Animals That Are Also Verbs
Posted by John Baez
This is just for fun — a bit like the puzzles I regularly post, but more open-ended.
I was walking over the bridge over the river Cam one day when it hit me: the verb ‘duck’ is related to the noun ‘duck’! Ducks hunt for food by ducking under the water! It shocked me that I’d never noticed the relation between these two words before. I wondered which came first: the animal or the verb. Did people call these birds ‘ducks’ because they duck under the water, or did they invent the verb ‘duck’ after watching what ducks do?
More generally: which other names of animals are also verbs?
I first thought about this issue while watching a fly fly. I don’t know for sure, but in that case I bet the verb came first. Lots of things fly, but a fly is sort of the minimal entity that can fly: a small speck, essentially a point, that does nothing but fly. Category theorists would call it the ‘terminal object’ in the category of flying things. So, it deserves to be called a fly.
Later, I was pleased to suddenly understand the origin of the adjective ‘dogged’, meaning ‘persistent’. It must come from the verb ‘to dog’, meaning ‘to persistently follow something’. And that, I suddenly realized, is something that dogs are good at!
In this case it seems clear that the animal came before the verb. I just checked that this is correct: ‘dogged’ dates back only to 1779, while the verb ‘to dog’ goes back to 1519 and the noun ‘dog’ just slightly earlier. Before that, Old English for ‘dog’ was ‘hund’, the original Germanic word.
Interestingly, the word ‘dogged’ was formed in a similar way as ‘shrewd’ and ‘crabbed’.
But what other animals are also verbs? How many can you think of?
James Dolan pointed out ‘to weasel’ and ‘to badger’, which made me think of ‘to ferret out’. Weasels, badgers and ferrets are related: they’re all in that fiesty family of mammals called Mustelidae, also including otters, martens, stoats, and the big, bad wolverine:
Picture a weasel – and most of us can do that, for we have met that little demon of destruction, that small atom of insensate courage, that symbol of slaughter, sleeplessness, and tireless, incredible activity – picture that scrap of demoniac fury, multiply that mite some fifty times, and you have the likeness of a Wolverine. — Ernest Thompson Seton
Weasels and ferrets dig into burrows to pursue their prey, so weasels can weasel around obstacles and ferrets can ferret out their victims. The verb ‘badger’ is different: it’s not something that badgers do, it’s something that dogs do to badgers… in the evil sport called badger-baiting:
This leads to another puzzle: besides badgers, which other animals are the object rather than the subject of a verb named after them? I can think of two.
Marge, don’t discourage the boy. Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals…except the weasel. — Homer Simpson
Re: Animals That Are Also Verbs
Speaking of dogs, you can ‘hound’ someone. You could ‘leech’ someone of something. You can ‘bear’ something, but I have no idea if there’s a relation there. You can ‘rat’ someone out.
More generally, you can ‘bug’ someone. You can also ‘fish’ for fishes and other things, too.