sur-

27 February 2017

The other day I was wondering about the word surname. What is the sur-? prefix. The etymology, while perhaps not immediately obvious, is quite straightforward; the sur- is a French variation on the Latin super, meaning above or beyond. It comes to us, like many French roots, from the Normans. So a surname is one’s second or higher name, and the word dates to the fourteenth century.

But there are other sur- words, some like surname, borrowed whole from French (Anglo-Norman surnum, early fourteenth century), while others have been formed in English:

surcharge, an additional charge, originally a verb (1429) borrowed from the Old French surcharger and turned into a noun by 1601

survive, to live beyond or after (1473), from the Anglo-Norman survivre, which was formed from the Latin vivere, to live

surpass, to go over or beyond (1588), from the French surpasser.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. sur-, prefix

speed

12 January 2014

Speed is a word with a rather straightforward etymology, but one with several archaic meanings that may be surprising to some. It is from the Old English word sped, which, among other senses, carried the meaning of quickness, swiftness that we are familiar with today.

In Old English the sense of quickness was a secondary and rarer sense of the word. In the extant literature it only appears in the dative plural form spedum and is used adverbially to mean speedily. (In Old English the dative plural of a noun can function as an adverb.) For example, there are these lines from the Old English poem Genesis, 2033–35:

                    Him þa broðor þry
æt spræce þære    spedum miclum
hældon hyge-sorge    heardum wordum.
(In that conversation, the three brothers very speedily healed his heart-sorrow with hard words.)

In Middle English speed is still mainly used adverbially, but as part of an adverbial phrase, often with a preposition. An example from the mid-thirteenth century poem The Story of Genesis and Exodus, line 1598:

Fro bersabe he ferde wið sped.
(He went from Beersheba with speed.)

It isn’t until the Early Modern period that speed starts to be widely used as a general noun meaning quickness, as in these lines from Milton’s 1667 Paradise Lost, 2:699–700:

Back to thy punishment,
False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings.

Going back to Old English, the Anglo-Saxons more commonly used sped to mean abundance, wealth and power, might. These senses died out in the early part of the Middle English period, not being found after about 1250, so they are among the words and meanings that didn’t survive the transition from Old to Middle English.

The Anglo-Saxons could also use sped to mean success, good fortune. This sense of speed was somewhat more successful and is commonly found into the early modern era. It is still found in Scottish dialect and in the old-fashioned, but not quite obsolete, wish of good speed.

The verb to speed follows a similar pattern. The Old English verb spedan means to succeed or prosper. It isn’t until the Middle English period that it starts to be used to mean to hasten.

In its Indo-European roots, speed is part of a larger group of words relating to swaths of time and distance and movement toward a goal. Some examples from other languages include the German spät (late), the Latin spatium (space), and the Old Slavic speti (to thrive).

Speed also has some specialized meanings that have developed with technology. The sense meaning the gear ratio of a bicycle, as in a ten-speed bike, dates to 1866 and the early forerunner of the bicycle, the velocipede. The application of the word to photographic film dates to 1892. One wonders how long this photographic sense will survive into the digital age—probably for quite a while as digital cameras also have a speed setting and film will probably remain in use for specialized applications for decades to come. And the use of speed as a slang term for methamphetamine is first attested to in 1967, one of the children of the Summer of Love.

Sources:

Bosworth and Toller, “sped,” “spedan,” An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 1898.

Liberman, Anatoly, Word Origins...And How We Know Them, Oxford University Press, 2005, 192.

“sped(e (n.),” “speden (v.),” Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2001.

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

sophisticated

3 January 2014

Our current senses of sophisticated, meaning either refined, cultured or highly developed, complicated, are surprisingly recent. The application of the word to people meaning experienced, refined can only be dated to 1895, when it appears in Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure:

Though so sophisticated in many things she was such a child in others that this satisfied her.

The sense applied to things that are complex, advanced is even more recent. From C. S. Lewis’s 1945 science fiction novel That Hideous Strength:

The man was so very allusive and used gesture so extensively that Mark’s less sophisticated modes of communication were almost useless.

The noun sophisticate, meaning a worldly, cultured person, is from 1923.

Other senses of the adjective are older, however. Sophisticated originally meant mixed with a foreign substance, adulterated or altered from a natural state; a sense that dates to at least 1607, when it appears in Thomas Dekker’s play The Whore of Babylon:

The drinke euen in that golden cup, they sweare
Is wine sophisticated, that does runne
Low on the lees of error.

And when applied to literary works, sophisticated can mean having been altered during copying or printing.

It makes sense, then, that the adjective comes from the verb to sophisticate, meaning to mix with a foreign substance, which dates to around 1400 when it appears in a version of The Book of John Mandeville:

It fallez oft tyme þat marchands sophisticatez peper.
(It happens oftentimes that merchants sophisticate pepper.)

The English verb is taken from the Medieval Latin sophisticare, which in turn comes from the Greek σοφιστής (sophistes), meaning one who accepts payment for instruction. These sophists, were different from the philosophers, who engaged in intellectual pursuits and education for higher purposes and not for money, hence the sophists were considered by some to be tainted or adulterated by base and material motivations. As a result, their teachings became associated, often unfairly, with specious and poor reasoning, or sophistry. The Latin sophisma means a false conclusion or fallacy. Presumably by the time the verb appeared in English, this sense of false reasoning had given way to deception and adulteration of substances, as in the merchant adulterating the pepper in the Mandeville quotation, although the trail of citations is not complete enough to be absolutely sure that this is the semantic path the word took.

The key to understanding the modern shift in meaning of sophisticated is the sense of altered from a natural state. Something that is cultured or refined is also altered from its natural state. Also, something that is mixed or made up of many substances is complex. The development of the current meanings is not surprising, but what is a bit of a shock is the rapidity with which they have taken over. The senses of adulterated and altered have all but completely vanished, and you have to turn academic literary criticism to find sophisticated used to mean altered during printing.

So, if you mix with the right circle of people, you too can become sophisticated.

Sources:

“sophisma,” Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1879.

“sophistic, adj.,” “sophisticate, n.,” “sophisticate, v.,” “sophisticated, adj.,” “sophistry, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

rap

14 June 2016

The sense of rap meaning a blow or strike is probably echoic in origin. Much like tap and clap, it represents the sound of the blow. The earliest citation in both the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary is from the poem Roland and Vernagu, found in the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1), which was copied c. 1330. The passage depicts a battle between the knight Roland and the giant Vernagu:

Þai gun anoþer fiȝt,
And stones togider þrewe.
Gode rappes for þe nones,
Þai ȝauen wiþ þe stones,
That sete swithe sore.

(They began another fight, and together threw stones. For the moment, they gave good raps with the stones very violently in that place.)

The verb appears a few decades later.

This basic sense of a blow has spawned three metaphorical senses that are in common use today. (There are lots of different senses, but I’m focusing on these three that are probably of the most interest.) A rap can also be a criminal charge or accusation, a discussion, or a genre of music.

The sense of rap, meaning a criminal charge comes from the sense of a blow or strike. Hugh Tootell, under the pseudonym Charles Dodd, used rap over the knuckles metaphorically in his 1715 The Secret Policy of the English Society of Jesus:

His Holiness himself [...]acquitted the appealing Clergy in a special Brief, and reprimanded the Arch Priest [...] You also, reverend Father, have a sensible rap over the Knuckles in the same Brief.

And several decades later we have the lone rap being used metaphorically to mean a rebuke. From a 1777 use published by the American Pioneer (Cincinnati) in 1843:

The post master general [...] has lately had a rap, which I hope will have a good effect.

By the twentieth century, the term had moved into North American criminal slang. A rap could be a prison sentence, as used by C. L. Cullen in his 1900 Tales of Ex-Tanks:

It was my first rap at Milwaukee.

Or in the 1935 Ellery Queen novel The Spanish Cape Mystery:

You’re in a tough spot. Do you know what the rap for blackmail is in this State?

But it could also mean a criminal accusation or charge, as in Hutchins Hapgood’s 1903 Autobiography of a Thief:

“What makes you look so glum?” [...]
“Turned out of police court this morning.”
“What was the rap, Mike?”
“I’m looking too respectable. They asked me where I got the clothes.”

The term rap sheet, meaning a police record of a person’s criminal arrests and charges dates to at least 1949. Some incorrectly believe this use is from an acronym for record of arrests and prosecutions, but while you can find this etymology in police manuals and forms, it is a backronym and not the origin of rap.

Another false belief is that this criminal sense of rap comes from counterfeiting and carries a connotation of the criminal charge being false. Rap did once refer to a counterfeit coin. This slang sense probably comes from the Irish rapaire. These counterfeit coins were used as currency in eighteenth-century Ireland due to a scarcity of copper. Jonathan Swift refers to them in his 1724 Letter to the Shop-Keepers of Ireland: 

Copper halfpence or farthings [...] have been for some time very scarce, and many counterfeits passed about under the name of raps.

But this sense was dying out in the nineteenth century when the criminal sense of rap developed. The connection to the counterfeiting sense is due to the phrase bum rap, meaning a false criminal charge, but the use of bum indicates that a rap is not necessarily, or even usually, false.

The sense of to rap, meaning to speak arose in the sixteenth century, originally meaning to speak sharply, quickly, or vigorously, as if one’s words were blows. It was commonly used in reference to swearing an oath. Thomas Wyatt writes in 1541:

I am wonte some tyme to rappe owte an othe in an erneste tawlke.

By the eighteenth century it was being used in criminal slang, meaning to give evidence, often to inform on another. In 1728 criminal James Dalton wrote a Genuine Narrative of this crimes in which he said:

The Whores are our Safe-guard; [...] they’ll rap for us.

And Francis Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue has:

TO RAP. To take a false oath; also to curse. He rapped out a volley; i. e. he swore a whole volley of oaths.

This criminal slang ties in with and may have influenced the previously discussed sense of a criminal charge.

Parallel to this criminal sense, the word also developed a sense of ordinary speech or conversation. Joseph Ritson writes in a 1787 letter:

I shall be most glad of my Lords arrival if it were only for the raps you promise me.

And R. Blakeborough’s 1898 Wit, Character, Folklore and Custom of the North Riding of Yorkshire has:

Lets ‘ev a pipe an’ a bit o’ rap.

By the beginning of the twentieth century this sense had crossed the Atlantic and became embedded in African-American speech. F. H. Tillotson’s 1909 How to Be a Detective explains:

“Rap” means to speak. If you “rap” to a man you speak to him or recognize him.

In African-American use the verb could also mean to impress via a verbal display. Nelson Algren writes in Playboy in 1957:

People like to say a pimp is a crime and a shame. But who’s the one friend a hustling broad’s got? [...] Who puts down that real soft rap only you can hear to let you know your time is up and is everything alright in there Baby?

In 1965, Eldridge Cleaver, a leader of the Black Panther Party, used rap to mean casual conversation in a letter:

In point of fact he is funny and very glib, and I dig rapping (talking) with him.

Today, this use of the word comes across as dated, hopelessly associated with the counterculture of the 1960s.

The musical sense of rap flows out of the speech sense, a reference to the rhythmic delivery of the lyrics. The earliest citation in the OED is from the 5 May 1979 issue of Billboard:

Young DJs like Eddie Cheeba, DJ Hollywood, DJ Starski, and Kurtis Blow are attracting followings with their slick raps [...] Tapes of Hollywood’s raps are considered valuable commodities by young blacks.

And:

He generally works with Cool DJ AJ, who does not rap but is a master of B-beats.

In September of that year the Sugarhill Gang released their single Rapper’s Delight, which had the lyrics:

Now, what you hear is not a test—I’m rappin’ to the beat,
And me, the groove, and my friends are gonna try to move your feet.

The Sugarhill Gang is often credited with coining this particular sense of rap, but while they were one of the first to use it in published form, and perhaps were the first to use the word in song lyrics, they were using a word that was already familiar to their musical circle.

By the following year rap had become the name for the musical genre.

Sources:

Middle English Dictionary, 2001, s. v. rappe (n.); rappen (v.(1))

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s. v. rap, n.2; rap, v.2; rap, n.4

raccoon

12 September 2015

I was shocked to realize that I had not included the etymology for raccoon on this list, not because it’s a particularly challenging one, but because after living in Toronto for five years, encounters with raccoons have become a daily occurrence. The city is overrun with them, to the extent that when one died, it got a memorial worthy of a rock star.

The word raccoon has a rather straightforward etymology. The word is from a Virginia Algonquian dialect aroughcun or aroughcoune. Its first known use in English is in John Smith’s, 1608 Narratives of Early Virginia in a description of the native American chief Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas:

Their Emperour proudly lying upon a Bedstead a foote high, upon tenne or twelve Mattes, richly hung with manie Chaynes of great Pearles about his necke, and coverd with a great Covering of Rahaughcums.

Early spelling of the word varied considerably, with three main forms of the word rahaugcum, arocoun, and raccoone appearing. The spelling standardized around the last in the eighteenth century. Up until the twentieth century, spelling racoon with one C was common.

Source:

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2008, s. v. raccoon, n.