Today's Wall Street Journal profiled a novel form of adjustable wrench made by Loggerhead Tools, Inc. The gadget-minded among us may enjoy looking at their website, even though it is of poor quality.

But this a word-post, not a gadget post. My question is, why do we describe disagreeing and disputing parties as being "at loggerheads"? What's a 'loggerhead' (other than a kind of turtle)?

See The Word Detective

Tinman

I have a yeah-but here. There are two problems with the Word-Detective analysis, which gives two possible explantions.

In the first explantion he notes that a loggerhead was a stupid person, an idiot, and concludes that from that at loggerheads came to mean 'in dispute'. But does the premise support the conclusion? Grammatically, how could one say at idiots to mean 'in dispute'? And logically, stupidity is not the same as disputing: fools need not be disputatious, and disputants are often not fools. (You get the very best disputes when the parties are intelligent.) I see little link from "loggerhead=idiot" to "at loggerheads=disputing", and Word-Detective's attempt to link them seems very thin and completely speculative.

The second problem is, how could a "loggerhead" come to mean an idiot, a kind of tool, and a kind of turtle? Nothing in word-detective suggests any commonality or connection linking these disparate senses.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

Interesting. We have seen, though, that words do evolve into other meanings.

Do you have a theory?

Jesse Sheidlower notes that one of the major senses of loggerhead was 'a ball or bulb of iron with a long handle, used, after being heated, to melt tar, heat liquids, etc.'. He then says,

The only vaguely plausible explanation for at loggerheads ... is that it refers to the use of the melting tool as a weapon.

You recall that Word-Detective had given two possible explanations. Sheidlower is in effect agreeing with one of them and saying the other is not reasonable. I'd agree.

But there's a further question. See next post.

Putting aside the above question of how at loggerheads evolved from loggerhead, let's ask how loggerhead itself arose (first recorded as used by Shakespeare). Word-Detective and Sheidlower agree, "The likely explanation is that it is from the dialectal logger 'a block of wood' (itself from log) and head. But Sheidlower notes a problem with this theory:

The problem is that logger is not recorded independently until the eighteenth century, so we have to assume that logger was in use two hundred years before but has not been recorded in print.

This seems to me a major problem with the explanation. Sheildlower brushes over it: "there are many words (particularly in Old and Middle English) that are recorded in compounds or place-names hundreds of years before they're found independently." But that seems very unconvincing to me. The two centuries following Shakespeare were fecund with literature, and I'd find it hard to believe that a word 'logger', though familiar to Shakespeare's audience, would not show up for two centuries.