blarmed = blamed, blessed and other bl-words + darned (damned).
be danged = damned + hanged.
I swow = swear + vow.
brunch = breakfast + lunch (so also, though more rarely brupper (... + supper), tunch (tea + lunch), tupper = tea + supper).[76]
XVI.—§ 7. Echo-words.
Most etymologists are very reluctant to admit echoism; thus Diez rejects onomatopœic origin of It. pisciare, Fr. pisser—an echo-word if ever there was one—and says, “One can easily go too far in supposing onomatopœia: as a rule it is more advisable to build on existing words”; this he does by deriving this verb from a non-existing *pipisare, pipsare, from pipa ‘pipe, tube.’ Falk and Torp refer dump (Dan. dumpe) to Swed. dimpa, a Gothonic root demp, supposed to be an extension of an Aryan root dhen: thus they are too deaf to hear the sound of the heavy fall expressed by um(p), cf. Dan. bumpe, bums, plumpe, skumpe, jumpe, and similar words in other languages.
It may be fancy, but I think I hear the same sound in Lat. plumbum, which I take to mean at first not the metal, but the plummet that was dumped or plumped into the water and was denominated from the sound; as this was generally made of lead, the word came to be used for the metal. Most etymologists take it for granted that plumbum is a loan-word, some being honest enough to confess that they do not know from what language, while others without the least scruple or hesitation say that it was taken from Iberian: our ignorance of that language is so deep that no one can enter an expert’s protest against such a supposition.[77] But if my hypothesis is right, the words plummet (from OFr. plommet, a diminutive of plomb) as well as the verb Fr. plonger, whence E. plunge, from Lat. *plumbicare, are not only derivatives from plumbum (the only thing mentioned by other scholars), but also echo-words, and they, or at any rate the verb, must to a great extent owe their diffusion to their felicitously symbolic sound. In a novel I find: “Plump went the lead”—showing how this sound is still found adequate to express the falling of the lead in sounding. The NED says under the verb plump: “Some have compared L. plumbare ... to throw the lead-line ... but the approach of form between plombar and the LG. plump-plomp group seems merely fortuitous” (!). I see sound symbolism in all the words plump, while the NED will only allow it in the most obvious cases. From the sound of a body plumping into the water we have interesting developments in the adverb, as in the following quotations: I said, plump out, that I couldn’t stand any more of it (Bernard Shaw) | The famous diatribe against Jesuitism points plumb in the same direction (Morley) | fall plum into the jaws of certain critics (Swift) | Nollie was a plumb little idiot (Galsworthy). In the last sense ‘entirely’ it is especially frequent in America, e.g. They lost their senses, plumb lost their senses (Churchill) | she’s plum crazy, it’s plum bad, etc. Related words for fall, etc., are plop, plout, plunk, plounce. Much might also be said in this connexion of various pop and bob words, but I shall refrain.
XVI.—§ 8. Some Conjunctions.
Sometimes obviously correct etymologies yet leave some psychological points unexplained. One of my pet theories concerns some adversative conjunctions. Lat. sed has been supplanted by magis: It. ma, Sp. mas, Fr. mais. The transition is easily accounted for; from ‘more’ it is no far cry to ‘rather’ (cf. G. vielmehr), which can readily be employed to correct or gainsay what has just been said. The Scandinavian word for ‘but’ is men, which came into use in the fifteenth century and is explained as a blending of meden in its shortened form men (now mens) ‘while’ and Low German men ‘but,’ which stands for older niwan, from the negative ni and wan ‘wanting’; the meaning has developed through that of ‘except’ and the sound is easily understood as an instance of assimilation. The same phonetic development is found in Dutch maar, OFris. mar, from en ware ‘were not,’ the same combination which has yielded G. nur. Thus we have four different ways of getting to expressions for ‘but,’ none of which presents the least difficulty to those familiar with the semantic ways of words. But why did these various nations seize on new words? Weren’t the old ones good enough?
Here I must call attention to two features that are common to these new conjunctions, first their syntactic position, which is invariably in the beginning of the sentence, while such synonymous words as Lat. autem and G. aber may be placed after one or more words; then their phonetic agreement in one point: magis, men, maar all begin with m. Now, both these features are found in two words for ‘but,’ about whose etymological origin I can find no information, Finnic mutta and Santal menkhan, as well as in me, which is used in the Ancrene Riwle and a few other early Middle English texts and has been dubiously connected with the Scandinavian (and French?) word. How are we to explain these curious coincidences? I think by the nature of the sound [m], which is produced when the lips are closed while the tongue rests passively and the soft palate is lowered so as to allow air to escape through the nostrils—in short, the position which is typical of anybody who is quietly thinking over matters without as yet saying anything, with the sole difference that in his case the vocal chords are passive, while they are made to vibrate to bring forth an m.