Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1993, Page 108

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Pétur Knútsson
be described as “eironeous” without confusing contexts: of course a
discontinuity may have occurred in the etymology of the word, but the
channels of etymology are not necessarily those of diachronic devel-
opment. It is as if lexicographers were still blinded by the revelatory
insights of the Neogrammarians of the 19th century, who pointed out
that linguistic change is essentially a systematic or rule-bound pro-
cess. In the Oxford English Dictionary the revelation has petrified into
dogma: whereas the essential Neogrammarian thesis is that exceptions
to the rule were due to non-etymological processes such as analogy,
the Oxford English Dictionary sees them simply as error. Not of course
that this was a later development — dogma typically infects the seeds
of revelation.
Unfortunately, however, things have hardly changed in some circles
since 1850. Here is a quote from Adrian Room’s Dictionary ofTrue
Etymologies more than a century later (Room 1985:2):
(6) Discovering such true origins is not only interesting, of
course, and even entertaining, but also can be important, since
it gives us new insight into the meaning of the word, its real
meaning, and the object or action that it describes. [Author’s
emphasis.]
Here we still seem to have the full-blown concept of “real meaning”
as being enshrined in a word’s genes — it is as if the whole panoply
of structuralism and post-structuralism had never been. And that’s not
all — it is also denying Horace and Cicero, Augustine and the Neo-
Platonists, even Jerome when he’s not being cranky: all of whom have
necessarily and explicitly accepted the existence of a prison-house of
language. Only the extremes of post-Renaissance pedantry actually
seriously voice the desire for a prison-house of etymology.
4.2 Popular and learned error
The second misconception is enshrined in the term “popular etymol-
ogy”, which suggests that the “errors” are perpetrated by an unleamed
populace. In fact, however, they are at leást as often scholarly as they