More Suffix-fu Part II

In my previous post, I noted that smile and smirk, tell and talk, and steal and stalk are all pairs that feature the suffix known as k-diminutiva. In other words, to smirk is to make a little smile, to talk is to tell a little, and to stalk is to indulge in a little stealing.

These pairs have of course diverged from one another semantically: a smirk is now a particular and unpleasant sort of smile, while stalking someone is not the same as stealing from them. Yet in these pairs the relations of meaning are still transparent to us.

Not so much in the pair well and walk, both, according to Partridge, related to Latin volvere, "to roll or cause to roll." The word well here comes from Old English weallan (meaning "to well, surge, or boil") and is the verb we use in expressions such as my eyes welled up with tears. The rolling here seems to be in the eddying currents of water in motion; we might think of cookbooks that direct us to bring water "to a rolling boil."

The rolling in walk is at first glance harder to explain. Old English wealcan meant "to revolve, roll, or toss," with the nice figurative sense "to reflect or revolve in one's mind." The ambulare sense of the word did not come in until Middle English, with walken. Even Partridge has a little trouble identifying the precise trajectory of the semantic leap: "the ME sense 'to walk' has perh derived from the OE senses—from the idea 'to walk with a rolling motion' (as a sailor does)."

My feeling, however, is that anyone who has ever used an elliptical machine is quite well acquainted with the rolling motion of walking. I don't suppose that Partridge (who died in 1979) ever had a health club membership, but he mightn't have had to think about a sailor's gait to make sense of this problem if he had ever got on an elliptical trainer.

And since I'm already rambling dementedly here, I'll also add that when I trained under a Zen teacher during my year in Madison, WI (a wonderful place), I had to learn a style of walking called hojo, which involved moving forward with one's hips on a horizontal plane. It was very difficult to master, and was apparently how swordsmen had to walk to achieve optimal balance and poise. But the thing that struck me as I was struggling with hojo was how very "roll-y" my gait became as I tried to keep my hips from bobbing up and down.

I told my Zen teacher all about well and walk of course; I think he was mildly interested.