Dave Wilton has a Big List entry on the word nimrod; as he says, “In current usage, nimrod is often used as a disparaging term for an inept or foolish person, but its original and basic meaning is as a term for a hunter.” That basic meaning derives (as any fule kno) from the biblical figure Nimrod, described as “a mighty hunter before the Lord”; Dave says “The name is probably a variant of Ninurta, a Mesopotamian god of war and the hunt.” The OED (entry revised 2003) has the following senses (I’ve given the first citation for each):
1. † A tyrannical ruler; a tyrant. Obsolete.
?1548 The boystuouse tyrauntes of Sodoma wyth their great Nemroth Winchester,..wyll sturre abought them.
J. Bale, Image of Bothe Churches (new edition) i. Preface sig. Bᵛ2. A great or skilful hunter (frequently ironic); any person who likes to hunt. Also figurative.
1623 The Nimrod fierce is Death, His speedie Grayhounds are, Lust, Sicknesse, Enuie, Care.
W. Drummond, Flowres of Sion 203. North American slang. Usually with lower-case initial. A stupid or contemptible person; an idiot.
1977 Heard you are a Philly fan. What more can you expect from a nitwit, nimrod, R.O.T.C.
Connector (University of Lowell, Massachusetts) 19 April 12/5
Dave quotes the biblical name from the Old English translation of Genesis: “An þære wæs Nenroth; þe Nemroth wæs mihtig on eorþan.” He then gives a very interesting description of the progression of senses in English, with citations from Chaucer (“ne Nebrot, desirous/ To regne, had nat maad his toures hye”), John Bale (“The boystuouse tyrauntes of Sodoma wyth their great Nemroth Winchester”), and Looney Tunes (specifically, the 1948 animated short What Makes Daffy Duck: “Precisely what I was wondering, my little nimrod”). What interests me is the variety of forms; early texts have Nenroth, Nemroth, Nembrot, Nemeroth, and the like; I can’t help finding the modern Nimrod flavorless by comparison. And I note that Russian had Нимврод, Неврод, and Немврод before settling on Нимрод; in fact, in the same Shaginyan mock-poem I quoted here, we find:
Не царь, не бог, не падишах,
Не древних мифов порожденье,
Марс иль какой-нибудь Немврод, —
Сам комиссар за загражденье
Загнал державный свой народ!Not king, not god, not padishah,
Not any fruit of ancient myths,
Mars or some Nembrod or other —
The commissar drove his mighty people
Beyond the barrier himself!
Bring back Nembrod, say I; besides being more impressive, it will remove any possibility of confusion with the modern slang term.
Nimrod is simply a rendition of the Masoretic Hebrew pronunciation.
The latest edition of Gesenius Handwörterbuch says “Etym. und Bdtg. unklar”. Some derive the name from Ninurta, but others claim it’s derived from Marduk. The forms Nebrod or Nemrod are from Greek and Latin translations of the Hebrew Bible. Josephus has Nabrodes.
not to be confused with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerods
(\rimshot)
I am so used to the Biblical reference that I am unable to shake off the feeling that the pejoritive sense is simply due to deep ignorance.
(I actually remember my first encounter with the pejorative sense: I did at the time – mistakenly – suppose that it was an error of the familiar kind where a not very literary reader has come across an unfamiliar word and guessed its meaning incorrectly from the context.)
If it’s just American, that would explain a lot. In hindsight, I’ve only seen that sense in US sources.
Some derive the name from Ninurta, but others claim it’s derived from Marduk.
And then there’s David Rohl’s near-crackpot (but intriguing) suggestion that it’s derived from Enmerkar.
I suspect that nimrod became an insult because of some sound-meaning association, perhaps like nitwit. Green also has nimshi, an obscure Old Testament name. There are many funny names in the OT, and the bad kids of the 19th century surely utilized them for sinful purposes.
Jumping Jehosaphat!
”I suspect that nimrod became an insult because of some sound-meaning association, perhaps like nitwit…”
I recently heard a theory on Youtube that Nimrod became an insult due to another Looney Tunes cartoon where Bugs Bunny (or another character ) called Elmer Fudd “Nimrod” in a sarcastic way, the way one might call an inept detective “Sherlock” or a dumb person “Einstein”. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is truth to this since, at least until the 90s, Looney Tunes were constantly played on television on Saturdays and in early afternoons on weekdays. Kids watching after school wouldn’t get the reference and only see Bugs making fun of Elmer and assume that “Nimrod” was a straight insult.
I’m surprised they’re not quoting Buggs Bunny, in reference to Elmer Fudd, as a reference for the disparaging meaning.
Green says that it was “popularized” by the 1940 Bugs Bunny cartoon, but the word is documented earlier, from 1933. Bugs mostly used existing slang.
But Bugs isn’t using the “idiot” meaning. It’s not a coincidence that Elmer is a hunter.
But a hopelessly incompetent hunter….
It occurs to me that ‘nimrod’ may be the closest American equivalent to the British ‘wally.’
Hat’s quote is correct. It is Daffy, not Bugs; the internet is a den of falsehood and deceit. The quote is in answer to Mr. Fudd’s “How am I ever going to catch that screwy duck?” (at about 5:35.)
Green’s 1933 quotation is
Hecht & Fowler Great Magoo 183: He’s in love with her. That makes about the tenth. The same old Nimrod. Won’t let her alone.
As the article linked in Hat’s original post points out, that could be “hunter”. I wonder whether there’s also a suggestion of the earlier sense Green mentions (cited only to a slang dictionary) of “penis”.
The article suggests the sense development was:– 1. eponymous “good hunter”; > 2. ironic “incompetent hunter”; > 3. bleached “incompetent person, loser”.
1>2, eponymous used ironically, seems more the rule than the exception; non-ironic use of Sherlock, Einstein, Casanova, etc, seems minority. “BE a regular NAME” is very likely ironic. Maybe for general attributes like “clever” it’s more common than specific ones like “hunter”. In any case, ironic and non-ironic senses can co-exist indefinitely.
It’s 2>3 bleaching that’s unusual and seems to have killed off senses 1 and 2 for many Americans. I note that X-Men comics introduced a mighty hunter named Nimrod as late as 1985; did the name confuse readers then? It does now.
@DE I am unable to shake off the feeling that the pejoritive sense is simply due to deep ignorance.
Seconded. The chief sense I’ve seen it used is the ‘Nimrod’ of the Elgar Enigma Variations, where it’s named affectionately for Augustus Jaeger who was a great friend and supporter. (Such friendships from Germany led to Elgar being completely bewildered when Britain went to war.)
Unlike DE, I’ve never even heard the pejorative sense.
@JF, you’re right. That slang dictionary adds to the gloss, by way of elucidation, “because a mighty hunter”.
I note that X-Men comics introduced a mighty hunter named Nimrod as late as 1985; did the name confuse readers then?
I’m sure it did. I graduated high school in 1984, and as a secular kid who did not go to Sunday School I only knew “Nimrod” as a pejorative, and I agree it probably was from watching Loony Tunes in the 1970s.
Would be interesting to know if American kids who grew up in evangelical or Jewish households retained the eponymous sense of the word.
I note that Chris Claremont – who held the pen on the X-men circa 1985 – was both English and Jewish, and had spent his childhood in the UK and then living on a Kibbutz. It’s quite probable he had no idea that Nimrod no longer meant “hero” to most of of his American reading public, and was in fact kind of a farcical name to give a superhero at that point. I wonder who eventually broke the news to him.
I didn’t even watch that much Loony Tunes, but was only aware of the pejorative sense. It’s thoroughly entrenched in US English, well beyond that immediate vector. I doubt most Americans (unless they had an exceptionally religious upbringing) are even vaguely aware of its biblical origin. “Two countries divided by a common language” indeed.
I seem to know Nimrod mainly as the name of an RAF plane, but it does *sound* a bit like a penis insult.
To follow up ulr’s initial comment, the LXX has Νεβρὼδ and the Vulgate has Nemrod. Looks like Tyndale initially stuck with Nemrod but that in the subsequent English versions (except for the Douay-Rheims, of course) it rapidly switched over to Nimrod, possibly* as early as the Great Bible of 1539, and possibly because that was how Luthers Bibel had handled it. Obviously the vowel in the first syllable was not explicitly specified in traditional Hebrew manuscripts, and one wonders whether the LXX translators and St. Jerome misheard it or misunderstood it or if the living Hebrew pronunciation in the best Rabbinical circles had itself drifted over the subsequent millennium-plus despite the official Masoretic commitment to stasis.
ETA: Russian apparently has lots of options, or at least the relevant wiki article starts off: “Нимро́д[3][4][5][6][7], Нимврод[4][7], Невро́д[5], Не́мврод[6][7]”
*When one is relying as I am here on modern digital transcriptions of 16th-century books there is always some risk that there has been some silent modernization/emendation of orthography, possibly inadvertently, not to mention the risk of sheer typos.
The Dave Wilton piece asserts that “Many people, including me, have distinct memories of Bugs Bunny calling Fudd a nimrod, but no one has been able to identify any specific cartoon in which he does so. Instead, it seems to be a case of quote migration and the plasticity of human memory” etc.
Significantly, however, wikipedia asserts that in the 1951 “Rabbit Every Monday” Bugs says towards the very end “Nah, I couldn’t do that to the little Nimrod,” where the “little Nimrod” referenced is not Elmer but rather Yosemite Sam (who, in the context of this specific short, is a rabbit-hunter). IMPORTANT EDIT: It’s at around 3:09 in this partial version. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=933107541954508
one wonders whether the LXX translators and St. Jerome misheard it or misunderstood it
No, the epsilon for Tiberian hireq in an unstressed closed syllable is completely regular in LXX transcriptions and right up to the Hexapla. The LXX translators and Jerome didn’t mishear anything: the pronunciation actually changed later on.
A possibly relevant predecessor for the Loonie Tunes instances: “Of all the characters in the history of U.S. drama, Colonel Nimrod Wildfire of Kentucky occupies a special place.” This from a 1954 story about the rediscovery of the text of the smash-hit (in the 1830’s and 1840’s) play that had introduced the character. https://time.com/archive/6795348/education-the-colonel-rides-again/ Colonel Nimrod is said by other sources to have been an over-the-top caricature of the historical Davy Crockett, and Yosemite Sam may plausibly be an indirect descendant of a stock comic character for whom Col. N. was the prototype.
Note the humorous detail that the play also included (in its milieu of a wild Kentuckian being a fish out of water in sophisticated Manhattan) a “visiting English lady named Mrs. Wollope” who bears a certain resemblance to Fanny Trollope.
I wonder if Colonel Wildfire of Kentucky was acquainted with Colonel Angus of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2oi-X8P38 ?
“Kuando el Rey Nimrod”. Bensoussan’s rendition is better, but it might be helpful to know Ladino. If you stay a bit longer, “L’cha Dodi” is also very good.
If it’s Nimrod-adjacent music you want …
Lux aeterna
Elgar (who never ceased being of the Church of Rome) always said there was a “larger theme” that ‘went with’ the enigma theme. Most of the cryptics in the score were solved pretty quickly except for that bit; and Elgar got tetchy that folks were being so slow. There’s no doubt in my mind this is what fits.
Even if I’m utterly wrong, this is music that carries a deep truth – even for an atheist.