Few words are harder to trace to their sources than the names of clothing articles. Those names travel with the things to which they belong, and the sources are easily lost sight of. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world.
Few words are harder to trace to their sources than the names of clothing articles. Those names travel with the things to which they belong, and the sources are easily lost sight of. As regards such travels, consider the global success of the word jeans. Today, my object is the etymology of the word shoe, but the origins of boot, stocking, and sock are also worthy of note. They provide a useful background for the main story, and as regards boots on the ground, see the header.
An ideal piece of clothing in the modern world. Photo by Patherb via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Let me begin with boot. The most detailed entry on this word will be found in Henry CecilWyld’s The Universal English Dictionary. He admits that the history and the origin of the word, which seems to have originated in Germanic, are obscure. Late Latin, we are told, probably borrowed it from German, and from Latin it passed into most of the Romance languages. The early senses were “barrel, tun, leather bag” and later “leather flask; bottle.” We are of course interested in boot “covering for the feet and legs.” Here German Bottich “tub, barrel” (from bottaha) and (!) English body turn up in the entry, along with Old Englishbyden “tub, barrel” and byte “leather bottle, wine-skin.” Thus, boot refers us to body and bottle.
Are all those words related? Perhaps. But surprisingly, at body, the same excellent dictionary makes no mention of the words listed above. The etymology of body is said to be very uncertain. “Its usage and origin may be exclusively English.” Some authorities connect body and Greek, apotēkē “storehouse” (think of Engl. apothecary). Most other sources state bluntly that the origin of the word is unknown.
Unfortunately, the entry on bottle sheds no additional light on boots. It is a pity that some dictionary makers do not check their cross references. Be that as it may, the entry on boot gives us food for thought. According to the chronology available to us, Engl. boot was borrowed from Old Norse. Perhaps so, but this fact tells us nothing about the distant origin of the word. So much for boot (a meager harvest). Apparently, it referred to a receptacle, rather than a covering.
Stocking is outwardly clear: stock + ing, but what is –ing? Our revered authority Walter W.Skeat says: “Stocking is a diminutive form of stock, used as short of nether-stock. … stock means a piece or stump, a piece cut off.” Stock is clear, but a diminutive suffix –ing does not and did not exist! Stockling would have been perfect, but stocking? What then does “a diminutive form of stock” mean? The word has been in use since the sixteenth century, and we could expect its structure to be more transparent. Great expectations: it is hard to disagree with the verdict “of obscure formation.”
Sock is both less and more problematic that the words briefly discussed above. The word and its cognates have existed all over Germanic since the oldest period. The word emerged with the sense “light shoe” and only much later developed into “half-hose.” The source is undoubtedly Latin soccus, from Greek. Dictionaries say: “of Oriental origin” or more precisely, “from Asia Minor.” Somebody somewhere in (?) Asia Minor invented this foot covering, gave it an easily remembered name, and it spread all over half of Europe.
The most famous shoe ever. Cinderella sheet music cover art, unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
By this time, it won’t come as a surprise that the origin of shoe remains partly undiscovered. Shoe is a Common Germanic word. It occurred even in the fourth-century Gothic text of the New Testament, where it meant “sandal.” Incidentally, sandal, like sock, is, most probably, a word of Asiatic origin!
The oldest form of shoe must have been skōh-, and numerous attempts have been made to detect its ancient root. An old verb meaning “to go” sounds somewhat like the root of skōh-, but it is most unlikely that a name designating a covering for the foot should have been derived from the idea of moving or going. Then there was a word meaning “cover, surround,” whose sense fits the idea of “shoe” much better, and some authorities cite this word (though without much enthusiasm) as the source of shoe. The reference is not specific enough: a shoe is not a kerchief or an overcoat, and this etymology does not sound like an ideal solution to our problem.
What was meant by that ancient skōh? What kind of “footwear” (to use the commercial term that Henry Cecil Wyld detested) did it designate? “Sandal” is fine for the biblical text, but the speakers of Gothic, Old Norse, or Old English certainly did not wear sandals. We can notice some similarity between soccus, the afore mentioned etymon (source) of sock, and skōh-. If shoe and sock are indeed related, we are back in Asia but not an inch closer to the origin of the words that interest us. We may, if we wish, reconstruct the ancient root of both, but only historical linguists will be happy with this result. As always, we want to know the human impulse behind word formation. For instance, sweater owes its form to sweat, hood is related to hat, and shirt is a cognate of short, but shoe seems to be a migratory word, a loan from afar, whose etymology is now beyond reach.
Such is the situation with most articles of clothing. Look up jacket, coat, cloak, and so forth! It is also amazing that nearly all such words in English are loans from foreign languages. And this is true not only of such exotic words as chemise and kimono. Cap (of somewhat unclear origin) is from Latin, dress is from French, breeches from Irish, pants ultimately from Italian, sandals from Greek (and there, most probably, from Asia), and so it goes. The word is either foreign or of undiscovered origin, and when it is foreign, its derivation in the lending language is often also obscure. Such is the linguistic price for globalization.
Sandals might be good for Hermes in the air but not for Germanic warriors or farmers. Artwork attributed to the Tithonos Painter, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0.
A curious detail. An inherited name for “shoe” existed: Old English hrifeling, Old Norse hriflingr, Latin crepisculum, and Greek krēpís, with broad connections elsewhere, but, surprisingly, just this ancient word has not stayed even in the conservative Modern Icelandic. The ways of language are hard to predict, and a historical linguist’s shoe is too often on the other foot.
Photo by Lance Cpl. Michael Nerl via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
When I’m reading or listening to a book, I sometimes find myself momentarily drifting away from what the author is saying and worrying about words and phrases I encounter. If there is a pen nearby, I’ll make a note, saving the word or phrase for a quiet afternoon of researching.
For example, a writer discussing literary criticism was complaining about “smarty-pants intellectuals.” I could see why the genteel author chose “smarty-pants” rather than “smart-ass intellectuals,” but why is the seat of smarts in the seat of the pants? And where do “smarty-pants” and “smart-ass” come from? “Smarty-pants,” it turns out, is attested from the early 1900s as a term for a know-it-all and “smarty” (sans pants) goes back to the mid-1800s. It shows up in Mark Twain, for example, where Tom Sawyer refers to a “St. Louis smarty” who thinks too highly of himself. Smart-ass comes later, arising in the mid-twentieth century and similarly referring to a smug display of knowledge. Perhaps it comes from the earlier smart-alecky, which was used in the 19th century.
In another book, a thriller featuring a lawyer who gave up her career as a mixed-martial artist, I fixed on the phrase “cleaned my clock.” It’s a bit of American slang referring to a thorough physical thrashing, and by extension any overwhelming defeat. Since we talk about the face of a clock, the underlying metaphor here is clear: a sound defeat, say in the boxing ring, could involve having one’s features rearranged. The phrase sometimes showed up as “fixed one’s clock” or “stopped one’s clock”, and the earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1895, describes an avicide:
The man approached the bird and struck it a deadly blow with the stock of his gun…‘Old Frank [sc. a heron] ha’ done me out of many an eel—the warmint—but I ha’ cleaned his clock now.’
The present-day meaning is thankfully less fatal.
In a review of another noirish suspense novel, I spotted the phrase “hard-bitten,” used to describe a world-weary protagonist. Is it supposed to refer to someone who has been bitten hard by life? It turns out that “hard-bitten” was first used of dogs that were resolute in their biting, a usage from the 17th century. By the early 19th century, the phrase could refer to people who were “tough,” “resolute,” “hardened by experience,” or “cynical.” A citation from 1819 refers to “Some hard-bitten fellow [who] assailed the orator with a line from Swift, ‘Fine words—I wonder where you stole ’em’,” and another from 1857 described some cricket players as “such hard-bitten, wiry, whiskered fellows, that their young adversaries felt rather desponding [sic] as to the result of the morrow’s match.”
Hard-bitten carries a sense of having been chewed up by life, and I wondered how it compared with “hard-boiled.” That phrase, of course, originated with eggs, and has been used that way since the late 16th century (and later in the 19th century to refer to hard-boiled peas, hard-boiled pudding, and hard-boiled dumplings). In the early 19th century, we find ideas referred to as “hard-boiled” and, by the late 19th century, people as well, including those who were tough, cynical, ruthless, or callous. By 1928, we find examples like this blurb from Century Magazine: “A hard-boiled, two-fisted, super-sleuth of the secret service tells the story of his adventurous dealings with the underworld of all nations.” I think of the contrast this way: hard-boiled is cynical toughness and a world-weary detachment; hard-bitten is a toughness arising through struggles.
One final puzzler (for now) is the phrase “eat your heart out.” Cannibalistic zombies aside, it can be a boastful expression (“eat your heart out, bro”) or can be used to indicate actual grief. In English it originally meant the latter: to suffer pangs of longing, regret, and envy, a usage that goes back to the 16th century and seems patterned after a Greek expression. So we find this from 1651: “A man that eats out his heart with worldly cares, will never sleep an happy sleep.” And in this example from 1707, without the out, we find: “He eat his valiant Heart to see the Prey He thought his own, so bravely snatch’d away.” By the late 1950s, a U.S. variant had emerged indicating that the addressee is likely to be annoyed or envious, as in this from 1958: “The boy, after noting my pained expression after his good run, yelled over to me: ‘Eat your heart out, coach.'” The meaning and point of view of the phrase has shifted from an indication of anguish to an expression of triumph.
It is surprising how similar the verbs in the title sound, though they are antonyms: tarry means “to linger, delay,” while hurry refers to haste. One even suspects that there is some affinity (hidden attraction) between them, and perhaps there is, but on the surface they are quite different, except that both are probably native formations.
I’ll begin with hurry and quote two statements from Walter W. Skeat. This is what he wrote in 1885: “I derive this as Wedgwood does, from the imitative word to hurr, a Scandinavian word meaning to whir or whiz. I suggest that this hurr is a mere variant of whirr. I now find that Nares actually gives the verb to whurry, with the sense of ‘hurry’; with two examples. This clinches the etymology.” Hensleigh Wedgwood, it will be noted, was Skeat’s predecessor, and Robert Nares (1753-1829) is the author of a famous glossary.
Alas, nothing ever “clinches the etymology.” Here is Skeat’s final statement (1911). The abbreviations have been expanded. For sb. (that is, substantive) I used noun. “Not allied to harry. Formed from an older base hurr-. Like skurr-y from skir. Middle English horien, to hurry….. + Middle Swedish hurra, to swing, whirl round; Swedish dialectal hurra, to whirl, hurr, noun, hurry, haste. Compare Danish hurre, to hum, whir; Icelandic hurr, a noise; Middle High German hurren, to move softly. See Hurland compare whir, whiz, of similar imitative origin; whence whurry, to hurry….” Hurl is said to be perhaps of Scandinavian origin.
The volume of the OED with hurry appeared in 1899, and there the etymological section on this word is considerably more cautious than in Skeat. The same is true of the modern OED online. Hurry does not antedate late Middle English, even though a dubious earlier instance has been found. The Century Dictionary mentions hurr and whirr, “the last word well combining the two notions of rapid motion and buzzing sound.” The obsolete verb hurr meant “to buzz, hum.” The sources I have consulted also mention hurly-burly and sometimes hurrah, both of them referring to the same emotional sphere. In sum, Wedgwood’s old idea seems to have withstood the test of time.
In Germanic, numerous words mean “to hurry, to make speed.” Such are, for instance, Engl. rush, dash, and scurry. All three are also “emotional.” But a few members of this family have a convoluted history. This is true of Engl. haste and German eilen. As a rule, if the verb is not onomatopoeic, the sense “move at high speed” tends to go back to the idea of doing something with force. This fact may throw light on the question even professional language historians hardly ever ask. If English, German, and Danish already had several verbs meaning “hurry,” why coin its synonym? The answer may not be too far to seek. Instinctively, people want words to have transparent meanings. Grunt, kick, push, and their likes answer this demand, and speakers keep producing such words. Rush is iconic, and so are its German cousins rutschen and rütteln. To coin and remember them is easy. The same holds for words like jig, jog, and push. Language was probably iconic at its inception, and it partly remains such to this day. So much for hurry, which by its shape suggests the idea of moving fast.
Tarry
The Italian word chiaroscuro means, as Byron rendered it, “a clear obscure.” Clear obscure may serve as an excellent label for the history of the verb tarry. This verb has been obsolete in British English for a long time, but it is still alive in American English. Tarry surfaced in the fourteenth century in the forms tarien and terien “to provoke, worry, vex.” The original OED has a long note on the history and etymology of the verb, and so does the OED online. The latter cites numerous opinions on the history of the verb but does not provide references. My database contains only one important title (a paper by LeoSpitzer) and nothing postdating 1947. Apparently, the history of the verb has been given up as hopelessly controversial.
The difficulty is obvious. As just mentioned, the oldest known senses of tarry are “to worry, vex,” while today it means “to delay, linger.” The only solution, supposedly, reconciling those senses, has been known for a long time: it is believed that the English verb was influenced by Old French targer “to delay,” related to Latin tardus “tardy.” But don’t the paths of “vex” and “tardy” cross?
Tarry “worry, vex” has numerous cognates outside English (especially in Slavic and Baltic. Note, for example, Russian drat’ “to pull or strip with force.”) Such verbs also mean “rub; tie a knot” and even “torment”—obviously, figurative senses. We seem to be dealing here with a series of words related to labor activities, and all or most of those activities (cf. rubbing and tying knots) are slow. I would like to suggest that the oldest attested senses of tarry “worry, vex” are late, figurative (worry itself once meant “strangle, choke”!). It may also be of interest to remember that linger has the same root as long. Tarry, I assume, emerged as a verb denoting a protracted action. It is of course possible that Old French targer crossed the path of its English lookalike and reinforced its original sense.
Ernest Weekley summed up the problem of tarry most succinctly: where the senses match, phonetics fails us, and where the phonetic correspondences are perfect, the senses diverge. However, if, in light of the multiple cognates, we assume that the earliest recorded Middle English sense of tarry (“to vex, harass”) is late, going back to “perform a difficult time-consuming process,” “delay” will fit the phonetic and semantic mosaic quite well. And did tarry ever interact with hurry, so that they began to look like cousins? That we’ll never know.
I have said more than once that a conscientious researcher fears two things: to say something trivial (then there was no need to say it) or to say something new (then perhaps the idea is wrong). In each scenario, the researcher may become the target of severe criticism or ridicule. Have I solved the age-long riddle of tarry? It is not for me to decide. In any case, though like a medieval archer, I shot my bolt, I tried to make haste slowly.
A medieval archer shoots his bolt. Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1391. MS1029. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
POSTSCRIPT
Once again, my thanks are due to Professor Wraith, who noted my wrong division of the Russian word medved’ “bear.” See the blog “On big and little foxes.” The correct division is med(v)-ed’, that is, “honey-eater.”
This is a Russian bear, an expert in honey. The bear and the honey, engraving by Wenceslaus Hollar. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Featured image: Photo by IgorShubin via Pixabay. Public domain.
This is a story about how the fox got its name. I discussed the word fox ten years ago (see the post for March 23, 2016), but today I have more to say about the subject.
Rudyard Kipling devoted many wonderful pages to elephants, camels, porcupines, and other animals in his Just SoStories but neglected the fox. Yet over the centuries and millennia, no other beast has engaged people’s imagination more than the fox. Wikipedia has an entry on Joel Chandler Harris’s 1880 book about the Br’er Rabbit cycle (Br’er “brother”), but the author of the entry did not mention the readership of that book abroad. Yet it so happened that in 1936 the book was translated into Russian, became immensely popular, and I grew up reading it.
Surprisingly, during my many years of teaching folklore at the University of Minnesota, I don’t remember meeting anyone who knew those tales. It may be different in the south. The fictional Uncle Remus was a slave from Alabama entertaining the owner’s son. This context is revolting, but the tales are wonderful. In the twentieth century, researchers of oral tradition studied African folklore very well, and some sceptics’ idea that Harris fabricated the tales was refuted once and for all. Analogs of those animal tales are known very well, though in Africa, the rabbit’s counterpart turned out to be the antelope.
Br’er Rabbit is a brilliant trickster. His main enemy is Br’er Fox, whom he always outwits. Yet elsewhere in the wide world of folklore, it is the fox that emerges as the prototypical trickster. In the oldest Indo-European languages, the word for “fox” is most often feminine (so, for example, in Greek, Latin, and Slavic, though not in Sanskrit), as opposed to wolf and bear. The same holds for some other language groups. It is unclear why, but Slavic provides a classic example of the situation. Thus, the Russian for “fox” is lisa (stress on the second syllable). The final vowel a marks the feminine gender, and the ending was cut off from this noun, to produce the fox’s masculine counterpart; hence lis, a dead born creation.
Why does the word for “fox” so often belong to the feminine gender? The old hypothesis—that the fox “lacked courage” and for that reason was thought of as a woman—lacks merit. Oral tradition depicts women as dangerous, nearly invincible warriors and certainly not as “the weaker sex.” We also read that great wars were fought on account of women, who either provoked deadly strife or were abducted. As matters stand, we have no answer to the question about why fox ended up as a feminine noun. In one of the Grimms’ tales, we encounter Mr. Fox and Mrs. Fox, and Mr. Fox has nine tails.
Certainly not the weaker sex. Valkyrie by Peter Nicolai Arbo, 1865. Photo by Viktor Fordell, CC-BY-SA via the National Museum.
WIlliam Caxton, one of the brightest stars in the history of English culture. From The Granger Collection. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Be that as it may, the Germanic form for “fox” was indeed feminine. The noun in the text of the fourth-century Gothic Bible(the oldest long text in Germanic) is fauho (au had the value of o in Engl. fox). In English, s was added to the root foh-, the result being fohs, that is, fox. That s marked the masculine gender! For instance, one of the OldIcelandic cognates of the animal name bear (Old English bera) is bersi (that is, ber-s-i). To repeat, once s was added to the old root foh, the fox became a he. (This was a more complicated process than the one in Russian: see above!)
The great protagonist of the German/Dutch/French epic Reineke Fox ~ Reintje (Reinaert)de Vos ~ Roman de Renart is a male, and a very aggressive one. (Note the Dutch form Vos: we will need it below.) In the spirit of medieval romances, he, we presume, is perhaps the queen’s (the lioness’s) lover. The great William Caxton, whose command of Dutch was near-native, wrote a delightful English version of the tale. It was published in 1481, but two Modern English versions of it exist.
There is no grammatical gender in English. Yet the fox may perhaps be categorized as a male, because it has a female counterpart, namely vixen, though in our linguistic intuition, fox and vixen are hardly connected. Also, I think we more often hear about a vixen (if we at all do) as about a cantankerous woman, a shrew, than about an animal. Yet vixen is originally a she-fox. If vixen began with an f, the tenuous tie between it and fox may have been retained.
German Füchsin throws some light on vixen, whose earliest recorded form was fyxen (indeed, an adjective “belonging to a fox,” rather than a noun). The main puzzle is of course why vixen begins with a v. The Dutch for “fox” is vos, and we can see that its v is not accidental. In Dutch, initial f was voiced regularly, but in England this change affected only some dialects in the Southwest. A few of those forms made their way into the dialect that became the foundation of Modern “Standard” English. Hence vat, veneer, vial, and a few more words that could have been expected to begin with an f.
And this is Raynard in his masculine glory. Illustration by Ernest Henri Griset, 1869. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The last (but the main!) question is, naturally, about the origin (etymology) of Gothic fauho, that is, foho. According to most authorities, light comes from words like Russian pukh “a covering of fluffy feathers” (Germanic f regularly corresponds to non-Germanic p: cf. my perennial example, Latin pater versus English father). A congener of pukh is a Sanskrit word meaning “tail”. In light of such cognates the fox emerges as an animal with a bushy tail. Few other suggestions are hardly more convincing.
There is only one point I may add here. Dictionaries usually say that coinages like “fluffy” or “having a long tail” are taboowords. Animals were often given names to deceive their bearers, because if one said (pronounced) wolf or bear, the beast might take the utterance for an invitation and arrive. But why should “fluffy” or “long-tailed” be taboo names? They are mere descriptions. When in Russian the bear is called medved “one knowing honey,” that is indeed a taboo name, but “long-tailed” or “fluffy”? After all, people had to call the fox something! To be sure, fox may not even be an Indo-European word. If so, its origin will remain hidden from us for all times. But such is often the situation with ancient words.
POSTSCRIPT: A QUESTION AND A COMMENT
QUESTION. What is the origin of the German noun Ereignis “event, occurrence”? This word has a bizarre history. The verb ereignen “to put in sight; present before the eyes” goes back to Old High German irougen. The root of the word is ouge “eye” (Modern Gernat Auge). This irougen later became eröugnen and still later ereignen. Today, ereignen looks like a verb related to eigen “one’s own,” but despite this association, the word managed to reteam its old meaning (-nis is a suffix in the noun Ereignis).
COMMENT. Professor Gavin Wraith cited a Hittite noun for “libation” in connection with my discussion of sp-words (see the post “Supper with an Etymologist” for August 12, 2026). I cannot judge whether the connection is valid, but I would not be surprised if here we indeed had another sp-word for sipping, supping, and the like.
Featured image: Brer Rabbit turnt ‘er aloose. Public domain via Picryl.
It does not require much philological preparation to guess that supper is a word containing the root sup– and the suffix –er. Yet in the days of King Alfred and even much later, the inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England had no such word. People spoke of the morning meal, midday meal, and evening meal. The word for “meal” was mete “meat,” whose ancient meaning “food; meal” is still heard in the idiom meat and drink, the compound sweetmeats “candies, etc.,” and the obsolete greenmeat “fodder.” As far as I can judge, sweetmeats is a dead word in American English (that is, no one even understands it), while greenmeat is so little remembered that even my computer does not recognize it. Be that as it may, supper exists (see the header!) and has been an English word since the thirteenth century. It was borrowed from French, but the root of the French noun is Germanic. This means that at one time the speakers of Old French took over the word sup from their neighbors, while later, those neighbors added a Romance suffix to it! Quite a journey, but such hybrids are not too rare.
Now, what is sup? Never mind sup for “what’s up.” Sup means “to sip,” and it seems to occur only in the context of imbibing alcohol. Yet it is an old “respectable” word with well-known cognates, for instance, Dutch zuipen, German saufen, and Icelandic súpa. Once we begin to wonder where sup– came from, we are sucked into a vortex of similar-sounding verbs. I used and even highlighted suck for a purpose: this verb is part of a sizable group of s-words, referring to liquids. All of them seem to be “obscurely related” to one another, as dictionaries characterize this situation.
Sup is not the same as sip, and neither is a synonym of suck, but the affinity is obvious. Let us first look at sap (from which we have sapling). The word is old and has cognates all over the Germanic-speaking world (for example, German Saft “juice”). Etymologists, naturally, reconstruct the most ancient form, common to several languages, and come up with the ancient noun sapam or sappam.
Butterfly sipping sap. Photo by Sandipoutsider. CC-BY-SA 4.0 International via Wikimedia Commons.
However, the sounds refuse to play the expected game, because we also remember Latin sapa “grape juice, boiled until it is thick” (Italian sapa or saba is the continuation of that word), obviously a member of the same family, but it too has p in the root, and it is well-known that Latin p should correspond to Germanic f (as happens in Latin pater versus English father). Another borrowing? Who borrowed what from whom? The most cautions sources admit that the origin of the word is unclear. Indeed, it seems that we have a group of words, either sound-imitative or somehow (how?) reflecting the words’ sense, that is, sound-symbolic. All of them refer to the way we deal with liquids: sip, sap, sup, and sop.
It pays off to have a look at those verbs individually. So far, we have examined only sup. Sip is a late fifteenth-century addition to English. Similar verbs exist elsewhere in Germanic. Etymologists seem to agree that sip, though “allied” to sup, is a weaker version of it. This verdict sounds convincing, because sip and sup do seem to be cognate in at least some way. Can seep throw light on this group? Not really. Old English sipian, along with its lookalikes with a long vowel in the root, have been recorded, but none of them would have become seep. Even if the progenitor of sip were found, we would still remain with the same group of similar-sounding verbs describing the movement of liquids.
There also is sop “a piece of bread dipped in liquid” (and compare milksop “a timid male, a pushover”!), which is universally recognized as a member of the family we are discussing, even though its ultimate origin is as obscure as of that of the verbs we have examined. Sip, seep, sop, sup…. Finally, what about sap “juice”? It has a secure German cognate Saft (the same meaning (f in Saft goes back to p, and final t was added to saf only in the fourteenth century). A good old word, but it is unable to solve our puzzle. We should resign ourselves to the conclusion made above: all the words belonging to the complex s-p with a vowel in the middle in some way imitate the noise made in the process of drinking.
Though we realize that multiplying the words belonging to this group will hardly result in a revelation, perhaps soup is worth mentioning here. Sop, we remember, was borrowed into English from French in the seventeenth century, and the story of soup sounds familiar: Latin suppa, the ancestor of soup, seems to be a word of Germanic origin! I am happy to report that so is soap.
Soup of Germanic origin. Photo by Takeaway. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Incidentally, Latin also had the word sapor “taste, flavor,” which (by way of French) ended up as English savor. To repeat: the words describing the “activity” of the mouth tend to depend on the complex sp– not only in Germanic but also outside it. The British scholar John Rupert Firth (1890-1960) was especially interested in such complexes (he called them prosodemes, a rather unfortunate label), but though he has, or at least had, a sizable following at home, he is little known in the US and elsewhere, which is a pity.
Once we become aware of the “mouthy prosodeme” sp-, we are beginning to wonder whether spit, spew, and even speak belong to our story. No doubt, sp- is at least partly sound-imitative, and once it established itself, it acquired a symbolic meaning, and many words, vaguely belonging to the same sphere, came into being. Since people spit and “sup” in the same way all over the world, it is no wonder that we have quite a few verbs sounding alike even in unrelated languages. A supper with an etymologist is rich but leaves you hungry. Sorry!
POSTSCRIPT: A question and a comment
QUESTION. What is known about the etymology of the word core?
The answer is: “Next to nothing.” The word surfaced in the early fifteenth century in the form we still have today. Its earliest recorded sense was also familiar: “the core of an apple”. The word has always been spelled with final e, which indicates that this sound was not mute. The French word for “heart” did not have this e. Core supplanted the dialectal (northern) word colk (the same meaning). But both core and colk also referred to what is today called coke, another dialectal word of unknown origin. One wonders who needed a special little-known word for the core of a fruit! Obviously, we are dealing with a regionalism, a technical term, whose origin we’ll probably never be able to discover. The fact that core sounded somewhat like French cœur “heart” may have contributed to its longevity (mere guessing). The verdict remains: “Of unknown origin,” and it is to be regretted that some dictionaries do not make this verdict sufficiently clear.
A Lover’s Complaint
A correspondent who is very particular about good usage was shocked to read a politician’s phrase less than fulsome information, in which fulsome means “full.” Many people like language history, but no one wants to be part of it. Fulsome did once mean “full,” but then “deteriorated” and stayed mainly as part of the phrase fulsome praise, that is, “excessive and insincere praise.” However, language has always changed under the influence of the uneducated, who don’t care whether what they say is correct or wrong from professors’ point of view. For many years, most of our young people have been reading only pulp fiction and one another’s emails. If troublesome means “full of trouble,” and if the main epithet for all situations is awesome, then fulsome obviously means “quite full.” This change has been going on for decades. Too bad! The same man dislikes the pronunciation gerrymandering with g, as in get. Incidentally Governor Elbridge Gerry did pronounce his last name with hard g. Thus, our “correct” pronunciation is wrong! Now those who have never heard the word mispronounce it, without knowing that Mr. Gerry would have been happy. Inscrutable are the ways of language. What is wrong is correct, and what is correct is wrong.
Featured image: Photograph by Lewis Hine. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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