Tall tales and folk etymologies

My master's degree is in historical linguistics, and one of the first things I learned was that it's tricky to tell if two words are related.

Languages are full of false cognates, pairs of words that look alike but have different etymologies -- in other words, their similarities are coincidental.  Take the words police and (insurance) policy.  Look like they should be related, right?

Nope.  Police comes from the Latin politia (meaning "civil administration"), which in turn comes from polis, "city."  (So it's a cognate to the last part of words like metropolis and cosmopolitan.)  Policy -- as it is used in the insurance business -- comes from the Old Italian poliza (a bill or receipt) and back through the Latin apodissa to the Greek ἀπόδειξις (meaning "a written proof or declaration").  To make matters worse, the other definition of policy -- a practice of governance -- comes from politia, so it's related to police but not to the insurance meaning of policy.

Speaking of government -- and another example of how you can't trust what words look like -- you might never guess that the word government and the word cybernetics are cousins.  Both of them come from the Greek κυβερνητικός -- a mechanism used to steer a ship.

My own research was about the extent of borrowing between Old Norse, Old English, and Old Gaelic, as a consequence of the Viking invasions of the British Isles that started in the eighth century C.E.  The trickiest part was that Old Norse and Old English are themselves related languages; both of them belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.  So there are some legitimate cognates there, words that did descend in parallel in both languages.  (A simple example is the English day and Norwegian dag.)  So how do you tell if a word in English is there because it descended peacefully from its Proto-Germanic roots, or was borrowed from Old Norse-speaking invaders rather late in the game?

It isn't simple.  One group I'm fairly sure are Old Norse imports are most of our words that have a hard /g/ sound followed by an /i/ or an /e/, because some time around 700 C.E. the native Old English /gi/ and /ge/ words were palatalized to /yi/ and /ye/.  (Two examples are yield and yellow, which come from the Anglo-Saxon gieldan and geolu respectively.)  So if we have surviving words with a /gi/ or /ge/ -- gift, get, gill, gig -- they must have come into the language after 700, as they escaped getting palatalized to *yift, *yet, *yill, and *yig.  Those words -- and over a hundred more I was able to identify, using similar sorts of arguments -- came directly from Old Norse.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Anyhow, the whole topic comes up because I've been seeing this thing going around on social media headed, "Did You Know...?" with a list of a bunch of words, and the curious and funny origins they supposedly have.

And almost all of them are wrong.

I've refrained from saying anything to the people who posted it, because I don't want to be the "Well, actually..." guy.  But it rankled enough that I felt impelled to write a post about it, so this is kind of a broadside "Well, actually...", which I'm not sure is any nicer.  But in any case, here are a few of the more egregious "folk etymologies," as these fables are called -- just to set the record straight.

• History doesn't come from "his story," i.e., a deliberate way to tell men's stories and exclude women's.  The word's origins have nothing to do with men at all.  It comes from the Greek ‘ἱστορία, "inquiry."
• Snob is not a contraction of the Latin sine nobilitate ("without nobility").  It's only attested back to the 1780s and is of unknown origin.
• Marmalade doesn't have its origin with Mary Queen of Scots, who supposedly asked for it when she had a headache, leading her French servants to say "Marie est malade."  The word is much older than that, and goes back to the Portuguese marmelada, meaning "quince jelly," and ultimately to the Greek μελίμηλον, "apples preserved in honey."
• Nasty doesn't come from the biting and vitriolic nineteenth-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast.  In fact, it predates Nast by several centuries (witness Hobbes's comment about medieval life being "poor, nasty, brutish, and short," which was written in 1651).  Nasty probably comes from the Dutch nestig, meaning "dirty."
• Pumpernickel doesn't have anything to do with Napoleon and his alleged horse Nicole who supposedly liked brown bread, leading Napoleon to say that it was "Pain pour Nicole."  Its actual etymology is just as weird, though; it comes from the medieval German words pumpern and nickel and translates, more or less, to "devil's farts."
• Crap has very little to do with Thomas Crapper, who perfected the design of the flush toilet, although it certainly sounds like it should (and his name and accomplishment probably repopularized the word's use).  Crapper's unfortunate surname comes from cropper, a Middle English word for "farmer."  As for crap, it seems to come from Medieval Latin crappa, "chaff," but its origins before that are uncertain.
• Last, but certainly not least, fuck is not an acronym.  For anything.  It's not from "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge," whatever Van Halen would have you believe, and those words were not hung around adulterers' necks as they sat in the stocks.  It also doesn't stand for "Fornication Under Consent of the King," which comes from the story that in bygone years, when a couple got married, if the king liked the bride's appearance, he could claim the right of "prima nocta" (also called "droit de seigneur"), wherein he got to spend the first night of the marriage with the bride.  (Apparently this did happen, but rarely, as it was a good way for the king to seriously piss off his subjects.)  But the claim is that afterward -- and now we're in the realm of folk etymology -- the king gave his official permission for the bride and groom to go off and amuse themselves as they wished, at which point he stamped the couple's marriage documents "Fornication Under Consent of the King," meaning it was now legal for the couple to have sex with each other.  The truth is, this is pure fiction. The word fuck comes from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *fug, meaning "to strike."  There are cognates (same meaning, different spelling) in just about every Germanic language there is.  In English, the word is one of the most amazing examples of lexical diversification I can think of; there's still the original sexual definition, but consider -- just to name a few -- "fuck that," "fuck around," "fuck's sake," "fuck up," "fuck-all," "what the fuck?", and "fuck off."  Versatile fucking word, that one.

So anyway.  Hope that sets the record straight.  I hate coming off like a know-it-all, but in this case I actually do know what I'm talking about.  A general rule of thumb (which has nothing to do with the diameter stick you're allowed to beat your wife with) is, "don't fuck with a linguist."  No acronym needed to make that clear.

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Dord, fnord, and nimrod

We were having dinner with our younger son a while back, and he asked if there was a common origin for the -naut in astronaut and the naut- in nautical.

"Yes," I said.  "Latin nauta, meaning 'sailor.'  Astronaut literally means 'star sailor.'  Also cosmonaut, but that one came from Latin to English via Russian."

"How about juggernaut?" he asked.

"Nope," I said.  "That's a false cognate.  Juggernaut comes from Hindi, from the name of a god, Jagannath.  Every year on the festival day for Jagannath, they'd bring out his huge stone statue on a wheeled cart, and the (probably apocryphal) story is that sometimes it would get away from them, and roll down the hill and crush people.  So it became a name for a destructive force that gets out of hand."

Nathan stared at me for a moment.  "How the hell do you know this stuff?" he asked.

"Two reasons.  First, M.A. in historical linguistics.  Second, it takes up lots of the brain space that otherwise would be used for less important stuff, like where I put my car keys and remembering to pay the utility bill."

I've been fascinated with words ever since I was little, which probably explains not only my degree but the fact that I'm a writer.  And it's always been intriguing to me how words not only shift in spelling and pronunciation, but shift in meaning, and can even pop into and out of existence in strange and unpredictable ways.  Take, for example, the word dord, that for eight years was in the Merriam-Webster New International Dictionary as a synonym for "density."  In 1931, Austin Patterson, the chemistry editor for Merriam-Webster, sent in a handwritten editing slip for the entry for the word density, saying, "D or d, cont./density."  He meant, of course, that in equations, the variable for density could either be a capital or a lower case letter d.  Unfortunately, the typesetter misread it -- possibly because Patterson's writing left too little space between words -- and thought that he was proposing dord as a synonym.

Well, the chemistry editor should know, right?  So into the dictionary it went.

It wasn't until 1939 that editors realized they couldn't find an etymology for dord, figured out how the mistake had come about, and the word was removed.  By then, though, it had found its way into other books.  It's thought that the error wasn't completely expunged until 1947 or so.

Then there's fnord, which is a word coined in 1965 by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill as part of the sort-of-parody, sort-of-not Discordian religion's founding text Principia Discordia.  It refers to a stimulus -- usually a word or a picture -- that people are trained as children not to notice consciously, but that when perceived subliminally causes feelings of unease.  Government-sponsored mind-control, in other words.  It really took off when it was used in the 1975  Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, which became popular with the counterculture of the time (for obvious reasons).

Fnord isn't the only word that came into being because of a work of fiction.  There's grok, meaning "to understand on a deep or visceral level," from Robert Heinlein's novel Stranger in a Strange Land.   A lot of you probably know that the quark, the fundamental particle that makes up protons and neutrons, was named by physicist Murray Gell-Mann after the odd line from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "Three quarks for Muster Mark."  Less well known is that the familiar word robot is also a neologism from fiction, from Czech writer Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots); robota in Czech means "hard labor, drudgery," so by extension, the word took on the meaning of the mechanical servant who performed such tasks.  Our current definition -- a sophisticated mechanical device capable of highly technical work -- has come a long way from the original, which was closer to slave.

Sometimes words can, more or less accidentally, migrate even farther from their original meaning than that.  Consider nimrod.  It was originally a name, referenced in Genesis 10:8-9 -- "Then Cush begat Nimrod; he began to be a mighty one in the Earth.  He was a mighty hunter before the Lord."  Well, back in 1940, the episode of Looney Tunes called "A Wild Hare" was released, the first of many surrounding the perpetual chase between hunter Elmer Fudd and the Wascally Wabbit.  In the episode, Bugs calls Elmer "a poor little Nimrod" -- poking fun at his being a hunter, and a completely inept one at that -- but the problem was that very few kids in 1940 (and probably even fewer today) understood the reference and connected it to the biblical character.  Instead, they thought it was just a humorous word meaning "buffoon."  The wild (and completely deserved) popularity of Bugs Bunny led to the original allusion to "a mighty hunter" being swamped; ask just about anyone today what nimrod means and they're likely to say something like "an idiot."

Interestingly, another of Bugs's attempted coinages meaning "a fool" -- maroon, from the hilarious 1953 episode "Bully for Bugs" -- never caught on in the same way.  When he says about the bull, "What a maroon!", just about everyone got the joke, probably because both the word he meant (moron) and the conventional definition of the word he said (a purplish-red color) are familiar enough that we realized he was mispronouncing a word, not coining a new one.

It's still funny enough, though, that I've heard people say "What a maroon!" when referring to someone who's dumb -- but as a quote from a fictional character, not because they think it's the correct word.

Languages shift and flow constantly.  Fortunately for me, since language evolution is my area of study.  It's why the whole prescriptivism vs. descriptivism battle is honestly pretty comical -- the argument over whether, respectively, linguists are recording the way languages should be used (forever and ever amen), or simply describing how they are used.  Despite the best efforts of the prescriptivists, languages change all the time, sometimes in entirely sudden and unpredictable ways.  Slang words are the most obvious examples -- when I was a teacher, I was amazed at how slang came and went, how some words would be en vogue one month and passé the next, while others had real staying power.  (And sometimes resurface.  I still remember being startled the first time I heard a student unironically saying "groovy.")

But that's part of the fun of it.  That our own modes of communication change over time, often in response to cultural phenomena like books, television, and movies, is itself an interesting feature of our ongoing attempt to be understood. 

And I'm sure Bugs would be proud of how he's influenced the English language, even if it was inadvertent.

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Swearing off

I've been fascinated with words ever since I can remember.  It's no real mystery why I became a writer, and (later) got my master's degree in historical linguistics; I've lived in the magical realm of language ever since I first learned how to use it.

Languages are full of curiosities, which is my impetus for doing my popular daily bit called #AskLinguisticsGuy on TikTok.  And one of the posts I've done that got the most views was a piece on "folk etymology" -- stories invented (with little or no evidence) to explain word origins -- specifically, that the word "fuck" does not come from the acronym for "Fornication Under Consent of the King."

The story goes that in bygone years, when a couple got married, if the king liked the bride's appearance, he could claim the right of "prima nocta" (also called "droit de seigneur"), wherein he got to spend the first night of the marriage with the bride.  (Apparently this did occasionally happen, but wasn't especially common.)  Afterward -- and now we're in the realm of folk etymology -- the king gave his official permission for the bride and groom to go off and amuse themselves as they wished, at which point he stamped the couple's marriage documents "Fornication Under Consent of the King," meaning it was now legal for the couple to have sex with each other.

This bit, of course, is pure fiction.  The truth is that the word "fuck" probably comes from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *fug meaning "to strike."  There are cognates (same meaning, different spelling) in just about every Germanic language there is.  The acronym explanation is one hundred percent false, but you'll still see it claimed (which is why I did a TikTok video on it).

The whole subject of taboo words is pretty fascinating, and every language has 'em.  Most cultures have some levels of taboo surrounding sex and other private bodily functions, but there are some odd ones.  In Québecois French, for example, the swear word that will get your face slapped by your prudish aunt is tabernacle!, which is the emotional equivalent of the f-bomb, but comes (obviously) from religious practice, not sex.  Interestingly, in Québecois French, the English f-word has been adopted in the phrase j'ai fucké ça, which is considered pretty mild -- an English equivalent would be "I screwed up."  (The latter phrase, of course, derives from the sexual definition of "to screw," so maybe they're not so different after all.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juliescribbles, Money being put in swear jar, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Linguists are not above studying such matters.  I found this out when I was in graduate school and was assigned the brilliant 1982 paper by John McCarthy called "Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation," which considers the morphological rules governing the placement of the word "fucking" into other words -- why, for example, we say "abso-fucking-lutely" but never "ab-fucking-solutely."  (The rule has to do with stress -- you put "fucking" before the primary stressed syllable, as long as there is a secondary stressed syllable that comes somewhere before it.)  I was (and am) delighted by this paper.  It might be the only academic paper I ever read in grad school from which I simultaneously learned something and had several honest guffaws.

The reason this whole sweary subject comes up is because of a paper by Shiri Lev-Ari and Ryan McKay that came out just yesterday in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, called, "The Sound of Swearing: Are There Universal Patterns in Profanity?"  Needless to say, I also thought this paper was just fan-fucking-tastic.  And the answer is: yes, across languages, there are some significant patterns.  The authors write:

Why do swear words sound the way they do?  Swear words are often thought to have sounds that render them especially fit for purpose, facilitating the expression of emotion and attitude.  To date, however, there has been no systematic cross-linguistic investigation of phonetic patterns in profanity.  In an initial, pilot study we explored statistical regularities in the sounds of swear words across a range of typologically distant languages.  The best candidate for a cross-linguistic phonemic pattern in profanity was the absence of approximants (sonorous sounds like l, r, w and y).  In Study 1, native speakers of various languages judged foreign words less likely to be swear words if they contained an approximant.  In Study 2 we found that sanitized versions of English swear words – like darn instead of damn – contain significantly more approximants than the original swear words.  Our findings reveal that not all sounds are equally suitable for profanity, and demonstrate that sound symbolism – wherein certain sounds are intrinsically associated with certain meanings – is more pervasive than has previously been appreciated, extending beyond denoting single concepts to serving pragmatic functions.

The whole thing put me in mind of my dad, who (as befits a man who spent 29 years in the Marine Corps) had a rather pungent vocabulary.  Unfortunately, my mom was a tightly-wound prude who wrinkled her nose if someone said "hell" (and who couldn't even bring herself to utter the word "sex;" the Good Lord alone knows how my sister and I were conceived).  Needless to say, this difference in attitude caused some friction between them.  My dad solved the problem of my mother's anti-profanity harangues by making up swear words, often by repurposing other words that sounded like they could be vulgar.  His favorite was "fop."  When my mom would give him a hard time for yelling "fop!" if he smashed his thumb with a hammer, he would patiently explain that it actually meant "a dandified gentleman," and after all, there was nothing wrong with yelling that.  My mom, in desperate frustration not to lose the battle, would snarl back something like, "It doesn't mean that the way you say it!", but in the end my dad's insistence that he'd said nothing inappropriate was pretty unassailable.

Interesting that "fop" fits into the Lev-Ari/McKay phonetic pattern like a hand in a glove.

Anyhow, as regular readers of Skeptophilia already know, I definitely inherited my dad's salty vocabulary.  But -- as one of my former principals pointed out -- all they are is words, and what really matters is the intent behind them.  And like any linguistic phenomenon, it's an interesting point of study, if you can get issues of prudishness well out of the damn way.

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An anthrope considers the strange case of couth and ruth

I noticed last week that the spine was torn on my Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.  It's a case of simple overuse.  Some people will wear out a beloved book from childhood; others will love to death a cherished novel, or memoir, or the Bible.  Me, I wear out the ODEE.  It's kind of pathetic, really.

What led me to this unfortunate discovery was a friend who had asked me why "ruthless" was a word but there was no word for its opposite condition ("ruthful," presumably?).  I didn't know, but it did put me in mind of the following couplet that I learned from my dad when I was a kid:

We rode in my convertible, my girlfriend Ruth and me,
I hit a bump doing 95, and I went on, ruthlessly.

So I went to look it up.  It turns out that the "ruth" in "ruthless" is a cognate of "to rue," meaning "to afflict with contrition or sorrow."  So "ruthless" originally meant "lacking contrition."  "Rue" isn't used much in that sense any more -- besides being the name of a bitter herb, you find it in "rueful," which is sort of the aforementioned opposite of "ruthless" but really has a completely different connotation.  Also, it's in the construct "to rue the day," as in, "you'll rue the day you ever double-crossed me, you dastardly and uncouth villain!"

Which brings us to "uncouth."  There's no such word as "couth," however people joke about it.  The current meaning of "uncouth" as "wild-looking, dirty, scary," is because the last part of the word comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *kynths, meaning "known."  So "uncouth" really means -- and is a cognate to -- "unknown," not "unkempt" (whose meaning it resembles more closely today).  And, by the way, the "kempt" part of "unkempt" comes from Old Norse kembr, meaning "combed."  So it turns out that "unkempt" and "disheveled" were cousins a millennium ago, and still are; the "sheveled" part comes from Old French chevel, meaning "hair."  Both, essentially, meant "having a bad hair day," a narrower meaning than today, when both of them usually simply mean "untidy, rumpled-looking."  

I don't know about you, but sometimes being either kempt or sheveled is simply out of the question.  There are days when even couth is a stretch.

"Disgruntled" is kind of a funny one, because here "dis" is not used in its most common meaning of a negative, but in its far less frequent role of an intensifier -- the only other example I could find was the obscure "disannul" (meaning "to cancel completely").  The "gruntled" part is a cognate of "to grunt" in its old sense of "to complain."  So really, it means "feeling like complaining really loudly."  But it's a pity that it's not one of the opposite-words, like the previous examples.  I think that having "gruntled" mean "cheerful" would be wonderful.

"Nonchalant," and its noun form "nonchalance," are predictably from French, and were only adopted into English in the eighteenth century.  The last part of the words comes from chaloir, meaning "to worry, to be concerned with," so "nonchalant" basically means "Don't Worry, Be Happy."  (Hey, if I have to have that ridiculous song stuck in my head for the rest of the day, so do you.)  Still, you have to wonder why we can't be "chalant."  I certainly am, sometimes.

A lot of "mis" words have no opposites.  You can be a misanthrope, but not an anthrope; a miscreant but not a creant; you can commit a misdemeanor, but not a demeanor.  A mishap occurs when you are unlucky, but only the hapless amongst us would describe winning the lottery as a "hap."

So anyway, you get the picture.  As usual, the answer to my friend's question about why such things happen in languages was "damned if I know."  I doubt much of this was new to you -- probably most of these examples were both toward and heard-of -- but perhaps you had never really stopped to think about the question before, so I hope this post was called-for, and that you were able to make both heads and tails out of it.

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It's obvious to regular readers of Skeptophilia that I'm fascinated with geology and paleontology.  That's why this week's book-of-the-week is brand new: Thomas Halliday's Otherlands: A Journey Through Extinct Worlds.

Halliday takes us to sixteen different bygone worlds -- each one represented by a fossil site, from our ancestral australopithecenes in what is now Tanzania to the Precambrian Ediacaran seas, filled with animals that are nothing short of bizarre.  (One, in fact, is so weird-looking it was christened Hallucigenia.)  Halliday doesn't just tell us about the fossils, though; he recreates in words what the place would have looked like back when those animals and plants were alive, giving a rich perspective on just how much the Earth has changed over its history -- and how fragile the web of life is.

It's a beautiful and eye-opening book -- if you love thinking about prehistory, you need a copy of Otherlands.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Whist, muslin, and bumble-puppy

It's been a while since I've posted on anything of a purely etymological nature, which is kind of a shame.  I'm a bit of a fanatic for words, especially odd words with curious origins.  This has the result that a trip to a dictionary or encyclopedia is never quick for me.  I go to look something up, get distracted by another entry, and then that reminds me of something else to look up, and I'm off on a two-hour birdwalk when I had intended to spend five minutes looking up a definition.  Ah, the pain of being a language nerd.

Speaking of birdwalks: the word "apricot" has taken a rather circuitous path to get to English.  Who knew?  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ian Alexander, Apricot Etymology Map, CC BY-SA 4.0]

A couple of days ago, I was talking to a friend and referred to an individual as being a "muckety-muck," and I was immediately accused of making that word up.  I protested that I did not do any such thing.  I've heard the expression "high muckety-muck" since I was a kid; it was one of my mom's pet expressions for someone who was in charge and whose assumption of the mantle of responsibility had turned him/her into a puffed up, arrogant twit.  Now, I was up front with my friend that it was entirely within the realm of possibility that my mom made it up, but that I'd see if I could find out for sure.  So I went to the Linguists' Bible -- the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology -- and lo and behold, she didn't.

The term apparently comes from the trade language Chinook, which was a composite pidgin used by members of various tribes in the Pacific Northwest to communicate, since their home languages were mutually unintelligible.  The Chinook phrase hiu mukamuk, meaning "a man with plenty to eat," got brought into English as "high muckety-muck" with the overtones of someone using his affluence or influence for self-aggrandizement.

I've always found such things fascinating, and so I have become something of a collector for obscure word origins.  I still haven't lived down with my family members the fact that I knew that "juggernaut" came from the name of a god in Hindi (Jaganath), and therefore is not a half-cognate to "astronaut" (which comes from Latin words meaning "star sailor").  The fact that "ignorant" and "agnostic" are cognates always makes me smile a little, and probably would bring an outright laugh from any religious folks -- "i" and "a" both mean "not," and gnosis is the Greek word for "knowledge."  To fire a salvo in the other direction, however, remember that the stock phrase of the stage magician, "hocus pocus" (originally "hocus pocus dominocus"), comes from the Latin phrase hoc est corpus domini -- "This is the Body of the Lord," the words used during the Catholic mass before communion.  Ha.  Take that.

My tendency to lose focus as soon as I open up the ODEE means, however, that looking up a word origin never proceeds in a straight line.  During my recent zigzag path through the Oxford, for example, I discovered another type of cloth that comes from a Middle Eastern city name.  I knew that "gauze" comes from Gaza, and "damask" comes from Damascus, but who knew that "muslin" came from Mosul?  Not me, or not until this week.

And then, there's my favorite new word, which I will find a way to work into a conversation soon.  "Ingurgitate."  Meaning "to swallow greedily."  From the Latin gurges, meaning "whirlpool." 

I also stumbled upon "bumble-puppy."  This charming word doesn't refer to a particularly clumsy dog, but (direct quote), "an unscientific game of whist."  This then necessitated looking up what "whist" was, and I gather from the definition of that word that it's a kind of card game (whose name, apparently, comes from Old Norse).  Card games generally make as much sense to me as integral calculus does to a second grader, so I doubt I'd be able to tell a scientific from an unscientific game of whist in any case.  ("Bumble-puppy" itself, I hasten to add, was marked "origin unknown.")

Then I found that "coracle" -- a little round boat -- wasn't a Latin word, as I expected from the "-acle" ending -- it's from the Welsh cwrwgl, meaning, of all things, "a little round boat."  The Welsh word looks unpronounceable to folks who don't speak the language, but it bears mention that /w/ is a vowel in Welsh (pronounced a bit like the vowel sound in the word "moon").  So cwrwgl would be pronounced "cooroogul" -- making the connection to "coracle" a little more obvious.

And last -- the first recorded use of the word "meringue" was in an English manuscript in 1706.  Sounds French, doesn't it?  I'd have thought so.  I guess it's not, or at least doesn't appear to be.  The ODEE puts it in with "bumble-puppy" as "origin unknown," and given that its first attestation is in England in the early eighteenth century, a French origin doesn't seem likely.

Honestly, none of this information is of the slightest use, but it's amusing and curious, and that's enough for me any day.  Can't be deathly serious all the time, or even most of the time.  Remember that next time you're playing a fast-moving game of bumble-puppy while ingurgitating meringue.

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My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Templar cookie warning

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Nabisco creating a hermetically-sealed, bomb-proof vault on the island of Svalbard, with the sole purpose of storing a stockpile of Oreo cookies.  It's a little odd, but on first glance seems innocent enough; in the case of a global cataclysm, the company wants us still to be able to have tasty snacks to enjoy.

It will not surprise loyal readers of Skeptophilia to find out that there are people who ascribe more sinister motives to the company.  And one guy, in fact, thinks that the Oreo cookie vault is in place because when you eat an Oreo, you are unwittingly swearing allegiance to Our Illuminati Overlords, and the Bad Guys want us to continue being able to do that even if civilization collapses.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Robbgodshaw / Oreo, Vector Oreo, CC BY-SA 3.0]

At least, that is the contention of one Maurice "Moe" Bedard, over at the site Gnostic Warrior.  I looked in vain for any sign that he was joking, but alas, I fear that this guy is 100% serious.  Here's an excerpt from his "About" link on the site:

Let us help you on along your evolving path to enlightenment in order to assist you in connecting with your higher self and who you truly are on the inside.  Our global community is composed of reasonable men, and women of truth who seek to understand the world we live in by seeking the without being trapped by the darkness of lies, conspiracies and the masses who love them. 

Well, that's very nice and all.  But there are a lot of words I could use to describe the cookie claim, and "reasonable" is not one of them.  Here's a bit of it, so you can get the flavor (crunchy and chocolate-y and nice when dipped in milk, of course):

Almost 500 billion have been sold.  In fact, if you were to stretch out all the OREOs ever sold, you could circle the globe with OREO cookies 341 times.  But did any of these billions of people ever notice the hidden Knights Templar symbology etched into a Oreo cookie as they dipped their OREO's in milk; or licked off the white creamy filling from the Cross Pattée emblazoned cookies?

I know I didn't.  He goes on to tell us that the little marks on the cookie's surface are actually crosses and triangles that come right from the symbolism of the Templars.  This immediately brought to mind a quote from Umberto Eco's tour de force novel Foucault's Pendulum, from a conversation in which the two main characters, Casaubon and Belbo, are discussing how to define lunacy:

The lunatic... doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits.  For him, everything proves everything else.  The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy.  You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.

Which is spot-on.  And as far as the crosses and so forth on the surface of an Oreo, the problem is that any geometrically-patterned surface is going to have triangles and crosses and squares and such.  That's what being "geometrically-patterned" means.  If all of this was Illuminati symbology, then kids in math class would be participating in a cult ritual every time they opened a geometry text.

Then he drops the bombshell on us that even the name "Oreo" is full of secrets:

The etymology of the word OREO gives us two words. Or and Eo.  The Hebrew meaning of the word Or is light, and it can also mean dawn, daylight, early morning, lightning, star, sun, sunlight, and sunshine.  The word Eo has a similar meaning from the Greek word ēōs, meaning dawn. 

In the scriptures, we can then find a reference to fallen angels who are called the watchers, whom I believe are connected etymologically to the word OREO.  For example, the Greek word for watchers is ἐγρήγοροι egrḗgoroi, pl. of egrḗgoros, literally "wakeful".  This Greek word for "Watchers" originates in Daniel 4 where they are mentioned twice in the singular (v. 13, 23), once in the plural (v. 17), of "watchers, holy ones".  Hence, the Templars symbology of the OREO cookie and name are dedicated to the Morning Star, or Dawn Star of the morning.  Another Greek name for the Morning Star is Heosphoros (Greek Ἑωσφόρος Heōsphoros), which means "Dawn-Bringer."

All of this brings up a general rule of thumb, which is "don't fuck with a linguist."  My MA is in historical linguistics, and I can say with some authority that you can not simply subdivide a word any way you want, and then cast around until you find some languages with pieces that fit.  If that's the way etymology worked, then I could take Mr. Bedard's first name, "Maurice" and say that we can split it into "Mau" + "Rice."  From there, it's obvious that it derives from the Egyptian word mau meaning "cat"and the Old English word rice meaning, "strong, powerful, mighty."  So it's clear that Mr. Bedard is actually being controlled telepathically by his cat, who is inducing him to write reams of confusing nonsense so as to mislead us puny humans and keep us subjugated, i.e., bringing our Cat Overlords lots of canned tuna.

Actually, if you're curious, the origin of the name Oreo is unknown; the only idea I've seen that holds any water (besides the most likely explanation, which is that it was simply a short and catchy name), is that it comes from taking the "re" from "cream" and sticking it between two "O"s from chocolate, to make a symbolic sandwich.

In any case, I think you can safely enjoy your Oreos.  No worries that you're accidentally ingesting Templar symbology and an abridged version of the name "Lucifer."  So I'm just going to leave this here, because now I have to go off and investigate the claims of a guy who thinks that John F. Kennedy is still alive, and that he's the Great Beast from the Book of Revelation, and is soon to reveal himself and initiate the End Times.  The guy also thinks that Henry Kissinger is the "Second Beast."  This makes you wonder who the "Third Beast" is, doesn't it?  I'm thinking Mitch McConnell.

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is one that has raised a controversy in the scientific world: Ancient Bones: Unearthing the Astonishing New Story of How We Became Human, by Madeleine Böhme, Rüdiger Braun, and Florian Breier.

It tells the story of a stupendous discovery -- twelve-million-year-old hominin fossils, of a new species christened Danuvius guggenmosi.  The astonishing thing about these fossils is where they were found.  Not in Africa, where previous models had confined all early hominins, but in Germany.

The discovery of Danuvius complicated our own ancestry, and raised a deep and difficult-to-answer question; when and how did we become human?  It's clear that the answer isn't as simple as we thought when the first hominin fossils were uncovered in Olduvai Gorge, and it was believed that if you took all of our millennia of migrations all over the globe and ran them backwards, they all converged on the East African Rift Valley.  That neat solution has come into serious question, and the truth seems to be that like most evolutionary lineages, hominins included multiple branches that moved around, interbred for a while, then went their separate ways, either to thrive or to die out.  The real story is considerably more complicated and fascinating than we'd thought at first, and Danuvius has added another layer to that complexity, bringing up as many questions as it answers.

Ancient Bones is a fascinating read for anyone interested in anthropology, paleontology, or evolutionary biology.  It is sure to be the basis of scientific discussion for the foreseeable future, and to spur more searches for our relatives -- including in places where we didn't think they'd gone.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Biblical corn

One of the things I find amusing about people who argue over the meaning of passages in the Bible is that so few of them seem to recognize that they're working from a translation.

A few -- very few, in my experience -- people are true biblical scholars, and have worked with the Aramaic and Greek originals (and I use that word with some hesitation, as even those were copies of earlier documents, copied and perhaps translated themselves with uncertain accuracy).  Most everyone else acts as if their favorite English translation is the literal word of God, as if Jesus Christ himself spoke pure, unadulterated 'Murican.

It does give rise to some funny situations.  We have the argument over whether the forbidden fruit that Eve gave Adam was an apple, a fig, or a pomegranate.  We have the claim (Micah 5:2) that the Messiah would be descended from David, and both Matthew and Luke go to great lengths to show that Joseph was a descendant of David (although they disagree on his descent, so they can't both be right) -- and Jesus wasn't Joseph's son in any case.  We have one person who has argued that the creation story was translated wrong, and that God didn't create life, he "separated" humans from everything else, presumably by giving them souls.

We even have some folks who claim -- tongue-in-cheek, of course -- that the line from Leviticus 20 about "if a man lies with another man, they should both be stoned" as biblical support for same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization simultaneously.

All of which strikes me as funny, because no matter how you slice it, you're still arguing over the meaning of an uncertainly-translated text that has been recopied with uncertain precision an uncertain number of times, and reflects the beliefs of a bunch of Bronze Age sheepherders in any case.  Notwithstanding, you still have people arguing like hell that their translation is the correct, God-approved one, and all of the others are wrong.

And then you have this guy, who takes things a step further, declaring that the translation of one word is correct, and that means that... pretty much everything else we know about the history of the Middle East is wrong.

That word is "corn."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The word occurs 102 times (in the King James Version, at least) -- mostly as a translation of the Semitic root dagan.  The problem, of course, is that corn is a Mesoamerican plant, and did not exist in the Middle East until it was brought over after the exploration of the New World. It's very easily explained, though; not only did dagan mean "grain" (not, specifically, corn), the word "corn" itself once meant "grain" in early Modern English -- a usage that persists in the word "barleycorn."

But this guy doesn't think so.  He thinks that the use of the word "corn" means... corn.  As in the stuff you eat at picnics in the summer with lots of butter and salt, the stuff cornmeal and popcorn and corn starch and high-fructose corn syrup are made from.  And therefore, he thinks...

... that everything in the bible actually happened here in the Western Hemisphere.

I'm not making this up.  Here's a direct quote:

The difficult situation with CORN in the BIBLE is that most people, due to the brainwashing that has been handed down through generations, firmly believe that the Biblical events happened in the Middle East.  After much research I can PROVE that the Middle East has absolutely NOTHING to do with the history, geography, and genealogy of the Holy Scriptures.  Nothing!...  CORN is in the Bible because the PEOPLE, PLACES, and EVENTS of the Biblical narratives were in the AMERICAS!

The "true history" of the events of the bible, he says, have been "hidden for over 500 years."  He has proof, which he will tell us when his book is released, and it's gonna overturn everything you think you know about history.

Oh, yeah, and the Crusades happened over here, too.  Apparently the Crusaders didn't trek to Jerusalem, they were trying to retake Peoria or something.

'Murica! Yeah!

I'm not making this up, and the guy who wrote it seems entirely serious.  But it does highlight what can happen when you decide that any human-created document is the infallible word of a deity, or even (as I've heard) that God guided the translators and copiers so that it still is inerrant even after the inevitable Game of Telephone that translating and copying usually entails.  Not many people go as far as Corn Dude does -- but it does bring up the question of whether any translation of the Bible is good enough that we should even entertain using it as a guide to behavior or (heaven forfend) science.

So that's our exercise in eye-rolling for today.  Me, I'm done with the topic, so I'm going to go get breakfast.

For some reason, I'm in the mood for cornbread.  Funny thing, that.

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is scarily appropriate reading material in today's political climate: Robert Bartholomew and Peter Hassall's wonderful A Colorful History of Popular Delusions.  In this brilliant and engaging book, the authors take a look at the phenomenon of crowd behavior, and how it has led to some of the most irrational behaviors humans are prone to -- fads, mobs, cults, crazes, manias, urban legends, and riots.

Sometimes amusing, sometimes shocking, this book looks at how our evolutionary background as a tribal animal has made us prone all too often to getting caught up in groupthink, where we leave behind logic and reason for the scary territory of making decisions based purely on emotion.  It's unsettling reading, but if you want to understand why humans all too often behave in ways that make the rational ones amongst us want to do repeated headdesks, this book should be on your list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!] 

Templar cookie warning

With all of the controversy right now over the upcoming presidential election, the conflicts over gun rights and federal land ownership, and the fears over climate change and ecological mismanagement, I'm sure what's in the forefront of your mind right now is:

Am I unwittingly swearing allegiance to the Illuminati every time I eat an Oreo cookie?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

At least, that would be your primary concern if you were one Maurice "Moe" Bedard, over at the site Gnostic Warrior.  I looked in vain for any sign that he was joking, but alas, I fear that this guy is 100% serious.  Here's an excerpt from his "About" link on the site:

Let us help you on along your evolving path to enlightenment in order to assist you in connecting with your higher self and who you truly are on the inside.  Our global community is composed of reasonable men, and women of truth who seek to understand the world we live in by seeking the without being trapped by the darkness of lies, conspiracies and the masses who love them.

 Well, that's very nice and all.  But there are a lot of words I could use to describe the cookie claim, and "reasonable" is not one of them.  Here's a bit of it, so you can get the flavor (crunchy and chocolate-y and nice when dipped in milk, of course!):

Almost 500 billion have been sold. In fact, if you were to stretch out all the OREOs ever sold, you could circle the globe with OREO cookies 341 times.  But did any of these billions of people ever notice the hidden Knights Templar symbology etched into a Oreo cookie as they dipped their OREO's in milk; or licked off the white creamy filling from the Cross Pattée emblazoned cookies?

I know I didn't.   He goes on to tell us that the little marks on the cookie's surface are actually crosses and triangles that come right from the symbolism of the Templars.  The problem is, of course, that any geometrically-patterned surface is going to have triangles and crosses and squares and such.  That's what being "geometrically-patterned" means.  If all of this was Illuminati symbology, then kids in math class would be participating in a cult ritual every time they opened a geometry text.

Then he drops the bombshell on us that even the name "Oreo" is full of secrets:

The etymology of the word OREO gives us two words. Or and Eo.  The Hebrew meaning of the word Or is light, and it can also mean dawn, daylight, early morning, lightning, star, sun, sunlight, and sunshine.  The word Eo has a similar meaning from the Greek word ēōs, meaning dawn. 

In the scriptures, we can then find a reference to fallen angels who are called the watchers, whom I believe are connected etymologically to the word OREO. For example, the Greek word for watchers is ἐγρήγοροι egrḗgoroi, pl. of egrḗgoros, literally "wakeful".  This Greek word for "Watchers" originates in Daniel 4 where they are mentioned twice in the singular (v. 13, 23), once in the plural (v. 17), of "watchers, holy ones".  Hence, the Templars symbology of the OREO cookie and name are dedicated to the Morning Star, or Dawn Star of the morning.  Another Greek name for the Morning Star is Heosphoros (Greek Ἑωσφόρος Heōsphoros), which means "Dawn-Bringer."

Well, at least now we're on solid ground for me; I'm a linguistics geek of long standing, and I can say with some authority that you can not simply subdivide a word any way you want, and then cast around until you find some languages with pieces that fit.  If that's the way etymology worked, then I could take Mr. Bedard's first name, "Maurice" and say that we can split it into "Mau" + "Rice."  From there, it's obvious that it derives from the Egyptian word mau meaning "cat"and the Old English word rice meaning, "strong, powerful, mighty."  So it's clear that Mr. Bedard is actually being controlled telepathically by his cat, who is inducing him to write reams of confusing nonsense so as to mislead us puny humans and keep us subjugated, i.e., bringing our Cat Overlords lots of canned tuna.

Actually, if you're curious, the origin of the name Oreo is unknown; the only idea I've seen that holds any water (besides the most likely explanation, which is that it was simply a short and catchy name), is that it comes from taking the "re" from "cream" and sticking it between two "O"s from chocolate, to make a symbolic sandwich.

In any case, I think you can safely enjoy your Oreos.  No worries that you're accidentally ingesting Templar symbology and an abridged version of the name "Lucifer."  So I'm just going to leave this here, because now I have to go off and investigate the claims of a guy who thinks that John F. Kennedy is still alive, and that he's the Great Beast from the Book of Revelation, and is soon to reveal himself and initiate the End Times.  The guy also thinks that Henry Kissinger is the "Second Beast."  This makes you wonder who the "Third Beast" is, doesn't it?  I'm thinking Ann Coulter.

Ishtar vs. Easter vs. the truth

There has been a rather unfortunate upswing lately in sites that have names like "The Dark Truth About ____," and which try to put us all in a state of shock and dismay by informing us about the rather sketchy origins of some of our most cherished institutions and traditions.

Because, apparently, such institutions and traditions never change.  At all.  If you decide to participate in a May Day celebration next week, you are not just having a party to welcome in spring -- you are actively participating in a tradition that comes from the medieval witches' celebration of "Walpurgis Night" and are therefore you are directly guilty of paganism, devil worship, sacrificing virgins, and who knows what else.  (Actually, for the record, I like Jonathan Coulton's take on this tradition, as he describes in his song "First of May." WARNING: this is SERIOUSLY NSFW, and not for those who are easily offended.  But also funnier than hell.  You have been warned.)

It's not just religious traditions that evidently can't ever change.  Ann Coulter, that voluble purveyor of pretzel logic and ad hominems, has claimed outright that Democrats are all racists because the Democratic Party was a staunch supporter of the institution of slavery.

150 years ago.

Even worse, though, is when these claims tie a tradition to some dark origin... and then gets those origins completely wrong.

I.e., when people lie about stuff just to stir folks up.

All of this comes up because of a link that was sent to me by my pal and fellow blogger Andrew Butters, of the wonderful and entertaining Potato Chip Math.  Entitled "The Truth About Easter and the Secret Worship of the Annunaki," this site makes some rather astonishing claims.  Here, in a nutshell, is what the author says that you're doing when you celebrate Easter:

• Actually worshiping the goddess Ishtar, who was known to Germanic tribes as "Eastre," who was the goddess of sex and fertility.
• Revering Ishtar's grandfather Anu, who was a Babylonian god and also part of the Annunaki, who lunatics like the person who wrote this think are actual aliens who have visited the Earth in spaceships.
• Probably going to church services where ministers wear vestments, which are representations of the god Dagon's "scaly fish suit."  (For the record, I did not make that quote up.)
• Participating in an occult ritual (if all of the above wasn't enough).  All of the world's prevailing religions are actually run by Satanists.
• Hinting that you'd like to sacrifice children to the Phoenician god Moloch, and would do so if you had the chance.
• Taking part in "dark and gory rituals."

And here you probably just thought you were going to church, having Easter egg hunts, and coming home to a nice baked ham with mashed potatoes and steamed peas.

Okay.  So can we take a look at these claims, then?

First, there is no evidence that "Ishtar" and "Easter" are cognates, however they may sound a little bit alike.  Ishtar (and her Phoenician cousin, Astarte) seem to be names that have changed relatively little since their Proto-Indo-European roots.  To quote linguist Paul Collins on the subject:

The name of the goddess Eshtar (later Ishtar) occurs as elements in both Presargonic and Sargonic personal names.  It has been suggested that Eshtar derives from a form of 'Attar, a male deity know from Ugaritic and South Arabian inscriptions (Roberts, 1972: 39).  The corresponding female forms are 'Attart/'Ashtart.  The two names may have designated the planet Venus under its aspect of a male morning star ('Attar) and a female evening star ('Attart).  This would apparently account for the dual personality of Ishtar as a goddess of love (female) and of war (male).  In Mesopotamia the masculine form took over the functions of the female and a goddess developed contrary to its grammatical gender; perhaps under influence from the Sumerian Inanna who may have possessed similar attributes.

The origin of the word Easter comes from the name of a Germanic goddess of spring, Eostre, but her name has a different etymology, apparently completely unrelated to Ishtar.  The origin of the name is in the Proto-Indo-European root *aus-, meaning "shine."  (As such, the name is a cognate of the word "east.")

Okay, so maybe the Christians did adopt the bunnies and eggs and whatnot from a Germanic spring festival.  Can't see how that's a problem, really, if all of the Hoppin' Down The Bunny Trail nonsense floats your boat.  But it doesn't have anything to do with Ishtar -- and therefore neither has it any connection to Anu (and the Annunaki, who, by the way, are mythological figures, and therefore not real.  Cf. the definition of the word "mythological.").  Which means that any idea that Easter is secretly about sacrificing children to Moloch is three degrees removed from anything even resembling the truth.

And throwing in Dagon is just plain weird.  "Scaly fish suit," indeed.  I mean, all right, the pope's vestments are a little goofy-looking, if you regard them with an unbiased eye.  But I'm not seeing the "fish suit" thing.

The whole thing makes me nuts.  I mean, if you're going to dream up some ridiculous conspiracy theory, at least get the freakin' facts right.  Linguistics is not some kind of cross between free association and the Game of Telephone.

And don't claim that decent, ordinary people are actually participating in something they're not actually participating in.  You haven't scored any points in your favor by doing so, and you haven't proven anything except that you may be an asshole.

So to anyone who celebrates Easter, and who saw this floating around on the interwebz and was upset by it, you can relax.  Your festivities last Sunday were not somehow a thin veneer of good cheer over a "dark and gory ritual."  As for me, I'm waiting for next week.  The First of May sounds like more fun, all things considered.

The voices of the ancestors

One of the (many) reasons I love science is that as a process, it opens up avenues to knowledge that were previously thought closed.  Couple that with the vast improvements in technological tools, and you have a powerful combination for exploring realms that once were not considered "science" at all.

Take, for example, historical linguistics, the discipline that studies the languages spoken by our ancestors.  It is a particular fascination of mine -- in fact, it is the field I studied for my MA.  (Yes, I know I teach biology.  It's a long story.)  I can attest to the fact that it's a hard enough subject, even when you have a plethora of written records to work with, as I did (my thesis was on the effects of the Viking invasions on Old English and Old Gaelic).  When records are scanty, or worse yet, non-existent, the whole thing turns into a highly frustrating, and highly speculative, topic.

This is the field of "reconstructive linguistics" -- trying to infer the characteristics of the languages spoken by our distant ancestors, for the majority of which we have not a single written remnant.  If you look in an etymological dictionary, you will see a number of words that have starred ancestral root words, such as *tark, an inferred verb stem from Proto-Indo-European that means "to twist."  (A descendant word that has survived until today is torque.)  The asterisk means that the word is "unattested" -- i.e., there's no proof that this is what the word actually was, in the original ancestor language, because there are no written records of Proto-Indo-European.  And therein, of course, lies the problem.  Because it's an unattested word, no one can ever be sure if it's correct.  The inferred word comes not from any hard evidence, but from the application of one of the most fundamental rules of linguistics: Phonetic changes are regular.

As a quick illustration of this -- and believe me, I could write about this stuff all day -- we have Grimm's Law, which describes how stops in Proto-Indo-European became fricatives in Germanic languages, but they remained stops in other surviving (non-Germanic) Indo-European languages.  One example is the shift of /p/ to /f/, which is why we have foot (English), fod (Norwegian), Fuss (German), fótur (Icelandic), and so on, but poús (Greek), pes (Latin), peda (Lithuanian), etc.  These sorts of sound correspondences allowed us to make guesses about what the original word sounded like.

Note the use of the past tense in the previous sentence.  Because now linguists have a tool that will take a bit of the guesswork out of reconstructive linguistics -- and shows promise to bringing it into the realm of a true science.

An article in Science World Report, entitled "Ancient Languages Reconstructed by Linguistic Computer Program, a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of California - Berkeley has developed software that uses inputted lexicons to reconstruct languages.  (Read their original paper here.)  This tool automates a process that once took huge amounts of painstaking research, and even this first version has had tremendous success -- the first run of the program, using data from 637 Austronesian languages currently spoken in Asia and the South Pacific, generated proto-Austronesian roots for which 85% matched the roots derived by experts in that language family to within one phoneme or fewer.

What I'm curious about, of course, is how good the software is at deriving root words for which we do have written records.  In other words, checking its results against something other than the unverifiable speculation that historical linguists were already doing.  For example, would the software be able to take lexicons from Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Provençal, and so on, and correctly infer the Latin stems?  To me, that would be the true test; to see what the shortcomings were, you have to have something real to check its results against.  (And for any historical linguists in my readership whose hackles got raised by my use of the words "unverifiable speculation" -- c'mon, you have to admit that what you're doing does have the inherent upside of being unfalsifiable.  If you think a particular Proto-Indo-European root reconstructs as *lug and your colleague thinks it's *wuk, you can argue about it till next Sunday and you still will never be certain who's right, as there are very few Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days who could tell you for sure.)

But even so, it's a pretty nifty new tool.  Just the idea that we can make some guesses at what language our ancestors spoke six-thousand-odd years ago is stunning, and the fact that someone has written software that reduces the effort to accomplish this is cool enough to set my little Language Nerd Heart fluttering.  It is nice to see reconstructive linguistics using the tools of science, thus bringing together two of my favorite things.  Why, exactly, I find it so exciting to know that *swey may have meant "to whistle" to someone six millennia ago, I'm not sure.  But the fact that we now have a computer program that can check our guesses is pretty damn cool.

Whist, muslin, and bumble-puppy

It's been a while since I've posted on anything of a linguistic nature, which is kind of a shame.  I'm a bit of a fanatic for words, especially odd words with curious origins.  This has the result that a trip to a dictionary or encyclopedia is never quick for me.  I go to look something up, get distracted by another entry, and then that reminds me of something else to look up, and I'm off on a two-hour birdwalk when I had intended to spend five minutes looking up a definition.  Ah, the pain of being a language nerd.

A couple of days ago, I referred to an individual as being a "muckety-muck," and I was asked by one of my students whether I made that up, or if not, where did it come from.  I didn't know -- I've heard the expression "high muckety-muck" since I was a kid, it was one of my mom's pet expressions for someone who was in charge and whose assumption of the mantle of responsibility had turned him/her into a puffed up, arrogant twit. As far as I knew, my mom made it up.  So I went to the Linguists' Bible -- the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology -- and lo and behold, she didn't.

The term apparently comes from the trade language Chinook, which was a composite pidgin used by members of various tribes in the Pacific Northwest to communicate, since their home languages were mutually unintelligible.  The Chinook phrase "hiu mukamuk," meaning "a man with plenty to eat," got brought into English as "high muckety-muck" with the overtones of someone using his affluence or influence for self-aggrandizement.

I've always found such things fascinating, and so I have become something of a collector for obscure word origins.  I still haven't lived down with my family members the fact that I knew that "juggernaut" came from the name of a god in Hindi (Jaganath), and therefore is not a half-cognate to "astronaut" (which comes from Latin words meaning "star sailor").   The fact that "ignorant" and "agnostic" are cognates always makes me smile a little, and probably would bring an outright laugh from any religious folks -- "i" and "a" both mean "not," and "gnosis" means "knowledge."  To fire a salvo in the other direction, however, remember that the stock phrase of the stage magician, "hocus pocus" (originally "hocus pocus dominocus"), comes from the Latin phrase hoc est corpus domini -- "this is the body of the lord," the words used during the Catholic mass before communion.  Ha.  Take that.

My tendency to lose focus as soon as I open up the ODEE means, however, that looking up a word origin never proceeds in a straight line.  During my recent zigzag path through the Oxford, for example, I discovered another type of cloth that comes from a Middle Eastern city name. I knew that "gauze" comes from Gaza, and "damask" comes from Damascus, but who knew that "muslin" came from Mosul?  Not me, or not until this week.

And then, there's my favorite new word, which I will find a way to work into a conversation soon.  "Ingurgitate."  Meaning "to swallow greedily."  From the Latin gurges, meaning "whirlpool."  That one also makes me strangely happy.

I also stumbled upon "bumble-puppy."  This charming word doesn't refer to a particularly clumsy dog, but (and I quote), "an unscientific game of whist."  This then necessitated looking up what "whist" was, and I gather from the definition of that word that it's a kind of card game (whose name, apparently, comes from Old Norse).  Card games generally make as much sense to me as integral calculus does to a second grader, so I doubt I'd be able to tell a scientific from an unscientific game of whist in any case.  ("Bumble-puppy" itself, I hasten to add, was marked "origin unknown.")

Then I found that "coracle" -- a little round boat -- wasn't a Latin word, as I expected from the "-acle" ending -- it's from the Welsh cwrwgl, meaning, of all things, "a little round boat."  I guess when the Welsh were out in their cwrwgls, there was a storm, and all of their vowels washed overboard.  Pity, that.

And last -- the first recorded use of the word "meringue" was in an English manuscript in 1706.  Sounds French, doesn't it?  I'd have thought so.  I guess not.  The ODEE puts it in with "bumble-puppy" as "origin unknown."

Honestly, none of this information is of the slightest use, but it's amusing and curious, and that's enough for me any day.  Can't be deathly serious all the time, or even most of the time.  Remember that next time you're playing a fast-moving game of bumble-puppy while ingurgitating meringue.