Robbie Armstrong’s The Bell story about magnet fishing in Glasgow’s canals is lively and well worth reading, with plenty of juicy Glaswegian dialogue, but this bit is what brings it here:
“What’s that, a chibber, oan yer first throw an aw?” McGeachin shouts over to Glasgow Magnet Fishing OG, Paul Goody, a hulking joiner with a gentle nature. He wanders over to see. Goody shows him the 1954 military pocketknife. “Finders keepers, this one,” Goody says joyfully, hastening to assure me: “Any big blades we hand it into the police.”
From context, chibber seemed to mean ‘knife,’ but I was unfamiliar with it; the only form in DSL is chib (Gangster slang) “A knife, a dagger; a knife or razor used as a weapon,” which is from Romani chhib, chhiv (to quote the OED, which has entries for both chiv and shiv — I am familiar with the latter). And for a spectacular folk etymology, contemplate the fearsome Mary McChib, “a headmistress in Scotland that took order and punishment very seriously”:
Here she is standing with her Chibber, a cupboard full of different types of spikes that she could add to the top of her cane. Before the belt or standard cane came into play in the 1900s, Mary would punish misbehaviour with the threat of stabbing in the top of the arm, a term that became known as getting “chibbed”.
“Into the police” is striking.
I would write “hand it in to the police,” hand it in being a standard formulation.
Yeah, I would not even hazard a guess as to whether that’s bad copyediting (which would be the case here in Yankdom) or it reflects an actual feature of the Patter.
DE will know.
I think autocorrupt has destroyed the distinction between sequences of letters that are sometimes written solid and sometimes not: everyday, awhile, onto, into…
Secret tip: “a while” is never wrong.
I think it’s just a mistake for “in to.”
In Welsh (irrelevantly):
i‘r feddygfa “to the doctor’s”
i‘r meddyg “into the doctor”
at y meddyg “to the doctor”
Confusion may arise if one is careless with one’s prepositions. (I actually does mean “to/for” a person in the dative sense, just not in the physical movement sense. It’s all perfectly simple.)
How do you date a military pocketknife so precisely? Are they marked with their date of origin?
@jwb
Short answer: yes (yearstamp on blade)
https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/959749197/vintage-british-military-1954-jh?show_sold_out_detail=1
There seems to be a highfalutin word awhile that just means… “while”. (Or “whilst”.) It’s very rare.
Alot, though, can’t be blamed on autocorrupt.
Anyone who suffered through Sons of Anarchy should be familiar with “chib” as slang for a knife or razor from the name of the character “Chibs”, who was from Glasgow and had been graced with a Glasgow smile (which the actor actually had done to him in his younger days).
I would have thought that anyone who calls a knife a ‘chibber’ – which is very unusual even in Glasgow, where ‘chib’ is the norm – would call the police ‘the polis’ (long o), the latter being a standard Glasgow pronunciation.
Surely no one in Glasgow would hand a knife in to the “police” – the correct term for law enforcement officers is “the polis”. (Influenced, I think, by the Scots Gaelic word “poileas” which is pronounced in much the same way.)
There’s an important code library in javascript called “HTML 5 Shiv”, which serves to make older versions of Internet Explorer more compliant with web standards. The name suggests an improvised solution, in the same way that a “shiv” in prison slang might be an improvised knife made by sharpening any available piece of metal. This confused some people, who thought that the word should be “shim”, which in coding world is a code library desgined to provide compatibility – itself from the literal meaning of a thin piece of metal (or other material) which is inserted to provide a better fit between two parts.
There now exist *two* libraries, html5shiv and html5shim, which are identical in every respect, apart for the last letter of the name. https://www.paulirish.com/2011/the-history-of-the-html5-shiv/
These days I refuse to enable people who insist on running geriatric browsers with no security support. That aside, that library is a prime example of a shim, and Chris’s link (and one further) do not address the question of why the creator chose not to call it a shim. If indeed it was a wilful act.
I would have thought that anyone who calls a knife a ‘chibber’ – which is very unusual even in Glasgow, where ‘chib’ is the norm – would call the police ‘the polis’ (long o), the latter being a standard Glasgow pronunciation.
Surely no one in Glasgow would hand a knife in to the “police” – the correct term for law enforcement officers is “the polis”.
That’s probably what Goody said; you can’t expect journalists, even local and well-informed ones, to provide accurate transcriptions of dialect, and this word in particular might have been thoughtlessly “corrected” by an editor or proofreader (assuming the paper still has such).
That’s something different, though, even if I can’t remember the name of it – if you invariably say ‘polis’, you’re going to read ‘police’ that way, but no one is going to look at ‘knife’ and say ‘chibber’.
Anyway, they’re two different people – Paul Goody seems to be a Scottish English speaker, assuming he’s represented faithfully.
I’ve met some of them, I think, but they didn’t show me any knives.
if you invariably say ‘polis’, you’re going to read ‘police’ that way, but no one is going to look at ‘knife’ and say ‘chibber’.
Which is exactly why I think they printed “chibber” (what else were they going to print?) but “police” (since that’s the standard printed version of “polis”).
Anyway, they’re two different people
Yes, and I was quoting Goody.
By coincidence I just saw a reference on the internet to “the eminent Marxist scholar Vivek Chibber.” His eminence is not so great that I had myself previously heard of him, but he’s the topic of a fairly long wikipedia article. It’s not a surname I recall coming across before, but wikipedia has a list of another seven “notable” individuals (all of Indian origin) with the same surname, plus a cross-reference to “Chhibber,” which is described as one clan of the “Moyhal Brahmins,” who in turn are a “sub-caste of Saraswat Brahmins from the Punjab region” who “do not perform priestly duties.”
The ultimate etymology of Glaswegian “chibber” is also Indic, but quite likely a false-friend resemblance?
I should perhaps supplement my prior comment with the caveat that I could not immediately google up an all-the-way-back-to-Sanskrit intra-Indic etymology for the Romany word borrowed into English as shiv/chib/etc. I assume the Romany lexicon probably picked up some non-Indic-origin loanwords of its own during the lengthy period in between their exodus from South Asia and their arrival in lands far enough west that they could start supplying loanwords for English.
I could not immediately google up an all-the-way-back-to-Sanskrit intra-Indic etymology for the Romany word borrowed into English as shiv/chib/etc.
Interesting — I can’t either. Is there a Romanyologist in the house?
Romany chiv
Sanskrit krpani “dagger” from IE root for cutting
For v (Rom) to p (San) compare
Romany sove “sleep”
Sanskrit supta
from IE root for sleep
PP, where are you getting that “dagger”? The OED revised the etymology of chiv, n.1 in 2023, and they have:
The name suggests an improvised solution, in the same way that a “shiv” in prison slang might be an improvised knife made by sharpening any available piece of metal. This confused some people, who thought that the word should be “shim”, which in coding world is a code library desgined to provide compatibility – itself from the literal meaning of a thin piece of metal (or other material) which is inserted to provide a better fit between two parts.
“Shiv” – an improvised knife to be inserted between ribs.
So if PP’s right it’s cognate to “kirpan,” the ritualistic dagger (male?) Sikhs are religiously obligated to carry and which these days creates agita in various diasporic contexts where it is no longer customary for most males to carry knives with them wherever they go. (When I was a young man I habitually carried a Swiss army knife in my pocket along with my keys unless I was planning to take an airplane somewhere and thus have to pass through a metal detector before boarding, but I eventually fell out of the habit of doing so in part because knife-phobic areas have within the U.S. spread unpredictably beyond airports.)
ktschwarz has provided a more authoritative etymology.
Well, if you’re gonna treat whoever is currently posting stuff on the internet under the OED brand name as more authoritative than a longtime valued commenter at the Hattery …
ETA: There is apparently a dispute among the learned about whether the reconstructed/conjectural Proto-Indo-Iranian “tongue” lexeme is actually descended from the reconstructed/conjectural PIE “tongue” lexeme. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Iranian/%C8%B7%CC%81i%C8%B7%CC%81%CA%B0w%C3%A1H
I saw the tongue but San j is usually j in Rom, also semantics. But yeah, I was just chancing my arm, as we say here. Or should that be tongue?
There is apparently a dispute among the learned about whether the reconstructed/conjectural Proto-Indo-Iranian “tongue” lexeme is actually descended from the reconstructed/conjectural PIE “tongue” lexeme.
It’s clear that jihvā is not the expected outcome of the usual PIE reconstruction (that would be **dahvā); the question boils down whether jihvā is some kind of distortion of the inherited word or an independent formation. The word has unexpected outcomes in other IE languages as well.
The word has unexpected outcomes in other IE languages as well.
Yes, if you check the descendants at the Wiktionary Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s page, only Italic requires no special pleading.
Perhaps it’s taboo deformation? We can infer some sort of taboo re frank discussions of the tongue in early IE cultures, just like the taboos re talking about nakedness or bears …
(My memory’s not 100% on this, but I think I may have first learned about taboo deformation long long ago when I took historical linguistics with hat’s old contemporary Stephanie Jamison and somehow γυμνός came up. Quoth wiktionary: “From Proto-Hellenic *gʷomnós by Cowgill’s Law (o → u between labial and resonant), from Proto-Indo-European *nogʷmós by metathesis (possible taboo deformation; if the metathesis didn’t happen we would have *νυγμός (*nugmós)), from *nogʷós (“naked”).”)
And we’d have nygmasiums instead of gymnasiums.
only Italic requires no special pleading
< Romani chhiv, British Romani chiv to put, to stick (< Sanskrit kṡip- to throw)
For LH readers who are curious about the IE background of the alternative etymon given in the OED, the Wiktionary collects material to be compared to the Sanskrit root kṣip- (Russian шибать, etc.) under a root *ksweybʰ-. These forms too require special pleading. The Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben has a good short summary of this mess under *k⁽ᵘ⁾su̯ei̯bʰ- here (middle of p. 372). The general lack of regular correspondences all around among the forms gathered under this ‘root’ is often ascribed to its onomatopoeic character or contamination with other (also seemingly onomatopoeic) roots. And Sanskrit *kṣip- is said to have lost the *-v- of the expected *kṣvip- by dissimilation of labials. On the unity of this root at least in Indo-Iranian, note for example Vedic kṣipreṣu- ‘having swift arrows’, epithet of Rudra in the Rig Veda (kṣipra- ‘quick, swift’, from the root kṣip-; iṣu-, ‘arrow’) beside Young Avestan xšuuiβi.išu- ‘having swift arrows’, epithet of Tishtrya, Mithra, and human warriors in the Yashts.