Monthly Archives: July 2026

chuckle, giggle, yuk, joke

Posted on July 24, 2026 | Leave a comment

If someone tells a funny joke, do you chuckle? Do you giggle? Do you yuk it up? (I won’t ask whether you yuck it up, because that spelling can also refer to something… unpleasant.)

What if I told you that all those words – joke, giggle, chuckle, yuk – are related etymologically?

They’re not. Sorry. But it’s not implausible, phonologically. And they are all imitative in origin, so, in a way, if you want to trace the etymology back to nonlinguistic utterances, you could say they are related.

First, though, let’s address a ticklish little issue: the -le on giggle and chuckle. That’s a frequentative suffix, meaning that it indicates repeated action. You can see that clearly on words like crackle and sniffle and snuggle, though -le also shows up on a lot of words that don’t have versions without -le – at least not anymore: cuddle, fumble, sizzle, tickle…

Anyway, chuckle is from chuck plus -le and giggle is probably from gig plus -le. Which doesn’t help much, because this chuck is not the chuck we think of when we think of chuck, and this gig is equally a different gig than gig.

Chuck, in this case, is imitative of a sound such as the one chickens make, and can also mean ‘cluck’. Fair enough, since a certain kind of laugh is often described as a cackle. Oh, yeah, cackle: another imitative sound, cack, plus the -le.

And gig is supposedly imitative of a creaking sound, although there are cognates with giggle throughout the Germanic languages, such as Dutch giechelen (which uses a pair of those deep velar fricatives characteristic of Dutch – a sound like horking a chicken bone out of your throat), and all of them mean ‘giggle’, not ‘creak’.

Anyway, getting back to the plausibility of their being related, you will see in chuck and cack and gig a velar stop (“g” or “k”) at the end, the same as in the plainly imitative yuk. And while the initial sounds are different, they are all capable of being phonologically related with vowel shifts: a dorsal stop “k” can assimilate forward towards a front vowel, giving an affricate /tʃ/ “ch” or a fricative /x/ “kh,” and at the back or in the front it can be voiced, /g/ “g” or /dʒ/ “j” or /j/ “y” – this is how the Dutch word for ‘goat’, geit, sounds sort of like a vehement utterance of “hate,” and the Swedish word for ‘goat’, get, sounds like “yate.”

So. Do you get it? (Or do you hate it?) The laughter sound we represent as yuk (or yuck) can also be the etymological origin of chuckle and giggle and even cackle, and while there’s no known common root for them between then and now, there could be, and anyway they’re all imitating the same thing.

But here’s the punch line: joke traces through Latin iocus (‘joke, jest, pastime’) back to Proto-Indo-European *yek- ‘speak, utter’. Yep, yek. That is the sound of people making sounds – talking or, yeah, laughing. That’s right, the prototypical utterance may well have been yukking it up. Yikes!

beeline

Posted on July 16, 2026 | 1 comment

As I was chatting with Timmy Danos and Donna Ferrante (see my word tasting notes on free rein and horse idioms), Maury at last appeared, holding a Bellini.

“Where have you been?” I said.

“Sorry,” Maury said. “I was making a beeline for the blinis.”

“There’s a nice New York subway reference,” Timmy said to Donna.

“Blinis?” Maury said. “I mean, the B line ends at Brighton Beach, but…”

“And it makes a straight line down to it through Brooklyn, express, skipping the long queue of local Q line stops.” Timmy said. “And it was inaugurated as an express line in Manhattan. The B-line beeline.”

“That may well B,” Maury said, trusting everyone would hear the pun, “but I can’t think anyone would name a highway in Florida after a New York subway.”’

“Highway?” Donna said.

“It’s officially the Beachline now,” I said, “but until 2005, Florida State Road 528 was named the Bee Line, so named because it goes straight from Orlando to Canaveral with no curves for more than 20 miles.”

“It’s not as though there are no New Yorkers in Florida,” Timmy said. He took a sip from his highball of Blanton’s.

“But beelines owe nothing to New York,” Maury said, “any more than to Berlin or Ljubljana. Leaving aside that the New York train was not called the B until 1967, the same year as the Beeline Expressway opened, the etymology of beeline is entomology: a bee, and not a B.” He tried to gesture to indicate the difference in words. “We’ve had beeline in the language since the earlier 1800s, referring to an apian trajectory through the air.”

“Don’t bees just kind of… buzz around, from flower to flower?” Donna said. “Seems more like a cruise than a direct route.”

“Right until it’s loaded with pollen and wants to go home,” Maury said. “Then it skips the stops.”

“Speaking of which,” I said. A yellow and black insect was making straight for Maury’s Bellini. “That doesn’t belong here.”

Maury looked up and flinched. “Then I won’t be long here either!” He made a move barely describable in Labanotation trying to ward off the bug. Alas, this only enabled it to sting him, leaving a blain. I won’t transcribe under my own byline what he bellowed – let’s just say it was an f-line.

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free rein

Posted on July 9, 2026 | 2 comments

“I guess I availed myself of some free rain with those horse words,” Timmy Danos said, chuckling a little. Since he was speaking, I didn’t notice his spelling. He had circled to the bar to get himself another drink, and came back with one for me as well – a glass of sherry or something like it – so I was perfectly glad to keep talking with him and Donna Ferrante a little longer.

“Interesting way of phrasing it,” I said. “People ‘get’ or ‘are given’ free rein, but I can’t think of ever hearing ‘availed myself.’”

“Well,” Timmy said, “if the rain is free, who am I to turn it away from my crops?”

“Sorry, what?” I said.

“Oh, that makes sense,” Donna said. “If the rainmaker is making rain…”

“Wait,” I said, but then I waited to see what he was going to say next.

“Well, yeah,” he said, “there was a king who had the power of making it rain, and usually he charged taxes, but sometimes he would just do it for free.”

“It’s… not usually… that kind of ‘rain,’” I said.

“Yeah, come to think of it,” Donna said, “I usually see it spelled r-e-i-g-n.”

“Well, sure,” Timmy said. “He was a king, so making the weather was part of his royal powers. So if he was making it rain, he was reigning, and if he wasn’t collecting taxes, he was doing it for free.”

“Oh,” Donna said, “I thought it was the other kind of free. Like no one’s keeping you from reigning.”

“Who would do that?” Timmy said. “Who’s above a king? Like, the king’s boss is going to text him and say ‘You’re on your own today’?”

“I have to say,” I said, “I’m surprised you’re not connecting it to horses, given your Trojan connections.”

“Horses?” Timmy said. “A horse king?” I really couldn’t tell if he was pulling my leg, but I had to assume he was, given precedent.

“Rein, as in r-e-i-n, the thing you use to control a horse,” I said.

“But that would be ‘free reins,’ wouldn’t it?” Donna said. “Because there are two of them.”

“It has sometimes been plural, historically, but the singular has prevailed, terming it like a type or mass object, in parallel with ‘free hand’ and so on,” I said. “It’s an old and well established idiom.”

“But, OK, you don’t pay for the reins, so what?” Timmy said. “You’re still using them to control the horse. What does ‘free’ mean?”

“It means you’re not tugging on them, so the horse is free in them,” I said. “Free as in not constrained.”

“But that would be ‘rein-free’ or ‘free of reins,’” Donna said.

“No, the reins are still attached, they’re just not constraining.”

“I find that a very weird way to put it,” Donna said.

“Welcome to English idioms,” I said. “We’ve had this one since the 1600s.”

“Well, I like the royal reign version better,” Donna said.

“And I like the precipitation version better,” Timmy said. “And since you’re drinking rainwater Madeira” – he gestured at my little tawny glass – “and you didn’t pay for it, I reckon I get to pull your strings.”

“Or jerk my chain,” I said, and drained the glass.

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