Etymology, Folk Etymology & Blind Guesses

Some years ago, I went on one of those tourist-trap boats on the Thames. The guide kept up the usual cheery chatter, and one of the pieces of "information" he gave us was that the word wharf is actually an acronym, standing for Ware House At River Front. I was immediately dubious about that, and sure enough, when I checked, I found that it actually comes from the Anglo-Saxon word hwearf, meaning much the same as the modern word.

It's possible that the acronym began as a mnemonic (it's not an easy word to remember how to spell) but somewhere along the line that was forgotten and it got taken as the word's origin. That's unlikely anyway, since using acronyms as words is a relatively modern phenomenon.

Folk etymology is everywhere, though, and people will insist on telling you completely invented origins for words which they believe implicitly. Another often claimed to be an acronym is news, for North East West South (presumably because the more common order would result in the word nsew). In fact, it's more prosaic than that. The word quite literally means "new things", as when we ask someone "What's new?"

It's very easy, too, to make assumptions about words that seem similar, especially when the meanings are compatible too, but that doesn't always prove a connection. The number of possible sound-combinations isn't infinite, and some will appear in languages all over the world. The problem is, they've often come to that point by very different routes.

A while ago, someone on an online forum claimed that the word devil is (not might be, but is) related to the Sanskrit word devi, meaning a lesser god. On the face of it, that's entirely possible: it wouldn't be the only time the gods of one religion have been turned into the devils of another.

Except that it isn't true. A brief look at the history of devil shows that it comes from the Old English deofol, and that derives from the Latin diabolus and the Greek diabolos, from which we get diabolic (trust me: b and f really are closely related sounds). The original word means an accuser or slanderer, and clearly has no connection with the Sanskrit word.

This kind of thing even happens within the same language. It can produce good puns: for instance, if we think of rock music as something to do with stones (as Dylan said, everybody — especially rock musicians — must get stoned). However, where rock as in stone comes from French roche and Latin rocca, rock meaning sway (which is how the music got its name) is a Germanic word, roccian in Old English. No connection whatsoever.

On the other hand, the opposite can sometimes happen, and the most bizarre links can exist between apparently unconnected versions of the same letter-jumble. One of my favourites is check. This has numerous different meanings: to make sure something's OK, to stop something's progress, a pattern of squares or (spelt cheque here in Britain) a bank's promissory note, as well as several others.

Which makes it more surprising that they all derive from exactly the same source: the Persian word for king, usually rendered as shah. It entered the English language via its use in chess — when you call out check, you're essentially saying "look to your king", while checkmate means "the king is dead". All the other meanings are ultimately references to or metaphors for some aspect of chess or of putting the king in check.

This happened because words change their meanings through the centuries, sometimes causing confusion. We all know, and usually accept without thought, the saying "the exception that proves the rule", without considering that it's absurd. After all, an exception to a rule challenges the rule, rather than confirms it.

But that's precisely what the saying really means. The word prove used to mean test (it's still found in that sense in military proving grounds) and the expression means that an exception tests whether a rule is still valid — not a confirmation, but still a valuable scientific process.

For example, we have a rule that says "An object will fall to the ground when it's suspended in mid-air." "Ah," someone objects, "but when I threw a stone, it went up, not down." You then explain at length the precise difference between suspending and throwing, possibly demonstrating both with the objector. The rule is neither tested nor affected.

"Ah," says someone else, "but I suspended (not threw) a balloon in the air, and that floated up."

This is a much more valid objection, and we actually have to rephrase the rule to say "An object that's heavier than air will fall to the ground when it's suspended in mid-air." The original rule has been proved in the old sense, but definitely not proved in the new sense.

Ultimately, of course, it's not a big deal if someone misunderstands the origin of a word. The problem is the internet. The flip-side of having all the information we might need at our fingertips is that it's not all true, and once something's been stated as fact online, it can be incredibly difficult to convince people that they shouldn't believe it.

There's a very simple answer to this: get a good dictionary, whether it's on your bookshelf or on your computer. And I mean a GOOD dictionary, not joebloggsonlinedikshonary.com. Something like the Oxford or Collins Dictionaries (or I imagine Merriam Webster if you're in America) will give the source of each word, as far as it's known, at the end of the entry. Five minutes with the Concise Oxford Dictionary would have told you everything I've put in this article, and a great deal more.

You too can be an etymologist, instead of a folk etymologist.

A New Word for...

In the 2nd century BC, the Greek scholar Aristophanes was not a happy man.  The problem was that young people today just didn't speak properly — the way, for example, his 5th century namesake the comic dramatist had spoken.  Besides (in all probability) the fact that they mumbled and used incomprehensible slang, they also completely ignored the pitch accent.

Classical Greek, unlike any modern western language, was spoken with the pitch of words and phrases varying according to a set pattern.  It's been suggested that listening to, say, Socrates talk in the streets of Athens would have sounded rather like an opera singer performing recitative.  But, in the 2nd century, Greek speakers were ignoring this in favour of a stress accent of the kind we use in English.

Aristophanes's solution was to invent a series of accents — such as è, é and ê — to use in written Greek and indicate how the pitch should go.  However, the unruly youngsters continued to ignore him, and Greek gradually developed into the language spoken by millions today.  The accents weren't even much help to classicists, since Aristophanes didn't leave a clear enough explanation of how exactly the accents should be used, and there isn't a complete consensus about how the language should sound, although the same accents have been used for a variety of purposes in other languages.

The point about this story is that languages change, regardless of the horror of pedants, and often in unexpected ways.  Of course they do.  If not, I'd be writing this blog in Anglo-Saxon.  Or perhaps in Proto-Germanic; or in Proto-Indo-European; or in the unknown language that derived from; or even in the monosyllabic calls some early hominid species used to coordinate their hunts.  Come to that, what was wrong with when we just used to get on with the hunting, without all this new-fangled language nonsense?

Nevertheless, as writers, we're not utterly helpless in the face of language change.  Of course, we can't all be Shakespeare or the translators of the King James Bible, who had a profound effect on how English developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, but to some extent we can try to encourage changes that feel useful and graceful over those that don't, and maintain usages that, while not needed on a regular basis, are valuable to keep for when they are needed.

I thought I'd have a look at some of the words whose meanings have changed over the centuries, for good or ill, and some of the reasons why this would happen.  Sometimes, of course, it's for purely practical reasons.  Most computing terms, for instance, are new, specialist meaning for existing words - booting, menu, icon and the like.

Some words just drift, though.  The word nice originally meant precise, and it's still occasionally used in that sense — a nice distinction, for instance.  Gradually, though, it came to mean pleasant, and more recently can even be used to mean the opposite in a "damning through faint praise" way.  To describe something as very nice can be the kiss of death.

Sometimes, changes of meaning can create confusion.  We all know the expression the exception that proves the rule, which appears to be an absurd statement — an exception challenges a rule, it doesn't validate it.  In fact, that's precisely what it means, since prove originally meant to test, as in a military proving ground.  We have such faith in sayings, though, that many people assume it must be true in its modern sense.

A euphemistic meaning might take a word over for a while.  Shakespeare's Falstaff refers somewhere to how accommodate used to be an excellent word until it fell into bad company, a reference to a temporary slang meaning at the time of having sex.  Even when it isn't bad company a word falls into, slang meanings can overwhelm the normal meaning.  A century ago, or less, a single man addicted to wine, women and song would be described as a gay bachelor.  Nowadays, that would mean something completely different.

So should we just go with any change that's in the air?  And if not, what makes one change good and another bad?  That's partly a matter of taste, but I'd like to give my view by contrasting two words.

The original meaning of mutual is reciprocal, but it's gradually acquired the new meaning of shared, as in the Dickens novel Our Mutual Friend.  In the "real" sense, mutual friend is a tautology — it means I'm your friend and your my friend — but the alternative has become established now.

My biggest hate in "wrong" meanings, on the other hand, is disinterested.  It does not mean indifferent, it means impartial or neutral.  The Concise Oxford Dictionary does list the meaning uninterested, but describes it as "disputed" - dictionaryese for a meaning that's used but the dictionary isn't convinced by — and represents pure failure to learn what the word really means.

There are two particular differences between these cases.  One is that the change in mutual is an understandable mutation — shared isn't the same as reciprocal, but there's a connection between them — whereas the change in disinterested is purely an error.  The other is that the difference between the two meanings of mutual is fairly obvious, and there's unlikely to be an misunderstanding.  The spread of the misunderstanding about disinterested, on the other hand, makes it difficult to use the word correctly.  If I were to announce I was going to be a disinterested judge of a contest, you could pretty much guarantee someone would tell me I ought to be interested.  So I'd have to hit the person over the head and introduce them to a dictionary.

The meaning of any word, of course, is what's understood by it, and maybe eventually the meaning of disinterested will change, but I'd regret that.  Although both meanings have synonyms, it seems to me that the correct meaning is a more useful one.  I'll continue using it that way — and any editor who suggests otherwise will receive a lecture.

Ultimately, though, it's usefulness that counts, and even a blatant error can be useful.  The word careen has gone through an extraordinary change lately.  It's actually a nautical term meaning to scrape the barnacles off the hull of a ship or boat, but somewhere along the line it seems to have become confused with the verb career, meaning to run wildly and aimlessly (the more usual meaning was originally a metaphor for a race, whether or not by rats).  In a way, it's as wrong as disinterested, but it sounds right.  In any case, the real meaning is very technical, and it's unlikely to be used between people who don't understand it.

This is just a tiny sample of how the English language has changed, and the only thing we can know for sure about its future course is that it'll continue to change in ways no-one will guess until it happens.  In the unlikely event of this piece still existing in a couple of hundred years, I wonder how much amusement it'll cause because the meanings of some of the words are different.  I hope you have a good laugh.