imp

24 September 2013

We all know that an imp is a small devil or demon, or somewhat more playfully, a mischievous child. But it was not always so. Would you believe that imp originally meant a shoot of a plant, a sapling?

Imp is an old word, dating to Old English, and back then an imp was a small plant. The word appears as early as c. 897 in King Alfred’s translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. Alfred (reigned 871–99), concerned that there were not enough competent speakers of Latin in England to foster sound education and advancement of knowledge, embarked on a campaign of translating Latin works into English and sponsoring new scholarly works in the vernacular. Alfred is personally credited with translating several significant works, including this one by Gregory. In his translation of Pastoral Care, Alfred writes:

Sio halige gesomnung Godes folces, ðæt eardað on æppeltunum, ðonne hie wel begað hira plantan & hiera impan, oð hie fulweaxne beoð.
(That is the holy congregation of God’s people, which dwells in orchards, when they cultivate well their plants & their imps, until they are full grown.)

This is commentary on the Song of Solomon, 8:13, which reads:

Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the friends hearken: make me hear thy voice.

Old English also had a corresponding verb, impian, meaning to implant or graft the shoot of a plant. These botanic senses are now obsolete.

By the fourteenth century, imp had made the jump from flora to people and was being used to mean a child, especially the scion of a noble house. This transition can be readily seen in two examples, a few decades apart. The first, uses an extended metaphor of plant growth in reference to a prince. The poem The Death of Edward III, written c. 1377, says of Edward’s grandson, Richard II, who succeeded his grandfather when he was just ten years old:

Weor þat Impe ffully growe, Þat he had sarri sap and piþ, I hope he schulde be kud and knowe ffor Conquerour of moni a kiþ.
(Were that imp fully grown, so that he had pleasing sap and pith, I hope he should be famous and known as conqueror of many a nation.)

The anonymous poet’s hopes were not to be realized, as Richard II was a rather weak king. Compare that to this line about another prince written by Thomas Hoccleve c. 1411 in the envoy to his Regement of Princes, which lacks any overt botanical references:

O litell booke, who yafe the hardynesse Thy wordes to pronounce in the presence Of kynges Impe and princes worthynesse?
(Oh little book, who gave [you] the courage to pronounce your words in the presence of the king’s imp and the excellence of princes?)

Hoccleve’s poem was written for the prince who would become Henry V, who as a grown man would fulfill the earlier, anonymous poet’s hopes for a conqueror-prince.

It wasn’t until the sixteenth century that the word acquired its devilish connotation. It started to be used in phrases like “imp of a serpent” or “imp of the devil.” For example, a line in William Bonde’s 1526 Pylgrimage of Perfection reads:

Suche appereth as angelles, but in very dede they be ymps of serpentes.
(Such appear as angels, but in very deed they are imps of serpents.)

Such uses became so common that by the century’s end the qualifying phrase could be dropped and use of imp alone connoted demonic heritage. Reginald Scot’s 1584 The Discoverie of Witchcraft reads:

They haue so fraied vs with bull beggers, spirits, witches, [...] tritons, centaurs, dwarfes, giants, imps.
(They have so frightened us with bull-beggars, spirits, witches, [...] tritons, centaurs, dwarfs, giants, imps.

That’s how a budding plant becomes a little demon.

Sources:

“imp, n.,” imp, v.” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

“impe (n.),” Middle English Dictionary, 2001.

hurricane

29 August 2017

As of this writing, hurricane Harvey has devastated much of the Texas Gulf Coast. (Here in College Station, Texas, we’ve avoided the worst of it, although it would be an understatement to say there has been a lot of rain.) But where does the word hurricane come from? It turns out it’s a rather straightforward borrowing.

Hurricane comes to us from the Taino language of the Caribbean via Spanish. The Taino word is hurákan. It makes its first English language appearance in Richard Eden’s 1555 translation of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés’s 1535 summary of La historia general de las Indias (Eden included portions of Oviedo’s work, and the works of other authors, in his translation of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s Decadas del nuevo mundo):

Lykewyse when the deuyll greatly intendeth to feare theym, he threteneth to sende them great tempestes which they caule Furacanas or Haurachanas, and are so vehement that they ouerthrowe many howses and great trees.

Today, the official definition of a hurricane is a western-hemisphere tropical cyclone (i.e., forms over tropical or sub-tropical waters) with sustained winds of 64 knots (74 mph, 119 kph). Those with lower sustained winds are dubbed tropical storms. Hurricanes are classified into five categories of increasing severity based on windspeed, the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Category five is the worst, with sustained winds in excess of 137 knots (157 mph, 252 kph).

Before 1953, the names of individual hurricanes and tropical storms were arbitrary and unofficial. For instance an 1842 storm ripped the mast off the boat Antje and became known as Antje’s Hurricane. Saint’s names for storms that hit on the particular saint’s feast day were also common, but could be confusing if storms hit on the same day in multiple years. Beginning in 1953, names for storms were assigned by the U. S. National Weather Service. These names were originally all female ones. Eventually the responsibility for naming was transferred to the international World Meteorological Organization. In 1979, the WMO began alternating male names with female ones. The WMO currently maintains rotating lists of names used in different years and for different regions. When a storm is particularly devastating, the name is retired from the list and replaced. Recent retirees include Katrina (USA, 2005), Haiyan (Philippines, 2013), and Sandy (USA, 2012).

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2017, s. v. hurricane.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. hurricane, n.

“Tropical Cyclone Naming,” World Meteorological Organization, accessed 29 August 2017.

“What is a Hurricane,” U. S. National Ocean Service, accessed 29 August 2017.

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.