Word Histories

BY CRAIG M. CARVER

bully

As the 1997 deadline for Hong Kong to revert to Chinese rule draws nearer, uncertainty is growing as to who speaks for the British colony. This uncertainty surfaced in a dispute last winter over the proposed construction of a new airport. The Deputy Premier of China went so far as to say that “only the Central People’s Government . . . is entitled to speak on behalf of the people of Hong Kong.” Editorials in Hong Kong newspapers called China’s statements “hostile” and “bullying.”Bully (to intimidate with superior size or strength; a person who is cruel to smaller or weaker people) originally meant nearly the opposite of what it does now. Borrowed in the sixteenth century from the Dutch boel (lover, brother), which is probably from the Middle High German buole (lover, friend, relative), it was first used in English as a term of endearment similar to “sweetheart” and “darling.” According to one explanation, this sense of bully allowed the word to acquire the meaning “one who lives by protecting prostitutes” or “a pimp” (“Mars the Celestial Bully they adore,/ And Venus for an Everlasting Whore”—Daniel DeFoe, Jure Dtvino, a Satyr, 1706). But because pimps are notorious for mistreating their charges, bully took on the more general sense “one who is cruel or abusive to a weaker person.” An alternative explanation for bully s current meaning is that it gradually grew out of such early combinations as bully-ruffian (a tough) and bully-huff(a bullying boaster), patterned after the earlier bully boy (fine fellow). Bully would then have been extracted from the phrases to stand on its own with its new and latest meaning.

bum rap

Recovering from a knife wound to the chest, a chastened Al Sharpton, the flamboyant New York minister and racial agitator, was conciliatory toward New York Mayor David Dinkins. “I’ve been a big critic of Dinkins,” Sharpton said, “but I happen to think he’s getting a bum rap for many things that happened under the Koch administration.” Bum rap (a false accusation) is a thoroughly American expression. Bum (of poor quality, false) may have its origins in the German Bummler (loafer), from bummelu (to loaf), which entered American English as bummer (“Come, clear out, you trunken loafer! Ve don’t vant no bummers here!” — The Oregonian , 1855). Bummer would subsequently have been shortened to bum (a tramp, vagrant) and used in the phrase to be on the bum (to travel about as a vagrant). The phrase was then extended to anything in poor condition, as was bum itself, which became an adjective. It should be noted that bum with the sense “rump, buttocks” is from a different source: perhaps the Middle Dutch bonne (Modern Dutch bom), meaning “bung, anus.”Rap probably originated in an imitation of the sound of a sharp blow or stroke. Its sense was transferred in the eighteenth century in American English to “adverse criticism” or “a rebuke" with the underlying meaning “a sharp blow to someone’s ego.” By the twentieth century rap had also come to refer to a criminal charge or sentence.

Scud

Iraqi missile attacks during the Gulf War launched Scud into the popular vocabulary. The Soviets developed the missile in the 1950s and called it the SS-1. American and NATO intelligence analysts have always preferred to give their own names to Soviet missiles, however. In NATO’s lexicon all surface-to-surface missiles have names beginning with s—for example, Satans, Savages, Sunburns, Scalpels, and Scuds. Scud is a good name for a missile, the oldest and primary meaning of the word in English being “to run or move quickly, to dart nimbly.” The notorious inaccuracy of the missile fits nicely with a later, specialized sense of scud that applied to an arrow: “to fly too high and off course.” The preEnglish origin of the word is obscure, though the consonant combination sc- indicates a Scandi navian source—perhaps the same word that gave skudda (to push, thrust) to Norwegian. An alternative history of scud draws on early English references in print to the movement of a rabbit (“Tindall hath, as ye have hearde, scudded in & out lvke an hare —Sir Thomas More, Confutacyon of Tyndales answere, 1532). This suggests that scud is from scut, meaning “the short tail of a hare or deer,” but earlier referring to the hare itself. The quick movements of a hare’s tail gave rise to the verb to scut (“He can scut and run gaily fast til his dinner”— English Dialect Dictionary), which was eventually altered to scud.