Fid and Marlinspike: Etymologies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. fid, n.; online version June 2012, http://www.oed.com, accessed 14 December 2012.

² Sir William Monson's Naval Tracts, III, 342/1.

³ Manwaring, The Sea-Man's Dictionary, s.v. fid.

⁴ Smith, A Sea Grammar, 31.

⁵ Thomas Harriot's notes on ships and shipbuilding, British Library Add MS 6788, fo. 36 (http://echo.mpiwgberlin.mpg.de/content/scientific_revolution/harriot) I am grateful to the Hon. Editor for calling this evidence to my attention. See also Jacqueline Stedall, ‘Notes made by Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) on ships and shipbuilding’, Mariner's Mirror, 99(3) 2013.

⁶ Old Norse viðr ‘tree, timber’ might be adduced as a possible source but it has left no trace in Norman French (whence a loan to English would have been possible) nor in the Danelaw. Furthermore, fid first appears long after these two paths of influence had been closed by time.

⁷ Quin (ed.), Dictionary of the Irish Language, s.v. fid.

⁸ Dineen, (ed.), Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla, s.v. fiodh. The older vocalism is preserved in fidhcheall ‘chess, chessboard’ (< Old Irish fid ‘wood’ + cíall ‘sense, intelligence’).

⁹ Burney, Boy's Manual of Seamanship and Gunnery, 61. Harland (2011) reviews various methodologies for this manoeuvre with topmast fids but does not address the questions of terminology or etymology.

¹⁰ ‘After having knocked out the “fid”, which united the chain that bound the load chain, the log rolled suddenly upon him’, Springer, 519; ‘Fid hook, a slender, flat hook used to keep another hook from slipping on a chain’, Terms Used in Forestry and Logging, 37. The OED lists additional meanings for fid but adds ‘it is doubtful whether all the senses belong to the same word’. Two of these, fid as a copious amount and fid as a small but thick piece of something, often food, could be linked to Irish fiadh ‘wild’ used as intensifying particle, and fíd ‘small portion of food’, respectively, but it is difficult to see how the Irish words could have reached the speech communities where these were current; see examples in the OED.

¹¹ Much of the lexical evidence for interlingual transfer that is relevant to this discussion is gathered in the OED online edition, s. v.v. marl, v⁵; marling, n¹; marline; marlingspike (entries last consulted 14 Dec. 2012). On the basis of this evidence, the present note focuses on the ultimate origin of the underlying term.

¹² See the well-informed discussion in Sandahl, Middle English Sea Terms, III, 62–3.

¹³ The OED would derive it from marble(d) yet a metaphorical use of the mineralogical term marl seems more plausible in terms of phonological development (the problematic reduction of the –rbl- cluster that is posited).

¹⁴ Falconer, Universal Dictionary of the Marine, s.v. marling.

¹⁵ The earliest attested use in English is from a 1417 inventory: ‘ij yerderopes, ij halyers, ij Prialle ropes. vj peciis Corde de Merlyn’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 68.

¹⁶ Koebler, Middelniederdeutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. marlinc.

¹⁷ Marlleine is found in F. Kluge (ed.), Seemannssprache, but not in his Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Jan de Vries has an entry in Nederlands Etymologisch Woordenboek, s. v. merlinc (in Dutch from about 1593).

¹⁸ Zimmern, The Hansa Towns, 163.