I continue to enjoy the every-so-often "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune. Today he, Nathan Bierma, reviewed a new book, Word Origins and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone (Oxford University Press), by Anatoly Liberman.

It looks excellent, and I will be posting a few of the examples that Bierma wrote about that came from the book. Liberman talks about unexpected turns that words can take (we have talked about a lot of them!) as the phenomenon of 'misdivision.' For example, 'nickname' is a misdivision. If you recall (we have discussed it before), it comes from 'an ekename,' but the 'n' in 'an' was accidentally added to it, making it 'nickname.' Another is 'tawdry.' This is a misdivision of 'Saint Audrey. Medieval historians wrote that Saint Audrey, queen of Northumbria in the 7th Century, died of a throat tumor. They claimed this tumor was divine retribution for the fancy necklaces she wore. Eventually 'tawdry' came to mean 'gaudy.'

One word that Liberman talks about is "speed." He says it is related to the Old English word "spowan," the Old Slavic word "speti," and the Latin "spes." He says that linguists speculate that the root of these words is "spodi." However, he puts an asterisk by the word because this is just a guess.

"Speed" disguised its meaning too. It used to mean "prosperity," as in "God send you good speed." Then over time it evolved to mean, according to Liberman, the manner in which prosperity is achieved. I wondered about that. Prosperity isn't only achieved through speed, is it? Or is he just kidding, do you think?

Well, I did contact Dr. Liberman and invited him to wordcraft, and he sent me back a lovely reply. I hope he joins us!

Of course, I had to ask him about 'epicaricacy' (as I do all linguists!), and here is what he says:

"SCHADENFREUDE appeared in German at the end of the 16th century as an attempt to gloss a Latin word from Seneca (actually, SCHADENFROH preceded the noun). Bailey's monster must have been his own creation, and Murray's policy was not to include stillborn words that occurred in dictionaries but were never used by normal human beings. I am sure this is the reason EPICARICACY did not find its way into the OED."

Apparently, he isn't a fan of "epicaricacy," either. Oh, well!

Seems like Dr Liberman and I came to similar conclusions.

Asterisks are used to mark a hypothetical reconstruction of a word or root in historical linguistics. In modern generative linguistics, an asterisk is used to mark a sentence which is ungrammatical. Not in their sense of the word, ungrammatical does not mean nonsensical. For example:

a. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
b. *One by one exited.
c. They exited one by one.

The first and third sentences are grammatical. The first sentence is also non-sensical. The second sentence is ungrammatical. A grammar of English should not generate sentences like the second one.