Odds and ends

I am delighted to say that in January I received unusually many questions. When this blog came into existence, the idea was that I would be flooded by “notes and queries,” as happens to word columnists who work for newspapers. That is why the last week of every month was reserved for answers. But all these years the traffic has been modest, and sometimes my replies were limited to what I had read in the comments. January and the beginning of February 2018 have been an exception; hence the extended “gleanings.”

Mad hatters

It seems that my reasoning made people return to the source of the idiom as mad as a hatter. There is no disagreement on the basic facts: hatters suffered from mercury poisoning; the dangers of mercury have been known for a long time; the idiom goes back to the 1820s; hatters’ exposure to mercury was also known around that time, but the name of the disease postdates the idiom by many decades; the idiom was probably launched as a joke, and this circumstance makes the connection between its coining and the discovery of the disease almost improbable. Stephen Goranson’s note is curious. Incidentally, I have had Manchester City Notes and Queries screened for the etymologies of both words and idioms (and found a lot of exotic material in that periodical), but the story of the Czar and the hatter did not attract my attention. Such an incident could have given rise to the phrase, but, as Goranson says, there is no knowing whether that hatter was famous in England, and here is the rub. By way of consolation, we’ll show you the crown of the Russian czars. In Russian, it is called shapka Monomakha (shapka means “cap, hat”).

Word origins

• Is the verb atone traceable to the phrase at one? In some way, it is. The phrase at one “in harmony” existed in Middle English and was influenced by Medieval Latin  adunamentum “unity” (from adunare “to unite”), which gave rise to late Middle English phrase at onement and the later form atonement. From this noun the verb atone was produced by back formation. In some way, the history of its pronunciation mirrors that of alone (from Middle English al one).
• Why does score mean “twenty”? I think most of us recognize only the numeral fourscore “eighty.” The root of this word designates “cutting,” so that score is related to share (as in ploughshare and in all other kinds of share) and shear. The initial group sc-, that is, sk– betrays the word’s Scandinavian origin. It is usually believed that Old Engl. scora (only the plural has been attested) designated a mark on a tally. This hypothesis cannot be confirmed, but from what we know about primitive counting it looks convincing. Perhaps every “scora” marked twenty of something. More puzzling is the phrase musical score. “Said to be so named from the practice of connecting the related staves by ‘scores’ or lines marking off the bars,” by The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology.

• Up and down. From a reader: “Downs are elevated land forms. Are there other autoantonyms (regardless of common origin, which makes this case wonderful)?” The unwieldy term enantiosemy means “the coexistence of two opposite meanings in a word.” Sometimes the clash is the result of quirky history. Thus, inflammable means the same as flammable, because in in this word is a negative prefix (compare inadequate, intolerable, and so forth, as opposed to inborn, ingrained, and the like). In Modern Engl. let, the opposite senses have coalesced: “to allow” and “to hinder.” In the past, two different words existed. The negative sense is forgotten, and only punsters enjoy examples like they let me go free (allowed me to go free or prevented me from doing so?), but in the tautological binomial without let or hindrance, the archaic sense stays alive (let = hindrance; that is why the group is tautological). The tennis term let has the same origin.

Quite often it is the situation that produces ambiguity, because adjectives (especially adjectives) tend to refer to things that are beneficial or detrimental, depending on the circumstances. We are delighted to receive gratuitous medical assistance but are shocked by gratuitous cruelty. Likewise, people constantly plead for compromise, but no one enjoys being compromised. The Old Icelandic word meaning “true” also meant “guilty,” and a good explanation exists for this development. A classic example of enantiosemy is Latin altus “high” and “deep.” Apparently, to the native speakers of Latin altus meant “far from the ground,” while the direction of the look depended on the situation: up or down. I discussed this phenomenon at some length in my book on word origins.

Both down “elevated ground” and down in go down are from Celtic. Despite some disagreement among etymologists, I think the two words are related. In Luke IV: 31, one of the Old English bibles has dūne āstāg “descended” (compare German steigen), and in the Gothic Bible (Matthew VIII: 1), the group sounds as dalaþ atggandin “going down” (gg = ng), in which dalaþ means “into the valley” (dal– “dale,” German Tal). There must have been a clear idea of going downhill in the direct sense of the word.

Spelling

•  Our correspondent asked why oar (see the post for 17 January, 2018), or, and ore are spelled differently. Oar goes back to Old English ār (with long a). In Middle English, long a became, by a regular sound change, long o, but there were two ō’s in Middle English: closed (the continuation of Old Engl. ō) and open, the vowel that developed from Old Engl. ā. Later, the open vowel, if it remained intact before r, was usually spelled as oa (a, the second element of the digraph oa, indicated its openness). The conjunction or, most likely, of Scandinavian origin, appears to have developed from oþþer (þþ as in Modern Engl. this), so that its spelling has not changed much since the thirteenth century, except that the lost consonant is, providentially, not reflected in today’s form. Finally, ore goes back to Old Engl. ōra “unwrought metal,” with closed ō, which, by the Great Vowel Shift, should have changed to ū (in which case ore would have rhymed with moor), but it was confused with the reflex (continuation, descendant) of Old Engl. ār “metal; bronze, ” and became a homonym of oar. I am not sure how the modern spelling of this word arose, but ore seems to be spelled, as though it went back directly to ōra, which it does not.
• I mislaid an old question and am now answering it with a long delay. Some time ago, I wrote that the latest tinkering with German spelling reflects the influence of the Swiss norm. The question was whether I mean the use of ß. Yes, this is what I meant. In German, ss and the special letter ß designate the same sound, namely s (voiceless). The rule regulating their use is only partly intuitive. The Swiss abolished ß long ago. The Germans followed their example, but only up to a point, and I am not sure that they have done it quite well.
• The Spelling Congress has been announced. The first session will take place on 30 May, in the form of a webinar. Closer to that time I will make a detailed announcement.

Many more answers next week.

Featured image credit: “Rough Horn Alpine Tannheimer Mountains Mountain” by Simon. CC0 via Pixabay. 

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