tabby

7 July 2019

Most of us know a tabby cat is either a female house cat or one with a striped or brindled coat regardless of its sex. But where does the word tabby come from? It has an unusual etymology, coming ultimately from Arabic and the history of Islam, and over the years it has been applied to things other than house cats, such as being used to refer to older, unmarried women.

The English word comes from the French tabis, in Old French atabis. This in turn comes from the medieval Latin attabi, which was taken from the Arabic ‘attābī, which is a reference to al-’Attābīya, a neighborhood of Baghdad. This quarter of the city is named for Attab ibn Asid, the first governor of Mecca following its conquest by Muhammad. Tabby, and its ancestors in these other languages, originally referred to silk taffeta, which was woven in the Baghdad neighborhood. The cloth was originally striped, but later came to be used for cloth of a single color that was waved or watered.

Tabby appears in English as early as 1638 referring to the cloth. It appears in an inventory of the possessions of Thomas Verney:

Now for some necessaries concerning myself. As first, for one good cloth sute, and one taby or good stuff sute.

The connection to cats is in place by 1665, where it appears in Thomas Herbert’s Some Years Travels Into Divers Parts of Africa and Asia the Great:

Cats be in more request with them than dogs; very large they are and tabby-coloured, streakt like those of Cyprus.

By 1695, the unmodified tabby was being applied to cats. From William Congreve’s play Love for Love of that year:

Look to it, nurse; I can bring witness that you have a great unnatural teat under your left arm, and he another; and that you suckle a young devil, in the shape of a tabby cat, by turns; I can.

The sense of a female cat was in place by 1826. From James Townley’s play High Life Below Stairs of that year:

Why, Mrs. Kitty, your cat has kittened—two Toms and two Tabbies!

It’s clear from this citation that the sense of tabby as a female cat developed in contrast to the male tomcat. It probably is a conflation of the name Tabitha, the word’s association with cats, and its sense of a spinster.

The word’s first association with human females is in Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel Clarissa:

With horrible grave faces was I received. The two Antiques only bowed their tabby heads; making longer faces than ordinary.

Here tabby is referring to various shades of gray hair on the two spinster’s heads. But within a few years, the word was directly referring to elderly spinsters. From George Colman’s 1761 play The Jealous Wife:

‘Pon honour, I am not sorry for the coming-in of these old tabbies, and am much obliged to her ladyship for leaving us such an agreeable tête-à-tête.

This sense of a spinster, as the quote from Richardson indicates, got its start from gray hair, but the association of old women with cats, from the stereotype of spinsters keeping cats as pets and disparagingly in comparing their disposition to the animals’, certainly influenced the development of this sense.

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2019, s. v. tabby.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. tabby, n. and adj.

synergy

16 January 2014

Words come into and go out of fashion. Sometimes, a particular word will catch a wave of popularity and become overused to the point where it becomes essentially meaningless and is used primarily to show that the speaker is fashionable and up on the latest trends. Such words are buzzwords, and you often see them in business writing, as firms indicating through their language that they are on the cutting edge of their field by using cutting edge language. A good example of a buzzword is synergy. The word hit its peak of popularity in the early 1980s. It is still common, but perhaps not as overused as it once was.

Synergy is the cumulative effect of coordinated action by a number of independent factors. Anytime you have the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, you have synergy. It’s a modern word coined from Latin roots. The Oxford English Dictionary has one citation of synergy’s use from 1660, but this appears to be an outlier, and the use didn’t catch on back then. It was recoined in the mid-nineteenth century in medical jargon, where it was used to describe the effects of multiple organs working together. From an 1847 translation of Ernst Feuchtersleben’s The Principles of Medical Psychology:

The transition to the homogeneous is called irradiation (in motor nerves, synergy,—in sensitive, sympathy).

It took about a hundred years for the business world to become wise to the word, and synergy began appearing in business writing in the late 1950s. From Raymond Cattell’s 1957 Personality and Motivation Structure and Measurement:

Immediate synergy through group membership [...] expresses the energy going into the group life as a result of satisfaction with fellow members.

Synergy continued to be unremarkably used for several decades, until suddenly in the 1980s, for some reason or another, synergy became a business imperative. As The Economist put it in its 28 November 1981 issue:

Others, through mergers (eg, research houses into retail brokerage houses), have demonstrated that there is something to be said for synergy.

Suddenly, every company had to be exploiting the “synergistic effects” of something or other. The word appeared on just about every executive resume. Products named synergy hit the market. Companies even changed their names to incorporate the word.

Of course, in reality nothing had changed. Businesses have been “exploiting synergistic effects” for as long as there has been business. The word synergy became so overused that it became something of a joke. Since then, synergy has settled back into the frequency of use it had prior to the furor of the 1980s. It can again be used without triggering rolling eyes and sniggering, but one should be careful to not overuse it, or the synergistic effect of that overuse will once again become negative.

Source:

“synergy, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

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

suborn

19 January 2019

Suborn is a verb that is usually heard in the context of lying under oath, and indeed roughly half of the instances of the verb in the Corpus of Contemporary American English are in the phrase suborn perjury. The verb clearly means to induce someone to commit a crime, but where does it come from?

Like many English legal terms, this one comes from French, a result of the Normans taking over the English legal system after 1066. (One of my favorite podcasts is a legal one, Opening Arguments, where the interlocutors are fond of jokingly attributing legal terms to “thirteenth-century Saxony.” But while the principles of English common law do indeed have roots in pre-Conquest, Germanic notions of justice, English legal jargon is usually from French.) In particular the English suborn comes from the Anglo-Norman suburner or subhorner, the meaning of which is remarkably consistent with the present-day English verb.

From a 1358 city of London statute:

Et plus curial chose serroit et accordaunt a ley et reson que homme se acquittat par son serment et siz bones gentz de jurer ovesqe lui ou par enquest de doze hommes qe par deux, issint subornés et faucement procures et enformés
(And because it would be more seemly and more according to law and reason that man should acquit himself his oath and that of six good people swearing with him, or by an inquest of twelve men, than by the witness of two thus suborned and tortiously procured and primed)

Of course, with the word being French, we can trace suborn’s roots back to Latin, where the basic meaning of the verb subornare is to equip, to adorn, but where it was also used to refer to inducing or inciting a crime, especially perjury. For instance we have this from Cicero’s Pro Aulo Caecina 71, a speech he gave in 69 B.C.E.:

itaque in ceteris controversiis atque iudiciis cum quaeritur aliquid factum necne sit, verum an falsum proferatur, et fictus testis subornari solet et interponi falsae tabulae, non numquam honesto ac probabili nomine bono viro iudici error obici.
(Therefore in other disputes and trials, when the question at issue is, whether a thing has been done or not, whether what is alleged be true or false; and when false witnesses are sometimes suborned, and false documents foisted in; it is possible that sometimes a virtuous judge may be led into error by a seemingly honorable and probable pretense.)

The etymology of suborn is, therefore, quite ordinary and straightforward, but it is unusual in that the meaning and patterns of usage have been preserved pretty much unchanged for over two millennia.

Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, Universities of Aberyswyth and Swansea, 1977–92, s. v. suburner.

Bateson, Mary, ed. Borough Customs, vol. 1, Seldon Society 18, London, 1904, 169–70.

Corpus of Contemporary American English, Brigham Young University, 2019.

Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 1879, s. v. suborno.

Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition, June 2012, s. v. suborn, v.

stiff upper lip

17 July 2019

Having a stiff upper lip is considered the quintessential British quality of resolution in the face of adversity. But surprisingly, the phrase itself is an American import to Britain.

The phrase first appears in the pages of the newspaper the Massachusetts Spy on 14 June 1815:

I kept a stiff upper lip, and bought [a] license to sell my goods.

Nova Scotian writer and politician Thomas C. Haliburton uses it in his 1837 novel The Clockmaker:

Its a proper pity sich a clever woman should carry such a stiff upper lip.

And it appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

“Well, good-by, Uncle Tom; keep a stiff upper lip,” said George.

The earliest British citation in the Oxford English Dictionary isn’t until 1887, when it appears in the newspaper The Spectator.

Source:

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. stiff, adj., n., and adv.