Laudator Temporis Acti

 Dear Mike,

Tom Shippey’s suggested nickname dritbrók, which he coyly forbears to translate, has an English parallel in the name of a Lincolnshire man, Randulfus Bla de Shitebroc, recorded in Court Rolls for 1202. Melissa Mohr, in Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 94) translates the name as ‘roughly, Randall Shitboast’. To quote Shippey, ‘This is a theory one has to reject!’ According to the MED ‘broc (?Cp. OE gebræc noise)’  means ‘a loud boast or threat’. However, if Mohr had consulted the entry for brẹ̄ch n. ‘The undergarment covering the lower part of the body; underpants, drawers, or tights;’ I think she’d have seen in brōc  the true source: ‘Etymology OE brēc (pl. of brōc, corresp. to OI brōk, OHG bruoh); perh. also the ON pl. brök-r, although ME brẹ̄k in N texts can come from OE.’ The word needs no translation, just updating. OED citations for shit-breech span the period 1648 to 2001 and include Joyce and Davenport.  For brōc-brēc, the same applies as to bōc ‘book’: ‘a feminine athematic consonant stem, with nominative and accusative plural and genitive and dative singular bēc (probably /beːtʃ/), reflecting i-mutation of the stem vowel to ē … and palatalization and assibilation of the final consonant, both due to following i in the lost inflectional ending.’ The plural form beec ‘books’ survived into early Middle English.

Best wishes,

Eric [Thomson]

Labels: noctes scatologicae