The Amateur Etymologist

Humble pie

To eat humble pie means to eat a figurative serving of humiliation, usually accompanied by forced submission, an apology or a retraction. But why is this figurative food a pie?

This goes back the 17th century when poor English folks are a pie made up of the innards of a deer (heart, liver, kidney and other offal.) These inexpensive innards were combined with apples, currants, sugar and spices. Servants often dined on this while their masters dined on the venison.

Some etymologists claim this pie was called "numble pie". Others claim it stemmed from "umble", a reference to umbilical cord, yet another part of the offal. Whichever the case, the pie eventually became "umble pie". And since after the Middle Ages, many English words were pronounced without the initial "h" (e.g., hotel), the dish began to be spelt as "humble pie". This was a fitting spelling as it was a poor man's dish.

To add colour to the discussion, the word humble comes from the Latin word for earth, humus. We usually think of humble folks as being "down to earth" so it's not hard to imagine a pie filled with dirt that you have to eat when you are humiliated.

The skin of my teeth

I've used this expression countless times before and never realised it had its roots in the Hebrew language. I discovered that while reading, The Origin of the Bible. The expression is a Hebrew one that first appeared in this form in the Geneva Bible (1560). In Job 19:20, it reads:

My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.

This was a change from an earlier translation by Miles Coverdale (1535) which reads:

My bone hangeth to my skin, and the flesh is away, only there is left me the skin about my teeth.

Though the Geneva Bible is more succinct in its expression, when I saw Coverdale's translation, I suddenly understood what the Hebrew expression was getting at. Obviously we have no skin on our teeth, but Job is actually referring to his gums, the "skin" around his teeth. At this point in Job's lament, he was saying that he had so little flesh left that the only visible flesh on him were his gums.

That expression has evolved in meaning and has come to mean narrowly escaping a situation by the thinnest margin imaginable. For what can be thinner than the non-existent skin on our teeth?

Writers have been using the expression with this meaning for the longest time. Mark Twain remarked in his book Roughing It, "I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth." And Thorton Wilder wrote a Pulitzer-Prize winning play entitled, you guessed it, The Skin of Our Teeth.

In today's English Bibles, the sense of having narrowly escape is now in the verse. The ESV version of Job 19:20 reads:

My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh,
and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.

The footnotes in the ESV Study Bible do note that modern readers think of the phrase as an idiomatic expression for just barely accomplishing or avoiding something. That meaning certainly fits the verse but readers get a deeper dimension when they realise the original meaning.

How interesting that the Hebrew language has contributed such a quaint expression to the English language.

English approaches one million words

According to the Global Language Monitor, the English language is rushing headlong towards it's millionth word in about 38 days. One million words! Goodness. That's more than any other language. But hang on a minute. What is a word? For example, AskOxford asks, should dog be counted as one word or two words? That's because it is a noun meaning 'a kind of animal', and a verb meaning 'to follow persistently'. And should hot dog be counted as a new word or counted as a construction of hot and dog and therefore not a new word. And what about borrowed words from Latin, Japanese, French and so on that we use but aren't really English words at present? Do we count those?

Some more commentary from AskOxford:

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use, and 47,156 obsolete words. To this may be added around 9,500 derivative words included as subentries. Over half of these words are nouns, about a quarter adjectives, and about a seventh verbs; the rest is made up of interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, suffixes, etc. These figures take no account of entries with senses for different parts of speech (such as noun and adjective).

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary, of which perhaps 20 per cent are no longer in current use. If distinct senses were counted, the total would probably approach three quarters of a million.

According to the Economist, the Merriam-Webster lists about 450,000 words in its lexicon. That count is very different from the OED. Ah! What's a word lover to think? It appears that counting up the number of words in a language is futile. But it's exciting to see English, grow, transform and change over time.  This means we never stop learning about the English language. It also means we need to discard old usage as the language evolves. English is truly is a living language. Every day, some new aspect of it amazes me.