I’m reading the autobiography of Geddy Lee, and so I’m listening to even more music by Rush than I usually do. And on Moving Pictures – the classic album that includes “Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight,” and “YYZ” – there’s one song that always quickens my pulse, but especially in times of revived prejudice and reactionary fervor: “Witch Hunt.” The song opens with discordant strings and the dark sounds of a mob, which, I read in Wikipedia, “[Alex] Lifeson explained was recorded outside Le Studio on a cold December day, with the band and others shouting, warmed by a bottle of Scotch whisky.” (I’m not sure how hygienic that was.) The lyrics build to describe xenophobic book-burners, “Quick to judge, quick to anger / Slow to understand.”
Quick. They were quick, and their victims were dead. It cuts to the quick – but in more ways than you might think. In the paragraph you just read, there are (along with quick and quickens) six other words all etymologically related to quick: biography, revived, Wikipedia, Lifeson, whisky, and hygienic. And if I were to point out that Le Studio, in the Laurentians of Quebec, was like a zoo of internationally famous recording acts, that would add a seventh.
I’ll go through them one by one. Let’s start with the origins of quick, though. As you may know, or may have surmised from phrases such as the quick and the dead and cut to the quick, its original meaning was not ‘speedy’ but ‘alive, living, lively’ – and it is from the ‘lively’ sense that it extended through ‘active’ and ‘vigorous’ to ‘speedy’, a sense that first showed up in the 1300s and, by the end of the 1800s, was the dominant sense. But quick, its Latin-looking qu notwithstanding, was cwic in Old English, and that came via Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European *gʷeyh₃- ‘live’, which is the source of quite a lot of other words relating to life – not all of which have the same kind of kissing mouth gesture as [kwɪk].
One of those words is Greek βῐ́ος (bíos) ‘life’, which appears in biography. Another is Latin vivus, ‘alive’, root of revived. Another is Greek ζῷον (zõion) ‘animal’, root of zoo (via zoological garden). Yet another Greek word from the same source is ὑγιής (hugiḗs) ‘healthy’, root of hygienic. And then there’s wiki, as in Wikipedia, which comes from Hawai‘ian wikiwiki, which is a borrowing and reduplication of English quick – a rather quicker etymology than the others.
And then there’s Lifeson, as in Alex Lifeson, the guitarist of Rush. But, ha ha, I’m pulling a fast one with this – you see, life is not etymologically related to quick. But Lifeson is his stage name; it’s a translation of his actual name, Živojinović, which in the original Serbian is written Живојиновић. A translation? Yes, the Serbian name means ‘son of life’, and ‘life’ in Serbian is живот, žìvot, which is indeed from the same Proto-Indo-European root, *gʷeyh₃-, via Proto-Slavic.
And then there’s whisky. It comes, clipped and modified, from Scots Gaelic uisge-beatha, ‘water of life’. It’s a translation of Latin aqua vitæ, and you will know that vitæ is related. But so is uisge-beatha. But while, as Ogden Nash wrote, candy is dandy but liquor is quicker, it’s not the whisky (uisge) part that’s related to quick, sound resemblance notwithstanding. No, I’ve pulled another fast one: uisge means ‘water’; beatha means ‘life’, and that is the word that is related – you may notice (if you squint) the resemblance of Proto-Celtic *biwos to the Greek bíos.
And so we see how one root has quickened many modern words (and there are still more in other languages), in some cases sneaking away after a brief kiss. Words are the stuff of life, and their ways are many and mysterious.
Oh, but did you notice one more word up there that’s related in sense but not etymologically related? Take a quick look and see if you can spot it.
It’s Rush.
Sesquiotica 