Gooooood morning fuzzies! Happy Ides of March, if that’s a thing one wishes people? I do not understand how we made it halfway through the month so quickly, but apparently we did :P and I am going to use my lunch break to talk about Words some more :3 Nothing to do with AI, for once.
In my last post, about the etymology of “blow job,” I mentioned what I referred to as the Dog Etymology Cutesiness Razor, which is not a thing. That’s distinct from the Dog Cuteness Razor, which is just that all dogs should be assumed cute, see attached photo for a dog from this morning’s walk.
But let me try to put something down in writing, if you are given an etymology and want to know if it’s accurate or not. One thing you could do is waste an entire day in the OED and reading old books and newspapers, if you have an OED subscription and a perverse willingness to sci-hub your way into any academic papers that catch your eye. This is generally not necessary. The Razor is:
Cute etymologies are never correct.
By “cute” I don’t mean the way that dogs are. But here are six things to look out for.
One: is it an acronym? In English, acronyms like “radar” and “scuba” are virtually unheard of before the 20th century. I suspect they represent a sort of logical extension of the linguistic playfulness that gave us “OK” and emoticons in the telegraph era, but in any case if a word is said to originate before 1900 and is also said to stand for something: it does not.
Two: is it racist? (sexist, etc.) There are definitely English words that are (or have become) slurs. There are also definitely words with problematic origins. “Cake-walk,” for example, seems to come from “entertainment performed by black slaves on Southern plantations,” as the OED puts it. “Bulldoze” also has racist origins*. That said, racists in American history have rarely felt the need to conceal their racism through hidden meanings.
* This one is also complicated in a directly relevant way. A brief discussion occurs below; content warning for mentions of racist violence during the American Reconstruction era.
“Bulldoze” very definitely “has racist origins,” as I said, because it was a term that gained currency in 1876 on the part of racist Louisianan “Regulators” intimidating and murdering Black citizens in a (largely successful) attempt to suppress their political and social power. This would be the case even if the word came originally from a Mr. “Bull” Dozer, or from a German pastry, or something.
However, one explanation for the word is that it comes from the idea of giving a slave a “bull dose” of a whip—sometimes specifically a hundred lashes. This is a very, very old explanation—dating back to within ~9 months of the word first being recorded at all, and definitely within a couple months of it becoming popular. It also has a certain sort of logical sensibility to it; the bullwhip as synecdoche for the institution of slavery is also current to that time period.
But the earliest uses of the term are not about whipping. The first person said to be “bulldozed” (on June 20th) was lynched, and that article also spells it both that way and as “bulldozled,” with the extra ‘l.’ The first mention, full stop, is from March 7th, regarding the arrival of some federal cavalry, where it is averred: “We suppose the ‘Bulldoozers’ will, by the advent of the major and his ‘boys in blue,’ soon be numbered with the things that are forgotten.” An article on August 26th describes the intent of someone to “‘bulldooze’ the school treasury,” so the term clearly extended beyond whipping to all acts of violence, intimidation, and crime with a political bent.
A November, 1876 article describes something as “bulldozered” instead of “-dozed.” Another article that month condemns “the old political bloat-thieves and bull-doggers,” which was also common—an earlier reference on July 28th describes “the reign of terror created by the bull-dogging regulators” of Louisiana, and “bull-doging” (one g) made appearances from August onward.
If the “bull dose” link were direct and obvious, we’d expect the early uses of the word to be clear about that—for “bull-doser” to show up first, or at least roughly contemporaneously. If nothing else, we’d expect them to be pronounced like “dose.” That the earliest uses are “doozer” and “dozled” calls to mind the term “bedoozled” (dazzled, perplexed) common through the eastern and southern US from the 1850s on.
It also could very well be a nonsense word. To reiterate: this isn’t to say that it doesn’t have racist origins, because it does, and it’s not to say that you shouldn’t (or should) feel uncomfortable with the word, or that bulldozing was not one more in a litany of white supremacist injuries committed against Black Americans. Just to say that I don’t think “bull dose” holds all that much water.
Three: is it surprising in a way that most people would care about? That is, something that immediately makes you want to tell your friends “did you know [word] comes from [origin]?” if your friends are, uh, normal people and not me? “Did you know ‘helicopter’ comes from ‘helico’ (spiral) + ‘pter’ (wing)?” or “did you know ‘island’ and ‘isle’ are unrelated words” are both in that format, but, like… I’ll venture to say that most people you tell that to are going to say: “so what?” because that’s the response from most people I tell that to.
But urban legends gain currency because they’re spreadable, so fake etymologies—like other folklore myths; “ring around the rosies” being about the black death or the little piggy that ‘went to market’ being sold for slaughter there—tend to be exciting to ordinary people, because that makes ordinary people repeat them. “Did you know ‘geek’ meant someone who bit the heads off chickens?” is to me one of the best examples of this, because it’s just so… juicy, you know? It’s a common word, given a surprising origin that is not just unexpected but also ghoulish and kind of outrageous.
So “surprising” in this sense (when it doesn’t mean racist) is very often more “shocking”—risqué, or blasphemous, or otherwise inappropriate for children or the polite society in which a word is used (this is the other common attribute of urban legends, is that they often confer a sort of hidden knowledge that “most people” are not aware of, frequently about something that those self-same “most people” are doing every day without realizing it).
…Honestly this is kind of it right here. If you hear an explanation for a word’s origins and think: “oh, man, that’s so wild” it’s probably not actually where the word came from :P
Oh, let’s call out a specific subset of the above as number four: is it surprising because it’s not the obvious meaning of the word? If I tell you that “accordion” comes from the fact that the buttons play notes that are in tune with one another (German Akkord, “musical chord,” via French accorder), okay, who the hell knows what an ‘accordion’ would be? That’s as good an explanation as anything else (which makes it handy that it’s the correct one).
But if I tell you that “silverware” is formed via metathesis from “sliver,” because kitchen utensils in the middle ages were originally just skewers taken from woodworking splinters? When there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation built right into the word? It’s almost certain bullshit; I made that one up right now so don’t go repeating it. Etymologies that are cleverer than what the word tells you right on the tin are a big red flag.
Anyway. Wrapping up,
Five: is it said to originate with a highly geographically specific and/or non-mainstream subculture? American English has borrowed lots of words from, say, Yiddish. Or from African-American vernacular, or Native American languages. I’m not talking about that. If an etymology purports that a word came from Boston stevedores, though? Or from prostitutes working along stations of the Rock Island Line, or from milkmaids in northern Lancashire, or something of that ilk? Be wary.
As I said about the humble “blow job,” etymology that involves the marginalized—the criminal, the downtrodden, the illiterate, the ghettoized—is also much less likely to be recorded. This is especially true the further back in time you go. Tell me that a word originated amongst criminals in the 90s? Maybe! Tell me that a word originated amongst criminals in the 1590s? Bring me some real good receipts.
Sometimes this is just another version of red flag number three, in that it’s attempt to spice up a word’s origin story by associating it with an unsavory demographic. At other times, though—as I said about blowjobs—I think it reflects a misapprehension of the degree to which mass media, and the Internet, have changed the way cultural memes propagate.
For a start, a short or easily derived word (like “geek” or “bug”) could well have multiple, unrelated origins. How that word was understood by people in New England might have nothing at all to do with how it was understood by people in California, or Florida, or Kentucky—they may well have started using it in complete isolation. “Bulldoze” is an interesting example because it has an extremely granular origin, Louisiana in early 1876, and even when it appeared throughout the rest of the year and 1877 it was initially always with that geographic bias preserved.
But, also, a word might be first attested in a particular quarter of New York City in the 1890s, and later gradually spread through use to the rest of the country. Does its use in Alaska in the 1910s “come from” New York City? I think that’s much less clear, and often the answer is functionally “no.” For a lot of words, it is much more accurate to say a word was first used in New York City. It’s not quite like saying “reddit” and “redditor” originally came from Latin because those are also conjugations of the verb reddō (“to give back”) and the Romans used them first, but it’s closer to that direction than not.
At least, from the point of view of the etymology being meaningful, as opposed to pure trivia.
I am also full of meaningless etymological facts, like that two words share some obscure Proto-Indo-European root or whatever, which I’m terribly happy to share with you. But always in the context of silly trivia, like “fascinate” deriving ultimately from a form of magic associated with the Latin fascinus.
I guess here I’ll throw in a less common flag six: is it overcomplicated and/or pretentious? In here we can throw fake Latin plurals like “virii” and “octopi,” as well as rarer purported derivations from foreign languages, like that “marmalade” comes from Marie est malade (“Marie is sick”). Be a little more gentle with this one, because English has stolen lots of words from other languages :P but if it requires a lot of elisions (i.e. that “pumpernickel” is pain pour Nichol, “bread for Nicholas”) it’s probably unlikely.
Anyway. Like watertight compartments on the Titanic, etymologies can survive some configurations of the above. As a rule of thumb, though, if you hear a proposed origin story where one of the above is true? Be very skeptical. If two are true (“did you know ‘fuck’ comes from ‘fornication under consent of king’?” There’s one and six right there—who says “fornicate” on the regular, even if they are using it incorrectly?), consider the story presumptively wrong. Three or more? (“Buck,” in the currency sense, coming from slave-trader pejorative slang for the people they were selling? That ticks two, three, and five) It’s sunk. Just start sending out the SOS.
…And hey, did you know “SOS” comes fr
