Dear Word Detective: I awoke this morning with the irresistible urge to know the origin of the word “humdrum.” Although it appears on your fine website in descriptions of other similarly obscure words, I am astonished to find it has no entry of its own. I would be grateful for some seconds if you could enlighten me on this point. — A. Leslie.
Sure, no problem. Hey, wait a minute there, buster. Whaddya mean you’ll be “grateful for some seconds” if I answer this question? My dogs are grateful for longer than that when I let them lick the butter knife. Whatever became of customer loyalty? Whatever became of the milk of human kindness? Whatever became of Jerry Mathers? OK, scratch that last one. I asked about Oskar Werner last month and several people sent me his entire biography.
“Humdrum” is a great word, meaning “routine, monotonous or dull.” Dreary. Tedious. Tiresome. Dry. Boring with a capital B. “Humdrum” is a small town on a Tuesday afternoon in August, where the loudest sound is the drone of ten thousand cicadas and the barber wanders over to the Post Office just to see another human being. Come to think of it, I actually live near a town that might as well be named Humdrum, where the gas station is the de facto social center and customers have prolonged conversations comparing brands of beef jerky.
By the way, “jerky” comes from the American Spanish word “charqui,” which in turn came from the Quichua (Peruvian) word “ccharqui,” meaning “dried slice of meat.” I must remember to tell the guys at the gas station next time I’m in town.
One of the things that makes “humdrum” such a perfect (one hesitates to call it “vivid”) word to describe a boring thing, place or time is the sound of the word itself. “Humdrum” sounds boring, and that turns out to be the key to the origin of “humdrum.” It’s what linguists call a “reduplication,” or rhyming repetition, of the word “hum.”
Reduplications are fairly common in informal English, from “fancy-schmancy” and “hoity-toity” to “okey-dokey” and “itsy-bitsy.” The second element in such formations is usually just there to emphasize the first — don’t go looking for a definition of “schmancy,” because it doesn’t actually mean anything.
In the case of “humdrum,” the “drum” echoes and emphasizes “hum,” which has meant “to make a low continuous murmuring sound” since the 15th century. “Hum” is itself echoic, intended to imitate the sound of a hum, and apparently a “hum” is such a boring sound that “humdrum” appeared in the 16th century and has been a synonym for “bore you out of your mind” ever since.
