1151. This week, we look at the deep history of words with Doug Harper, creator of Etymonline. We look at the "gravitational" link between digging a grave and having a grave problem, the surprising 1839 origin of "OK," and why some of our favorite word stories are actually "folk etymologies" designed as jokes.
1151. This week, we look at the deep history of words with Doug Harper, creator of Etymonline. We look at the "gravitational" link between digging a grave and having a grave problem, the surprising 1839 origin of "OK," and why some of our favorite word stories are actually "folk etymologies" designed as jokes.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Doug Harper from the online etymology dictionary, affectionately known as Etymonline. Doug has created this resource that is one of just a handful of things that I use almost every day. I can't imagine doing my job without it. So, Doug, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
Doug Harper: Hey, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
Mignon Fogarty: I'm so excited to finally meet you. You know, I have to say, I put out a call on social media for questions that people might have for you, and the overwhelming response I got was just people saying, "Tell him thank you." Like, "Tell him thank you for making this amazing resource." So the world loves you.
Doug Harper: I don't, I don't want to say that doesn't matter because it matters a good deal to hear that from people from time to time. Just don't let it go to my head.
Mignon Fogarty: It does. No, tell creators you like their work, writers.
Doug Harper: Yes.
Mignon Fogarty: It matters.
Doug Harper: Yes. It's almost as good as money, and better in the right ways.
Mignon Fogarty: That’s right. You know, we're going to talk about the site and your process a little later, but I thought to get started, you've given me some words we can talk about their etymologies, which is always obviously interesting. That's sort of are entryways into bigger questions about etymology. The first one we have is "grave." The grave we bury people in is not the same as when you say, "He has a grave problem." And I thought that was so interesting.
Doug Harper: It is, because it's subtle. We could go in and look at the actual entries, and I can show you how to use the site to answer the question: Are they probably related or probably not?
Mignon Fogarty: Oh yeah. This will be great.
Doug Harper: You want to do that?
Mignon Fogarty: For people who are watching on YouTube this will be great.
Doug Harper: Okay. Shall I share my screen or do you want to just open it and do it from your end?
Mignon Fogarty: Go ahead and share your screen.
Doug Harper: Alright. This is, if I do a search on Etymonline for “Grave,” this is what comes up in the search results. At the head of it is the noun, the one you were talking about, the thing you put the dead body in. And below that one is the adjective. And frankly, to answer the question, “are they related?” you can skip 99% of this. You're looking, you're following the “from” train through all this, from this, from that. Each of those is a step back in time. One of them might be 10 years, one of them might be a thousand. That's a different question. And what you're looking for is the last stop on the line. And in this case, it's going to be this Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root that meant “to dig.” It sort of makes sense.
And you go down to the other one, skip everything else, looking for the end of the train again. And here it stops at this Proto-Indo-European root that means “heavy.” They're not the same root. You could stop right there and say not related, period, except for two things. These have asterisks in front of them and, in this case, it's actually explicit that it's a reconstructed root. You've crossed an invisible line between history and reconstructed language there, and that asterisk is a warning sign, among other things, to you. Okay? We're now in guesswork, really highly educated and careful guesswork, but guesswork.
And the other one is, if you look further down in the “burying grave” one, or perhaps it's not even certain. And I can tell you, I should indicate who I got this from and I'm pretty sure I know where I got it from. That it could be a substratum word in Germanic, you know.
Mignon Fogarty: Where do you think you got that from?
Doug Harper: It's my old Friesian etymology book, which I identify as Boutkan, B-O-U-T-K-A-N. It's in the sources. They're all in the sources. That just looks like the first job with reconstructing Proto-Indo-European was to make everything fit together. And now they're looking at it again and saying, “Okay, maybe we over-assumed connections here. There might have been older languages that contributed words to this corpus, and we've, in a rush to connect them all and make it Proto-Indo-European, overlooked that.”
So I think there's a tendency in the discipline now to undermine old assumptions, which is one of the reasons I really don't like dealing with it on the site. You've got what you need to know here with the, with that, you know, that sort of warning sign that, wait a minute, they're not, you know, they're not certain about this, whether they're connected or not. But you can say they're not thought to be related. You're still left with the question of, well, how come, how did they end up being the same word?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Doug Harper: That's where I think a lot of linguistic sites don't go there. My background is newspapers. We always ask that question, “Well, why? You know, what color was it and why, why not?” You know, that's in the grain here. I look at this and I'm trying to figure out, oh, the digging grave is Old English. That's, and that's Germanic. It's a very old word. The first thing I'm looking at is dates. This one goes all the way back. This is all the way back. The other one, this is recent, the adjective is from the 1540s, and the census that we're getting it in come along not long after that: 1580s, 1590s. It's Elizabethan, well, Tudor Elizabethan. That's the period when English is bulking up on Latinate words. It needs to get bigger than the ideas, and the poetry needed it to be bigger.
So English is embiggening itself. It's the kind of word you might see, even though it does come ultimately through French, but it reaches back more directly to Latin. Why did it wait that long? If you look around further down the list, there's also a verb “grave,” “to dig,” you know, to like, which we now have as “engrave.” But it used to be a fully verb. It also survives in this sort of biblical amber of “graven images,” you know, that phrase. But it's basically gone. And not even in here… In Middle English, there was an adjective, “grief.” The same grief we have as a noun. But it could mean serious, heavy, you know, bad sins were grief sins. And so that's floating around.
Mignon Fogarty: Is that the same grief that is sadness?
Doug Harper: Pretty much. It's that used as an adjective, which apparently the French did too, but that's gone and most of the verb “grave” is gone. And you get the sense they were voted off the island because it was just too crowded there. But there's another way to look at that: that words have an influence on each other. They can both grow together in form if their senses converge, but they can also drive each other apart. And, you know, the image I came up with in one speech, and Pete Bowers, who was the educator, loved that one. It's just like gravity. You know, we use gravity. Gravity doesn't just pull things together; you can use gravity to shoot things apart. That's how we get space shots. You know how we get the moonshot: you loop around this to get to that. So there's this repulsive power of gravity.
And interestingly, gravity is in that family. It's from the same Latin, you know, “gravis,” heavy. And I just get this feeling of the “grave” that comes along later. The adjective “grave,” when you say - I mean, we all use it, you know, “a grave situation”- it feels like it means one that puts you on the edge of your grave.
Mignon Fogarty: Right, that's why I was so surprised.
Doug Harper: You expect that. It's not that, as you go back in time, they get further apart, but their senses don't. You can see how, once they get close enough, they capture one another in a gravitational orbit almost. You know, “a grave danger” is a deadly danger, and it's all, you know, in the metaphor. And you can't quantify; you can't put that in the from, I can't put it in the from, but it's there. It's there. It's definitely there.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay. So you're saying, you're saying that even though, you know, we look at the etymology and we go back to Proto-Indo-European, like, probably they aren't related. It's reconstructed, so it has those asterisks, but probably they aren't related etymologically. But that over time, they have influenced each other and sort of grown together because the meanings are so similar.
Doug Harper: It is the difference between empirical etymology and human etymology. You have to account for the human quality in this, which is not going to obey the rules.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, man, that's so interesting because I tend to focus on the actual- like, where did it come from? So-
Doug Harper: Right, and so did I for 25 years, and I finally got to asking myself, well, you know, I'm seeing something. There's this Germanic quality of the sn sound or the gl sound in words that glitter, glean, glus, glister. You know, there's a clustering thing in German. German was up in the swamp all by itself for hundreds of years when Latin and Greek were writing to each other. They, they got, they did funny stuff with language.
If I had more time, I'd learn more German. If I had ten more lifetimes, I'd know more Germanic. But it is really rich back there. It's a lot different than Latin. If you, you know, German can do just, I think German's a funny language, and I'll never convince anyone of that. It can do a lot. The one thing it can't do is French, and the funniest thing in the world is to get a Latin or get a German-French dictionary and just read through what the German form of the French word is. They're like, you couldn't believe they're the same species-like a chihuahua and a Great Dane.
Mignon Fogarty: So I think this is a good time, actually. So you've been doing, you've been the site, I think you created the site in 2001. So you've been doing it for a long time. What got you started?
Doug Harper: I drifted into it. This is a channeled obsession. I was going to do something anyhow. I had finished a book on the county where I grew up, and just like I, I had also worked there as a newspaper man. So I knew the place from top to bottom, and to get into something that deep is just something my mind likes to do.
I could have made a train set; I could have done a million-word crossword puzzle. I was going to have to chew on something. And this seemed, I was interested really in getting to be better at writing. And I understood that to do that you had to understand the different weight in English of the Latinate component and the native component, the stuff we were just talking about.
First I tried to learn Greek. I only got so far in that. I went back to Old English. I was getting good at that. And I'm picking up books and I'm starting to write this stuff down as notes to myself. And a friend says, "Why don't you publish that?” I thought no one cares what you know, Doug Harper in Pennsylvania thinks he's trying to teach himself Old English." And it grew out of that. I never intended any of this to happen. I'd still be happy with a train set.
Mignon Fogarty: It looks like you might have room for one back there.
Doug Harper: I don't need it. No, I don't need it anymore, to tell you the truth. This is enough. This is a lifetime. I took on a lifetime. I try to get away from it. And every place you go, I hit language, and language sends me back to words like, "Why did you use that word?" Or “Is that the word in the original,” or is that, you know, I keep going back there. You can't get away from it. Once you've got a hook in it.
Mignon Fogarty: I find that too. You know, just this morning I had to get up extra early because I scheduled the time wrong for this interview, and I was thinking, "Ugh, time to pay the piper." And I'm like, "Ugh. Why do we say that?" So often I just find myself like, "Why do we say that?" And then it's an entry into another podcast episode or another article.
Doug Harper: Rabbit holes are the fun of this. But yeah, you had to get up early. I don't sympathize as I worked on the night shift for 40 years, so people were always getting me up early.
Mignon Fogarty: When you started at Etymonline, it wasn't your full-time job then.
Doug Harper: Never has been. This is a hobby. I've always treated it as a hobby. And I look at what you do, and you do a lot of work. I mean, you work hard. I couldn't do that. I certainly couldn't do that and do this too. This is what I did in the middle of the night when I got off my work shift on deadline. And I still had caffeine pumping in my system, so I went to the books and started plowing through them, and I loved it. It's beautiful to me. It's like solitaire. Once you get the hang of the searches, it's like swimming laps. It's fun.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you have any sense, over the years, of how many entries you've written or created?
Doug Harper: I probably can figure that out if I knew the technology. My guess is it's somewhere between 54,000 and 55,000 right now, not counting the separate PIEs, because that's not really an entry. But I mean, that's kind of meaningless too, because some of the entries might just be a part participle adjective. Some of them might be a single word that has ten different forms of that word explained within it. So, you know, I don't put too much in, in that. I just may, I think I've got, I got a lot. We’ve got a lot now. There's two of us.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you work in fits and starts, or do you just, is it slow and steady wins the race? You just do like a little bit every day?
Doug Harper: It's, yeah, it's an obsession. I mean, this is, you know, like Tolkien locked himself up and wrote Sam and Frodo into Mordor. I locked myself away from the world and go dig into, you know, old newspaper ads. It was every day, at least an hour a day for most of the... How many years has it been? Twenty-five.
You know, I got married, I had a kid. There were years when I sort of let it, I thought I was done a couple of times. I never was. That was a long time ago, but it's pretty much since... but since I had the last sweep through, and I've long... you know, my job ended and everything else, it took me a while to get back into it. I was, for the first time, I felt like I was almost just not done with it. But I no longer felt the magic in there. It was just... this has been a rough year. Let's face it. Everyone had a rough year. This is my version. But luckily, by that time, I had a second editor on who kept bringing me back to it. Like, “I found this, what are we going to do about that?” And also looking at how people were using it online and the, you know, the expressions that people had about how much they appreciated it. I really, I couldn't walk away from it. Like I said, I can't walk away from it because everywhere I go I hit words, and I have to go back to it.
Mignon Fogarty: It does make a difference. What are some of the most surprising... you know, you said you bump up against words, and you're digging through books to find the etymologies. Like what are some of the most surprising places that you've found the answers to questions?
Doug Harper: Well, it's funny because by now the surprising is unsurprising. Because you learn to look in places that haven't been looked at. And the first thing, when you read the OED, the first thing you realize, the old print OED, you know, the one I have on back, that one, it doesn't, it's really skimpy on Americanisms, and you can understand why. I mean, Oxford dons don't want to spend a lot of time reading the sports section of the Chicago Tribune. But that's where a lot of things turn up. And with newspapers.com, God love them, I've got ink in my blood, I know how newspapers are done. I can go in there and just surf that. And it's often unexpected, but it's not, if you think about it. In that certain window of years, that's where language percolated up into print from the vernacular. It's going to show up first in, you know, a Westbrook Pegler newspaper column or, you know, a kind of boxing match in Philadelphia. All kinds of words running through that. And we're kind of more focused on those words now, those 20th-century weirdo words. Because that's, first of all, that's where the fresh ground is. And they're fun. They're just fun words to track.
Mignon Fogarty: They are. Yeah. Now the new word, the slang that surfaces in a newspaper for the first time.
Doug Harper: Comic strips. Comic strips and, and editorial comics. I mean, you can get a lot of stuff I'm seeing there for the first time.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that's great. I love the story of, “OK,” you know, that it rose in like the 1820s, 1830s and newspapers is, you know.
Doug Harper: 1839. You can almost pin the date to it on that one. It's funny. But everyone's got the story kind. I looked into the story again just recently because NPR was after it. And it's more complex than it's usually painted. It's not straight Martin Van Buren. He's in it, but it's not the OK Club. I mean, that's in it too, but it's, that's not, it was already in play when they took that as the name.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. It was abbreviation, right? It was newspapers playing around with language.
Doug Harper: Yeah. It was, oh, it was really like dock workers. It was sort of like slang. It was verbal. “OK” equals “all correct,” misspelled deliberately. You know, and this is what slang does. This is the insider. This is like the British rhyming slang that comes to mind first. You know, you change it and deform it enough so that if you're on that inside, you know what I'm saying? If you're not, you don't. It's that kind of street slang-New York's, Boston, whatever. But it gets picked up in the election campaign. Everything got swept up in that election. It was the 1840s; it was the first harbinger of what was to come for America.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah and popularized it, yeah.
Doug Harper: It did, but it was mainly used, as I counted through all the uses. It was used by the other side. The Whigs were using it, you know, because they were driving what was then social media. They were way ahead of the Democrats. Democrats weren't thinking; they were just trying to catch up with OK, because the Whigs had co-opted it so nicely.
Mignon Fogarty: Huh. So was it an insult then? Were they using it against?
Doug Harper: It could be used both ways. The beauty of it, the reason those words survive is because they're ambiguous. There was one version of the story that said “OK” was the fact that Andrew Jackson actually couldn't spell, and he actually wrote “OK” on something when he meant “all correct.” That's the insult version. You know, the other version is the hip version. We know, you know, “we're all correct, we're hip, we're now.” I'm using sixties terms; I'm not using the 1840s. Don't quote me as 1840s. So it could be both. You can use it on your side, and it would be a "we're OK." You could use it on the other side. They think OK is how you spell-perfectly versatile.
Mignon Fogarty: That's amazing. I mean, I've read it shows how there are always new things to find about language because I've read Alan Metcalf's entire book on the word “OK,” and I've never heard that story before.
Doug Harper: Because this stuff is new. It hasn't been out. You know, I don't read the books because by the time they're out, I can already go into an archive that wasn't available then, and if they're still going to be there. This is my fear; this is all digital. You know, I'm only looking at actual scans of actual pages that have dates in the file. Not just written in the file, but visible on the page. You gotta be very careful with this stuff. But it's in there, and I remember the first time I found something; this was actually in Google Books that the OED didn't have. And I kept looking at it and looking at it and thinking, “Am I allowed to do this? You know, should I be seeing this?” I'm looking around like, is this a game? But you could, I could do that five times a day now with their print edition. Hopefully. I think they're catching up. I don't even look at the online; it would be too depressing.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, I remember, I recently talked to Ben Zimmer, and we were talking about antedating, and you get this sense-it's like, like you can just do that, like anyone with the time can go look at all the digital databases.
Doug Harper: And it's not that we're smarter than they were. It's, we have more stuff. We have a huge haystack, and we have this needle finder called, you know, internet search. I'm not smarter than anyone, but I live in a time when this suddenly opened up, like they invented glass-bottom boats to sail across history. I'm getting one. You know, that's fun.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, I was going to ask you about this later, but Amir, one of my followers on Mastodon, wanted to know what you think about the rise of AI and digital corpora. You know, what do you think? Do you think it's going to be useful? Do you think etymologists should be worried? Like, what are your thoughts on this, you know, digital databases that have helped you so much? Like, this is a new digital thing. What were your thoughts about AI?
Doug Harper: That's the question everyone should be asking everybody right now. Not just about etymology; entomology too, insects are involved. And the answer is, you know, it's funny, I live now out here in Lancaster County and have the whole time I've done this among the Amish. You get to know the Amish, and it's like, they're not trying to not be us. They're trying to choose what they admit into the house. You know, the young guys can have a car, but you have to park it somewhere else. You know, we can have a phone on your job, but you can't have one in your house. It's a case by case. So here's fire, you know. AI is fire. Fire is a, you know, a useful servant and a dangerous master. You have to decide; you have to know what it's good at. Almost everything that's allowed me to make etymonline, other than a condensation of what's in those books on, not just the big blue on a lot of them, is the online archives. Google did that. Google scanned all those books and put them out there in a way that you could see the actual pages.
What's next? Google doesn't want me to look at that as much as it wants me to ask their AI what to do. You know, what it said in the past, what happened in the past. I'm not, that's not never going to work for me, but a lot of people will do that. And now it's become a master and not a servant, and it's a danger. What I fear ultimately, I mean, Google has disappeared things in the past when they weren't profitable to Google. It's very hard now to find the old Usenet archives where so much language comes up in the internet jargon, in the nineties, you know, the old archives of those; I don't even know where they are anymore. They're not really easy to use, so they're kind of hard for my purposes, but I don't want them to go away. Google can make things go away, and, you know, newspaper.com might not be there forever.
I wonder how many of those books that Google digitialized out of libraries, and I look at the front covers and I see where they came from. I wonder how many of those have been deaccessioned. Now, I wonder how many of those even still exist now in physical form with the real words and the real date. I don't like thinking down that path. I'm old, so I'm not going to be here when it happens, but I've said that in the past and been wrong.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, man, I never thought about that before, that those books and Google Books might not even exist in physical form anymore. That's depressing. So are you seeing a drop in traffic to your site because of AI?
Doug Harper: Oh yeah. Oh absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, all you have to do is go look at, follow a thread. I mean, I follow, I don't do social media, but I follow Reddit because it seems to have more intelligent discussions, at least these days. And you look at how people are posting, "Well, this is what Google AI told me about this." And someone says, "Well, why didn't you just search a website and get a better..." Well, and he says, "Well, it's the same thing. It's just like letting Google do the search instead of having me do the search." No, it's not. No, it's not. You want to reach for the, you know, and that's, you know, that mindset is out there and I can't, we, you could see that coming.
I mean, I'm exactly the kind of thing; what I do is what AI wants to do. Google's had etymologies at the top of their search results for years. Even when you search “etymonline, word,” they'll give you their version. They've wanted this, you know; Google wants to be the whole internet. I think this is one of the first places they want; they feel like this is theirs. This is their job to tell you. Etymologies, that's easy. Computers can do that. No, they can't. But you'll find out.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, we're seeing the same thing. And yeah, those Google snippets, you know, years ago were the beginning, the beginning of the end. I think, you know, it worries me because, you know, I think people like you and maybe me, we will always do this because we love it, but like, it's, AI is built on our material, and if people don't come to our websites, then we have, you know, a lot less of a reason to write the things we write. If nobody, if only AI is reading it, then it's, you know, it's like you say, we like to hear thanks. Right? The AI that's scraping our site is never going to say thanks, you know? And I think that, you know, I do it because I love it, and you obviously do it because you love it, but the incentives help us to keep doing it, and some people aren't going to be able to keep doing it just for love, and then the information won't be there.
Doug Harper: If you were starting out today, if I were starting out today, we'd look at... I would never have done this today. I couldn't have done this today. This could only happen when the internet was new, and you could sort of muscle your way into things and find a way to be useful.
Mignon Fogarty: And you could be just a person who liked to do a thing and put it online, and other people say, "Oh, that's useful. I will visit that and like it." Yeah.
Doug Harper: Right, right.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Doug Harper: And no, it's going to be a different experience in the future. And I don't... it's a shame because you lose... I actually kind of have a perverse hope that, like “Fahrenheit 451,” if we hang on long enough, they'll come around. I think that, you know, the AI can do certain things better than I could as a writer. But it can't do this. It really can't. And I don't think so. I just... I don't believe people are going to trust it because it's now absorbing itself and getting tangled up in its own lies and confusions. You know, I took advantage of the Dr. Johnson clause. If you're writing a dictionary as a solo act, you get to throw in a few jives and asides from place to place in it, which I did. The GAOL spelling of "jail" was the first one and probably the most noticed, which is a direct response to Johnson's dislike of Americans. But you also get to appreciate that throwing in a few oddball entries really stops the ripoff artists who just rip your site and then pretend they wrote it and return, "Oh no, this is all of my original research." Yeah. Did you write that joke? Because that's in my site too, you know? And now I like them because they trip up, I hope, trip up AI and make them... I hope it's like one of my stupid asides that turns up in an AI answer somewhere. I'm sabotaging it as actively as I can.
Mignon Fogarty: What are they called? Mount weasels or is it the fake...
Doug Harper: Yeah, there's something... there's some smarty-pants term for it.
Mignon Fogarty: Those are fake entries that people, dictionaries put.
Doug Harper: Well, not quite a fake entry, but like Johnson was in, you know, “oats,” he defines as a grain that in England feeds the horses and in Scotland, the people. Something like that. Didn't like Scots. It was politics back in those days. But, you know, you can slip things like that. And Webster has things. Everyone who's a solo act will do that. So I claim that as my birthright.
Mignon Fogarty: But the big dictionaries, they do... they made up... they actually made up entries that they put in so that they could tell if another dictionary had stolen their words.
Doug Harper: Yes. And they also sometimes screwed up entries and made up words without meaning. "Dord" being the famous one.
Mignon Fogarty: One of my favorites too, “dord.”
Doug Harper: Yeah. Oh, it's beautiful. I mean, dictionary-wise, we could nerd out all day on dictionary where we'd probably lose half your audience.
Mignon Fogarty: We should tell them “dord,” the entry was D the letter, the word “or” D, or D for I think, density. And then someone misread it and decided it should be the word “dord.”
Doug Harper: Right. It was like the index card said “D or D.” I guess it might've forgotten to put the periods after the Ds, and the person typing it in said dord, and there it went. And there it remains because this is the beauty of things. Once you accidentally make it a word, it stays a word, if it's in the dictionary. You know the typographical errors in the printings of Shakespeare's plays, which are rather shabbily done. In many cases, they're words because they're in Shakespeare. We're pretty sure he didn't mean that word. But there it is on the page. So it's a word. If Shakespeare uses it, it's a word in your language.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, listen, let's go back. You worked in news for many years, and “news” is one of the other etymologies that we were going to talk about because there's this folk etymology where some people think it means “north, east, west, and south” for all the information from around the land. And, you know, that's really just not true. So, I think maybe, I don't know, tell me.
Doug Harper: Oh, I know you're right. I'm going to share here again, and we're going to look at “news.” Let's look at the news. This is, you know, people think this because they're told this, and they're told this in, it is either a joke or a deliberate act of vandalism. It's not a very good example of either, I think. The discovery of an acronym origin is now a game, and it's not a discovery; it's the invention of one. Alright, let's look at the entry “news.” Here we go. Late 14th century. Your first clue that this is not going to be an acronym, because those are all modern. It means “new things.” It's the plural of “new,” the word “new.”
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Doug Harper: Used as a noun, and there's a French, you know, precedent for it. You can see how it comes to English.
Mignon Fogarty: I remember thinking it was really funny the first time I realized that news is just new stuff.
Doug Harper: Yeah. It's even simpler than the phony explanation, which is usually the simpler one. Now this one, I've…this is great because I have written about this twice. Well, I once wrote about the whole problem, once wrote about that particular word. And I get to link both of them from here because they appear in this part called “columns” that nobody ever goes to and that's where you'd find them. If you click this one, this is the big one, ingenious for everything. It's under “columns” up here, and you can see the whole stack of them. Talia wrote some, I wrote some. It's down in there, but you can link it directly from the news entry. And this goes into the whole history and problems of the acronym origins.
What interests me is less the origins than the stories themselves. When did people start inventing things like “posh” for "port out, starboard home," golf? You know, what about the other ones? That itself is an etymological thread because it's changing the language. When does that begin? How does that start? It's really modern; it's very recent, you know, commercial advertising and the military around the time of World War I kicked this off.
Mignon Fogarty: Why?
Doug Harper: Because they're shorthanding; they're using, you know, telegraph. I mean, you're sending Morse codes, things like that. Suddenly compression becomes necessary, and once it becomes a habit, then it becomes a game.
You know, the American Civil War, which I studied extensively, was one of my obsessions before this. Reading through the official records, reading through an account of a Civil War history, now abbreviations are everywhere. You know, USCT, the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia-they didn't use any of that. They spelled everything out in every single record of the Civil War. They could have, but they didn't. By World War I, the military is doing that, and I think a lot of it has to do with quick communication. You know, like AMP, you know, TI. If you read the military slang of World War I, it's full of those kinds of things.
It's just, it's not going to be old. If anything is supposed to be an acronym origin before about 1900, you're probably not. It's almost like people didn't think that way. It was there to be done, but their minds didn't see the language that way.
Mignon Fogarty: And it’s so funny because people were handwriting much more before then, so you'd think they would have more incentives to shorten things.
Doug Harper: You'd think. It just didn't, it didn't, it didn't. You know, “OK” is interestingly a very early example of it because that is an acronym of something, but it was only used in that slang, twisty sense. You know, they used the trick there to make slang, not to make language. And the whole point of it was to be obscure. It's, you know, it's, again, we're looking at the clouds, we're seeing what's going on around the words, but that's where the tantalizing things are. So news, I mean, and the other one linked from it directly addresses the word “news” and what it doesn't come from, and this goes on and on, but it's funny because it starts out, I'm pretty sure as, yeah, it's a joke, and it's an old joke. That goes back to 1640. But it was a joke again. It was humor, not language building. They had the word “news,” and it was kind of, I mean even then it's kind of obscure; “new” is not usually a noun in English. You know, the construction of it is French, and so it sort of feels a little odd in English, which opens the door to this kind of playfulness.
And they made a joke of it, and they put it in joke books, and everyone thought, ah, that's pretty funny. A hundred years. You know, so much for us being smarter than the 18th century. What did, what did, what did Randall Gerald once write there? Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know and nothing it did. And then we'll be difficult to live with.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So, I think we're done with the main episode. We have a lot more to talk about for our bonus segment for our Grammarpaloozians. But you know, I mean, I usually ask people where they can find you, but I think we know where we can find you, which is etymonline.com.
Doug Harper: I will tell you one thing: I've both made myself easy to find and hard to find there because I don't want to encourage the same email that I can get 30 times a day just from, you know, "Why did you say?” you know, the nationalists, everything. However, if you go, and I'm going to share my screen again to show you where to find it, this is a secret for you people only. Down at the bottom of every page, way down at the bottom,
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, the copyright.
Doug Harper: Here, copyright. See the little fingery, You click on that and you can, it should take whatever your chosen email is. Mine's Proton. I'm on it. It's theoretically on every page, but it's not easy to notice if you're in and out, in a rage, and just looking to strangle me because of what I wrote.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
Doug Harper: But it's down there. That's for you guys.
Mignon Fogarty: Your name in the copyright line, that's where your email is.
Doug Harper: It should automatically open in your, I don't know how. Frankly, I don't rent that myself, so I don't know how it works.
Mignon Fogarty: Very sneaky, Doug.
Doug Harper: Oh yeah. Oh, I'm full of that kind of thing.
Mignon Fogarty: I love it. Well, thank you so much for being here.
Doug Harper: Thank you for having me.