Ah, sweet Election Day hangover--as The Union Leader of New Hampshire notes "Dems surge in sea change for House". Radio Iowa reports a "Sea-change in Iowa's congressional delegation". Hillary Clinton urges a "sea change" in Mideast policy. We must thank Shakespeare for the phrase sea change, which first makes an appearance in The Tempest. As Ariel, the spirit of the air, sings

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Michael Quinion notes

Shakespeare obviously meant that the transformation of the body of Ferdinand’s father was made by the sea, but we have come to refer to a sea change as being a profound transformation caused by any agency. So pundits and commentators who think it has something to do with the ebb and flow of the tide, and use it for a minor or recurrent shift in policy or opinion, are doing a grave injustice to one of the most evocative phrases in the language.

A grave injustice, indeed! A quick search on Technorati shows 74 blogs using the phrase "sea change" in the past 24 hours, about 24 of these also mentioning the word "Democrats". On Google News we find 37 articles published in the past 24 hours that use "sea change" and 12 of those mention the word "Democrats". Thus, in both cases about 33% of online sources appear to be using the phrase sea change in reference to a shifting political tide.

Michael Quinion reports that the earliest idiomatic use of sea change seems to be from 1877; the OED says the first allusive use was from a 1917 Ezra Pound poem. In both cases sea change was used apolitically. At the earliest, it seems sea change wasn't used in reference to politics until after WWI.

Labels: Shakespeare, The Daily Hump

I've always been a fan of the series Connections, hosted by James Burke. In the each episode James connects seemingly disparate historical/scientific events and demonstrates how technology progessed from, say for example, the steam pump to the moon landing (via carbon paper, drill bits, and a host of other innovations). Today's hump is a bit like that. We're going to start with some humps from earlier in the week and ultimately conclude with today's focus, the prankster of 16th c. English folklore, Puck, aka Robin Goodfellow.

If you've been keeping up with the site this week you'll know that bogeyman and bugaboo share a common root, the Welsh word bwg, meaning "ghost" (see also bugbear). Related to bwg is the Welsh pwca, best described as a fiend or ghoul.

From pwca we get the English word puck. Pucks were a class of pre-Christian nature spirits common in popular English superstition. It was during the 16th c. that a puck became the Puck (note capital P), identified alternately with the devil or a trickster-like sprite. By the time Shakespeare authored A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s the identities of Puck and Robin Goodfellow (first cited in 1531 per OED) were so indistinguishable from one another as to render their names interchangeable.

Fairy: Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Called Robin Goodfellow...
Those that Hob-goblin call you, and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck.

Interestingly, these lines also reveal a third name, Hobgoblin. In their common noun form hobgoblins*, like pucks, are mischievous imps. The prefix hob- was a familiar by-form of the name Rob. It's not surprising, since the word hobgoblin likely came from Robin Goblin, which of course is a reference to Robin Goodfellow.

*For more on goblins see my gremlin post

William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream [U of Oregon]
Robin Goodfellow [Wikipedia]
Hobgoblin [Wikipedia]
Puck [Wikipedia]

Labels: Shakespeare, The Daily Hump, Welsh Gaelic

WordHumper would like to extend warm wishes to once-frequent, now lackadaisical, contributor Caroline who celebrates her 30th birthday today. You may remember Caroline from classic WordHumper posts such as:

Penultimate Frisbee
The Hardworking Do-rag
Hump This: Heckle

Caroline has unexplicably decided to abandon wasting time on etymological musings and instead nurture her real career over at The Longstockings. Regardless, Happy Birthday.

Now back to business: lackadaisical. You may remember this word from when I used it in the first paragraph. It describes someone lacking spirit, languid, sans liveliness.

Michael Quinion, who basically created the concept of WordHumper years before I got around to it (but instead called it World Wide Words), humped lackadaisical back in June 2001:

It [Lackadaisical] owes its origin, strangely enough, to an old saying of regret or dismay, lack-a-day!, a shortened form of alack-a-day!. Alack dates back to medieval times, and probably comes from a dialect word lack that is variously interpreted as failure, fault, reproach, disgrace, or shame. So alack-a-day! originally meant "Shame or reproach to the day!" (that it should have brought this upon me). But over time it became weakened until it became no more than a vapid and vacuous cry when some minor matter went awry.

The Bard peppered a few of his works with alack-a-day, notably The Tragedie of King Lear ("Alacke, alacke the day") and Romeo & Juliet where the expression creates a parallel between the Nurse's reaction to Romeo's apparent death and Juliet's authentic expiration:

Nurse: A weladay, hee's dead, hee's dead, We are vndone Lady, we are vndone. Alacke the day, hee's gone, hee's kil'd, he's dead

and

Nurse: Shee's dead: deceast, shee's dead: alacke the day

On a side note, I intended to hump the word hickey today, but alack-a-day, its origin is unknown.

Labels: Shakespeare, The Daily Hump

Have you ever paused to wonder what the word hobnob actually means? I have. Or maybe I should say I hob because hobnob's hob is most likely from a Middle English word, habbe, meaning have. The nob is from the Middle English nabbe, which is simply a contraction of ne habbe (have not). Thus hobnob is to have and to have not.

It wasn't until Shakespeare came along that we see the first compounded use of hob and nob meaning something beyond the literal "to have and have not." In Twelfth Night Viola states "His incensement..is so implacable, that satisfaction can be none, but by pangs of death and sepulcher: Hob, nob, is his word: giu't or take't." Pleasantly for the modern etymologist Shakespeare contextually defines the 1601 meaning of "hob, nob" as "to give or take."

Around the middle of the 18th century the verb hobnob begins popping up rather frequently to mean "to drink together." In a literal sense, it still retained the meaning of giving and taking; specifically what was being given and taken was the wine of two drinkers as their glasses clinked together during a toast. We all know that drinking breeds chumminess and today the word simply means "to associate familiarly."

Of course, that's not the whole story. Back in Shakespeare's time, before the give and take aspect of hobnob was associated with wine, an adverbial definition appeared--hit or miss. Hit or miss shares an obvious linguistic symmetry with give and take and have and have not. This meaning endured well into the 20th century, although today this definition has been rendered virtually obsolete by hobnob's more popular verb form.

Hobnob [OED]

Labels: Middle English, Shakespeare, The Daily Hump

"Shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth." - Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, iv. m3.

Machiavelli used it for the title and theme of a play (Mandragola). Shakespeare mentions it in not just Romeo and Juliet, but Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and King Henry VI. DH Lawrence called it the "weed of ill-omen"; Ezra Pound and JK Rowling write of its magical properties (Portrait d'Une Femme and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, guess who wrote which).

The mandrake is the common name for members of the plant genus Mandragora, which is part of the nightshades family. Found mainly around the Mediterranean, the Mandragora officinarum has a short stem with a solitary purple or whitish flower. It's rather obvious to see that the word mandragora comes from the roots man + dragon. Mandrake is simply a Middle English alteration of mandragora which heralds from Old English, back to Latin, mandragorā, and then earlier to Greek. (Drake and dragon share a common Latin root dracō).

Per the OED, the mandrake

...was formerly credited with magical and medicinal properties esp. because of the supposedly human shape of its forked fleshy root, being used to promote conception, and was reputed to shriek when pulled from the ground and to cause the death of whoever uprooted it....

This connection with fertility can be seen in the Hebrew word for mandrake, דודאים, which literally translates as "love plant." The Arabs refer to the plant as beid el-jinn--"genie's eggs". This ability to create life yet also cause death is also reflected in the common legend that mandrakes are seeded by the semen of hanged men. Samuel Beckett references this myth in Waiting for Godot.

Estragon: Wait.
Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting.
Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It'd give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited) An erection!
Vladimir: With all that follows. Where it falls mandrakes grow. That's why they shriek when you pull them up. Did you not know that?
Estragon: Let's hang ourselves immediately!

Alas, man's best friend was left with the dangerous duty of harvesting the plant. As Jewish historian Josephus chronicled,

a furrow must be dug around the root until its lower part is exposed, then a dog is tied to it, after which the person tying the dog must get away. The dog then endeavours to follow him, and so easily pulls up the root, but dies suddenly instead of his master. After this the root can be handled without fear.

Mandrake (plant) [Wikipedia]
Mandrake [The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition]

Labels: Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Middle English, Old English, Shakespeare, The Daily Hump