The virtual linguist

Swivel-eyed loons

A close associate of David Cameron apparently called Tory party activists "swivel-eyed loons". Swivel-eyed originally referred to squinting, but modern references are always related to people who are wacky or bonkers, particularly right-wingers. One of the citations in the OED for the entry 'barmy army' is "During the 1995 Tory leadership contest it was Collins who described John Redwood's campaign team as a ‘swivel-eyed barmy army’". That citation is from 2002 (Collins was a spokesman for John Major, and the quotation continued with ".. from Ward 8 at Broadmoor"). Another example, the phrase "“swivel eyed Daily Mail reading loon” appeared on this BBC forum last year.

 

Loon has several different senses. Actually, the sense meant in the phrase "swivel-eyed loons" is not mentioned on the loon page, but is closer to loony, which is short for lunatic. Loony is defined as "extremist, fanatical" and, ironically, became frequently used to refer to the "loony left" in the 1970s and 80s. One of the definitions of loon itself is "A boor, lout, clown; an untaught, ill-bred person", and is described by the OED as Scottish or northern English.

 

Loon is also an aquatic bird. The OED says that here loon developed from the word loom, a word from the Shetland dialect, and ultimately from Old Norse.

 

If you were around in the 1970s you may remember wearing loons ie flared cotton trousers. The noun loons developed from the 1960s verb 'to loon', meaning to lounge around or spend one's time pleasurably. The origin of this sense is unknown.

Womb man

There is a piece on the Quiverfull movement on the BBC website today. The term Quiverfull is a reference to Psalm 127, and the lines "As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them".

 

Quiverfulls believe in having lots of children. One of the gurus of the movement is Nancy Campbell, whose organisation is called Above Rubies. As mentioned in the BBC article, Campbell likes to cite the 1928 edition of Webster's dictionary, which states that the word woman is a combination of womb plus man, therefore a woman is 'a man with a womb' or 'a womb man' (she says it on this page of Above Rubies website).

 

This is not the current understanding of the derivation of woman. The word woman developed from the Old English wifman (which had various spellings), where the i was pronounced /iː/, like the ea sound in the modern weave. Wifman was made up of the words wif + man, where wif was a woman (as in Chaucer's Wife of Bath, or a fishwife, housewife etc) and man was a person of either sex. Over the centuries the long /iː/ (ea) vowel sound, said with open, spread lips, was affected by the w sound in front of it, said with the lips rounded and forward, and by the f sound after it, articulated at the front of the mouth, and so the vowel also came to be pronounced with rounder lips. The f of wifman gradually disappeared, in a process similar to what happens when people say 'give me' quickly ie the v disappears and it becomes gimme.

 

Womb is another word that has been around since Old English times, but it is unrelated to wifman. Womb has cognates in other Germanic languages eg Old Frisian wamme, Old Danish vom, Old Swedish vamb, Gothic wamba and means belly or uterus. Today it means uterus, but over the centuries the term womb has also been used to refer to the abdomen, chest, stomach, chamber of the heart, and bowel.

 

Quack

Oxford Dictionaries Online's Word of the Day yesterday was quack. I discovered that quack meaning fake doctor was originally an abbreviation of the earlier quacksalver, whose first recorded use was in 1579. The OED tells us that this longer word was very common in the 17th century, and only later was largely superseded by the shorter quack.

 

The word comes from the Dutch kwakzalver. It possibly came from the Dutch kwak, meaning scrap or rubbish (zalver is related to the English salve, and means one who uses ointments). Kwak here is from the Dutch verb kwakken, to fling down. Or, another suggestion has been put forward for the etymology, namely that it is from another Dutch verb kwaken, to croak, squawk or quack. The link is that medical quacks aggressively touted their cures.

 

There was also once in common use a corresponding verb to quack, which meant, in the words of the OED: "to advertise, palm off, or sell like a quack cure; to promote or boost (a person or thing) with fraudulent or exaggerated claims".

 

The verb to quack, with reference to ducks, first appeared in the 16th century. There are very similar words for the sound ducks make in all Germanic languages. There was an earlier (14th century) word, to queck, meaning the same. In the 19th century quackle and quake were used of ducks, too.

 

All in all, there are six separate entries for quack in the OED. The earliest meaning is "a state of hoarseness or croakiness in the throat". Chaucer used the phrase 'on the quack' (he wrote 'quake') in the 1390s in The Reeve's Tale. Quack is also short for quackgrass, which is couchgrass.

 

 

Dog's letter

The Oxford English Dictionary's word of the day today was dog's letter, defined as "A name for the letter R (from its resemblance in sound to the snarl of a dog)".

 

It got me wondering which other letters of the alphabet had a nickname. There's the NATO phonetic alphabet, of course, plus the names of the letters linked to their sounds (bee, em etc), but nothing as picturesque as 'dog's letter'.

 

There is a term in the OED for the letter C with a cedilla, and that is ceceril. There's also the obsolete essefirme, a letter S. Upsilon is the Greek letter Υ, υ, representing the vowel u, and izzard is an old word for the letter Z.

 

Researching the topic in the Dictionary earlier, I came across these other letter-related words, which I shall try and squeeze into my conversations this week ...

 lambdacism: A too frequent repetition of the letter L in speaking or writing.

metacism: a definition from Ogilvie's Imperial Dictionary is given in one of the citations - "the too frequent use of the letter M".

 

And I also like the definition from another dictionary (the American Dictionary of the English Language by Joseph Emerson Worcester), given among the citations at the balbuties entry: "vicious pronunciation, in which b and l are substituted for other consonants".

Volcano

The OED published its latest additions at the end of last month, and Chief Editor John Simpson highlights a group of 'volcano-related' words in an article on the OED site (here).

 

The earliest word in English that described what we now call a volcano was vulcan, first used with this sense in the early 15th century, but the word was known much earlier as the name of the Roman god of fire and metalworking. By the 17th century the word vulcan had also gained the meaning of metalworker or blacksmith, and also of cuckold, particularly where the husband in question was a blacksmith. Volcan started to be used in the late 16th century to mean a volcano, and volcano, itself, which by the 18th century had become the established spelling, entered English a few years later in the early 17th century. The words have their origin in Latin (the volcan spelling came from Spanish). As Simpson says in his article, it is not surprising that such mountains were given foreign names, since they are not English phenomena.

 

Vulcan has always been in the OED, but a new sense has gone within the last few weeks, namely the fictional alien race from Star Trek.

Internet words

I blogged recently on the book Netymology. Its author Tom Chatfield had a piece in The Guardian about the history of some internet words that are included in the book. They are a mixed bag - from the Sanskrit origins of the word avatar to the word meme, coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976. The word spam became ubiquitous on the internet, thanks to an old Monty Python surreal sketch (see on YouTube here). Geeks were originally travelling circus performers who bit the heads off live chickens, and troll comes from the French verb troller, meaning to wander round while hunting.

 

Here's the Guardian piece, entitled The 10 best words the internet has given English.

Scallion and rapscallion

Oxford Dictionaries Online's word of the day today is rapscallion, an archaic word, although sometimes used humorously today, for rascal. It is unconnected to the word scallion, which is more commonly called a spring onion in British English. It was first attested in the late 17th century, and is a variant of the earlier rascallion which, according to the OED, derives from rascal plus an "apparently fanciful ending".

 

In the late 16th century there was a similar word with similar meaning -- rampallion. This may derive from the verb to ramp, which, in heraldry, means 'to rise on the hind legs', and when applied to people used to mean 'to gesticulate or behave in a furious or threatening manner'. Another suggested link is a connection to Ram Alley, the name of various old streets in London. Lording Barry, a 17th-century dramatist, wrote a play called Ram Alley, populated by various disreputable characters and set in a seamy area.

 

There is an even later word with similar spelling and meaning - ramscallion. Here, the OED suggests that the ram may be a Scottish intensifying prefix (and directs the reader to the Scottish ramfeezled, exhausted and ramsgunhoch, surly or boorish).

 

As for scallion, this word has an interesting origin. It comes from the popular Latin escalonia, onion. The classical Latin equivalent is ascalonia, and this is from the Latin name (Ascalon) for the old Palestinian port of Ashkelon on the Mediterranean, which was a thriving trading town at the time. The word shallot derived from scallion, so has a similar history.

Frimponged

My football-mad son introduced me to the verb 'to frimpong', which means, as far as I can gather, 'to tackle very aggressively'. Emmanuel Frimpong plays for Fulham on loan from Arsenal, and he seems to be the person responsible for the new verb coining, having written tweets such as 'I need to start frimponging people instead of me being frimponged' (see here). Coincidentally, Emmanuel Frimpong was also instrumental in coining the word dench, which I blogged on very recently (here).

 

Another well-known verb derived from the name of a footballer (well-known among football fans, that is) is 'to kerzhakov', from Aleksandr Kerzhakov, a striker with Zenit St Petersburg. The verb was coined by a journalist on The Guardian, after Kerzhakov failed to score, despite having several chances, in a match during last year's Euro Championships. It therefore means 'to fail to score when shooting from a perfect position'. Kerzhakoved has been used to refer to other players, for example in this report about the England-Italy match in the Euros:

It should have been dealt with without any fuss whatsoever, but the England defence was dozing and it dropped to De Rossi, who turned and Kerzhakoved a volley wide from six yards out!

 

I can't think of any other footballers whose names have become verbs. I have found 'to be de Jonged' on the internet, after Nigel de Jong, a Dutch footballer, who kicked an opponent in the chest (see the action here), but my son tells me it's not a common phrase.

Birch tree

The literal meaning of the late Boris Berezovsky's surname is 'birch tree' (берёза, pronounced 'beryoza', is birch tree in Russian). Coincidentally, the name of the Icelandic singer Björk also means 'birch tree'.

 

Most words for the tree in Germanic and Slavonic languages are similar. It is believed that the words all stem from a common Proto-Indo-European root *bherəg’-, meaning something bright or shining. The English word bright originates from the same PIE root.

 

Interestingly, the Latin fraxinus, is also a cognate of *bherəg’-. It's hard to see the link, I know, but the PIE sound /bh/, an aspirated vocal stop, changed into other sounds down the centuries, depending on the language. This explains why blaze and flagrant (= burning) come from the same PIE root, and why bleat and the Latin verb flēre, to cry or weep, are related. However, the Latin fraxinus is not a birch tree; it's an ash. Scholars have speculated that the birch, a tree that grows in cool and temperate climates, may not have been familiar to the original inhabitants of warmer, southern European countries, so they applied the same stem meaning 'shining' to a familiar tree that also appeared to be bright and shining.

Not on your Nelly

The phrase 'not on your Nelly' was one of the rounds in last week's radio programme Just a Minute, which prompted me to look it up. Nelly is short for Nelly duff, which is Cockney rhyming slang for puff. Here, puff means 'life; span or length of life' (OED). The OED mentions the phrase in all one's (born) puff, meaning 'in all one's life', and tends to be used in negative contexts, or with a negative verb.

 

Nelly and puff share a definition. They can both refer, according to the OED, to 'an effeminate man'. Puff is the older word here, dating from the very early 20th century, whilst Nelly (also written nelly) goes back to the 1930s.