Word Histories: Etymologies Derived From the Files of the Dictionary of American Regional English

BY CRAIG M. CARVER

farce

In a 1988 memo released last July the Justice Department alleged that the Northrop Corporation. the manufacturer of the B-2 bomber, had provided the Air Force with false information on costs and scheduling—and that the Air Force had known it and done nothing. “Northrop’s cost schedule control system,” the memo said, “is essentially a farce.” The memo’s use of farce was a piquant word choice, etymologically speaking. The earliest sense of farce is “forcemeat" or “stuffing” (“Make a farce with the livers minced small,” an eighteenth-century cookbook directs), and the word is borrowed from the Old French farcir (to stuff), but ultimately from the Latin farcire. The farce that is a broadly satirical comedy also started out as filler—ad-lib gags and buffoonery that actors inserted in medieval religious dramas or mystery plays. (Similarly, the earlier Medieval Latin word farsa or farsia referred to the various phrases inserted in litanies between the words kyrie and eleison — for example, “Kyrie, genitor ingenite, vera essentia. eleison”—and to other expansions of liturgical formulas.) Once also a verb, farce had the sense of padding or spicing up a speech or literary piece (“With what stuffe our old historiographers have farced u p their huge volumes”—Raphael Holinshed, The First Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1577).

ruckus

Last year, when William Bennett, then the nation’s “drug czar,” believed that a $231 million slice was going to be cut out of the Administration’s budget for drug programs, he lost no time in criticizing Congress. After Congress restored the funding, Bennett backtracked a bit, saying, “I’m sorry about the rancor this has caused. But we needed this money. We were taken completely by surprise on these cuts, and raising a ruckus seemed the only way to get this money back.” Ruckus (a commotion, row, noisy disturbance) probably originated in the southern United States, where, especially in the Appalachians, moonshine is sometimes called ruckus juice (because when you drink it you may start a ruckus). Most lexicographers claim that it is a blend of ruction and rumpus. Ruction (a heated quarrel, brawl, riot) is sometimes said to derive from eruption but is more likely to have come from insurrection, specifically meaning the Irish insurrection of 1798 (“The ruction has been hardly in the fearless old Hibernian manner” — Saturday Review, 1886). Rumpus (riot, disturbance) may be a shortened form of rumbustious or rumbustious (boisterous, violent), which has the well-known American variant rambunctious. These words are probably modeled after the English dialect expressions rumbustical, rumgumptious, and rumbumptious, all meaning “boisterous.” Alternatively, there is an outside chance that rumpus is from Swiss-German students’ slang use of Greek rombos (the Greek meaning is “spinning top; commotion, disturbance”). Ruckus, however, may have a much simpler derivation. It may come straight from raucous (strident, boisterously disorderly), perhaps influenced by English dialect’s ruck, meaning “noise" or “racket” (“‘Will they come and settle on the net, Dave?’ ‘Not a bird of ‘em if thou keeps up that ruck’” — G. Manville Fenn, Dick o’ the Fens, 1888). Raucous itself is a learned eighteenth-centurv borrowing from Latin caucus (hoarse, harsh) and is related to riot, rout, and rumor, all ultimately from the Indo-European root * re u - (to roar). The simplest explanation is that ruckus may be a variant of fracas (noisy quarrel, brawl), which is from the Italian fracasso (din, uproar), which in turn is from fracassare (to smash; to crash).

blackmail

When Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein began taking Westerners as hostages last August, President Bush warned that “America and the world will not be blackmailed by this ruthless policy.” Blackmail was originally protection money that predatory Scottish chieftains forced farmers and small landowners on the English border to pay in return for immunity from plunder (“Sundry of her Majesty’s loving Subjects within the said [northern) counties . . . have been forced to pay a certain rate of money, corn, cattle, or other consideration, commonly there called by the name of black-mail“— Statutes at Large, 1601). It was made a felony during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, punishable by death. The mail in blackmail has nothing to do with the postal service, but is a term for rent or payment which is still used in Scotland, Blackmail is black because it was usually paid with goods that were not “white"—that is, were not silver money.