Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

Lenn Zonder sent such profound comments on my recent treatment of the Good Word shenanigans that I just have to share them with everyone. Here is his response:

“I was so glad to read your definition of shenanigans and noting that it has nothing to do with the female gender as there is no henanigans.”

“Historectomy used to scare the daylights out of me until I found out it actually should be called a herstorectomy.”

“Seriously, though, you let the Germans off the hook in charting the etymology of shenanigan. I would point out that the second through the sixth letters of this word, H-E-N-A-N, names a large Chinese province on the south bank of the Yellow River. and remember, San Francisco has one of the finest Chinatowns in America.” [A great lead to follow were the word henanigans—REB]

“Also, if you take those same five letters and add a second ‘E’, it spells Heenan, a fine old Irish name. And lord knows the Irish have produced some of the finest practical jokers to have ever walked this earth.”

“Just blowing some smoke up Smoketown Road in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. ”

‘Nuff said.

I received this note from Rebecca Casper today:

“The word that came up in the debate tonight was idyll or idyl. Some believe it is related to ideal. Others said, “No.” In any event, its full meaning is not altogether clear from a simple dictionary. Have you ever featured this word so that you could share your research? It is of Greek derivation, but I thought it was also an allusion to some Greek myth or legend. (But I can’t find anything.) Tennyson wrote ‘Idylls of the King,’ but that doesn’t give us a good etymology. Can you?”

First of all, how do we spell this word: Idyll or idyl? The US dictionaries don’t seem to care how many Ls we use but idyll is the original spelling. Idyl is a later misspelling that has become acceptable.

This word is unrelated to ideal though the latter may have informed the meaning of the former. Ideal is the adjective for idea under the assumption that the idea of an object is always a perfect representation of that object.

Idyll comes, via Latin idyllium, from eidyllion, a diminutive of Greek eidos “form, that which is seen, a person’s beauty”, from the verb meaning “to see”, the one that also went into the making of English video. The diminutive of this word came to refer to a type of short idealized poem, usually a bucolic one, which is to say, a romantic poem about the countryside.

An idyll today still retains a bucolic aroma but today it means ”a simple, tranquil state of affairs”. It can also refer to a peaceful interlude that is absolutely perfect, a vacation or affair in a place we normally only dream about.

Look for this word as a Good Word toward the end of October.

Andrew Rowland dropped a line a few days ago and I finally got around to answering him today. The question is so interesting, I thought it might be worth sharing.

“It’s really a question about to words, or part words that are used in many other words. I was wondering about the words para, as in paranormal, parachute etc. and also tele, as in telephone and television. Are there any meanings to these words, and if so, what are they?“

These lexical items are sort of semi-prefixes. We borrowed a lot of them from Greek and Latin and they “sort of” have meanings though they are not always exact. Tele- is pretty straightforward, it means “distance” or “at a distance”. Tele-phone is a Greek compound meaning “distant sound” or “sound at a distance” and tele-vision means pretty much what it looks like “vision at a distance” or distant seeing. Tele-scope is ”distant watching”.

Para- is a bit more difficult to put your finger on. It can means “beside” as parathyroid, parachute or “beyond” as in paranormal, or perhaps 4 or 5 other things. The trick to keep in mind is that these two prefixes are Greek, and can only be combined with other Greek, maybe Latin (paranormal) words. You can’t add them to regulary English words, like para-table or tele-car.

Last month William Hupy asked about an English suffix that he has spotted in a Romance language, too: “What’s up with the suffix -ery, as in livery and grocery? I detect a similar origin with the Spanish cafeteria, farmacia, etc.”

The English suffix -ery is an adaptation of the Latin -oria via the French -erie suffix, usually meaning “place of”: bakery, eatery, brewery, nunnery. However, it sometimes converts a noun into the quality that identifies the noun: tomfooley, knavery, savagery.

If we borrow these words directly from Latin, the suffix is -ory: laboratory, observatory, dormitory, depository, a suffix more frequently used to convert verbs into adjectives: congratulatory, conciliatory, exclamatory. But French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish are Latin as spoken in various parts of Europe today, so they will contain the same suffixes as those suffixes have changed over the years. English has borrowed liberally from all these languages, but especially Latin and French.

Livery and grocery do not contain this suffix. Livery comes from a French word meaning “delivery-boy” while grocery is simply the suffix -y added to grocer. The latter word has an interesting history. It comes from grossus “large, gross” with the suffix -arius, a personal suffix meaning “someone who (does something)”. The original word grossarius meant “wholesaler”, i.e. someone selling on a large scale (by the gross), as opposed to a small-scale retailer.

Here is one from the weird and wonderful world of the world’s worst spellers. It was sent to me by Martha Hulshof.

“How about this one, huxion, found in an old 1956 cookbook from Downeast Yarmouth, Maine? My mother-in-law is from Holland and her mother used to cook like this, but she’s not sure what the word means. I looked on line and, remarkably enough, found refrence to the VERY SAME recipie but that author did not know the meaning of the word either! I wonder could you ascertain its origin and meaning.”

I can’t prove this but I am so sure this is what happened. The stew is made from a hock (hough in Scotland, pronounced [hox]). The hock is that part of an animal’s hind leg just below the knee, thus located near the shin, so some people have used the word hockshin for a long time. It is still alive in parts of Northern England and Scotland, I believe; we have written documentation from as late as 1886. In some areas it has been reduced to ‘huxon’, only a letter away from huxion.

Now, what if we spelled hockshin by the Latin rules of spelling? Hoxion would certainly be a candidate and from hoxion to huxion is but a tiny skid. These types of spelling errors are common for words that are mostly heard and seldom seen in writing.

Further evidence is provided by preserved written examples of hox and huxen in the sense of “hamstring”. The examples are old and these words are clearly archaic but may well have been involved in the shift of CKS to X and the shift from O to U.

Bottom line, the spelling of the word hockshin has rambled all over the place in the past three centuries. That the spelling huxion was one of those places, doesn’t surprise me at all.

I was rather taken aback at the response to our recent Good Word nickname. A reader by the rather silky name of Monroe Thomas Clewis admitted, “I have always enjoyed silkier sobriquet as a synonym for the more leathery nickname.”

I must admit material sympathy for Mr. Clewis’s preference. I do think that we have room for both these terms, though. I wouldn’t want to stretch the patience of sobriquet to names like Knucklehead, Stinky, Pusslegut, or even Buck, for that matter. So, I would say that there are both nicknames and sobriquets in this world, and may never the twain collide.

A Canadian reader, Davi McGrew, after buttering me up with an ostensible confession of pleasure in the daily Good Word, tried to tauten my definition of nickname in this way: “It seems to me that Pat, etc. should more properly be acknowledged as diminutives rather than nicknames…of which I have had several myself. If the point was to ‘add something to, or enrich’ [Great approach: pinning me down with a direct quote–DG] then a bald shortening seems besides the point.”

I’m one of the few US-ers who give Canada credit for harboring several clever people, so I am not at all surprised at Davi’s comment—nor his sly argumentational tactics. I fully appreciate them, in fact, even though they leave me unconvinced. Pat as a nickname for Patrick or Patricia could be a “clipping”, i.e. a word the majority of which has been clipped, e.g. Doc for doctor, rep for representative.

I don’t think, though, that I could call it a diminutive, a word that indicates a smaller version, as a napkin was once though to be a smaller version of an apron. English doesn’t sport diminutives any more, just the vestiges of them in words on -kin and a few borrowings from French on -ette, as when the former cigarette was a smaller version of the still current cigar.

Nicknames do sometimes come with diminutives. Billy is more likely applied to a small Bill than a large one; Annie sounds more girlish to me than Anne. In fact, we have lots of these in English: Bobby, Jacky, Johnny. But this is not a consistency in the language. Molly is something quite different from a Moll and I wouldn’t take Leslie all the way down to Lessie.

Anyway, these words do show us how we can find some of the most uncommon behavior in the commonest of our speech habits.

We at Lexiteria are in the process of developing a collection of folk etymologies. Along the way we have stumbled over an interesting facet of words that might be called “reverse folk etymology”. Folk etymology is the conversion of a foreign or unfamiliar word into one that is more familiar, such as the conversion of French dormeuse “sleepy (one)” to dormouse and kith and kin to kissing kin. The opposite would be to make a recognizable word unrecognizable.

The following list of words have “lost words” in them, words we no longer see or hear when we speak:

• sweater (hidden word sweat)
• business (hidden word busy)
• atonement (hidden words at one)
• disease (hidden word ease)
• necklace (hidden word lace)

We no longer think of sweaters as clothing designed to make us sweat but to simply keep up warm. Business in no longer ‘busy-ness’ and has come to be pronounced [biznis] or even [bidnis]. Atonement is a form of repentence, making up for bad deeds, and not making anything at one with another. The pronunciation of this word makes it clear that it has been reanalyzed as [atonment].

Disease has come to be something much more painful than simple uneasiness or discomfort. But that is the meaning it began with. Finally, Lace worn around the neck is no longer called necklace; necklaces are countable things made of almost anything but lace. Concomitantly, their pronunciation has shfted to blur the word lace: [neklis].

These are examples of two discrete processes. First, semantic drift, the tendency of the meanings of words to drift way from their original meaning over time . The second is the tendency of words to be reanalyzed and pronounced differently over time. The examples above starkly reveal the two critical historical changes that words undergo if they remain in English for centures.

Charlene Moore notices the darnedest things in English. I always enjoy mulling them over because it inevitably gives me a tickle. Today she wanted to know why bone and debone mean that same thing. Well, it is a good question. Couple and decouple have opposite meanings. So do regulate and deregulate. May Day! May Day? What’s going on with bone?

Make no bones about it, to bone by itself means to remove the bones from whatever you happen to be operating on, just as to shell means to remove the shell from and to husk means to remove the husk from. So, I have no bone to pick with Charlene on this one.

However, as I boned up on the problem I discovered this: to bone also means to put bones in, as to bone a skirt with stays, originally made of whalebone. So, verbing nouns like bone can result in a verb meaning “to add to” or “to remove from”. To saddle, to soap, and to clothe all indicate adding saddles, soap, and clothes to something. In fact, the sense of addition is far more prevalent than the sense of removal, so that interpretation of bone would be far more natural. Hmmm. That could lead to confusion, couldn’t it?

Well, the solution is to add something to bone that would clarify the fact that we have in mind removing bones and not sticking them in. Now, what is the prefix we use for that? I know! DE-! Best of all, we will keep that meaning for both bone and debone so that any bonehead can use them without making a boner. Right? Right! Aren’t English-speakers smart? You betcha!

William Hupy has been struggling with the English suffix -ery, which seems to have at least two different meanings, neither of which fit livery and grocery. I wrote this up quickly in hopes of clarifying the functions of this suffix and its various relationships. I thought some of you might be interested, too.

The English suffix -ery is an adaptation of the Latin -oria which came to French as the suffix -erie, usually meaning “place of”: bakery, eatery, brewery, nunnery. However, it sometimes converts a noun into the quality that identifies the noun: tomfoolery, knavery, savagery.

When English borrows such words directly from Latin, the suffix -ory is the result, e.g. laboratory, observatory, dormitory, depository, a suffix more frequently used to convert verbs into adjectives: congratulatory, conciliatory, exclamatory. (Don’t be surprised that a suffix in English has more than one function. Suffixes are dying out like flies in English and, as the number of suffixes dwindle, the remainder must pick up more and more funtions.)

Livery and grocery do not contain either suffix. Livery comes from a French word meaning “delivery”, originating in the Latin word liberare “to liberate, set free”. Grocery is simply the suffix -y added to grocer. The latter word has an interesting history. It comes from grossus “large, thick” with the suffix -arius, a personal suffix meaning “someone who (does something)”. The original word, grossarius, meant “wholesaler”, i.e. someone selling on a large scale, as opposed to a small-scale retailer, rather like someone selling by the gross rather than by the item.

Yesterday Martin Kirk raised this issue:

“I am trying to find out whether there is a word to describe the written linguistic situation where a word is unintentionally misspelled, resulting in another correct word which makes sense in the context but is the opposite of that intended in an ironic way, e.g. cease the opportunity instead of seize the opportunity or relive the pain instead of relieve the pain.”

“I have quries this with the Oxford Dictionary Press’s ‘question line’ and they suggest that I am describing a malapropism. I do not agreee withn this. Have you any better sugestions.”

I can think of a couple of points in this connection. First, however, remember that languages are spoken or signed. Writing is a superficial attempt at symbolizing what is spoken. Fewer than 2000 of the world’s approximately 6700 languages and dialects have functioning writing systems. While writing has some effect on language change (adding the T in the pronunciation of often), it is marginal to the point of being trivial.

The question, then, resolves to one of whether mispronunciation leads to permanent language change. The mispronunciation of courtesy led to curtsy and, if you follow our Good Word series, you know that ornery was once a mispronunciation of ordinary. These words are examples of phonological reduction, very common in language; we see it all the time in contractions.

This process is not usually referred to as malapropism, which is usually the mispronunciation of a word so that it sounds like another, e.g. a fire distinguisher or a wolf in cheap clothing. My favorite was actually written in a freshman thesis at Bucknell some years ago: a devil-make-hair attitude.

The words you mention (relive - relieve, seize - cease) are only accidentally similar and are wholly unrelated derivationally and historically. The only similar normal historical change I know of is a change in pronunciation that leads to the loss of the relationship of a derivation to its base or origin. I call them words with hidden words within them for lack of a term and they seem to have caught only my eye (or, more properly, ear).

I’m thinking now of words like disease which today is unrelated semantically to ease, the word it was derived from. No one out of the cloth associates atonement with its origin, the phrase at one. We don’t think of business as simply the activity of being busy any more.

So far as I know, I’m the only one writing about such words and I haven’t named them yet. What do you think we should call them?