Etymological excavation: What is a fossil word?

The following is an excerpt from the book Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds.

A fossil word is a word that primarily appears in the context of phrases or idioms. It typically comes attached to other words. The phrase survives even when the word itself becomes antiquated and rarely appears on its own.

Think about the phrase “to and fro.” “Fro” was a preposition and adverb meaning “away” or “backwards.” It almost never appears on its own, but “to and fro” remains in wide use.

Another example is the word “bated” in the phrase “bated breath.” It’s a past participle form of the word “abate,” but that form is not typically used in English unless it’s attached to the word “breath.”

Although the word “bide” can still be found independently in some English dialects, it’s heavily associated with the phrase “bide one’s time” in American English. It’s related to the words “abide” and “abode,” and both are from the Old English bidan, meaning “to stay, live, or remain.”

“Lam” is rare outside of the phrase “on the lam,” and its origin is a bit mysterious. In the Elizabethan era it was both a verb meaning “to beat,” and a noun meaning a heavy blow, so “on the lam” which was originally American crime slang, might imply the same thing as the term “beat it” does when it comes to running away. It’s also thought to be related to the word lambast. To “lambast,” which was originally pronounced and spelled “lambaste” (and still is in some cases, depending on your region) combines that lam verb, to “beat,” with a 17th century sense of the verb “baste,” which comes from Old Norse and also means to thrash someone.

Both spic and span are fossilized in the phrase “spic” and “span.” A spic is a nail, and span is a word for a wood chip. The phrase refers to something that’s freshly cut by a workman’s hands, like a brand-new nail from a smith or perhaps like a fresh cutting from a lumberjack. Both of these are Germanic and probably from Old Norse. “Span new” is recorded as a variation on “brandnew” in the 1600s.

“The whole shebang” is another etymological mystery. We do know that Walt Whitman used the word “shebang” as a word for a shelter in his 1862 prose work “Specimen Days”:

“Besides the hospitals, I also go occasionally on long tours through the camps, talking with the men, &c. Sometimes at night among the groups around the fires, in their shebang enclosures of bushes.”

The “lo” in “lo and behold” is a generic Old English exclamation. It’s probably an imperative of the word “look” or in Old English loken. But you might also use it as a greeting, or if you’re surprised, or if you need to express joy or grief. Sounds like it’s all about tone of voice.

“Caboodle” is fossilized in the phrases “kit and caboodle” and “the whole caboodle.” The first of these phrases is predated by similar terms such as “kid and cargo” and “kit and boodle.” An earlier version of the phrase “the whole caboodle” was simply ”the whole boodle.” “Caboodle” and “boodle” both mean “collection,” with the ca- on caboodle probably operating as an intensifier, implying a really big boodle. Both are thought to be from the Dutch tern boedel, meaning “property.” The “kit” in “kit and caboodle” is, of course, the modern word for any collection of items used to repair, maintain, or make another item, or all the clothes and equipment needed to perform a task or play a sport. It too is probably Dutch in origin, from the term kitte meaning a “wooden vessel” or a wooden ship. Hence “kit and caboodle” implies “the whole ship and its cargo.”

Sometimes fossil words are only semi-fossilized. The word “figment” can certainly be used independently to describe something invented, but it most often appears in the phrase “figment of your imagination.” The word “inclement” is rarely used outside of the phrase “inclement weather,” from the Latin clementem, “mild, placid.” “Turpitude” rarely appears outside of the phrase “moral turpitude.” This word is from the Latin turpis meaning vile, foul or ugly. So moral turpitude is utter depravity and vileness.

Another form of semi-fossilization: The word “dint” is a predecessor to the word “dent,” which remains in use as a word for a small indentation or defect. You may have read this word in historical or fictional accounts of people wearing armor; a small indentation in armor is often a dint rather than a dent. Similarly the little indentations in coconuts are often called dints instead of dents. But there’s also the idiom “by dint of,” meaning “by means of,” and in this context dint is fossilized because this is the only scenario in which “dint” has this definition. But both usages have the same origin: A dint (or in Old English, dynt) was a blow dealt in a battle, just like we see in the armor sense, so in the context of the phrase “by dint of” it suggests the force by which a blow or other action is carried out. So, you might receive a dint in your armor by dint of fighting in a battle. “Dent” came along later (early 14th c.) from the same etymological source as “dint,” but “dent” became the preferred spelling in the 15th century due to influence from Latin-derived words like indent and indentation.

Much ado about ado

Another fossil word worth a more detailed excavation is “ado.” Nowadays, it’s most often found in the phrases “without further ado” and “much ado about nothing,” which survived thanks to the name of the Shakespearean comedy. But did you know that the word “ado” is a contraction—and an infinitive?

As you probably know from your grade school grammar lessons, an infinitive is the base form of a verb, the form it takes when it’s not conjugated. In English, we pair unconjugated verbs with the word “to” to create the infinitive.  An infinitive phrase is something like “to walk,” “to go,” “to speak,” or “to do.” The word “to” usually acts as a preposition, but in infinitive phrases, it acts as what we call a particle. This usage of the word “to” came around in Middle English as an adaptation of the word “to” in the Old English dative case.

But English also has some influence from Old Norse thanks to the Vikings. For an example of why this matters with the word “ado,” let’s take a look at Norwegian, which is a modern Nordic language. Norwegian infinitives are generally introduced by the particle å, which is cognate with the English word “at.”

So, if Middle English had had more influence from Old Norse, our modern infinitive particle could very well have ended up being “at” rather than “to.” So instead of “to speak” or “to walk,” we could have ended up having “at speak” and “at walk” as infinitives. And that’s exactly what’s happening with the word “ado,” which is a contraction of “at” and “do.”

So why does “ado” mean a commotion or a big deal?Well, you know how sometimes when there’s a lot of drama or commotion, or someone throws a big event, we sometimes say that it’s “a big to-do” or “a whole to-do”? Using this infinitive like this is literally suggests that there is a lot to do or a lot that has to be done.

In the phrase “a big to-do,” the infinitive phrase “to-do” is cosplaying as a noun. “Ado” functions the same way, but it uses that Norse-influenced infinitive structure, with “at” in place of “to,” and then it’s contracted to “ado.” Ado is the older word, first recorded in Norse-influenced areas of northern England, and “to-do” arose later in the 16th century, taking over in a lot of contexts.

Learn more in Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds, available via Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or anywhere you get your books.