7 Words With Genuinely Surprising Origins
Are "sphinx" and "sphincter" really related to each other?
Skip to the end (or click here) for a puzzle I’ve made you. My crash course on how to do cryptic puzzles begins here.
I’ve been collecting words with origins that genuinely surprise me for a while (because it’s important to have a hobby) so I thought I’d use this space to share a few good ones with you this week. There’s no relation between these words except that they all kind of take you on a journey when you learn where they came from, and they’re all quite fun to say, for different reasons.
Teetotal, as in “abstaining from alcohol,” is an example of what’s called “reduplication,” where all or part of a word is repeated to add emphasis for one reason or another. “Kitty cat” is an example of this, as is “Easy peasy” and when you say “like-like” to mean you like someone in a smoochy kind of way. So teetotal is actually T-total, as in “more than totally,” as in “I T-totally do not want a gin and tonic, thank you very much!”
Well wouldn’t you know it — “knickknack” (or nicknack) is also a reduplicative word. Although there are plenty of languages that use reduplication for very specific grammatical purposes (such as to form the plural of a word), it seems like we mostly just use it playfully in English. “Knick-knack” is a reduplication of “Knack,” which originally meant “an ingenious device” before it came to mean “special talent.” So you could say that a knickknack is a T-totally ingenious knack. (But you shouldn’t. People will think you’re weird.)
Americans don’t really say “yob” (meaning a young hooligan) as much as the English because all our young people are very polite and well-behaved, but it’s an interesting word to think about as it comes to us via a unique etymological process. “Yob” is an example of back-slang — a type of slang common in a number of languages wherein words are “pronounced phonemically backwards” (meaning that each unit of sound in the word is pronounced in reverse order rather than just spelled backwards). Put slightly less confusingly, “Yob” is “Boy,” backwards. And as far as I can tell, it’s the only piece of back-slang to have common currency in English.
Sphinx (as in the lady with the wings and the lion body and the riddles) has a more standard etymology than any of the words we’ve looked at so far, but I was genuinely surprised to learn where it originated: It comes from the Greek word σφίγγειν (sphingein), which means “to bind or hold fast.” “Sphinx” (via a back-formation from σφίγγειν) actually means “Strangler,” which is extremely cool in three different ways: 1.) It’s badass that The Sphinx is literally called “The Strangler.” 2.) This means that sphinx and sphincter (a muscle that “binds or holds fast”) are etymologically related. And 3.) An absolutely correct alternative plural of Sphinxes is … Sphinges.
Now if you happen to solve a bunch of Sphinxes’ riddles and they give you a cool device as a reward, you’d be in a perfect position to say, “Those sphinges’ knickknacks are T-totally ingenious knacks.” (But, again, don’t.)
When I learned Greek, I was taught that συκοφάντης, which means “an informer” and which is the word we get “sycophant” from, originally had a very specific meaning of “someone who snitches to the authorities about illegal fig-smuggling operations.” As far as I can tell, this may be apocryphal, but it is true that the word literally means “someone who shows figs.” σῦκον (sykon) means “fig,” and φαίνειν (phainein) means “to show.” The consensus appears to be that “showing the fig” was a Greek euphemism for a vulgar gesture, and “sycophants” (literally, “fig showers”) were public figures who used the gesture in private. Seems to me kind of like the opposite of a sycophant, but this whole thing got pretty convoluted when the figs appeared in the first place, so I’m just going to leave it there.
“Pipsqueak” (meaning a weak and insignificant person) is another word that’s more common in British English than American English, likely because all Americans are strong and significant. One theory is that it originates from soldier’s slang referring to German shells that made “a pip and a squeak” when they went past the trenches during World War I. But the word occurs in English before the war — a more illustrative usage comes in 1918 when the British politician Eric Geddes says, of the Germans, "We will get out of her all you can squeeze out of a lemon and a bit more. I will squeeze her until you can hear the pips squeak." So a pipsqueak is a pathetic person who makes sad noises like the sound you might expect to come from a throttled lemon pip. (Americans, of course, don’t use the word “pip,” because our fruits are all seedless.)
This one is more widely known, though it came as a surprise to me. “Halcyon” (almost always paired with “days” to mean “a carefree time in the nostalgic past”) is from the Latin halcyon, via the Greek ἀλκυών, and it means … “Kingfisher.” The missing piece of the puzzle is the Greek myth of Alcyone and Ceyx. As Ovid tells it, Alcyone begs her husband Ceyx not to go on a sea journey. But will he listen? Nope! And he promptly gets in a wreck. Not one to say, “I told you so,” the grieving Alcyone throws herself into the ocean. Fortunately, it’s a Greek myth, so instead of dying, Alcyone and Ceyx are both transformed into kingfishers (halcyons). Importantly, Alcyone’s dad (Aeolus, the God of wind — Alcyone was an original nepo-baby) makes a point of calming the winds for seven days every winter so the kingfishers can mate. These are the halcyon days. What a ride.
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