Muck

Muck

I’ve always been fond of the word muck. What a pleasure to discover muck has an intriguing etymology.

The noun muck came to English in the mid-1300s, followed within a half century by its verb form. Initially, the noun meant cow dung & vegetable matter spread as fertilizer, which helps explain why the verb initially meant to dig in the ground or to move manure. Apparently all this mucking about made its way through Scandinavia after starting off as a Proto-Germanic word meaning soft.

And most sources suggest that same Proto-Germanic word meaning soft also gave us the word meek, which came to English even earlier (in the 1200s), meaning gentle, courteous, benevolent.

Interesting that a word meaning soft grew to mean both cow dung mixed with vegetable matter & those who will inherit the earth.

Pondering this unlikely association led me to have a look at the etymology of manure, which first arrived in English as a verb meaning to cultivate land or hold property (possibly a synonym for inheriting the earth?). It came through Anglo-French & Old French from the Latin word manuoperare, literally to work with the hands. It’s easy to see how one of the most humble forms of working with one’s hands is/was to spread fertilizer, or work the earth. It wasn’t until1540 the noun manure was born, meaning exactly what it means today.

And what other words did the root of manure become? How about maneuver? Its humble roots of working with the hands morphed in time through Old French to land in English in 1758 meaning planned movement of troops or warships. All this suggests there is at least etymological truth in those epithets thrown by military grunts on the ground regarding the instructions given them from above.

Which brings us to humus, a word meaning earth or soil. Humus showed up in English in the late 1700s after a trip through Latin from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning earth. Another branch of that same word meaning earth made its humble way into Latin to become the word humility, which seems to bring us back to meekness.

Hmmm.

Good readers, I hope you’ll have a comment on these humble, meek, manure-ish words & their histories.

Big thanks to friend Aaron Keating, for suggesting this week’s topic, & thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam-Webster, Wordnik,  Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, & the OED.