Ritter (1910:478) explained lass as a sub- sub-stantivized comparative, that is, as the

continua-tion of OE (se@@o) l椤°°sse (f), literally ‘the lesser one,’

and cited as analogues OE _ta¤ ieldran ‘parents,’ se ieldra ‘father,’ se geongra ‘youth, disciple, vassal,’

and a few others. It may be added that Jünger is still the only German word for ‘disciple,’ and E elders has retained a meaning not too different from G Eltern ‘parents.’

Two arguments weaken Ritter’s etymology.

First, it is unclear who would call girls, and why only girls, ‘the lesser one(s).’ Eltern and Jünger pre-suppose a deferential attitude toward the parents and the teacher on the part of the followers and children. Lass belongs to a different style. Ritter cited G die Kleine (f) ‘the little one’ as a synonym for ‘sweetheart.’ However, lass is not a term of en-dearment typical of wooers’ language. The parents might perhaps call their daughter ‘the lesser one,’

to distinguish her from the mother of the family when the division of property or inheritance rights were at stake (cf John Smith Jr.), but lass has never been a legal term. Second, it is preferable to have the etymology of lass that would take into account the word’s northern provenance; lass understood as ‘the lesser one’ has no recorded counterparts in any Scandinavian language.

The other hypotheses (except Holthausen’s:

see below) are worth mentioning only for com-pleteness’ sake. The same people who thought they knew the origin of lad often had something to say about lass. H.C.C. (1853:257) traced lass to OE

*hla¤festre, the nonexistent feminine of OE hla¤^fæ¤^ta

‘servant’ on the analogy of lad, allegedly from hla¤^fæ¤^{ta (see LAD} for discussion). Makovskii (1977:63 and 1980:67) suggested that lass is the re-sult of a misunderstood gloss: puluis, that is, pulvis

‘dust, ashes,’ was allegedly confused with puella

‘maiden,’ and the gloss l.asce ‘or ashes’ merged into lasce, whence the English word. He did not explain how lasce < l.asce became a common word and why it surfaced only in Middle English. (Shchur [1982:153] cited both of Makovskii’s etymologies—

of lad and of lass—approvingly.) Later he derived lass from the concept ‘squeeze (milk)’ and related it to L la¤c ‘milk’ or to Skt la^s'ah ‘resin’ and lası@ka¤

‘lymph, serum,’ as well to Lith la~^s‡as ‘drop’ (sb) ([1992a:52]; he did not mention a different opinion in KEWA III:94, 96). Finally, he said that lass was akin to words meaning ‘battle’ (lass ‘warrior

Lad Lass

maiden’), such as L lı@s ‘dispute, lawsuit’ and Skt las

‘move’ (v), though Skt las ‘appear,’ he added, should not be ignored either (lass emerged as ‘the producer of children’). As an afterthought, he mentioned OE læ¤s ‘field’ and E reg lash ‘comb,’ be-cause fights play themselves out on battlefields, while the comb is a metaphor for the woman’s genitals (1999a:190-91).

2. Modern dictionaries call lass a word of ob-scure origin but often cite Bradley’s etymology (1894) as tenable. This is how Bradley presented it in his article: “The feminine lass first occurs about the year 1300 in two Northern works, the ‘Metrical Homilies’ and the ‘Cursor Mundi,’ and in both passages is spelt lasce. This spelling suggests that the word is one of those in which Northern dialects represent a Scandinavian sk by ss, as in ass for ashes (Scandinavian aska), Sc buss for bush (Scan-dinavian buskr). Hence the etymology of the word may be sought in the Scandinavian *laskw, the feminine of an adjective meaning unmarried; cf.

Middle Swedish lösk kona, unmarried woman.

...The original sense of the adjective (which is ety-mologically akin to the verb to let) is ‘free from ties, loose,’ whence the meaning ‘vagrant,’ also found in Middle Swedish, and the Icelandic sense (...löskr)

‘idle, weak.’ The association of the words lad and lass is, if this explanation be correct, due to their accidental similarity in sound.” OED and ODEE repeated Bradley’s etymology in an abridged form.

Although Thomson, as usual, cited several uniden-tifiable forms, he had an idea similar to Bradley’s:

lass, he suggested, means ‘free, single,’ with refer-ence to a word that looks like OI lo§sk. Lass, as Bradley pointed out, was first recorded in north-ern texts, and it is current mainly in northnorth-ern and north midland dialects, so that its Scandinavian origin is likely. However, *laskw, the presumed etymon of lass, did not exist (Ekwall [1938:259]).

Nor is it necessary to reconstruct the substitution of ss for sk in this word.

3. The most probable etymon of lass is, as Björkman (1912:272) suggested, a word like Old Danish las ‘rag,’ which has identical cognates in Swedish dialects and Old Norwegian. In a way, Björkman’s predecessor was Holthausen (1903b:39), who compared lass and E lash and re-ferred to his earlier etymology of Sw flicka ‘girl’

from Sw flicka ~ G flicken (v) ‘mend, darn’

(1900:366). But lash ‘make fast with a cord’ sur-faced in English only in the 17^th century and is probably a borrowing from Low German, like the analogous Scandinavian words discussed at the end of this entry, while the verbs G flicken ~ Sw

flicka belong with flip, flop, and the like (see FUCK).

The sought-for similarity at the semantic level is between las ‘rag’ ~ lass ‘girl’ and flicka ‘patch, shred’ ~ flicka ‘girl.’ Holthausen wanted to corre-late his conclusion with Bradley’s and suggested that lass was the development of the northern form lash (< *lask).

In slang, words for ‘rag’ frequently acquire the jocular meaning ‘child’ and especially ‘girl.’

See some examples in Gebhardt [1911:1896]. Pauli (1919:225-26) cites various Romance examples and endorses Björkman’s derivation of lass (see p. 225, note 5). Not only Sw flicka ‘girl’ but also E brat, from brat ‘ragged garments,’ has a similar origin (Sc bratchart may be an extension of brat, though the usual idea is that brat is a clipped form of bratchart); compare the history of dud (if it is from dud ‘coarse cloak’) and LAD, end of sec 2.

Sometimes the path from ‘piece of cloth’ to

‘child’ was from ‘diapers’ or from the similarity between a baby and a doll (dolls were made of rags), or from the practice of calling females after the clothes they wore (see the examples given at

DRAB and GIRL, sec 4). In other cases, the transfer of the name followed more circuitous routes. OI lébarn ‘infant, baby in arms’ corresponds to E bas-tard (< OF basbas-tard), held to be from bastum ‘bat, packsaddle’ (OED). With regards to lébarn, see N reg ljo ‘padding for a pack saddle, consisting of a woolen blanket, a straw cushion and a skin’; barn means ‘child’ (AEW lébarn; Elmevik [1986:84]). Ini-tially, the suffix -ard need not have had a deprecia-tory meaning.

Despite the guarded support by OED and Skeat of Mahn’s idea that E bantling ‘illegitimate child’ is a “corruption” of G Bänkling, from Bank

‘bench’ (‘a child begotten on or under a bench’), the old derivation from *band-ling ‘one wrapped in swaddling bands’ may be correct, the d ~ t problem notwithstanding. Since Bänkling, which first occurs in Fischart (the same example in DW [Bänkling]

and HDGF [Bank]), seems to have had minimal currency in Germany, its spread to England in this form would be hard to demonstrate.

Old designations of illegitimate children were not always coined as terms of abuse, and bastard was probably no closer to ‘packsaddle son’ (what-ever it is supposed to mean) than lébarn. Likewise, OF coitrart (from coite ‘quilt’) and LG Mantelkind

‘mantle child’ that ODEE cites (bastard) do not sound offensive. In all those cases, ‘(piece of) cloth’ served as the foundation of a word for

‘child.’

Like LAD, ultimately from ‘old or unseemly,

Lass Lass

or worthless garment’ (‘hose; sock; shoe’), lass emerged from the metaphorical use of a word for

‘rag.’ Both are words of Scandinavian origin, but neither is, strictly speaking, a borrowing, for they do not mean ‘youngster’ and ‘girl’ in any Scandi-navian language. Their recorded Middle English meanings developed in the northern dialects of England. If this reconstruction is acceptable, the only unanswered question will be whether ME lass and lasce are related. Bradley suggested that lasce was the original form, with sc later simplified to ss, but the interplay of las- and lask- is typical of the word for ‘rag’ far beyond the Scandinavian area.

4. Although ModG Lasche means, among other things, ‘loop; tongue of a shoe; flap of a pocket,’

MHG lasche and MLG lassce (with several variants) meant ‘rag; patch; gusset’ (KM, KS). The technical senses of the Middle Low German word contrib-uted to its popularity in other countries. Dan lask is a doublet of las ‘rag, patch’ (the same in Nynorsk). In Swedish, lask ‘metal plate’ occurs, while in Icelandic, laski means ‘crack in the wood, top of a glove, loop in knitting, splinter; section of an orange; slip of dry ground between two streams, etc’ (ÁBM). Some of these senses must have developed on Scandinavian soil, others may have been taken over with the German word.

G *las has not been recorded, whereas forms like la(s)ka ‘rag, patch, shred’ are known over a large territory: such are Gk lakàj ‘rag,’ L lacer

‘torn,’ Russ loskut ‘shred,’ Sp and Port lasca ‘piece of leather, chip,’ and many others. Gmc *laska is possible, but its origin and the relationship be-tween the Germanic and the Romance forms are unknown (in addition to etymological dictionaries, see Hubschmid [1953:84-85]). Meyer-Lübke re-jected Gmc *laska as the etymon of the Spanish and Portuguese word in all the editions of his diction-ary (ML 4919), and it is strange that Holthausen (1929a:108 and GEW, *laska) repeated Gröber’s opinion to the contrary (1886:510) without com-ment. We seem to be dealing with a European word traceable to an ancient etymon, but borrow-ing and chance are the probable causes of the simi-larity that would otherwise be natural to ascribe to common heritage.

Gmc *laska and Dan las may be unconnected despite the near identity of sound and meaning.

Las ‘rag’ seems to be akin to Go lasiws ‘weak,’ but regardless of whether this etymology is correct, ME lasce was, in all likelihood, a Middle English diminutive of las, for lask(e) is known to have ap-peared in the Scandinavian languages only in the 18^th century, and that is why it is believed to be a

borrowing from Middle Low German. Lasce must have been a word like ME polke ‘small pool,’ ME dalk ‘small valley (dale),’ OFr dönk ‘small dune’

[sic], and OFr tenk ‘small pail’ (Kluge [1926:sec 61a]; KrM, 214). E reg lassikie (EDD) is a formation parallel with it or a continuation of ME lasce.

Windlass (1500) has nothing to do with lass; its etymon is OI vindáss. It may have been influenced by some word like ME windle ‘winnowing fan,’ but once windlass came into existence, it was felt to be wind + lass. Humorous and grim references to fe-males in the names of tools and weapons are not rare. Consider Scavenger’s daughter ‘instrument of torture,’ Dutch wife (in tropical countries) ‘open framework used in bed as a rest for the limbs’;

maiden, one of whose meanings is ‘guillotine’; gun, held to be the first syllable of Gunnhild(r), as well as Big Bertha and Katyusha (cannons). See gun in Weekley (1921) for many more examples of the same type.

LILLIPUTIAN (1726)

The word Lilliput(ian) became known in 1726, when Jonathan Swift brought out the first (anonymous) edition of Gulliver’s Travels. Like most of Swift’s neologisms, Lillipu-tian has been the object of numerous attempts to explain its origin. English, French, and Latin words have been cited as its possible etymons. Some conjectures centered on codes and anagrams. Probably lill(e)- is a variant of little and -put is E put(t) ‘lout, blockhead.’ However, put- is the root of a vulgar or colloquial word for ‘boy, lad’ in Latin, as well as in the modern Romance and Scandinavian languages. Lilliputian has a common European look—a circumstance that Swift could not fail to have noticed and that contributed to its worldwide popularity. Later he seems to have modeled Laputa (= the whore?) on Lilliputian. A definitive answer about the origin of a coinage can be given only by its origina-tor, but Swift left no hints to the history of the words he in-vented.

We can only try to guess at the origin of Lilli-put(ian), a word Swift coined. He did not elucidate the meaning of this name, but even if he had done so, his explanation might have been offered in jest, to confuse and mislead rather than enlighten. For example, Gulliver mentions two etymologies of Laputa: one by local sages and one that occurred to him. It is hard to tell whether both ridicule con-temporary philologists or whether Gulliver’s in-terpretation contains a clue to Swift’s parody.

Lilli- is almost certainly a variant of little, de-spite the fact that the second i is unetymological and may have been inserted for euphony’s sake.

The earliest conjectures on the origin of Lilliputian do not antedate the eighties of the 19^th century.

Lass Lilliputian

Kleinpaul (1885:17-18) traced the German family name Lütke (the spelling Lüdtke also exists) to LG lütje (= HG lützel) ‘little’ rather than Ludwig and added in passing that Swedish and Danish lille ‘lit-tle’ seems to be the first part of Lilliput. Chance (1889) found Kleinpaul’s hypothesis plausible and suggested that Lilliput was a Scandinavian-Italian hybrid: lille + Ital putto ‘boy.’ At the same time, H. Morley (1890:17-18), the most authorita-tive editor of Swift’s works, wrote the following:

“The small representative of lordly man has a name of contempt familiar in Swift’s time; he was a ‘put.’ But he was of the little—lilli—people, as Swift’s ‘little language’ phrased it, of the land of Lilli-put. ‘Put’ may have been from the Latin ‘pu-tus,’ a little boy, allied to puer. But it was used in Romance languages—the put and pute of old French, the Spanish and Portuguese puto and puta, the Italian putta—in the sense of boy or girl stained by the vices of men. This made it once current in England as a word of scorn; and it has been sug-gested that the root was in the Latin putidus, stink-ing, disgusting. This use of the word was probably repeated in Laputa.” Most of what has been said on Lilliputian since 1890 represents variations on Morley’s hypothesis, and some researchers (for example, Kelling [1951:772]) see no need to modify it (but see below).

E put(t) ‘blockhead’ turned up in printed texts no later than in 1688 (OED). Country put means

‘lout, bumpkin.’ According to R. Smith (1954:186),

“it may have come into English from Irish pait, puite, pota ‘pot’; cf. poteen (Ir. poitín, ‘illicitly dis-tilled whisky, little pot’). Swift probably heard the word many times, since it appears in both Lhuyd and Begley.” The etymology of put(t), be it from Latin (put = ‘stinker’) or Irish (put = ‘pot’) is of no consequence for the modern attempts to decipher the workings of Swift’s mind. Important only is the fact that Lilliput may have been composed of two English words, whatever their ultimate origin.

Swift knew and disliked the phrase country put, defined as ‘silly, shallow-pated fellow’ in 1700, for he had a strong aversion to recent monosyllables (see, among others, J. Neumann [1943:200, note 50]

and Söderlind [1968:75]). Söderlind remarks that Swift’s dislike of the word put “does not preclude its occurrence as an element in the title of Gulli-ver’s first story, but it detracts a little from the probability of that derivation.” This is a non sequi-tur. Swift would have relished the idea of endow-ing the citizens of the great empire of Lilliput (and by implication, of Blefuscu) with the name he de-tested.

K. Crook (1998:171) considered an association