The over-enthusiastic etymologist, #5: sprauncy, puny, underdog
I’ve always loved words and, as a schoolboy, I desperately wanted to become an etymologist. I was terrible at it. I thought Canada was so named because the Spanish Conquistador mapmakers wrote Ca Nada – Nothing Here – on maps of the endless expanse of the American north.* But I’ve never lost my curiosity about words, their origins and their use. So what follows is an occasional blog, not just about etymology, but also celebrating English words in general. I hope you find it both fun and informative.
Sprauncy
This is a rare word invented by British Jews (it is unknown in the USA) and I first encountered it in a Giles Coren column in The Times, the newspaper I used to work on. According to my Collins dictionary is meant “smart or showy”. But I have always felt it had an element of “cocky” in there too. A sprauncy lad going out on the town in his best clothes, full of beans, dressed to the nines, looking for fun. I might be wrong. The etymology of the word is unknown and it only seem to have been used in the 21st century, probably from combining “sprightly” and “fancy” – although The Jewish Chronicle suggests it may stem from the rabbinic word “shapar” which means “polished”. Apparently it is pronounced “shprauncy”.
Puny
I have always longed to write the words: “Tremble before my magnificence, you puny mortals!” but I thought I would never get the chance unless I wrote an intergalactic space opera, or got a gig on Doctor Who. But I guess I just did it. Another one ticked off the bucket list. I like the word “puny”. Dunno why. Maybe because is sounds like what it means – weak, wimpy, small and a bit sad. Randomly, I looked up its etymology and found it fascinating. It means “born later”, ie, not the first born, who presumably would be manly and tough and powerful as Hell. Like Charles Atlas (below) flexing on the beach in the 1950s. Later-born children were inferior in rank – the runts of the litter. And puny comes from the French puisné. Contrast that with “first born”, the heir to the lord’s estate, who in medieval French was called the aisné.
Underdog
This one I am not so sure of. So if you have any info, please feel free to share it with me. Some etymologies say it comes simply from the weaker dog in a fight, back in the days of dog-fighting. But I prefer this one which I saw recently on Twitter, and which also stirred a distant memory of my own pre-internet researches. The underdog was the name for the guy at the bottom of the saw pit, in the days when they sawed logs by hand with a long steel tree saw (see below). The “underdog” had the worst job of the two, because he would have to endure being covered with sawdust all day long. It came to mean an unlucky person. And from there to its modern meaning of the one most likely to lose a contest. I hope in the old days, the underdog was able to swap positions with the “overdog” from time to time.
My latest novel The Loki Sword (Fire Born 3) is available in paperback or as an eBook (now just 99p!) from Amazon; the next book in my epic Viking series King of the North (Fire Born 4) will be published in September 2023 but you can pre-order now from Amazon. If you have enjoyed this blog and others and wish to show your appreciation of my work, you can buy me a coffee or a cheeky pint on my Ko-fi page.
* See my blog on Canada here
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