A panting syllable through time and space,
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul,—to Greece,—and into Noah’s ark.”
A fundamental rule, to be kept constantly in sight by those who would not etymologize at random, is, that no amount of resemblance between words in different languages is sufficient to prove their relationship, nor is any amount of seeming unlikeness in sound or form sufficient to disprove their consanguinity. Many etymologies are true which appear improbable, and many appear probable which are not true. As Max Müller says: “Sound etymology has nothing to do with sound. We know words to be of the same origin which have not a single letter in common, and which differ in meaning as much as black and white.” On the other hand, two words which have identically the same letters may have no etymological connection. An instance of the last case is the French souris, a smile, and souris, a mouse, from the Latin subridere and sorex respectively. Fuller amusingly says that “we are not to infer the Hebrew and the English to be cognate languages because one of the giants, son of Anak, was called A-hi-man;” yet some of his own etymologies, though witty and ingenious, are hardly more correct than this punning derivation. Thus “compliments,” he says, is derived from à completè mentiri, because compliments are in general completely mendacious; and he quotes approvingly Sir John Harrington’s derivation of the old English “elf” and “goblin,” from the names of two political factions of the Empire, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.
Archbishop Trench speaks of an eminent philologist who deduced “girl” from garrula, girls being commonly talkative. “Frontispiece” is usually regarded as a piece or picture in front of a book; whereas it means literally “a front view,” being from the Low Latin, frontispicium, the forefront of a house. The true origin of many words is hidden by errors in the spelling. “Bran-new” is brand-new, i.e., “burnt new.” “Grocer” should be “grosser,” one who sells in the gross; “pigmy” is properly “pygmy,” as Worcester spells it, and means a thing the size of one’s fist (πυγμή). “Policy,” state-craft, is rightly spelled; but “policies of insurance” ought to have the ll, the word being derived from polliceor, to promise or assure. “Island” looks as if it were compounded of “isle” and “land”; but it is the same word as the Anglo-Saxon ealand, water-land, compounded of ea, water, and “land.” So Jersey is literally “Cæsar’s island.” “Lieutenant” has been pronounced “leftenant,” from a notion that this officer holds the “left” of the line while the captain holds the right. The word comes from the French, lieu-tenant, one holding the place of another.
“Wiseacre” has no connection with “acre.” The word is a corruption, both in spelling and pronunciation, of the German weissarger, a “wise-sayer,” or sayer of wise maxims. “Gooseberry,” Dr. Johnson explains as “a fruit eaten as a sauce for goose.” It is, however, a corruption of the German, krausbeere,—from kraus or gorse, crisp; and the fruit gets its name from the upright hairs with which it is covered. “Shame-faced” does not mean having a face denoting shame. It is from the Anglo-Saxon, sceamfaest, protected by shame. “Surname” is from the French, surnom, meaning additional name, and should not, therefore, be spelled “sirname,” as if it meant the name of one’s sire. “Freemason” is not half Saxon, but is from the French, frèremaçon, brother mason. “Foolscap” is a corruption of the Italian, foglio capo, a full-sized sheet of paper. “Country-dance” is a corruption of the French contre-danse, in which the partners stand in opposite lines.
“Bishop,” which looks like an Anglo-Saxon word, is from the Greek. It means primarily an overseer, in Latin episcopus, which the Saxons broke down into “biscop,” and then softened into “bishop.” There was formerly an adjective “bishoply”; but as, after the Norman Conquest, the bishops, and those who discussed their rights and duties, used French and Latin rather than English, “episcopal” has taken its place. Among the foreign words most frequently corrupted are the names of plants, which gardeners, not understanding, change into words that sound like the true ones, and with which they are familiar. In their new costume they often lose all their original significance and beauty. To this source of corruption we owe such words as “dandelion,” from the French, dent de lion, lion’s tooth; “rosemary,” from ros marinus; “quarter-sessions rose,” the meaningless name of the beautiful rose des quatre saisons; “Jerusalem artichoke,” into which, with a ludicrous disregard for geography, we have metamorphosed the sunflower artichoke, articiocco girasole, which came to us from Pery, through Italy; and “sparrow-grass,” which we have substituted for “asparagus.”
Animals have fared no better than plants; the same dislike of outlandish words, which are meaningless to them, leads sailors to corrupt Bellerophon into “Billy Ruffian,” and hostlers to convert Othello and Desdemona into “Odd Fellow and Thursday morning,” and Lamprocles into “Lamb and Pickles.” The souris dormeuse, or sleeping mouse, has been transformed into a “dormouse”; the hog-fish, or porcpisce, as Spenser terms him, is disguised as a “porpoise”; and the French écrevisse turns up a “crayfish” or “crawfish.” The transformations of the latter word, which has passed through three languages before attaining its present form, are among the most surprising feats of verbal legerdemain. Starting on its career as the old High German krebiz, it next appears in English as “crab,” and in German as krebs, or “crab,” from the grabbing or clutching action of the animal. Next it crosses the Rhine, and becomes the French écrevisse; then crosses the Channel, and takes the form of krevys; and, last of all, with a double effort at anglicizing, it appears in modern English as “crawfish” or “crayfish.” The last two words noticed illustrate the tendency which is so strong, in the corruption of words, to invent new forms which shall be appropriate as well as significant, other examples of which we have in “wormwood” from wermuth, “lanthorn” from laterna, “beefeater” from buffetier, “rakehell” from racaille, “catchrogue” from the Norman-French cachreau, a bum-bailiff, and “shoot” for chute, a fall or rapid. So the French, beffroi, a stronghold or tower,—a movable tower of several stories used in besieging,—has been corrupted into “belfry,” though there is no such French word as “bell.”
Often the corrupted form gives birth to a wholly false explanation. Thus in the proverbial dormir comme une taupe, which has been twisted into the phrase “to sleep like a top,” there is no trace of the mole; and the corruption of acheter, to buy, into “achat,”—which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was in London the word for trading, and was first pronounced and then written “acat,”—led to the story that Whittington, the famous Lord Mayor, obtained his wealth by selling and re-selling “a cat.” There is no hint in “somerset” of its derivation from the Italian, soprasalto, an overleap, through the French, sobresault, and the early English, to “somersault”; nor would the shrewdest guesser ever discover in faire un faux pas, to commit a blunder, the provincial saying, “to make a fox’s paw.” The word “ceiling,” from the old French seel, “a seal,” was formerly written “seeling,” and meant a wainscoating, a covering with boards for the purpose of sealing up chinks and cracks. The spelling was changed from an opinion that the word is derived from ciel, which means “heaven” and “a canopy.”
Among the most frequent corruptions are the names of places and persons. Thus Penne, Coombe, and Ick, the former name of Falmouth, has been transformed into “Penny-come-quick”; and the corruption of Chateau Vert into “Shotover” has led to the legend that Little John “shot over” the hill of that name near Oxford, England. Leighton-beau-desert has been converted into “Leighton-Buzzard”; Bridge-Walter, in Somersetshire, into “Bridgewater.” The Chartreuse has become the “Charter-House.” Sheremoniers Lane, so called because the artisans dwelt there whose business it was to sheer or cut bullion into shape for the die, became first “Sheremongers Lane,” and then, from its nearness to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and an analogy with Amen Corner and Paternoster Row, passed into “Sermon Lane.” The origin of the well known legend of Bishop Hatto, who forestalled the corn from the poor, and was devoured in his fortress on the Rhine by rats, is owing, it is said, to a corruption of the name of the maut-thurm, or custom-house, into the mäuse-thurm, or “Mouse-tower.” The Cologne myth of the eleven thousand virgins is supposed by an English philologist to have sprung from the name of St. Undecemilla, a virgin martyr. “The insertion of a single letter in the calendar has changed this name into the form ‘Undecem millia Virg. Mart.’ The bones of the eleven thousand, which are reverently shown to the pious pilgrim, have been pronounced by Professor Owen to comprise the remains of almost all the quadrupeds indigenous to the district.” The name “Gypsies” is a misnomer springing out of an error in ethnology. When they first appeared in Europe, nearly five centuries ago, their dark complexion and their unknown language led men to suppose that they were Egyptians, which word was corrupted into “Gypsies.” Boulogne Mouth was corrupted by the British sailors into “Bull and Mouth”; and Surajah Dowlah, the name of the Bengal prince who figured in the famous Black Hole atrocity, the British soldiers persisted in anglicizing into “Sir Roger Dowlas”! “Bedlam” is a corruption of Bethlehem, and gets its meaning from a London priory, St. Mary’s of Bethlehem, which was converted into a lunatic asylum.