Folk Etymology

The other day on Twitter, I saw a thread in which a person who claimed to have been a linguistics undergraduate degree wrote about the origins of the phrase "knocked up." He said that Merriam Webster confirms it originated in the U.S. slave trade, when auctioneers purposely impregnated enslaved women to increase their value — "knocking up" the woman's price. He also cited the OED, though that quote didn't exactly verify his statement.

Respondents in the thread were 90 to 95 percent outraged, while a few questioned his conclusions, having gone to look it up in the OED themselves, or checked other sources. The term "knock" had a preexisting slang use related to sex, it turns out, and the original poster was a bit too ready to be outraged.

It made me remember the term "rule of thumb," which I learned to my shock in the mid-1980s had its origin as the maximum width of the stick a man could use to beat his wife, under English common law. And then later I learned, also to my surprise, that it did not have that origin, but was instead a general term that comes from a number of trades. We had all been outraged over nothing.

As it happens, a day after reading the "knocked up" thread, I came across another thread by an anthropologist named Holly Walters, who wrote about back-filled folk etymologies like these. Citing a paper by two other scholars, she discusses the way folk etymologies make "cultural sense because they speak to something happening in the moment. In short, they reflect current concerns."

She specifically mentions the rule of thumb example, but also the term "Eskimo," which — while it's not the preferred name of Inuit people, and was given to them by colonizers — does not have the specific negative meaning that is usually described.

Her main point is:

Many modern folk etymologies seem to be derived from a need to find some "inherent wrongness" that justifies "purifying" the language. As if in doing so, history and culture could be equally purified of their sins.

I am NOT...giving anyone blanket permission to use slurs and insults on the basis of "innocuous history" ...!

I AM saying that the origins of words matter less than how they are used. What makes words into weapons is how they are wielded, when, and by whom. There is plenty to take on without making up evil origin stories for phrases that we then use to measure ideological purity.

I'll be thinking about this.