This is unutterably fantastic, but … I don’t understand why it’s silly to have a word for the fourth stomach of a ruminant? I mean, actually in use today we have words for all four? (And they are: rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum, just in case you were wondering). It is my understanding that tripe, the food, is only made from one or two of the stomachs, so you’d need to know which one to keep, so you need a name for it if you’re a butcher! And if you’re a farmer with sick stock, you need to be able to communicate with the vet about things like blockages in your cow’s gut (cows will eat stupid things and get bunged up – I saw a cow eat a bra once).
Also actually they’re stomach compartments, but y’know, I think I’ve been pedantic enough!
PS I really do like this post I just can’t help myself on the subject of anatomy.
Right, well, since someone else has been pedantic before: most of these except for rhotacism and lingible (and of course defenestration) are words that, at some point or in some place, would have been useful everyday word! With the exception of those three, they sound funny partly because they’re no longer in common use (we no longer fear that people might falsely arrive by sea and pretend to be destitate… no wait yes we do, we just call them “boat people” instead), but also partly because they are formed from native anglo-saxon roots. They’re low-class words for low-class things. (Overmorrow and Eremorrow not so much – they’re funny just because the prefix has been swapped)
The exceptions on that list, rhotacism, lingible and defenestration are funny not because they’re more germanic than we’re used to but because they’re latinate or greek in origin. None come via medieval french, so they haven’t had time to soften and morph into the local language – because they’re rarely used outside specialist contexts.
Rhotacism has been used to refer to speech defects which primarily affect the -r- sound but the word was coined to describe the process by which some languages turn -s- into -r- as they adopt words. High German is particularly notable for this, thus the term was first seen in German (formed from a byzantine greek word) before moving into English. It’s extremely nifty to know there’s a word for this, but it’s not surprising there is a word – it’s exactly as useful as, say, ‘heteronormativity’ or ‘transubstantiation’: it expresses a complex concept in a single word, very specifically, to in-group speakers (in the case of Rhotacism, linguists; in the case of heteronormativity, a mix of queer people, gender scholars, tumblr denizens, and anyone else likely to participate in a complex discussion about gender and/or sexuality; for transubstantiation, catholics and religious scholars); when dealing with out-group speakers it will need to be expressed in simpler terms at least once.
Defenestration: as far as I can tell, all the cited examples of this in the OED refer specifically to the Defenestration of Prague (or one of them): actual political showdowns in which people got thrown out windows in Prague. The word is easy to form from latin, de-fenestra, and seems initially to have been used humorously in English – by people amused that an actualfax historical event culminated in window-throwing – but is now used perfectly seriously to refer to said event. The second of the two, in 1618, was a prelude to a major war, so you can see why people would keep talking about it.
Lingible: now the OED has only one citation for this, from in 1618. It’s perfectly easy to form in any romance language, from Latin lingere (same root that gives us cunnlingus, fun fact!). That 1618 citation is from a book of pharmacology, describing how medicines may be consumed: some are lingible. Clearly the word didn’t catch on, but in 1618 anyone concerned with pharmacology could be reliably assumed to know the Latin root word. (I mean, yes, he COULD have said lickable, but academic texts of that period are littered with improbable loan-words: it’s only very, very recently that ‘plain english’ has become prized). Perhaps even now scientists recognise it: i found a few citations in googlebooks to do with immunology: ‘lingible bodies’ seem to be a thing.
Does English have more weird words than other languages? Maybe so, but if so, that’s down to two things: linguistic history and specialisation, and the OED.
Firstly, English has a huge vocabulary because of how Norman French hit Anglo-Saxon at a dead run and they shattered and multiplied. The end result was in many cases a doubled vocabulary – the famous cow/beef distinction, where the french word refers to the meat (eaten by francophone nobles) and the native word to the animal (raised by saxon farmers). But other examples of specialisation turn up that aren’t so clearly class related: skirt/shirt, where one is an anglo-saxon word for drapey garment and one a norse word, is a great example.
Then there’s the grammatical/syntactical impact: English almost completely lost its case system when it met French, and lost a lot of verb conjugations over the middle ages as well. That means it’s really easy to adopt new words into English. When a new word enters, say, Icelandic, it needs to be one that fits into the noun declension and/or verb conjugation patterns of the existing language. Icelandic cannot easily incorporate, say, Japanese words the way English can because it needs its words to fit its existing paradigms. Also, due to having lost so much of its native grammatical structure, it’s really easy to coin new words in English by moving them from class to class. Don’t have a noun for this? Borrow a verb! Need a verb? Verbalize an adjective! This is not equally easy in all languages.
And secondly, the OED. Bless the OED. For a new word to “become” French it has to be approved by the Academie Francaise, who take an active role in curating the language. There’s the infamous ‘le weekend vs le fin-de-semaine’ case, for instance. The early lexicographers of English were curatorial – Webster, for instance, set about systematically standardising spelling, and that’s why Americans will be cringing that I didn’t put a z in standardize, but brits would cringe if I did.
But the OED, my friends, was from the outset a descriptive dictionary. One reason it took so bloody long to finish the first editin was that it set out not to proscribe words that ought to be known but to describe everything they could conceivably get their hands on. So English has more of these weird medieval and early modern rare words kicking around in its Official Dictionary than many other languages have. (Eg: yerd. Yerd does not belong on that list of ‘weird words English has’, it’s a bloody MIDDLE ENGLISH word, no one’s used it since the 13th century! It is not a word that could conceivably be used now, or even in 1600!)
One of the distinctive features of Old Norse poetry is the use of kenning: a circumlocutory device in which a straightforward noun is replaced with an allusive phrase.
For example, a ship might be referred to as a “wave’s horse”; a sword, a “wound-serpent”; a shield, “the shame of swords”, and so forth. Sometimes, kennings could be embedded in other kennings – thus, one might have “feeder of war-gulls” = “feeder of ravens” = “warrior”; this is known as a doubled or extended kenning.
Though many conventions of English literature can be traced back to Old Norse roots, kenning isn’t much encountered these days – at least, not in most genres. There’s one particular genre where the art of kenning is alive and well, though.
I’m speaking, of course, of erotic fanfic.
Whether you’re referring to a penis as a “porn-truncheon” or a vagina as “squish-pocket” (both examples I’ve seen employed in all apparent seriousness, incidentally), that perfectly fits the form and function of a kenning. Indeed, these examples even adhere to the idiosyncratic grammatical structure of many Old Norse kennings, with the base word being modified by an uninfected noun determinant inserted as a compound prefix.
Euphemisms for sex acts, meanwhile, can be even more baroque, forming multi-level allusions in the manner of doubled/extended kennings. “To ride the baloney pony”, for example, employs the act of riding a horse as an allusion to penetrative sexual intercourse – but the contained phrase “baloney pony” is, itself, a kenning of the simple type, with “pony” as the base word and “baloney” as the determinant, making the whole phrase a doubled kenning.
There are practical reasons for this sort of practice, of course; e.g., complex euphemisms can help sexually explicit works sneak through content filters. Still, it’s kind of fascinating that smutty fanfic has managed to preserve – in virtually unaltered state – a poetic form that’s otherwise been largely extinct in English literature for the better part of a thousand years.
I love how, because of that “Beautiful Cinnamon Roll Too Good For This World, Too Pure” Onion headline, “cinnamon roll” has become a commonly accepted phrase for “a character who is cute and kind and typically gets more pain in canon than they deserve”.
Like, we didn’t have a real phrase for that common phenomenon (wubbie maybe, but that has negative connotations ie “this character has been wubbiefied by the fandom”) and then someone used a screenshot of a headline from a satire news website to describe it, and then everyone else was like “yes good let’s use this”. You couldn’t make that shit up. I bet there are people who use that phrase now who didn’t even see that headline.
Language is evolving right before our eyes in a very weird and beautiful way and I am very very sorry for future linguist who have to puzzle this shit out.
One of my favorite linguistic phenomena is rebracketing, which is when a word or words is/are redivided differently, either two words becoming one, one word heard as two, or part of one word interpreted as part of the other. This frequently happens with articles, for example:
apron was originally napron, but “a napron” was interpreted as “an apron”
newt comes from ewt by the same process
In the opposite direction, nickname comes from Middle English nekename which in turn came from ekename (an ekename -> a nekename) where “eke” was an old word meaning “also” or “additional” (so basically “an additional name”)
ammunition comes from an obsolete dialectal French amunition, which came from munition, the phrase la munition being heard as l’amunition.
the nickname Ned comes from Ed, via “mine Ed” being heard as “my Ned” (in archaic English, “my” and “mine” had the same relationship as “a” and “an”), same with several other nicknames like Nell
The word “orange” ulimately derives from the Arabic nāranj, via French “orange”, the n being lost via a similar process involving the indefinite article, e.g., something like French “une norange” becoming “une orange” (it’s unclear which specific Romance language it first happened in)
in the Southern US at least (not sure about elsewhere), “another” is often analyzed as “a nother”, hence the phrase “a whole nother”
omelet has a whole series of interesting changes; it comes from French omelette, earlier alemette (swapping around the /l/ and /m/), from alemelle from an earlier lemelle (la lemelle -> l’alemelle)
Related to this, sometimes two words, especially when borrowed into another language, will be taken as one. Numerous words were borrowed from Arabic with the definite article al- attached to them. Spanish el lagarto became English alligator. An interesting twist is admiral, earlier amiral (the d probably got in there from the influence of words like “administer”) from Arabic amir al- (lord of the ___), particularly the phrase amir al-bahr, literally “lord of the sea”.
Sometimes the opposite happens. A foreign word will look like two words, or like a word with an affix. For example, the Arabic kitaab (book) was borrowed into Swahili as kitabu. ki- happens to be the singular form of one of the Swahili genders, and so it was interpreted as ki-tabu. To form the plural of that gender, you replace ki- with vi-, thus, “books” in Swahili is vitabu. The Greek name Alexander became, in Arabic, Iskander, with the initial al- heard as the article al-.
Similarly, the English word Cherry came from Old Norman French cherise, with the s on the end interpreted as the plural -s. Interestingly enough, that word came from Vulgar Latin ceresia, a feminine singular noun, but originally the plural of the neuter noun ceresium! So a Latin plural was reinterpreted as a singular in Vulgar Latin, which in turn was interpreted as a plural when borrowed into English!
The English suffix -burger used with various foods (e.g., cheeseburger, or more informally chickenburger, etc.) was misanlyzed from Hamburger as Ham-burger, itself from the city of Hamburg
This can happen even with native words. Modern French once is used for the snow leopard, but originally meant “lynx”. In Old French, it was lonce (ultimately from the same source as lynx), which was reinterpreted as l’once! In English, the word “pea” was originally “pease”, but that looked like it had the plural -s on it, and so the word “pea” was created from it. Likewise, the adjective lone came from alone, heard as “a lone”, but alone itself came originally from all one.
A Middleground 