Monthly Archives: July 2020

halfsome

Posted on July 30, 2020 | 1 comment

I’m fed up with being fed up, and I’m sick of having to avoid getting sick. I am surrounded by fulsome wholesome advice, and I am feeling much more partial to something on the middling side. I do not want to replace potato chips with celery sticks. I do not want something so morally improving that it is as warm and welcoming as a marble sculpted peach. I want to cut loose, I want a cut of the louche, I want some cheese on my cheese and hold the cracker, I want some sparkle in my life and I want it served in a stem glass, and I don’t want anyone to tell me how good for me it isn’t. It’s not that I’m interested in hopping on the helter-skelter to hell – I’ll seek the endorphin high of exercise on my own time and terms, don’t you worry – but let me have something halfsome.

That’s some word, halfsome, but for some reason we don’t see it much. It has the same pattern as wholesome and fulsome. That some shows up in cumbersome, handsome, gladsome, loathsome, and some more (such as wlatsome), to make a word that means its object has or provokes the quality, act, or response named; the whole in wholesome is of course the same as whole but is also related to hale and health (a person who is whole is healthy and vice versa, and whole and hale trace back to the same word, while health is from hale as width is from wide); the ful in fulsome is just a less fully written full with the same sense and some extensions (though woe betide you if you run afoul of the lexicranks on that one). So if there’s whole and full, there’s half, right?

I’m partial to it. Half comes originally from an old word for ‘side’, as in one side of a person (or a cow, or a cookie, or a nagila) or, by extension, one side of a two-party relationship or deal (which is why “on my behalf” means “taking my side” – these days specifically “acting as my proxy”). So it doesn’t originally convey a situation such as a glass that is somewhere between full and empty (in the middle, one might say – maybe midsome, though that word is no more popular than a midden at midsummer); rather, it implies a one-sidedness, an imbalance, or anyway a partialness or partiality. It names a diet and lifestyle that tend more to one kind of thing – just the kind of thing to which a person is partial – rather than one of those annoying wholesome regimens recommended by people who seem not to understand the concept of enjoying food.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to spend all my days eating nothing but potato chips and fancy cheese. There are delicious ways to serve things that even the most morose martinet of a medical fanatic would recommend. But even moderation is best enjoyed in moderation. Every now and then, have something halfsome.

Oh, by the way, for some dumb reason, this word is not in any dictionaries. Yet. So I get to decide what it means, and I just did. I guess that makes it a new old word, and I’m serving it up fresh for you. Have some!

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cancel

Posted on July 26, 2020 | 3 comments

The word cancel can make people cross – or at least crabby. It can seem to bespeak censorship and social incarceration. But it’s been in circulation for a long time and comes from an even longer and larger line of words, and while etymology does not reign over current usage, I think a few of cancel’s siblings and cousins can help us get to the crux of the matter.

Our English verb cancel comes from Anglo-Norman canceler, ‘cross out’, ultimately from Latin cancellus ‘railing or lattice’, because at first cancel referred to crossing something out by drawing not just one line or a scribble on it but a whole lattice of lines. But that Latin cancellus has other progeny. It (or in some cases its plural, cancelli) referred to a barred door, as well as to a barred railing dividing two spaces. The ‘barred railing’ sense gave us a word for a part of a church on the far side of a dividing screen or railing, the part the priest and other ecclesiastical authorities would occupy: the chancel. The ‘barred door’ sense gave us a word for someone who at first was a gatekeeper, someone who was at the screen between the public and a judge, censor, or other official, for instance; over time it gained in stature to refer to a high appointed official or executive: a chancellor.

And where did cancellus come from? It’s the diminutive form of cancer, which, aside from naming a nasty disease, is also the Latin for ‘crab’ (as astrologists will know), and it also meant ‘lattice, grid, barrier’. The disease was named after the crab (due to the appearance of certain tumours). But how do you get from a crab to a barrier? You don’t; you go the other way. The crab got this name because of the circular enclosure its pincers make. Cancer comes from Proto-Italic *karkros, ‘enclosure’, and is a doublet (meaning they were originally the same word, like person and parson or vermin and varmint) of carcer.

Carcer? If you’re thinking right away of incarcerate, you got it in one: our carceral words for prison and similar enclosures are long-lost twins of our words for crabs, tumours, barriers, high officials, and obliteration or discontinuation.

But wait, there’s more. Cancer and carcer both come from a Proto-Indo-European root *kr-kr- having to do with circles and enclosures that is the source of words such as circus, circle, circulation, crux, cross, curve, and crisp. And because *kr-kr- is in turn from *(s)ker- meaning ‘bend’, all of these words are also cousins of other words descended from that root, such as corona, crown, shrine, and even ring.

That took a few turns, didn’t it? But I’d like to draw on the connection between cancel and chancellor just to underline (rather than cross out) an important fact about cancelling: like censorship, it can only be executed by someone who has the authority or power. If you are the official gatekeeper, you can cancel: if you are the postmaster, you can cancel a stamp; if you are the TV network boss, you can cancel a show; if you are the owner of a newspaper (or someone with similar power over it), you can cancel an edition or even the whole newspaper. But if you are an ordinary person, the most you can actually cancel is your own subscription. You don’t end the circulation of the newspaper everywhere; you just end your involvement in its circulation. That said, if you and a lot of other people cancel your subscriptions, the people who do have discretionary power over the newspaper may cancel it – or they may remove the factor (e.g., an author) who is the reason you all have given for cancelling your subscriptions. But that’s not quite the same as you actually cancelling the newspaper or author; you just exerted pressure, which in this case (as not always) was responded to.

Cancelled, of course, is now sometimes used to refer to an attitude towards a person when something unlikeable is discovered about them. Fans may find that the star has views they don’t subscribe to, so the fans decide no longer to underwrite the star (subscribe is from Latin for ‘underwrite’; originally it meant exactly the same thing, and still typically has an aspect of fiscal support). But any one person or group of people can’t end all of a person’s circulation (fame, discussion, purchase of works, existence as a human being on the face of the planet); they can only end their own involvement in it. And that involvement is not unlimited in scope.

So, to get to the crux of the matter, if many of the fans of a person decide they no longer want to support and give their money to that person, they may say the person is “cancelled,” but this is like cancelling a newspaper subscription, not like cancelling a TV show or a stamp. The person still walks, talks, and writes, and probably still has a relatively large audience – they may even be getting paid handsomely to give their opinion to an audience of millions on how bad being “cancelled” is. But even famous people don’t have a right to require people to listen to them or pay them. If they have offended enough of their audience – or enough powerful people – that someone who does have the power to cancel their TV show or book or whatever chooses to do so, even then they are generally in no worse circumstance than millions of other people, and they probably have much more money and property than most.

In other words, since cancel is often used as an expression of dislike and withdrawal on the one side and upset about being disliked and withdrawn from on the other, much use of cancel these days is less about being barred (or barring) – let alone about incarceration – and more about circulation, subscription, and crabbiness. And that’s not really a new phenomenon. It’s just another manifestation of the old truism: What goes around comes around.

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andor, tai

Posted on July 22, 2020 | Leave a comment

In English, we have a bit of a disjunction in our conjunctions. We can navigate them in speech, but in writing we have a problem. Consider this sentence:

Do you want food or drink?

In speaking, there are two ways we can say it, and the meaning is distinct:

Do you want food or drink [even tone until “drink,” then rising]?

Do you want food [rising tone] [slight pause] or drink [falling tone]?

With the first one, it’s understood that you might want both food and drink (or you could say “neither” or “no thanks”). With the second, the implication is that you can have one or the other, but not both (and it’s assumed you’re going to have one of them).

But when you get into writing, you can’t make that distinction. And when it’s formal writing and ambiguity is a bad thing – especially if it’s a context where lawyers might be involved if things get awkward – the “both” option can’t necessarily be taken as implied:

Offer the participants food or drink.

Crumpets are available with butter or honey.

Imagine if I were in some tea room (probably, by the look of the text, one run by a disgruntled former office manager) and I saw that second sentence and I said “I would like a crumpet with butter and honey.” Imagine the server said “Can’t you read? One or the other.” Imagine I were a lawyer. Do you think I’d be able to argue that I should be able to have both?

Admittedly, there are many instances where an “or” is not problematic. But take it from a guy who’s worked on millions of words of information about human health and its care and treatment: sometimes you really need to be clear about this kind of thing. There’s a reason that the usage and/or has burbled up into the written language.

There’s also a reason that many style guides tell you to avoid it and many editors will, on seeing it, sneeze and swat half of it away, leaving either and or or. It’s ugly, it seems inelegant, it’s often unnecessary, and there’s a slash in the middle of it.

So what do we do?

Well, I mean, I know what we generally do. It prevails because people like it and it makes them feel safe, and meanwhile other people do their best to get rid of it wherever they see it in the same way as they get rid of irregardless: with a shiver. It becomes a make-work project for text workers.

But look. I’m an editor but I’m also a linguist. And I’m the kind of editor working on the kind of stuff where having and/or is sometimes very useful. So here’s the thing: what do you do when you see “and/or” on a page and you have to read it out loud?

You say “and or,” don’t you? Or, really, “andor”?

I propose that we just run up the white flag and get rid of the slash (slashes are for fan fiction anyway) and make it andor. Hey presto, it’s one word!

But I know that not everyone will like that. I know that some people will see in andor what Swedish speakers see in ändor (which is Swedish for ‘behinds’ or ‘ends’): a bummer. So if you don’t like ends, let me suggest some Finnish: tai.

Finnish has two words for ‘or’: vai and tai. Guess what the distinction between them is.

Yes, it’s this: where we say “Do you want food or drink” and mean “but not both,” it uses vai: “Haluatko ruokaa vai juomaa?”; where we say it and mean “Do you want food andor drink,” it uses tai: “Haluatko ruokaa tai juomaa?”

Isn’t that handy? Now, I know that it’s uncommon for grammatical particles to be borrowed from other languages, but it’s not altogether unheard of. And while it may seem a weakness that tai sounds like “tie,” I see it as an asset: if it’s a tie between food and drink, you can have both.

So take your pick: do you want andor or tai? Or… do you want andor andor tai? (Or do you want andor tai tai?) You may be inclined to say “neither” or “no, thanks.” But in this case you have to pick at least one, because otherwise you’re stuck with and/or – and even if you never use it, it’s not going away!

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maxillaxation

Posted on July 20, 2020 | 1 comment

You step in, close the door behind you – click – and then, ahhhhh, you peel it off. You reach up behind your ear and hook your finger into the loop and strip that mask off and your face is free. You are, at last, maximally relaxed: you are at the moment of maxillaxation.

Not that maxillaxation comes from maximally relaxed. The laxation is related to relaxation – they both come from Latin laxare, which can mean ‘relax’ or ‘open’ but can also mean ‘undo, release, relieve, free’ – but the maxil is from maxilla, ‘jaw’. You could say that maxilla is bound so closely to laxation that the la and la have overlapped and become one.

There are other Latin confections that could be made to express the moment of freeing your face from an anti-infection mask. But they don’t all sound as good. And, really, unlike some other masks (which may cover the whole face or only the eyes), the contagion-stoppers are fitted mainly to the jaw, with the lower nose included. Plus, if anyone wants to say “mask” and turns this word into maskillaxation, well, that works too.

You don’t have to use this word, of course; you could use something based on the Greek for ‘unveiling’, ἀποκάλυψις – oh, sorry, apocalypse is already kinda taken. You could do something with ‘lips’ and ‘sheath’, but not using Latin roots, because the Latin words for those would get you caught in adult content blockers (see here). A Greek-derived word for ‘lip stripping’ would be something like cheiloecdysis, which, um, I like maxillaxation, don’t you?

Well, I hope Susan C-P (@booksnips) likes it, because she made the request that led me to this word:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Led me to it? Led me to make it, of course. The ingredients were all there, but this result is my own recipe. I’m sure you’re not surprised that it’s a new old word, first unveiled now before you. But it feels good to have it, doesn’t it?

PS @ottawasteph said “Now do bras!” and as far as I make it, that would readily be mammillaxation – because Latin for ‘breast’ (or anyway ‘nipple’) is mammilla.

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sudorific

Posted on July 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

On a day like this, the air is a thousand furry caterpillars crawling down your back. The sun shames you like a bad performance review, and all the envy you have ever felt creeps viscous from your skin and slinks to find the earth. Even the shadows of trees unwelcome you as though you had filled out paperwork in the wrong order. Your choice is to retreat to the hard artificial arctic of indoor air conditioning or to elongate yourself and allow the hot wet tongue of the dog star to lick you. Never mind how north you may be; your skin is in not the south but the sud, and it is torrific, horrific… sudorific.

If you’re in Canada, this word may be more familiar thanks not to the weather (which is only occasionally sultry) but to the toiletries: your antiperspirant (if you have one) says, on the French side, antisudorifique. Which can readily be anglicized as antisudorific, telling us that sudorific must mean perspirant and, from that, that sudor would seem to have to do with… sweat.

Which it does. It’s the Latin word for ‘sweat’. You may know it from the long and laborious medieval song “Olim sudor Herculis,” about the labours of Hercules, the title of which means “Once, the sweat of Hercules…”

But where does this word come from? Oh, that’s no sweat. No, wait, actually, it is. Or, anyway, it’s the same source as sweat, as scholars have found by poring over the historical record: sudor traces to Proto-Indo-European *sweyd-, which is also the source of Proto-Germanic *switjaną, which is the origin of, yes, sweat, and all the related words in other Germanic languages, such as German schwitzen and Yiddish shvitzn.

Well. This is the weather where we’re all shvitzers waiting for waiters to bring us spritzers (“sudo bring me a spritzer”). It’s not so terrific; it’s sudorific.

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lustration

Posted on July 16, 2020 | 1 comment

Sometimes a once-illustrious institution has lost its lustre. Perhaps (by way of illustration) its leader has been too great a luster, for power or money or luxury or adulation or adulteration; perhaps there has been less lucidity than one would like. The loutishness of the lotharios has gotten many into a lather of loathing for the leadership and its acolytes. It will all need to be laved, washed clean like the Augean stables, but more than that: it cannot have a mere whitewash; it must have performative purification. There must be a lustration.

Lustration is a word not often seen or heard, though it’s certainly not without occasion for use. One problem is that it sounds too much like a number of other words that don’t mean the same: lust and luster and lustre and illustration all leap to mind, and while the first two are not related to lustration the latter two may be. But while something that has had a lustration may seem sparkling clean and picture-perfect under illumination, that’s not what lustration means.

A lustration is, in the old and original sense, a rite of purification, especially of washing. Sometimes it’s more of a symbolic washing, or even a sacrifice, but it can also be a good and proper cleansing. And from that comes a more modern and figurative sense: to quote Wiktionary, “The restoration of credibility to a government by the purging of perpetrators of crimes committed under an earlier regime.” Not just slapping a new coat of paint on the walls and some perpetrators on the wrists, and not just making an example of one or two while letting the rest remain unexemplary; getting rid of all of them, and dealing with them according to their deserving. You can see where such a word could come into play from time to time.

But how has this word, which looks so lustrous and illustrative, taken a left turn to the lavabo and perhaps the guillotine? It comes from Latin lustratio, which is derived from lustro and ultimately lustrum, which refers to a purificatory sacrifice; it most likely is related to luo and lavo, both of which mean ‘I wash’ (they’re originally two versions of the same word); trace those back to Proto-Indo-European and you find the source of words to do with washing, including such as lather. But it may also (or alternatively) be related to luceo, ‘I shine’, source of words such as lucid; luceo traces to a Proto-Indo-European root that has as descendants words such as illustration, illustrious, lustre, luxury, light, and even leukemia and lynx. The evident fact that illustro (‘I elucidate’ or ‘I illuminate’ or ‘I make illustrious’) is formed from the same lustro as lustration gives some weight to this derivation.

It’s not too hard to see how brightness and cleanness can be related, anyway. As they say, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” But a good scouring with soap, and a removal of those who made it dirty in the first place, can only help.

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kymoskepsis

Posted on July 14, 2020 | 2 comments

We all do it, from time to time, given the chance: we sit and watch the waves come in. The future rolls to you, becomes the present, and again, and again: change, incessant change, so similar one to another but never the same, and yet after half an hour, after an hour, what has changed?

Tide comes to you and takes your time. You look to the horizon, but it is just waves all the way. It is the meeting of happenings you can’t see and things you can see that are not truly happening. The invisible wind brushes the surface of the water, and the water arches its back like a cat and pretends to move. You see it come towards you, but the water is not coming towards you, not piling up at your feet: instead, like generations passing down their thoughts and fears and hopes to later generations, each indistinguishable drop of water pushes the next and that one the next and that one the next, and at last the front of the line falls forward, reaches for you like a drowning person grasping at the shore, and then slides back. And again forward, and again back. In each lash of surf it falls to pieces and comes back together, and that shakes the air, and the air sends waves in the same way to you, and you hear the rush and froth and hiss but it is only the air that was already in your ear telling you what it was told, information passed from the splash through countless atoms until the last of them tumble forward and bump against your eardrum. And waves of light reflect and strike your eyes, and cells take note and nerves pass signals and your brain decides what it all signifies.

This is kymoskepsis. ‘Wave-gazing’. From Greek κῦμα kuma ‘wave’ and σκέψις skepsis ‘watching, considering’. You may know the similarly formed omphaloskepsis, ‘navel-gazing’; here, you look not at your own umbilicus, but at the lifeblood of the world.

You may also recognize in σκέψις the source of skeptic. A person who watches and considers may doubt. But when you watch the waves come towards you from the horizon, do you doubt them? Do you doubt the sea or the lake? More likely you doubt yourself, your significance, your existence. Well, you are also a wave: nothing stays the same inside your mind or your emotions; they change from moment to moment. And from moment to moment your body changes, too; it takes in new food and new air, and it destroys and rebuilds itself, and it lets go of what is no longer needed, and it all changes gradually. The waves know you as one of their own. All your life of watching yourself is so much more kymoskepsis: waves watching waves watching waves.

And words are waves, too, changing with the times, passed on by air and minds and other fluids. We can trace κῦμα and σκέψις back to their postulated Proto-Indo-European origins; everything before that is over the horizon of history, but it came from somewhere. And now we can see κῦμα and σκέψις come together in this word to roll forward: this article that you are reading is the first time of use of kymoskepsis, the new old word. I nearly used the Latinized spellings to make cymoscepsis, which is more wave-shaped and more wave-sounding, but I was… skeptical. Perhaps it is the better version; we shall see, in time.

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kauch

Posted on July 10, 2020 | Leave a comment

There are times when things just don’t look right, don’t sound right, don’t match what you expect, and it seems to come out of nowhere; you can’t see clearly, like you’re in a mist, and you’re full of… kauch.

Kauch? Is that like a short form of “OK, augh!” or “OK, ouch”? Well, no, but it does express something of that attitude. It means ‘trouble, worry, anxiety’. And it’s said like…

…hmm, well, there are quite a few variations on the pronunciation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Brits may say it /kjɔːx/, /kjɔː/, /kɔːx/, or /kɔːk/; Americans may say it /kjɔ/, /kjɑ/, /kjɔx/, /kjɑx/, /kɔk/, /kɑk/, /kɔx/, or /kɑx/; Scots say it/kjɔx/. And Wiktionary goes simply with /kjɑx/. Which, for those not familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, is like if you start to say “cute” but replace the “oot” with “ach” (as in the Scottish or German word), perhaps because you see something that troubles you.

Which might be, for instance, how you get to that pronunciation from the spelling kauch. Shouldn’t it at least be kiauch?

Would you settle for kiaugh? That’s the other spelling, and it helps account for those versions that sound like “kyaw” as well. But you can write it kauch and pronounce it /kjɑx/, or you can write it kiaugh and pronounce it /kɔk/. Because anxiety has its own secret reasons and distortions, hiding behind clouds, and nothing seems to go together as it should or to make clear sense.

And nothing has a good justification, either. This word, for instance. Where does it come from? Oxford doesn’t know. Wiktionary doesn’t know. Merriam-Webster (which goes only with the kiaugh spelling and the /kjɑx/ pronunciation) doesn’t know.

We do know that it’s a Scottish word, originally, and so it would seem to come from Scots Gaelic, which branched off from the same old tongue as modern Irish. And the way that /kjɑx/ would be spelled in Irish would typically be ceach or ciach. It happens that there’s no Irish word (modern or historical) spelled ceach, though ceacht means ‘lesson’ (a cause of anxiety for many people), but there is an Irish word ciach, a now-disused genitive form of the word ceo (ceo is said like “kyo” or “ko”). Of course many people get anxiety from their CEO, but this ceo means ‘fog’, ‘mist’, ‘haze’, or ‘vapour’ – or it can be used idiomatically in a phrase such as “Níl tú ag insint ceo den fhírinne dhom” (“You aren’t telling me a word of the truth,” or more literally “You aren’t telling me a mist of the truth”; thanks to Wiktionary for the example). So ciach used to mean ‘of fog’ or ‘of mist’ (or ‘fog’s’ or ‘mist’s’), but now they just use ceo unchanged for that.

But that’s not where kauch comes from either. Remember: etymology by sound is not sound etymology! You need to have a trail of attested uses. And there’s no known link. Sometimes when you try to go back in the mists of time, you just get more mist.

Just like how sometimes when you dive into anxiety, worry, trouble, kauch, kiaugh, whatever, you just get more of it.

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geloscopy

Posted on July 7, 2020 | 1 comment

Can you divine what this funny-looking word means?

The -oscopy is the easier part, since we see it in a variety of terms: arthroscopy, colonoscopy, microscopy, horoscopy, laparoscopy, spectroscopy… In general they involve taking a look at something, and sometimes doing something to or about what you’re looking at. This -scop- is the same one as in periscope, telescope, horoscope, and assorted other words such as scopophilia; it comes from Greek -σκοπία -skopia, ‘observation’, from σκοπεῖν skopein, ‘look at’, but its various uses in English exhibit some amount of scope creep.

The gel- part might stop you cold at first. Is that the same gel as in gelid, ‘cold’? Which is the same, at root, as in gelatin and congeal and assorted other words tracing back to coldness or freezing? Then geloscopy would be, what, a cold glance? Or a cold read? Or looking at something cold? Or just looking cold?

H, no. Sorry to cast a chill on the idea, but that gel- is from Latin gelare, ‘freeze’ or ‘cause to congeal’ or ‘petrify with fright’. It traces to a Proto-Indo-European root that also descended to Greek γελανδρόν gelandron, ‘cold, chill, frost’, but that Greek root isn’t the source of this gel-.

No, the Greek root that this word draws on is γελάω gelaō (Modern Greek γελώ), verb, ‘laugh’.

So… does that mean that this word, which is funny looking (and also funny sounding, in that the stress is on the o, “jell oss co pee”), also means ‘the state of looking funny’?

No, it’s even more laughable than that. You see, -scopy can refer to looking at something for scientific or medical purposes, but it can also refer to looking at something for purposes of divination – as in horoscopy, whish is time-based divination, or scatoscopy, which is divination by looking at feces (perhaps watching certain TV channels would serve today), or, well, geloscopy, which is divination by looking at laughter.

Looking at? Who has seen the laughter? Not even W.O. Mitchell or Christina Rossetti! Obviously this is the broader sense of ‘look at’, meaning in this case ‘listen to’. But what can you divine from laughter?

You tell me. Don’t say you’ve never listened to how someone laughs and formed expectations of their character from it. It’s as common a clue to their persona as how they shake hands or how they dress. Can it predict what will happen to them in the future? Well… it sets up odds of how you’ll interact with them, anyway. Don’t laugh! That’s part of their future, right?

Besides, divination has also been used for things hidden in the here and now, not just in the future. You can know something about a person by how they’re laughing. Also by when they’re laughing, and at what – or whom. Not so laughable when you think of it that way, is it?

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smew

Posted on July 5, 2020 | 1 comment

Say, what’s smew?

This is a cute but iffy little word, isn’t it? It brings all sorts of things to mind. Perhaps it has a smell, or perhaps it smears; maybe it mews like a kitten, or maybe it lives in a mews. It might spew from its maw. It seems small and perhaps new. It might be suited to smog or to snow or it might prefer to swim; it might like to eat s’mores or watch sumo. Who’s to know?

Well, this chap, for one:

You can see he’s a big fan of smew. Has been ever since he was a kid. The smew come over from Siberia and spend the winter in England, some of them right by where he grew up.

For those who can’t or don’t want to watch the video: a smew is a kind of little diving duck. The males are mostly white, with a striking black pattern, including a mask; the females are grey with brown heads; both of them have pointy bills and, typically, crests on their heads that would get them into the better kind of punk bars. Their calls sound like a cross between a chainsaw revving and a character from The Simpsons.

And they’ll just paddle along happily on the water, then abruptly dive in and, thereafter, resurface eating a fish. Icy water does not bother them.

OK, but… where the heck did they get this name? Why, of all the things they could be called, are they smew? And why, of all the things smew could be a name for, does it refer to these little ducks?

The answer is… no one really knows. The name has been in use since at least the 1600s. There’s another word, smee, that is used for several ducks, including the wigeon and the smew, and smew may be related to that, though they showed up at about the same time; smee in its turn is probably related to smeath, which is another word for the same thing and has been around about as long. Smew and smee may also be related to Dutch smient (which means ‘wigeon’) and German Schmeiente or Schmünte (which mean ‘wild duck’).

And… well, that’s all. The word might as well have flown in from Siberia. It didn’t, though; when they’re in Russia, the locals call them луток, lutok.

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