「经济学人」Origin Uncertain

A new book investigating strange etymologies reads like a detective story

Origin Uncertain. By Anatoly Liberman. Oxford University Press; 344 pages; $29.99 and £22.99

Many words are puzzles themselves. “Conundrum” confounds scholars; “bamboozle” beguiles them. Anatoly Liberman, an etymologist at the University of Minnesota, explains why in “Origin Uncertain”, a delightful romp through the annals of words’ origins.

Compiled from some 20 years of blogs he wrote for Oxford University Press, “Origin Uncertain” takes a broadly thematic approach. He covers words that are “bizarre, misbegotten and born by mistake”, such as punk, spunk and funk, and terms with “troublesome phonetics”, including the related words sneak, snack and snuck.

All of this will delight logophiles. The book may also appeal to true-crime fans; it reads like a detective story. The hunt for the Middle English word “henchman”, for example, has “villains and casualties at every step”. It first surfaced in 1360; etymologists thought it meant “horseman”, from hengst, an Old Germanic word for “stallion”. Yet hengst had died out in English a century earlier, making this coinage unlikely. The word eventually became hencheman, before vanishing in the 17th century. Walter Scott, a poet, revived it some 200 years later, bestowing the definition “one who is always at his master’s haunch”. This bears some resemblance to its meaning today, as an unscrupulous or corrupt crony.

Mr Liberman does not manage to prove the true origins of “henchman”, concluding that the “criminal” leaves the “investigators partly at bay”. Some readers may grow tired of the unsolvable linguistic riddles in this book. Yet they demonstrate the capricious nature of vocabulary. So many words have quietly fallen out of fashion; others have survived only because famous writers such as Shakespeare used them.

In few cases is the invention of a word recorded. William Thoms, a 19th-century British writer, coined the term “folklore” (“the lore of the people”) in a letter in 1846. As “folklore” became popular, however, Thoms had to keep reminding readers that he came up with it. If a word “finds approval by the community”, Mr Liberman explains, “it survives, and the inventor’s name is soon forgotten”. The origins of bamboozle will continue to bamboozle, a fact that would doubtless have delighted its unremembered creator.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Can we have a word?”(July 18th 2024)

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