Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

Eileen Opiolka wrote today:

“The reason I wanted to contact you today is the entry mega which refers to the word mickle and gives it as a Scottish word for “much”. Here in Scotland we say “many a mickle makes a muckle”, i.e. mickle means a small amount and muckle, a large amount. I’d be interested to find out what Dr. Goodword thinks.”

“Many thanks for your website, which is always interesting.”

Eileen, many thanks for your appreciation of the website and your interesting question. Here is what I think.

In Scotland today mickle is known mostly from the idiom you quote: “many a mickle makes a muckle”. The idiom was originally: “many a little (also pickle) makes a mickle”. The form “many a mickle makes a muckle” arises from a misapprehension that, rather than being variants of the same word, mickle and muckle have opposite meanings, the former representing a small amount and the latter a large amount. This is a false assumption.

It doesn’t matter mickle since both mickle and muckle are being shamelessly gobbled up by the hounds of history.

Several readers have called me to task for my etymology of the word snob. It is purely speculative and I no doubt should have added a bit more to that point.

Barbara Kelly wrote in the Alpha Agora:

I had always understood that “snob” came from “sine nobilitate”, that is “without nobility”. The story I recall is that births were recorded with these abbreviations: “nob” for nobility and “s.nob” for non-nobles. A “snob” then was someone who had pretensions of nobility. I did not see this mentioned as a possibility.

Loek Hopstaken wrote to me directly:

Somehow I always thought that ‘snob’ was an abbreviation of ‘sine nobilitate’, or ‘without a noble title’. An ancient European habit: entered in a guest book when the person in question was no Lord, Duke, King or Count. Snob then would indicate a person who isn’t a registered nobleman but desperately wants to be one. [Someone who] belongs to this social class, has studied their behaviour yet doesn’t really know how to make it natural and comes across as a fake.

In fact, what we do know about this word is that it did arise in the 18th century and originally referred to shoemakers. No one has any idea why. Later, in Cambridge, it came to refer to shopkeepers in general and was a was used as a put-down used by students there in referring to the townspeople.

What happened after that is anybody’s guess; however, I find it hard to believe that it was not influenced by some word referring to the nose, given all the semantics relating noses and snootery in English: to stick one’s nose in the air, snotty, and the like. For that reason I played with these ostensible parallels.

Both readers are correct, of course, in implying that I should have made my speculation clearer and I will clear that up later today. Also, I am collecting false etymologies like the one Loek and Barbara came across. So far I have only the examples for posh (Port Out Starboard Homeward), golf (Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden), gaudy is an eponym of Antoni Gaudi, and this one. If you can think of any others, please let me know. I would like to have at least ten before posting them.

My wife and I recently took a pair of our grandchildren to visit one of the many large caves in Pennsylvania and was guided by a young girl who hoped to graduate from high school next year and go on to college.

Hopefully, she will take the opportunity to work on her vocabulary in her senior year. In explaining how bats can live in the cave when all the lights are out, she asserted that they possess “that sono-thing”. Close but no cigar.

She then told us that there were other rooms in the cave that are not open to the paying public. One was recently discovered by Penn State students as they were “splunking”. She then added, “Splunking is crawling around in a cave. Not everyone knows that word.” Indeed, I didn’t, though I use spelunking from time to time.

A year from now she will be voting.

Gordon Precious, one of our Canadian subscribers, today wrote on a subject that constantly arises in writing the alphaDictionary website and the Good Words. Here is what he wrote:

On the subject of “Yankee” (July 3, 2011, Dr. Goodword), and with Canada’s national day, “Canada Day”, having just past on July 1st, (celebrating our 144th birthday. The United States of America is about to celebrate Independence Day on July 4th, (its 235th, I believe), it seems an appropriate time for me to raise an old question and slight grievance:

“Why do not the citizens of the United States of America have a singular, just appellation for themselves?”

Ever since I attended public school, here in Canada, over 80 years ago, I have considered myself to be an “American”, inasmuch as I live in America – North America to be exact. I find that the citizens of Mexico, Central and South America also consider themselves “American”. It is quite common to see a sign on a storefront in Guatemala, Columbia, Chile, etc., “Compañía de Plomería Americano”, which is, of course, “American Plumbing Company”, but has no connection with the U.S.A.

It is my contention that the citizens of the United States of America have unwittingly usurped the name “American” from the rest of us Americans.

I would like the citizens of the United States of America to find, and develop the use of, a specific name for their nationality, as have the citizens of every other country of which I can think.

I generally agree and try to use awkward phrases like “people of the US” or “those of us in the US” instead of “American” whenever I can think of it. They are all awkward, though.

The problem is obvious to all: we have a queer name for a country. It is easy to call those from Canada Canadians, those from Mexico Mexicans, and those from Guatemala Guatemalans. But there is no word derivable from “The United States of America” in the same vein unless, of course, we take the last word in this phrase, “America”, and use Americans.

We might try building a word from an acronym, USans or USAsians. I’m sure these sound as bad to everyone else as they do to me. United Statesians not only sounds atrocious but is grossly ungrammatical. The best solution is the one we seem to have chosen, the one mentioned above, using the last word in the phrase, Americans.

I wouldn’t call such a selection “usurpation” of the term from other American nations, however. Using the same word to refer to the US and the Americas is simply another instance of polysemy, a word with more than one meaning. I personally think that, outside scientific terminology, there are no words with only one meaning, take for example cooler (noun and adjective), dresser (furniture and person), air (for breathing, for singing).

Nations generally do have distinct names that distinguish any one from the others. However, we even get polysemy among the names of nations: Turkey, China, Cyprus, Georgia, Jordan, and Jamaica are a few. We also find it among the personal nouns: Danish (pastry), Dutch (uncle), and Indian are a few of those. The fact that American falls into this category should not offend our neighbors in the other Americas.

So, I see no offense in the word America having referring to two geographical entities. All of the alternatives are worse.

I just received a comment on self-empretzelment from Dr. Margie Sved:

“I would have thought self-empretzeltment meant something a contortionist would do!!”

In fact, her interpretation works for me. The current meaning should have come from the one she mentions as a metaphorical (figurative) usage and semantically it does.

It is not uncommon for a derived word to appear historically before its semantic predecessor, so it would be possible for a word like uninsightfulness, say, to be used before anyone uses uninsightful. The longer word would come directly from its stem, insightful, prior to uninsightful arising from the same stem.

Happens all the time.

Sally Colby just shared a funny experience she had with the verb osculate that I thought should be shared with you all:

“I’ll never forget going to a department store to purchase a fan about 30 years ago. The (very young) sales girl showed us the features of various fans, including one she really liked.

‘This one is great,’ she said. ‘It works standing still, or it can osculate.’

It was hard not to laugh, but I sure chuckled in the car on the way home.”

Of course, you must mind your nose.

My wife and I skyped our grandchildren in Colorado Sunday and I had a stunning conversation with my seven-year-old granddaughter, Laurel.

I started with a joke I hoped would not go over her head. I told her that we had a squirrel in our attic. She asked what it was doing there. I said that it was looking for me because I’m nuts and squirrels love nuts. I was right—she didn’t laugh. Her comment was, “They’re just homophones.”

Amazingly, she was right: the adjective nuts and the plural of nut are just that, homophones, two different words that sound alike much like piece and peace or sow and sew.  I was impressed first by the fact that this concept, which I taught to  college students for 35 years, is being taught in a Boulder, Colorado elementary school. But I was more impressed that an seven-year-old girl could not only remember the concept, but could use it to identify homophonic pairs from the speech zipping past her ears.

Deeply impressed by this mental feat and her willingness to sit still and converse with me, I boldly asked what else she was doing in school. She told me that her class was writing poems. Again, not bad for second grade. She even agreed to recite one that she remembered: “I’m not happy today because I did not play.”

I told her how much her verse impressed me, how much I loved poetry, and offered her what I considered a grandfatherly suggestive one of my own: “My thinking is muddy because I did not study.” I’m sure now its suggestiveness was so obvious as to offend her. She told me that it sounded like a haiku! She wasn’t sure, though, because she did not have time to count the syllables. (Haiku generally contain 17 syllables in Japanese, though English haiku is usually shorter.)

Was I accidentally telling the truth all those times I claimed that my grandchildren are smarter than average? I think it is true that children are growing up in a culturally richer environment than my generation grew up in. The public school she attends is obviously an excellent one. But now I’m thinking: could there be a linguistic gene? How else could I hold a conversation with a seven-year-old in MY highly specialized language?

In response to our Good Word May Day, Monika Freund sent me her remembrances of another European May Day custom that persisted to the late 50s:

On April 30 all the bachelors of a village came together in the local pub and auctioned all the girls off: the one who made the highest bid (later redeemed in beer) was allowed to set a May tree,  meaning, a young man who wanted to date a girl would decorate a young birch tree with ribbons and put it into the front garden of her parents’ home.

He was then allowed to come for Sunday Kaffeetafel all May. The girl who got the highest bid of all became “May Queen” and the highest bidder was “May King”. If a boy from a neighboring village wanted to set a tree, he had to buy himself a place at the pub event at the rate of four crates of beer.

My treatment of the adjective camp obviously caught Doug Schulek-Miller off guard. I thought his reaction worth sharing:

My children go to camp in the summer (and there is nothing homosexual  or kitsch about them!)

• I made a camp in the forest when we stayed outdoors.
• I camped on my neighbour’s doorstep so that I wouldn’t miss him.

I am confused, as I understand you will likely get a lot of other responses like this despite noting that you are talking an adjectival sense.

Apoplectically yours,
Doug

The same word reminded Harry Murphy how folks down East in Maine use the noun camp a bit different from the way it is used farther south:

Your recent description of “camp” as an adjective neglected “camp” as a noun.  As an expatriate from Maine, I prefer to think of “camp” as a noun.

In his “Maine Lingo”, John Gould defines “camp” this way:  “CAMP:  The general word in Maine for a wilderness dwelling, no matter how elegant.  It can be a one-room log cabin or the sumptuous retreat of land-owning executives.  Not always, but in many instances Mainers will use ‘camp’ for a building others would call a cottage.  ‘Going to camp’ does not mean tenting out in Maine, but moving to the cottage on the lake or in the  woods for the season, or for a vacation.”

‘Going camp’ to me means dressing tacky, so Maineiacs should be careful not to drop the “to” in ‘Going to camp’ when talking to out-of-staters.

I didn’t include all the other meanings of camp in my treatment because I wanted all my readers to finish reading it in a day.

kru-sə-fai • Hear it! • Verb, transitive

Meaning: 1. To execute someone by nailing them to a post with a crossbar to the arms. 2. To punish or berate someone viciously, brutally.

Notes: Unfortunately, this word is so useful it has begotten a large family of words referring to torture and torment. Someone who crucifies in either of the two senses above is a crucifier and the act of crucifying is crucifixion. If excruciating pain represents the extreme in torture, that is because excruciate is based on the same sense of crucifixion. Today Christians throughout the world commemorate the day on which Jesus Christ was crucified, a day now called “Good Friday” in English.

In Play: Aside from Eastertide, we use this word today only in the figurative sense as a hyperbole: “Dad is going to crucify you when he finds out you bent his Bentley!” In fact, we probably overuse it: “Gladys Friday was crucified by the boss in front of the whole office when she arrived at the meeting late.”

Word History: Proto-Indo-Europeanroot behind crux turns up in many modern Indo-European languages. English crook and crutch share the same origin. Of course, we borrowed crux itself from Latin to refer to the central point of an issue. This sense of crux goes back to a reference to a crossroads at which a decision must be made. The adjective crucial “decisive” reflects this same sense. The F in the Latin verb figere came from an older PIE word dhig- “to fix, set”, which seems to have come to English as dig. The semantic road between these two words is too long to travel in this Good Word entry.