These Lovely "Fossil Words" Are Hiding in Plain Sight

Wend, kith, vim … shebang!

Jan 28, 2024

N.B. There’s a cryptic crossword puzzle at the end of this article! If you’re new to cryptics or want to brush up, my quick cryptic crosswords crash course begins here.

I don’t want to sound too alarmist, but they walk among us. We thought they were dead, but they clung to life through a loophole, travelers from a distant past living tourist lives in the host homes they have somehow carved out of our alien present. These are the “fossil words,” obsolete and active all at once; common as dirt, but strange to the touch. If you saw one out alone at night, you’d recognize it as an interloper right away — they often wear their unbelonging openly — words like “wend,” “knell,” “druthers,” “eke,” and “dudgeon.” But they are adept at hiding in plain sight: “Wend your way.” “Death knell.” “If I had my druthers.” “Eke out a living.” “A state of high dudgeon.” And some are even better hidden, revealing their antediluvian sensibility only on close inspection — “point” in “in point of fact;” “needs” in “must needs;” “the” in “nonetheless,” “step” in “stepson.”

A rather marvelous but mostly forgotten 1901 book called Words & Their Ways in English Speech by J. B. Greenough and G. L. Kittredge is (as far as I can tell) the earliest text to describe these remarkable anachronisms as “fossils”:

Thus it often happens that a word which was one of a thousand, or a form which was universal, becomes isolated. Dissociated from its fellows, it ceases to share their future destiny. If they perish, it does not perish with them. Nor is its preservation assisted by their survival. It may become the centre of a new group. Or it may remain isolated, — embedded, as it were, in amber, and lost or preserved to future ages, not as one of the swarm but with the individuality of a fossil.

Some of the fossils the authors single out (such as “whilom”) have themselves mostly vanished from the language since the book was published, but many more are still with us: “Umbrage,” for instance, which is never seen outside of the phrase “to take umbrage at,” is a word that literally means “shade” or “shadow” (as in umbrella), and someone takes umbrage at something (presumably) because it has cast a shadow on them (a converse of the more contemporary “throwing shade.”) “Dudgeon,” similarly, can’t walk on its own two feet outside of the phrase “High dudgeon.” Greenough and Kittredge speculate that it could be related to an earlier dudgeon that referred to the wood used to make knife handles, but most other sources are skeptical of this. In fact, it may have its roots in the Italian aduggiare, “to overshadow,” which would make it, rather satisfyingly, a cousin to umbrage.

Armed with the concept of “fossil words,” you can start to see them everywhere: The “Pale” that only exists in “Beyond the Pale” is unrelated to the “Pale” that means “colorless” — it’s an otherwise obsolete word from the Latin palus, meaning “stake” and, by extension, “boundary.” The “Dint” that can nevermore escape from the phrase “By dint of” was once a mighty sword strike — the Old English dynt means “a blow from a weapon.” “Offing,” a nautical term for the open sea as it’s seen from the shore, now survives only in “In the offing,” which itself probably only survives because it was a favorite phrase of Bertie Wooster. Neither “Spick” nor “Span” are ever seen outside of the phrase “Spick and span,” which is a truncation of an older idiom, “Spick and span-new,” meaning something like “new as a freshly shaved chip” (a span was a chip, and a spick was probably the spike that shaved it).

And “Shebang,” which was (somewhat mysteriously) Civil War slang for “a tavern,” now never leaves the safe confines of “The whole shebang,” where it means something like “business.” In an 1869 letter to his publishers, Mark Twain rather impressively managed to get “Shebang” and another soon-to-be fossil word into one sentence:

“I like the book, I like you and your style and your business vim, and believe the chebang will be a success.”

“Vim” of course has since been almost entirely confined to the phrase “Vim and vigor,” but it briefly had a life of its own as a 19th century word that may have been a coinage from the Latin vis, which means “strength,” or may just have been something people like Mark Twain said because they liked the sound of it.

There are enough of these that I don’t have space to set them all to rights here, but once you start noticing them, they really do pop out at you everywhere. There’s “Wend” (the original present tense of “went”) in “Wend your way;” “Bated” (a truncation of “abated”) in “Bated breath;” “Kith” (a relative of the word “know”) in “Kith and kin;” and dozens more: “Loggerheads,” “Riddance,” “Fettle,” “Eke,” “Bandy,” “Petard.” I’ll just end, because I teased it earlier, with the (to my mind) astonishing “Step” in “stepchild.” Unlike the “Step” that means “moving a foot forward” and comes from the Old English steppan, the “Step-” in “Stepchild” is the last remaining vestige in English of a word that meant “bereaved.” As Greenough and Kittredge explain:

The step- in stepson and the like is the adjective stēop, ‘destitute,’ ‘bereaved,’ so that stepson or stepchild is the same as orphan, which comes from the Greek for ‘bereaved.’ Stepfather and stepmother are therefore terms which could only have arisen after the step- had lost its proper sense. A stepmother is not a ‘bereaved mother,’ but one who takes the place of a mother to the bereaved children. This illustrates the tendency of language to form groups, and to make new words to fill out any gaps that may be observed in any group.

Which is to say that not only have these charming little time travelers made homes of their own in the language, some of them are starting families.

I have made you a themed puzzle. The puzzle image is below if you want to print it out like our forebears used to, but you can also fill it in with a click!