A nice piece of etymological discourse from Haggard Hawks (see this LH post):
Last week, a sweary fact about kestrels turned out to be not only HH’s most popular fact of the week, but one of our most popular facts ever. Back in the sixteenth century, kestrels were known as windfuckers and fuckwinds. Having said that however, there’s a theory that claims you should in fact change those Fs to Ss. Some etymologists (presumably looking to make the history of the English language slightly less offensive than it actually is) will have you believe that those windfucker and fuckwind nicknames for the kestrel are actually misreadings: they come from a time when the archaic long S character < ſ > was often used to be used in place of < s > at the beginnings and middles of words, and so it’s entirely possible that that long S was simply misread as a lowercase F < f >.
So those kestrels? Perhaps they weren’t so much fucking the wind as they were sucking it. So to speak. It’s a neat theory, certainly, but alas it’s not the case; these nicknames really were as uncompromising as they sound. Take a look at this page from Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, for instance, and you’ll see under the French word crecerelle—well, pretty clear proof that there was no sucking involved whatsoever […]
But why call kestrels windfuckers and fuckwinds at all? Well, pragmatically the name probably refers to the fact that kestrels have a habit of hovering expertly in one place while they hunt, during which their posture could be said to, er, resemble doing something else.
Etymologically meanwhile it’s worth remembering that the F-word wasn’t always as opprobrious as it is today: it’s always meant “to copulate”, but back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it wasn’t a swear word so much as it was just a fairly rough and impolite bit of throwabout language. (For instance, another translator’s dictionary from around the same period—John Florio’s Italian-English Worlde of Words—drops the F-bomb more times than an episode of The Wire).
It wasn’t until people found that the F-word was being used more as a sweary intensifier than a literal expression in the prudish late 1700s (and then the even more prudish Victorian era after that) that it began to be considered genuinely bad language; the F-word vanished from all major dictionaries in 1795, and didn’t reappear until 1965.
(Images at the link.) I like the combination of swearing and typography, and of course the piquant bird names (previously at LH in the OED draft here).
For whatever it’s worth, jebivjetar is a common enough insult in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian—the Hrvatski jezični portal, for instance, defines it as meaning ‘superficial person, charlatan, unreliable character.’
Another great word!
I can confirm jebivetar is alive and well, at least in Serbian. I usually see it in the sort of slacker/layabout/good-for-nothing meaning.
Heh. I googled “ветроеб” and found it only as a translation-equivalent for “windfucker”!
Yeah, in colloquial Croatian too, jebivjetar has the sense of ‘slacker’ or ‘layabout’ or ‘good-for-nothing.’ Its kid-friendly (but equally fun) synonym in colloquial B/C/S is šalabajzer, a pseudo-Germanism apparently formed from šalabazati, which, in turn, is an obscure verb of uncertain etymology (but apparently attested in Vuk’s dictionary) meaning ‘to wander aimlessly.’
I consider ‘fuckwind’ and ‘windfucker’ survivals of a sense of ‘fuck’ which must have died out very early in the word itself (before it was recorded in written form): the kestrel *strikes* or *hits* the wind, rather than fucking it in the sense we’d use the word today. This sense survived in other Germanic languages long enough to be written down, and indeed goes back to the probable IE original of ‘fuck’, *peug-.
in the prudish late 1700s (and then the even more prudish Victorian era after that) …
There’s another bird’s name got euphemised, from etymonline:
wheatear (n.)
type of bird, 1590s, back-formation from white-ears, literally “white-arse” (see white + arse). So called for its color markings; compare French name for the bird, cul-blanc, literally “white rump.”
(It always struck me as odd how anybody knew what sort of ears it had.)
1965, the year the UK abolished the death penalty and the lexicographers were like “fuck it”.
Given “wheat”, I might have thought of an ear of corn (Ähre in German, vs. Ohr for the body part)… but of course that wouldn’t make sense either.
Daphne Preston-Kendal: I consider ‘fuckwind’ and ‘windfucker’ survivals of a sense of ‘fuck’ which must have died out very early
My thought too, but you say it with such authority!
And another thought. If there is a *peug-, an obvious descendant would be Norw. fyke v.intr. “fly, move swiftly (esp. in the air)” and the noun fokk n. “drifting snow”.
I have long been under the impression that the earwig is so named because it wiggles its arse, but dictionaries seem unanimous in saying that the name comes from a folklore belief that it could wiggle its way into your ear. Which is true, I guess, but also true of many other insects. I am now wondering if there is some big conspiracy to sanitize the true etymology, which I heard from an extremely reliable source in my teen years.
I wonder why HH is so sure of the “wind-copulator” etymology, vs. the “wind-beater” etymology, which is what I had assumed (also of the cutthroat compound fuckwind). OED’s 2008 entry on FUCK entertains this possibility in the etym (WINDFUCKER has not been updated since published in 1926). I think this is what Lockwood suggests, too, but I’m basing that on a second-hand reference as I can’t access the text here. The Orcadian synonym “windcuffer” would seem to belong to that idea.
you say it with such authority!
Well, she was the designer and developer for the online edition of Green’s Dictionary of Slang…
馬糞鷹 /magusotaka, magusodaka/ ‘horse manure hawk’ is another name for the kestrel (長元坊 /chōgenbō/) and the common buzzard (鵟 /nosuri/).
As it happens, there is Mt Bafungatake 馬糞ヶ岳 ‘horse manure mountain’ in Yamaguchi Prefecture.
CHINMEI places around the world
[…]
CHINMEI means “strange (or unusual) name”.
Therefore, CHINMEI travel means traveling to the places that named strange (or unusual) in Japanese.
My definition of “CHINMEI” places is based on followings:
1. Words that have sexual meaning in Japanese
2. Words that have meaning of slander in Japanese
3. Funny and interesting words in Japanese
https://ankyo.net/chinmei-e.html
Anecdata: The only insect I’ve ever (knowingly) had in my ear was an earwig. (I had lice once or twice as a kid, I suppose those will crawl all over including the inside of your ears, but not so that I noticed, and for all I know various minuscule ones might be having a party in there right now, but keeping it quiet).
In Finnish, it’s tuulihaukka ‘wind hawk’, which I knew, but in Estonian, it’s called something more interesting: tuuletallaja, where tallaja is the agentive noun from the verb tallama ‘tread, trample; 4 cover, mate (of a male bird)’. That translates to your windfucker.
Hat: Well, she was the designer and developer for the online edition of Green’s Dictionary of Slang…
Yes, I meant it in a good way.
Me: And another thought. If there is a *peug-, an obvious descendant would be Norw. fyke v.intr. “fly, move swiftly (esp. in the air)” and the noun fokk n. “drifting snow”.
This, however, is on my usual level of imprecision. I should have said “If *peug- begat descendants in Germanic, an obvious candidate for phonological reasons would be Norw. fyke [etc.]” The semantic shift is less obvious, but I think there’s an established connection between “beat” and “cause whirling or chaotic movement”. English examples off the top of my head are ‘batter’ and ‘whip’.
…and note the long *kk hinting at an iterative, “beat again and again”.
Straight-up Ohrwurm in German, like a musical earworm. I suppose it crawls into your ear if you sleep on the ground outdoors.
Earwigs do like to hide themselves away in small dark crevices, such as inside peaches where the stone has split, or in the space between groups of two or three apples on the tree – all waiting to suddenly jump out on unsuspecting kids on fruit-picking duty in the garden…
Whatever the actual meaning of “windfucker,” it always caused hilarity in my Ben Jonson class. It’s in Epicoene, which was written to be put on by adolescent boys.
Straight-up Ohrwurm in German
See also Northern dialect variants like Ohrenknieper = Ohrenkneifer “ear pincher” and the other regional words in the German WP article.
Oh great, I had suspected -/ʃlɪɐ̯fːɐ/ had nothing to do with schlürfen “slurp”!
Tuulihaukka and Tuuletallaja revisited.
Turns out there is a historical novel called Tuulihaukka, which ‘has been translated into Polish (Jastrząb, 2000), German (Sturmfalke, 2002) and Estonian (Tuulepistrik, 2017)’.
Tuulepistrik ‘wind falcon’? What gives? All the occurrences of the word in the wild refer exclusively to the book, and not to the bird. (Another bird whose name ends in -rik is västrik [Fin. västäräkki ] ‘wagtail’.)
Kaari Utrio’s other bird book, Vaskilintu ‘copper/brass/bronze bird’, has this part of possible linguistic interest:
A Finnish noblegirl with abilities of casting spells, Terhen of Arantila, gets mingled with royalty of Sweden, and follows in a retinue to the Court of Novgorod in Russia, where the sister of the Swedish King is to marry the Grand Duke of Novgorod (Kievan Rus). Along the journey to Novgorod an accident happens and Terhen replaces a young Swedish princess Thorgerd. The young girl has odd experiences when she meets Finno-Ugric tribe Muroma along her travel.
I wonder how realistic it is.
From KU’s Wiki article:
There were over four thousand books (100 meters) in Utrio’s childhood home in Tapiola, Espoo, and literature was greatly valued in her family.