In addition to a huge database (the physical files stand in my office, while the juice of the papers has been preserved on my computer), I have a heap of curious notes on language and etymology that I can use for neither my publications nor for this blog: just odds and ends. Sometimes I feel sorry that they are dying in their obscurity. For example, I walk into a store and read: “Bright, juicy and a beloved staff favorite citrus.” Quite a gem: a beloved citrus! Or is the staff beloved? Beloved-staff or staff-favorite? And why did the indefinite article crop up only in the middle of the phrase? In another store, I read: “Employees only beyond this post.” What is meant: “Employees: only beyond this post” or “Employees only—beyond this post”?
Of course, I am saying it all tongue in cheek, pretending that I cannot understand those signs, but still…. Incidentally, the phrase tongue in cheek surfaced in print only in the nineteenth century (Walter Scott was the first to use it) and does not seem to have analogues in other European languages. I have been unable to find any discussion of its origin. Was the gesture meant to be obscene? A variant of “giving one the finger”? Any protruding part of the body may arouse similar associations. Sex and humor are inseparable.
Or to return to a paper by Jeremy Bergerson (2004) about emphatic –s in Modern Germanic (I referred to it in the post on buddy of June 21, 2023). The paper is full of curious and non-trivial data. One of the most memorable -s words is the interjection shucks! (an expression of embarrassment or disappointment). Its etymology is known. The OED online devotes one short line to its origin and refers to the source, but I think the word deserves a more detailed explanation. Old English scucca ~ scocca meant “devil” (see the image in the header!). The long consonant (-cc-) was used for emphasis (a typical feature of “emotional” words). Like many old religious terms, scucca has a respectable ancestry. The word skohsl “evil spirit, demon” occurs In the fourth-century Gothic text of The New Testament (Gothic is a Germanic language; it is now dead); –sl is a suffix. Scocca and skohsl share the same root.
Surprisingly, even the 1986 etymological dictionary of Gothic says, “no Germanic cognates,” though scucca ~ scocca can be found in all dictionaries of Old English. Moreover, shuck “evil spirit” is still known in British dialects, and in 1936, Mary S. Serjeantson, a first-rate specialist in the history of English words, mentioned it in the widely read periodical Folklore. Finding such crumbs of information is hard. I keep returning to this subject because I know from bitter experience how much precious information on etymology lies fallow in runaway sources. Now an exhaustive bibliography of English etymology exists, but some researchers keep ignoring it. Last week, I mentioned the sad fact that in the not-too-distant past, some people interested in etymology were unaware of the OED, a work hard to overlook. See also the end of this essay, which is very much in tune with what I have just said.
Even though specialists in Gothic missed the evidence of English, Celtic cognates of skohsl were discovered long ago, and several hypotheses explaining the origin of the word exist. They need not bother us here. Perhaps the reference was to shaking (shake goes back to skak-) or to the root of a word like the little remembered English noun shaw “thicket, copse” (hence the family name Shaw: compare the family name Wood). Skohsl as a forest spirit? Perhaps. Today, copse is as obscure as shaw, though its doublet coppice still occurs in printed sources. However, it is not shaw but shucks that interests us. Here is a fact worthy of surprise. An ancient demon of Indo-European (or at least Germanic-Celtic) antiquity survived in English rural dialects (shuck), migrated to our colloquial speech, and developed into an interjection. Did shucks! once have an apotropaic function? Did people say shuck-shuck-shuck to avert evil? Today, that sense is perhaps still discernible in shucks, but -s adds a tinge of familiarity to it, so obvious in digs, Boots (the youngest son in British folklore: no connection with any type of “footwear”), and names like Toots (Mr. Toots is an endearing character in Dickens’s novel Dombey and Son).
Many etymologies are probable but not certain, and it is useful to know all conjectures, even if they are dubious. Here is a case in point. A colloquial expression dry beating exists. It means “a sound beating.” In the past, the phrase was common. Why dry? The usual explanation suggests that a dry beating does not (did not) involve bloodshed. In 1915, G. C. Macaulay (Cambridge) published a note in the periodical Modern Language Review (Vol. 10, 224-225), in which he questioned this etymology, and indeed, in the sentences from Middle English he cited, dry beating means only “severe” and has nothing to do with avoiding blood. Consider his dynttes were full dreghe “his blows were very dry/severe.” Dreghe is of course “dry” (plural). Dynt has also survived, but only in the phrase by dint of, that is, “by means of.”
It is indeed strange that dry (“bloodless”?) developed the sense “severe,” even though stranger things happen in historical semantics. G. C. Macaulay suggested that this dry “is connected of course with the stem of Old English drēogan.” The verb drēogan meant “to endure, suffer.” It disappeared from Modern English and was revived by Walter Scott in the form dree. To dree one’s weird means “to accept and surrender to one’s fate” (the tremendously overworked modern adjective weird is the same word). Macaulay should not have said of course. This obnoxious word often means: “There is no proof, but what proof is needed? Isn’t everything quite obvious?” At the moment, I have no opinion on dry beating and only have trouble with Macaulay’s treatment of vowels, but I believe that his conjecture should not be lost. To repeat: astute conjectures are strewn all over the place, and many of them go to waste.
On the same note, consider the following. In 2015, Juha Janhunen wrote a short article, titled “Etymology and the Role of Intuition in Historical Linguistics” (Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia 20, 9-15). He connected two words that on the face of it have nothing in common and thought that he was the first to offer this reconstruction. But later he stumbled on a 1933 publication that contained the same idea (and the journal was not one of those obscure sources nobody remembers!). However, he writes, this “publication was totally ignored by the standard textbooks. Only after I had independently arrived at the same conclusion half a century later, has the idea become more widely known. It may be another half a century for the correct explanation to win its place in the pool of generally accepted etymologies.” Shucks! Or should I say: “Fie!”
And now back to the previous post on the word bloody. The comments suggested that the word might be connected with menstruation. If it originated in Norman French, we may indeed think of taboo on everything, connected with the woman’s periods, but is the sense under discussion so old?
Featured image by Aden Kowalski via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
