Gimme an “S.”

Dear Word Detective:  My question is about the word “spell,” in particular the way it is used when someone, for example, might ask their friend, “Do you want me to spell you for a while?” as in “give you a break for a while.”  I used it in front of my middle-aged son and he said that he had never, once, heard it used that way in his entire life.  We had to explain it to him.  I immediately thought of you.  Where did it come from and when? — Lee.

That’s a good question.  I’m not surprised that your son hadn’t heard “spell” used to mean “take over for someone for a while,” because I myself haven’t run across it used that way in years.  In fact, if you Google the word “spell,” what you get are results about evenly divided between “online spell check” (hard to argue with the need for that) and “spell” in the “magic spell” sense, prompting dozens of ads for things designed to “bring back your lover” and similar bad ideas.  Am I the only one around here who’s a bit disturbed that if you scratch the surface of the internet you find yourself back in the 14th century?

A reader recently asked me if all the various meanings of “litter” (trash, battlefield stretcher, passel of puppies, etc.) are really all the same word, which they are.  In the case of all the meanings of “spell,” however, we are dealing with three separate words, although two of them are related.

“Spell” used as a verb meaning “to enunciate the letters making up a word” first appeared in English in the 14th century, borrowed from the Old French “espeller,” and originally meant “to read out, to study intently.”  Interestingly, the phrase “spell out,” meaning “to explain something step-by-step in detail” (“If you weren’t such a fool you’d know it too. You want me to spell it out in words of one syllable for you?”, 1956) is a very recent invention, first appearing around 1940.

The root of that Old French “espeller” was the ancient Germanic root “spell,” which also gave us the “magic” sort of “spell.”  The original sense of this noun “spell” when it appeared in Old English was simply “talk, narration,” but by the late 16th century, this “spell” had taken on the special meaning of “a set of words supposed to possess magical powers; an incantation.”  This “spell” is also used in the figurative, non-occult sense of “a compelling interest or attraction” (“The spell is removed; I see you as you are,” Jane Austen, Lady Susan, 1817).

“Spell” as a verb meaning “to work in place of another” is completely unrelated to either of the “spells” above.  This “spell” comes from the Old English verb “spelian,” meaning “to take the place of; to substitute,” and when it appeared in modern English in the late 16th century it was with the specific meaning of “to relieve another by taking a turn at work.”  Used as a noun, this “spell” originally meant “a group of persons taking a turn at work to relieve others,” what we today would call a “shift.”  By the 18th century, we were using “spell” in this sense to mean “a turn at work; a period of labor,” or, conversely, “a period of relaxation from work.”  Eventually, “spell” lost its connection to work entirely and came to mean “a period of time of indeterminate length” sometimes spent in a particular way (“Then came a spell of wandering, of high play, of rage for costly excitement…,” 1885).  This “spell” is also used in such phrases as “fainting spell” and to mean a stretch of  weather, as in “hot spell.”  This “period of time” usage is now considered a bit antiquated, and often found in dialogue written to depict old fashioned or rustic characters (“Go sit a spell on the porch with Pa while I fry us some possum”).

More seal, Your Lordship?

Dear Word Detective:  I’m sitting here at my desk in the HR office (I’m the security guard, and I have nothing better to do than read your site. Go figure.), and I tell the receptionist in the cube adjacent to mine that the gentleman passing the desk to the offices behind unannounced can do so because he must be a “mucky muck” (she had heard it “muckidy muck”), meaning someone of importance, or at least higher rank than us.  I’m curious as to how “muck” got mixed in with the “upper crust” of the workplace, though if you ask me, I’d say it’s because when they open their mouths, the stuff that comes out resembles the muck in the gutters after a nice rain.  I suppose that’s the kind of thinking that keeps me from being one. — B. Waligorski.

Gosharootie, why would a Human Resources department ever need a security guard?  After all, their mission is to help employees realize their potential, right?  On the the other hand, some folks probably get pretty annoyed when they discover that their potential has turned out to be standing in an unemployment line.  Personally, I’ve always thought “Human Resources” is one of the creepiest locutions in the English language.  Way too evocative of “Soylent Green” for my taste.

“Muck” definitely has an image problem.  The word first appeared in the English language back in the mid-13th century, derived from Scandinavian roots, with the meaning “animal dung used as fertilizer,” and it’s been downhill since then.  The nicest thing you can say about “muck” is that it’s commonly used today to mean simply a very slimy sort of dirt or mud, the kind you often find on the bottom of a pond or, as you say, in a gutter.  “Muck” is also used in a variety of figurative senses, including to mean wealth or money (when regarded as corrupting), and it’s also applied to people regarded as despicable.  But, poetic resonance aside, that “muck” has nothing to do with “mucky muck” meaning “a self-important person; a person who imagines he is more important than he actually is.”

The original English form of “mucky muck” was “high-muck-a-muck,” and it comes from Chinook Jargon, a hybrid of English, French and the Indian languages of the Pacific Northwest of the US once widely spoken in that region. In Chinook Jargon, “muckamuck” meant “food” (or, as a verb, “to eat”).  With the addition of the Chinook word “hiu” (plenty), you had “hiu-muckamuck,” “lots of food” or “plenty to eat,” i.e., prosperous or wealthy.  When this phrase was adopted by English-speakers unfamiliar with Chinook, the “hiu” was mistakenly understood as “high,” and the resulting English form was “high-muck-a-muck,” first appearing in print in 1856 meaning “a self-important person, a bigwig.”  Various forms, including “mackamuck,” “muckety-muck” and “mucky-muck,” either with or without the “high” and the hyphens, have arisen since.