Victims of folk etymology

[mmcirvin]

I'd never looked it up, but the popular claims that the old expletive bloody comes from a Christian blasphemy (especially the "by Our Lady" variant) always sounded like suspicious folk etymology to me. It turns out that the blasphemy stories are probably untrue, but go back a long way and may well have led to the word being considered extremely rude.

Something similar has been happening in recent years with the phrase rule of thumb, which is commonly said to originate from an old law about permissible forms of wife-beating. The etymology is bogus but is sufficiently widely known that the phrase now offends many people. I guess this kind of thing has been going on for a long time.

It's an interesting question what one does when these situations are developing. Is the loss of rule of thumb as a polite phrase a sufficiently dire outcome that it's best to stand against the tide and educate the ignorant when they take offense? Or is it better to accept that language changes for reasons that are not always rational, and that this phrase is now a casualty? I'd naively thought that the widespread Snopesish debunking of the rule of thumb story had removed the taint at least in some quarters, but I recently saw somebody take umbrage at it again. I suppose one could regard it as a stronger form of skunked term.

Comments

[paraleipsis.livejournal.com]

"Picnic" will live, I think, for the reasons given below.

I cried a little inside the other day, though, when my perfectly decent psychiatrist, a very well-educated man of my father's generation, attempted to explain to me the Real Origin of the word "fuck."

[paraleipsis.livejournal.com]

Of course, they're actually the reasons given above, because I can't remember how LiveJournal works. This is why I am not allowed to comment pre-caffeine.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid I thought "fuck" was a recent schoolyard invention, since I'd never seen it in printed matter or heard adults use it. It was a particularly pure example of the Recency Illusion.

I read somewhere about somebody who, in his childhood, thought he and his friends had invented the word, but I can't remember who it was now.

[samantha2074.livejournal.com]

Stephen Fry? Once on QI he admitted that he was astonished the first time he heard his father use the word fuck, as he thought he and his brother had invented it.

"Picnic" will live

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

because the myth is nowhere near widespread enough to threaten it. I actually had no idea what Manfire was talking about, even though the Snopes debunking is from as far back as 1999! If it hasn't even reached me in that long, no way could it taint the word severely enough to make a difference. Besides, it just sounds like a stupid playground joke.

"Buck," on the other hand, has a more insidious problem. The idea that dollars were nicknamed for slaves used as currency may be a little silly, but the false assertion that "buck" was used to describe slaves as beasts of burden is alive and well. Again in Promise & Betrayal, something came up about "strapping young bucks," and the black woman reading the parts like Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Sojourner Truth commented on it as an offensive description of black men. None of us but her husband, an African and African-American historian, could convince her that it really was used complimentarily and carried no racial connotation.

Re: "Picnic" will live

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was wondering about the Snopes explanation of "buck" as money, too; at least some dictionaries give its origin as unknown. I'd heard a very different story, that some version of the 10-dollar bill had a big X on it and was therefore referred to as a "sawbuck", and the 20 as a "double sawbuck". But I haven't found any recent corroboration for that and it is probably just another folk etymology.

Re: "Picnic" will live

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...hmm, the New Oxford American corroborates "sawbuck" but doesn't give this as related to "buck".