Nicknames and oranges

Do you know the feeling of watching a movie and not being able to concentrate on the story because you become completely preoccupied with an interesting word, drifting off into the wonderful world of syntax and slang? No? Well, unfortunately I do. By now, my friends close their ears as soon as I start babbling and shush me (they don’t want to risk a popcorn attack from our cinema neighbors). Which brings me to this column. I am hoping that this will be my solution; a place to vent a little, brainstorm, and maybe inspire (hey, that’s interesting... a lot of “air circulation” in these words! To vent, storm, inspire... )

If you think about it, language is the most efficient tool of human beings: Without it, we couldn’t speak, write or even THINK... but still there are so many things in our language that people don’t pay any attention to. Case in point: Nicknames. Have you ever wondered what the hell “nick” has to do with names? Are nicknames the names you blurt out when you nick to somebody? Uh, no. The origins of nickname are in earlier English, ekename. Eke meant “also” – you had an “also” name. The word was, just like now, often used with the indefinite article an; an ekename. As time passed, people got a little confused about where the n in an belonged and they started thinking of the n as the first letter in the following word: a nekename. Hence: a nickname. (By the 1600s, a few spelling changes had given the modern form.)

This is actually a pretty common kind of language change (which, for those of you interested in Linguistics, is called metanalysis and occurs when a letter is added or subtracted because of the influence of a nearby word.) Through a similar process, a napron (borrowed from French naperron) became an apron and a nadder became an adder (compare German Natter and Icelandic na_ra which still have the original n). Then of course there’s orange which came from Hindi, n_rang_, into French and from there into English. When it showed up in English the n had fallen off, resulting in an orange (Spanish, however, kept the n: naranja). Now isn’t that great? I think so. Please contact me if you would like to share any fun facts about languages or interesting words!