WTN: clod, clot, cloud, clout, klutz
James Harbeck
clod, clot, cloud, clout, klutz
Look, lexically, and in life, sometimes things just get bumped about. The school of hard knocks and all that. But if you – as I once did some years ago, with my head in the clouds – clout your cranium like a clod on a block of wood or concrete, leaving blood to clot on whatever you’re clad in, you can rightly be called a klutz.
All of which works together just fine – leaving aside the scar on my forehead – because clod, cloud, clout, clot, and klutz are all of the same family, not just in sound (though they do all sound rather like what was echoing through my head after its brisk contact with that beam) but in origin.
Here’s how it goes. There was a Proto-Indo-European root that referred to balling up or clumping or clenching. It descended to a Proto-Germanic word, reconstructed as *klott, that named a lump, ball, or similar clod, as well as to another Proto-Germanic word *klutaz, naming a lump, boulder, rock, or hill. Clumps of earth, in short.
And then from *klutaz we got cloud, because, somehow, a cloud was seen as a boulder or hill in the sky, or a clumping of the whiteness in the air. And we got clout, which named a fragment of cloth – a mere shredded piece, barely worthy of mention – and also, somehow, a blow with the hand (and, from that, via Chicago English, social influence). We also got cleat, for a wedge of some hard material used for attaching things or stopping things or grabbing things.
And from *klott we got clot – originally earth, or a ball or lump thereof – and, emerging as a variant form of that, clod: a lump, for example of earth, and also a stupid or clumsy person. Blood and soil, but specifically the kind of each that agglomerates. And then, at length, by way of Old German kloz and then Yiddish klots, both – like modern German Klotz – words literally denoting a block of wood or other hard material, we got klutz, borrowed into English only about a century ago: originally a word for the same kind of person as we would call a clod – slow of wit and body, and rough of reflex – but now we focus particularly on the tendency to physical calamity. Which means that a person may be quite intellectually acute and yet be a klutz… but not a clod.
And so now how heaven and earth, for a time broken into their own clumps, are collated by clumsiness and lack of cautious coordination: the clod of the earth, the Klotz of the wood and stone, the clout of striking, the klutz who strikes, the clot resulting from clouting, the clouds high in the sky, all from the same original agglomeration. That’s quite a lot to bear in mind! And when the beams of wood or of earth (e.g., concrete) are moved from their origin with the clods of earth up closer to the clouds, or anyway to forehead level, the insights can indeed be striking.
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