Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
Just like any other science or academic discipline, etymology has its share of disproven theories, popular misconceptions, and false narratives. Though bad word histories get debunked repeatedly, some of them have reached the status of urban legend and cling to the popular imagination like barnacles, primarily because the stories are just too good. We want them to be true because they turn sometimes dry linguistic history into a fun story or keen wordplay.
For instance, most etymologies that claim a word was originally an acronym are false. Furthermore, the older a word is, the less likely it began as an acronym, which was a fairly uncommon way to coin words until the mid-1800s; the word acronym (Greek akros “topmost or at the extremities” + onym “name”) wasn’t even coined until the 1940s. What’s more, the words that do derive from acronyms are fairly well-known, like scuba, radar, snafu, and BASE jumping (BASE signifies the four fixtures adrenaline junkies jump from: building, antenna, span, and earth) — all 20th-century coinages.
So no, posh didn’t begin as “port out, starboard home,” nor golf as “gentleman only, ladies forbidden,” nor rap as “rhythm and poetry,” nor tips as “to insure prompt service.” News was not created by cramming together the initial letters of the four cardinal directions; it’s the plural of an obsolete noun form of new. We especially like to see acronyms in profanities, but they’re all false: today’s worst curse words trace all the way back to good old Old English, and they weren’t considered so impolite back then.
It goes way beyond acronyms, of course. There’s a common story that the word sincere comes from the Latin sine cera “without wax.” According to one such tale, before Michelangelo became the master artist he is known as today, he worked in a Roman marble quarry. During his time there, he witnessed unscrupulous quarrymen rubbing wax over the marble to hide its imperfections. Because of his experiences, when he was later buying marble for his own sculptures, he knew what to look for to avoid substandard materials. But eventually, once enough disappointed customers complained to the Roman Senate, a new law was passed declaring that marble be sold sine cera “without wax.”
It’s a great story, but it’s not true; Latin had the word sincerus “whole, unadulterated” centuries before Michelangelo was born, and it’s from this source that sincere developed.
Or take kangaroo. As one story goes, English-speaking explorer James Cook, near Australia’s Endeavour River, caught sight of a large animal hopping around on two huge legs. “What is that?” he asked of a native. The native, of course, didn’t speak English, so he replied, in his own language, “I don’t understand” or “I don’t know,” which sounded something like “kangaroo” and which Cook took as an answer. He transliterated that answer, and the animal was henceforth called a kangaroo in English.
It’s a light-hearted tale of human folly, and it’s also a load of poppycock.
Cook did bring the word kangaroo back to Europe as a transliteration of a native term, but it’s a legitimate word. In Guugu Yimidhirr, an Aboriginal language that was spoken around the Endeavour River, the animal was called something akin to “gangurru,” which Cook took down as kangaroo. What’s more, in none of the languages in the area does the word kangaroo sound like something that could mean “I don’t know.”
But it’s such a good story! And we human beings like stories, especially when they involve celebrities. Those weird little unexpected stories, even the untrue ones, are what drew me to etymology in the first place, and they’re likely part of what draws you to this column as well.
But let it be said, if the history of a word’s coinage hinges on the acts of a well-known personality, you should be doubly dubious of its veracity.
Sometimes bad etymologies can come from good places. Some guesswork and estimation is involved in etymology, and new research techniques and freshly uncovered sources can lead to modern theories that supersede earlier ones. But the news doesn’t always make it out to the world of word nerds — especially if the original story is more interesting.
Take the story of saunter. None other than Samuel Johnson offered two possible explanations of the word’s history in his dictionary of 1755:
(1) aller à la sainte terre, from idle people who roved about the country, and asked charity under pretence of going à la sainte terre, to the holy land; or (2) sans terre, as having no settled home.
Johnson was the ne plus ultra of 18th-century English lexical authorities and so was considered what we in the 21st century might call a “trusted resource.” Henry David Thoreau repeated this explanation in his essay “Walking,” published a month after his death in 1862 (and reprinted in the Post in March/April 1992 and January/February 2001). John Muir reportedly told the same story in 1911.
It’s believable that Thoreau would have read Johnson, and it seems likely that John Muir would have read Thoreau. So the story was passed down through 150 years, and from learned, believable, trustworthy men.
The problem, of course, is that it’s wrong. Or, at least according to modern scholarship, Johnson’s etymology is highly unlikely. Etymologists don’t know for certain exactly how saunter came to be, but it can be traced back to the Middle English santren “to muse” — which has to do with a state of mind, not a movement of feet. But “origin unknown” isn’t nearly as evocative as a story about swindling panhandlers preying on the good hearts and change purses of the devout. So the story gets retold.
Noah Webster — whose name has become synonymous with dictionary — also pursued etymology. Though his academic rigor is generally well-regarded, some of his foundational beliefs about language stained his etymological results. A born-again Christian fundamentalist, he believed in a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the story of the Tower of Babel, in which everyone was speaking the same tongue, but God confounded the languages and spread the people around the Earth. As an etymologist, Webster wasn’t so interested in teasing out the connections and influences between languages; he was trying to trace all words back to the antediluvial language of Adam and Eve.
(He was also a bit over-confident in his own abilities and dismissed the etymological scholarship coming out of Germany, including seminal work by the Grimm brothers.)
Webster spent 10 years researching language history and developing his own theories about language evolution and etymology, but he never published his conclusions. Luckily, I suppose.
The lesson here is that if a story about a word’s history sounds too good to be true, it probably is — especially if there’s a celebrity or literary great attached to it. And if the story perfectly supports your own biases about language, people, and history, it’s worth more closely examining that story (and maybe your biases) before you accept it as truth.
As they say, don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
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