The virtual linguist

Witch

I heard the tail end of an awful story on the news about someone killing a boy who was thought to be a witch. The OED says that witch meaning "a man who practises witchcraft" is a dialect word only, although that can't be the case as I heard it on national news, and it features in several newspaper reports.

 

There are two separate entries for the noun "witch" in the OED, one for the masculine meaning, and one for the feminine (defined as "a female magician, sorceress" as the original meaning, although needless to say, it soon pejorates into "a woman supposed to have dealings with the devil or evil spirits" - the male version does not have the equivalent pejorative definition). The first citation for 'witch' the man is c890, so it is a very old word. It comes from the Old English wicca, which was a masculine noun. 'Witch' the woman comes from the feminine version, wicce, and the first citation in the OED is from c1000. The Dictionary says that both words probably derive from the verb 'to witch' (wiccian in Old English), meaning 'to practise sorcery'. Interestingly, Wicca itself only went into the OED in 1993; it is defined as "the practices and religious cult of modern witchcraft".

Eskimo words for snow

Since there is still some stubborn snow lying on the ground outside, I'll revisit a post I wrote three years ago about the "Eskimo words for snow" myth, which is being linked to in a piece in today's Guardian. This Guardian article discusses some other language myths, which will probably interest most readers of the Virtual Linguist blog.

 

The Guardian article also advises people to "look up the origins of marmalade", although it is not a particularly contentious word, as is implied. I've written a post on marmalade, too, as I found it interesting.

Ought, nought and aught

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery". On the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, today I am taking Mr Micawber's famous piece of advice in David Copperfield as inspiration.

 

'Ought' in this quotation means "nought" ('no shillings' is meant). It's not very common to hear 'ought' in this sense today, although I remember my dad saying it 30 or 40 years ago in connection with small measurements - one point ought six, that sort of thing. Ought is a variation of nought; it just lost the N a couple of hundred years ago. This process occurred with other common words, too; an adder, a snake, was spelled nædder in Old English and nadder in Middle English. Since "a nadder" sounds exactly the same as "an adder" the n eventually migrated across to the article. Apron was originally napperon (it comes from the French nappe, tablecloth) and orange can be ultimately traced back through the Persian nārang and the Sanskrit nāraṅga.

 

A similar word is "naught", not very common in Britain these days except in the phrase "come to naught" (and many people spell that 'nought'). It's a very old word that goes back to the beginnings of English, and is a mixture of no + wight, or ne + aught, both wight and aught meaning 'thing' in Old English, so naught was 'no thing', or 'nothing'. Naught and nought were originally pronounced differently, but by the 17th century the vowel sounds had merged to sound the same - in standard English, that is - note the regional word 'nowt', still pronounced with the original pronunciation. Naught and nought could also be used interchangeably, but naught tended to be associated with the sense 'worthless' or 'bad'. This is how the word naughty came about (there was once also the spelling noughty).

 

Aught is the opposite of naught, and means 'anything'. It is not very common in British English these days, except for the phrases "for aught I know" and "for aught I care".

 

Hoopla

'The hoopla will have to wait till June', said an article in the Guardian today (I've paraphrased slightly), talking about Diamond Jubilee celebrations. Interestingly, hoopla with this sense (excited bustle, hullabaloo) is not in the OED, although it is in smaller dictionaries. In the OED hoop-la (with hyphen) is in only with the sense of the ring thrown at fairgrounds.

 

Hoopla is mostly a North American expression. Admittedly, the OED has lots of American slang in it, so there is no reason why it would exclude hoopla. The main reason, I suspect, is that the OED is such a huge "book" that it takes decades for things to filter through into it, and probably the Hs haven't been edited for decades either.

 

Some sources say that the 'bustle and commotion' sense of hoopla comes from the French expression houp-là, which is an exhortation to a child or animal to "get up" or "move". The equivalent of houp-là in English is up-a-daisy (or ups-a-daisy, oops-a-daisy, whoopsy-daisy or various other spellings).

 

Sporting a beard

I've been editing a Russian grammar book lately and one of the sentences was translated "he wears glasses and sports a beard". "Sports" sounds a bit quaint in English, although you do hear it occasionally. In the Russian equivalent there was just one verb -- in Russian you "wear" a beard, so the sentence was a bit more succinct.

 

I wondered why we said "to sport" for moustaches, beards etc and went to the OED to check. Sport, whether a noun or verb, is related to the older "disport" meaning divert or amuse oneself. That was the original meaning of the verb "sport" in English and remained popular until the 17th century. Then, in the late 18th century, the word gained the meaning that is its usual meaning today, "To display or exhibit publicly, esp. in an ostentatious way; (now) esp. to possess (a distinctive visual feature)". Another definition in the OED is "To display on the person; to wear".

 

The OED says that the fact that the noun "sport" can mean both amusement and competitive activities might have come about through an association with the Latin ludus. Ludus in Roman times was play, amusement and frivolous activities, but it also referred to physical exercise and military training.

 

The word for 'sport' in many other languages (including Russian) is 'sport', too, and these borrowings have come from English.

Bus drivers banned from calling female passengers "babe"

Bus drivers in Brighton and Hove, on the south-east coast of England, have been told by their bosses not to call female passengers "babe". There has apparently been just one complaint that the term is sexist. Other regional organisations have banned, or advised against, other terms of endearment, too - Newcastle City Council asked its staff to think very carefully before calling women 'pet' or 'hinny' (which comes from 'honey').

 

Love, duck, dear, chuck, lover, guv, hen - these are mostly traditional and long-standing regional terms of endearment and are used to address people of all ages. I wouldn't necessarily say that "babe" belongs in this group though; it is probably a more modern expression. As Ian Brookes from Collins says in this BBC article, it became popular in the 1990s to describe an attractive woman, thus it is seen as having overtones of sexism.

 

Words out of context are fairly neutral. Most people don't mind a shop assistant or market stall holder calling them 'love' or 'ducks' in a cheery voice, but would probably object if a boss said it. A young woman might not mind an elderly man calling her 'pet', but an older woman probably wouldn't like to be addressed in this way by a young man.

 

Here's the story, and here's a list of regional terms of endearment.

 

Shakespeare's grammar

When people talk about Shakespeare's contribution to the English language, they usually refer to the words he used. His works contain the first recorded use of many words, including bandit, dwindle, excellent and tranquil. That does not mean that he coined the words, just that no-one can find any written evidence of them before him. An academic from Strathclyde University has said that Shakespeare was no more inventive than his contemporaries when it came to vocabulary, but where he was really innovative was in the grammatical constructions he used. One example is his use of adjectives to describe inanimate objects; talking of horses and their "proud hoofs" was ground-breaking at the time.

 

Here's a Daily Telegraph article on the subject.