Birth of a nickname - John McWhorter

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Where do nicknames come from? Why are Ellens called Nellie and Edwards Ned? It's all a big misunderstanding from the early days of the English language, a misunderstanding that even the word nickname itself derives from. John McWhorter tracks the accidental evolution of some familiar diminutives.

Lesson by John McWhorter, animation by Lippy.

English, like all languages,

is a messy business.

You can be uncouth but not couth.

You can be ruthless,

but good luck trying to show somebody

that you have ruth

unless you happen to be married

to someone named Ruth.

It's bad to be unkempt

but impossible to be kempt,

or sheveled as opposed to disheveled.

There are other things

that make no more sense than those

but that seem normal now

because the sands of time

have buried where they came from.

For example, did you ever wonder

why a nickname for Edward is Ned?

Where'd the N come from?

It's the same with Nellie for Ellen.

Afterall, if someone's name is Ethan,

we don't nickname him Nethan,

nor do we call our favorite Maria, Nmaria.

In fact, if anyone did,

our primary urge would be to either scold them

or gently hide them away

until the company had departed.

All these nicknames trace back to a mistake,

although, a perfectly understandable one.

In fact, even the word nickname is weird.

What's so "nick" about a nickname?

Is it that it's a name that has a nick in it?

Let's face it, not likely.

Actually, in Old English, the word was ekename,

and eke meant also or other.

You can see eke still used

in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in a sentence like,

"Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth,"

which meant,

"When Zephyr also with his sweet breath."

Ekename meant "also name."

What happened was that when people said, "an ekename,"

it could sound like they were saying,

"a nekename,"

and after a while,

so many people were hearing it that way

that they started saying,

"That's my nickname,"

instead of, "That's my ekename."

Now, the word had a stray n at the front

that started as a mistake,

but from now on was what the word really was.

It was rather as if you had gum

on the bottom of your shoe

and stepped on a leaf,

dragged that leaf along for the rest of your life,

were buried wearing that shoe

and went to heaven in it

to spend eternity wedded to that stray, worn-out leaf.

Ekename picked up an n and never let it go.

The same thing happened with other words.

Old English speakers cut otches into wood.

But after centuries of being asked

to cut an otch into something,

it was easy to think you were cutting a notch instead,

and pretty soon you were.

In a world where almost no one could read,

it was easier for what people heard

to become, after awhile,

what it started to actually be.

Here's where the Ned-style nicknames come in.

Old English was more like German

than our English is now,

and just as in German, my is mein,

in Old English, my was meen.

You would say meen book,

actually boke in Old English,

or meen cat.

And just as today,

we might refer to our child

as my Dahlia

or my Laura,

in Old English, they would say, "Meen Ed".

That is mein Ed,

mein Ellie.

You see where this is going.

As time passed, meen morphed

into the my we know today.

That meant that when people said, "Mein Ed,"

it sounded like they were saying my Ned.

That is, it sounded like whenever someone

referred to Edward affectionately,

they said Ned instead of Ed.

Behold, the birth of a nickname!

Or an ekename.

Hence, also Nellie for Ellen

and Nan for Ann,

and even in the old days, Nabby for Abigal.

President John Adam's wife Abigail's nickname was Nabby.

All sorts of words are like this.

Old English speakers wore naprons,

but a napron sounds like an apron,

and that gave birth to a word apron

that no one in Beowulf would have recognized.

Umpire started as numpires, too.

If all of this sounds like something sloppy

that we modern people would never do,

then think about something you hear all the time

and probably say,

"A whole nother."

What's nother?

We have the word another, of course,

but it's composed of an and other,

or so we thought.

Yet, when we slide whole into the middle,

we don't say, "a whole other,"

we clip that n off of the an

and stick it to other

and create a new word, nother.

For a long time, nobody was writing

these sort of things down

or putting them in a dictionary,

but that's only because writing

is more codified now than it was 1,000 years ago.

So, when you see a weird word,

remember that there might be

a whole nother side to the story.