In flipping through my Russian edition of Vasmer’s Etymological Dictionary, I occasionally run across words that strike me as odd or intriguing in one way or another, and I thought I’d share a few of them here.
1) уй (or вуй) ‘maternal uncle.’ This is from Proto-Slavic *ujь, which goes back to that fine old Indo-European root *h₂éwh₂os ‘maternal grandfather; maternal uncle,’ from which we get Latin avus ‘grandfather’ and avunculus ‘maternal uncle,’ Old Irish aue ‘grandson,’ Armenian հավ (hav) ‘grandfather,’ and others. You can see why it dropped out of use in Russian — it’s dangerously similar to The Worst Word in the Language.
2) страфил(ь), the “mother of all birds” (мать всех птиц) in the Dove Book (Голубиная книга). This is thought to be an alteration of Greek στρουθοκάμηλος ‘ostrich.’ It’s good to have a word for ‘mother of all birds’ should you need one.
3) исто ‘kidney,’ gen. истесе, used in the dual истесѣ to mean ‘balls.’ I’m not sure why this is even in Vasmer, since it’s not in Dahl, his usual source for weird words, and only seems to be used in Church Slavic, but I’m glad to know about it; it’s related to Old Norse eista (Synonym: bǫllr) ‘testicle,’ inter alia.
That’s Russophobic, to call our most Russian* word “the worst”!
* or I think “хуй!” is what a Russian is likely to think (but not necessarily say:)) if you ask her, which word is the most Russian…
I wonder if that’s where we got “Phooey!” (via Russian or Ukrainian Jews, and/or German “Pfui”)….
Interesting about that исто word. First, any chance it’s related to ῐ̔στός? But even more interesting is it related to истовый (meaning “zealous”, more or less, but the meaning seems to have changed in historic memory)?
Kidneys=balls is found in Algerian Arabic too: klawi. I guess some metaphors recur…
Paulus, ex Festo, on the meaning of a Latin form nefrendes:
(For the background, see Proto-Italic neɣʷrō in the Wiktionary.)
On the possible use of Greek νεφρός ‘kidney’ as a euphemism for ‘testicle’, cf. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 9.33:
Place for disabling body blow.
For the typology of ‘testicle’ = ‘kidney’, there is also Old Norse víg-nýra ‘fight-kidney’ for ‘testicle’ (nýra, ‘kidney’), as in the Gutalagen:
(Some manuscripts here (folio 18r, scanned image 49 of 136) and here (top of folio 21r).)
I came upon this remark in Christine Peel (2009) Guta Lag: The Law of the Gotlander
This is also the case with Old High German nioro ‘kidney, testicle’. I haven’t bothered to look up any examples.
CLICS has some more examples of ‘testicle’ = ‘kidney’ here. See also Blust under *batux and *batu₂.
The CLICS examples are from Rotuman and Malagasy. The ACD does not have Rotuman, and the Malagasy only has the meaning ‘kidney’.
The Rotuman dictionary gives a different common word for the two, ififi.
Likewise the Semantic Shifts Database shows this colexification in Tamil and Vietnamese. In its sources, Tamil vakku (< Prakrit) is not the standard term for ‘kidney’. (However, is kuṇṭi, a term for ‘kidney’, related to kuṇṭu ‘testicle of beasts’?). Vietnamese trái cật (here, search under ‘kidney’), glossed ‘kidney (as food); testicle (of some animals)’ appears to be the standard ‘kidney’ word, preceded by a ’round’ classifier, also not the default.
As regards to “вуй” — “вуйчо” is still alive and well in Bulgarian as a maternal uncle; “чичо” for paternal.
According to the dictionaries, Literary Mongolian bögere is both ‘kidney’ and ‘testicle’. I had a nagging feeling that I had met this colexification in Turkic, but I could only find börek ‘kidney, testicles’ in Gunnar Jarring’s dictionary of the modern southern Uyghur dialects here (standard Uyghur بۆرەك börek ‘kidney’, corresponding to Turkish böbrek, Azeri böyrək, Turkmen böwrek, Kyrgyz бөйрөк, etc.). Maybe more later.
Kidneys=balls is found in Algerian Arabic too: klawi.
And in the Aramaic of the Targumim—sense 3 here, the first example translating Hebrew אֶשֶׁךְ ʾéšeḵ directly and the second paraphrasing Hebrew וְשׁוֹר וָשֶׂה שָׂרוּעַ וְקָלוּט wəšôr wāśeh śārûaʿ wəqālûṭ ‘and a bullock and a lamb that has anything too long or stunted’ as ותור ואימר יתיר כוליא או דחסיר כוליא ‘and a bullock or a lamb with an extra testicle or lacking a testicle’ according to the interpretation there. Presumably an extra kidney would not be detectable until after slaughter…
The entry in Aasen’s dictionary (mentioned above) is here, p. 340, where the meaning ‘testicle’ is attributed to the region of Sunnmøre. He notes that there, the kidney itself is called the ryggjanyre, literally ‘back kidney’. (Which reminds me of the puzzle of the kid- of English kidney. What was the motivation for this kid-?)
In the Old Testamnet there are several instances of “kidneys” in metaphorical or metonymic sense. Could those have been meant as testicles? With no Hebrew, I’ll resort to one of the more lexically conservative English translations, Jubilee Bible 2000.
The oldest examples are all about slaughtering of lambs. The metaphorical senses start with Job. I’ll pick a couple of example from Psalms:
In psalm 139:13 there would be a parallelism, as well as a more obvious continuation in verse 14 and 15, if this was originally conceived (ha!) with reference to the father’s testicles, before lexical change or sexual taboo made it incomprehensible or unusable.
.
In Psalms 16:7, “testicles” makes great sense in isolation, less in the wider context, but one might suggest a metaphorical meaning “desires” and a celebration that one’s nightly desires guides one towards the godly approved pleasures.
I’ll stop here. Further speculations are left to those who can dissect Biblical Hebrew.
in thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.
Say no more, say no more!
There was a reason I kept the quote going until verse 11. Even so, I missed an obvious
desecrationdissecation joke in the final line. I’m losing it.“вуйко” is still widely used in Ukrainian, mostly in the western part of the country
FYLOSC ujak (mother’s brother)
Following up on Dave J., I wonder if the old-fashioned deprecation “That’s a load of hooey!” is derived from ?Polish.
Hebrew kilyâ is just ‘kidney’, when in the literal sense. There are cognates throughout Semitic, and in the OT itself there are many references to the fat of the kᵊlāyôṯ. You can read all about it at TDOT.
The expression musar kᵊlāyôṯ, lit. ‘torment of the kidneys’, meaning something like ‘pangs of conscience’, derives from the verse in Psalms. My dad told me that he once saw the bilingual Hebrew-English menu of an Israeli restaurant, with the entry for ‘kidneys’ translated to English as “remorse”. (Whether you are using a dictionary or AI, double-check.)
Agolle Kusaal has sianif “kidney”, which looks just like a transparent compound “waist-eye” (no testicles were harmed in the creation of this word.)
The appearance is misleading, though: in fact, it’s a rather startling folk-etymology: the original form did indeed have “waist” as a first element, but had a cognate of Mooré yíimdi “kidney” as the second part. (Cf Toende Kusaal sɛ̀-íin “kidney.”)
However, unlike Mooré (and Toende Kusaal), Agolle Kusaal has preserved the original “small round things” noun-class membership of the word. This class shows stem-vowel umlaut before its plural suffix -i(i): the original original form of the Mooré stem appears in yàam-bíla “kidney” (where bíla means “small”), and the front vowel in Mooré yíimdi is due to levelling from a now-defunct plural *yíimi “kidneys.” (Kidneys are, like other paired body parts, good candidates for remodelling singulars after the corresponding plural forms.)
It’s all perfectly simple.
Nioro only occurs in glosses; it is used to translate both L ren and L testiculus. As for MHG niere/nier, the 19th century dictionaries (Benecke/Müller/Zarncke) explicitly only mention the “kidney” meaning, but at least one of the examples refers to testicles. The “testicle” meaning seems to have disappeared in contemporary German.
Seconded, FWTW.
This reminds me vaguely that I’ve never quite grokked the extended/metaphorical sense of “kidney” to mean (quoting one online reference) something like “constitution, temperament, nature, type, character, disposition.” Which may now be dated-if-not-archaic, in that it isn’t in my idiolect or that of anyone I can recall speaking with, although I can imagine still-living writers with certain styles using it without making me raise an eyebrow. I guess I don’t understand what motivated this sense historically and likewise don’t know whether it’s unique to English or found elsewhere, either via calquing in either direction or because it’s based on some metaphor that’s opaque to me but was found obvious to more than one society in prior times.
I didn’t know about that one, but spleen “excentricity of British upper-class twits” has even made it into German and doesn’t make any sense either. I think it’s the Ancient Greek thing of matching every psychological state with a random organ and vice versa.
The gall bladder is the seat of both rationality and the more elevated emotions in Kusaal.
The Kusaal version of the Song of Songs renders 2:10 רַעְיָתִ֥י “my darling” as m ya’am bʋn “my gall-bladder thing.”
[This becomes less bizarre when you appreciate that (a) ya’am, in this metaphorical sense, is probably the closest equivalent of our “mind”, and (b) the standard idiom for “I’ve fallen in love with you” is M ya’am kpɛn’ɛf “My mind has gone into you.” And I mean, isn’t “I’ve set my heart on you” much weirder?]
@JWB: OED witnesses it as early as “A man of my kidney” in The Merry Wives of Windsor. That entry is still the 1901 one. I found nothing earlier in the Middle English Dictionary.
Maybe it has something to do with kind, with switched letters?
Spleen has been used in English to refer to: anger or foul temper, gloom or moroseness, and even gaiety (although the last one is archaic if not obsolete). I don’t think I’m familiar with an “excentricity of British upper-class twits” sense.
excentricity of British upper-class twits
And others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Spleen_de_Paris
[Mere mention of Beaudelaire always induces in me a desire to start declaiming “La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la lésine, Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps” and to keep on going until innocent bystanders start pleading with me to stop. But I have sternly repressed the urge. For now.]
@DE: for me, it’s “Grands bois, vous m’éffrayez comme des cathédrales / Vous hurlez comme l’orgue…”
and the same idiom came to my mind as to JWB’s; i think of it as not quite archaic, but certainly passé or archaizing, and as english-english or anglicizing. i wonder whether it’s a remnant of an earlier notion of the kidneys as the seat of temperament (or of one of The Temperaments)? or, i suppose, a lingering trace of a kidney=testicle equation?
For me, it’s “Le vieux Paris n’est plus — la forme d’une ville change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel…”
“La nature est un temple oú de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuse paroles…”
And, as a poet, “Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.”
*où, and confuses
this seems like the moment to share a yiddish anti-translation i did of Obsession a few years ago (and an english retranslation of it). i didn’t try to stick to baudelaire’s rhyme-scheme and line-length in either, but aimed at looser euphonies in both. interestingly, i haven’t managed to find a yiddish translation of the poem – the main translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, vunderkind leyb naydus‘ posthumous Blumen Fun Shlekhts, doesn’t include it!
obsesye
an antitaytsh
tife velder, ir mikh fartsitert vi a mikdesh
ir voyet vi a khazn, un in undzere hispaylete hertser
shtiblekh fun alte vundn vu vibrirn alte gragers,
entfern di viderkoyles fun ayer kadish.
kh’hob dikh lib, yam! dayne akeydes un lyarems
zaynen oykh gefunen in mayn ruekh; a zis lakhn
fun a proster moyd, bagosn mit krekhtsn un nokhgezangen,
kh’her es inem yams yam mit gelekhter.
kh’lek fun dir di finger, o nakht! on shtern
vos redn mit likht an umbakantn zhargon
vayl kh’zukh dem kholel, dos shvarts, di erves!
ober shotns zaynen zikh aleyn peroykhes
vu lebn, fargosn fun mayn oyg be’alofem,
di farshvumeners mit heymishe mines.
obsession
an antitranslation
deep woods, you tremble me like a temple
you howl like a cantor, and in our rapturous hearts
upstairs prayer-rooms of old wounds where ancient ratchets resound,
the echos of your kaddish reply.
i love you, ocean! your sacrificial bindings and commotions
are also found in my phantom; a sweet laugh
from an everyday girl, overflowing with moans and mockery,
i hear it in the ocean’s oceans of laughter.
i lick my chops at you, o night! without stars
that speak with light an unknown dialect
for i seek the void, the black, the obscene!
but shadows are themselves ark-curtains
where there live, spilling from my eye by the thousands,
the disappeared with familiar looks on their faces.
Croatian (and presumably BSM) still preserves ujak for maternel uncle, and has stric for paternal uncle (стрый in older Russian)
Modern Polish mostly uses only wujek for either side although I understand stryjek survives regionally.
Le Spleen de Paris
That reminds me—French rognons blancs, literally ‘white kidneys’ (cf. Faroese hvítanýra, mentioned above). I wonder, is ‘white kidney’ for ‘testicle’ anywhere else? Also simply rognons, as already in Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (1690):
Very strangely, Hindi-Urdu कपूरा کپورا kapūrā ‘testicle (of a goat, lamb, etc., as food)’, is said to derive from Sanskrit karpūra- ‘camphor’, because of the waxy white appearance of testicles after butchering.
Staying as close as possible to kidneys, Aristotle and Theophrastus used τριόρχης for some bird of prey. Any thoughts on the suggestion that they confused the adrenal glands with a testis? In birds the adrenal glands “lie close together, even fusing in some species,” according to this. The word survives in some genus names, so I added that suggestion to the Wikipedia article on the Madagascalr Serpent Eagle, Eutriorchis astur, a long time ago.
==> Rodger C
Re “hooey”, I was wondering the exact same thing: could it also be related somehow to хуй? Possibly via Yiddish?
The OED cites “hooey” back to 1924 and says, “Origin unknown”, with the summary “Of unknown origin”. You seldom see a summary longer than the original text.
My problem with that is that хуй isn’t used that way. It can mean ‘nothing, fuck all,’ but not (as far as I know) ‘nonsense.’ That doesn’t prove anything, of course, but it makes me dubious; I’d want to see a clear trail of evidence.
Not in Polish either as far as I’ve noticed.
i can’t think of a yiddish parallel to “hooey”. there also aren’t a lot of words beginning with /xu-/, and i think most of them are hebrew/aramaic origin. (i also find myself wondering how “bull-hooey”, which i’ve read but don’t think i’ve heard in the wild, fits in to the picture)
Russian хуй is also mentioned by Wiktionary at hooey (“possibly”) and Green (with a question mark). But like languagehat, I’d want to see some evidence that it was originally associated with Russian/Polish/etc. speakers.
Hooey was first entered in the OED in 1933, and last revised in 1976 very high-mindedly with quotations from Louis MacNeice, Auden, and Germaine Greer; RHHDAS has many quotations from famous writers as well. It shares an expressive element with phooey (also orig. US, earliest citation 1902 in Green’s), which in turn sounds similar to phoo, pfui, ptui. One big thing standing in the way of linking hooey directly with phooey is that hooey is (originally) a noun and phooey etc. are (originally) interjections.
There’s also hoo-ee or whoo-ee, int., which goes back to the 19th century in the US; OED’s definition: “Used to attract attention, or to summon a person or animal. Also used to express various emotions or reactions, such as surprise, awe, excitement, disgust, etc.” But it’s not at all obvious (to me anyway) if that has any relation to the noun hooey.
Green has an earliest citation for hooey dated 1912, quoted from an anthology of IWW songs, which says it appeared in Industrial Worker (Spokane), March 21, 1912, and was later collected as a hobo song and published in 1930:
Unfortunately, this does not pan out. That issue of Industrial Worker is online at marxists.org, and it has the song (p. 3), but with slightly different words:
The anthology was quoting the 1930 hobo version (which was in the section “Wobbly Songs”).
Oops, missed the earlier comment:
I wonder if that’s where we got “Phooey!” (via Russian or Ukrainian Jews, and/or German “Pfui”)….
Pfui is indeed counted as a borrowing from German by the OED, and attested since the 1800s, originally “Chiefly in representations of German speech”. (The OED’s older examples are all British, but some can be found in American sources as well, e.g. in Boston, 1874 — also a representation of German speech.) Phooey could be an anglicization of pfui, or it could just as easily be an extension of phoo, which is much older and was more common in the 1800s, and is part of a large family including phew, pho int., pooh int., faugh, pah, phah, shoo int.2, pshaw (those are all separate headwords in the OED, and almost all go back hundreds of years).
Previously at Language Hat: some discussion of German pfui and similar words under RUSSIAN INTERJECTIONS.
Does English “phooey” sound dirty to Russians? Hans says no.
I was thinking that hooey is akin to hoo-ha ‘nonsense’ (n.), but the latter doesn’t appear until 1961, per Green.
The earliest hooey/hooie I can find is in a 1925 issue of Petroleum Age. It occurs sporadically in 1926 (e.g. here) and from 1927 on is everywhere, appearing constantly in light-reading magazines like Judge.
Two articles appear in Printer’s Ink in 1927, one by Amos Bradbury and a response to it by S.K. Wilson. They use it in referring to bad advertising copy. Both writers try to define exactly what they mean by it. Says Bradbury,
Great articles from Printer’s Ink. The OED’s two earliest citations (one as a noun, the other as an exclamation) are both from The Plastic Age, “the second best-selling novel of 1924” according to Wikipedia, about students at “a barely disguised version of Brown”. A few earlier ones that look legit (among a lot that turn out to be bad metadata):
The Michigan Chimes (University of Michigan student magazine), May 1921
most of their criticism of the Daily was hooey.
(Also, a subscription ad: “a little hot hooey about CHIMES”)
The Nietzschean Follies, story by Thomas Beer, The Smart Set magazine, August 1922
As a hedonist he has no interest in kisses that close instead of beginning the tale of love. This is all “hooey” and he is off it.
Fifty and Fifty, story by Thomas Beer, Harper’s Magazine, September 1922
I never listened to such bunk. It’s a lot of hooey.
Electrical Merchandising, November 1922
They showed him their junk till he said to them: “Stop!
I’m darned if I’ll purchase such hooey!”
those early-20s examples all look to me pretty specifically like euphemized “[bull]shit”, which more or less fits bradbury and wilson’s respective explanations as well.
Seconding rozele’s theory, and I got a feeling that it started as college slang.
My maternal grandfather used to say “хой” as a statement of affirmation — as in “yeah”. I suspect it has a complicated history.
Sorry, I remembered wrongly, it was хоў-.
Possibly of relevance, back when I was young enough that I might have been hip, there was a fad (how localized I have no idea) of saying använd njuren “use your [lit. the] kidney” to mean “use your brain”.
Half calque, half phonosemantic non-matching of Hirn einschalten “switch brain on”?