Languagehat Returns.

Oy gevalt! Glad to hear you’re ok, get well soon and enjoy the painkillers.

Glad to hear things seem on the mend. Please take your time, and take care. どうかご自愛ください。

Welcome back home!

Logy has always been a written-only word for me, so I decided to look up the pronunciation to see if I had it right. Sure enough, LOW-ghee. Etymologically its origin is uncertain: it may connect to Dutch log of the same meaning, or Low German luggich, or possibly it is a variant of loggy; log is itself of unknown origin. In short, we are clueless but happy.

Welcome back, Steve! We missed you.

May your sutures never rupture and may all your wounds heal by primary intention! 🙂

Have a good reast and get well soon! Поправляйтесь!

Dear Hat,

may you be in heaven a half an hour before the divil knows you’re dead!!

Keep on recovering well, please.

All the best, Mr. Hat!

We’ll come here faithfully in your absence, to keep the campfire burning. But we hope for your swift recovery, and return.

Wishing you the very best!
Всего доброго!!

@John Cowan – I’m the opposite: I had only ever heard it (used by my father) until now. I even looked it up once, but guessed loagy and, not finding it, prematurely concluded it wasn’t known to OED. I wonder if anyone with a subscription to DARE can fill in some details?

I associate logy with commercials for laxatives and the like, but it’s been decades since I’ve heard it there. Whatever. Best wishes.

So you say / And so say we all.

Whether it’s written logy or loagy, the oa vowel makes it unlikely that it’s either borrowed from or cognate with luggisch et al.

If it’s native then it’s from lāg, apparently related to ‘law’, ‘low’ and words for “lay (down)” all over Germanic, suggesting an original meaning “prone to lay down; sleepy”. No. lei(g)e “(makeshift) bed; rent” is close in form and partly in meaning. The English verb ‘lag’ might owe its form to shortening in compounds and inflected forms. A parallel example might be ‘rogue’ (in faux French spelling), ‘ragged’ and No. dial. reig “bout of illness; row of travellers”. But are there forms of English with “hard g” in that position?

Rest, rest, rest. Hope you are healed up soon.

Some research says appendicitis is best treated with antibiotics, unless there is a rupture – only then surgery. And other research that says the appendix is a reservoir for gut bacteria from when humans regularly had cholera, if you survive – you get to recolonize your gut with good bacteria. Not entirely useless after all.

Good to hear you’re back home. Wishing you a speedy recovery.

@Hat:
Joining with everyone else, best wishes and hope you feel better soon!
@Trond Engen:
But are there forms of English with “hard g” in that position?
I’m no expert, but as far as I know, non-doubled final “g” in Old English consistently corresponds to modern y or w (or I guess sometimes /f/), so lāg would be expected to become “low/lough” (cf. dough < dāg). That’s why there are so few words in Modern English with a long vowel/diphthong before a “g”, and a lot of them are from French. A rhyme to “logy” is “hoagie”, but that word’s etymology also seems to be mysterious.

Yes, a bit late but I’m glad to hear this too.

unless there is a rupture – only then surgery

The trick is to do the surgery just before the rupture, so that you don’t risk peritonitis, which even today is often fatal (my sister died of it as a result of adhesions from gut surgery she had had over 20 years before). Of course, this is like the little boy on the bus who tells the old lady she needs to get off two stops before he does!

Wow; I’m glad to hear you’re O.K., and I hope you’re back to feeling 100% soon! 🙂

David M.: Or it might be a Kluge doublet.

Yes, that finally struck me too this morning. EtymOnline mentions a dialectal Norwegian verb lagga “go slowly”, which I didn’t know. After looking it up I can broaden the attested meanings to “walk slowly and steadily” (No. Telemark), “walk around without purpose” (Da. Bornholm), “hang about, walk lazily” (Shetland). This could be a doublet of laga In the sense “talk in great detail about nothing”, new to me. Also, there’s an unvoiced parallel doublet: lakka “move steadily”, which I actually did know, but only in the specific meaning of time passing: Det lakker mot kveld “Evening is approaching”, and laka “walk around with nothing to do”, which I also didn’t know.

To the rogue bunch, add Scand. ragg “goat wool”.

Peritonitis can be nasty business indeed. Unlike JC’s, several decades ago my sister survived a bout after gut surgery.

1. For Hat: We’re all (I’m sure) hoping for a smooth and quick recovery of strength. My grandmother was over 70 when her appendix burst and she waited two days to go to the hospital. (“It’s just a stomach-ache. I’ll be fine if I skip dinner.”) She recovered quickly and lived another 10-15 years. Then again, it’s possible that 50 years of Scotch-and-very-little-water every night had made her guts near-invincible.

2. Eli Nelson: Unless I’ve been pronouncing it wrong all my life, ‘fogy’ rhymes with ‘logy’ and ‘hoagie’.

3. Everyone: If we’re getting into etymologies inspired by Hat’s account of his adventure, I’d like to mention that ‘appendix’ is (or was) just about the only word I can think of with different plurals for different meanings. When I was young, humans had appendixes, and books had appendices. I can still recall the shock when I saw (35 or 40 years ago?) that Oxford University Press had started advertising the quality of the ‘indexes’ and ‘appendixes’ in their books on Roman history and the Latin language. I would have thought that they could have let us Latinists keep our ‘indices’ and ‘appendices’, even if everyone else switched over.

Michael Hendry: ‘fogy’ rhymes with ‘logy’ and ‘hoagie’

Heh. Spelled fogey in my dictionary. Let me quote EtymOnline (starting there this time):

fag (v.1) “to droop, decline in strength, become weary” (intransitive), 1520s, of uncertain origin

And, of course, ON/No. dial. feigr “mortally ill or wounded; moribound”, No. feig “cowardly”.
The semantics of the pair of verbs faga “weaken, give in” and fagga “cuddle; lump together” isn’t too promising, though.

I also have a couple of issues with my other No. wordpairs above: None of the examples show original long a, since that would have yielded No. å. Also, the English GOAT vowel regularly corresponds to No. ei (as in geit). I don’t know if Kluge is particularly helpful with that.

Also bogey, dogie, stogie.

Meaning that one variant has been through Kluge’s law (see above for link) and the other has not. Kluge’s law generates Germanic non-expressive words with geminated voiceless stops.

Bogey < dial. bogge < ME bugge ‘fearsome specter’, also > bug. This is surely expressive gemination. Dogie is of unknown origin and provenance (it first appears in print as late as 1887), but I bet it’s expressive gemination too. Stogie, on the other hand, is adj. ‘coarse, rough’ > n. ‘cheap cigar’, short for Conestoga, an Iroquoian name ‘?people of the cabin-pole’.

More medical news (to me, anyway). Lots of people with dangerous allergies carry an epipen nowadays to receive a shot of adrenaline in emergencies. It helps buy time to get to a hospital by opening up airways and correcting low blood pressure in anaphylactic shock. I just twigged that epinephrine is our Greek-derived word for ‘above the kidneys’, the location of the source, just as the Latin for it is adrenal. Adrenaline & epinephrine are the same thing. Epinephrine is the coinage of an American pharmacologist who extracted the stuff from adrenal glands in 1897.

John Cowan:
Excellent: nouns with different plurals for different meanings are more numerous than I thought.

However, I don’t think ganglia/ganglions really belongs on that list. That’s one of the many words with two different plurals (usually Greek or Latin vs English) but no difference in meaning, e.g. cacti/cactuses, fungi/funguses, referenda/referendums, genera/genuses, lots more.

Something that’s a little harder to classify: the plural of ‘life’ is ‘lives’, but I believe the plural of ‘still life’ (as in paiting) is always ‘still lifes’.

Maple Leaf takes a regular plural because it is a compound, and as such seals off the irregular noun head, unlike lower case maple leaf. Similar things happen with fly v., preterite flew > fly ball > fly out, preterite flied out, not flew out.

I thought yesterday of:

datum (geography) -> datums
datum (otherwise) -> data

Then there is the strange case of ephemeron. In the singular, it referred to the beliefs of ancient authors that there were insects that lived only a single day (true, if you mean just the adult form, like mayflies), plants that ditto (untrue), and plants poisonous enough to kill you in a single day (true). The figurative sense ‘short-lived person, institution, or production’ is still with us, but the last recorded use of the singular is in 1796; since then we have spoken only of ephemera in this sense, as well as the later sense, not yet in the OED, of ‘collectable items that were originally expected to have only short-term usefulness or popularity’ (from the ODO).

But there are two outliers: during the 19C, mayflies were called ephemeras or even ephemerae, taking ephemera as the singular. And in very recent times, computer scientists have invented an object called an ephemeron, reviving or re-creating the 18C word in a new sense, but with plural form ephemerons. (For those who care, an ephemeron registers interest in two other objects, known as the key and the value; if no other object is interested in the key, then the ephemeron will forget about both key and value, even if — and this is the distinguishing point of ephemerons — the value is itself interested in the key.)