Will - the Magpie Linguist
I post bits of shiny etymological stuff which have caught my attention.
- This is Sky, the official Magpie Linguist dog. Sky would like you to know that the oft-repeated fact that the butterfly used to be known as the flutterby, while charming, is in fact certifiably nonsense. She would also like you to know that she once ate one and wasn't very impressed.
- Good morning from Magpie HQ. Today I thought I'd do a thread on backronyms. These are words which have evolved as words in their own right, but which humans have come up with (often very pleasing, sometimes trite) things that they supposedly stand for. Strong language ahead in a couple of examples.
- [Not loaded yet]
- TIL I had this the wrong way around! Thanks.
- [Not loaded yet]
- See, the problem is that now I have had 1 (one) encouragement to nerd about bird words specifically, that's now what I'm most likely to post.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Thankfully chroico- means coloured rather than black, which would have been the final insult.
- [Not loaded yet]
- It is a gull. But as said, it has its black head (which is brown) for about two months of the year.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Indeed. Occasionally there will be what seems to be a glaring omission in a language, and the idea that we should have had a word for someone who robs houses, but not the action or act of robbing houses, seems very strange. But here we are.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Debatable. Possibly, yes; possibly, people just saw them hovering in the wind and thought, ah, we will call that a windhover. But personally I'd favour the idea that windfucker was a little too on the nose for Renaissance sensibilities 🤣
- [Not loaded yet]
- Potentially. A lot of bird/nature terms were a lot less polite than we would consider to be proper nowadays - wheatear, for instance, is simply "white-arse".
- It's an interesting one and my other special interest is birds, so it's especially interesting for me. I think there's just about enough to say that windhover is a later bowdlerisation; "fuck" has been offensive in English for a very long time.
- Coda: There's a separate debate about "windsucker", which appears at almost the same time as "windfucker". Nobody is sure whether it's a bowdlerisation too, or whether "windfucker" is a misreading of a long s when it was written "windſucker", which was then the accepted style for non-word-final S.
- This was so they could (supposedly) get the benefit of the most sunlight as their cabins would be south-facing. Nautical microeconomics aside, as nice an idea as it is, there just isn't any evidence of this being where we get the word posh. A nice story nonetheless.
- TL;DR: pleasing-sounding backronyms are rarely, if ever, correct.
- Perhaps my favourite example of this, and one I'm genuinely sorry isn't the correct origin, is the word posh. Posh is one of those words that nobody is certain where it came from; but, by far the most likely origin is from Romani, as "posh-koroona" (half a crown) was used to mean anything expensive.
- What we can be absolutely certain of is that the backronym Port Out Starboard Home holds no water (pun intended). The idea is that it came from the days of transatlantic liners, when first-class passengers would be given a port cabin on the crossing to the US, and starboard cabin on the way back.
- Likewise, shit, whose etymology can be traced as far back as a Proto-Indo-European word meaning to separate, divide (and hence is related to schism etc), existed many centuries before someone decided that because manure was combustible it stood for Store High In Transit.
- And fuck, one of the objectively oldest words in the English language, and ultimately from a root meaning strike or beat (hence why kestrels used to be known as windfuckers), definitively does not come from Fornication Under Command of the King.
- A while ago someone very confidently told me that "news" stood for "notable events, weather and sport". Of course, it doesn't, it simply means "things that are new". But there are quite a few examples of this.
- Golf is a good example. It's thought to derive from Middle Scots golf, from Middle Dutch colf (=club) and thus which is simply named for the thing you play it with. However someone decided it would made a better story if it were an acronym standing for "Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden".
- Goodness, thanks for all the love and follows as a result of my little thread about Lichfield. I'll try and do them regularly - they won't always be about place names, it's likely just to be anything that steals my attention momentarily. 😊
- [Not loaded yet]
- I am no Susie Dent - but I take it as a great compliment! 😊
- This weekend we found ourselves in Lichfield, which has always struck me as an odd name for a place.
- [Not loaded yet]
- I am reminded of a definitely-very-suspicious gate at Pontefract castle with a prominent sign that said "this gate leads to an old well, and NOT to a labyrinth of secret subterranean tunnels". Which, you know, served only to convince us of the opposite.
- [Not loaded yet]
- Aw, thank you!
- Lich survives in English in the word lychgate which refers to a covered gateway to a cemetery or churchyard, where coffins typically rested before interral.
- Lich itself comes ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *leyg- and shares a linguistic root with like, alike, German gleich (=same, similar) and comes from the idea of a corpse/dead body being the likeness of a person. TL;DR: Lichfield isn't full of zombies, but it is full of ash trees.
- Old English then takes its own form, Licid, and appends -feld meaning open heathland to give Licidfeld, giving us Lichfield. Unrelated, a lichfield (lower case) is another name for a graveyard. This sense comes from the use of "lich" to mean corpse.
- Lich meaning corpse, as often as not reanimated, is found through fantasy and folklore, but alas Lichfield is not named for a mass grave, nor is it full of shambling corpses (though, a bit, for all that).
- A bit of digging reveals the name comes from the Roman name Letocetum, which means "place of grey wood". It's thought this refers to the ash and/or elm trees which grew around the area. This then gets changed in Old Welsh to Luitcoyt (c.f. Modern Welsh coed = wood).
