hogmanay

1 January 2019

Hogmanay is a Scottish dialect word for New Year’s Eve or a present given, especially to children, on that day. The word is recorded in Latin as early as 1443:

Et solutum xxxj die decembris magn. hagnonayse xijd. et parv. hagnonayse viijd.
(And paying on the thirty-first day of December a great hogmanay of twelve pence and a small hogmanay of eight pence.)

It’s use in English is recorded in 1604:

William Pattoun delatit to haue been singand hagmonayis on Satirday.

The origin of Hogmanay is not certain, but it most likely comes from the Middle French aguillanneuf or a variant thereof. The Scottish-French alliance of the late sixteenth century introduced a number of French words into Scottish dialect, and this is likely one of them. The first element of the French word is unknown, but the final element is likely a variation on l’an neuf (the new year).

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2018, s. v. Hogmanay.

Dictionary of the Scots Language, s. v. hogmanay, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s. v. hogmanay, n.

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.