Wednesday, June 5, 2013
"Gumption"; "PAWKY"; "SMIDGEN"; "Fluke"; "Flummox"
Last week I came upon the word "squandering" and said to myself, "That's an interesting sounding word. I'll bet it has a fascinating background." ORIGIN UNKNOWN. Always disappointing.
I remembered an essay I wrote about some attractive words with no identifiable "primeval" ancestor, and I'm drawing on that this week.
"Pawky" does come from "pawk," which is obsolete but meant "trick," and pawky is "crafty, artful, cunning," but no one knows where pawk came from. Similarly "smidgen" probably comes from "smitch," "a particle, a bit," but no one knows where that came from.
(Continued tomorrow)
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In the classic Gone With The Wind, there is a scene wherein a garden placard is etched with this phrase: "Do not squander time, it's the stuff dreams are made of" - Since most of the primary characters (actual historical occupants of the south during the Civil War) were of Irish or English (and Scottish) lineage, I wonder if the squandering is a word borrowed from the Emerald Isle or U.K.?
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