Dave Wilton has a Big List entry tracing the history of the word callow:
Callow is a word that dates back to the beginnings of the English language, but it has shifted in meaning significantly over the past eleven-hundred years. Today it means inexperienced or naive, and it often appears in the phrase callow youth. But way back when it was associated with aging, for in Old English the word calu meant bald. […] The meaning of callow remained stable through the Middle English period, but in the late sixteenth century the word began to be applied to young birds, who were unfledged, that is without feathers. […] And by the end of the seventeenth century, callow was being used to refer to young and naïve people without allusion to fledgling birds. […] This inexperienced sense would quickly overtake the bald sense, driving the latter out of the language.
I’ll add this to my stock of ammunition to be used against those who object to semantic change (my go-to example has been bead, originally ‘prayer’): “Oh, so you think callow should only mean ‘bald,’ then?”
I was wondering if it was related to Russian голый ‘naked’; Wiktionary says yes, but the OED (entry revised 2016) is more cautious:
Cognate with Middle Dutch calu, cāle (Dutch kaal), Middle Low German kale, Old High German kalo (Middle High German kal, German kahl); further etymology uncertain.
Notes
Further etymology
Perhaps < the same Indo-European base as Old Church Slavonic golŭ naked, bare, or perhaps an early borrowing into Germanic of classical Latin calvus bald (see calvity n.).
Obviously from Bété “kʋla “tortoise.” The semantic link is clear.
Actually, I’m not totally kidding. After I was talking the other day about Volta-Congo *kud-/*kul- “tortoise” perhaps being phonaesthetic, it occurred to me that words for “skull” in a number of quite unrelated languages – Aramaic sparked this off, over Easter, but English too, for that matter – have a similar pattern. And as the Wiktionary page on “callow” actually points out, it’s impossible to relate all these suspiciously similar-looking words by good honest Neogrammarian sound changes.
“Skull” and “bald” are not too great a stretch semantically.
[Kusaal zupɛɛlʋg, etymologically “white-headed”, in fact means “bald.” And this is in an African language. Weird.]
I’ll add this to my stock of ammunition to be used against those who object to semantic change (my go-to example has been bead, originally ‘prayer’)
Check, garble, gas, and the currently “trending” cardinal come to mind. And there are the others that don’t.
@David E.: Somehow Aeschylus in involved in all this.
And have you considered that when a boat turns turtle, it keels over?
It all fits, I tell you!
Somehow Aeschylus in involved in all this
τοφλαττοθρατ τοφλαττοθρατ.
> Actually, I’m not totally kidding.
Is it a hill you’re willing to die on? Your Calvary?
Hey, when life gives you turtles …
Well, he is a Calvinist.
And possibly a Ninja Turtle.
Hebrew qērēaḥ ‘bald’, which prompted the humorless prophet Elisha to yell at some kids to get off his lawn (and into some bears.)
Those bears are specified to be female bears (or “she-bears”) in most but not all English translations. It looks like femaleness is maybe specified in the MT Hebrew but not in the LXX or the Vulgate? I find it an intriguing detail precisely because it seems like exactly the sort of point of not-particularly-salient fine detail that a pragmatic/rational editor might well have recommended omitting as irrelevant to the main point of the story, but leaving the seemingly-gratuitous detail in somehow makes the narrative more quirkily engaging and/or reminds us that the writers/editors of long long ago did not necessarily share our own modern views of what sorts of details were salient versus irrelevant.
Of course, for all I know there may well be some sort of rabbinical tradition of commentary purporting to explain why the femaleness of the bears is in fact Highly Significant because it obviously symbolizes such-and-such.
In the Hebrew, the bears are actually unisex, but the “two” is feminine.
Calvo, va
Del lat. calvus.
adj. Dicho de una persona: Que carece total o parcialmente del pelo de la cabeza.
source: https://dle.rae.es/
I was interested to see how the Western Oti-Volta languages rendered “bear” in that passage, given that bears aren’t a thing in those parts.
The Kusaal version uses zɔtʋg, which seems to be the deverbal adjective of zɔ “fear” used as a noun in the “nasty animals” gender/class-pairing: so “nasty scary animal.”
The Mooré version is more creative: it uses rigd-n-yĩidga “chaser-and-ripper” which seems to be a nonce neologism (there’s a footnote helpfully explaining it.) While vivid, it does strike me as somewhat Bearist. “Paddington Chaser-and-Ripper”? I think not.
There is, of course, no gratuitous gendering of these nasty scary chaser-and-rippers. Volta-Congo languages do not stoop to such things.
I’m looking for a remake of Alannis Morrisette’s Hand in My Pocket where the second of each pair of adjectives is cognate with a synonym of the first: “I’m bald but not callow…”
Baldness:
Thews (intangibles “habits, qualities” > tangibles “sinews, manly parts”):
I’m looking for a remake of Alannis Morrisette’s Hand in My Pocket
I’m looking for a bisl gefilte fish.
I had looked up the etymology of callow before, and I remembered that it had been transferred from young birds to young and inexperienced people. However, for some reason the more picturesque origins in baldness had not stuck in my mind.
As far as words with drastically changed meanings, my favorites is brand because it can be traced back through a sequence of senses (from “intangibles associated with a product, company, etc” to “burning stick”), with all the intermediate meanings still in use.
Calvo, va
I first read this as an imperative: “Calvo, go!”
In the Hebrew, the bears are actually unisex, but the “two” is feminine.
The verbs ‘came out’ and ‘smashed up’ (or so) are also marked feminine.
(To be fair, it doesn’t say that the bears ate any of those boys, as I had intimated. Those bears may have been supernatural, but they still had a figure to maintain.)
So this story also contains nutritional advice ? It’s ok to maul your meals, but be selective about what you actually eat ? I’m getting Goldilocks vibes here.
Be careful not to fall into heresy:
Heresies, Damned Heresies, Goldilocks and Elisha’s Bears
Well, he is a Calvinist.
But not a chauvinist.
Y’all are being very hard on Elisha. Bethel had Golden Calf tendencies and suchlike in those days. And it was the Lord specifically sent the bears—Elisha just curses the boys. Elisha had just received the mantle of Elijah, and the Lord had to make Bethel respect that. Remember Leviticus 26:21–22: ‘And if you remain hostile toward Me and refuse to obey Me…’:
The דֹּב שַׁכּוּל dōḇ šakkûl ‘bereaved bear, bear robbed of its cubs’ was proverbial (2 Samuel 17:8, Proverbs 17:12, Hosea 13:8)—same root škl as in Leviticus.
Bethel had Golden Calf tendencies and suchlike in those days.
Similar to DEI in our times. Back to basics !
Elisha had just received the mantle of Elijah, and the Lord had to make Bethel respect that.
None of that inconsequential I-love-ya-man badinage. Trump and Musk are pretty ursine. They’d make a cute pair.
dōḇ šakkûl ‘bereaved bear, bear robbed of its cubs’
And note that here šakkûl is masculine, though the referent is likely a she-bear — those are particularly touchy about their cubs. There is a tension between numbers/adjectives/verbs agreeing with the grammatical gender and the semantic gender of the noun.
Trump and Musk are pretty ursine.
Unbearable, but. Let no leopards eat our collective face: unless by an act of God (opus DEI), of course.
Then there’s calid and callid to conjure withal.
Unbearable and ursinine.
I first read this as an imperative: “Calvo, go!”
Not in the fine tradition of the immobile Chevy, that eschewed the comma.
Just re the point about the femaleness of the bears being indicated in the Hebrew via the numeral rather than any inflectional variation of the noun itself, that’s something that couldn’t be directly duplicated in the LXX since the usual inflectional possibilities of δύο do not enable disambiguation of masc. from fem. But it is otherwise in Latin, and there’s no obvious-to-me reason why the Vulg couldn’t have had “duae ursae,” esp. given Jerome’s schtick about looking directly to the Hebrew and not simply relying on the LXX.
https://www.bugmartini.com/comic/does-a-scientist-crap-in-the-woods/
Clean is particularly impressive.
Gas is fake: the “petrol” sense is short for gasoline, which is backformed from gas + oil.
https://www.saob.se/artikel/?unik=K_0001-0168.c60K
Not in current Danish. (since 1700).
And there are the others that don’t.
I’m partial to nice and cretin.
@David M.:
Clean is particularly impressive.
If I understand you correctly, etymonline disagrees.
Gas is fake: the “petrol” sense is short for gasoline, which is backformed from gas + oil.
I was thinking of the origin from chaos (“probably”, says etymonline).
@Y: Those are good ones.
Harvard alumni are undoubtedly aware that crimson means “produced by worms”.
I forgot—I’m also partial to idiot. And, well, partial.
crimson means “produced by worms”
That’s according to etymonline, where “crimson” leads you to kermes. The OED s.v. kermes isn’t willing to go beyond Arabic qirmiz.
Etymonline has no suggestion that
is related to
Really?
As not-necessarily-reliable etymological sources go, Wiktionary is generally more up to date and overall better than Etymonline. Here and here, in this case.
Thanks. So all they’re willing to do is “compare” PIE *kʷŕ̥mis to PIE *wr̥mis, both meaning “worm”. I guess the idea is that two similar words from different sources happened to have the same meaning, like “minimal” and “miniature” only more so?
Old Irish cruim
… and (much more importantly) Welsh pryf “insect, worm.”
*kʷŕ̥mis is obviously derived from the proto-World *kur- “tortoise.”
The Day of the Pryfed ?
Indeed. The Turtle Apocalypse.
The Naked Lunch, when we see what’s hidden under every shell.
Having established that “worm” in fact derives from *kʷŕ̥mis, we can now see the correct analysis of “world.”
The first element here is clearly not (as has been implausibly suggested) “man”, but the much more natural “turtle.”
This is an obvious allusion to the well-attested* Germanic belief that “it’s turtles all the way down.”
* An early commentary on Vafþrúðnismál reveals that this is what Óðinn whispered in the ear of the dead Baldr. The point is (of course) that Vafþrúðnir did not know this because he was a giant.
Silly. Decomposition. Egregious. Fulsome. Bad. Purblind. Pious.
(Yeah, right …)
Thought you meant me, for a second. (I am, in fact, all of these things except “decomposition”, which has not yet supervened.)
Nah. SOED, for decomposition:
For decompound, verb:
And for decompound, noun and adjective (cf. decomposite):
For decomplex, adjective:
Go, as they say, figure. Do we sanction these blessèd mercurialities? Should they forever be replaced?
They should be decompounded. And eaten by whorms.
Indeed.
It is the way of the whorld.
Visualize whorld pottage.
Typically found in your compost.
It is the way of the whorld.
And we’re back to Gene Wolfe, as we should be.
The link doesn’t work, but Wiktionary agrees with me in any case.
Sorry about the link. But Etymonline isn’t very different from Wiktionary. I’m saying that it’s not very surprising for “clean” to come from a word meaning “gleam” or one meaning “shining, fine, splendid, tender”. Saying “So you think ‘clean’ should still mean ‘shining’?” wouldn’t be very effective. The surprising words are in other Germanic languages. (However, Etymonline adds, ‘But Boutkan doubts the IE etymology and that the “clean” word and the “small” word are the same.’)
@Noetica: Thanks for those.
Finally got around to looking at my notes: antic, vermilion (worms again), pencil, cue, profane, miniature (red again), gymnasium, glamor, area, world, sugar, orchid (and my etymologically favorite collocation, “vanilla orchid”).
“Creole”, though it’s not turned into an antonym of itself, exactly, certainly has changed …
Your prototypical criollos would certainly have bridled at the notion that they might speak a creole.
My favourite Western Oti-Volta semantic shift is the one seen in Kusaal nɛɛr “empty” versus Mooré néere “beautiful.”
Going back to the stages of the semantic shift in “callow” the key transitional one seems to be young-birds-without-feathers. It strikes me upon further reflection that of course *human* infants are typically or stereotypically “bald” in the literal sense of having little to no hair on their heads. So that would have been a more straightforward route to the destination than one involving fledglings, except perhaps for the significant fact that in practice we maybe don’t use “bald” to describe that aspect of human infants, other than jocularly, perhaps because “bald” has an implicature of permanence or something? I have no idea whether that’s true in other languages, though.
Re “criollos,” I’m not sure of the timeline (and it may have varied by language/culture) when there was a shift from “person of 100% Euro ancestry but born here in the new world” to “person or cultural thing reflecting admixture between Euro and indigenous elements,” but as best as I can tell the loanword into Russian (Креол, presumably via French) meant the latter from the beginning of Russian America, e.g. someone born from the union of a Russian dad and an Aleut mom. Of course, the Russian colonial enterprise in North America only got started after the Spanish had been doing it for close to three hundred years.
perhaps because “bald” has an implicature of permanence or something?
Not in “bald-faced lie”. Not even bold-faced lies are forever, nor bare-faced ones.
MW opines: “The current status of this trio of lie-and-liar descriptors is this: both bold-faced and bald-faced are used, but bald-faced is decidedly the preferred term in published, edited text. Barefaced is the oldest, and is still in use, but it’s the least common.”
Then there’s bald as brass.
@Stu: a literal sense of “bald-faced” is “unshaven,” which is known to be a temporary condition. That might override the semantic implicatures of freestanding “bald.” But I’m not sure what you mean by not “forever.” That the false statement will become true if you wait long enough, or just that no one will continue to be deceived by it because everyone now knows it to have been false?
…What next? The Spanish Inquisition?
This hit home immediately when the article associated “callow” with “bald”. It reminded me of Carnaval in Eindhoven, NL a good 10 years ago, playing the song “Sex on Fire”, but substituting the words “Your sex is on fire” with “ik wil sex met die kale”.
Hopefully this amuses someone.
My unshaven condition is only temporary in the sense that I myself am. The same was true of Gale.
Speaking of which, I note that the RAE definition limits “calvo, -va” to the absence of hair on the head. In English, at least, when a woman is said to be bald, it is not usually her head that’s meant.
It’s not? That’s all it means to me.
What hat said…
It appears in hindsight that I may have misnegated, what with being an imperfect primate rather than a Large Language Model.
Even a search for “bald woman porn” turns up almost exclusively movies of women with shaved heads having sex.
We honour your commitment to research.
Somebody had to do it.