I think most people agree that there are some words that just sound funny. People (perhaps including you) have been amused by the sound of words like cattywumpus, discombobulated, flummoxed, and squelch. On the Grammar Girl site, Kevin Cummings does some analysis of what makes words sound funny—for example, passing along an observation from Neil Simon that words with a K in them are just somehow funny.
Is there a term for these, besides funny-sounding words? Well, maybe. About 20 years ago, the linguist Arnold Zwicky—a prolific coiner of language words, including libfix, recency illusion, and zombie rule—proposed the term risonym. This is a great word. We see the -nym part (“name”) in words like antonym, (“opposite+name”), homonym (“same+name”), pseudonym (“false+name”), and synonym (“together+name”).
The riso- part is a bit more obscure. It’s a Latin-based root meaning “laugh,” so risonym means “laugh+name.” If you happen to know Spanish, this is the same root that produced reír, “to laugh.” Cousin words in English include risible (“laughable”), derisive, and ridiculous. (But not riddle, which comes from a Germanic root.)
To my mind, the word risonym works very well. Now whenever someone says “That’s a funny word,” I am totally going to say “Oh, it’s a risonym.”
On to origins. On Twitter this week, user @headbandmike alerted me to an unusual etymology, namely for the word howitzer, as in the cannon. Per a common definition, a howitzer is a cannon that fires at a high arc, like to go over walls. (There are technical definitions of different types of artillery that we need not get into here.)
This isn’t a word whose origins really jump out at you, is it? For purposes of modern-day English, we got howitzer from German, possibly via Dutch; the modern German word is Haubitze. (We pause for a moment to observe that we’ve borrowed a number of military terms from German, including blitzkrieg, flak, and strafe.) We imported the word in the late 1600s, when it showed up in various spellings, including hauwitzer. Notice that we eventually decided that the word should have an -er on the end, although through the 18th century we also had the alternate term howitz, which is now “rare” according to the OED.
Well, the Germans got it from Czech (Bohemian) houfnice. In Czech, the word referred to a kind of catapult or slingshot. (Remember the “high arc” thing about howitzers from earlier?) To make things even more interesting, it seems that Czech got the word from … German. The houf- part of the Czech word came from an old German word hufo, which we have in English as heap.
I find two explanations for why the term heap was applied to the weapon. One was that the device could sling a heap o’ missiles. The other is that houf means “crowd” in Czech, and that the weapon was originally used to fire into crowds. Anyway, whatever the actual definitions of the roots, it seems pretty clear that the journey was German > Czech > German (>possibly Dutch) > English. Words do go a-wandering sometimes.
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