Tag Archives: punch

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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lunch

Posted on October 31, 2010 | Leave a comment

“I have a hunch,” Maury said, “we’ve beaten the lunch bunch to the punch.”

“Yes,” I said, surveying the still-deserted food court, “we’re ahead of the crunch.”

Jess nodded approvingly. “That’s good. I hate to have to use a truncheon to approach my luncheon.”

Maury looked at his watch. “Of course, the fact that it’s barely eleven would have something to do with it.”

“So we’ll call it a brunch,” Jess said.

I shrugged. “I just want something to munch.” I looked around. “Not too many options in that respect.”

“We’re surrounded by food places!” Jess protested. “Not too many options?”

“Most of what they serve does not make an audible crunch,” I said. “I am not of that school who – like some restaurant reviewers – would use munch for eating foods such as fried eggs or mashed potatoes.”

“Or soft tacos or hamburgers,” Maury added. He looked over to his left and jabbed me with his elbow. “You could get a Double Down.”

I looked down at his elbow. “What was that?”

“A dunch,” he said. “A short sharp blow, with the elbow.”

“Well,” I said, returning to the main topic, “double down is what I want in my pillow, not on my plate – and goose down, not chicken down.”

“Well, then, what sounds tastiest?”

“So far,” I said, “unch.”

“You can’t make a meal of a phonaestheme,” Jess pointed out.

“True,” I said, “but it works the jaws and, with that final affricate, makes a sort of crunch.”

“Would you really call it a phonaestheme?” Maury mused. “Do the words all have some element of sense in common?”

“They mostly seem to have an onomatopoeic origin,” I said. “Even bunch is thought to have an imitative basis.”

“Well,” said Jess, “I don’t know that I’d be as definite as that. I seem to recall that the OED gives ‘of obscure origin’ for several of them.”

“My favourite is its source for luncheon,” I said. “It says ‘related in some way to lunch.'”

“Which, in its turn,” Maury said, “may have formed on the basis of lump the same way hunch may have been based on hump and bunch may be related to bump.”

“And then there’s the other lunch,” I said, “basically obsolete now: ‘the sound made by the fall of a soft, heavy body.'”

“A lump, perhaps?” said Maury. “Does a lurch by a lump count?”

“Well,” declared Jess, “I would like a lump of something for lunch.” She looked around again. “Holy cow!”

We looked up. In the short time we had been tasting words, lines had formed at all of the food places. Maury threw his hands up as if crying “Uncle!” and audibly collapsed onto the nearest seat.

“Well,” said Jess, “that was our ‘lunch.'”

Thanks to Gabriel Cooper for suggesting the unch words.

punch

Posted on November 18, 2008 | 1 comment

A short, punchy word, on the whole – or, rather, several identical short, punchy words. One (or two, counting noun and verb) comes from puncheon, a tool for poking holes or, by extension, stamping into (as with a die), which comes from the same Latin source as puncture. From this application of direct force came the sense with the fist. One comes from a commedia dell’arte character, Policinella, with a big paunch and a hooked nose, who became Punchinello, an English puppet character, shortened to Punch, who became best known for beating his wife, Judy, with a stick. One comes from the Sanskrit and Hindi word for “five,” as in five ingredients – in a beverage that was adapted by the English to something that rather caught on. (And began drifting semantically quickly once unmoored from the Raj – rum punch, big in the West Indies, has four ingredients classically: “one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong and four of weak” are the measures.) But a good glass of punch packs a punch (and may punch a hole in your stomach if you have H. pylori problems). Hole is certainly a common collocation of this word, and ticket comes in often enough with the same sense, but outside of specific uses – and even to some extent within them – the puncture sense is bested by the pugnacious force of the word. Other collocations include pulling, packing, drunk, press, card, in, out and up. Even the letters have more the rounded shape of a blunt object (fist, wife-beating stick*) than any reminiscence of an awl or similar piercing object. Only a vowel separates this word from pinch, but the broad u and the narrow i are as opposed as the two actions. This word has the opening phonaesthetics of abrupt words such as puff, punt, pug, and punish, and the closing impact of crunch, bunch and hunch and the crisper munch and lunch. But when you’re quaffing a glass, it may make you think sooner of quench.

*The story that “rule of thumb” comes from the size of a stick a man was allowed to beat his wife with is not true; that account was invented long after the phrase, which came from estimating measurements. See www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-rul1.htm .

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