5 Words for ... Firsts
Now where were we? Ah, yes, the Twitter buyout.
Soooo with social media not a particularly nice place to be at the moment, we’ve rejigged and rebooted the old HH webspace to create this brand new blog, feed, and hub for all things Haggard and Hawks. Don’t worry, we’ll still be posting hither and thither on Twitter, Instagram and now Bluesky now and then if that’s your kinda thing, but from now on your daily dose of all things brilliantly peculiar and peculiarly brilliant about our language will be centred on haggardhawks.com.
Something new that we’ve been working on for the new blog, however, is a series of curated lists of obscure and interesting words—not just the occasional on here and there on Twitter. And so, what better way to kickstart this new endeavour that with this: our Top 5 list of interesting words for firsts.
QUAALTAGH
A perennial Haggard Hawks favourite we dust off every New Year’s, the quaaltagh is the first person you meet who or who crosses the threshold of your home on the morning of January 1. if you think that word doesn’t look even remotely English, you’d be quite right: quaaltagh, or qualtagh, is a word we’ve adopted from Manx, the Celtic-origin language of the Isle of Man.
HANDSEL
Handsel is a particularly ancient English word whose roots can be traced back into our language’s Anglo-Saxon days. It essentially means a ‘hand-gift’, and over the centuries has been applied to anything from a welcome omen to a settled payment. But the word has always had an undercurrent of firstness, and in particular has been used of the first instalment of a series of payments, the first takings of a new business, or the first sale or customer of the new day. And following on from the word above, you can also use handsel to mean a new year’s gift.
KERF
In general terms, the word kerf simply means the act of cutting. A distant relative of carve, in different contexts kerf can also be used to refer to the incision made my a saw, the groove or distance between two of the pronged teeth of a saw blade, or the quantity of material removed by the action of a saw. In a handful of English dialects, however, this word was also used more specifically of the first cut made by a saw, which then serves as a guide for the blade during the rest of the process.
PROTONYM
Protos was the Greek word for ‘first’, and it’s from there that we’ve ended up with words like prototype, protoplasm, and protocol (which originally meant a prologue, and literally means ‘first glue’ in reference to a page pasted into the beginning of a document). At the slightly less familiar end of the proto-scale, however, is protonym—a word for the first person to thing to bear a name, or the initial predecessor after which something else is named.
LOGIN
Etymologically the ‘log’ in login is the same one you’d find in a lumber yard. The verb log, meaning to enter or record data, derives from the earlier use of a ship’s log book, where data on the speed and course of the ship could be noted. The log book in turn was so named because some of the data it contained was collected used a log line—that is, a piece of timber attached to a long rope or cable, which was thrown over the side of the ship and into the water. The wood would float in the sea as the ship continued moving, while the crew could then count how long it took the line to reel out in its entirety, giving them a fairly accurate idea of the speed of the ship.
It’s a neat story. But what does that have to do with firsts? Well, back in 1969, login was the first word ever sent over the internet, by UCLA student Charley Kline. Unfortunately, the system Kline was using crashed after the first two letters, so the first message ever sent online was actually just “lo”; the full word was successfully sent an hour later.
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