Looking up something else in my Merriam-Webster, I ran across ridley, the name of two varieties of sea turtle. What struck me was the conjunction of the etymology and the date, respectively “unknown” and 1926. There are lots of words with unknown etymologies, of course, but you’d think that recent a word would not be a total mystery. Wikipedia, in its Kemp’s Ridley article, says:
These turtles are called Kemp’s Ridley because Richard Kemp (of Key West) was the first to send in a specimen of the species to Samuel Garman at Harvard. However, the etymology of the name “Ridley” itself is still in question. Prior to the term being popularly used (for both species in the genus), L. kempii at least was known as the “bastard turtle”.
I wonder if the OED will turn up anything more when it gets to this word in its ongoing revision?
Ever an ardent friend to sea fauna, let me be the first to jump in on a topic about which I know nothing… There’s an interesting discussion of the name in the Marine Turtle Newsletter, found here:
http://www.seaturtle.org/mtn/archives/mtn58/mtn58p10b.shtml
It suggests that “ridley turtle” is derived from “riddle turtle” (admittedly, hard to say), the riddle being where it bred (hence the alternate name, bastard turtle).
May be true, may be folk etymology — but even turtle specialists do not know.
The OED2’s first quotation says:
“Known locally” sounds to me as if ridley is of long standing in the (future) Conch Republic, but was made known to the wider community only in the 20th century, though I suppose it’s conceivable that it means “known since 1926”.
The OED also quotes the EB on the etymology of bastard turtle: “stemming from the mistaken belief that it is the offspring of a green turtle and a logger-head”.
Someone on Pharyngula is bound to know.
Believe it or not.
…the riddle being where it bred…
What does ‘the riddle’ mean in this context, please ?
“riddle” sounds suspiciously like a folk etymology
Off topic: I’d love to see what linguists here say about this: What English sounds like to foreigners.
What does ‘the riddle’ mean in this context
Mystery.
Merriam Webster:
There is also a phrase “riddle me this” that gets some 2 million ghits, but for some reason it’s something I associate with either Appalachian or British usage. There yet another meaning for riddle as a verb: “1 : to separate (as grain from chaff) with a riddle : screen 2 : to pierce with many holes 3 : to spread through : permeate “
[Slaps head] I misunderstood Cherie Woodworth’s use of riddle – the riddle being where it bred as being the location (a local name for sandbars or cays or so forth) where the turtles bred, rather than meaning it was a puzzle where they bred.
There are so many arcane names for maritime features …
This has nothing to do with it, I’m sure.
What is that creatures, Ridley? I’m trying to search the image. I found to possible result first turtle and the last a creature like pterodactyl.
O: No, but I constantly re-read it…
As well as Graham Greene, if I may hazard a guess?
arcane names for maritime features
Remembering that another meaning of “riddle” is a screen for separating grain, I skimmed the OED to see if there wasn’t a maritime usage as well. I didn’t find one, although I did find the information that in the Scottish and north dialect, “turning the riddle and shears” was a mode of divination for the discovery of theft.
Scanning the entries I did find an entry for the archaic “ridel”, and its variation “rydely” [a. OF rideler, f. ride wrinkle, fold], which unlike “riddle” has only one d.
While “ridley” is supposed to be a noun, the creature is also called “Kemp’s ridley turtle” which makes it sound more like an adjective.
Could this name be a way of identifying the turtle as being more wrinkled than other turtles, that is, “Kemp’s wrinkly turtle”?
According to Harold A. Dundee, writing in Marinte Turtle Newsletter in 2001, the etymology of “ridley” was still a riddle:
http://www.seaturtle.org/mtn/archives/mtn58/mtn58p10b.shtml
No news on ridley, but news on ridleys. For the first time (as far as is known), Kemp’s ridleys successfully hatched on a NYC beach; indeed, this is the most northerly hatching on the Atlantic coast of North America. The eggs were laid in July, but when September rains eroded the beach they were on, they were dug out and incubated. 96 baby turtles survived and were released close to the spot where the eggs were laid. Hopefully in 10-15 years some will return to lay their own eggs. Local newspaper story.
I realize that it’s been nine years, but since nobody has answered jasonflops’s question:
Ridley is the name of a dragon monster from the Metroid video game series. He is a recurring boss and appears in almost all the games, starting with the original Metroid for the Nintendo Entertainment System. For whatever reason, Ridley has become the iconic enemy associated with the series, even more than the titular metroids.
And he was named in honor of Ridley Scott, wasn’t he?
Indeed so.
most northerly hatching: I failed to mention that it is the most northerly hatching not only of Kemp’s ridleys (which normally hatch on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico) but of any sea turtle whatever.
The OED updated the entry in June 2010, just half a year after my post; alas, they have not come up with any revelations:
But they have antedated it:
Ridley is an Anglo surname. I had a soccer teammate whose father was “Mr. Basketball” in Illinois. It seems more likely it’s related to the surname than that it derived from riddle.
For a full discussion see H. A. Dundee in Marine Turtle Newsletter 58 (1992) 10–2.
It occurred to me to google that, and it turns out it’s online in full (scroll down to p. 10). It ends:
1885 (Yazoo, MS): “We pegged a ridley, or yellow turtle…”
(The article is disgusting, but that’s another matter.)
An antedate, a palpable antedate!
An excellent one, though maybe not by as much as it seems. Another article on the page mentions “the recent killing of Sitting Bull, the famous Indian chief”, which occurred on Dec. 15, 1890, according to Wikipedia. It’s too bad the page doesn’t have the date on it.
By the way, the Hattery’s own Stephen Goranson posted the above antedating to Linguist List in 2015.
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2015-August/138709.html
I’m trying to think what you’d call an antedating of an antedating, without sounding like Porky Pig.
Thanks for catching that, JF. Here’s (I hope) a fuller link:
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn87065683/1885-05-07/ed-1/seq-9/#date1=1756&index=1&rows=20&searchType=advanced&language=&sequence=0&words=ridley+turtle&proxdistance=5&date2=1963&ortext=&proxtext=ridley+turtle&phrasetext=&andtext=&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1
Maybe an odd sheet crept in? The pages are not numbered.
(The previous page enlightens: “Joe Burks of Panther Creek, N. C., is an enthusiast upon the subject of egg eating. He lacks one inch of being seven feet high, and claims a record of eating 130 eggs at one meal.”)
By the way, I emailed the Library of Congress about the incorrect date. If you’ve done that, they now have two.
I hope the eggs Joe Burks ate were butterfly eggs on his cabbage. There was also an interesting story about a man who shed his entire skin on the same date every year.
@Y:
It must have. Page 10 shows on the obverse of page 7. Pages 8 and 9 are two faces of another sheet, and this sheet can be dated no earlier than 1887 since the fourth column of p. 9 reports the following about postal cards.
Delayed update: Malea Walker at the Library of Congress replied to me on Nov. 14, saying that she’d take the correction to the Chronicling America team. She noted that the article about the IIII on clocks was from Jan. 17, 1891, and the one about the man who sheds his skin was from Jan. 18, so she suggested that the page was from shortly after those dates. She also suggested that I write to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, which I just finally did.
From the Linguist List post:
Bummer. Was there some other Mr. Ridley who was a right bastard?
But in my conversations with Marjorie Carr, Archie Carr’s widow, came a revelation. She could not remember the exact source, but she said that “ridley” came from “riddle”, which was transmogrified in the Florida Keys to “ridder” and finally “ridley”. The riddle being, she said, “Who were its parents?” No one knew from whence the “bastard turtle”, as local turtlers sometimes called it, came or where it bred.
Already in 1697, William Dampier refers to a kind of sea turtle as bastard green turtle, on page 106 of A New Voyage Round the World (available here).
Remembering that another meaning of “riddle” is a screen for separating grain
When making her nest, the female Kemp’s ridley shakes back and forth like a riddle for ‘sifting sand’ or riddling oysters. There is a good video of the behavior here. Apparently, ridleys nest in the daytime, to avoid predators like coyotes that are more active at night. This is unlike other sea turtle species—whose nocturnal nesting would not be observed so often? And so riddly from riddle like a wriggly from wriggle? Perhaps there is even the hint of something sexual; cf. ‘digging sand’, ‘sifting sand’, etc., in songs like ‘Sound Bay Gal’ (leading to bastards?) and in the Harry Belafonte version. 😜
However, in the present day, Kemp’s ridleys mostly nest on the western coast of the Gulf of Mexico. So how could this notion of sifting or riddling be prominent among Anglophone fisherman based out of Florida and the Bahamas, then? (If the name did originate among this group…)
That all seems interesting (not that I’m entitled to an opinion), but riddle me this: What is the “riddling oysters” you mention?
Your video is from Cape Hatteras, way north and east of Florida, so it seems quite possible Kemp’s ridleys nested in Florida and the Bahamas. Or could the original ridley have been the olive ridley, which according to Wikipedia now breeds as close as Cuba? It covers its eggs with the same motion, around 2:45 in this video.
I hadn’t realized that “riddled” (with bullets etc.) is another “sieve” word like “garble”, “critic”, and “crisis”, all from PIE *krie-, according to etymonline.
That’s not a possible PIE root, but this is.
Thanks. Even if I’d typed it correctly or copied it from etymonline as *krei-, would it have been wrong?
In any case less wrong. 🙂
It would have been outdated by many decades. Douglas Harper has no education in historical linguistics and didn’t want to include PIE, but people “kept pestering” him for it, so he copied everything out of Watkins’s Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (dumbing it down by substituting e for schwa); Watkins in turn mostly just repeats Pokorny without revision. After some attempts to use more recent sources, Harper officially disclaimed and abandoned all his content on PIE — he just can’t be bothered to delete the obsolete stuff from his pages.
If you’re reading Language Hat, etymonline’s PIE material was never meant for you. Wiktionary, or a professional dictionary, is a better bet.
ktschwarz: Thank you. I won’t bother with Etymonline’s PIE any more.
I must have been confused about olive ridleys, since I don’t see what I thought I saw at Wikipedia. Sea Turtles of the Caribbean says, “The Kemp’s ridley is largely confined to the Gulf of Mexico, with only minor nesting on the east coast of Florida, giving it the most restricted nesting range of any sea turtle species globally. Olive ridleys are the least common species [in the Caribbean], with significant nesting occurring only in French Guiana.”
Since Kemp’s ridleys do nest in Florida and probably did in greater numbers in the 19th century, it seems possible that local people named them after their egg-laying behavior.
“riddled” (with bullets etc.) is another “sieve” word like “garble”, “critic”, and “crisis”
All of those have OED3 updates, which agree that riddle, critic, and crisis come from a common PIE root. Garble is interesting: all sources I checked agree that it’s from Anglo-Norman, from Medieval Latin or Italian, from an Arabic word for ‘sieve’. (“Presumably a word passed from Arabic to Mediterranean Europe through trade in Eastern spices,” says Merriam-Webster.) Watkins has it under this PIE root because older dictionaries said Arabic borrowed it from Latin crībellum, diminutive of crībrum ‘sieve’. On the other hand, the OED’s 2020 revision says:
Thanks again! That’s quite a coincidence, another one for my como-kmo list. (Edit: Spanish and Hebrew for “like, as”.)
The Marine Turtle Newsletter mentions Henry Ridley but dismisses him saying he never published on turtles.
However, the Index of the Linnean Society records him either speaking or writing in 1877 on the turtles of Fernando Noronha, where olive ridleys are indeed reported. I believe this was an oral presentation to the society’s general meeting, but it’s hard to track down on my phone.
I believe that’s the origin. Note that he would have been there some years earlier, allowing time for the name to spread before 1877. Here is a link to the General Index of the Linnean Society Journal and Proceedings.
After finding this in Google books, I discovered that the olive ridley internet seems broadly aware of this. It’s hard to understand why the news never reached the Kemp’s ridley internet. The siloing of information in academic specialties these days…
Gah this was 1887. Sorry. Still antedating other cites. No direct mention of olive ridleys in my source, just an index note of turtles on Fernando Noronha, but FN had no terrestrial or freshwater turtles so Ridley was certainly discussing sea turtles.
Here, page 1–2, is the report of Ridley’s account of the flora and fauna of Fernando de Noronha, given 3 November 1887.
Thanks, so Ridley, who was primarily a botanist, didn’t identify the turtles to species. Since other sea turtle species are reported from F. de N., and 1887 to 1891 is a short time for a scientific discovery (if there was one) to change the popular name of a species in another country, I don’t think “Mad” Ridley is likely to be the origin of “ridley”. (Wikipedia says that was his nickname because of his fervor for encouraging rubber-tree plantations.)