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Over the past few months, U.S. political events have given Ben Zimmer opportunity for some fun etymologies in his WSJ column: mug shot, racketeering, listless. There are plenty more targets Out There — like candidate, from Latin candidus (“dazzling white, shining, clear”); or debate, originally from Latin dis- (“apart, in different directions”) + battuere (“to beat, to fence”).

Ben began with Mug Shot, back on April 9:

[H]ow did photographs taken for police records come to be called “mug shots” anyway? The “shot” part, from the act of shooting a camera, is straightforward enough, but the “mug” part tells a fascinating etymological tale.

The word “mug” probably entered English from a Scandinavian source to refer to a drinking cup, typically cylindrical in shape. There are similar words in Swedish, Norwegian, German and Dutch, but it’s unclear how they all historically relate to each other. In any case, mugs became popular drinking vessels in 17th-century England, and they began to be manufactured in all shapes and sizes.

One style of drinking mug that was trendy for a time was shaped like a grotesque human face. As an allusion to these fanciful mugs, the word “mug” itself came to be used to refer to a face, especially an ugly one. […]

The use of “mug” for a person’s face branched off on many slangy trajectories. In boxing, striking a person in the face was called “mugging” in the early 19th century, which then got extended to attacking or robbing someone in a public place. (Thieves also called their marks “mugs” since the word came to refer to gullible or incompetent people.) And among the theatrical set, the verb “mug” could also signify making exaggerated facial expressions.

Next was racketeering, on August 17:

Racketeering is one of dozens of offenses charged in the Georgia case, but it is the one with the most serious legal consequences under the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, modeled after the RICO Act for federal crimes. On both the federal and state level, antiracketeering laws are designed to combat organized crime by allowing prosecutors to charge a group of people if they can be shown to be engaging in a pattern of criminal activity as part of a shared enterprise. […]

[H]ow did this word, which brings to mind cacophony and corruption in equal measure, become enshrined in our legal lingo?

The term’s boisterous origins start off with the emergence of the word “racket” in English in the 16th century, when it first got used for loud disturbances and general disorder. In 1565, the English clergyman Matthew Parker, serving as the Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a letter about a young firebrand named George Withers at Cambridge University who had called for the removal of “superstitious” stained glass from the school’s chapels. Parker complained of “the racket stirred up by Withers” for “the reformation of university windows.” […]

While the origin of “racket” is unclear, etymologists suggest it was supposed to be imitative of a noisy sound. It appears to be unrelated to the other kind of “racket”—also spelled “racquet”—for the implement used in tennis and related sports. […]

By the 18th century, “racket” got extended to loud protests, exuberant social gatherings and the hustle and bustle of society in general. In 1819, James Hardy Vaux, an English convict exiled in Australia, published a memoir of his criminal career and included “A Vocabulary of the Flash Language” collecting underworld slang. Vaux explained that the word “racket” applied to “some particular kinds of fraud and robbery,” detailing various schemes that used the label. The extension of “racket” to petty crimes may have had to do with the noisy disturbances that teams of thieves used to distract their victims. It may also have been influenced by the tennis term, since “rackets” were seen as a kind of “game,” also applied to criminal endeavors.

It wasn’t until the Prohibition era that “racket” became firmly linked to organized crime. A March 1924 Chicago Tribune article spoke of a bootlegger who “had decided to quit the ‘racket’ and go into legitimate business.” The next month, the Tribune reported on the mob funeral of Al Capone’s brother Frank, killed in a police shootout: “all manner of ‘racketeers’” were in attendance. Adding the “-eer” suffix created a snappy term for someone engaged in illicit schemes. Soon enough it was turned into a verb, with “racketeering” coming to refer to such crimes as loan-sharking and extorting protection money.

And finally listless, on August 24 (with some quotes and links derived from "Listless vessels", LLOG 8/20/2023):

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken some heat for comments he made in an interview last week comparing supporters of former President Donald Trump, his rival in the Republican presidential primary race, to “listless vessels.” […]

DeSantis has actually used the phrase before in different contexts. When speaking on education, he has warned that students who are not provided with a foundation in what he calls “the principles that have made this country unique” will graduate as “listless vessels.” In May, DeSantis referred to President Biden as “a listless vessel, not energetic” in a Fox News interview. Meanwhile, his wife Casey has decried politicians who go to Washington, D.C. and “become listless vessels, bending in the wind, beholden to polls and politics.”

The peculiar turn of phrase hinges on what exactly it means to be “listless.” In the sense of “languid” or “unresponsive,” “listless” dates back to the 15th century in English usage. An English-Latin dictionary from 1440 gives “lystles” as a translation of the Latin words “desidiosus” (“lazy”) and “segnis” (“sluggish”). It could apply to things as well as people seen as lacking energy, as in a 1652 sermon by the English clergyman Anthony Burgess, who spoke of how “the Church was listless, unprepared.”

“Listless” is rooted in a now-obsolete meaning of “list” meaning “desire” or “inclination,” sharing a root with “lust.” As a verb, “list” could also mean “to wish to do something,” as in the line from the King James Bible, “The winde bloweth where it listeth.” This old meaning of “list” is likely related to the nautical use of the word, as both a noun and a verb, for a ship tilting to one side, since a tilt can be thought of as a kind of inclination.

There's some serious synchronicity here, as often in etymologies. Ben mentions the word list as historically related to lust, in the sense of "desire"; and the concept of "inclination" as a physical metaphor for leaning towards a particular option.

He also notes the connection between "inclination" and "a ship tilting to one side", but he seems to miss a critical aspect of the historical physics of the metaphor. The effect of wind in powering a sailing vessel is almost always to make it tilt to one side or another, except in the unusual circumstance that a steady wind is dead astern. So a sailing vessel that's not tilting is probably becalmed and going nowhere — metaphorically "lacking energy", "lazy", "sluggish". The physics behind the metaphor disappeared with the advent of steam power and other internal engines, but the (as usual) the word sense remained behind, at least in the "listless vessel" phrase.

 

August 28, 2023 @ 6:57 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Etymology

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