skulduggery

Skulduggery! What kind of clandestine outrage is that? Is it some fiddling, diddling, or jiggery-pokery? We know it’s not pleasant, that’s for sure.

Or… well, what do you find pleasant? Certainly not digging skulls by moonlight in graveyards. But how about some other “underhanded or unscrupulous behavior”? Or what about “shockingly gross or lewd conduct”?

Don’t look shady at me. Those are just definitions from Merriam-Webster. Here, though, let’s switch to Oxford. Do you like “underhand dealing, roguish intrigue or machination, trickery”? Not so many admit to enjoying engaging in it, but rather more like to read about it – and it never fails to fill movie theatre seats. OK, and how about “breach of chastity”? Or “obscenity”? I know that many of you are at least secretly charmed by such things.

But wait. I’m playing a trick here. My subterfuge is that the more lusty among those definitions are not for skulduggery itself but for the word it evolved from: sculduddery.

Sculduddery, we discover, got its destiny from the clans: it’s an old Scottish word, spelt variously, including sculdudrie, which is how it can be seen in a 1714 play by Susanna Centlivre with the provocative title The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret!!!

Well, the secret’s out now… except for the secret of where the heck sculduddery originally came from. Not from skull, that’s for sure, for what have skulls to do with lewdness? (Please don’t answer that. You know what I mean.) From scullery-maids? I mean, probably not, but even if that were so, what would duddery mean? Something to do with duds, i.e., clothing or rags? We can only speculate, and I wouldn’t want to reach too far on something like this, because, as every linguist learns, etymology by sound is not sound etymology, and sculduddery has left no trail of evidence behind.

Which, admittedly, is a thing skulduggery aims for. But, now, by what skilled diddly did sculduddery become skulduggery? Well, skulduggery shows up first in the mid-1800s, and first in the US, and first spelled scull-duggery, and first referring to political and financial trickery and intrigues. We don’t know for absolute certain that it traces to sculduddery, but the trail from shady conduct of one kind to shady conduct of another is not long, and neither is the trail from duddery to duggery, especially when we consider the influence of other English words that go to the /g/ in the middle rather than staying at the tip of the tongue. It just feels a bit more right (and a bit more shady) to dig in further.

And then, of course, the scul or scull is easily reinterpreted as skull, especially given the associations of skulls with piracy, graveyards, and so on. It’s true that etymology by sound is not sound etymology, but the average speaker does not carry that in mind; common uses of words are often quite strongly influenced by what other words they sound like. That’s how outrage has gained an air of rage out even though it’s unrelated (it’s from the French noun form of outré, which means ‘excessive’ or ‘beyond propriety’ and traces to Latin ultra). And so the shady conduct of sculduddery, shifted to the different shady conduct of scull-duggery, gained yet another kind of shade at the sign of the skull.

Which is not to say that there is always a literal boneyard in mind with the term. I checked for collocations, and political implications remain quite frequent – for instance, if a candidate starts out promising one thing and then sneakily ends up standing for something very different. I was surprised, however, to see that the word most commonly seen with skulduggery in the Corpus of Contemporary American English was pleasant.

Hmm… so is skulduggery really so charming? Or is it returning to its more sexual senses? Some of you already know the answer: Skulduggery Pleasant is the title character of a series of dark fantasy novels by Derek Landy. They are, I’m told, quite popular. And what sort of person is Skulduggery Pleasant? A 400-year-old murder victim brought back to life as a living skeleton.

And it seems there’s no lewdness or bawdiness in the books at all. What a sneaky transformation!