WORDS FASCINATE

Evening Star, Issue 26087, 29 April 1947, Page 7

WORDS FASCINATE

EXCURSION IN ETYMOLOGY (Prom Our Correspondent.) (By Air Mail.) LONDON. April 9. For many people etymology is the most fascinating phase of archeology. To these any work emanating from Professor Ernest Weekley, onetime professor of French at Nottingham University, is a delight. He has just published a revised and extended edition of two books of his now out of print, under the ’ title 1 Words Ancient and Modern,’ in one section of which he deals with words that either baffle the New Oxford Dictionary or have been, in his authoritative view, wrongly diagnosed. Professor Weekley writes on his subject with finer scholarship, less pedantry,, and greater popular interest and humour than any other authority with whom I am acquainted. Read his dissection of “ blackmail,” and its history. He observes: “The scale of the science has been so intelligently enlarged that the trifling baksheesh with which the nineteenth century blackmailer was satisfied .would hardly pay the postal expenses of a modern operator?” NOT 80 MODERN. : Dip where you will in ‘ Words Ancient and Modern ’ you find something interesting and surprising. Take, for instance, “ wiseacre,” a word derived from obsolete Dutch “ wijsseggher,'’ itself borrowed from the German “ weissager,” which comes from “ weissagen,” to prophesy. Now, “ weissagen ” means literally “to wise-say,” and throws quite an antique light on that up-to-date Americanism “wise-crack”! Not least interesting is the jovial way in which Professor Weekley handles popular etymological fallacies. He recalls that when, at the age of 10, he lent Ballantyne’s * Coral Island,’ with its repentant pirate, Bloody Bill, to a school-fellow', the treasured volume was returned with the peccant adjective carefully obliterated throughout by the blacklead pencil of an austere parent. Now that the word has become a feature of the best-seller, Professor Weekley observes the delusion that it is a corruption : of “ by’r Lady ” seems ineradicable, and crops up as regularly as the superstition .that “ cabal ” comes from the initials of five Charles Second ministers. It comes from the German “ blutig,” an expletive instinctively chosen, for its grisly and repellant sound and sense.