06.09.03
Further covery
Now I look it up, Collins claims that cove probably derives from the Romany kova, meaning “thing, person”. I never would have guessed such a chappish word to be Romany in origin, but I like the generous latitude of meaning it implies.
Of course, the similarity of meaning to covey (a small group of people, by extension from a small number of grouse) is entirely accidental; one of those glancing blows of apparent meaning you get in a jackdaw language such as English.
Every time I see something like that I am reminded that the English ended up with Shakespeare as poet of the nation; verbose, eclectic, eccentric, syntactically obscure, coining more than the Royal Mint, and madly, intemperately punning.
Puns, let us not forget, only work if you have a lot of semantic variance spread over a small lexical space. Cove seems to be Romany, while covey comes from old French. Languages with fewer borrowed words obviously tend to have fewer opportunities for puns.
One upshot of this that pleases me: we should be looking forward to a whole new set of puns emerging based, particularly, on the increasingly visible Indian languages.
Until we do, keep taking the tablas.
Janey said,
June 11, 2003 at 12:35 pm
There are already two layers of floating Indianness in the rich mulligatawny of English; words from the East India Co. of the eighteenth century, such as shampoo, and words from World War II such as cushy. Travels round Southall suggest a convergance of usage between Anglo-Indian ‘isn’t it’, which is more of a ‘y’know’ type filler, and Cockney ‘Innit?’ which is more or less a question. As you say, it’s only a matter of time till we’re all putting the bang into bhangra.