Etymonline introduces me to a redolent word heretofore unknown to me:
”
SNIFTY was on etymonline’s list. The list is a file of hundreds of words and phrases that want more research. Snifty. It didn’t even have a squib entry on the site. But it led a splendid steeplechase. The Century Dictionary entry (above) turned out to be only the least third of it and the wrong end.
Snifty barked once and sprouted three heads, bounded through a thicket of nicknames in old newspapers, and wrapped itself around nifty. Then the blatant beast head-faked toward Scotland and doubled back to that impenetrable Germanic SN- forest. By this time the editors were trying to decide if we were looking at one word or two, or three, or something somehow in between.
Coincidentally a Reddit thread had got me curious about snooty/snotty. Snotty/snooty like nifty/snifty presents itself as more than one word, not quite two. And it goes to ground in that same SN- forest, the dunkle Tannen of pre-literate Germanic. The words taunt as they plunge, with grins suggestive of something in language deeper and wilder than we moderns guess. Something not comprehended in our tone-deaf train of “froms.” […]
Here’s how etymonline described [nifty]: “A slang word of uncertain origin, perhaps originating in California (used in the east by 1867) as more or less a deformed clip of magnificent. Bret Harte (1868) wrote that it was a shortened, altered form of Magnificat.” Looking at the new lay of the evidence, after the “snifty” hunt, nifty might turn out to be a clip of snifty. Imagine “that’s snifty” misheard, mis-divided. The scientifically accurate DNA of the word nifty in that event would not touch magnificent.
There follows much more speculation and thoughts about “picture-charts of etymologies,” and it ends with some personal ads, including one from Joe to Kitty saying “Send your ‘snifty’ friend a note.” Fun stuff. Oh, and if you’re curious about what the OED has for these words, it says snifty is from a verb snift ‘to sniff’ and nifty is “Of unknown origin.” (Thanks, Nick!)
The google books corpus has a modest selection of hits for “snifty” in 19th-century sources, but they don’t predominantly look at a quick glance like ones where “nifty” could be swapped in and make sense.
An OCR error, however, led me to M.E. Barentz’ very interesting-looking 1895 volume titled _Woordenboek der Engelsche Spreektaal: Anglicismen en Americanismen_, which explains English “Slang, Cant, Colloquialisms and Idiomatic Phrases” for readers of Dutch. “Nifty” FWIW is glossed as “slim, uitgeslapen, verstandig.”
they don’t predominantly look at a quick glance like ones where “nifty” could be swapped in and make sense.
Yes, I’m extremely dubious about that suggestion.
Separately, I found hat’s phrasing “a redolent word” puzzling because I’m not used to seeing “a redolent NOUN” as opposed to “a noun redolent of X” or “a noun redolent with Y.” I was pleased to discover that someone else has already done some corpus math and determined that “Out of the 452 occurrences of the adjective _redolent_ in COHA, 378 instances, that is, 83.7%, are followed by either _with_ or _of_.”* Now, 83.7% is not 100%, yet I suspect that in many of the other 16.3% of COHA hits one could still figure out from context what it was that the noun at hand was redolent of or with, yet here I can’t.
*This of course from _The Development of the Concept of SMELL in American English_, by Daniela Pettersson-Traba. This 2022 volume seems to be a variation of her doctoral dissertation, which is described here in a university press release which charmed me simply by being written in Galician. It’s the next best thing to Romansh! https://www.usc.gal/gl/xornal/novas/circulo-linguistica-inglesa-profunda-ilusions-gramaticais-case-sinonimos-vinculados
I actually wondered about that after I posted it: “Is it OK to just have redolent modifying a noun, with no of phrase?” But I figured if I wrote it it must have sounded right to me, so I left it.
Well, it may be OK in terms of being permissible in a strict syntactic sense yet result in a sentence that is puzzling because the reader can’t actually discern what you had in mind. Tennyson famously (okay, maybe not that famously because I just googled it up …) wrote “Every flower and every fruit the redolent breath / Of the warm seawind ripeneth.” There I think you can take a close-enough-for-poetry stab at what the seawind is supposed to be redolent of or with. Or put another way, there “redolent” means “smelling notably of exactly what you’d expect this particular thing to smell of.” Which doesn’t get me very far with “redolent word.” But maybe that’s just my own lack of imagination.
This of course from _The Development of the Concept of SMELL in American English_, by Daniela Pettersson-Traba.
I wonder if that is the very work that Sabine Hossenfelder got so bent out of shape about, as a shining example of why “our” tax money must not fund the humanities.
Which doesn’t get me very far with “redolent word.”
Well, the word means “Having an inviting odor; smelling agreeably.”
These dark firs look like a misunderstanding of the (obsolete) idiom im tiefen Tann “deep in impenetrable forest”. We’ve discussed that word before, but Google doesn’t find it.
See, I thought the “redolent” in “redolent word” was the extended sense “(figurative) Suggestive or reminiscent,” which typically needs to be suggestive or reminiscent of *something*, even if that something can be gleaned from context without an explicit prepositional phrase immediately following the adjective.
https://image2url.com/images/1764650183896-a7a61f28-96d6-471f-b5c1-80941b5e7b68.jpeg
Snifty meets Snooty?
that looks to me like it got a little lost looking for “snippy”.
Yes, but the next line may suggest something else.
“Snifty! A charming word!”
“Well, high-nosed, if you prefer it.”
Is this the first image posted on languagehat, ever?
Was he aware that in Latin anima redolens means “bad breath”?
@cuchuflete: That looks like an in-universe malapropism for sniffy, for which the OED gives:
@Brett, while we can’t know for sure, I’m strongly inclined to agree with you.
Financial Times crossword today:
Reminiscent of further attempt at a fast time. (8)
Ugh-fast time = Lent
Is this the first image posted on languagehat, ever?
Not at all — I’ve posted images from Google Books for a long time, e.g. 2012.
This issue comes up quite often in Kusaal, because it has borrowed quite a bit from Mooré, which is closely related to it anyway. With words which are ultimately from Arabic you can often trace the paths of borrowing, and some other Kusaal words give themselves away as Mooré loans by their phonological irregularities, but there are probably quite a few Mooré loans in Kusaal which are indistinguishable from simple cognates.
The OED has a second meaning for ‘snifty’, which seems to overlap with ‘sniffy’:
2. 1889– slang (originally and chiefly U.S.). Haughty, disdainful.
So possibly variation rather than a mistake.
Of the better known snifter, AHD says “From Middle English snifteren, to sniff, perhaps of Scandinavian origin”
I would have guessed “snift” plus “-er” rather than “snifteren” minus “en”. Maybe that’s what they mean, but if so they are being too concise for me.