Word of the Day

The noun hugger-mugger, “disorder or confusion; secrecy; reticence,” has the earlier spellings hucker-mucker, hukermoker, hoker moker, hocker-mocker, hugger mucker, and the Scots variants huggrie-muggrie and hudge-mudge. All of these variant forms share reduplication, similar sounds, and nearly identical meanings, but there is no secure origin or origins for them. The word or element mucker leads some scholars to see a connection with Middle English moker “worldly possessions, wealth” and mokeren, mokren “to heap up (money); hoard.” Hugger-mugger entered English in the first half of the 16th century.

The verb perorate, “to speak at length; make a long, grandiloquent speech,” comes from Latin perōrātus, the past participle of perōrāre “to plead, harangue, argue a case to the end; deliver the final part of a speech, wind up a case.” Perōrāre is a compound of the preposition and intensive prefix per, per- “through, thoroughly” and the simple verb ōrāre “to beseech, supplicate; speak before a court, plead.” Perōrāre and its derivative noun perōrātiō (inflectional stem perōrātiōn- “peroration”) in Latin imply grandiloquence and forcefulness, but not length, let alone long-windedness, which is a connotation that has always existed in English. Perorate entered English in the early 17th century.

Natant, “swimming; floating,” began life in English in the mid-15th century as natand, a term in heraldry describing a swimming fish or dolphin. Natand is an Anglo-French derivative of the Latin participle natant- (the inflectional stem of natāns), from natāre “to swim, float.” Natāre is a frequentative verb formed from the simple verb nāre (a frequentative verb expresses repeated or frequent action). Latin nāre comes from the Proto-Indo-European root snā- (with several variants) “to swim, float.” The root appears in Sanskrit snā́ti “(he) bathes (himself)” and Greek neîn, nḗchein, nā́chein “to swim.” Irish writer Brian O’Nolan (1911-66), whose pen name was Flann O’Brien, wrote a comic masterpiece entitled At Swim-Two-Birds (1939). This title is a literal English translation of Irish Snámh Dá Éan, the name of a ford on the River Shannon. Snámh “swim, swimming” comes from the same Proto-Indo-European root snā- as the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin words.

Brouhaha, “excited public interest; the clamor attending some sensational event,” comes from Medieval French brou, ha, ha, an exclamation used by characters representing the devil in 16th-century drama. Beyond that everything else is speculation. The most interesting explanation is that brou, ha, ha is a distortion of the Hebrew sentence bārūkh habbā (beshēm ădōnai) “Blessed is he who comes (in the name of the Lord)” (Psalms 118:26). Brouhaha entered English in the late 19th century.

Furphy, a piece of Australian slang meaning “a false report; rumor,” originated in the early days of World War I and derives from the Furphy carts used to haul water and rubbish for the Australian army. The carts, made of galvanized iron drums mounted on wheels and originally used for hauling water on farms, were invented and manufactured by J. Furphy & Sons in Shepparton, in the state of Victoria. Soldiers gathering around a Furphy cart, like office workers around the water cooler, would hear and spread all the rumors they could absorb, and the drivers of the Furphy carts could then spread rumors among different units. Furphy first appears in print in 1915 in a poem by the English poet Robert Graves entitled On Gallipoli: “To cheer us then a ‘furphy’ passed around... They’re fighting now on Achi Baba’s mound." Scuttlebutt, “an open cask containing drinking water,” shows a parallel development among American sailors, the scuttlebutt originally being the place where one could get a drink of water, becoming by 1901 “rumor, gossip.”