In defense of etymological speculation

[Fred Shapiro]

Jerry's viewpoint, as I take it, is that etymological speculation is
harmless and may lead to fruitful advances.

Query:  Can you name one example where etymological speculation of the
bulldyke-from-bulldog-like type has ever led to a real advance in
etymological knowledge?  I doubt it; the real advances come from research
or from a lexicographer studying the evidence of a citation file rather
than from speculation unanchored in historical documentation.  And the
speculation is almost always wrong.

As for harmlessness, the only harm is to promote the very widespread
perception that etymology is not a science or form of historical
scholarship, but rather a kind of amusement in which one person's
unfounded conjecture is as good as another.  As a result (here I get
Popikian) I can write all the articles in the world proving that _bug_
'defect in computer hardware and software' did not originate because Grace
Murray Hopper found a moth in an early computer, but hundreds of millions
of people will swear that I am wrong.  Allen Walker Read can prove that
_O.K._ originated as a jocular abbreviation for "oll korrect" and sixty
years later few will believe this.  The Oxford English Dictionary can
print a citation proving that "hooker" 'prostitute' did not derive from
the name of a general in the Civil War and decades later belief in the
General Hooker theory will still be near-universal.  Etc., etc., etc.

In other words, far-fetched speculation, not just by the general public
but by professors who edit journals about etymology, pretty much robs
etymology of any value in terms of promulgating accurate word-histories.
How many people even realize that there is such a thing as accuracy in
word-histories and methods of verifying the truth (or, more often, the
falsity) of word-histories?

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Public Services     YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
  and Lecturer in Legal Research            Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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