Even more kids
Welcome to the third of three posts on synonyms for child.
The first & second posts can be found here & here.
In 1725 the Scottish word tot, little child, became an English word. It appears to have come from
either the word totter, OR an Old
Norse term for dwarf, OR a Danish term of endearment that
translates to thumb-child.
In early Renaissance Western England and the northern Midlands there
was a word for ragged garment. It was
related to the word for cloak. This
word morphed by about 1500 to mean beggar’s
child. The word? Brat.
Back in the 1300s, urchin meant hedgehog (it still does in Shropshire, Yorkshire & Cumbria).
Apparently the word urchin was used pejoratively to refer to those who looked
different. Etymonline tells us these unfortunates ranged “from hunchbacks to
goblins to bad girls.” By the 1500s, we English speakers landed on a new
meaning for urchin: raggedly clothed
youngster.
Along similar lines, the word nipper appeared in 1530s
to refer to a pickpocket. One can
imagine how the chaos, poverty, & 16-hour work days of parents during the
industrial revolution might have inspired nipper to shift its meaning to small
boy (by 1859).
Friend Bruce West asked about the terms of affection sometimes
applied to children, punkin & punkinhead. These
spellings, considered to be “vulgar American English,” appeared in 1806 &
appear to have come from the 1780s term pumpkinhead, which referred to a
person whose hair was “cut short all around.” Pumpkin, as in squash, showed up in English in 1640
from Middle French.
Bambino came to English in 1761
from the Italian word for baby, the
diminutive form of bambo, the Italian word for simple.
Interestingly, in 1919 the word bambino gave birth to another
English word that originally meant simple
fellow, the word bimbo. Only one year later, bimbo
picked up the additional meaning floozy.
Any thoughts about all these childish words? Please
say so in the comments section.
Big thanks to this week’s sources: Etymonline, Wordnik, Collins Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, & the OED.
Fascinating that an urchin is a hedgehog. That would make a sea urchin a sea hedgehog, which would make a lot of sense for those spiky little guys.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting about "punkin". I've never understood why calling children vegetables is considered a term of endearment. The French do it too, calling their children little cabbages, as in 'mon petite chou."
Hi Anne - I love the urchin story -- who would've guessed? And I'm with you on the veggie-children. You'd think fruit would be the food of choice, Okay, there's "apple of one's eye", but pears? prunes? mangoes? kiwi?
DeleteI love the urchin/hedgehog thing too. A friend of mine is writing children's books and they always have a hedgehog in them. I think she will be quite delighted when I tell her.
ReplyDeleteIt only took a year for bimbo to go from simple fellow to floozy. Interesting. And I thought of an almost fruit endearment: sweetie pie!
Sweetie pie, indeed! Why does nobody call a kid Melon Lips? I mean really.
ReplyDelete