Dear List,
Most of you may be familiar with words such
as "petard" ( in Shakespeare, in Nabokov) and "fart", but for
those who, like me, feel curious enough to probe further (with no access to
Webster II ), one posting at the "Morpheme Addict" address was quite revelatory,
even if not fully authoritative.
I would like to share it with you, if the EDs are in
agreement. It might add a special twist to the "Bengal Ben" (coachmen in
Nabokov) mystery.
Feisty and Petard:
lisala on Fri, 03/13/2009 - 6:22am
Feisty is one of those words that we all
know. It's used a lot in ordinary speech, and generally, with a positive
implication. Here's the usual definition:
1. Touchy; quarrelsome.
2.
Full of spirit or pluck; frisky or spunky.
The etymology though, is
down right odd. Feisty is from feist.
Feist, a word you'll sometimes still
see used in the south in the old form fice or more commonly, fist, in reference
to a kind of dog. A "fisting dog" is a small, nervous, even belligerent little
dog. Over time, the word feist, in the adjective form feisty, has evolved from
describing a canine personality trait to describing a human personality trait. I
hesitate to point out that feist, like fice, is derived from Middle English
fisting, which means "a blowing, breaking wind," derived from Old English
fisting, itself derived from the Proto Indo-Europen root *pezd-, which makes it
cognate with Latin petard.
Petard, which most of us probably think of in the
context of Shakespeare's reference to being "To be hoist by one's own petard,"
refers to a variety of small explosive devices. In Hamlet when the hero
says:
For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own
petard, an't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And
blow them at the moon.
Hamlet III.iv ll. 202–09
Shakespeare, or rather Hamlet's, reference refers to someone being
blown up by their own bomb, either figuratively or literally. The standard
definition of petard is
1. A small bell-shaped bomb used to breach a
gate or wall.
2. A loud firecracker.
The first use of the French
loan word petard in English according to the OED was c. 1598; Shakespeare's use
was in c. 1604, when it was still a fairly "new" word borrowed from French. The
French word pétard was used to refer to an explosive gas bomb typically used in
war to destroy city gates and walls. French pét, the ancestor of French pétard
means "fart," and was derived from Latin peditum, which, yes, you guessed it,
derives from the Proto Indo-European root *pezd-, just like English
feisty.