[Ads-l] Bald eagle etymology

[Jonathan Lighter]

You've no doubt observed that OED lists no "earlier" sense of
"white-headed," though the lengthy etymological note serves to confuse this
particular issue. "Bald" comes to mean, figuratively, having a big white
spot that looks as though it were bald.  But that's a secondary usage.

As for "piebald," until somebody comes up with a 17th C. ex. of "piebald
eagle," I'd ignore it as too clever by half.

JL



On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 10:57 AM, Ken Hirsch <kenhirsch at ftml.net> wrote:

> I noticed on Wikipedia that the entry for the bald eagle (
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald_eagle) has these sentences:
>
> > Bald eagles are not actually bald; the name derives from an older meaning
> of the word, "white headed".
>
> and later
>
> > The bald eagle placed in the genus Haliaeetus (sea eagles) which gets
> both its common and specific scientific names from the distinctive
> appearance of the adult's head. Bald in the English name is derived from
> the word piebald, and refers to the white head and tail feathers and their
> contrast with the darker body.[18]
>
> Reference 18 is "Dudley, Karen (1998). Bald Eagles. Raintree Steck-Vaughn
> Publishers. p. 7. ISBN 0-8172-4571-5."
>
> Searching on Google books, this idea goes back to at least the 1930s:
> https://books.google.com/books?id=WbErAQAAMAAJ&dq=piebald
>
> But this seems questionable to me. One of the first references to the bald
> eagle is: "The Second is the Bald Eagle, for the Body and part of the Neck
> being of a dark brown, the upper part of the Neck and Head is covered with
> a white sort of Down, whereby it looks very bald, whence it is so named."
>
> Published 1693
> http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/17/206/978.extract
>
> Apparently written 1688 https://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbcb.27239/?sp=1
>
> Any thoughts on this?
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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>



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