Word Histories: Etymologies Derived From the Files of the Dictionary of American Regional English
freedom
Freedom is such an ordinary word that we don’t really see it, even though Americans are preoccupied with the concept. It’s everywhere in our free press and in the speeches of our politicians. During Ronald Reagan’s last summit with Mikhail Gorbachev he used the word three times almost in one breath: “The freedom to keep the fruits of one’s own labor, for example, is a freedom that the present reforms seem to be enlarging. We hope one freedom will lead to another” (Time).
Free goes back a long way in linguistic history, back through freo (free) in Old English, with its Germanic roots, to the prehistoric Indo-European form prt, meaning “to love.” “This form gave to Sanskrit the word priya, and eventually, through various sound changes, gave to Old English the word freon (to love) and its derivative freond, which has become modern English’s friend. In the Germanic development of the root word the basic meaning, “dear,” naturally applied to one’s family or clan, as opposed to slaves, and in time the word was used more and more to refer to any person who was not in bondage or servitude. By the ninth century in England its modern meaning, “free will,” was so well established that the learned King Alfred could use the word in translating Boethius from the Latin into Old English: “Forthaem he yesceop twa yesceadwisan yesceafta freo, englas & men” (“Therefore he created two kinds of free creatures, angels and men“).
The dom of freedom was originally a separate word, meaning “statute; jurisdiction,” formed from the common verb do. In Old English it was occasionally combined to form compound words, such as cyningdom (kingdom), and haligdom (holiness). In modern English dom is not a free word but exists only as a suffix.
geezer
A cover story in The New Republic last spring titled “Greedy Geezers,” about an alleged grab by the elderly for entitlements, made me wonder where this word came from. Athough in American usage it almost always refers to an odd or eccentric old man, in late-nineteenthcenturv Britain it usually applied to an old woman. In standard usage geezer is almost always derisive, as the magazine’s cover illustrated with a caricature of an aggressive army of avaricious oldsters. In contrast, underworld slang uses the word and its variant, geezo, without derision to refer to a young man, as in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, when Pinkie complains that “a geezer can’t have an alibi for every minute of the day.”
Geezer derives from the fifteenth-century Scottish dialect guiser or guisard (masquerader; mummer), which comes from the Middle English gise (manner; costume—hence disguise). Gise in turn comes, through Old French, from the Germanic root wise (manner; style—hence the adverb-forming suffix -wise, as in clockwise). Children in Scotland to this day go door-to-door as guisers on Halloween, Christmas Eve, and Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) to collect gifts of cakes and nuts. By the 1880s guiser had moved beyond its dialectal borders into general English, the diphthong (î) had become a high, tense vowel (e), and the reference to a zany youthful masquerader shifted ironically to an odd elderly person, perhaps with the implication that age was being worn as a kind of guise.
quack
Like the poor, the practice of quackery has always been with us. However, its practitioners— ignorant pretenders to medical knowledge and skill— have been known as quacks only since the seventeenth century. The origin of this word is a minor etymological puzzle. It is generally agreed that quack is an abbreviated form of quacksalver, which has the same meaning, and that this in turn was adopted from the Dutch quacksalver (now spelled kwakzalver). The puzzle is the origin of the Dutch word. The second element, salver, derives from the Dutch salf or zalf (ointment; salve) or salven (to salve). And most etymologists agree that the first element is formed onomatopoetically from the sound that a duck makes (Dutch has kwakken, and German has quacken). Hence a quacksalver is one who quacks or boasts of the virtues of his salves.
The American Heritage Dictionary does not agree with the quacking metaphor. It instead derives the first element from the Middle Dutch quac (unguent), which is related to quagmire and quaver, the Indo-European root (gwebh) having the meaning “sliminess.” But such a redundant compound (unguent + to apply salve) seems unlikely. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary derives quacksalver from quicsiver (mercury), which was used extensively in folk medicine. Quicsilver (quic or quick meaning “alive; living”) in this derivation was then modified by the quacking metaphor and the verb meaning “to salve.”
