The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Fossil-less

Do you have any gorm? It’s an important question, because if you don’t have any gorm it logically follows that you are gormless. Gormless is a fossil. Dinosaurs and trilobites once flourished, now only fossils remain, petrified and scattered. The same has happened to gorm, feck, ruth and reck. They were all once real words. Now they are frozen for ever in –less phrases.

Gorm (spelled all sorts of ways) was a Scandinavian word meaning sense or understanding. As a twelfth-century monk called Orm put it:

– a sentiment with which we can all, I’m sure, agree. However, poor gorm (or gome) rarely got written down. It was a dialect word used by Yorkshiremen, and most of the literary action was happening in London.

However, in the nineteenth century Emily Brontë wrote a book called Wuthering Heights, in which is the line:

Joseph is a servant who speaks with a strong Yorkshire accent, and the word gormless is clearly being brought in as an example of one of his dialect terms. Joseph would probably have used the word gorm as well, but Emily Brontë doesn’t mention it. So gormless got into one of the most famous novels ever written, while poor gorm was left to pine away and die on a lonely moor in Yorkshire.

Once upon a time there was the word effect. It was a happy, useful, innocent word until it went to Scotland. Once north of Hadrian’s Wall, the word effect was cruelly robbed of its extremities and became feck.

Indolent, vigourless Scotsmen who had no effect on things were therefore feckless. This time it was not Brontë but Thomas Carlyle, a Scot, who brought the word into common usage. He used feckless to describe the Irish and his wife.

However, it’s hard to see exactly what Carlyle meant by feckless. This is from a letter of 1842:

In another letter Carlyle wrote that the summer had made his wife feckless, and he even described how living with her in London had turned the couple into ‘a feckless pair of bodies’, ‘a pair of miserable creatures’. Anyway, Carlyle used feckless but he never used the word feck, and so the one word lived and became famous, while the other vanished into a Celtic twilight.

Reckless is far simpler and there’s more poetry in it, which is the important thing. Reck used to mean care (although it’s etymologically far from reckon). As Chaucer put it:

Shakespeare used reck too, yet by his time it already had an archaic feel. In Hamlet, Ophelia chides her brother thus:

Rede was an archaic and ancient word for advice, and reck was probably already an archaic and ancient word for take notice of. Shakespeare used reckless six times in his complete works, as much as all the other recks, reckeths and reckeds put together. Reck must already have been fading, reckless rushing headlong to the future.

If something is true, it’s the truth. If you rue your actions, you feel ruth. If you don’t rue your actions, you feel no ruth and that makes you ruthless. Ruth survived for quite a long time, and it’s uncertain as to why it died out in the end. Maybe it’s just that there are more ruthless people than ruthful ones.

Language sometimes doesn’t have an explanation. Words rise and die for no reason that an etymologist can discover. History is not immaculate, in fact it is maculate. We might feel more consolate if we could give a span, and even spick, explanation for everything, but to no avail.

And so we come, exorably, to the end of our study of fossil words. We could go on, as the language is brimming with them, but you might become listless and disgruntled. P.G. Wodehouse once remarked of a chap that, ‘if not exactly disgruntled he was far from being gruntled’. So let us continue by seeing exactly how gruntling relates to grunt.