Month: April 2018

Q: Can you explain the word “makeshift”? The parts don’t add up to what it brings to mind—improvised or cobbled together.

A: The word no longer makes literal sense because the noun “shift” has shifted its meaning. Once upon a time, a “shift” was a substitution, and to “make a shift” was to make do with a lesser substitute.

The noun is related to the verb “shift” (circa 1000), which originally meant to put in order or arrange, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The verb came from ancient Germanic and was written as sciftan in Old English.

By the early 1300s, this verb was used to mean “to change, to replace by another of the kind,” the OED says. And in the 1600s, “to shift with (or without)” meant “to manage with something inferior or without something desirable.”

Meanwhile, the noun had been developing along the same lines. By the early 1500s, it was being used to mean “an expedient, an ingenious device for effecting some purpose,” Oxford says, and later in the century it meant a substitution.

Consequently, “for a shift” (first recorded in 1523) meant “for want of something better”; and “by the shift” (1665) meant “at a pinch,” Oxford explains.

Similarly, to “make a shift” or “make shift” simply meant to make efforts, try all means, contrive, or succeed with difficulty. And by the 1570s, the OED says, the phrase (followed by “with”) also meant “to do one’s best with (inferior means), to be content with, put up with.”

Here’s the dictionary’s earliest use of the verb phrase in that sense.

“The bread is very drye … but the common people remediyng that with Larde or Oyle, doo make a shift with it as wel as they can.” (From Foure Bookes of Husbandry, Barnaby Googe’s 1577 translation of a Latin treatise on farming, by Conrad Heresbach.)

The dictionary’s next example is from Ben Jonson’s comedy The New Inne (1661): “Thou must make shift with it.”

The verb phrase “make shift” survived into the late 19th century, as in this OED example from a monthly trade journal, The Bookseller (1885): “We cannot afford to employ … efficient assistants but have to make shift with cheap labour.”

This brings us to the 17th-century adjective “makeshift” and its younger cousin, the 19th-century noun.

The OED’s earliest written use of the adjective refers to an outdated printing press: “A make-shift slovenly contrivance.” (From the second volume of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, 1683.)

This is Oxford’s definition of the adjective: “Of the nature of a makeshift; serving as a temporary substitute, esp. of an inferior kind; improvised; formed haphazardly.”

The dictionary’s earliest written use of the noun is from an essay by Charles Lamb in the September 1822 issue of the London Magazine: “The cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building).”

Here’s the OED definition of the noun: “That with which one makes shift; a temporary substitute, esp. of an inferior kind, an expedient.”

The definitions of “makeshift” haven’t changed over the years, though writers have stopped using the hyphens.

Today The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines the adjective this way: “suitable as a temporary or expedient substitute,” as in “used a rock as a makeshift hammer.”

And AH defines the noun as “a temporary or expedient substitute for something else,” as in “lacked a cane but used a stick as a makeshift.”

As you know, the noun “shift” has lots of other meanings. And many are connected with the verb that originally meant to arrange or put in order and later meant to substitute.

For example, the notion of change or substitution is behind the “shift” that originally (1601) was a piece of underclothing and later (1950s) came to mean a woman’s “straight loose dress,” the OED says.

The same idea of change or substitution is reflected in the “shift” that means the length of a work period (1809), the “shift” that’s a new set of workers (1812), and the “shift” that means to change gears in a car (1910).

Even the adjective “shifty” is derived from those original senses of the verb “shift.”

In the 16th-century, the OED says, the verb came to mean  “to employ shifts or evasions; to practise or use indirect methods; to practise or live by fraud, or temporary expedients.”

In the same century (1570), “shifty” meant “full of shifts or expedients,” and by the 19th century it was used to mean “fond of indirect or dishonest methods; addicted to evasion or artifice; not straightforward, not to be depended on.”

The OED’s earliest examples are from the works of Thomas Carlyle (“one of the shiftiest of men,” 1837) and John G. Kinnear (“A most shifty old fox he is,” 1841).

But we can’t resist quoting some later ones from Thackeray (“A handsome, tall, sallow-faced man, with a shifty eye,” before 1863) and Dickens (“I scorn your shifty evasions,” 1864).

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Q: Why do we have two words for a small island—“key” and “cay”? And are they related to “quay,” the word for a wharf?

A: “Key” and “cay” are just different spellings of the same 17th-century word for a small, low island, especially in the Caribbean or off the coast of Florida.

“Key” is more common in Florida and “cay” in the Caribbean, and it’s likely that local customs and place names have kept the different spellings alive.

As we’ll explain later, both of them are probably derived from “quay,” a word from French that means a wharf.

First let’s talk about the pronunciations.

“Key” is pronounced KEE, like the unrelated word for something that opens a lock. “Cay” is usually pronounced the same way (KEE), but some dictionaries give an alternate pronunciation, KAY.

“Quay” was originally pronounced KEE, and that’s still the preferred pronunciation (it was once spelled “key”). Some dictionaries give only that pronunciation, though in American English two variant pronunciations are recognized as standard: KAY and KWAY.

We’ll have more to say about “quay” later.

The geographical terms “key” and “cay” were “originally the same word,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Although “key” was recorded in writing first (1693), Oxford says it originated as a variant spelling of “cay,” which wasn’t recorded until 1707 but was no doubt known to explorers much earlier. In 17th-century English, “key” was pronounced KAY.

Oxford defines “key” as “a low-lying island or reef, esp. in the Caribbean or off the south coast of Florida.” And it says the earlier “cay” was similarly used for “islets” of sand, mud, rock, or coral lying “around the coast and islands of Spanish America.”

Here is the dictionary’s earliest citation for “key”:

“The place whereon Port-Royal was since built, was like one of the Keys or little Islands that lie off this Harbour.” (From a letter written on July 3, 1693, and published the following year in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.)

“Key,” as we’ve said, was originally a variant spelling of “cay.”  As for “cay,” it was derived from the 16th-century Spanish word cayo (shoal or barrier reef).

That old Spanish word is “of uncertain origin,” Oxford says, but it’s “perhaps ultimately the same word as French quai … or perhaps a loanword from an indigenous language of the Antilles.”

Other etymologists are more definite about the French connection.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (2nd ed.) says that “cay,” and “key” are descended from the Old French quai, the source of “quay.”

And the French word, American Heritage adds, comes from caio (rampart or retaining wall) in Gaulish, an extinct Celtic language once spoken by Celts in what is now France, Belgium, and other parts of northern Europe.

Going even further back, etymologists have identified a prehistoric Indo-European ancestor, a root reconstructed as kagh– that meant a wickerwork or a fence. This ancient meaning is reflected in the Gaulish and early French versions of the word.

“The French word was probably originally used with reference to fence-like wooden revetments, which were used to stabilize riverbanks and allow boats to moor,” the OED explains.

When the word first came into English in 1399, the OED says, it was spelled “key” and meant “a man-made bank or landing stage” for ships, either along the water or projecting into it.

The earliest OED example is from Aberdeen, Scotland. A notation in town records for 1399 describes a contract for the construction of 12 windows and 12 doors, to be delivered by the following Easter “at ony key of Abirden, or ellis at the sandis at Lawrence of Lethis howss” (“at any key of Aberdeen, or else at the sand beach at Lawrence of Leth’s house”).

The quotation appears in Extracts From the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398-1625. We’ve added a few words from the original for context.

Though this is the first known example in written English, the word was familiar in Britain much earlier through Anglo-Norman French (spellings include kaye, kaie, kei, key, and many others).

And similar-sounding words meaning a fence or enclosure—and traced to the same prehistoric Indo-European root—existed in Celtic languages spoken in Britain, like Welsh (cae) and Cornish (kē).

The spelling “quay” showed up in the mid-1500s, more than 150 years after that 1399 example, when it was borrowed from French, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

The earliest citation in the OED is from a letter written to Sir Thomas Gresham on Dec. 31, 1561, by his agent in Antwerp:

“So many Quays crowne-serchers, wayters, and other powlyng [plundering] offycers.” (The letter is about the chaotic customs searches on the London docks, as compared to more sedate Antwerp.)

Today “quay” still means what it originally meant—a wharf. But it’s always been less common in the US than in the UK, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries.

Finally, as we mentioned earlier, the “key” that opens a lock is unrelated, as far as anybody knows. It’s been traced back to Old English (caeg), but no further.

“No one knows where the word originally came from,” Ayto says, adding that “it has no living relatives in other Germanic languages.”

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Q: In a 2016  post, you say there’s no etymological connection between the biblical name “Eve” and the word “evil.” Is there by any chance such a connection between “Eve” and “eve,” as in “evening”?

A: No, there’s no etymological connection between the name “Eve” in Genesis and the word “eve” used to mean “evening.” The word “eve” began life as a shortening of “even,” a now obsolete term for “evening.”

In Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, the word for “evening” was ǽfen. Here’s an example from Beowulf, an epic poem that may have been written as far back as 725:

“Syþðan æfen cwom ond him Hroþgar gewat to hofe sinum, rice to ræste” (“As evening came, Hrothgar left for home, the noble king to rest”).

The noun ǽfen gave rise to the verbal noun ǽfnung (“the coming of evening”). Later, ǽfen became “even” (then “eve”), while ǽfnung became “evening.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation for “evening,” which we’ve expanded, is from an Old English translation of Genesis, written around 1000, by the Benedictine Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham:

“Heo com ða on æfnunge eft to Noe, ond brohte an twig of anum elebeame mid grenum leafum on hyre muðe” (“She [a dove] came again that evening to Noah, and brought in her beak a twig with a green olive leaf”). From Genesis 8:11.

The first OED example for the noun “evening” with much like the modern spelling is from Layamon’s Brut, a Middle English poem written sometime before 1200:

“Riht to þan euening þa fleh Cadwalan þe king” (“King Cadwalan escaped right into the wet evening”). In Middle English, the “v” sound in the middle of a word was written as “u.”

The short form “eve” appeared in writing for the first time in The Owl and the Nightingale, a Middle English poem believed written in the late 12th or early 13th century: “Thu singest from eve fort a morȝe” (“Thou singest from eve right to morn”).

As for the name “Eve,” it’s derived from biblical Hebrew, where the first woman is referred to as hawwa in Genesis 3:20. The name became “Eva” in Latin and Greek translations of the Bible, and “Eve” in later French and English translations.

The meaning of the original Hebrew name has been the subject of much scholarly debate over the years. We discussed the issue extensively in our 2016 post, but here’s a brief summary.

A common suggestion is that hawwa means “life” or “living” or “life giver,” assuming a connection with the Hebrew haya (to live) or hay (living).

However, biblical scholars have questioned such a connection, saying there’s no direct linguistic link between hawwa and the other two words.

Some scholars say hawwa may have been a play on those other Hebrew words, or perhaps the words were indirectly connected through other Semitic languages.

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