It may please some of my readers to learn that the word whore and the name Cher are etymologically related. But how?
The first thing we need to clear out of the way is that w at the beginning of whore. It doesn’t belong there. It’s orthographic kudzu. It’s linguistic wisteria. It’s a parasite. People in the late Middle Ages no longer pronounced the w in words like who and whose, so they ended up putting it in print where it had never been before, to begin words that should have begun with hoor hu. The Anglo Saxon word is hure (German Hure, in pristine condition).
The next thing to do is to apply Grimm’s Law. Yes, it’s the Grimm of the Fairy Tales. The Law says: Thou shalt not enter a gingerbread house. Actually, it doesn’t say that. It is a law associating consonants in the Germanic languages with consonants in Proto Indo European, which was the language that Proto Indo Europeans spoke. We’ll meet up with this Law often in these pages. Here, the Law tells us, if we have a Germanic word beginning with h, to look for a Latin or Greek word beginning with c (k). Now, is there a Latin word having to do with, er, um, love, that begins with c, followed by a back-of-the-mouth vowel (u, o, aw), followed by an r? Indeed: cara, feminine of carus, dear, beloved. From that word and its relatives we get, filtered through French, our English charity. We also get the French cher, chere, dear, beloved. Q. E. D.
January 9th, 2013 | 10:41 am
That first sentence is priceless.
January 9th, 2013 | 1:40 pm
Familiar examples of the same sound-shift is Latin “cornu” and English “horn,” Latin “centum” and English “hundred,” not to mention Greek ἐπίσκοπος [episcopos] and English “bishop.”
January 9th, 2013 | 1:41 pm
I don’t get this.
Meaning, after reading this post, I don’t understand 1) why there’s a “w” at the beginning of “whore” when apparently there’s not supposed to be one; 2) who Grimm is, or what his law is; and 3) why there is a connection between “hure” and some Latin word.
And I also don’t get how German Hure, for “pristine condition,” comes to mean what “whore” means today. Unless the Germans or the Anglo Saxons or someone is being ironic.
January 9th, 2013 | 3:43 pm
J.W. Cox, let me take a stab at this.
The “w” is there because in the Middle Ages people dropped the “w” sound in other words beginning with “wh” but nonetheless retained it in print (that’s the connecting point that Dr. Esolen implies but doesn’t state), so that for some words pronounced with an initial “h” sound, the spelling was an initial “wh”. That was then extended to words that never had the “w” sound to begin with.
As to what Grimm’s law is, I thought he stated that pretty clearly. For your last point, “Hure” doesn’t mean “pristine condition,” it means “whore” or the like; he just means that the word has survived into modern German without changing from the Anglo-Saxon. I think in the previous entry in this series he pointed out that pristine really (or originally) means “in its original condition” rather than “spotless.” And yes, he is doubtless being witty in associating this with “Hure.”
January 9th, 2013 | 4:30 pm
Faith, hope, and whority doesn’t have quite the same ring.
January 10th, 2013 | 1:34 pm
And the joke on Cher being a w****?
Not really seeing the humor in that.
January 10th, 2013 | 4:01 pm
Perhaps Esolen, or someone else, can explain the appropriateness of the gratituous and viscious slander found in the first sentence of his post. Why so little charity for a 66 year old woman?
January 10th, 2013 | 5:48 pm
I must admit, the first sentence made me laugh. Not because I think Cher is whorish, or because I think it is appropriate to make fun of her, but because I know of people who don’t at all approve of her music or style. I thought the sentence was poking fun at them, not at Cher.
So exactly how would the “wh” in “who,” etc. be pronounced? I have a have a hard time envisioning (so to speak) how that would differ from just a “w.” I know Family Guy did a riff on an exaggerated pronunciation of “cool whip,” but wasn’t that sound “hw,” a different sound than “wh”?
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