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fist, punch

Posted on October 31, 2024 | 1 comment

Did you know that, back in the mists of time, fist and punch come from the same root? It’s true (probably). But not the punch you’re probably thinking of. The other one.

Also, by the way, it is the fist you’re probably thinking of, and not the other one.

Oh, did you know about the other fist? To start with, it’s pronounced like “feist” (as in “feisty”) – which, in fact, it’s closely related to. You see, feisty started as a reference to a kind of dog: one full of spirit. Or of vapours. Noxious ones. A feist was (and is) a spunky or belligerent dog, but it first of all meant a dog that fists. By which I mean the fist that sounds like feist. Which means, brace yourself, ‘fart’. The source is the Old English verb fisten, with a long i; an alternate spelling led to feist. There are similar words in other Germanic languages: Dutch veest (fart, noun), Swedish fisa (fart, verb), German Fist (quiet wind)…

But that’s not the word that’s related to punch, etymologically. Nor to the other punch, for that matter. Though, come to think of it, we can find a commonality of sense or effect between each pair of words… except the pair that’s related etymologically. Here, let’s call them fist₁ ‘clenched hand’, fist₂ ‘fart’, punch₁ ‘strike with fist; make a hole’ (they’re the same word, sort of… see below), and punch₂ ‘mixed beverage of juice and (usually) alcohol’. The match-ups are:

fist₁ and punch₁: done with the clenched hand
fist₁ and fist₂: adds an air of unpleasantness to a conversation
fist₂ and punch₂: can make you queasy
punch₁ and punch₂: can render you unconscious
fist₂ and punch₁: an assault on the senses
fist₁ and punch₂: derived from a root meaning ‘five’

Yes, that’s right: five relations of sense or effect, and one etymological relation meaning ‘five’.

You might already know that punch, the beverage, comes from the Hindi word for ‘five’. This is because the original beverage that had the name was made in India and had five ingredients. (Never mind that in the Caribbean their recipe for punch names four things in proportion: “one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak” – e.g., lime, sugar syrup, rum, and water. In India the fifth ingredient was spice, and that’s also often added in the Caribbean.) The Hindi word comes from the Sanskrit word, which in turn comes from Proto-Indo-European, a root reconstructed as *pénkʷe (the asterisk before it means we don’t have documentary proof of it, it’s just reconstructed by deduction and inference). This root meant ‘five’ and ‘hand’ – because, of course, of the digits of a hand. It is the source of the words in pretty much every Indo-European language for ‘five’.

It is also – or, rather, I should say, it may also be – the source of English finger and English fist. The phonological changes involved are plausible but not inevitable; there are no competing conjectural derivations that I’m aware of. So we can take it provisionally that fist and punch (but not punch₁, just punch₂) are related. Also finger and punch as in “five-finger death punch” – but only if the death punch in question is an overly strong drink made with five fingers of rum.

By the way, the other punch – the one meaning ‘hit with a fist’ or ‘make a hole in’ – traces via Old French ponchon to Latin punctus, from pungo ‘I prick’. But the ‘hit’ sense also draws on an earlier form of punish.

There is, by the way, one word that ties together all four words, fist₁, fist₂, punch₁, and punch₂. It’s a name of a place that was known for drunkenness (punch₂) and was struck and punished (punch₁) – perhaps by the hand of God but anyway by the hand of nature (fist₁) – and wiped out by an enormous mephitic eructation of the earth (fist₂). And its name also means, etymologically (via the Oscan language, in reference to how many districts the place had), ‘five’. It’s Pompeii.

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fisticuffs

Posted on January 31, 2013 | Leave a comment

What is the softest sound in English? The one most like a very fluffy feather duvet?

To my ears it’s /f/. Yes, /h/ is in some ways softer, but that’s the softness of a breeze. I’d rather lie on a fluffy duvet than a soft breeze.

Now, what do you associate with being hit with the hand, open or clenched? Anything soft?

Well, yes, perhaps there’s a scuffle, a brushing and grasping of clothing before the bruising and bone-bopping. Two bodies engaged in a physical confrontation may come into close contact like letters in ligature, fi or ff. But the swinging fists, cuffing each other’s heads? Hard like a voiceless stop – a knuckle tap like a /t/, a solid knock like a /k/.

Perhaps the fists swing through the air with a rustling of fabric, and the person hit falls back with further friction. Perhaps a pugilistic confrontation really can sound like “fisticuffs.”

But does it have to? Well, of course not. Onomatopoeia is not the sole basis of language. And it just happens that the word we have for a closed hand, claviform, is fist, a word of Germanic origin that comes by way of the Old English strong feminine noun fyst. And one word we have for striking a blow with the hand is cuff – we tend to think of this as a backhand now, the sort of thing that might actually make a “cuff” type of sound – a word that appears to come from Germanic but may have an ultimate Hebraic source, the OED says coyly. (Note that it’s not cuff as in ‘sleeve collar’ – and fist-to-cuffs, which I have seen, is just not it.)

And so we do the sort of handiwork to which we are often wont: we take two words and, playing on assonances, make a compound analogous to another one – such as handiwork. Handy work? Fisty cuff. (Fisticuff was at some earlier times spelled fisty cuff.)

You don’t normally see or hear reference to just one fisticuff. Somehow such a lengthy and scuffling word is not quite right for a single bop to the brainbox, is it? Instead we get a five-dollar word for a fistfight: “It now and then happened that the literary gladiators came to actual fisticuffs.” (J.A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy.) There is something of the Victorian waistcoated bare-knuckle boxer in this: it has a formal or old-fashioned edge, or anyway a certain detached erudition. I can picture Snagglepuss saying it: “Heavens to Murgatroyd! Fisticuffs even!”

And it does, after all, have a sonic infrastructure of physical stuff, sticks and staffs and fists and some selected expletives (stronger than “Suffering succotash!”). It is also a pleasure to say, cycling from bitten lip to hiss and tap on tongue tip to kick at the back and then again the opening fricative. It has rhythm, a dactyl time-step like a little soft shoe. It plays so effectively with words like confiscate and suffocate and even sycophant, plus stick shift and scoff at and so much more.

Give it a try: The sycophant was fixated on the efficacy of resorting to fisticuffs. Stephanie Escoffier can scoff at my fractured stick, but it effected sufficient deflection when I was engaged in fisticuffs. Not glorious prose styling, but an engaging oral exercise. And fair enough: a most common kind of fisticuffs now, it seems, is verbal fisticuffs.