Posh

On Etymology and Linguistic Originalism

A persons cubicle is, in some ways, like a storefront church.

Its clearly got its purposecome worship at the altar of the
Almighty Nine-to-Five. But because its not hidden away and any-
one can walk past and peer in to see what were about, we trick it
out with little cultural markers that tell the passersby something
about the religious inside. The main place of devotion, the desk, is
occupied primarily with the tools of our worship: computer, books,
files. Around the periphery are the things we carry with us to remind
us and our fellow clerics that work is not all that we are: totems
and fetishes that we arrange (intentionally, ritually) to advertise the
essence of whats inside us. Steve and Madeline both have an abun-
dance of plants in their cubicles; one of our cross-reference editors
has set up pictures of her cats (and other peoples cats) along the
long banked bookshelf each of us has to keep multiple dictionaries
open at once. Dan has a few desk toys and some Far Side cartoons;
Emily has a few artistic photographs and postcards within her view
to balance out the feng shui of the giant, inflatable Collegiate Dic-
tionary with arms and legs that she won at a company luncheon
and that sits on her bookshelf, overseeing her duties like Pharaoh
watching the children of Israel.
And then theres Jim Raders cubicle. Jims cubicle is not an
altar to language but a terrarium of language, a place where lan-
guage slowly, slowly grows, breathes, takes shape. Its also a mar-
vel of space-time. There is no way that much paper can fit inside a

16 9

Stam_9781101870945_3p_all_r1.indd 169 10/24/16 3:13 PM

 1 7 0 Word by Word

six-by-six-foot work space and allow a human to comfortably work

in there, yet all you need to do is walk by and peer over the piles
of dictionaries to confirm that, no, Jims in there, leaning back in
his chair, even. One wall of his work space is a high bookshelf,
stuffed to overflowing with titles like Alt-mittledeutsch Etymolo-
gisches Wrterbuch and Old Frisian Etymological Dictionary; his
standard-issue desk is literally (sense 1) buried underneath a static
wave of loose papers, a good number of them covered in a fine
scrawl of Proto-Indo-European roots. There are stacks of books on,
near, and under his desk that are micro-feats of engineering, the
sorts of constructions you hold your breath around for fear of top-
pling them, but Jim swivels in his chair without regard for them.
He will lean back and plop his feet on his desk in a clear spot that
wasnt there when he began to unfold, or reach out for a book bur-
ied under a sheaf of papers and find it comes neatly into his hand.
The rest of us gawp, as if Jim were an alchemist or magician, a
Level-Ten Word Mage. He is, in a sense: hes an etymologist.
If logophiles want to be lexicographers when they grow up, then
lexicographers want to be etymologists. Etymology is the study of
the history and origins of words, lexical genealogy, and etymolo-
gists are the practitioners of it. Lexicographers love the nerdy intri-
cacies of a language, trading esoteric factoids like baseball cards,
but etymologists master the nerdy intricacies of language, not just
a languagelanguage morphology, phonology, and history as a
whole. The amount of information they know is almost superhu-
man. A while ago, after a trip to Finland, I brought in Finnish candy
to share with the office. Jim stopped by my desk. Finland, he said.
Puhutko suomea? Do you speak Finnish?
I blinked. Its rare to meet a Finnish speaker outside Finland, and
especially one in your own office. En puhu paljon suomea. Puhun
vhn, I answered. I dont speak much Finnish. Just a little. Ent
sinulla? And you?
Ei, he said, shaking his head. En puhu suomea. No, he said
in Finnish. I dont speak Finnish.

Stam_9781101870945_3p_all_r1.indd 170 10/24/16 3:13 PM

 1 7 1

This isnt peculiar to Jim. Steve Kleinedler recounted listening to

Eric Hamp, one of the more famous etymologists of the modern era
(insofar as there are any famous etymologists of any era), explain
what a Pan-Scandinavian pronunciation of Hagen-Dazs would
be, respecting the umlauts and everything, though the ice-cream
brands name is definitely not Scandinavian and so cant really be
pronounced in any of the Scandinavian languages. Then Eric talked
for half an hour about the Albanian word for milk. Patrick Taylor,
one of the etymologists for The American Heritage Dictionary, is in
some remote part of central Asia learning Kurmanjifor no other
reason than learning an obscure language. Some of his etymolo-
gies take things back to Middle Chinese or Akkadian, notes Steve.
Hes crazy. I love it.

Part of why people love etymology is because it tells a story about

English and a words place in it, and sometimes that story tells you
something about the culture or time period in which that word blos-
somed. It makes words literally relatable: virulent is just a dumb
SAT word that means malignant or intolerably harsh or strong
until you find out that its root word is the Latin virus, poison, the
same word that gave us virus (no surprises there) and that is akin
to the root words for bison, weasel, and ooze.* From that
point forward, virulent is no longer the province of pundits and
English teachers eager to get you into the best colleges; it becomes
the hoity-toity East Coast cousin at the weird Virus family reunion,
keeping its distance from its muskier relatives.
English is full of these delights, and we eat them up like penny
candy. Theyre not only fun but informative: Why do we call them
sideburns? Its a play on the name of the Civil War officer who
made them popular, General Burnside. Why do we call practical

*
The Latin virus is a wonderfully evocative yet tidy word: it can mean poi-
son, stench, venom, or slimy liquid. It got its distant tie to ooze
because of the slimy liquid sense, and to weasel and bison for the
stench sense.

Stam_9781101870945_3p_all_r1.indd 171 10/24/16 3:13 PM

 1 7 2 Word by Word

and unflappable people phlegmatic? Because we used to believe

that they were unexcitable because they had an overabundance of
phlegm in them. Why do we say that someones worth their salt?
Because in the ancient world salt was such a valuable commod-
ity that we used to pay people in it (and this is why you also get a
salary). Ah! we cry, and e-mail this factoid to all our friends: see,
theres a reason!
This is also what makes etymology dangerous. Its easy to assume
that no matter how convoluted and ridiculous English seems to be
today, it can be straightforward and logical if we trace it back to its
beginnings. Its a beguiling idea: that theres a golden plumb line of
logic that English follows, and we just need to snag it to unravel the
mysteries of this language. Noah Webster himself succumbed. The
etymologies given in his 1828 dictionary are based on a complex
etymological system he devised himself that assumes all words in
all languages stem from one common source languagea language
he calls Chaldee.
Websters push to relate all words was not a linguistic one but
an existential one. The section of his American Dictionarys intro-
duction that is titled Origin of Language gets right down to brass
tacks: We read, in the Scriptures, that God, when he had created
man, Blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and
replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish
of the sea, &c. Webster goes on to explain that as the Bible says,
we all must have spoken one language from creation onward until
our innate dickishness (my paraphrase) played out at the Tower of
Babel, when God punished our hubris by making us speak differ-
ent languagesall of which are equally ancient even if they have
undergone some changes over the years. Everything, for Webster,
should be able to be traced back to an ancient Semitic language,
Chaldee. And trace things back he did:

BECK, n. A small brook. Gray. This word, Sax. becc, Ger. bach,
D. beek, Dan. bk, Sw. back, Pers. bak, a brook or rivulet, is

Stam_9781101870945_3p_all_r1.indd 172 10/24/16 3:13 PM

 1 7 3

found in the Ir. Ar. Ch. Syr. Sam. Heb. and Eth., in the sense of
flowing, as tears, weeping. Gen. xxxii. 22 It is obsolete in English,
but is found in the names of towns situated near streams, as in
Walbeck; but is more frequent in names on the continent, as in
Griesbach, &c.

According to modern scholarship, just about every part of that

etymology is wrong. Beck comes from Old Norse, which is not
listed here, and beck is not found in Irish, Arabic, Chaldee, Syr-
iac, Samaritan, Hebrew, and Ethiopic in the sense of flowing, as
tears. There are words in German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish
that look a lot like beck and refer to a small brook, but thats
likely because all those words are probably from Old Norse as well.
Even his claim that the word is obsolete in English is wrong: its
used in Britain.
This problem with Websters etymologies underscores an impor-
tant point about etymology. As Anatoly Liberman, one of the
etymologists for the OED, has said, Everything in etymology is
conjecture and reconstruction. Websters etymologies were hit or
miss, but they were based on a mostly coherent system that, if you
look at it through Websters lens, is completely logical. He had
the notion that derivations can be elaborated from ones own con-
sciousness, said James Murray, the first editor of the OED, and this
is the tack that many language lovers and armchair etymologists
today take. If the forms match and they seem logical, then how can
it be disputed? I had one correspondent tell me that we were incor-
rect in saying that sushi is Japanese: The correspondents family
was Polish, and their grandmother used to eat raw fish and call it
szukajcie, and this was long before sushi became popular. Sushi
is close in sound to the Polish szukajcie, so the origin of sushi
must be Polish.
I tell Jim about this theory, and he actually laughs out loud.
Ridiculous, he says, and here is where rubber hits the proverbial
road, where the difference between the amateur and the profes-

Stam_9781101870945_3p_all_r1.indd 173 10/24/16 3:13 PM

 1 7 4 Word by Word

sional is laid bare. The earliest uses of the English word sushi,
he tells me, come from travelogues written by Westerners traveling
to Japan in the late nineteenth century, which makes sense because
there was rising interest in Japan, which had been closed to West-
ern contact for hundreds of years but reopened during the Meiji
dynasty, after Matthew Perrys 1853 voyage to the nation. English
speakers had consistent contact with Polish speakers as far back as
the sixteenth century through trade, and though there was an influx
of Poles seeking asylum in England in the mid-nineteenth century,
Polish just didnt lend as many words to English as Japanese did.
Besides, he finishes, szukajcie is the second-person plural impera-
tive form of szuka, which actually means to seek, not raw fish.
Hes nonplussed. This is settled, he says. Why would this person
think otherwise?
I shake my head, not so much in answer to his question as in
wonder at his answer.

The process of finding a words etymology is about as abstruse

as lexicography gets, which is pretty damned abstruse. Etymolo-
gists begin their process by working backward. They start pawing
through the written record until theyve found the earliest Modern
English use of the word in question. Then they use a combination
of education, research, and (frankly) hunches to move even fur-
ther back. If the word goes back to Early Modern English, around
1500 or 1600, then the etymologist looks at the context, the spelling,
where and who and how the word was used. Specter, for instance,
goes back as far as 1605 in Englishnothing earlier. But the ety-
mologist also knows from their training that because of its orthogra-
phy specter is likely not a native English creation. That initial sp
followed by that ctthose are the morphological marks of an Italic
language, not a Germanic language (of which English is one). Its
very well-known that the Italic language that English speakers have
historically had the most contact with is French; the etymologist
doesnt have to poke too far to find the sixteenth-century French

Stam_9781101870945_3p_all_r1.indd 174 10/24/16 3:13 PM