Interesting etymologies

Knacker is a common pejorative term with a very interesting history.

Did you know it can be traced to the 1570s, where it relates to harness-makers, and describes people who helped farmers with horses (harness-making, castrating, disposing of carcasses)

It can be further traced back to the Old Norse word hnakkur, meaning a saddle. Saddles are fitted just behind the horse's neck, of course, and hnakkur is itself related to the Norse word hnakki, meaning the back of the neck.

Hence, the words neck and knacker are also related. For what can be an offensive term, it has a very long & interesting history. It's a shame that a word of such dignified history has been reduced to a slur.

(Please don't start talking about travellers here, that isn't the point of the thread)

What's your favourite piece of etymology?

bear1

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

Knacker is a common pejorative term with a very interesting history.

Did you know it can be traced to the 1570s, where it relates to harness-makers, and describes people who helped farmers with horses (harness-making, castrating, disposing of carcasses)

It can be further traced back to the Old Norse word hnakkur, meaning a saddle. Saddles are fitted just behind the horse's neck, of course, and hnakkur is itself related to the Norse word hnakki, meaning the back of the neck.

Hence, the words neck and knacker are also related. For what can be an offensive term, it has a very long & interesting history. It's a shame that a word of such dignified history has been reduced to a slur.

(Please don't start talking about travellers here, that isn't the point of the thread)

What's your favourite piece of etymology?

So knackers and horses went hand in hand for centuries it seems.

The ancient Hindu caste system, put simply, held that man was divided into four castes according to profession, the highest caste being the priests and holy people, the second being the warriors and nobles, the third being farmers and merchants and the last being the servants and labourers.

All others fell outside this caste system. This is the origin of the word 'outcast', meaning those outside the Vedic caste system.

Ted111

From the french - cavavane, from Persian kārwān meaning
covered horse-drawn wagon.

s4uv3

My tea is gone cold.

steddyeddy

Can we include phrases in this OP?

Vowel Movement

s4uv3 wrote: »

My tea is gone cold.

I'm wondering why I
Got out of bed at all
The morning rain clouds up my window
And I can't see at all
And even if I could it'll all be gray
Put your picture on my wall
It reminds me, that it's not so bad
It's not so bad

The King of Moo

The word ok comes from a short-lived fad in New York and Boston in the late 1830s of making "hilarious" abbreviations of deliberately misspelled phrases. Ok was short for "oll korrect." Others that didn't survive the fad included nc ("nuff sed") and ky ("know yuse"). The spelling okay didn't appear until 1929.

tomwaterford

A Tyrant Named Miltiades! wrote: »

Knacker is a common pejorative term with a very interesting history.

Did you know it can be traced to the 1570s, where it relates to harness-makers, and describes people who helped farmers with horses (harness-making, castrating, disposing of carcasses)

It can be further traced back to the Old Norse word hnakkur, meaning a saddle. Saddles are fitted just behind the horse's neck, of course, and hnakkur is itself related to the Norse word hnakki, meaning the back of the neck.

Hence, the words neck and knacker are also related. For what can be an offensive term, it has a very long & interesting history. It's a shame that a word of such dignified history has been reduced to a slur.

(Please don't start talking about travellers here, that isn't the point of the thread)

What's your favourite piece of etymology?

Deos knacker not mean someone who collects dead animals from farmers etc



Pretty sure I've a receipt from a knackery in the drawer

metaoblivia

In San Francisco, there's a neighborhood called Nob Hill. In the late 1800s, it was settled by Gilded Age tycoons who were supremely - and often newly - wealthy. They built these huge, ostentatious mansions and were collectively not very nice guys. They pushed out the current residents using bullying tactics and when one man refused to give up his home and property, his new wealthy neighbor surrounded his house with a huge spite fence to keep out all sunlight.

These rich guys were called nabobs, which was a term stolen from the English used to describe men who made their fortune in Asia, sometimes through corrupt means. So it was mildly pejorative, let's say. But the word also means "deputy governor" and is an actual title. Anyway, "nabob" got shortened to "nob" and now we have Nob Hill to commemorate those early tycoons and the great mansions they built that were mostly destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.

tomwaterford

from wikipedia

The word has a long and distinguished history, with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) giving examples of its usage dating back to the 13th century. One of the early references is Wycliffe's Bible (1382), Leviticus xxii, 24: "Al beeste, that ... kitt and taken a wey the ballokes is, ye shulen not offre to the Lord...[/I]" (any beast that is cut and taken away the bollocks, you shall not offer to the Lord, i.e. castrated animals are not suitable as sacrifices).

The OED states (with abbreviations expanded): "Probably a derivative of Teutonic ball-....

The Teutonic ball- in turn probably derives from the Proto-Indo-European base *bhel-, to inflate or swell. This base also forms the root of many other words, including "phallus".

[The word Bollocks] was studied on behalf of the Broadcasting Standards Commission, Independent Television Commission, BBC and Advertising Standards Authority. The results of this jointly commissioned research were published in December 2000 in a paper called "Delete Expletives?". This placed "bollocks" in eighth position in terms of its perceived severity, between "prick" (seventh place) and "arsehole" (ninth place).

tomwaterford wrote: »

Deos knacker not mean someone who collects dead animals from farmers etc

Pretty sure I've a receipt from a knackery in the drawer

Yes, a knacker (or, nacker) seems to have been a person who helped with various aspects of horse husbandry, including disposing of carcasses.

Of course, just because the word dates from the 1500's, it doesn't necessarily follow that Irish travellers can date their heritage to that time. Possibly, they were a dispossessed people who found a niche as specialist horse handlers due to their familiarity with horses as part of their nomadic lifestyles, and assumed the older name 'knackers'.

Today, farmers and horsepeople routinely refer to knackermen as the guys who collect dead livestock. It isn't just a slur, but has had and continues to have various meanings, from the aforesaid livestock men, to guys with their hands in their trousers on dole day.

Your Face

Is that you Rory McGrath?
Rory McGrath is a ponce.

The word 'Bungalow' comes from the Hindi word 'Bangla', meaning Bengalese - a Bengali house being one storey with a low roof.

The other explanation comes from my Irish Granddad who told me they were called bungalows because 'you build a little house, then bung a low roof on it'.

jacksie66

This post has been deleted.

jiltloop

There's a few good ones which originate from cockney rhyming slang which I always found interesting;

Meccano box sets came in a couple of different standards, the more pieces in it the better the standard. The best being "Box Deluxe" which the slang "dog's bollocks" comes from. "Bog standard" came from the entry level box set which was "Box Standard".

Denim is so-called because of it's place of manufacture. When this coarse fabric, usually used for hard-wearing work clothing and dyed with indigo dyes - the cheapest to produce - was first produced in Nimes in France in the decades before the turn of the 20th Century, it was shipped to be made into overalls in large bolts which would be tagged with 'Fabrique DeNimes'.

At first it was called De Nimes, but over time it became shortened to Denim.

Isolt

Midwife comes from the middle English words mid (meaning with) and wife (meaning woman, pronounced like we-fa).

maudgonner

Some words of Irish origin:

Smithereens - from the Irish word smidirín - little fragment.
Slob - from sláb - mud.

maudgonner

Oh, and Avocado comes from a word used by the Aztecs, the same word they used to refer to testicles. Which kind of makes sense, there are similarities

Funnily enough it's also very similar to the word used for lawyers...

gw80

Can't remember where I heard it but the word shambles originated from fish amble st in Dublin. Due to the fish market there years ago witch used to be very messy,
Can any dubs confirm this?

Just thought of another particularly pertinent one.

In Hinduism, Avatar is the name given to the manifestation of a god in animal or human form.

Realt Dearg Sec

gw80 wrote: »

Can't remember where I heard it but the word shambles originated from fish amble st in Dublin. Due to the fish market there years ago witch used to be very messy,
Can any dubs confirm this?

I carried out research on the history of street names in Dublin for the RIA years ago and in the sixteenth century there were several shambles in the city, including a meat shambles and the fish shambles which gave the street is name. So it's not that the street gave us the word, the word gave us the name of a street (at least as late as the 1700s it was as often called Fish Shamble Street or Fish Shambles Street as Fishamble Street, which is a corruption of the other terms (street names were highly variable Dublin at the time and that street much more than usual precisely because it was named for the shambles). A shambles was just a type of market. But you are probably right that our use of the word comes from how chaotic and stinking such places must have been.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

gw80 wrote: »

Can't remember where I heard it but the word shambles originated from fish amble st in Dublin. Due to the fish market there years ago witch used to be very messy,
Can any dubs confirm this?

That an old myth.

It's actually the other way round. Shambles comes from 14th century middle English for a place where meat is butchered and sold and is an untidy area as a result. A shamble table was used by meat sellers -from Old English sceamel stool, from Late Latin scamellum a small bench, from Latin scamnum stool

Fish Amble street was originally fish shamble street.

Edit. I type too slowly... beaten to it.

PARlance

"Nitty gritty" has more or less gone out of use in the States, but can still be used over here and I know of one particular Irish sports person who got into a bit of bother when he used it over there.

Nobody really knows its exact origins, there are many theories. One is that it is believed to be a euphemism for the layer of excrement at the bottom of a slave ship after a trans-atlantic crossing. Hence "getting down to the nitty-gritty" was an unsavoury thing.

RobertKK

In Ireland on a farm you may have a haggart.

The word comes from the Vikings, and it is a small piece of land close to the house where the hay was stored for the animals.
Next to my house is the haggart.

Related to Old Norse heygarthr, with hey = hay and garthr meaning yard, so a hay yard, but it is a small piece of land usually beside the farmhouse.
Mine currently stores bales of silage...

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Bedlam.

From the 13th century Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem in London which housed the mentally ill.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

PARlance wrote: »

"Nitty gritty" has more or less gone out of use in the States, but can still be used over here and I know of one particular Irish sports person who got into a bit of bother when he used it over there.

Nobody really knows its exact origins, there are many theories. One is that it is believed to be a euphemism for the layer of excrement at the bottom of a slave ship after a trans-atlantic crossing. Hence "getting down to the nitty-gritty" was an unsavoury thing.

There's no basis for that.

Nitty-gritty is the specific detail or heart of a matter. There is no suggestion of anything unsavoury in the term.

castletownman

The term "piss poor" comes from families in the eighteenth century selling their urine to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were said to be "piss poor".

Furthermore, those families who couldn't even afford a pot "didn't even have a pot to piss in" and were seen as the lowest of the low.

Canard

I'm not entirely sure how true it is, but it's really interesting. The Italian word uccidere means to kill, and apparently that's where the word occident comes from, because since the sun rises in the east, it 'goes to die' in the west.

padd b1975

maudgonner wrote: »

Some words of Irish origin:

Smithereens - from the Irish word smidirín - little fragment.
Slob - from sláb - mud.

Bothar- Irish word for road. It loosely means cows side by side.

Boreen- Irish word for lane means cows in single file.

Aongus Von Bismarck

The word donnybrook was used to describe a fight at a sporting event in early US radio broadcasting, especially when a boxing bout would descend into late rounds of haphazard brawling. It is still used occasionally, but has become rather archaic.

Its origin is in organised fights that used to take place in Donnybrook fair in Dublin in the mid 1800's. Men would arrive up to Dublin looking for enough money to take passage on a boat to America at best, or Liverpool at worst. They'd fancy themselves as a hardshaw and would take part in organised betting fights for the chance to make enough money to get to the US.

In the US, the word donnybrook then became a part of the vernacular associated with illegal boxing matches. I won in Donnybrook, so this Italian should be no problem etc.