Of Charlatans, Mountebanks, and Cheap Jacks

 
This time last year, Wordlady investigated the word "toxin" and had a few choice words to say about "various charlatans seeking to separate us from our money by convincing us that our bodies are chock-full of 'toxins' that we need to 'cleanse'."

This got me wondering about the word "charlatan".  I am so happy it did, because I was led to the Oxford English Dictionary's delightfully Victorian entry for this word:

A mountebank or Cheap Jack who descants volubly to a crowd in the street; esp. an itinerant vendor of medicines who thus puffs his ‘science’ and drugs.

The etymology section of the entry is even more entertaining:

Etymology:

< French charlatan ‘a mountebanke, a cousening drug-seller, a pratling quack-salver, a tatler, babler’ (Cotgrave) [a French-English dictionary published in 1611],

< Italian ciarlatano = ciarlatore babbler, patterer, mountebank, < ciarlare to babble, patter, act the mountebank, < ciarla, chat, prattle

The entry does have this note: 

This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1889).

Who'da guessed?  Wouldn't every 21st-century lexicographer use "mountebank" and "Cheap Jack" as defining terms? (Fear not, the OED lexicographers will get around to revising this in the fullness of time.)

Of course, the meaning of "charlatan" has since broadened to include

An assuming empty pretender to knowledge or skill; a pretentious impostor.

No shortage of THEM around at the moment.

What about "mountebank"?

An itinerant charlatan who sold supposed medicines and remedies, frequently using various entertainments to attract a crowd of potential customers. Later also (more generally): an itinerant entertainer. Now chiefly hist.

Etymology: < Italian montambanco, montimbanco (late 17th cent.), contracted form of monta in banco (1598 in Florio [an Italian-English dictionary), lit. ‘mount on bench’, with reference to the raised platform used by itinerant salesmen

I don't know what it says about Italy that both of these words originated there.

"Cheap Jack" seems to have originated in mid-19th- century Britain and gone through a vogue for about 75 years, but has been petering away more recently.

Here's wishing you robust good health in 2018 so that you can avoid all "pratling quack-salvers"! 

Want to learn more fun facts about the language like this? I'm offering my Rollicking Story of the English Language course again starting January 17! You can sign up for the whole 8-week course or just drop in for the lecture(s) of your choice (so long as you book in advance). More info here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2017/12/rollicking-story-of-english-course.html 

#ScienceNotSilence: Vulnerable

"Vulnerable" is one of the words that the US administration has reportedly told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention they may no longer use in budget reports.

It's an odd word, when you look at it. What can it literally mean? "Able to be vulnered"? It is in fact a 16th-century borrowing from Latin vulnerābilis wounding, from vulnerāre to wound. 

One of those many "inkhorn terms" we borrowed from Latin at the time, "vulnerable" did originally mean "able to wound", but very quickly it took on a passive sense, "able to be wounded". At first, this was literal, as in this quotation from Macbeth:

a1616   Shakespeare Macbeth (1623) v. x. 11   Let fall thy blade on vulnerable Crests, I beare a charmed Life. 

But very soon it came to be used figuratively:

b. fig. Open to attack or injury of a non-physical nature; esp., offering an opening to the attacks of raillery, criticism, calumny, etc.

1678   R. Cudworth The true intellectual system of the universe: the first part We had further Observed it, to have been the Method of our Modern Atheists, to make their First Assault against Christianity, as thinking that to be the most Vulnerable.

The most recent usage started in sociology in the 1940s. Consider the second quotation and contemplate how much wisdom is to be found in the quotations of the Oxford English Dictionary!

Designating a person in need of special care, support, or protection (esp. provided as a social service) because of age, disability, risk of abuse or neglect, etc.

1947  Journal of Educational Sociology  20 261   We have cited above the more dramatic ways in which children are hurt and neglected by their communities and their families. These are the ‘vulnerable’ children, those who need extra care, extra protection, and a background of careful planning for them.

1963  The Times Literary Supplement 15 Feb. 112/3   The care of vulnerable groups is one indication of a country's degree of civilization...

The other words reportedly banned are

Diversity 

Evidence-based
Science-based
Transgender
Fetus
Entitled

Photo by Ian Espinosa on Unsplash

Want to learn more fun facts about the language like this? I'm offering my Rollicking Story of the English Language course again in the New Year! You can sign up for the whole 8-week course or just drop in for the lecture(s) of your choice (so long as you book in advance). More info here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2017/12/rollicking-story-of-english-course.html

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Looking for an entertaining speaker? Here are some of my topics:

Why is English so wacky?
A fun-filled and light-hearted but informative look at the weirdness of the English language and how it got to be the way it is. Includes things you never suspected about husbands, ptarmigan, porcelain, and much more. Laughs guaranteed...even when you find out why "guarantee" has such an odd spelling.

Bachelor for Rent: Things You Never Suspected About Canadian English”

A hilarious look at what is distinctive about Canadians and their language

English Schminglish: How Jews have Enriched our Language

An entertaining look at how Hebrew and Yiddish words have enriched the English language for thousands of years

How do you pronounce CLAMBER?

Hey Ma! I clamb the tree!!

Kittens love to clamber up trees (...and curtains). 

But... do they "CLAMburr" or do they "CLAMMER"?

First of all, let us look at the word from which "clamber" derives: "climb". Although the b was pronounced back in Anglo-Saxon times, it started being dropped by the time of the Norman Conquest, and by the 1500s it had become silent. As a result, we even sensibly spelled the word "clime" for about two centuries. But, as usual with English spelling, less sensible heads prevailed, we reinstated the silent b, and we ended up with our modern spelling.

When the past tense of "climb" was "clamb"

"Climb" has not always been the regular verb it is today: 

present: climb

simple past: climbed

past participle: has climbed

Instead, from the earliest times, the past tense was 

clamb, clumb, or clomb

and the past participle

  clumb or clomb

For some people, these forms survived into the 1800s, and according to the OED, in Scottish English this verb is to this day conjugated

 clim, clam, clum

I love it!

Starting in about 1300, though, a new regular past tense and past participle, "clim(b)ed", crept into the language, and was pretty well established by the Renaissance.

How "clamb" gave us "clamber"

But that old irregular past tense "clam(b)" is at the origin of "clamber", a word which cropped up in the 1400s.  By that time, the b was not being pronounced in "climb" (or the past tense "clamb"), so neither was it pronounced in "clamber",  which was in fact more likely to be spelled "clammer" well into the 17th century. 

But just as "climb" got its b back, so too "clamber" acquired a b in its spelling. But unlike "climb", "clamber" also acquired a b in the pronunciation, probably because almost all other English words ending in -mber have a pronounced b. 

Why some North Americans say CLAMMER

This introduction of a b into the pronunciation, however, happened after English colonists took the CLAMMER pronunciation with them to America. In North America, this older, b-less pronunciation of "clamber" survived. This survival of older vocabulary and pronunciation on this side of the pond frequently explains differences between North American and British English.

All the same, according to a survey I did, CLAMMER, though still healthy, especially in the US, is much less common than the b-full pronunciation. Here are the results:

US: CLAMburr: 113  CLAMMER: 46

Canada:  CLAMburr: 83  CLAMMER: 12

No one outside North America said CLAMMER. 

As you can see, although CLAMMER is the minority pronunciation in both countries, CLAMMER is more common in the US than in Canada.  For all that, a Montrealer told me she had never heard anyone saying CLAMburr. (Meanwhile a Vancouverite told me she had never heard CLAMMER!) 

All this has nothing to do with "clamour/clamor", which is a completely different word, borrowed from French in the 1400s and ultimately from Latin clāmōr (a call, shout, cry). As should be evident from the explanation above, people who pronounce "clamber" as a homophone of "clamour" are not simply confusing these very semantically different words. And those who suggest that it's wrong to pronounce it CLAMMER because then it and "clamour" would be homophones are simply ignoring the literally hundreds of homophones we have in English which rarely present an obstacle to understanding (great for punning, though).

When I worked on the entry for "clamber" in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, a colleague and I were each convinced that the other's pronunciation was WRONG. Or at the very least RIDICULOUS. I said CLAMburr, he said CLAMMER. Both pronunciations ended up in the dictionary, and he and I still talk to one another. (But CLAMburr is listed first, ha!) 

All the same, one of the things you learn (or should learn) when working on a dictionary is that you have to be humble about variants other than your own (and that in fact you might not have even known about previously).  Because CLAMMER is the minority variant, some of my poll respondents who used it apologized for doing so, accusing themselves of "lazy" speech. Others who didn't use it dismissed it out of hand as "a mistake". But as you can see from the above, there are usually legitimate historical reasons for variants such as these. Just look at the fascinating facts about the English language you can unearth if your reaction is "I wonder WHY?" rather than "Well, that's just WRONG because I don't say it that way".

How do YOU pronounce "clamber" (and what variety of English do you speak)?

For the silent b in lamb, click here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/05/to-b-or-not-to-b.html

For the silent b in crumb, click here
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/06/crumbs.html


Want to learn more fun facts about the language like this? I'm offering my Rollicking Story of the English Language course again in the New Year! You can sign up for the whole 8-week course or just drop in for the lecture(s) of your choice (so long as you book in advance). More info here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2017/12/rollicking-story-of-english-course.html

Photo credit: Koen Eijkelenboom on Unsplash

12 Days of Wordlady: The Fifth Day

Five golden rings

Well, I have to tell you, "golden" and "ring" are pretty boring words, having meant the same things since, well, forever.

But "fifth", now THERE'S an interesting story.

The fift day of Christmas

If I said, "On the fift day of Christmas", you'd probably think, "Don't you know how to speak proper, Katherine? You sound like a gangster!" Even worse, can you imagine if I referred to that famous history play of Shakespeare's as "Henry the Fift"?

And yet....  

The first edition of Shakespeare's Henry V

 


















So, what gives?

"Fift" was indeed the original ordinal form of the number "five". The -th ending started to appear only in the 13th century, by analogy with "fourth" (which had always had a -th ending). But "fift" survived well into the 17th century, and in some dialects much longer.

The fith day of Christmas

A more recent development in the pronunciation of this word is the dropping of the second "f", so that it sounds like "fith". This naturally causes much gnashing of teeth in some quarters. But it is here to stay, the result of the phonetic difficulty of saying "f" followed by "th".

The fiveth day of Christmas
 
Another obvious question is: if the number is "five", why aren't its derivatives "fiveth", "fiveteen" and "fivety"?

First, let's look at the difference in the vowels. This is the result of the dastardly Great Vowel Shift, which messed with many English words between about 1400 and 1700. 

Back in Old English, all these words were much more closely related: fif, fift, fiftene, fiftig.  In all cases the first syllable would have originally sounded like "feef".  In the derivatives fift, fiftene, and fiftig, however, because the vowel was followed by two consonants, fif gradually shortened to sound like "fif".  Short vowels were not affected by the Great Vowel Shift, so these are still pronounced today as they were in the Middle Ages. Long stressed vowels, such as the long "ee" sound that still survived in "fif", however, moved to a different place in our English mouths, in this case to the diphthong we call a "long i".

The fifeth day of Christmas

And why is it "five" rather than "fife"? In Old English, fif  had various endings depending on the role it was playing in a sentence: fífe, fífa, fífum. Because there is a very old tendency in English to voice (i.e. to make the vocal cords vibrate when saying) consonants between two vowels, the second "f" became a "v", and voila, fif became "five".

Now you are no doubt wondering about "fife", the small flute. This came into the English language much later, in the 1500s, possibly from German pfeife, which already had what we would call a "long i", and which turned up too late for its final "f" to become voiced into a "v". 

For why it was OK to call the Virgin Mary a "bird", click here: 
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2014/12/12-days-of-wordlady-calling-birds.html

For what French hens have to do with syphilis, click here: 
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2014/12/12-days-of-wordlady-french-hens.html

For turtle-doves, click here: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2014/12/12-days-of-wordlady-turtle-doves.html

For what partridges have to do with farting, click here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/12/12-days-of-wordlady-partridge.html

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! You can either:

use the subscribe window at the top of this page

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Want to learn more fun facts about the language like this? I'm offering my Rollicking Story of the English Language course again in the New Year! You can sign up for the whole 8-week course or just drop in for the lecture(s) of your choice (so long as you book in advance). More info here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2017/12/rollicking-story-of-english-course.html

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Flus, gnus, emus, and tutus

Flu season is upon us. The word flu is typically a mass noun, meaning it isn't often used in the plural. But, like all mass nouns, it can be, because there are many different kinds of flu. This raises the question: how do you spell the plural of flu?

If you found the word flus by itself written on a piece of paper, it would look very odd: "What the heck's a FLUSS??" you might wonder. Thus, you might be tempted to do something else with the plural, such as adding an e before the s. However, this would give you flues, which is the plural of a different word designating part of a chimney. Or you might think about sticking in an apostrophe, "flu's", but this is not recommended.

Bear in mind that words are almost never devoid of context that [fancy lexicographer word alert] disambiguates them. You probably did stumble over the title of this post, because of the lack of semantic context to help you. But if you are talking about flu in the plural, it is likely to be in a phrase like "colds and flus" or "there are a lot of different flus going around this year", so your readers shouldn't stumble, or at least not for long. There aren't many words in English ending in -u, but those that do exist (e.g. gnu, emu, tutu) all form their plural by simply adding an s. By the way, if you want to see some really funky tutus, visit this post.

You can, of course, also avoid the problem by sticking to using flu as a mass noun: "Colds and flu are taking a toll this year."

The word flu was a 19th-century shortening of “influenza”, which the English had borrowed from Italian in 1743. Influenza, like the English word “influence”, comes from the Latin influere (to flow in).In the Middle Ages, astrologers believed that an ethereal fluid flowing from the stars or heavens affected people's characters and events generally, so influenza in Italian and “influence” in English referred to the impact of the stars on human life. Since this kind of influence was thought also to cause illness, Italians used influenza to mean a “visitation” of an epidemic disease, an influenza of chicken pox, catarrh, and so on. When a particularly nasty flu outbreak hit Italy in 1743, people just used the word la influenza by itself. As flu does, it spread, and the English adopted the Italian name.

As for the part of a chimney, the flue, its origin is unknown.

Chomping at the bit: bridle vs bridal

Just when I think there are certain homophone confusions no one will ever make, I come across ... "bridle party" instead of "bridal party". 

Admittedly, it's not that common a mistake (most of the examples on the web are journalists making puns in headlines about the horsey set), but some people do make it. And it's one you really don't want to make, as apparently the term is also used for a sexual practice that Wordlady doesn't want to get into. That is, she doesn't want to get into explaining it! Well, actually, neither does she want to... oh, never mind.

Back to my staid etymological persona!

Bridle goes all the way back to Old English, derived from a Germanic root bregdan (pull or twitch), which is also the origin of the word "braid". The -le ending is what is called an "instrumental suffix", meaning "something with which the root verb can be done"; for example a handle is something which you can take in your hand; a girdle is something which girds you. So a bridle, the headgear of a horse including the bit and the reins by which it is controlled, is literally a tool used for pulling.

Bridal, which also goes back to Old English, has a very interesting history. It was originally a noun, literally meaning "bride ale". It used to mean the banquet and other festivities associated with the wedding, when, of course, the Anglo-Saxons would quaff a lot of ale. I guess wedding receptions haven't changed much in 1500 years. But by about 1600, people started to think that "bridal" was an adjective meaning "of a bride". They were influenced by that -al ending, more typically used in adjectives (nuptial, mortal, fatal...) than in nouns.

Remember, using the wrong homophone is something that your spellchecker cannot identify or correct!

PS: some readers have commented that they think the correct expression is "champing at the bit". Please check out my other post about this, Breakfast of... chompions?

Photo by Demetrius Washington on Unsplash

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! If you are not already subscribed, you can either:

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A cheery thought

Cheers! The Beaujolais nouveau has just been released. “Cheer” has its origins in an ancient Greek word for “head”, kara, which, by the time the Normans arrived in England, had become chere and meant the face or facial expression. Back then, it could be either a sad or happy expression, or even the emotion revealed by the expression. Gradually the association with happiness won out; so it was no longer possible to have a “sorry cheer”. By the 1700s a “cheer” was a shout of encouragement. The drinking toast did not crop up until the early 20th century.