hobbit

7 December 2019

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” So begins J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit. A hobbit, as anyone who doesn’t live in a hole in the ground knows, is a small humanoid creature with hairy feet and a fondness for pipe-weed. The two most famous hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, are the protagonists of that novel and of Tolkien’s later The Lord of the Rings. But contrary to what most people believe, Tolkien did not coin the term hobbit.

Instead, hobbit comes to us from English folklore, where it is a name for a type of spirit or mythical creature. The word is recorded in the Denham Tracts, a series of privately published compilations of folklore by Michael Denham, produced between 1846–59. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the tracts were edited and re-published by the Folklore Society. Denham gives no description of what a hobbit is, only the name in a long list of such names:

…boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men…

The hob is most likely a nickname for Robert and appears in a number of names of spirits and creatures, such as hobgoblin and hob-thrush. A form of Robert also appears in the name Robin Goodfellow, a name known to us today mainly from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but which was used generally as a name for a sprite or fairy.

Tolkien, who never claimed to have coined the word hobbit, had access to the Denham Tracts, and given his interest in creating a mythic corpus for English culture, it seems likely that he absorbed the word from this source. In Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gives a fictional etymology for hobbit, deriving it from the Old English words hol (“hole”) and bytla (“builder”):

Hobbit is an invention. In the Westron the word used, when this people was referred to at all, was banakil “halfling.” But at this date the folk of the Shire and of Bree used the word kuduk, which was not found elsewhere. Meriadoc, however, actually records that the King of Rohan used the word kûd-dûkan “hole-dweller.” Since, as has been noted, the Hobbits had once spoken a language closely related to that of the Rohirrim, it seems likely that kuduk was a worn-down form of kûd-dûkan. The latter I have translated, for reasons explained, by holbytla; and hobbit provides a word that might well be a worn-down form of holbytla, if the name had occurred in our own ancient language.

In 2003, the remains of what appears to be a diminutive species of hominin were found on the Indonesian island of Flores. Officially dubbed Homo floresiensis, by 2004 they had become known popularly as hobbits. There is debate in the scientific community whether the remains truly represent an extinct species or if they are a sample of Homo sapiens that are pathologically small.

While Tolkien may not have coined the word hobbit, he did invent the concept of hobbits as we know them, and we should justly thank him for that inspired leap of imagination.

Source:

Hardy, James. The Denham Tracts: A Collection of Folklore by Michael Aislabie Denham, vol 2 of 2. James Hardy, ed. London: The Folklore Society, 1895, 2:79.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. hobbit, n., hob, n.1, hob-thrush, n.

hairbag

9 November 2019

What is a hairbag? And is it a bad thing?

Police Detective Keith Dietrich has sued New York City, alleging that he was driven into retirement because his supervisors considered him too old for the job. One piece of evidence that Dietrich put forward was that his supervisor called him a hairbag.

The term has been New York City police slang for a veteran office since at least 1958, when it was recorded in a New York Times article, which defined hairbag as “a man a long time on the police force.” An article from 1970 defined it as “a veteran patrolman, also a patrolman with backbone.”

While these two definitions are neutral, or in the case of the reference to “backbone” positive, the term has generally been a negative one. For instance, Edward Droge’s 1973 The Patrolman: A Cop’s Story says, “my partner that night, a lethargic old ‘hairbag’ (old-timer) who could not be aroused by Raquel Welch.” And William Heffernan’s 2003 novel A Time Gone By has, “Donahue was a sergeant closing in on his thirty years—an old hairbag in department lexicon, a term used to describe an aging and often useless cop who was just biding his time until he could get out.” So, Dietrich appears to be correct in his assessment that the term is an insulting one.

The origin, as with most slang terms, is uncertain. A bag is police slang for a uniform, and it seems likely that hairbag is related to that. Some have suggested that hairbag comes from pilling and general untidiness of an old, woolen uniform that hasn’t been properly maintained. That’s a plausible, if speculative, explanation.

Another suggestion that it comes from nineteenth-century firefighter slang for someone who shirked duty by going to get a haircut has no evidence to support it. In particular, there is no evidence that the term is nearly that old.

Sources:

Berger, Meyer. “About New York: Violinist Whose Skill Saved Him From the Russians to Play Here—Police Cant Listed.” New York Times, 20 Oct 1958, 34.

Burnham, David. “Police (Cops?) Have Slanguage of Own.” New York Times, 15 Feb 1970, 65.

Goldstein, Joseph and Ali Watkins. “What’s a ‘Hairbag?’ $7 Million May Hinge on the Answer.” New York Times, 9 Nov 2019.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2019, s. v. hair, n.

hag

21 September 2013

The word hag, like the woman it represents, is old, tracing back to the Old English, but hag does not appear to be a very common word until the sixteenth century, when it underwent an explosion of usage and popularity. And while today hag simply means an ugly old woman, the history of the word indicates that it once meant something darker and more sinister.

The Old English progenitor of the word is hægtesse, which meant a “witch, a Fury, an evil female spirit.” The Old English word is relatively rare, appearing mostly in glosses of Latin text that reference the Furies of ancient myth. It does appear in the Metrical Charm 4, which is evidently to be used to cure a sudden stitch:

Ut, spere,    næs in, spere!
Gif her inne sy    isernes dæl,
hægtessan geweorc,    hit sceal gemyltan.

(Out, spear, not in, spear! If any portion of iron, the work of hags, is in here, it shall melt.)

In the Middle English period the word was clipped to hagge. The modern hag has cognates in other Germanic languages that underwent parallel transformations. The Old High German hagazissa became the modern German hexe, and the Middle Dutch haghetisse became the modern Dutch hecse. The English hex, meaning a magical spell, is a nineteenth century import from modern German.

The clipped hagge appears in the B text of William Langland’s poem Piers Plowman, c. 1378, 5.191:

He was bitelbrowed, and baberlipped also, With two blered eyghen, as a blynde hagge.

(He was sharp-browed, and thick-lipped also, with two bleary eyes, as a blind hag.)

In modern use, hag has a number of different, albeit related, meanings. Because the term is not common before 1550 and by that date all the senses were in use, it is hard to determine the order in which the senses arose. These include references to the Furies and Harpies of classical myth, assorted demons and bogeymen, nightmares, witches, and simply old women. We do know that from its earliest days, hag has had the meaning of “an evil spirit, a female demon.” The term night-hag dates to the seventeenth century, originally referring to female ghosts and spirits believed to visit men at night—the succubi of nightmares—but now used to refer to the psychological phenomenon of imagined paralysis and hallucination that occurs in some people as they fall asleep, often mistaken today as alien abduction.

Sources:

Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record 6, New York: Columbia University Press, 1942, 122.

“hagge, n.,” Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2001.

“hag, n.1,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

graduand

3 November 2015

I learned a new word yesterday, graduand: a candidate for graduation at a school or university; someone who has completed the requirements of a degree, but hasn’t received their diploma yet.

The oldest citation in the OED is from the 1882 Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, so the word is bound to be somewhat older than that. The word comes to English from the medieval Latin graduandus, which is the gerundive of the verb graduare, to graduate.

gaffe

11 August 2018

A gaffe is a mistake, a blunder, especially a verbal faux pas made by a politician. The word is a borrowing from the French, but its English use may been influenced by a Scots word as well as by a Vaudeville method of removing a floundering performer from the stage. So the origin is a bit more complex than a straightforward borrowing.

The “mistake” sense of the French gaffe, which as in English is literally a pole with a hook or barb at the end, antedates the English sense, and appears to be the proximate source for our present-day use of the word. The French word is also the origin of the English gaff or hook, but that’s a much earlier borrowing, from the thirteenth century. The earliest citation for the “mistake” sense of gaffe in the OED is from the Pall Mall Gazette in 1909:

These two gentlemen, whose weather predictions are still listened to with some deference, have made a bad “gaffe,” to use a popular slang expression.

But there’s an older sense of gaff meaning nonsense or humbug that comes from Scots, the dialect of English (some classify it as a separate language) spoken in lowland Scotland. The OED has this from W. H. Thomson’s 1877 Five Years’ Penal Servitude:

I also saw that Jemmy’s blowing up of me was all “gaff.” He knew as well as I did the things left the shop all right.

And the phrase to blow the gaff meant to reveal a secret. James Hardy Vaux includes this entry in his 1812 A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language:

BLOW THE GAFF: a person having any secret in his possession, or a knowledge of any thing injurious to another, when at last induced from revenge, or other motive, to tell it openly to the world and expose him publicly, is then said to have blown the gaff upon him.

In Scots, gaff has meant a boisterous laugh since the eighteenth century. The English guffaw also comes from this source. The Scottish poet Alexander Ross includes this line in his poem Helinore, written around 1768:

An’ tho’ poor Lindy look’t but half an’ half, Yet Bydby answer’d wi’ a blythsome gauff.

The Scots word developed into the sense of to babble, to talk foolishly or merrily. The poet James Hogg wrote in his 1801 Scottish Pastorals:

But man’tis queer to mak sik fike About an useless gauffin tike.

So it seems likely that this Scots word influenced the borrowing and use of gaffe after it was borrowed from French.

But there’s another possible influence on the English use of the word. Around the turn of the twentieth century it was an occasional practice on the Vaudeville circuit to remove an act that was bombing by using a giant hook to yank the performer from the stage. The practice went on to become a staple gag in early television comedies, so it’s familiar to later generations. While not the origin of the word gaffe, the metaphor may have helped boost its use in present-day political circles.

Of course, no discussion of the word gaffe would be complete without mention of journalist Michael Kinsley’s definition of the word. (It’s one of those unwritten rules of language commentary that one must mention Kinsley when discussing gaffe.) In 1984, Kinsley wrote:

The dictionary defines “gaffe” as a social error or faux pas. Its usage to refer to political misspeak probably began by courtesy or newspaper headline writers, whose work requires words of few letters. Of course, “lie” has even fewer letters than “gaffe,” but lies by politicians are not news. A “gaffe” is the opposite of a “lie”; it’s when a politician inadvertently tells the truth.

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2012, s. v. gaffe.

Dictionary of the Scots Language (Dictionar o the Scots Leid), 2004, s. v. gaff, n. v.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2018, s. v. gaff, n.2.

Kinsley, Michael. “Mondale Tries Demagoguery on Mortgage Interest Issue.” Los Angeles Times, 15 May 1984, C5.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. gaffe, n., gaff, n.1, gaff, n.2, guffaw, n.

Vaux, James Hardy. A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1812). Project Gutenberg Australia, 2011.