In this bonus episode, we look at what it means to turn a "channeled obsession" into a resource used by millions of language fans. We look at how he built Etymonline alone, after his day job. We also look at word mysteries and the obsessive sidequests that Doug and his team take to find the truth behind words.
In this bonus episode, we look at what it means to turn a "channeled obsession" into a resource used by millions of language fans. We look at how he built Etymonline alone, after his day job. We also look at word mysteries and the obsessive sidequests that Doug and his team take to find the truth behind words.
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad-free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription. Greetings Grammarpaloozians. I am here today with Doug Harper, the creator of Etymonline, the online etymology dictionary, one of my favorite resources, and I know a lot of you too love it. So we are excited to talk today. Doug, welcome to The Grammar Girl Podcast.
Doug Harper: Hey, thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.
Mignon Fogarty: It is. I know. I can't believe we've never talked before. So we have some extra etymologies to talk about. So, I showed you that I saw people talking about “Nimrod” on Blue Sky, and it seemed to have an interesting etymology related to, I don't know, Bugs Bunny and the Bible. And you want to enlighten us.
Doug Harper: I want to, but I'm not sure I can, but I'll try. It's a word that I see people looking for. I think it's like a Cartoon Network word. I think they're, it's sort of on the verge of-it should probably have died out as a teen insult years ago if it hadn't been preserved in old cartoons. But the first people used it in the 18th century to mean a big, a great hunter. You know, it was not really a-I would say it was always with a sort of touch of jocular humor, all those biblical name references. This is a fairly obscure one. He's in Genesis, et cetera. So the phrase is "a mighty hunter before the Lord," you know? So when the guy came back from the field all covered with mud and didn't get a dead rabbit much, less a deer, they'd say, "How'd it go, Nimrod.” And there's actually a Middle English form of it in Nimrod, which is fun.
No, look, he's a-he's reputed to be.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, the building of the tower of babel?
Doug Harper: But not, that's a reputational thing. It's not in the Bible, apparently. So the word-the name kicks around. I mean, Milton just emptied the Bible for Paradise Lost like the phone book. He took it upside down and shook it till all the names fell out because he needed them all. So all of these names are getting used in poetry and so forth. Now, the teen slang set, the one that interests people now, is basically a little, it's in our wheelhouse right there in 1983. By then. And I think it'll come up in teen movies.
Mignon Fogarty: So how does a biblical name become teenage slang?
Doug Harper: That is the big question. I think it's not going right from the Bible to a teen's mouth. It's going through the hunter sense. And there is, you know, a suspect in the Bugs Bunny cartoons because Elmer Fudd, the inept hunter, is a continuing character that everyone knows. And, you know, I haven't actually-are there scripts of those? I mean, I've watched a ton of them, and I'm pretty sure he does call him Nimrod at least once, but I don't think it's that common. But it might be. I haven't-I'll have to go dig that out. Talia Felix is better at Hollywood scripts than I am. Maybe she can find it.
So this is a guess. It's the best guess we've got. It's not perfect. There are steps that are missing in the evidence. And I don't remember, you know, I guess it could have been, but we can't-I wouldn't say for sure it is. Because coincidence is it, you know, is it the same thing as this caused that?
Mignon Fogarty: I love that about my work too. On occasion, you know, you're saying, well, gosh, I guess I'd have to go watch some Bugs Bunny cartoons to figure out the answer to this question.
Doug Harper: I'm working. Yeah, I'm working; I'm watching cartoons.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Sometimes I have to go listen to music or, you know, some rap song I'm not familiar with to get some information about some word, and like, this is my job.
Doug Harper: And I learn so much every day when I do this.
Mignon Fogarty: What are some other fun places you've had to go look at? Had to.
Doug Harper: Oh, well, boy, some of the book titles. I-and I have to write them, like in the 17th century, they would give a book a title that was half a page long.
Mignon Fogarty: I know.
Doug Harper: But, oh, there's a, we kept a list of them. I-and I've gotta dig this out because I usually save pictures of the title pages and just, you know, throw them back and forth to the other editor. But they, you, my God, “A Girl's Wanderings in Hungary” by, I think her name was Ellen Browning. This is, oh, 19th century, very obscure. She goes and travels the world, and she hates everything. She's like, she puts everything, and she's funny. Oh, I can't tell if it's the most brilliant parody ever. You hit things like that, and you think this can't be real, and you do end up looking at Wikipedia and saying, "Was this, did this really happen?"
But you know, I have collected them. I've, if you look at the Patreon, I post things there. Some of them are in the columns. But yeah, I've got to dig them all out and make a collection someday, because the places you go, you go down a rabbit hole, and you never know where you, I'm looking at, we could do this whole column looking at the trending words list. I hated that. When it came out, I was like, oh, this is, this is crap. This is the clickbait. And now I love it, because, you know, look at these, look at these words. Each one of these is a huge rabbit hole. I mean, bumper, the drinking bumper, and then it becomes anything large, you know, and then the bumper of a car sense originally in railways. And then you get into automobiles, and then you get into bumper to bumper in reference to traffic. They're talking about something that might happen in the future in 1901, and by 1908, there's the real thing.
This is one of the places you fall into: the language of the automobile. It happens, it comes up, what? 1890 to about 19, by about 1910. It's all set in place. We're calling them this, we're calling this that, but you can watch it evolve in real time, because there's a lot of publications. It's the hot hobby if you're you know, a tech guy back then making a car. And so there's a lot of bantering about, what word do we use? “Automobile,” I think. But you could, you can watch them work it out in print, and you could not, you can't do that in stages of history much before that. Yeah. Here's, you know, you had “motor car,” you know, “auto car.” It could have been called any of these things. But we happened to land on, you know, the “horseless carriage.” There's one of the major publications about what we call the automobile was called “The Horseless Age.” Because they saw the new thing in terms of the past thing. To me, that period is fascinating to watch that exact thing happen in real time.
That's a history side of me. That's not language; that's history. But I'm really, the secret is I'm really a historian, not a linguist.
Mignon Fogarty: I get into history too.
Doug Harper: Big secret.
Mignon Fogarty: The history is so interesting, and bumper-to-bumper traffic is much older than I would've thought.
Doug Harper: Right? Look, go down with two more “Celsius.” Ooh. That's like a good-well, I'm like, oh yes, good word. Good word. That is connected to “Neanderthal” in a way. I'm going to let you figure out, or let your readers figure out, what's the connection between the word “Celsius” and the word “Neanderthal.”
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, man.
Doug Harper: They go through this weird, weird little obscure wormhole in language. And there's a lot of history in it.
Mignon Fogarty: You share those top lookup lists on Patreon a lot, and I always love seeing them.
Doug Harper: I'm really-someday I'm really going to dig it. I look at it, I see “dodgy” and “Grinch” next to each other, and I think Dickens and Dr. Seuss into the Artful Dodger. I mean, all these things look, “grammar's” on there, right under “etymology.” It's like they knew we were going to do this.
These things are wonderful. You know, other people look at it and see, you know, some newspaper game word or the word that fell out of the president's mouth the day before, and I see a fair field of rabbit holes. You know, this is like, here's a steeplechase. The charmed hand of fate has put us together in this list. It's like, it is like a Scrabble display of history. It's spelunking time.
Mignon Fogarty: No, I mean, it's almost like a different way of seeing the news by looking at the- you know, it's the same with the dictionaries, seeing the lookups. It's like, you can tell what sort of what's happening today, what time of year it is, what people are talking about. I imagine there are surprises. There's somewhere you probably just never figure out why people are-it's like something's in a crossword puzzle that day or something that you didn't know about.
Doug Harper: Having been in the news for 45 years, I don't look at it anymore. That's a sausage factory. I know too. This all surprises me. I get to look at this like a complete, like an alien that fell on the, fell down to the planet today. And that's much more fun. You know, eventually someone tells me, "Oh, that was in Wordle," or, "Oh, that was, you know, someone was talking about that," or, "Or on this and that." It's like, "Ah, that's less interesting than thinking that the hand of fate put ‘etymology’ and ‘grammar’ on the page together today." You know what the-I mean, I've had enough of empirical thinking. I haven't had enough. No one can have enough. I know how to put it aside and enjoy life sometimes. This is much more, the games are much more fun inventing what might be going on out there based on just this list.
That's, in a way, that's like historic reconstruction. You know, all you get is, you know, the torn-off left hand of a safo poem, but you've got that and you can rebuild from that, and it's sometimes very interesting work.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Doug Harper: This is more fun.
Mignon Fogarty: No, I mean, it's about enjoying life. It's like you did this on your own for a long time, starting in 2001, but you mentioned Talia a couple of times. You brought someone on to help you. Tell me a little bit about Talia, and did you bring her on to give yourself more time or-
Doug Harper: Talia, when she's ready, will speak for herself. I will tell you, Talia's a ton of fun to work with, and a really-here's a word of warning: don't get into a cussing contest with Talia Felix. She can bring it from dimensions I didn't know existed. But she was doing the same kind of research on related topics, and for years we would-she would feed, "Look, I found this, here's this." And I realized her mind's working the same way mine is; she's doing this to teach herself the thing. And when I first started saying, "Could you, let's look into this word?" I had to be, you know, she will eventually... We were talking about toast. The toast that, you know, that you drink a toast and the toast that you cook, and we spent a lot of time digging into that. At one point, she just casually mentioned to me that she was making toast and putting it in certain beers and drinking it just to compare the different ones. I'm like, I realize this is how she does it. I have to be careful not to tell her to research, you know, heroin addiction or trap panning or self-trap panning. So she's just an immersive researcher, which...
The mind is like mine. It knows a lot of the things that I know, and it's good at a lot of the things I'm not good at. So it was just a natural pairing. And I said, "Look, why don't we work together on this thing?" And, you know, we came to an arrangement. So it was all worthwhile. And she's also a good bit younger than me. This is important. You gotta start thinking about this too. We should talk about this. What happens to these sites after us? I gotta start thinking about that. And I now feel a lot more comfortable knowing that there's someone who can do the whole site now and can, you know, I don't want it to die. I want it to stay alive and to also contributes her own stuff.
So that's an important part of it. But it's funny, the thing I never asked is, "Do you have a degree in this? You know, what's your background?" I just saw her work, and I said, "This fits," and I know she's going to stick with it because, like me, every time you try and get away from it, you hit words again, and they send you right back to it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Doug Harper: So it's, you know, it is good for this kind of mind, and you learn to look for this kind of mind if you have one. And it's fascinating because I was born, and possibly you were, before they diagnosed spectrum disorders. And I feel kind of lucky that I escaped all that. I got to be free-range, and I got to do stuff like this rather than being told what I was.
Mignon Fogarty: You get to be obsessive and the work stands for itself.
Doug Harper: The trick is to steer it in a good direction; it's like a fire hose, you know? You have to just point it in a way that it helps.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, what are some of the things you're working on now that you're excited about?
Doug Harper: Surviving, paying for things. Oh man, what are we talking about? I'm not excited about this. I gotta redo my will because of this.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Doug Harper: That's not cheap. And, you know, I gotta get the tech cleaned up. It's a mess. I'm, you know, I'm excited about now that I get the...
Mignon Fogarty: I was going to say, that’s not something to be excited about.
Doug Harper: No, it's, you know, I'm trying to just gin up my excitement about the site again. When I look at these lists, these journals-ooh, ooh, these words. And also, I keep looking at old entries and thinking, I gotta make this better. I gotta make this better. And I don't want to get drawn back into the entry-by-entry editing. Yeah. It's hard to... my excitement is waiting for AI to die.
Mignon Fogarty: I don't think it's going to.
Doug Harper: I'm sorry. There's not a lot of excite... I'm digging deep here. Help me out. What should I be excited about? What are you excited about?
Mignon Fogarty: What am I excited about? You know, it's funny, like I am always excited about new things. So, I just got into making crossword puzzles.
Doug Harper: Making them?
Mignon Fogarty: Making them. Yeah. You know, I've been probably doing them pretty avidly for about a year and I've interviewed people. So I interviewed Ben Zimmer and Natan Last, and Lex Friedman, and all these people who make crossword puzzles. And one day it just occurred to me, like, "Hey, I could do that." And so I've been playing around just with minis, you know, and so I'm sending them a mini crossword puzzle now every week to my patrons at Patreon. I just launched a Patreon. And, like, I've been a member of your Patreon for years and years, so I watch what you do, and, you know, that looks like fun. I'm thinking, like, well, okay, what could I send these people? And I was like, well, I couldn't do a full crossword every week, I don't think, but I could do a mini crossword. And so I've been doing mini crosswords, and I'm excited about that. And so I think having these new, these new people, and having the new Grammarpaloozians has gotten me really excited and thinking again about, like, okay, these are people who are so excited that they want to get my work. Like, what more could I do for them? And so that, I think, has gotten me really excited lately.
Doug Harper: Do you think AI is going to do crossword puzzles? I mean, is it going to write them? Is that in its wheelhouse?
Mignon Fogarty: I think it can help. I don’t think it can do good ones. But it can, you-
Doug Harper: Could fill out the blocks and you write the clues, kind of thing?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it can do that now. And there’s a program that everyone uses called, oh, I forget what it's called now, but it's crossshare or something like that.
Doug Harper: Oh, okay.
Mignon Fogarty: If you put in words, it'll pop up what words would fit in that space. So if you have, you know, like the second letter as C and the fourth letter as A or whatever, it'll show you all the words that fit that. And that used to be in books. And now, you can get those books for like $5 on eBay because no one wants them anymore since the computer program does it. And so, I don't know if that’s AI or not actually.
Doug Harper: I don't know. Yeah, I have that question too. At what point does regular computing and AI begin? Because it's obviously a search is a sort of an AI thing, but yeah, that's, it's very crossword puzzles. We just passed the hundredth anniversary of them. And again, that's a newspaper thing that exists only because of newspapers. It still exists. Newspapers don't-
Mignon Fogarty: Well, they kind of do, but they don't.
Doug Harper: Nah, they're ghosts and zombies. Believe me, I know people on the inside still. The New York Times still exists. I mean, that's a lifestyle product. Your hometown paper, I'm afraid, is in the tank. But there are more things to be excited about.
Mignon Fogarty: The New York Times site, that’s like a game site with news on the side, but that's what newspapers always were, right? They were comics and…
Doug Harper: That’s why they still exist, right? They always had the horoscope. The reason horoscopes exist is because of the newspapers. They needed to lure that particular set of people. That was the beauty of the thing. They were watering holes of your town. I don't get me started on newspapers. You guys are going to have to live without them.
But yeah, no, the crossword puzzle is-why is it called a crossword puzzle? You know? Why not something else? I mean, someone worked all this out, and you can see this birth of it in newspapers. I think it's funny you use AI; Talia sometimes I use it for photo generation, and I do too. If you try to make Victorian costumes, it has a sense of history. It has no sense of history. It only knows Hollywood history. It'll give you the Hollywood version of everything in history if you try to do real history. It won't start putting zippers on the Victorians. There were no zippers until, what, 1912, 1920, something like that, when we didn't even have the word. And you know, it'll put them on everybody. It puts them on George II.
Mignon Fogarty: We got the pirate story with like Johnny Depp the Pirate.
Doug Harper: Yeah. Right. So I, you know, it's hard to… I get excited about looking… I'm retired now. I get excited about having time to myself, theoretically. Don't tell my wife I said that; there's a lot of chores I gotta do.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, I know you're going to keep going, Etymonline. I know you will.
Doug Harper: I know, because I can't get away from it.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, I'm glad, and a lot of other people are glad too, so know that every time you, you know, open up your computer and dive into a new word, know that people are waiting for it.
Doug Harper: Yeah. I mean, the challenge is do I keep up with all the latest slang? No. My interest in the language stopped about 20 minutes ago or 20 years; take your pick. You know, my job, I have enough to do to keep the past alive in your head, which is what I'm really secretly trying to do. Keep alive your ability to communicate with these minds and ideas and things that got people through crises in the past, and that built, for better or worse, the world we're living in now. You can't be afraid of it. You gotta go there. You can't trust AI to show it to you.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Even if you to search, sometimes it can be great to search; it can get you to the sources faster, but you gotta click through on the sources to see what they really say.
Doug Harper: That's true of everything. I mean, you know, I get a lot of grief for not having footnotes. Wikipedia has footnotes. Does anyone click them? I click them. And sometimes, a lot of times, they're not helpful at all. They're not going anywhere.
Mignon Fogarty: I click them. I always check.
Doug Harper: You gotta click. Yeah. I frankly don't even, I mean, unless you're looking at. I mean, our rule is simple. It doesn't count unless you can see the scan of the full page in a scan of the full volume with the date on the front page of the book. Yeah. So all the snippet views, nope, nope, nope. Don't use them because they screw it up. It's all, the amount of wrong in Google Books. That's the fun of it; you're in grave danger in there of slipping into one of Google's traps because, you know, AI doesn't think, it doesn't reason, and sometimes the mistakes are the best mistakes. I got a stack of these. The book is actually printed with the wrong date on the front.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Doug Harper: When they were done in Roman numerals, that was easy to do. You just had an extra X in there. The guy's, you know, half drunk, the typesetter that day-how many Xs in 19? And you get an X one in there and suddenly the book is wrong. But you can just tell by looking at it. Before you even read a word of it, you look at the printing, at the layout, at how close the type is or isn't. This isn't 1920; this is 1820. And then sure enough, it's in the text, but it's like, aha. So there's a trap. It's like you dodge a trap there.
It is just like a game. It's like you go out and there are little obstacles and little challenges. And you know, except even when you die, you get to start over. It's like a game.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Well, I hope we get to keep playing the game a lot longer.
Mignon Fogarty: So how about your book recommendations?
Doug Harper: I thought you'd never ask. I had to think about this. I'm going to show you some books. If you've read the kind of writing that I tend to do about Etymonline, these are writers who I love because they do it supremely well. They just sort of dissolve themselves into a time, a place, and sink down to the roots of its past and then bring it back up beautifully, or not beautifully, but appropriately. W. G. Sebald, he died in the nineties, and he was on the way up-a German author, but his English publications are just sumptuously beautiful. "The Rings of Saturn" is an excellent one. He just goes to a place and, well, I'll let you find out.
Mignon Fogarty: Is it a novel?
Doug Harper: It is... You decide. It's not a novel; it's first person. He's taking a walk through the English countryside, let's say. For his health. But along the way, there are characters and unforgettable moments, and the past weaves together through all this-the decay and deteriorated parts of England-and all the threads of the dead past, you know, in this muddy carpet that he's walking across, he finds them and just lovingly sifts them.
The second one is, his name is Guy Davenport, and his fiction is the rich stuff, but I'm not even going to bother you with that. It'll take you a while. He wrote a lot of nonfiction and a lot of essays. “The Geography of the Imagination” is the best collection of them. In fact, the title essay in it is a good introduction to him. He died in 2004, I think, and his fiction is not surviving well. You can still find a few of them online. He wrote, he did sort of an idiomatic method. It's like if you took two panes of stained glass, put one on top of the other, and looked through it-two unrelated stories that seem unrelated until you lay them on top of each other, and then you see things. But his nonfiction essays sort of cover the same ground. There's a lot of history, a lot of language, and a whole lot of poetry about poetry, I should say. You know, he was in the Ezra Pound circle.
Mignon Fogarty: Hmm.
Doug Harper: And I just, that's the kind of thing I would take with me anywhere and read anytime. The third one is a long shot. Sten Hall, the French author, was holed up in Italy on a job he had with the government that he hated, and he hated his boss. He's sitting there alone in this backwater town in central Italy, wants to get back to France, and he's trying to, and he decides to write his life story. There's no internet. There's no Google. He has to try and remember everything. And he gets so deeply involved in conjuring, remembering. It becomes like a 20th-century psychological biography. He never, and he comes up with these images. It’s like one of those old frescoes in Rome where you can see an arm on the wall and then there’s nothing else. And he’s really dealing with memory as much as it just to me it goes, it’s never finished, never published until much later. To me, it's just endlessly fascinating. I also happen to like the fact that my particular copy of this book was Warren Zevon's copy. Man when I was a teenager. I loved his stuff. He was quite a reader and he, after his untimely death from cancer, I think right around the time Davenport did. His widow sold off his library to help raise money bit by bit to his fans. I was able to get this one that's like one of the few books I'm actually proud of as a physical specimen.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Doug Harper: And I'm going to cheat a little. And for pure language people, for a really good, for me dense, but erudite introduction to the whole history of everything, it's called “Philology” simply.
Mignon Fogarty: Philology.
Doug Harper: James Turner. “Philology, the Forgotten Origin of the Modern Humanities.” What he's doing here is tracing the growth of the modern humanities corpus. You know, and it starts fairly, you know, it's new. This is new, this is the Enlightenment coming into our lives, and for language. It's both tracking the biblical texts for their language accuracy, putting together Proto-Indo-European, realizing that it existed, and then the Grimms, and then William Jones. All of these branches. Anthropology and kind of grows. I don't know enough about intellectual history to say he's absolutely right, but what I see is there, you're not just looking at the history of linguistics; it's the western discovery of the mind's empirical ability to interpret reality.
It's the thing that's dying now. It's the thing we're at the end of the curve now. This was the beginning of the curve. But all along the way, the fact that it's entangled in the disciplines of history, in anthropology, in biblical studies-that's important. People just, "Oh, I'm just interested in the language." No, you're not. You've got to, it's because that's not different than this. You know, we use the categories, the academic categories for the sake of argument and convenience. We have to; they're not really there. There wasn't a different linguistics from history, from biblical study. That gets sorted out. Just like there wasn't any Old English or Middle English until, you know, the 19th century basically. There was, and there wasn't; there never was a thing called Old English that behaved like a single language. Even Middle English, I could argue, was three or four different dialects at the same time. Not until the plague wipes out London and all the people come in from the countryside and have to hammer out a new speech for London. Then we get Modern English. But that's history.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I mean, history and language are so tied together.
Doug Harper: There's no one without the other.
Mignon Fogarty: You can't do English without history.
Doug Harper: You can't tell history without words.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Doug Harper: And what wasn't written down we don't know. It's not history. History is, by definition, what was written down until 1877 or whatever. Edison starts recording us.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, they talk about prehistory, but yeah.
Doug Harper: Well, that's a real thing though. That's the asterisk.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Doug Harper: Prehistory is not history that people don't, people blow through that stop sign all the time. Prehistory is not history. Proto-European is not a language; it's a reconstructed language. Probably none, not all of those words, those root words were in use at the same time, in the same place by all the same people. But we need that; we need to put that cladism on the thing in order to have an intellectual discussion about it.
Mignon Fogarty: Thanks so much for being here. People can find you at Etymonline. But you're also, you are on Blue Sky?
Doug Harper: I lurk there pretty much. I sometimes post some of the trendings there. I started posting them there before I then shifted them mostly to Patreon.
Mignon Fogarty: So, yes, thank you. I mean, this show originally went out for my Patreons and the Grammarpaloozians which is a name I love. But yeah, I mean, Doug has been on Patreon a lot longer than I have. It's been, it's great; you know, I use the site all the time, so I sign up there. And so if you're already on my Patreon, check out Doug's; check out the Etymology Online, the Etymonline Patreon too. Go support Doug. He's great.
Doug Harper: Help pay for my will.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh God. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being here today.