Reduplication III

Reduplication III

One of the alluring elements of any language is the music of it, & one of the ways we infuse a language with music is the repetition or near-repetition of sounds. Linguists call these childish-sounding gems reduplications. Here are a few:

Since 1741 those who move slowly have dilly-dallied. 

In 1940, a reduplication of the word super was born — super-duper.

A reduplication of the word roll came to be in 1820 — roly-poly.

Since 1610 those who lie can be said to fib. Though fib isn’t a reduplication, it was born of the reduplication fibble-fable, a term of the 1500s meant to disparage the telling of fables.

Zigzag (or zig-zag) came to us in 1712. It’s likely this term grew from the German reduplication zickzack, a play on the word zacke, which meant tooth or prong.

Since the 1530s, when someone goes about doing something in a backward fashion, that person’s actions can be labeled arsy-versy, a reduplication of the somewhat titillating word, arse. Some Linguists suggest this term might also have been influenced by the word reverse.

And the reduplication ticky-tacky, brainchild of folksinger Malvina Reynolds, made its debut in 1962 to label the reiterating rows of tacky homes being built at the time. Listen to her song, “Little Boxes,” here.

First meaning feeble or poor in quality, & later meaning vacillating, the term wishy-washy has been with us since the 1690s.

And though this post was sparked by a conversation with good friend Anne Peterson about the term willy-nilly, the term in question is not a reduplication. It was born in the 1600s of the phrase will he, nill he, which meant with or without the will of the person in question. Willy-nilly doesn’t qualify as a reduplication because it’s not simply a near-repeated sound. Its roots clearly go back to two words that simply happen to rhyme. Proof that hardworking etymologists are exacting & don’t go about things willy-nilly.

If you're interested in more examples of reduplication, check out this post, or this one.

Please leave any comments on all this reduplication in the comment section.

Big thanks to this week’s sources: the OED, Etymonline, Merriam Webster, Wordnik, & Collins Dictionary.

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker

November 26 marks the 185th birthday of a little known, feisty and fascinating human being. I know I’m supposed to be writing about words, but as folksinger Arlo Guthrie once said, “You can’t always do what you’re s’pose to do.”

I fell for Dr. Walker some years ago. I hope you might find her intriguing.

She was one of America’s first female medical doctors. In the late 1850s she opened her practice more than once, but failed miserably. People were under the impression that a woman couldn’t possibly practice medicine, so she had no luck attracting patients.

Her lack of professional success may have been affected by her strident insistence that the primary reason women “got the vapors” and fainted was the corsets that restricted their breathing. Another fashion-related opinion may have had something to do with it, too. She was among the Bloomerites, and scandalous as it was, she wore wool trousers — under her wool dress or skirt. Though it’s beyond the modern sensibility to comprehend it, Dr. Walker was arrested multiple times for those trousers.

When the Civil War broke out she wanted to do what she could for wounded soldiers, but it took two years of fighting with the US Army before she was allowed on the battlefield. Once there, she argued with the male doctors that they should embrace the newfangled practice of washing their hands between patients. This advice was not happily received. During free hours, she left the battlefield to treat injured civilians, whether northerners or southerners. After helping with an amputation in southern territory, Confederate forces captured her and she became a prisoner of war.

Four months later she was freed through a prisoner exchange and became the first female recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor. It will not surprise the historians among you that 52 years later at the age of 85 she was stripped of the honor for nebulous reasons. She wouldn’t give the medal up, though, and wore it the rest of her life.

In her 70s and 80s her feistiness didn’t decline. She took to wearing men’s formal wear and fought with her fellow Suffragettes, arguing that there was no reason for a 15th amendment; the word men referred to all of humanity, and because of this, the Constitution already gave women the vote. All the Suffragettes needed to do was force Congress to accept the Constitution as it was written.

Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable.

Big thanks to this week’s sources: Town of Oswego, Syracuse.com, biography.com,  NIH, 

AAUW, Darlene Stille’s Extraordinary Women of Medicine, & Goldsmith’s Civil War Surgeon & Medal of Honor Recipient.

Angry

Angry?

Recent harassment disclosures seem to get uglier the deeper we dig. These are significant disclosures & spark significant emotion, but we Americans aren’t famous for our facility with emotional vocabulary. This week’s Wordmonger post asks, What are you really feeling about all this?

Our default word tends to be angry. Dictionaries tells us anger is a broad term which implies emotional agitation of no specified intensity, aroused by great displeasure. That doesn’t quite nail my emotional response to all this, so here are some options:

Fury is an overwhelming rage of a frenzied nature, bordering on madness. 

When we feel upset we’re experiencing an emotional toppling or disorganization.

Ire suggests that our anger & wrath are transforming into keen resentment.

When we are vexed, we are troubled, annoyed, irritated, & disturbed.

Wrath is deep indignation expressing itself in a desire to punish or extract revenge.

When we are enraged we experience uncontrolled anger that often results in violence.

Indignation is righteous anger aroused by what is considered unjust, mean, or shameful.

Smoldering means fully or partially suppressed rage and fury.

When we are incensed we are spitefully or furiously angry.

And rage is a violent outburst of anger unleashed through a loss of self control.

I’m hoping you readers will use the comments section to identify the emotions you’re experiencing in response to recent harassment disclosures. Even better — suggest how our society can constructively respond to all this.

Big thanks to this week’s sources: the OED, Merriam Webster, & Wordnik, Collins Dictionary

& the 1959 Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language.

Narcissism

Narcissism

The word narcissist is getting a lot of play these days. The word appears to have been coined by Coleridge in 1822, but didn’t catch on until 1905. Narcissism means to show extreme love & admiration for oneself. The word comes from the Greek story of a young man who fell in love with his own reflection.

Other terms or idioms & their meanings include:

To be full of oneself  — to be annoyingly self-focused.

To have a swelled head  —  to have an exaggerated sense of self-importance.

The word egotist arrived in 1714 meaning one who makes too-frequent use of the first person. Since then it has morphed into meaning one who is boastful & conceited.

As of 1969, we began to say a person enthralled with him/herself was on an ego trip.

Or there’s the academic term from 1890 — egocentric — meaning limited in outlook or concern to one’s own activities or interests.

A more colorful term arriving in the 1520s is cocksure, a person as assured of himself as a barnyard rooster. A century or so later cocksure began to mean arrogant & overconfident to the point of annoyance. It seems DH LAwrence offered a “feminine version” of this word, but for some reason hensure never caught on.

And back in 1835 Davy Crockett gave us too big for your britches/breeches, an idiom he applied to General Andrew Jackson, a man Crockett believed overvalued himself.

In 1991, English received a contemporary version of too big for your britches courtesy of the British musical group Right Said Fred. Their first hit song was inspired by the self-infatuation of mirror-gazers at the gym & gave us the idiom too sexy for your shirt. 

Comments? You know what to do.

Big thanks to this week’s sources: the OED, Etymonline, Merriam Webster, & Wordnik, Free Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, Phrases.org, CDUniverse

Bear

Bear

I’ve always assumed that — like most homonyms — the verb to bear & the noun bear came from different sources & managed to land in English with the same spellings but different meanings. 

Apparently not. They each come from a Proto-Indo-European word which had two different meanings.

So, those who study steaming heaps of Indo-European languages in order to manufacture a proposed earlier language (Proto-Indo-European), came to the conclusion that way back in some imagined time & place, something shiny & brown was called *bher-, AND to carry or give birth was to *bher-.

Why not? Every language includes words that look & sound the same but mean different things. Why not this imagined language of the distant past?

The meaning shiny & brown gave us these modern words:

brown

brunette

bruin

burnish

beaver

And look what the meaning to carry or give birth bore:

through Germanic languages

birth

burden

bairn

through Old English (look for barr)

barrow

wheelbarrow

through Greek & earlier Latin (look for for, phor, fer, or phag)

fortune

semaphore

euphoria

metaphor

odiferous

pestiferous

esophagus

through later Latin for the most part (look for pher or fer)

periphery

peripheral

paraphernalia

circumference

proliferate

fertile

conifer

refer

prefer

infer

confer

transfer

offer

differ

aquifer

ferret

I can hardly bear it.

Comments? You know what to do.

Big thanks to this week’s sources: the OED, Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, Merriam Webster, & Wordnik.