The English word petition originally had a chiefly religious sense, meaning a supplication or prayer. The word comes from the Latin verb petere "to require, seek, go forward, to aim at" and ultimately we can trace its origin to the Proto-Indo-European base *pet-/*pte-, "to rush, to fly". From this base we've gotten words like pterodactyl, the Old English feðer (feather) and fearn (fern--for its feather-like fronds), and the Latin penna, meaning "feather, wing" which survives in modern ornithology to mean the contour feather of a bird (as opposed to a down feather or plume). From the Italian plural of penna we get penne, as in the pasta, whose diagonally cut ends likely reminded people of writing utensils, pens, whose name also comes from penna because pens were made from quills, the main shafts of feathers.

petition [Online Etymology Dictionary]
pen [Online Etymology Dictionary]
fern [Online Etymology Dictionary]
penne [AHD]

Labels: Italian, Latin, Old English, PIE, The Daily Hump

The ides of March, a date that will live in infamy (at least for members of the gens Julia). For it's on this day that Gaius Julius Caesar, from the Caesarian section of Rome, was slain by a gaggle of senators which included among them supposed bff Brutus. Of course, Caesar got a pretty good heads up from one Titus Vestricius Spurinna whose name may not be well known but job title surely is: soothsayer. Alas, Titus's warnings were not heeded and the world took receipt of one very dead emperor 2,051 years ago today.

Sooth comes from the Old English soð meaning "truth". Soð is the noun form of the adjective soþ, "true", which was originally *sonþ- and from the Proto-Germanic *santhaz (not to be confused with the Proto-Germanic sexual practice known as dirty *santhaz), a cognate with Old English synn "sin" and Latin sontis "guilty". Ultimately, we go back to the Proto-Indo-European *es-ont meaning "being, existence". This also is the root of today's s-forms of the verb "to be" such as the Latin sunt, German sind and French sont.

Sooth is also a linguistic cousin of soothe, which came from the Old English soðian "show to be true". How this came to mean "to quiet, mollify" beats me. Any ideas?

sooth [Online Etymology Dictionary]
soothe [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Ides of March [Wikipedia]
Julius Caesar [Wikipedia]
Titus Vestricius Spurinna [Wikipedia]

Labels: French, German, Latin, Old English, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

I love chickpeas. I love hummus. I love falafel. Falafel comes from the Arabic falāfil, which is the plural of filfil, meaning "pepper". It's likely that this word is related to the Sanskrit pippalī (long pepper), which comes from the Sanskrit pippalam, and referred to the pipal, a fig tree native to India. Incidentally, this is the same species of tree Siddhartha Gautama was sitting underneath when he became enlightened. That's one spicy Buddha.

Our word pepper is from this same root via the Old English pipor, Latin piper and Greek peperi.

pepper [AHD]
falafel [AHD]
pipal [AHD]
pepper [Online Etymology Dictionary]
sacred fig [Wikipedia]

Labels: Arabic, Greek, Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, The Daily Hump

Ah, the storied brogue, that singsong lullaby of the Irish, brogue being another name for the strong dialectal accent common to Irish and Scottish speakers of English. Before we begin, let's look at one of OED's alternate definitions for brogue:

A rude kind of shoe, generally made of untanned hide, worn by the inhabitants of the wilder parts of Ireland and the Scotch Highlands.

This is important because brogue in the dialectal sense probably originated from "speech of those who call a shoe a brogue." Or, if you believe Wikipedia,

The term has been said to have been coined by an Englishman who met an Irishman whose accent was so thick that he spoke "as though he had a shoe in his mouth".

Of course, English has other examples of words that were influenced by footwear: ciabatta (from Italian) and sabotage (from French) being the two most obvious. However, shoes are not always the namesake; in the case of clodhopper (clod being from Old English via Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European base *gel- "to make round") the word originally referred to a plowman (literally "one who goes around fields") but then later it became the heavy shoes worn by such an unsophisticated rustic. Likewise plimsolls are so named because the band around the shoe that holds the two parts together reminded people of the mark on the hull of a ship that shows how heavy it can be loaded (the Plimsoll line--Samuel Plimsoll was a 19th c. M.P. keen on shipping reforms).

brogue [Online Etymology Dictionary]
ciabatta [OED]
sabotage [OED]
clodhopper [OED]
clod [Online Etymology Dictionary]
brogue [Wikipedia]
clodhopper [AHD]
plimsoll [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Samuel Plimsoll [Wikipedia]

Labels: French, Irish Gaelic, Italian, Old English, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

You're familiar with the quasi-weekly Hump This and of course you know The Daily Hump, that weekday feature that's been more regular than a sixty-five year old full of prune juice. Well, this week I'm happy to introduce two new features: Mondays' This Week in Endangered Languages (TWiEL) and Wednesdays' I Live for Dead Tongues (ILfDT).

Endangered languages make me sad. Like endangered animals they're just steps away from disappearing from this earth forever. As Wikipedia notes

While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a good scenario, about half of today's languages will go extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years.

Sure, unlike extinct animals, we can occassionally resurrect an extinct language but it hasn't happened to often (Wikipedia shows only 13 examples). Some people even argue that language extinction is good

...fewer languages means better and clearer communications among the majority of speakers. The economic cost of maintaining myriad separate languages, and their translator caretakers, is enormous.

Humbug. Languages are invaluable; they are unique and hold within their grammar, lexicon and oral traditions thousands of clues about the identities of the speakers and how they live. To delete a language is to permanently destroy windows into these cultures. This line of thinking condones abuse of the minority by the majority and is nothing more than a form of cultural whitewashing.

TWiEL will be relying a lot on Wikipedia's List of endangered languages so I'll be using their definition for determining whether a language is endangered: it must have less than 1,000 speakers and be in rapid decline. I maintain this column as an appreciation for the shrinking universe which these languages describe. Today we're going to start with the waning Wymysorys.

Wymysorys
Language family: Indo-European, Germanic, West Germanic, High German
Writing system: Latin alphabet

Where you'll hear it: Wilamowice, Poland


The origins: "Wymysorys appears to derive from 12th century Middle High German, with a strong influence from Low German, Dutch, Frisian, Polish and Old English. The inhabitants of Wilamowice are thought to be descendants of Dutch, German and Scottish settlers who arrived in Poland in the 13th century. However, the inhabitants of Wilamowice always refused any connections with Germany and proclaimed their Dutch origins."
Famous speakers: poet Florian Biesik

The beginning of the end: "After World War II, local communist authorities forbade the use of the language. Despite the fact that the ban was lifted after 1956, Wymysorys has been gradually replaced by Polish, especially amongst the younger generations."
And today: 70 speakers

Example:

Śłöf duy buwła fest!
Skumma frmdy gest,
Skumma muma ana fettyn,
Z' brennia nysła ana epułn,
Śłöf duy Jasiu fest!

Sleep, my boy, soundly!
Foreign guests are coming,
Aunts and uncles are coming,
Bringing nuts and apples,
Sleep Johnny sound

Labels: Dutch, Germanic, High German, Indo-European, Low German, Middle High German, Old English, Old Frisian, Polish, TWiEL, West Germanic, Wymysorys

Today I was wondering; does the lame exclamation darn have anything to do with mending socks? Answer: no.

Darn, in the quasi-curse sense, is an American creation that was said to have originated in Puritanical New England where it was a punishable offense to say the word damn. It's thought that darn was likely influenced by 'tarnal (supposedly a favorite exclamation of Andrew Jackson), which is short for eternal, as in By the Eternal.

Darn, in the mending sense, is likely from the Middle French darner, meaning "to mend." This goes back to the Breton "piece, fragment, part," which ultimately traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root *der-, meaning "tear" (as in "rip"). And *der- also happens to be the root for our word tear, which came to modern English via Proto-Germanic then Old English.

darn [Online Etymology Dictionary]
tear (v) [Online Etymology Dictionary]

Labels: Breton, Middle French, Old English, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

The pith helmet is often associated with the British Empire; we imagine the English gentry, soon to be dead from cholera, tramping through the tropical jungle while shaded by hats made from the dried pith of the Bengal spongewood. Pith is from the Old English piþa and like its modern counterpart referred to the core of a plant or, more generally, the essential part (thus our word pithy). Ultimately, piþa is from the West Germanic root *pithan-, which is also the source of our word pit, as in a hard seed or kernel.

And, no, *pithan- is not related to python, which is a Greek word named after the fabled serpent slain by Apollo near Delphi. Delphi's original name was Pytho, so named (possibly) because this is where the serpent rotted (the Greek verb meaning "to rot" is pythein). Per the OED

According to one form of the [Python] legend, the oracle originally belonged to or was guarded by the serpent, and, on the extermination of the latter, became the oracle of Apollo.

pith [Online Etymology Dictionary]
pith helmet [Wikipedia]
West Germanic languages [Wikipedia]
python [OED]
python [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Python [Wikipedia]

Labels: Greek, Old English, The Daily Hump, West Germanic

I used the word henge yesterday to describe the structure of books I erected (heh) on my desk. One of my coworkers looked at me quizzically, obviously not understanding what I meant. When disambiguated from its usual primary element, stone-, I suppose henge looks pretty odd.

As I began my research I started to doubt whether henge is really a word; for one, it's not in the American Heritage Dictionary. The oft-cribbed (by me) Online Etymology Dictionary simply states henge, from 1740, is noted as a Yorkshire term for Stonehenge-like structures. I needed more hump fodder than that. Finally, the site English Heritage came through defining henge as

...a roughly circular or oval-shaped flat area over 20m in diameter which is enclosed and delimited by a boundary earthwork that usually comprises a ditch with an external bank. Access to the interior is obtained by way of one, two, or four entrances through the earthwork. Internal components may include portal settings, timber circles, post rings, stone circles, four-stone settings, monoliths, standing posts, pits, coves, post alignments, stone alignments, burials, central mounds, and stakeholes.

Ah, but what of the etymology? Thankfully we have the OED, which defines henge as "In particular reference to the name Stonehenge; something 'hanging' or in suspense." Notice the OED puts hanging in quotes; that's because henge, first coined with the use of the name Stonehenge in the 12th c., likely comes from the same Old English root as our modern word hang.

henge [Wikipedia]

Labels: Old English, The Daily Hump

As the title of this post suggests my particular interest in hags is with the sea variety. Anyone who has ever watched a Popeye cartoon is familiar with the Sea Hag; she's the tall witchy woman with a vulture for a familiar who suffers an unrequited crush on the our favorite roid-raged sailor. It's kind of pathetic, really. But I experienced no such empathy as a child; I just thought the Sea Hag was creepy and awesome in the way only nautical rapscallions can be (evidence: a, b and c).

Hag is a shortened form of the Old English hægtesse meaning "witch, fury." The word can be traced further back to the Proto-Germanic *hagatusjon-. The Middle Dutch cognate, haghetisse, was also shorted to form the German Hexe, meaning "witch;" and it's via the Amish we got our English hex. Now, here's where things get crazy:

[Hag's first] element is probably cognate with [Old English] haga "enclosure" [which is related to our modern hedge]...Or second element may be connected with [Norwegian} tysja "fairy, crippled woman"...from PIE *dhewes- "to fly about, smoke, be scattered, vanish."...Haga is also the haw- in hawthorn, which is a central plant in northern European pagan religion. There may be several layers of folk-etymology here. If the hægtesse was once a powerful supernatural woman..., it may have originally carried the hawthorn sense. Later, when the pagan magic was reduced to local scatterings, it might have had the sense of "hedge-rider," or "she who straddles the hedge," because the hedge was the boundary between the "civilized" world of the village and the wild world beyond. The hægtesse would have a foot in each reality...

Sea hag [TV Acres]
hag [Online Etymology Dictionary]
hex [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Häxan [IMDB.com]
The Dreams in the Witch House [Wikipedia]

Labels: German, Middle Dutch, Norwegian, Old English, Pennsylvania Dutch, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

You may notice the humps this week are shorter; I've got a lot of work to do. Now that that's out of the way today we're going to (very gingerly) hump the scythe: whether reaping barley or souls it's the go-to tool. First things first, however; that initial sc- that we've come to know and love didn't show up until around the 15th c., likely influenced by the Latin verb scindere (to cut: think scissors). Before this time the we had the Middle English sithe and before that the Old English sigði. We can trace the word further back to the Proto-Germanic *segithoz and the Proto-Indo-European base *sek-, meaning "cut".

The base *sek- also happens to be the root of our modern words section, a "cutting off or division," and scythe's close relative, sickle.

scythe [Online Etymology Dictionary]
scythe [OED]
sickle [Online Etymology Dictionary]

Labels: Latin, Middle English, Old English, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

Yesterday we discovered that the Arctic is named after the Greek root for bear, arktikos. Today we're going to look at the word bear itself and why the English and Latin are so incredibly unrelated.

Our word bear comes from the Old English bera. This comes from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic *beron, meaning "the brown one" (think bruin). Apparently, a large chunk of the northern branches (the Germanic, Baltic, Celtic and Slavic branches) of our linguistic ancestors had a taboo associated with the names of wild animals being hunted and either deformed or replaced the PIE term. As Wikipedia notes examples include

...the Irish word for "bear" translated means "the good calf", in Welsh it translates as "honey-pig", in Lithuanian it means "the licker" and Russian "медведь" literally means "one who leads to honey".

As my Persian teacher explained to me yesterday this substitution also occurs in many of the languages of northern Central Asia, in lands once populated by the Scythians. Given the Slavs' propinquity to Scythia it's not surprising that the Russians would also adopt this taboo as we see in the above Wikipedia quote. (Interestingly, Scythia was the first state north of the Black Sea to collapse to the Goths in the 2nd c. CE, but more on the Goths later.)

Labels: Greek, Irish Gaelic, Lithuanian, Old English, PIE, Proto-Germanic, Russian, The Daily Hump, Welsh Gaelic

Yesterday we humped reindeer and today we're going to hump another animal with an affinity for the cold, the arctic narwhal. The narwhal is a type of whale most notable for the extremely long tusk that juts from the left jaw of the male. These tusks can grow up to 10 feet long which is pretty impressive when you consider the whale itself is no longer than 16 feet.

In Inuit legend the narwhal was created when a woman holding onto a harpoon was dragged into the sea by a beluga and became twisted upon the weapon. In Medieval folklore many Europeans equated the narwhal tusk to the unicorn horn. Vikings and other northern traders sold the tusks for large sums of gold as cups fashioned from the ivory were believed to negate the effect of any poison which they held inside.

The word narwhal comes to us from the Danish and Norwegian narhval, which itself is from the Old Norse nāhvalr. It is generally assumed that the Old Norse name is derived from nār, corpse (from its whitish color) + hvalr, whale, although this is not known for sure. Another suggestion is that the narwhal was named "the corpse whale" for its ability to lie belly up and motionless for a few minutes at a time. Or, alternatively, nā- could be short for the Old Norse nál, meaning needle, an obvious reference to the male's tusk.

Here's a fun bit of mental masturbation: If we assume the first element nā- is from nār (corpse) this is a cognate with the Old English ne, neo, which is an element associated with things that are dead. Examples in Old English include neobedd (death bed), the root of our modern word need (surprisingly enough) and orcneas (evil spirits); orcneas is the likely source of our word orc and shares a Latin root with orca, another species of whale.

narwhal [Wikipedia]
narwhal [AHD]
narwhal [Online Etymology Dictionary]
narwhal [OED]
orca [Online Etymology Dictionary]
need [OED]
orc [OED]
orc [Online Etymology Dictionary]

Labels: Danish, Latin, Norwegian, Old English, Old Norse, The Daily Hump

Loyal WH readers undoubtedly noticed there was no post on Friday. This is because I was spending a relaxing vacation up in southern Vermont where the gf and I made a brief excursion to visit some reindeer. Apparently unbeknownst to some people, reindeer are not fictional animals--they're quite real--and quite adorable as this video demonstrates.The question is, of course, what does rein- mean? The word reindeer is from the Old Norse hreindyri where dyr means "animal" and hreinn refers to the type of animal. Per the Online Etymology Dictionary, this first element is from the Proto-Germanic *khrainaz and not rennen (to run) as folk etymology often associates it. The Online Etymology Dictionary doesn't define *khrainaz specifically, however it does point to similarities with the Old English hran, meaning "reindeer", and the German renn. As well, it suggests a cognate with the Greek krios, meaning "ram".

Labels: German, Greek, Old English, Old Norse, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

I'm worried that some of my more loyal WH readers read into the words I choose to hump. Sometimes this is okay, but you shouldn't make a habit of it; case in point, today's word, anger. I'm not angry, mildly frustrated maybe, but not angry.

But before we begin I need to get something off my chest. In elementary school I remember being told that there are three words in the English language that end in -gry. Two of them are angry and hungry; what's the third? Well, praise be unto thy Internet, as the Online Etymology Dictionary reports

...there is no third (except some extremely obscure ones). Richard Lederer calls this "one of the most outrageous and time-wasting linguistic hoaxes in our nation's history" and traces it to a New York TV quiz show from early 1975.

It's stupid questions like that that make me angry. Anyway, we trace our anger back to Middle English. Their anger, in turn, came from Old Norse (which is not surprising since I'm sure the Vikings made a lot of people angry). In Old Norse angr referred to strife or trouble and was from the root word ang which also meant "troubled" but could also mean "strait" or "narrow." We can trace this word even further back to the Proto-Germanic *angus, meaning "narrow" or "painful" and to the Proto-Indo-European *angh- meaning "tight" or "painful."

We have a word agnail which is originally from Middle English and refers to a corn on your foot. This is from the Old English angnægl which is nothing more than a compound: ang- + nægl. In this word ang- has the sense of painful and nægl translates to "nail;" hence, our word hangnail, a painful nail.

PS. I'm on vacation tomorrow, so no hump for you. Happy Groundhog Day!

hangnail [AHD]
agnail [AHD]
anger [Online Etymology Dictionary]
agnail [OED]
anger [OED]

Labels: Middle English, Old English, Old Norse, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

My original idea was to hump patsy this morning but some asshole over at Wikipedia already humped the word every which way to Sunday. Fear not! The consolation prize is nothing to sneeze at (sorry).*

The lowly sneeze, known scientifically as a sternutatory reflex,

is a semi-autonomous, convulsive expulsion of air from the nose and mouth. This air can reach speeds of 70 m/s (250 km/h or 155 MPH). Sneezes spread disease by producing infectious droplets that are 0.5 to 5 µm in diameter, about 40,000 such droplets can be produced by a single sneeze.

The word traces back to the Old English fneosan, which is from the proto-Germanic *fneusanan (which is likely of imitative origin). From this base we see similarities in Middle Dutch, Dutch (fniezen - "to sneeze"), Old Norse (fnysa - "to snort"), and Swedish (nysa - "to sneeze"). As the Online Etymology Dictionary notes

the [English] forms in sn- appear 1490s; change may be due to a misreading of fn-, or from [an Old Norse] influence. But OED suggests [the Middle English] fnese had been reduced to simple nese by early 15c., and sneeze is a "strengthened form" of this, "assisted by its phonetic appropriateness."

Regardless up until around 1400 c. English had the words fnese (sneeze), fnast (breathe) and neeze, which is still used to mean sneeze in a number of Scandinavian, northern Irish English and north England regional dialects. You may find it interesting to note that fnese and fnast make up the OED's entire contingent of words beginning with fn-.

*"To sneeze at" first attested to in 1806.

Sneezing [Wikipedia]

Labels: Dutch, Middle Dutch, Middle English, Old English, Old Norse, Proto-Germanic, Swedish, The Daily Hump

I know some of my more loyal readers may read into the fact that yesterday I humped witch hazel and today I'm humping bleach. Yes, I have a thing for cleanliness. Yes, you could even say I'm kind of OCD. But really, I swear, this hullaballoo is unwarranted as this whole occurrence is a freak coincidence.

Do ya know what I'm doin', doin' the Humpty Hump.

Bleach isn't just the name of Nirvana's totally excellent first album (which, granted, pales is comparison to their later efforts) so-named because Kurt appreciated the chemical's effectiveness for cleaning needles. Bleach is better known as that noxious agent that keeps your brights bright and your tile floor sparkly. The word comes down to us from the Old English blǣcan, which is from the Proto-Germanic *blaikos "white," which is from the Proto-Indo-European *bhleg- "to gleam." Other related words include blanche, blank, bleak and blink; and curiously, quite unexpectedly, black.

Yes, folks, bleach and black are likely from the same root. As the Online Etymology Dictionary notes the connection between blanche, blank, bleak and blink seems to be "burning, blazing, shining, whiteness." The burning and blazing aspect is what's important because that's also the likely link between bleach and black. "That the same root yielded words for 'black' and 'white' is probably because both are colorless, and perhaps because both are associated with burning." Okay then.

Before you go some more fodder for your noggin: according to the AHD bleachers (like those ass-hurting things you used to sit on at high school pep rallies) were so named because it's a comparison of "a person's exposure to the sun when sitting on them with the exposure of linens bleaching on a clothesline." The Online Etymology Dictionary disputes this etymology however saying bleachers "were so-named because the boards were bleached by the sun." The OED doesn't weigh in on the issue so I'm going to have to go with the Online Etymology Dictionary on this one. The AHD etymology is just stoopid.

Labels: Old English, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

I've got a pimple living at the end of my nose and it makes me a sad WordHumper. It's one of those ones that's kind of under the skin, so it's just a sort of red splotch that hurts a lot. Anyway, I should be washing my face with witch hazel like I was back in the day, but I'm too lazy and the smell is kind of funky. Plus, this pimple got me thinking; what's so witchy about witch hazel? Is it a magical bush? Evil? Satanic perhaps?

Actually, no. Witch hazel has absolutely nothing to do with old crones flying around on broomsticks or reciting incantations and frolicking in an orgiastic circle around a bonfire in some sylvan glen. No, the "witch" in witch hazel is from the obsolete wych, which is a shortened form of the wych elm (see photo at left) whose name in turn comes from the Old English wice. Wice is from the proto-Germanic wik- meaning "to bend" and from this root we get oodles of other modern English words including: weak, wicker and wicket. Even the words week and vicarious share a proto-Indo-European root with wik-, the PIE base *weik-, *weig- "to bend, wind" (in regards to vicarious think of bending in the sense of changing, or a substitution. For week the sense comes more from the idea of "turning" or "succession").

So, there ya have it: for better or for worse there is nothing diabolical about the powers of witch hazel.

witch hazel [Online Etymology Dictionary]
vicarious [Online Etymology Dictionary]
witch, wych, n3 [OED]
witch hazel [AHD]
Wych elm [Wikipedia]

Labels: Old English, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump

An ait, or an eyot as it is sometimes spelled, is a small island, especially one found in a river, but also in a lake. Ait is, in fact, derived from the Old English word for small island. As in: “On a bare ait at midcurrent, completely surrounded and only inches above that muddy roiling water, huddle the squealing pigs.” Not to be confused with: “Yo momma gave me a blowjob. Watchoo think about that. Ait!”

Check out: Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

Interested in guest humping? Send WH an email.

Labels: Guest Hump, Old English

We all get them--some people more often than others. The lowly, ubiquitous pimple. It's sort of like nature's oil well, only it just happens to be on your skin. We know the word existed in English as far back as around 1400 CE. It's assumed that there is some relationship between pimple and the Old English pipligende which is the state of having...wait for it...herpes. It's possible that pipligende, in turn, is related to the Latin papula, which gives us our modern word papule meaning "A small, solid, usually inflammatory elevation of the skin that does not contain pus." However, as the OED explains, this is difficult to connect phonologically.

And in case you're curious the origin of zit, which was first recorded in use around 1966, is completly unknown.

pimple [AHD]
papule [AHD]
pimple [OED]
zit [Online Etymology Dictionary]

Labels: Latin, Old English, The Daily Hump

Ah, to be smitten; that time in one's life when your attention is romantically focused upon a single person. But do people realize that smitten is simply the past participle of smite? You know, smite, as in God's favorite pastime in the Hebrew Bible: God smote the Egyptians, God smites the Midianites, God hearts smiting Philistines. Yes, smitten comes from a not-so-nice word at all, as smite literally means to be beaten or struck.

Smite comes to us via Old English, Proto-Germanic and quite possibly the Proto-Indo-European base *(s)mei-, meaning (somewhat disturbingly) "to smear or rub". In the Germanic languages the early sense of smite seems to be focused on throwing. As the Online Etymology Dictionary notes, the Biblical sense of the word, as in "to slay", doesn't start showing up until around 1200 CE. Smitten, in the sense of love, is a relatively recent concoction, making its linguistic debut in 1663: "Lord Chesterfield..is..put away from Court upon the score of his lady's having smitten the Duke of Yorke" (from the Diary of Samuel Pepys, as written Jan 1, 1663--happy 344th birthday, Smitten; my apologies for being a day late but it was New Year's Day and I was hungover. You understand.)

So next time you beat, strike, throw, smear or rub your lover just remember this is all part of being smitten and, by definition, is expected.

smite [OED]

Labels: Old English, PIE, Proto-Germanic, The Daily Hump