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I read a book once that had a chapter on corrupted words and phrases in English. It was about 15 years ago, and I can't remember a thing about the book other than that chapter, because it had so many cool examples.
"Critters" as a corruption of "creatures"
"Varmints" as a corruption of "vermin"
"Victuals" kept its spelling, but gets pronounced as "vittles"
"The spittin' image", or "the spitting image", as a corruption of "the spirit and image"
"Full of piss and vinegar" as a corruption (or possibly a mockery) of "full of puissance and vigor"
There were a couple of pages of these, but those are the only ones I can remember right off the bat. I think the book also covered spoonerisms, like "butterfly" coming from "flutter-by".
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Those last two bullets aren't correct. "Spitting image" just comes from "spit and image," and "piss and vinegar" is just piss and vinegar.
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Spit and image makes no sense. Saying that Junior is the very spirit and image of his dear old dad does. The author had some kind of documentation for all of the examples in the book, but I skipped them, because I thought they were boring.
Anyway... has anyone else seen this book? Does it ring any bell at all?
Oh, two more than I just remembered:
"Curtsey" as a corruption of "courtesy"
"Flights of fancy" as a corruption of "flights of fantasy"
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And there was a rant about the word "normalcy", too. I don't remember the whole thing, though.
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I've definately heard of the books you're talking about. I can't remember what it's called either, but it always looked really cool.
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The word "fancy" is often used by itself ("Oh, I fancy a cup of tea"), so although I can guess that "fancy" is from "fantasy" the whole phrase might actualy have originally included the corruption.
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Huh! I never thought of that. I mean the verb "fancy" being from "fantasy". Makes sense, though.
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quote:Originally posted by starLisa: Spit and image makes no sense. Saying that Junior is the very spirit and image of his dear old dad does. The author had some kind of documentation for all of the examples in the book, but I skipped them, because I thought they were boring.
It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense to us today. Idioms are usually like that. The fact is that you can find uses of "spittin' image," "spitten image," and "spit an' image" dating back over a hundred years, but nowhere do you find "spirit and image." If you go further back, there were other idioms with just "spit" that meant the same thing. Here's a link.
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Lisa, I have lots of English language books at home (where I am not right now), but I think the one you are referring to is by Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue.
I disagree with what he says about "scapegoat". Jewish practice was to take the goat to a cliff and push it off. I believe that's where the "scape" part came from, and that the author of this webpage simply didn't know that this was how it was done, because it's not specified in the biblical text.
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I also disagree with his take on spittin' image. All of the examples he gives make much more sense as corruptions of spirit => spit.
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Of course, you're assuming that Tyndale was familiar with the practice, given that he was the one that coined the term. I know nothing about him, so it's possible that he was, but it doesn't strike me as a foregone conclusion; I doubt that the typical gentile in 1530s England was really up on Jewish cultural practices. Not that Tyndale was an average person by any stretch of the imagination, but still.
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I think you're misreading that etymology. The English word scapegoat does indeed come from a mistranslation by William Tyndale, who authored the first English translation of the Bible.
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quote:Originally posted by starLisa: I also disagree with his take on spittin' image. All of the examples he gives make much more sense as corruptions of spirit => spit.
You're disagreeing with experts that have studied things like this all their lives. I don't mean to be rude, but unless you have a Ph.D. in linguistics and have spent a lot of time poring over old manuscripts and studying dead languages, you're not really qualified to decide where a word comes from.
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Jon Boy, that doesn't follow. How do you get from eiz azal (goat left) to "scapegoat"? The mistranslation thing is a theory, but it just doesn't do it for me.
Tyndale could have known a Jew who knew what was done. It's not like it was a secret or anything.
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It's like the word "upshot". Dictionaries tend to have a bit of an obsession when it comes to finding European or Indic etymologies for words, even when they don't fit at all. Upshot is so clearly derived from the Hebrew/Aramaic.
Same with "copacetic".
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quote:Originally posted by starLisa: I also disagree with his take on spittin' image. All of the examples he gives make much more sense as corruptions of spirit => spit.
You're disagreeing with experts that have studied things like this all their lives. I don't mean to be rude, but unless you have a Ph.D. in linguistics and have spent a lot of time poring over old manuscripts and studying dead languages, you're not really qualified to decide where a word comes from.
I've read about etymological studies. There is a pronounced bias in the field towards sticking to the prevalent paradigm.
I could virtually guarantee you that none of the etymologists who claimed Tyndale mistranslated the text were aware that the goat in question was indeed pushed off of a scapement. I could further guarantee you that none of them were familiar with the Hebrew/Aramaic word "pshat" as used in common discourse by many Jews.
I'm not much for respecting academic authority just because they have letters after their names. If the argument makes sense, it makes sense. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
Where credentials matter is in fields where things can be proven. Not where nothing but educated guesses can be made. They only have access to a limited number of documents, and claiming that spittin' image was never spirit and image is essentially unprovable, as it would be an attempt to prove a negative.
Their attempts to link it to a person's spit sound more like folk etymology to me.
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quote:App. invented by Tindale (1530) to express what he believed to be the literal meaning of Heb. azazel, occurring only in Lev. xvi. 8, 10, 26. (In verse 10 he renders: ‘The goote on which the lotte fell to scape’.) The same interpretation is expressed by the Vulgate caper emissarius (whence the Fr. bouc émissaire), and by Coverdale's (1535) rendering ‘the fre goate’, but is now regarded as untenable. The word does not appear in the Revised Version of 1884, which has ‘Azazel’ (as a proper name) in the text, and ‘dismissal’ in the margin as an alternative rendering.
The simplest explanation is that Tyndale was not very familiar with Hebrew practices and was not the greatest expert on the Hebrew language.
And I hate to say it, but upshot is good, plain English. There wasn't exactly an influx of Hebrew words into English in the 1500s.
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quote:Originally posted by starLisa: I've read about etymological studies.
That doesn't make you qualified.
quote: There is a pronounced bias in the field towards sticking to the prevalent paradigm.
Prove it.
quote: I could virtually guarantee you that none of the etymologists who claimed Tyndale mistranslated the text were aware that the goat in question was indeed pushed off of a scapement. I could further guarantee you that none of them were familiar with the Hebrew/Aramaic word "pshat" as used in common discourse by many Jews.
You'd be surprised at how many languages most linguists speak. And I could virtually guarantee you that Jews were not making an impact on the English language 500 years ago.
quote:I'm not much for respecting academic authority just because they have letters after their names. If the argument makes sense, it makes sense. If it doesn't, it doesn't.
It makes sense if you have studied enough to know what you're talking about. You haven't.
quote:Where credentials matter is in fields where things can be proven. Not where nothing but educated guesses can be made. They only have access to a limited number of documents, and claiming that spittin' image was never spirit and image is essentially unprovable, as it would be an attempt to prove a negative.
Their attempts to link it to a person's spit sound more like folk etymology to me.
The irony there is astouding. A folk etymology is one made up by people to give a plausible and reasonable explanation for a word origin. A real etymology is one made by experts who are familiar with historical forms of the language and linguistic processes and who have actually researched the matter in question.
Did you even read that link? There are quotes 600 years old that refer to a father "spitting out" a son that looks just like him. Language takes a lot of twists and turns that you can't see just by looking at a word today and imagining where it came from.
Your explanation of the origin of those words is equivalent to looking at the sky and deciding that the most reasonable and plausible explanation is that everything orbits the earth.
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