Thumb: What's with that b?

English can be stupid, that's what

Photo by roger vaughan on Unsplash

Yesterday afternoon our neighbour Rosemary dropped in on her way back from Auckland and ended up - much to our delight - staying for dinner.

At one point she mentioned she’s writing her memoirs but was concerned her grammar might not be up to the job. In particular, she said, she was unsure when to write “my husband and me” versus “my husband and I”.

In my youth, when I knew everything, I would have taken great delight in delivering her a know-it-all dissertation on the matter. Now that I’ve reached an age when bits of me are failing faster than you can say “karma’s a bitch”, one of the losses I’ve endured is the certainty that I know much at all.

Grammar - including spelling and punctuation - is one area in which I’ve developed an uncharacteristic hesitation to pass judgement. The reason is twofold. First, what appears at first blush to be “correct” is often only the result of some arbitrary decree, made by some busybody back in time, that good writers have never observed (before or since), and that any self-respecting modern person should feel free to ignore too. Second, English is a mish-mash of inconsistencies that an alien visitor to the planet would surely say was designed to mess with careful people’s heads.

Take the ridiculously overendowed thumb. Why would anyone with a care for our children’s efforts to learn spelling put a clearly redundant b on the end of it? Why would they then go splashing more b’s about in the middle of words like debt and doubt and subtle?

You might think the b in thumb is a holdover from an earlier version of the word in which the letter was voiced. It’s not. Middle English had thoume, Old English had þuma, the predecessors of those languages - Proto-Germanic, Old Saxon, et al - had words like thuma, thumo and þumall, all of which are thought to have derived from the PIE tum, “to swell” (because your thumb is thicker than your fingers). We can also thank that origin word for tumour and tuber.

Some time around the 1200s someone somewhere with not nearly enough to do decided that thum, or however they spelt it then, would be made immeasurably more pleasing by the appending of a silent b at the end. No one knows why, but one plausible explanation is that they figured if dumb could have a b, then thum should have one too.

But the b in dumb was once voiced, as was the b in comb, womb, tomb, lamb and a host of other words. For the young person being harassed instructed in spelling, the etymology of each word is irrelevant - their suffering will not diminish one iota either way - but for anyone with an ounce of compassion in their otherwise cold and stony hearts, it may give cause for a little more patience with those who find spelling a tough road.

Other words with a silent b, like doubt, have travelled a more tortuous path. It’s from the Latin dubitare, “to question, hesitate, waver in opinion”, and is a close cousin to dubious, where a silent b would challenge even a contortionist’s tongue. For centuries, English had no need of the b, commonly spelling the word douten or duten. From the 1400s, however, feeling that Latin knew English better than the English, scribes began popping the b back in (French scribes did the same). Then, during the 1600s, the French regained their senses and reverted to doute, forcing the English to insist, in the adamantly superior manner only English speakers can pull off, that the b remain.

Debt, from the Latin debitum, has followed a similar path to doubt (Middle English had dette), as has subtle, from the Latin subtilis.

Another word to have taken a similar path as thumb is numb - its earlier spellings were nome and nimen. While you and I think of it as referring to a loss of sensation, our forbears thought of it in broader terms, as being “taken” so as to be powerless to feel or act, something you might experience if you had a seizure or great shock, for example.

But as so often happens in language, numb’s story in relation to that final letter isn’t entirely straightforward. It can be traced back as far as the PIE nem, “assign, allot, take” and is where we get words like agronomy, astronomy and automony, where the last three syllables mean “custom or law”. It’s also the source of number, for which Latin had numerus and Old French had nombre - having decided a consonant, and why not b?, was needed to round things out.

Before the Norman invasion of 1066, people in England didn’t have numbers; they had getæl. Number was the anglicising of nombre - for a long time the usual spelling was noumbre before it was ruled that it still looked too French and today’s spelling was conjured up.

The point, if this newsletter is capable of such a thing, is that modern English is like the cast of Reservoir Dogs - an ill-fitting rabble of amoral lowlifes with shady pasts whose only redeeming feature is that thrown together they make for a really good story.

Except for the torture scene. It’s unwatchable, the late, great Michael Madsen notwithstanding.

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Bits and specious

An interesting article here on the pervasive myth that Inuit languages have a kerjillion different words for snow. Includes cartoons, my favourite educational tool.

Michael Madsen was Quentin Tarantino’s first choice to play Vincent in Pulp Fiction, but he chose to appear in Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp instead, later expressing regret for the decision. While it’s never explicitly stated in the movie, Vincent Vega is the brother of Madsen’s Reservoir Dogs character, Vic Vega. The reason we know: Because Tarantino has said so.

Heightening the unwatchableness of the Reservoir Dogs torture scene is that Vic bops along to the Stealers Wheel song Stuck in the Middle throughout it. The song’s often been mistaken for a Bob Dylan number, and no surprise. The lyrics could easily have come from Dylan and singer Jerry Rafferty even adopts a Dylanesque singing style for it. Rumour has it that he intended the song as a gentle Dylan parody, but I haven’t been able to find anywhere quoting him on that.

Here, you decide.

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Quote of the week

I’m glad I wasn’t in Free Willy 3. That’s all I can say on that.
Michael Madsen (who starred in the first Free Willy movie)