I learned a new term this week while reading Cory Doctorow’s latest blog post about Uber. Doctorow’s assessment is that “Uber is a scam and it will never be profitable.” The company will ultimately fail, is the theory, but in the meantime, billions of dollars have flowed into it, so someone is making a lot of money. Doctorow refers to this as the bezzle.
The term originates with the economist J. K. Galbraith. The word is (obviously?) related to the verb embezzle, but it’s a noun. Galbraith had a specific definition: “an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement” and “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” When Galbraith was writing about the 1929 market crash, he noted that “The gross national bezzle has never been larger than in the past decade.”
I don’t know that people have used the term outside the context of company officers enriching themselves at the expense of investors. One article I found says that the word bezzle “seems to pop up every few years when someone writes about the intersection of economics and politics.” (In that article, the company was WeWork.) Galbraith noted that bezzles tend to be discovered when there’s an economic downturn—for example, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was discovered when the market stopped inflating—so perhaps we’ll soon be in for a series of bezzle revelations, as when the first internet bubble burst.
Isn’t that cheery. Let’s move to origins. I was listening to the History of English podcast, and in an episode about Robin Hood (!), I learned about the unexpected history of the word hobby.
A hobby is something you do in your spare time for fun. Where would a word like that come from? Surprisingly (to me), it’s a shortened version of the term hobby-horse, as in the toy that consists of a horse head on a stick. The way the OED makes it sound, the term hobby-horse for an enjoyable pastime was sort of derisive: “a favourite occupation pursued merely for the amusement or interest that it affords, and which is compared to the riding of a toy horse […] an individual pursuit to which a person is devoted (in the speaker’s opinion) out of proportion to its real importance.” Obviously, the word hobby today doesn’t have inherently negative connotations, though I suppose it can be used to dismiss someone’s activities as dilettantish (“he’s just a hobbyist”).
The original hobby-horse was not a toy horse-on-a-stick; it was a kind of horse costume used on stage, in dances (like morris dancing), and in parades and ceremonies.
Among these is a horse head made of a wood, or even from a horse’s skull, held up on a stick, with the person below possibly masked with a sheet or other material.[1]
This meaning in turn derived from a term for a real horse: a hobby-horse or just hobby was a small horse or pony. Here’s a weird turn: all the best sources suggest that small horses that were used as plow/plough horses were conventionally named Hobin or Hobby. Which is in turn a variation of the name Robin. Which is one of many short forms of the name Robert: Robbie, Bobby, Robin, Hobin, Hobby.
Assuming I got all this right, here’s a recap:
Robert, a name >
Hobby, a nickname for Robert >
Hobby, a name often given to (small) horses >
hobby, a generic term for a small horse >
hobby-horse, a costume that looks like a horse >
hobby-horse, a children’s toy >
hobby, something you do for fun
How’s that for an unexpected etymology?
Side note: I looked into whether Tolkien based the word hobbit on hobby or the like. According to him, hobbit (a.k.a. halfling) “might well be a worn-down form of holbytla (‘hole-dweller’), if the name had occurred in our own ancient language.” But this is Tolkien talking about languages he made up, so it’s hard for me to tell if he’s being meta and staying in character, so to speak, and/or whether his deep knowledge of actual historical English influenced his naming conventions. A question for the conlangers among us, I guess.
And speaking of hobbies, time for me to get back to work. Happy Friday!
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
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[1] This feels to me like it has a kind of Wicker Man/Children of the Corn vibe, but I probably watch too much British crime drama. [^]