The Amazing Adventures of Archibald Esq.

Word Hound: A Little Muse on Feistyness and Adoration

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The linguistic forerunner of feisty is the word feist, an antiquated English term for “a small, mixed-breed dog.”

The noun feist, in turn, arose from an even older verb, to fist, which literally means “to pass gas.”

In Merrie Olde England, in fact, it was once common to express contempt for a dog considered annoying, referring to it as a fisting hound or a fisting cur. (Hence, once ‘unpacked’, a stincking or smelly dog.)

Eventually, non-dog-lovers shortened these phrases to either fist or feist—epithets still occasionally applied in parts of the United States today to small, mixed-breed dogs, particularly if they’re belligerent or persistent barkers.

As often happens when words are passed down from one generation to the next, the term feisty came to be applied more generally, not just to gassy little dogs, but to anyone similarly spunky or pugnacious.

When we tell someone we plan to muse about a topic, we’re also invoking canine behavior. As a noun, the word muse means “a source of inspiration”— an allusion to the nine Muses of Greek mythology who presided over the arts. But the verb to muse apparently comes from a completely different source.

Etymologists suspect that this type of muse arose from the Middle French verb muser (a relative of the English muzzle), which originally specified the way a hunting dog stares distractedly and sniffs when unsure about a scent.

Over time, this sense of “staring while lost in thought” came to be applied to the way humans ponder.

A happier image—one that every doggy devotee knows well—lies at the heart of our word adulation: When the ancient Romans used the verb adulari (the forerunner of adoration), they were alluding specifically to the enthusiastic wiggle of an eager-to-please puppy.

In its earliest sense, the Latin word adulari meant “to fawn over someone like a dog wagging its tail.”

Over time, this word’s meaning expanded to include the more general sense of “to flatter,” and by the 18th century, its English descendant, adulation, had come to mean “effusive admiration or praise.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed: “The etymologist finds the deadest word to have once been a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.” Indeed, when you open up a dictionary and dust off those fossils, you just might uncover the tracks of a dog or detect traces of houndishness.

In any case, the next time you and yours are out for a walk, it’s something worth musing about.

Awoof! Your word-sleuth, Archibald Esquire

Posted 02 Mar 07