WTN: ragamuffin
James Harbeck
ragamuffin
Oh, that Oliver Twist! What a perfect ragamuffin. Making mistakes like any little boy, but so colourful, always improvising, and always worth a song, too – but always in want of a little bread, and all in tatters… the little devil!
You see what a perfect ragamuffin he is? We have all the parts, and then some. Make mistakes: muff. Little boy: ragazzo. Colourful, improvising, song: raga. A little bread: muffin. Tatters: rag. Little devil: also muffin.
Of course not all of those actually relate directly to ragamuffin. But if I can sniff and taste a wine and get things that definitely are not actually in the wine (leather, chocolate, tobacco, and pencil shavings, or petrol, or gooseberries), I can taste a word and find things that fill it out in my mind, and you can’t stop me. It’s a process not of deduction or induction but of abduction. And, look, we know words by association anyway.
So let’s look closer at all these abducted bits. First: muff, as in make a mistake. It seems to come from muff meaning ‘clumsy or incompetent person’, which may come from muff meaning ‘handwarmer’, coming from a sense meaning ‘mitten’, which is likely related to muffle and muffler. No indication that it has any etymological relation to ragamuffin.
Next: ragazzo. That’s just Italian for ‘little boy’. When you think about it for a moment, though, it’s kind of an odd word; I mean, Italian comes from Latin, but Latin for ‘little boy’ is puer. It seems that the Italian word comes either from an Arabic word for ‘courier’ or ‘delivery boy’ or, perhaps, from Greek ῥάκος rhákos ‘rag, tatter’ – as Wiktionary says, “suggesting the clothing.” Weirdly, the Greek ῥάκος doesn’t appear to be related to English rag (what? I know, right?), and the Italian ragazzo has no known relation to ragamuffin. I mean, for heaven’s sake, but you can’t just say that it has to be so. As linguists love to say, etymology by sound is not sound etymology. You need a chain of evidence, and ideally a plausible morphophonetic route. Words may run loose in the world like little Dickensian orphans, but if you want to give a word an inheritance, you need a birth certificate.
OK, how about raga? Strictly it’s rāga, even more strictly राग. It means, literally, ‘colour’, but in music it refers to a particular musical form. It’s hard to explain raga to people used to European forms of music, because it is less fixed than a symphony or other scored composition and both more and less fixed than a jazz jam session. A raga will have a specific scale associated with it, or sometimes two, because the descending scale can be different from the ascending scale; it has a prescribed structure of parts, and within each part it has specific time signatures (which are more complex than European ones, and I’m not going to start on them here) and certain associated motifs. Within that framework, each performance is like an ex tempore musical essay, improvised within a framework. It can be sung or played by an instrument such as a sitar. For a good example, try Roopa Panesar’s performance of Raga Bhairavi (with Dalbir Singh Rattan on table) at Stornoway, Scotland. Needless to say, there’s no etymological connection between raga and ragamuffin. But you can eat a muffin while listening to a raga, and so – in a twist – can Oliver.
Speaking of which, there’s muffin, the little bread we all know and love, though somehow the English muffin is nothing like the American muffin. Either way, it probably comes from a Low German word muffe ‘little cake’, the source of which is not forthcoming. Is it related to ragamuffin? It is not, but you can have some more if you say “Please, sir.”
OK, well, how about rag, as in tattered clothes? That comes up from old Germanic roots referring to fur and frayed fabric. And it is assumed to be the source of the rag in ragamuffin – it’s rag-a-muffin, with an added syllable for connection (as in thingamajig, or as some people do with rigamarole).
And, finally, the muffin, the one that in some historical uses has meant ‘little devil’ or ‘mean creature’ or similar. It may come from Middle French malfé or maufé ‘demon, evildoer’ or Anglo-Norman malfelon, maufelon ‘devil, scoundrel’ (per the OED). It doesn’t seem to be related to the pastry. It may or may not be the source of the muffinin ragamuffin, but if it’s not, we’re all out of leads. Will the poor little ragamuffin come into its etymological inheritance? Dickens only knows. But at least it’s picked the pockets of a few other languages along the way.
Please send comments, replies, and suggestions for words to taste to me to ja...@harbeck.ca.
Feel free to pass this on to friends. If you've received it as a forward, feel free to join the Word Tasting Notes email list at http://groups.google.ca/group/word-tasting-notes .
Visit my blog at http://sesquiotic.wordpress.com .