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 student, predictably, 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:

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."  The word "rue" only remains in English 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 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 as that goes, "unkempt" and "dishevelled" were cousins a millenium ago, and still are; "shevelled" 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."  (And in case you are wondering, I am both kempt and shevelled today, not to mention highly couth.)

"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."  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 just be wonderful.

"Nonchalant," and its noun form "nonchalance," are predictably from French, and were only adopted into English in the 18th century.  The last part of the words comes from "chaloir," meaning "to worry, to be concerned with," so "nonchalant" hasn't changed much in meaning since that time.  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 among us would describe winning the lottery as a "hap."

So anyway, you get the picture.  As usual, the answer to my student'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.

Swash yer bucklers, laddie!

Last week, two students came into my classroom after school.  One of them asked me, "I'm wondering if you know what a swash is, and how you buckle it?"

It is probably not a coincidence that the student who asked the question was wearing a pirate hat at the time.

This led to a highly amusing, and as it turns out, completely irrelevant conversation about how pirates had to not only check to make sure that their flies were zipped, but that their swashes were securely buckled.

Actually, the word "swashbuckler" has been in use since the sixteenth century, and (according to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology) comes from the verb "to swash," meaning "to clash together noisily," and the noun "buckler," meaning "a small round shield."  Apparently "swashbuckler" didn't begin as a noun at all, but as a verb meaning "to clash a sword noisily against your shield so as to intimidate your foe."  A highly appropriate action for a pirate to engage in, but this means that "swashbuckling" is a truly lovely example of one of my favorite linguistic phenomena -- that of back formation.

Back formation occurs when a word is treated as if it contains a common inflection -- such as the -er ending meaning "someone who does a particular action," -ing meaning "currently doing something," or -ed meaning "this action occurred in the past" -- when in fact the apparent inflection is just a coincidental part of the word itself.  Then, someone "undoes" the fake inflection, and a new word is born.  The classic example of back formation is "to burgle," which is a back formation from "burglar."  Even though the -ar ending in "burglar" sounds like the usual -er ending (as in "farmer" and "teacher") by pure coincidence only, the word was verbified in the nineteenth century by following the logical pattern:  farmers farm, teachers teach, so burglars must burgle.  Others include "to gel" (or "jell"), originally from "jelly," which is a cognate to the French word gelé, meaning "frozen" or "congealed;" "to lase" (from "laser," which is an acronym having nothing to do with the -er morpheme -- it stands for Light Amplification from Stimulated Emission of Radiation); and "to loaf" (from "loafer," which comes from the German landlaufer, meaning "hobo").

A fairly obscure, but awfully funny, example of back formation is "to maffick," meaning "to cause trouble, to riot."  It originated during the Siege of Mafeking (pronounced like "maffick-ing") during the Boer War in what is now South Africa -- a siege that lasted 217 days and apparently involved large quantities of troublemaking and riot.  Someone evidently decided that Mafeking was the present participle of a verb (in fact, it's the name of a town, and is of Dutch origin), and decided that the people in Mafeking must engage in mafficking.  It prompted the British satirist Saki (H. H. Munro) to write the couplet,

Mother, may I go and maffick,
Tear around, and hinder traffic?

It seems that "swashbuckler" works the same way.  "Buckler" comes from the French boucle, meaning "shield;" so like "burglar," its ending in -er is entirely a coincidence.  In fact, as a composite, the "swash" part is the verb and the "buckler" part is the noun; so instead of "swashbuckling," it should probably be "bucklerswashing," but that sounds silly and unbefitting of a pirate.

So fear not, lads and lassies; go forth and be swashbucklers to yer hearts' content, and ye needn't worry about having to buckle yer swashes.  Ye should still probably make sure yer flies are zipped.  Arrrr.