bear / bruin (animal)

Alaskan brown bear in a river with a fish in its mouth

22 December 2020

Bears are large, carnivorous quadrupeds of the family Ursidae. There are eight extant species of bear (unfortunately, soon to be seven as climate change is killing off the polar bears) found across the northern hemisphere and in South America. The brown and polar bears are the largest terrestrial carnivores currently existing.

The English word bear has cognates throughout the Germanic languages: Frisian bear; Dutch beer; German Bär; Icelandic bera; Norwegian Bjørn; Swedish Björn; and Danish bjørn. The Proto-Indo-European root is *bher-2, which is associated with the color brown.

The word goes back to the Old English bera, an example of which can be found in a late tenth-century sermon taken from the biblical book of Kings by Ælfric of Eynsham:

Þa forseah se ælmihtiga God þone Saul æt nextan and hine of his rice awearp be his agenum gewyrhtum and ceas to cynincge þone cenan Dauid, se ðe butan wæpnum gewylde ða leon and þæs beran ceaflas tobræc mid his handum and ahredde þæt gelæhte scep of his scearpum toðum.

(Then the almighty God finally spurned Saul and cast him out of his kingdom because of his deeds and chose the brave David as king, he who without weapons overpowered the lion and shattered the jaws of the bear with his hands and delivered the captured sheep from his sharp teeth.)

The word bruin, which also means bear, is a fifteenth-century borrowing from the Dutch. Bruin in Dutch means brown. Bruin makes its way into English in William Caxton’s 1481 translation and printing of the tales of Reynard the fox:

the kynge thouught that alle this was good and saide to brune the bere syr brune I wyl that ye doo this message / but see wel to for your self / ffor reynart is a shrewe / and felle & knoweth so many wyles that he shal lye and flatre / and shal thynke how he may begyle deceyue and brynge yow to some mockerye

The use of words meaning brown to name the creature is probably some form of taboo avoidance, out of fear that mentioning its name will make the bear appear. In other words, the bear is, like Voldemort, “one who must not be named” and thus was referred to as “the brown one.”

xkcd cartoon featuring four people discussing the etymology of the word bear

All this is a rather straightforward and obvious etymology, except there is a belief afoot, as evidenced by the Randall Munroe xkcd cartoon pictured here, that the “true name” of the bear has been lost. This idea is wrong on several levels. First, there is no such thing as a “true name” of something. Names are arbitrary (usually, echoic ones aren’t arbitrary) combinations of sounds used as commonly understood labels. There is nothing magical or special about older names. Second, the older root has not been lost.

As Munroe’s cartoon points out, the Proto-Indo-European root meaning bear is *rkto-, and that root survives in the Greek άρκτος (arktos) and the Latin ursis. The latter can be seen in the Linnaean nomenclature of Ursidae for bears. The name Orca for killer whales is from the same root and comes from earlier use to mean sea monsters. The root is also the source of J.R.R. Tolkien’s monstrous orcs, which he took from the Old English orcneas, meaning some kind of demon or evil spirit. These uses of the Proto-Indo-European root to mean monstrous creatures supports the idea of taboo avoidance in bear, but they disprove the idea that the older name has been lost. It hasn’t; the Germanic languages just no longer use it to refer to bears.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Sermo excerptus de Libro regum” (“A Sermon Excerpted from the Book of Kings”). Old English Lives of Saints, vol. 2 of 3, Mary Clayton and Janet Mullins, eds. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 59. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019, lines 12–17, 140.

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2020 s.v. bear2, n. and bher-2 in Appendix of Indo-European Roots.

Caxton, William, trans. This is the Table of the Historye of Reynart the Foxe. London: Caxton, 1481. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. bera.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2020, s.v. bear, n.1.; December 2016, s.v. bruin, n.

Image credits: Chapman, Carl, 24 June 2006, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license; Randall Munroe. “The True Name of the Bear,” xkcd.com, 2020.

heathen

21 December 2020

Heathen is an unusual word. For despite being a very old one, it has retained its meaning pretty much intact through the centuries, with few additional senses or connotations. A heathen, of course, is someone who is not an adherent to one of the Abrahamic faiths, although in early use it was sometimes used to refer to Jews and Muslims as well. But while its form and use in English is well documented and understood, the word’s early history is contested, with two competing explanations.

The word is common in Old English, with close to a thousand extant instances. Since many of the surviving Old English texts are religious ones, the high number is not terribly surprising. For example, the eleventh-century gospel of Mark 7:26 found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 140 reads:

soðlice þæt wif wæs hæðen sirofenisces cynnes

(truly that woman was a heathen of the Syrophoenician people)

The original Greek is:

ἡ δὲ γυνὴ ἦν ἑλληνίς, συροφοινίκισσα τῷ γένει:

(the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by nation)

Heathen is also common across the Germanic languages: the Old Frisian hêthin, the Old Saxon hêðin which gives way to the present-day Dutch heiden, the Old High German heidan and the present-day German heide, and the Old Norse heiðinn with the present day Swedish and Danish heden.

The common explanation is that heathen comes from heath, a tract of uncultivated or wild, but not wooded, land, from the Old English hæþ. A heathen, according to this explanation, is a dweller on the heath, which corresponds to the Latin paganus, originally a rustic person and later a worshipper of older gods. Paganus is, of course, the source of pagan. It is presumed that Christian writers in the Germanic languages translated paganus as heathen. There are some problems with this explanation though. The endings, particularly the difference between the Old High German -an and the Old English -en, are not explained. Furthermore, the oldest of the Germanic appearances, the fourth-century Gothic gospels, places it earlier than most of the Latin Christian writings.

The Gothic gospel of Mark renders the opening clause of 7:26 as:

wasuþþan so qino haiþno, Saurini fwnikiska gabaurþai

(truly the woman was a heathen (Greek?), a Syrophoenician by birth)

The competing explanation is that Gothic, an East Germanic language from the Black Sea region, borrowed it from the Armenian հեթանոս (het’anos) which in turn comes from the Greek ἔθνος (ethnos, nation). Thus, the Gothic haiþno would be better translated as Greek than as heathen, which would make the Gothic biblical verse a word-for-word translation from the Greek. From the Gothic it spread to the other Germanic languages. This explanation is chronologically sound and accounts for the phonological changes.

We’ll probably never know which one of these explanations is the correct one. I prefer the second as it accounts for all the evidence better, but the first is far from implausible.

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Sources:

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. hæþen, hæþ1.

“Gothic Bible and Minor Fragments.” Wulfila Project.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. hethen, adj. and n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. heathen, adj. and n.1, heath, n.

hawk a loogie

18 December 2020

To hawk a loogie is a slang phrase meaning to expectorate a glob of phlegm from the back of the throat. It comes in many variants. Hawk is often hock or hang, and loogie can be looey, louie, or lunger. The phrase is the coming together of two words, one quite old and the other rather new.

The old one is hawk or hock. It’s probably echoic in origin and dates to the late sixteenth century. From Richard Mulcaster’s 1581 treatise on education, Positions, which also contains medical advice relevant to bringing up young boys:

Of all these diuersities in walking the moderate is most profitable, which alone of all, that I rekened, hath no point either of to much, or of to litle, and yet it is both much, and strayning, which be the two properties of an healthfull walke. It is good for the head, the eyes, the throte, the chest, when they be out of frame: so the partie spit not blood. For distilling from the head, for difficultie of breath, for a moyste and and pained stomacke, wherin the nurriture either groweth bitter or corrupteth: for the iaundise, costisnesse, fleeting of the meat in the stomacke, stopping of the vrine, ache of the hippes, and generally for all such, as either neede to prouoke any superfluitie from the vpper partes downward, or to send that packing, which is already in waye to depart. Now to the contrarie it is naught for agues, bycause it encreaseth heat, and so conseque[n]tly the disease: for the falling euill, for hauking vp of blood: and in the time when one is making water.

Loogie is of more recent vintage, dating to the latter half of the twentieth century, at least in writing. It appears in Carlo Curti’s 1967 biography of movie mogul Spyros Skouros, Skouras: King of Fox Studios:

“Out kid!” he ordered as one of his bodyguards put me in an armlock. I spit a lugey on him and he slapped my face.

The phrase is recorded in student slang in the journal Current Slang from 1970:

Hang a louie, v. To spit on someone.—College students, both sexes, Minnesota.

And another example is found in Julian Moynahan’s 1979 novel Where the Land and Water Meet:

In the old neighborhood, by Raymond Street Park, to cough up and expectorate heavy phlegm from the back of the throat was to “hawk a lunger.” When you did it, the remark to make was “Go pick the bones out of that one!”

Not a very pleasant image.

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Sources:

Moynahan, Julian. Where the Land and Water Meet. New York: Morrow, 1979, 276. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mulcaster, Richard. Positions. London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1581, 83. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. hawk, v.3; third edition, March 2017, s.v. loogie, n.

hat trick

17 December 2020

A cricket scene: Shaun Pollock, South Africa, bowls to batsman Michael Hussey, Australia, 27 December 2005; Pollock had one-upped a hat trick in 1996 by taking four wickets in four successive balls

North Americans are probably most familiar with hat trick from ice hockey, the name for the feat where one player scores three goals in a single game. It’s a seemingly nonsensical name, and its origins are not in hockey but in stage magic before moving into the world of sports with its use in cricket.

Hat trick is the name given to any of a variety of stage magic tricks involving a hat, perhaps most famously that of pulling a rabbit out of one. The term hat trick first appears in the United States in the Boston Morning Post of 26 February 1840:

That Master Young, at the N. E. Museum, does his tricks with remarkable ingenuity—what he calls “the hat trick” is the cleverest thing in the legerdemain line we have witnessed for many a year.

The term quickly crossed the Atlantic and appears in newspaper accounts of stage magic shows in both Britain and North America throughout the 1840s and 50s.

Then in a cricket match between the All England Eleven and the Twenty-Two of Hallam and Staveley, played at Hyde Park, Sheffield, 6–9 September 1858, bowler H. H. Stephenson knocked over three wickets with three successive balls. In celebration of this feat, his team awarded him with a new hat. The incident is recorded in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle of 12 September 1858:

The next four wickets fell to H. Stephenson without troubling the scorers; he took three wickets in three successive balls, entitling himself to a new hat, which was presented to him by the Eleven.

At some point, someone dubbed Stephenson’s feat a hat trick, a play on words combining the sense of an amazing bit of magic with Stephenson’s prize of a hat. But the sporting sense of hat trick isn’t recorded in print until 23 June 1865, when it appears in the Chelmsford Chronicle:

When the fourth wicket went down for 60 the excitement was intense. Grays, however, had yet a man equal for the occasion, and Mr. Biddell going on at W. Sackett’s end, with his second ball bowled the Romford leviathan, Mr. Beauchamp, and afterwards performed the hat trick by getting three wickets in the over, Mead being bowled for 0 and Mundy and Lawrence caught by long stop and slip respectively.

The phrase moved into other sports starting with horse racing in 1893. From the London Evening News of 14 September 1893:

“Morny” Cannon was going strong and well at Warwick yesterday, and did the hat trick by riding three winners in as many mounts.

And from there it moved into other sports, including eventually hockey. Exactly what needs to be done to achieve a hat trick varies with the sport, but it is always a set of three.

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Sources:

Boston Morning Post, 26 February 1840, 2. NewspaperArchive.

“Cricket.” Supplement to the Chelmsford Chronicle, 23 June 1865, 1. Gale News Vault.

“Cricketer’s Register.” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (London), 12 September 1858, 3. Gale News Vault.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2017, s.v. hat trick, n.

Photo credit: Prescott Pym, 27 December 2005, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

vaccine

An 1802 cartoon portraying a physician (perhaps Edward Jenner or George Pearson) inoculating patients with the cowpox virus and having them sprout bovine parts from the their bodies, showing that anti-vaccination hysteria is nothing new

16 December 2020

The word vaccine comes to us from the Latin vacca, meaning cow. That may seem a bit odd until one considers the history of this particular aspect of medical science. Smallpox is caused by Orthopoxvirus variola, and its cousin in the Orthopoxvirus genus causes cowpox, a disease that is far less virulent in humans. In the late eighteenth century, people began to observe that those who had been infected with cowpox seemed to be immune to smallpox.

Acting on this observation, English physician Edward Jenner began experiments to inoculate people with the cowpox virus and discovered that this was an effective preventative for smallpox. Jenner dubbed the causative agent for cowpox variolae vaccinae (pox of the cow) and used the adjective vaccine to refer to things associated with cowpox. From a 1799 discussion by Jenner of his discovery:

From communications, with which I have been favoured from Dr. Pearson, who has occasionally reported to me the result of his private practice with the vaccine virus in London, and from Dr. Woodville, who has also favoured me with an account of his more extensive inoculation with the same virus at the Small Pox Hospital, it appears that many of their patients have been affected with eruptions, and that these eruptions have maturated in a manner very similar to the variolous.

Jenner’s use of virus here refers to the pus from a cowpox pustule, which is what he used to inoculate his subjects, as what we today call viruses would not be discovered for another century. In Latin, virus means venom and can refer to any toxic substance.

The noun vaccination to denote inoculation with cowpox appears in the title of an 1800 paper by physician Richard Dunning: “Some Observations on Vaccination, or the Inoculated Cow-Pox.”

Later in the nineteenth century vaccine began to be used as a noun and in reference to inoculations for diseases other than smallpox/cowpox. For instance, here is a 1 April 1886 article in the anti-vivisection journal The Zoophilist in reference to Louis Pasteur’s vaccine for rabies, or as it was known then, hydrophobia:

On the 6th of July last, M. Pasteur performed his first inoculation on a human being with the so-called vaccine of hydrophobia. Joseph Meister, his first subject, had been bitten two days before by a dog supposed to be mad.

Curiously, over the centuries since Jenner first began to inoculate people against smallpox, the virus in the smallpox vaccine mutated, and while it has remained an effective prophylaxis for smallpox, it is no longer the causative agent for cowpox. As a result, the virus in the vaccine kept the name Orthopoxvirus vaccinia, while the name of the virus that causes cowpox is now Orthopoxvirus cowpox virus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared in May 1980 that smallpox, Orthopoxvirus variola, had been eradicated, but we continue to use vaccines for any number of diseases,

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Sources:

Jenner, Edward. Further Observations on the Variolae Vaccinae or Cow Pox. London: Sampson Low, 1799, 56. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. vaccine, adj., vaccine, n., vaccination, n.

“The Pasteur Craze.” The Zoophilist, 5.12, 1 April 1886. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: James Gillray, 1802, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZC4-3147.