Viking Manbags

It is amazing where spirals of procrastination lead to. Reading something blatantly non-work-related I came across the word "douchebaggery", which made me amused and bemused. To me the word sounds awkward, but I do see the need for an abstract noun for this fun American common noun which differs slightly from the British "wanker" and "wankiness". Having thought that something a bit smoother than "douchebaggery" must be possible, I checked the expanding universe of cyberspace, but found nothing.

The word sounds etymologically slightly weird, so I checked where "bag" came from. I assumed it would be French as the word baggage sounds it and as it is easy to picture the French inventing something so frivolous like a bag. But I was wrong and identity of the first bag-bearers blew my mind: the Vikings. Yes, bag comes from Old Norse, meaning it was not poncey Frenchmen that invaded England armed with handbags, but the fearsome Vikings did. Just to blow all stereotypes, the Vikings even gave the French the word baggage.
A manbag, therefore,being a gift from the manly Vikings, is the most manly accessory one could sport apart from a horned helmet, a claymore or double-axe.


Damn, that means that being a "douchebag" is a bit manly after all.
It means that if one wanted to go for etymological faux-authenticity "douchebaggery" would be out of the question. The two suffices of Norse origin that make adjectives, verbs or common nouns into abstract nouns are -lock (wedlock) and -red (kindred), but they both sound terrible with douchebag ("douchebaglock" and "douchebagred").
So the best bet is to go with good old Old English ones. Bagginess is a real word, but it is a bit too removed semantically from bag to make "douchebagginess" not awkward sounding. In a similar vein, "douchebagging" is also awkward as "to bag" means to gain possession and who would want to gain possession of a douche? 
The established suffix is ery, which is -er + y, and generally represents a place or an office (bakery), which when used on douchebag makes it sound the official role of a douchebag, so "douchebagship", "douchebaghood" and "douchebagdom" could be alternatives. On second thought, I think I quite like the word "douchebaggery" after all...

The -meal suffix

An Old English suffix that has been unjustly forgotten is the -meal suffix.
If something is done gradually the phrase that is normally used is x by x, in archaic English -meal suffix can do the same thing, similarly to the Latin -atim. It is not constructive anymore, but several examples are present in the OED:

• piecemeal: piece by piece —only one not obsolete
• stickmeal (styccemǣlum): bit by bit
• yearmeal (gēarmǣlum): year after year
• sheafmeal (scēafmǣlum): sheaf by sheaf, although the later pagemeal works better
• stemmeal (stemmǣlum): turn by turn, alternately
• stepmeal (stæpmǣlum): step by step, gradually
• namemeal (nammǣlum): name by name
• dropmeal: drop by drop
• flockmeal: group by group
• footmeal: foot by foot
• heapmeal: heap by heap
• limbmeal: limb by limb
• stoundmeal: hour by hour
• cupmeal: cup by cup
• gobbetmeal: fragment by fragment
• littlemeal: little by little
• parcelmeal: parcel by parcel
• pennymeal: penny by penny
• piecemeal: piece by piece
• poundmeal: pound by pound
• ravishmeal: rapidly (a Latinisms  by Wyclif from raptim)
• tablemeal: iPad tablet by iPad tablet (from tabulatim)
• fitmeal: jitter by jitter
• inchmeal: inch by inch
• jointmeal: joint by joint
• lumpmeal: lump by lumb
• pagemeal: page by page

Unfortunately, converting the imperial units to metric, sounds terrible, eg. millimetremeal, so they'll have to stay imperial.

Verbatim et letteratim is an expression that means word by word and letter by letter, in other words, with insane thoroughness. It is a rather cool, so with the above it would be wordmeal and lettermeal.

The only problem is that, even knowing the meaning, the words wholemeal, wheatmeal and oatmeal spring to mind…

Gender-less pronouns

Most folk agree that writing he/she is a pain, however, nobody agrees on what is the best substitute.
Singular they is the most commonly used and it appears in the king James's bible, so when Jehovah speaks English he/she uses singular they (ref). That last sentence shows that it has a glaring problem: singular they is used as a plural and the closeted prescriptivistic pedant (†)  in all of us screams out upon hearing a grammatical number mismatch (e.g. "Someone has made a mess again, I wish they'd tidy up once in a while"). "They is" is too revolutionary to be anything but jarringly awkward sounding.
Impersonal one (from the French homme curiously) is used differently, so is not a gender-less pronoun.


Wikipedia has a hodgepodge collection of attempted pronouns (link), some of them badly put together.
I thought I'd make up my own.


What did the vikings ever do for us? They gave us useful words!
They in English is not of Old English origin, but of Norse.
The third person personal pronouns in Old English are: (in the order subject, possessive, direct and indirect object)
M: he, his, hine (=him), him
F: heo or hie (=she. eo is read ee), hire (=her), heo or hie (=her), hire (=her)
N: hit (=it), his (=its), hit (=it), him (=it)
Pl: hie (=they), hira (=their), hie  (=them), him or heom (=them)


As you can see, not only some forms are repeated within a gender as in in English (her can be possessive or object), but also between (him can mean to it or to him). Therefore the Norse they makes life so much less confusing. 
Humorously, hie could be they or she, which would make gender-neutral pronoun advocates happy.


Search the Old English 3rd prs. plural pronouns gives me:
hie became hi or hy, which was last used in 1400.
hera gave us her.
heom became hem and then 'em.

So one version of a gender-neutral pronoun could be:
hy, her or heer (modernised hiera), hem or heem (modernised  heom).
Hy sounds a lot like I, though.

Alternatively, Old Norse could be the source of the sought pronouns.
The thon pronoun set which someone proposed is not based on the singular form in Norse as only the neuter begins with þ (thorn, th-group) and it is the same as the demonstrative pronoun that.
The feminine set is: hon, hennar, hana, henni
They have no derivatives in the OED, so hon, hennar and henne could be another set, but they do not sound English.
Those Old Norse pronouns became hon, hennes and henne in Swedish, which has a made up gender-neutral pronoun, hen, which would not work in English for obvious reasons.


Taking a step back, I think I'll adopt hon, heer and heem.
Example: Someone e-mail: hon said to call heem or heer secretary.
Maybe I'll stick with he/she.


†) Prescriptivism may suffocate the natural evolution of a language and has the sole purpose of linguistic snootiness, Descriptivism is a tad hypocritical to say the least. Descriptivistic snootiness at prescriptivistic snootiness at grammatic butchery...