In defense of etymological speculation

[Dave Wilton]

> 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.

To me, this seems like the age-old question of what is the nature of
empirical research. Is it dogged determination by researchers exploring
every possible avenue until conclusive evidence is unearthed? Or is it a
creative endeavor where someone is inspired by a hypothesis and then sets
out to prove/disprove it? It's a bit of both, but I think the latter is
actually the more common. Researchers conduct their research on the basis of
some hypothesis (i.e., speculation). Without speculation there would be very
little research and no direction for what research did exist. Making the
intuitive leap of speculation is an indispensible part of the scientific
process.

Someone suggests that perhaps "bargaining chip" may be related to "chit."
Someone else (or maybe the same person) combs Lexis-Nexis and other
databases and finds that uses of "bargaining chit" are few and tend to be
later. So it's not likely to be the origin. But without the speculation,
would anyone have done the reseach? Negative results are important too.

What is important is the that speculation be clearly labeled as such, that
it be followed up with research into the historical documentation in an
attempt to falsify it, and that it be confined to appropriate forums.
Speculation in an ADS-L email list seems appropriate to me. It's an informal
communication tool for researchers and can provide them with potential
avenues of research. On the other hand, I would not expect to find
groundless speculation in the pages of _American Speech_.

> 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.

Again, the forum is everything. Speculating/hypothesizing among etymologists
is one thing. Publishing these speculations thinly veiled as truth is quite
another. Curtailing the free flow of ideas among researchers seems a high
price to pay for a war against folklore and urban legends that we are not
likely to win.