galimatias

[prettygoodword]

galimatias (gal-uh-MAY-shee-uhs, gal-uh-MAT-ee-uhs) - n., confused or unintelligible talk, gibberish.


First used in English (without the final s) in 1653 in a translation of Montaigne, borrowed from French where its first attested use is by Montaigne (in an essay published in 1580). The origin is unknown, but theories include medieval Latin ballematia, meaning an obscene song, from the same root as gave us gallimaufry, a confused jumble, originally an unappetizing dish, and a supposed disparaging slang term for a doctoral candidate from Latin gallus, a cock + Greak mathia, learning. It's a bit of a farrago, really.

---L.

Comments

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

I almost mentioned that it had also been borrowed in Russian, but very few other languages, but decided that was digressing too much. :-P

---L.

[med_cat]

Hee hee ;) No, I think that would've been an interesting thing to mention in the entry! ;)

(But then again, Russian is my native language, so I would naturally find it interesting...others, perhaps, might find it less so ;))

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

At least for me, any borrowing into or out of immediate W Europe is automatically interesting because it's less common. French, vulgar Latin, whatever. :)

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's interesting all right. I was thinking of it as a digression from its history as an English word, though.

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Aren't all etymological musings digressions?

I have the Oxford UP blog's feed in my RSS/Atom reader solely to pick up Anatoly Liberman's weekly posts--one can get the category isolated only for web view, no thanks to Feedburner, and I won't paste in the link lest this comment be classified as spam, no thanks to LJ. Perhaps I have been influenced unduly by his little essays re: what counts as digression: he's a Russian emigré trained as a Germanic philologist who now writes principally in English, and thus one of the very few informed commentators upon English etymologies who can adduce or rule out related words in Slavic with some confidence. (Is that a tangent or the provision of a potentially interesting resource?) English isn't particularly vacuum-sealed.

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

Aren't all etymological musings digressions?

Well, true, that.

I like Liberman's columns, but don't read them regularly because I never could figure out where the feed for just those was buried. Apparently that's be design ...

---L.