I came across the wonderful word quockerwodger on the BBC Radio 4 programme Wordaholics. Surprisingly it doesn’t appear in the OED, but on World Wide Words it is defined as “a wooden toy figure which jerks its limbs about when pulled by a string”, and also a politician whose strings are pulled by someone else.
It’s origin is uncertain and it doesn’t appear to be related to the dialect words quocken (to vomit/choke), or quocker (a man who goes harvesting at some distance from home).
Last night a friend asked me why the word write begins with a silent w, so I thought I’d investigate.
According to the OED, the word write comes from the Old English wrítan (to incise, engrave, write, draw; bestow by writing). It is related to the Old Frisian wrîta (to score, write) and the Old Saxon wrîtan (to cut, write), which all come from the from Proto-Germanic *writanan (to tear, scratch).
So it seems that the w goes back to Proto-Germanic, a reconstructed ancestor of all Germanic languages which is thought to have been spoken between about 500 BC and 500 AD.
Does anyone know if the w in write used to be pronounced?
The term cellar door has, according to J. R. R. Tolkien and a number of other writers, a particularly pleasing sound, even though its meaning isn’t anything special. An article in the New York Times discusses the origins of this idea, an example of phonaesthetics*, and cites a 1903 novel by Cyrus Lauron Hooper, Gee-Boy, as the first mention in writing of the aesthetic properties of cellar door. It is said of the main character in the novel that:
“He even grew to like sounds unassociated with their meaning, and once made a list of the words he loved most, as doubloon, squadron, thatch, fanfare (he never did know the meaning of this one), Sphinx, pimpernel, Caliban, Setebos, Carib, susurro, torquet, Jungfrau. He was laughed at by a friend, but logic was his as well as sentiment; an Italian savant maintained that the most beautiful combination of English sounds was cellar-door; no association of ideas here to help out! sensuous impression merely! the cellar-door is purely American.”
In 1955 J. R. R. Tolkien wrote an essay entitled English and Welsh which has been mentioned as the origin of the idea:
“Most English-speaking people…will admit that cellar door is ‘beautiful’, especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.”
The OED lists a source from 1425, when it was written celer dore, as the earliest use of cellar door in English, though doesn’t mention the phonaesthetics of the term.
* Phonaesthetics is the study of the inherent pleasantness (euphony) or unpleasantness (cacophony) of the sound of certain words, phrases, and sentences. It comes from the Greek: φωνή (phōnē) – voice-sound; and αἰσθητική (aisthētikē) – aesthetics [source].
Cellar door words for me include spollagyn (chips/fries in Manx), schmetterling (butterfly in German) and spontus (terrible, awful in Breton). There are more examples on my favorite words page.
What are you cellar door words?
What’s the connection between newspapers and magpies?
Well, apparently the first newspapers published in Venice and were known as gazeta de la novità and cost one gazeta (Venetian) or gazzetta (Italian), a small coin which had a picture of a magpie on it. A magpie is gazza in Italian and the name of the coin is a diminutive form of that name. Another possibility is that the newspaper was named after the magpie, a bird renowned for chattering.
The word gazette was first used in English in 1665 for a newspaper published in Oxford [source].
Recently a friend told me that in North Wales the area under stairs is know as the spench – I hadn’t heard it before and didn’t know how to write it so this spelling is a guess. I found spench in the Urban Dictionary, which defines it as “the area under the stairs (often a cupboard) where things are stored. Used in North Wales.”
In the Geiriadur Mawr, one of my Welsh dictionaries, I found the Welsh word sbens, which is defined as “twll dan y grisiau” (a hole under the stairs) and is translated as spence.
The OED defines spence as “a room or separate place in which victuals and liquor are kept; a buttery or pantry; a cupboard.” and says that it is dialectal or archaic. It comes from the Old French word despense (to dispense), from the Latin word dispendere (to dispense, weigh out; pay out; open, spread out), from the Latin word pendere (to hang; depend; weigh out; pay) plus the prefix dis-.
Have you heard this word before, or do you have another word for the area//cupboard under the stairs?
While listening to a programme on Radio Scotland today I heard mention of downies, which seems to be a Scottish word for duvet. These days I usually call these things duvets, but when I was a child I had a slumberdown, which I think might be a trade name. I’ve also heard them called quilts or continental quilts, and think they’re called comforters in the USA.
The definition of duvet in the OED is “A quilt stuffed with eider-down or swan’s-down”, and it comes from the French word duvet (down), from dumet, a diminutive of Old French dum (down).
What do you call these things?
Spontus is a Breton word I learnt recently that means scary or terrible, as in spontus eo an amzer hiziv (the weather is terrible today). It doesn’t sound like it comes from a Welsh or Cornish root, and I wondered where it came from.
According to the Wikeriadur spontus comes from the word spont (to faint/wake with terror) plus the suffix -us. Unfortuantely it doesn’t say where spont comes from. Does any one have any ideas?
Yesterday I discovered that there are quite a few different words for handle in French, depending on what kind of handle you’re referring to:
– poignée /pwa.ɲe/ is a door handle or the handle on the lid of something. It also means handful, as in une poignée de sel (a handful of salt) or Ils n’étaient qu’une poignée (There were only a handful of them). In can also refer to love handles (poignée d’amour) and a break handle (poignée de frein). [source]. It comes from poing /pwɛ̃/ (fist), from the Latin pugnus (fist) [source].
– anse /ɑ̃s/ is the handle of a cup, or a cove, and comes from the Latin ansa (handle, tiller).
The Welsh equivalents are dolen (bow, handle, link, loop, ear, noose) and trontol (handle).
– manche /mɑ̃ʃ/ is the handle of a tool or a saucepan, and also a sleeve, or neck (of a violin or guitar).
The Welsh equivalents are coes (leg, stalk, handle) and carn (hoof, hilt, handle).
– queue /kø/ = is the handle of a frying pan, and also a tail, stalk and queue (line of people). It comes from the Latin word coda, a variant of cauda (tail) [source].
Are handles metaphorically linked to the same words in other languages?
Recently I came across a couple of French words I hadn’t seen before – tchatter /tʃa.te/ (to chat) and tchat /tʃat/ (chat). As far as I can tell, they seem to refer particularly to online chat. The definition of tchatter on Reverso is “discuter avec d’autres personnes en temps réel depuis un ordinateur.” (to talk with other people in real time via a computer).
Similar words include:
– tchatche /tʃatʃ/, which Reverso defines as ‘jabberism’ (have you heard that one before?), patter, loquacity, verbosity, blather, etc. and which appears in the phrase avoir (de) la tchatche or ‘to have the gift of the gab’.
– tchatcher /tʃa.tʃe/ – to talk a lot and charmingly
– tchatcheur /tʃa.tʃœʁ/ – a great boaster; a voluable or talkative person.
Another French word for to chat is bavarder, and alternatives to tchatter include bavarder en ligne, cyberbavarder and clavarder – the latter is apparently used in Quebec and is a portmanteau of clavier (keyboard) and bavarder.
According to Wikitionaire tchatter, which is also written chatter and chater, comes from the English word chat, which comes from the Middle English word chateren (to chatter), which is thought to be of imitative origin.
Tchatcher and related words apparently come via Pied-Noir slang from the Spanish word chachara (an animated but futile conversation).
Last night when I went out the sky was dark with very low clouds, and I expected it to rain at any moment. It did start raining while I was outside, but fortunately I was inside by the time the heavy rain arrived. I said to a friend that the sky had looked decidedly foreboding. He agreed, and we wondered how you would say this in the past tense if you use forebode as a verb – e.g. the sky foreboded/forebod/forebad/forebid rain. It’s not a word I use every day so I wasn’t sure. Now I know that it’s foreboded.
To forebode means to warn of or indicate (an event, result, etc.) in advance; to have an intuition or premonition of (an event) [source]. Fore comes from the Old English prefix fore- (before), from the Proto-Indo-European root *per- (forward, through), and bode from the Old English word bodian from boda (messenger) [source].
Fore comes from the same root as the Latin words pro (before, for, on behalf of), prae (before) and per (through, for) [source], and related words in other languages.
I like the word bode – you could say that something bodes without specifying whether it bodes well or ill, it just bodes.