and skr– ~ scr– are twins (triplets?).
Below, I will return to those groups for the last time. Recently, I have been paying more and more attention to expressive words of all kinds and stumbled at my old acquaintances, first of all at shrivel. Obviously, an expressive word? There is a certain danger in a hunt like mine. Etymologists (and probably many other researchers) tend to find what they are looking for. Leo Spitzer, an outstanding Romance linguist, wrote numerous papers on the origin of etymologically obscure English words, and somehow it turned out that all them were of French origin. Another excellent philologist, Stefán Einarsson, an Icelander, also tackled some etymological problems. He invariably discovered light in Icelandic.
I learned a lot from both of them, admire their insights, but fear becoming a slave to a preconceived idea. Language, as most specialists believe, was expressive at its conception. It of course still is, but up to a point. The problem is just this “point”: one wonders where to stop. For example, boat (see the beautiful image in the header), such a prosaic word, an onomatopoeia? Boat?! James A.H. Murray, the great first editor of the OED, despaired of finding the origin of this intractable noun and exclaimed that he gives up—perhaps boat is an onomatopoeia! One of the readers of my essay (see the blog for October 5, 2011: “From Ship to Boat”) found the idea acceptable: waves beat against the vessel baht-baht-baht (in the past, boat had a long vowel, as in today’s spa). The OEDonline provides valuable notes on the etymology of boat but cannot offer a solution (for the obvious reason: given the evidence at our disposal, the riddle is insoluble).
Let us now look at some words beginning with shr-. Shred (related to shroud) has the root that at one time began with scr– (that is, skr-). Isn’t skr-skr the sound we hear when shredding something? Dozens of words in the Indo-European languages (verbs and nouns, from shred to scrotum) have been referred to this root. But as I keep repeating year in, year out, this kind of root is not more inspiring that a common denominator. How did that root originate? It seems to have been an onomatopoeia. Shrill and scratch are classic examples. Of course, the picture is not so uniform.
Some, shrew, for example, almost certainly, have a different origin (see the reference at the beginning of this essay), but most are indeed either sound-imitative or “emotional.” German etymologists have given up Schrulle “quirk, whim, vagary” and call it a fanciful formation, which it probably is. Outside the likes of shriek, shrill, and shrivel, we find quite a few “emotional” words beginning with scr-, for example, scrap, scrape, scrub, scrawl, and scream. In English, the consonant group scr-, unless it is from a Romance source (as, for instance, in script), is usually of Scandinavian origin.
I have always wondered why English speakers needed Northerners to teach them how to say scramble, scrape, scratch, scrawl, scream, screech, and scrub. (See some vague remarks on this subject at the end of this essay.) Incidentally, it was only Walter W.Skeat who traced all the verbs listed above to Scandinavian. The OED said about scramble: “Of unknown origin.” The same verdict appears in the OEDonline. The few additional note on this verdict leave the verb in its obscurity. TheOxford Dictionary of English Etymology(1965) called scramble a word “of symbolic origin” (this is water to my mill!) and a blend (or a portmanteauword) of dialectal scamble (said to have been known to Shakespeare) and its old synonym cramble. I do not know who suggested this solution and have no opinion about its second half.
Finally, the 1914 reprint of The Century Dictionary declared scramble to be a frequentativeform of the dialectal verb scramb (that is, to scramble was explained as “to scramb regularly or many times”). We are also told that scramb “to pull or scrape together with the hands” emerged as a variant of scramp (also dialectal) “to catch,” “probably a nasalized form of scrape,” which “conformed to the series scrimp, scrump, etc.” Scrump does not appear in TheCenturyDictionary. Only scrumptious (the word that years ago made me study the entire group) does, but nothing quotable can be found about its origin there. Very complicated! Let those who consult reference books beware.
A screeching, shrieking forest demon. Image: forest demon by Stiller Beobachter. CC-BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Be that as it may, English scr– words are usually of Scandinavian origin, because this ancient Germanic consonant group yielded shr– in English. English shrill and shriek must be imitative. The situation with schr– in German is partly the same. I have mentioned Schreck and Schrulle above. Schramme means “scratch” (a noun), and I know this word, mainly because it made all the way into Russian, though Russian shram means “scar.” German Schrat “forest demon” is a word “of unknown origin.” Its Scandinavian cousin is scratti. The word may be sound-imitative (this is my idea), but etymologists do not know for sure and probably never will. Demons are secretive creatures, even though they tend to make a lot of noise and scare people. They scratch, scrape, perhaps screech, scream, and do other scr– ~ skr- things, to scare people.
In Old Germanic, words designating “noise” sometimes began with hr– (this situation is typical of many other languages of the world). Such were, for instance, Old English hrēam, hræfn “raven” (called this for its cry), and quite a few other words, one of them being rattle, which had hr– in the past. When later, h- was lost before r, such words also lost their connection with noise, and English began to borrow Scandinavian skr– words with gusto. I am not saying that the borrowing happened because the native hr- words lost their h-, but a certain “emotional” gap in the vocabulary did occur, and it was filled with loanwords.
My initial plan was to write an essay about the origin of the verbs shrink and shrivel. Also, I did not doubt that German schrumpfen (the same meaning) is their next of kin. But my database yielded very few results. No publications emerged about the distantetymology of those words: just one essay by a Swedish researcher went great lengths toward showing that shrivel is a verb of Scandinavian descent (if so, the northern word was “Englished” later: skr– changed to shr). Perhaps if one is mainly interested in shrinking and shriveling, it is unrealistic to expect greater profit.
Scholars tend to find what they look for. The bear and the honey, engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
PS.I am pleased to thank our readers for the comments and one correction!
Feature image: Nswo statuette with its dugout canoe and paddle, Sakata. Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren. Photograph by Ji-Elle. CC-BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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.
In Of Cities and Women, Adnan reimagines Beirut through personal memory and encounters with the city, challenging the idea that its history fits into a single narrative. Her attention to women, displacement, and place offers a gendered reimagining of the city and its histories.
Adnan’s visual art performs a similar archival function without relying on documentary representation. Landscapes and abstract forms become traces through which loss, destruction, and memory remain visible.
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.
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