Thursday, October 27, 2022

Language Of Confusion: Cut

Talking about words related to cutting this week since this time of year always makes me think of slasher movies.
 
Cut
Cut showed up in the fourteenth century as a verb, and a century later as a noun and then an adjective. It’s either from the Old English cyttan (pronounced with a hard C), the North Germanic kut-, or the Old French couteau, all of which mean cut or knife. I’d have to assume they’re all related in some way, but this is etymology we’re talking about.
 
Slash
Slash showed up in the mid sixteenth century, and it’s thought to be from the French word esclater, to break out or splinter. That’s also the origin of slat and slit, and speaking of which…
 
Slice
Slice showed up in the fourteenth century as a noun before becoming a verb a century later. Both are from the Old French escliz, splinter or slice, from the verb esclicier, which is from the Frankish slitan. You might notice that looks like slit with extra letters, and yes, that’s where slit is from, though via a slightly different origin. Slit is from the Old English slitan, to tear or rend, from the Proto Germanic slitan, which is what gave us the Frankish version of the word.
 
Carve
Carve comes from the Middle English kerven, from the Old English ceorfan, which is the word they used to use instead of cut. It’s from the West Germanic kerbanan, which can be traced to the Proto Indo European gerbh-, to scratch. And that’s… actually the origin word for graph.
 
Gash
Finally today, gash showed up in the mid sixteenth century from the Middle English garce, which in spite of what autocorrect wants is not a misspelling of grace. It’s from the Old North French garser, and that’s thought to be from the Vulgar Latin charassare and Greek kharassein, scratch or carve. Nothing really super surprising about this, except… that’s the origin word for character. Seriously. The Latin word character is from the Greek kharakter, which means character but is from kharassein. I mean, WOW. What a leap.
 
Sources
Online Etymology Dictionary
Google Translate
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center
University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language
University of Texas at Arlington
Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English
Old English-English Dictionary
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Cambridge

3 comments:

  1. That one word took a couple weird roads.

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  2. As I sit here in an Integrated Math 3 class (read: algebra 2), while the students are struggling with graphing polynomial functions (the ones with the wiggle in them), I find it fascinating that carve and graph come from the same origin word. I'd tell the class, but they're struggling enough with the work in front of them.

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  3. That's actually kind of fascinating. Who'd have thought those disparate words would come from the same root?

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