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All contents herein (except the illustrations, which are in the public domain) are Copyright © 1995-2020 Evan Morris & Kathy Wollard. Reproduction without written permission is prohibited, with the exception that teachers in public schools may duplicate and distribute the material here for classroom use.

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“Spring” and “neap” tides

Stop whining and keep bailing.

Dear Word Detective: A reference book about nautical navigation says that the root for “spring” (tides) is from the Viking word for “lack of.” For “neap” (tides) it says the meaning is from the Viking word for “abundance.” I am having trouble verifying this statement; can you help? — Philip.

Gee, I miss the ocean. Although I live in rural Ohio now, I grew up on Long Island Sound. Literally. My family set me adrift in a small, leaky dinghy when I was twelve, and for weeks I lived off the flotsam and jetsam of passing merchant ships. Fortunately, I was adopted by a school of talking dolphins, who taught me to catch fish in mid-air and other crowd-pleasing tricks, and eventually I got a job at Sea World. That turned out to be excellent training for journalism, and here we are. Now I’m gonna go back and actually read your question.

Well, that’s strange. I really did grow up near the Sound, even sailed my own little sailboat as a kid, but I’d somehow missed learning about “neap” and “spring” tides. We just paid attention to when the tide was going to be “high” or “low,” mostly so we’d be able to avoid running aground on sand bars at low tide. “Neap” and “spring” tides are a bit more special than just “high” and “low.”

A “neap tide” occurs just after the first and third quarters of the moon, when the high tide is at its lowest point, i.e., the lowest height above “low” tide (and thus there is the least difference between high and low tides). Apparently at those times the moon, earth and sun are arrayed so that the gravitational pull of the sun does not add to the pull of the moon as it usually does. “Neap” first appeared in Old English (in the form “nepflod,” or “neap flood”), and the origin of the word is a complete mystery. By the way, I’d be a bit leery of the navigational advice of an author who claims “neap” comes from a “Viking” (presumably Old Norse) word meaning “abundance.” Not only is there no evidence for that, but it doesn’t even make sense. How would the lowest high tide be considered “abundance” of anything except wet sand and dangerous reefs?

It is true that “neap” appears to have relatives in German, Swedish and Danish, but those words were probably ultimately borrowed from English, so that’s no help. The one theory that seems plausible ties “neap” to the English words “nip” and/or “neb” (meaning the bill or beak of a bird). You could make a case that when the level of high tide converges with that of low tide, the difference between the two narrows like the beak of a bird, or perhaps something that is “nipped,” squeezed together sharply.

A “spring tide” is the opposite of a “neap tide,” i.e., the point just after either a full or new moon when the high tide reaches its highest point above the level of low tide. Again, the story related in that book doesn’t make sense. Why would the highest high tide come from a word meaning “lack of?” I think the dude has his theories backwards. And as for where the “spring” in “spring tide” came from, that’s easy; we don’t need no stinking Vikings. It’s the common English word “spring.”

The noun and adjective forms of “spring” come from the verb “to spring,” which first appeared in Old English as “springan,” meaning “to burst out, rise up suddenly, leap, etc.” The season we know as “spring” gets its name from the notion of life (plants in particular) bursting forth after being dormant during the winter. But that usage didn’t actually arise until the mid-16th century. The earliest use of “spring” as a noun was in reference to the kind of “spring” where water issues or wells out of the earth, and it is this “rising water” sense of “spring” that gave us “spring tide,” also first appearing in the mid-16th century.

Interestingly, “spring tide” was initially also used to mean “the time of the season of spring” or “springtime.” That’s because the word “tide,” which came from the same Germanic root (“tidiz”) that gave us “time,” originally just meant “time” or “a specific period of time.” So “Yuletide,” a synonym for the time around Christmas, simply means “the time when the Yule log is traditionally burned,” i.e., Christmas. “Tide” wasn’t applied to the periodic fluctuations in ocean levels until the 14th century.

Aback

Whoa!

Dear Word Detective: I’d like to put in a plug for “taken aback,” as opposed to its apparent replacement, “taken back.” I think this locution is the work of people who don’t quite “get” the original phrase and therefore assume that it, rather than their understanding, is deficient in some way. Thus they feel free to “fix” the problem based on their own extensive understanding of our native tongue. “Taken back” appears several times in the stage directions — not the dialogue — of the pilot script for a TV show that debuts in mid-September. I just finished reading it last night, and I winced every time I came across it. I could almost see putting it in the mouth of a character — to show how ill-educated he or she is. How a professional writer who was no doubt paid big bucks could commit such a crime against form and sense is beyond me. — Joe.

Scriptwriters, don’t you just love ’em? Sometimes I think studios recruit them in shopping malls. Last week I was watching the new Fox series “Terra Nova,” in which people in 2149 travel back 85 million years to escape their dying civilization and to pet dinosaurs, when I heard one of the characters tell the hero, an ex-cop, that the new world needed more police officers “not so much.” It’s good to know that today’s trendy catch phrases will still be current in 138 years. Oh, well. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “Whatever.”

I agree that finding “taken back” in stage directions is quite a bit worse than seeing it in dialogue. It’s actually very depressing, because it indicates that the person who wrote the script had heard (and perhaps misheard) the phrase, but apparently never read it, and you cannot have read much worth reading without encountering “aback.” If it’s any consolation, there seem to be a lot of people online reacting to “taken back” with shock and horror.

“Aback” first appeared in Old English as the adverbial phrase “on baec” meaning simply “to or at the rear,” describing either motion or position. (That “baec” also gave us our modern noun “back”) “Aback” was used in this sense in modern English, particularly in the phrases “to hold aback” (to restrain or hinder) and “to stand aback from” (to stand aloof from, or avoid). Both of these phrases shed the “a” prefix by the late 17th century, and today we just say “hold back” and “stand back.”

“Aback” in the modern sense found in the phrase “taken aback,” meaning “suddenly surprised” or “stopped by surprise,” is one of those rare English phrases that actually sprang from the decks of square-rigged sailing ships. A sailing ship is “taken aback” when, because of either a shift in the wind or an error by the crew, it is suddenly sailing directly into the wind and the sails are blown back against the masts, halting all progress. In the worst-case scenario, the ship is actually pushed backwards by the wind, which can be very dangerous, especially in rough weather.

The sailing phrase “taken aback,” with its connotation of a sudden reversal, was a perfect metaphor for that moment when the unexpected happens and the wind is suddenly figuratively blowing in your face, rocking you back on your heels (“I don’t think I was ever so taken aback in all my life,” Dickens, 1842). This figurative use first appeared in the mid-19th century and “taken aback” has become so common an idiom that few people are aware of its nautical origins.

“Taken back,” on the other hand, at best has all the semantic impact of returning something to Target. The phrase “taken back,” unlike “taken aback,” has no single strong idiomatic meaning. It could apply to one person “taking back” a gift, an army “taking back” territory, a person “taking back” an insult to a friend, and so on. “Larry was taken aback by Laura’s accusation” is clear and vivid. “Larry was taken back by Laura’s accusation” is confusing nonsense. That a highly-paid scriptwriter apparently does not know the difference is both infuriating and depressing.

Go / Went

With all thy going, get lost.

Dear Word Detective: I understand (unless you tell me otherwise) that the principal parts of the verb “to go” are really parts to two different words: “go” and “wend,” viz. “went,” the past tense of “to go,” being the pluperfect of “wend.” If that is so, what, originally was the simple past of “to go” and how did “went” sneak in there? And was (or is) “to wander” related to “wend” in some way? — David Hendon.

Whoa. Excuse me, for a minute there the room was spinning like a roulette wheel. Oddly enough, when it stopped, my mind (which resembles a small steel ball to an uncanny degree) settled on a famous line from Saki (pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916)) about the difficulty of retaining household staff: “The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.” I’m sure you’re all thinking, along about now, “My, what a clever man. I wish I had literary quotations leaping into my mind right when I need them.” Unfortunately, I originally remembered that line as involving a maid, not a cook, and consequently wasted about an hour looking for the source of a quotation that didn’t actually exist. But even my mangled version involved two senses of “go” and one of “went,” so I still get ten points.

“Go” is, of course, one of the oldest and most basic English words, first appearing in Old English as “gan,” based on the Indo-European root “ghe.” The general connotation of “to go” is to move, either literally or figuratively, in most senses away from a point (contrasted with “to come,” generally expressing movement towards the speaker’s position). Summarizing all the uses to which the English language has put “go” is seriously impractical here (the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists 48 senses of the word, most with at least four or five sub-senses). We are, after all, talking about a word, originally connoting physical motion, that is now regularly used (sense 44) to mean “To pass into a certain condition. Chiefly implying deterioration” (OED), as in “to go rogue,” “to go missing” and “to go medieval on someone.” The first “go” in that Saki quotation (“as cooks go”) reflects sense 15, “To have ordinarily a certain degree or range of value, amount, excellence, etc.” (“It was a good enough luncheon, as hotels go,” 1872). The second “go” reflects the original basic sense of “to leave a place.”

“Wend” also first appeared in Old English (in the form “wendan”), from Germanic roots carrying the general sense of “to turn or go.” In use as a transitive verb, “to wend” meant to turn something or change its direction. In intransitive use, however, it eventually meant not just to turn, but “to turn away, go, depart,” especially “to travel in a certain direction.” This is the primary sense in use today, and when we speak of “wending our way home” we’re really just saying “going home,” although “wend” tends to carry a connotation of a more casual pace and perhaps a more roundabout route than usual. (“Wend,” as you suspected, does indeed come from the same Germanic roots that produced “wander.”)

In Old and Middle English “go” (“gan” at that time) only existed in the present tense “ga” and the past participle “gegan”; for the past tense we used “eode” (later, in Middle English, “yede” or “yode”), which actually belonged to another long-obsolete Germanic verb also meaning “go.” The verb “to wend” (“wendan” in Old English) was a bit more conventional, with the past tense and past participle of, respectively, “wende” and “wended.” But, beginning in the 13th century, those forms sometimes appeared as “wente” and “went,” and those spellings eventually became standard.

During this same period of time, “to go” and “to wend” came to be used as synonyms, and “wend” actually began to fade from use, at least in the present tense. So it’s not surprising that people started using the past tense of “wend,” which was “went,” as the past tense of “to go.” Poor little “wend,” having been effectively robbed of its past tense “went,” developed a new past tense, “wended,” still in use today.

So, long story short, the past tense of “to go” is “went,” not because “went” developed organically from “go,” but because people using “go” just decided to use it. It’s a long and confusing story, but it’s also a vivid illustration of the fact that English was developed by the people speaking it, not by some committee or commission.