Tuesday, December 09, 2003
A Blogger to Let
I love words, and I especially love etymologies of words. The funny thing is, I like figuring words and their origins out for myself more than I like looking them up. This is probably because I don't have an Oxford Dictionary, but I also like the thrill of putting two and two together.
At lunch recently, a couple of colleagues and I were wondering about the origin of the word "hack", used to describe a taxi but also a less-than-credible writer or artist. At the time I said that the taxi origin is probably the "Hackney Coach" used as a means of conveyance in the 17/18th C. But that didn't tell us how the other meaning came about.
Well, in reading Samuel Johnson's biography of Richard Savage I stumbled across what might be the origin of that usage. Richard Savage (18C playwright and poet) wrote a pamphlet called "An Author to Let" about a fictional "prostitute" writer named Iscariot Hackney. This writer was willing to write anything for anyone for money.
So the author to let is named after the carriage or coach that you can hire (like a cab). It's entirely possible that Savage wasn't the first to use Hackney to impute disreputability (is that a word?) to an artist and his motives. But I thought it was fun to find this out in my own reading when we had just discussed it recently.
Sometimes it pays to go back and read those books you were supposed to read in university! You can certainly enjoy them more when you read them at your leisure.
I love words, and I especially love etymologies of words. The funny thing is, I like figuring words and their origins out for myself more than I like looking them up. This is probably because I don't have an Oxford Dictionary, but I also like the thrill of putting two and two together.
At lunch recently, a couple of colleagues and I were wondering about the origin of the word "hack", used to describe a taxi but also a less-than-credible writer or artist. At the time I said that the taxi origin is probably the "Hackney Coach" used as a means of conveyance in the 17/18th C. But that didn't tell us how the other meaning came about.
Well, in reading Samuel Johnson's biography of Richard Savage I stumbled across what might be the origin of that usage. Richard Savage (18C playwright and poet) wrote a pamphlet called "An Author to Let" about a fictional "prostitute" writer named Iscariot Hackney. This writer was willing to write anything for anyone for money.
So the author to let is named after the carriage or coach that you can hire (like a cab). It's entirely possible that Savage wasn't the first to use Hackney to impute disreputability (is that a word?) to an artist and his motives. But I thought it was fun to find this out in my own reading when we had just discussed it recently.
Sometimes it pays to go back and read those books you were supposed to read in university! You can certainly enjoy them more when you read them at your leisure.
# posted by becca : 10:29 AM
