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Death to Flying Things, Lurch, and Language Evolution – Okay?

Those individuals who study language, particularly the English language, point out that our language is always evolving. Words are always being created and introduced to our vocabulary and words from other languages are assimilated into our language. These two methods are relatively well known and accepted. However, one of the most interesting ways our language evolves is through a process called elision.

Elision, in the linguistic sense, can be defined as the omission of a syllable or vowel at the beginning or end of a word, especially when a word ending with a vowel is next to one beginning with a vowel or, any omission of a part or parts of words. So how does elision actually work? Well, let’s consider Franklin Gutierrez.

Franklin Gutierrez plays Major League Baseball for the Seattle Mariners and is renowned for his defensive prowess in centerfield. As everyone knows, baseball has a very long history of bestowing creative nicknames to players and, in the case of Gutierrez, one sportswriter who watched Gutierrez run down fly ball after fly ball dubbed him “Death to Flying Things” – one of my all time favorite nicknames.

But wait a minute: what is a nickname? Of course we all know that a nickname is another name for an individual but when you look at the word it appears to be a compound of the words “nick” and “name” and that presents a problem.

When you look up the word “nick” you find that it can be a noun as in a small cut or notch, or as a verb, as in “I nicked myself shaving.” But neither of these two uses, when combined with the word “name” would seem appropriate for our current definition of the word nickname.

The answer to this problem goes all the way back to Old English when the word “ick’ was part of our vocabulary and meant “else” or “other.” So if baseball had been around 500 or so years ago, and Franklin Gutierrez was alive and playing ball for the Portsmouth Plowshares, when you referred to him as “Death to Flying Things” you would have been calling him by “an ick name.”

Thus, over the course of years, elision in our language transformed an ick name to a nickname.

Sometimes elision takes on a more complex form. Consider the word “howdy,” a relatively common greeting that most scholars agree originated in the American South with a first recorded use in 1840. This one is relatively easy to parse: it is a shortened form of the phrase “How do you do?’ [As an aside, I cannot hear, read, or write “How do you do?” without thinking of Lurch from the Addams family – once again dating myself in an uncomfortable way – who would never be caught saying “Howdy”].

A variation of the shortened “How do you do?” is “Howdy-do?” though “Howdy” is the more common utterance in the present day.

Today, “Howdy” is considered a simple greeting, virtually interchangeable with either “Hello” or “Hi” despite the fact that its origin is a question. If someone greeted us with “Howdy” and we were responding according to the original meaning of the word, the appropriate response would be something like “Very well, thank you” (I should note that I have on rare instances been given a response similar to this when I have greeted customers in my store with “Howdy”).

The conundrum of whether “Howdy” is simply a word of greeting or an interrogative was something that several classmates and I first considered back in my college days (please keep in mind as you continue reading that this was in the late 1970s). As I recollect the topic came up in my dorm room very late one night. In essence, we determined that if “Howdy” is simply a greeting, well enough. But if “Howdy” is an interrogative (as in “Howdy?”) then a response of “Hi” from an individual should give one pause.

As you may have surmised, it became the norm among our group during the rest of the term to greet one another with “Howdy” followed by the response “Hi” – with the “gh” silent.

And this leads me to the last word I will consider in this column, “okay,” which has nothing to do with elision but does show that nothing is new in our language.

These days, as we all know, “okay” means adequate, satisfactory, and acceptable – but its origins are somewhat murky. Through the years various theories have cited a Choctaw Indian and West African origins. But the most popular theory today places the origin in Boston and cites the national popularization of the term in America to the 1840 election.

In that election Martin Van Buren, originally of Kinderhook, New York, was one of the candidates. His American Democratic party, in an effort to capitalize on the abbreviation fad that had arisen in Boston during the summer of 1838, seized on “O.K.” as meaning “Old Kinderhook” and took to promoting “Vote for OK” since it was simpler than using Van Buren.

It appears that Van Buren’s party, in using OK, was trying to make use of a double entendre in that “O.K.” was, by then, largely accepted as an abbreviation of “olle korrect” or “ole kurreck” (i.e. “all correct”). These two curious phrases were the result of another fad sweeping Boston in the summer of 1938 (in addition to the abbreviation craze): intentional misspellings.

In other words, folks, our penchant for abbreviating phrases and utilizing intentional misspellings has been around for a long, long time (LOL, or laff out loud for you non-texters).