origin of "muggle"

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Friday, March 5, 2004 9:51 am -0500 "James A. Landau"
<JJJRLandau at AOL.COM> wrote:
> from an interview with Joanne "J. K." Rowling, on the Web at URL
>      http://www.mugglenet.com/jkrwbd.shtml
>
> <quote>
> I was looking for a word that suggested both foolishness and loveability.
> The word 'mug' came to mind, for somebody gullible, and then I softened
> it. I think 'muggle' sounds quite cuddly. I didn't know that the word
> 'muggle' had been used as drug slang at that point... ah well.
> </quote>

I've seen American fan sites that have insisted that 'muggle' is British
slang for 'loser'.  Just found a case of this at:
<http://savage.authorslawyer.com/journals/j_9c.shtml>, which says:
"Rowling's books use British slang extensively, and "muggle" has meant
"complete loser" since the 19th century."

This point has been made, apparently, to protect Rowling against a claim of
plagiarism (and has hence been repeated on fan sites).  But I've never
heard any such thing in the UK, it's not in Partridge's (except as a
marijuana term, muggles) and OED, which has four entries for _muggle_ has
none that mean 'loser' (or anything like it) and Rowling's 'non-magical'
sense (given there as _Muggle_) is attributed first to Rowling.

So, how (if indeed it did) that story held up in court I don't know.  I've
seen the muggle=loser claim many times (always from Americans), but never
seen any citations backing it up.

Lynne




Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics

Department of Linguistics and English Language
Arts B133
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9QN
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