Dreamers Rise An Open Notebook And for those who choose the twisty road, prefer it to the straight Let joy beat out old misery, as love will conquer hate. Illustration by Henry L. Stephens from The Goblin Snob (ca. 1855) A sort of electronic broadside, composed of rants and reviews, conceits and speculations, and whatever else feels the need to be here. Issued as chance will have it. Husks (Winter's end) Last year's stalks and brambles are still standing, brown and dry, even as buds swell and the first shoots, tentative and pale, begin to emerge from the earth, brushing off the ruins of last fall's leaves. There are little knotted clusters of seed casks on the Rose-of-Sharon in the yard next door, and beneath the trees in the park acorn hulls, segments of hickory nut rind, and sycamore balls have been ground together underfoot by the passage of winter travellers. According to Skeat's Etymological Dictionary, husk (“the dry covering of some fruits”) is simply the Anglo-Saxon hus (house), with a diminutive suffix k. It would be tempting to connect it with our cask, casque and the Spanish cáscara, all meaning a shell or container of some kind, by means of the same Indo-European sound shift that gave us horn = Latin cornu; hundred = centum; and heart = cor, but like many an appealing etymology it evidently evaporates upon closer inspection. The true source of the latter group, Skeat informs us, is Latin quassare, meaning to break, whence also quash and the French casser. But house / hus itself may, like hoard and hide, ultimately derive from the reconstructed Indo-European root *keudh-, meaning to conceal. Hull, both in its botanical and its nautical sense, is traced to Germanic *hul- / *helan- (IE *kel-), with much the same meaning. Skeat doesn't draw a link between the two roots, no doubt because, once again, the connection is spurious. And no one would have come down faster and more furiously than the formidable Skeat on the speculations of an untrained and fanciful amateur etymologist. In any case, all of these words — husk, house, hull, cask, casque, cáscara and the rest — are at once the discarded shells and the secret hiding-places of meanings and sounds from a world long buried, trampled under by history but leaving their seeds behind them to bear fruit in a distant time. March 20, 2008 [ Permalink ] Previous page Next page Home Index About Email me