pernickety, persnickety

There are some pervasive misconceptions of editors. The humble word midwife is pictured as a kind of sneering, snickering, prickly, pernicious nitpicker, peering down every grammatical snicket in search of perfidy with a prurient, almost pornographic concupiscence for impertinent solecisms, enforcing pure lexical trickery purely for the purpose of putting poor scribes in the nick. In short, editors are thought of as persnickety.

Or should that be pernickety?

Hmm.

First of all, I must protest that it’s not true: a good editor is not a grammar numpty. A decent verbal massage therapist is in no way a textual Torquemada. Good editors are kind people who want the author to do as well as possible. (Yes, there are bad editors, but they are very much the minority. And those people who freelance unsolicited with markers on signage are rank amateurs, and pretentious creeps at that.)

Now let’s move on to the word – or words – of the day. Perhaps you have only ever seen one of the pair, or perhaps you have seen both; you more likely than not have at least a preference. But which one is the right one?

Ha. Both are established and accepted. I will brook no pernicketiness or persnicketiness about this. If you accept that we have both person and parson, both vermin and varmint, both further and farther, then you can accept that we have both pernickety and persnickety.

Which came first? That we do seem to know: pernickety was seen in print as early as 1808, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, while persnickety is known just since 1885. Also, pernickety started in Scotland and still prevails in Britain, whereas persnickety seems to be predominantly North American.

It’s not entirely clear why the s appeared. Some have suggested influence from snicket, though the first sighting of snicket as such was not until 1898 (it’s a narrow passage between buildings, in case you’re not sure – and it is not obligately lemony, either). Others have suggested that it’s just a substitution of snick for nick, which, yes, OK, but what does that mean? Well, snick could be an alteration of sneck, which is a Scottish word for – not snake! – ‘cut, notch’… which, as you may connect, nick also means.

Of course, nick means a number of things. You could be in good nick with Saint Nick, or down in the nick with Old Nick. But while Nick comes from Nicholas (which comes from Greek for ‘victory’ plus ‘people’), the other nicks come ultimately from the same nick, which, as noted, has to do with a notch, possibly (you’d think) related to nock as in the place at the back of an arrow where the bowstring goes. That in turn is… apparently not related to various similar-sounding words in various other languages, such as German nicken and Swedish nicka, which both mean ‘to nod’.

OK, but what about the per- and that rickety -ety ending? As far as we can tell, this is the same per- as in perfidious and pernicious and perseverant and even perhaps: a Latin root meaning ‘through’ that has gotten all through our language, even mixing with non-Latin roots (like hap). It seems perfect for the task. And the -ety certainly has a somethingness to it, but to some extent this word is responsible for that. It’s suggested that the -et- comes from -ed, as in the past participial suffix. The -y is the usual adjectival suffix, as in funny and happy (oh, hi, hap, what luck to see you again).

And it all comes together nicely enough. And frankly, the sound of it happens (happens!) to work with it too, in its polysyllabic way: per(s)nickety is to fussy what discombobulate and absquatulate and copacetic are to break and scram and fine – it expends needless additional energy in a punctilious display of painstaking conscientiousness, like some wanton nitpicker seeking to make a victorious mark on public signage. It presents itself as fastidious by being slow and tedious. But it’s plenty of fun to say.