Today’s new-to-me word involves two things that are new with the whole coronavirus thing. The first is that people have taken up new hobbies to pass the quarantine time. And the second, of course, is that they’ve coined new words for such activities.
One such hobby is musical instruments. For example, a lot of people have decided that this is a good time to start playing the ukulele. And why not? The instrument is affordable, it’s not that hard to learn[1], and online slash Zoom-based “virtual jams” are easy to find. Is there a name for people who’ve taken up the ukulele as a quarantine hobby? Of course! They’re qukes.
I got this word from Cynthia Lin, who’s a ukulele player and teacher. In one of her email newsletters, she wrote “I want to send a special welcome to all of my new quarantine uke newbies (I like the term Qukes!).”
This is a funny portmanteau: quarantine + uke, the latter being common shorthand for ukulele. But it doesn’t meet the transparency bar that marks a good portmanteau; you don’t look at it and immediately know what it refers to. On top of that, it misses the mark semantically; the word quke captures uke, but where’s the part that defines newbie player? That might be one reason that the term, in spite of Cynthia Lin’s enthusiasm for it, doesn’t seem to be catching on. Or that’s my interpretation after searching for it and not finding hits. Then again, is there another, better term? Maybe not. I would love to hear about it if there is.
As an aside, the origin of the word ukulele isn’t certain. As we noted before, the word ukulele might come (probably comes?) from a Hawai’ian word meaning “jumping flea.” Or maybe “gift.”
Ok, origins for real. Friend Melanie recently asked me if I was aware of the origins of the word draft as in a working copy of a document (first draft). I was pretty sure that draft was also draught that’s a very old Germanic word meaning “to pull.” Very close relatives are drag and draw. (Without getting too much into it, we see these sorts of g/w/gh/f relationships with tow/tug and with plough/plow and with the pronunciation of enough and tough.)
Even if this was all true, it didn’t explain how the word came to refer the various iterations of something you’re writing.
I looked in the OED, and boy, there are many senses (about 50) of the word draft, but almost all of them go back in one way or another to the sense of pulling, dragging, or stretching. Just a few:
- draft animal, a horse or ox that pulls a plow.
- draft of drink, from “the quantity of drink swallowed at one ‘pull’.” Draft beer is beer that’s pulled from a barrel.
- military draft, from pulling (selecting) people out of a larger body.
- shallow draft (of a boat), from the amount of water displaced (drawn) by the boat.
- a cold draft (of air), from a sense of movement or pulling.
- a draft (money), from the sense of withdrawing or drawing on funds from an account.
Ok, that was fun. What about [first] draft? As near as I can tell, this sense initially arose in reference to drawing on a surface (oh, look, here’s draw again) using a pencil or pen: a sketch. This sense of a preliminary version was used to describe writing pretty early (“The famous draughtes of poetes eloquent” from 1504).
I like looking into words like draft and draw/drag that have been in the language a long time; they feel sturdy and reliable. In this case, it’s especially pleasing that so many (most? all?) senses have ultimately come from the root sense of pulling. It’s like the many literal and metaphoric meanings are all children that derive from the original sense, but they didn’t move very far from home.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[1] This is where I should put in a plug for my free! ebook about movable chords on the ukulele. If you’re new to ukulele, learning how to move the basic chord shapes will open a whole new world for you. [^]