Ellington

As we limp mercifully closer to the end of the quarter, I thought it’d be fun to discuss the origins of a relatively silly word. Thanks are due to Carter Butaud for suggesting gaggle.

Yes, that’s right: gaggle. Like a charm of finches, a smack of jellyfish, a prickle of porcupines or a parliament of owls, we often think of a “gaggle” in reference to a flock of geese. The word can also refer to any sort of group of people or things (especially a disorderly group), or to chatter or gabbling (especially in a manner that imitates geese).

The latter points to the origins of the word; it’s a classic example of onomatopoeia, or a word that mimics a sound in nature. Gaggle comes from the Middle English gagel, from gagelen, meaning “to cackle.” Other related words include the Old Celtic gegdâ, the Irish geadh, the Welsh gywdd, and the Old Norse gagl, all referring to the sound a goose makes. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) speculates that the “gag-gag” cry of geese is the inspiration for all the aforementioned onomatopoeic words.

As it stands, the OED asserts that gaggle was one of the few terms more or less “invented” in the 15th century to refer to a unique collection of animals or people (for example, a murder of ravens), but unlike many of its peers, it has survived into the present day.

True to its imitative nature, the word first appeared in English as a verb in 1399 in William Langland’s Richard the Redeles, with the line, “bey gaglide fforth on the grene, ffor they greved were” (sic). As you may recall, we encountered literary phantom that is Langland last week in the etymology of beau, the first instance of which also appeared in Redeles.

Also, a gaggle was a somewhat derogatory term for a group of girls, but that meaning has slipped from current usage and is now rather archaic.

Other examples can be found throughout the 1400s, but we find some particularly good examples of this imitative definition in the latter half of the 16th century.

Richard Stanyhurst’s The Historie of Irelande … Continued, published in about 1584, contains this line, “It is not expedient that the Irishe tongue should be so vniuersally gagled in the English pale” (sic). While this reference to Gaelic being “gaggled” in the English-dominated areas around Dublin in eastern Ireland (the Pale, the origin of the phrase, “beyond the pale”) might seem a little derogatory, Stanyhurst (or Stanihurst) was actually Irish himself.

He was also a literary genius who became one of the theological lights of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation after moving to the Spanish Netherlands. Stanyhurst advocated for his native land in the 1590s as a sort of self-appointed Irish diplomat-at-large.

Gaggle as a collective noun made one of its first appearances in Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, published the same year as Stanyhurst’s book, with the line, “a shoale of goslings, or (as they saie) a gaggle of geese” (sic). Scot (sometimes Scott) was an Elizabethan engineer educated at Oxford. He was a staunch critic of English practices regarding witchcraft, claiming that there were no “witches” as such in England and that there was no sanction in the Bible in its original languages for the execution of witches.

He saw the belief in witchcraft as superstitious and identified prejudiced attitudes toward old, single women as the source of the myths surrounding modern witches. Scott was both lauded and attacked by his contemporaries (including the future king of England, James VI of Scotland).

We’ve gone from goose noises to Gaelic to witches — the next time you see a bunch of geese, you’ll know why we call them a gaggle.

Please feel free to also submit your word suggestions and until next time, cheers.

[Reach columnist Will Mari at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]