ESCROW, n. and ESCROC, n. A nice thing about writing this newsletter is that every week, I get to have a moment where I go, “oh, this is it, this is the one.” I look up words every day—maybe I should start keeping a journal of words I have looked up and why—but not all of them result in an essay.
Anyway, this week a friend was dealing with some financial stuff that I do not now and will likely never understand, and the word “escrow” came up. In case you, like me, require a definition of this word, it’s a contractual arrangement where a third party keeps money and pays it out according to the terms of the contract. I think.
It comes from Old French escroe, which means a scrap or a piece of parchment—the contract!—which, in turns, come from Old High German scrot, which means a scrap or a shred or a cut-off piece of something, and is related to English “shred.”
Not that this isn’t interesting, but it was a disappointment to me, because I really wanted “escrow” to be related to French escroc, which means a crook or a con artist. (Escroc and “crook” are also not related, in case you were wondering. “Crook” is related to a whole family of words about being crooked, bending, hooks, etc.)
So anyway. Escrow and escroc sound alike but they’re not from the same root. Where does escroc come from, then?
Well, Wiktionary says, it’s borrowed from Italian scrocco, which seems to mean something like “a mooch.” Semantically, “mooch” isn’t too far removed from “swindler.” Either way, you’re talking about somebody who gets their money through shady means. (When you google scrocco, some of the results are for a cardiologist who has “Scrocco” as a last name. Guess we know something about his ancestors now.)
That’s kind of funny, but it leaves me with more questions. I still haven’t really found a root yet. So I click on scrocco, and what does that say?
Scrocco is borrowed from Middle High German scurgo (no link), which gave rise to modern German Schurke(n), schüren. That second word is a verb that means “to stoke a fire” and by extension “to stir up.” That first word, Schurke, is a noun that means “villain, scoundrel.”
And there’s a note next to Schurke that says it’s possibly related to English “shark.”
Wait, what?
When I look up a word and the etymology section is multiple paragraphs, that’s when something really juicy has gone down. Who knew that “shark” was such a mystery?
No one really knows where English gets the word “shark,” and this Wiktionary entry has some truly wild shit in it. In Old and Middle English, the animal we now call a shark was “dogfish” or “haye.”
Apparently some people have suggested that “shark” comes from Yucatec Maya xoc (“fish,” pronounced like “shok”). I would love if this were true because it’s so bonkers, but unfortunately there’s an instance of “shark” in English from the 1440s, which is before we learned xoc from the Maya.
Other people have suggested that “shark” comes from Latin carcharias, which is a borrowing from Ancient Greek karkharías. This is pretty sensible because both of those words do mean “shark.” But usually when we get English words from Latin, we expect to find forms of those words in Old or Middle French first, and that just isn’t the case here.
The French word for shark is requin, and because everything I look up this week is amazing, basically it comes from a verb that means “to grimace while baring teeth, to make an ugly face.” French people looked at sharks and were like “you know, the fish with the teeth.” Can’t fault that logic.
Meanwhile, in English, it seems like before we said “shark” to refer to a fish, we said it to refer to villains, scoundrels, and crooks of the human variety—Schurken.
I have no evidence for the claim I’m about to make, but we probably traded “dogfish” and “haye” for “shark” for the same reasons that the French traded goupil for renard (“fox”) and the Latvians call wolves “the forest one” or “the grey one.” People like to use euphemisms for scary animals—instead of “the forest one,” shark is “the villain.”
That’s just a guess, though. Animal words are often imbued with folklore (like “butterfly”). The more mundane ways that we name animals are by going “well, that thing looks kind of like this other thing”—“dogfish” is pretty transparent, but “lobster” is less so—or by naming them after the sound they make (“cur”), or their most notable physical quality (requin and teeth, or Ancient Greek karkharías, which is related to the word for “sharp”).
Anyway, however it happened, we know that a few centuries ago, English speakers abandoned “dogfish” and “haye” and started talking about scoundrels. I had always assumed that “card shark” and “loan shark” were inspired by the predatory fish, but it turns out to be the other way around. You’re not safe from escrocs by land or by sea.
I only read in English this week, and it was all either news about our garbage world (sharks from the bottom of the sea all the way up), poetry (necessary in trying political times), or small-r romance, listed below. There are not very many scoundrels; the sea is also largely absent.
Mangos and Mistletoe (f/f, both cis and lesbian, contemporary, novella) by Adriana Herrera. A reality TV competition! A castle in Scotland! Only one bed! Two headstrong Dominican women are forced to work together on a holiday baking challenge and they fight ferociously over whether they should put mango and guava and coconut in their pastries or go with some more traditional European flavors—until they realize that what they really want is to kiss ferociously. It’s very good. I love seeing a woman get to be brooding and arrogant, and Kiskeya has the skills to back it up. I also love f/f where both women have jagged edges (Sully might be sunshine-y, but she’s not here to be bossed around by Kiskeya) and really have to earn their happily ever after, and this delivers. Content warnings: homophobia, discussion of family estrangement, sex. Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. (I also talked about it a lot on a forthcoming episode of RomBkPod about queer holiday romance.)
Stormhaven and Necropolis (m/m, both cis and gay, fantasy, historical) by Jordan L. Hawk. Every time my anxious gay linguist favorite child Percival Endicott Whyborne forgets his fears and does badass violent magic, I LIVE. The romance in this series is great and all, but the real fantasy is a life split between translating fragments of ancient text in the basement of a museum and using the power of your mind to incinerate anyone who would harm you.
Also, look at Whyborne about to write an issue of Word Suitcase:
I eagerly await my own transformation from mild-mannered linguist to powerful sorcerer. It’s about time I leveled up.
Lastly, I am, of course, deeply into angry, foul-mouthed, rifle-toting archaeologist Dr. Christine Putnam.
As if hearing my thoughts, Christine said, “This… well, I won’t pretend it doesn’t worry me. [Spoiler…] my responsibility. If either of you wish to turn back, I wouldn’t think any less of you.”
“Of course you would!” I gave her an incredulous look. “You’d march in there alone, cursing our names with every step. Your last words would be ‘Too bad Whyborne couldn’t be bothered to come, the coward. I could really have used his help.’ You’d pray there really is an afterlife so you could return to haunt me. Probably stand in the corner of my office and glare, or make the walls at home bleed, or some such nonsense.”
She tried to look vexed, but laughter won out. “Well, yes,” she admitted. “But it sounded noble, didn’t it?”
Content warnings: murder, gore, institutionalization, abuse, homophobia, one main character has been raped in the past and still suffers trauma from it, sex, discussion of racism (some characters make racist remarks, other characters object).
Misadventures of a Curvy Girl (bi m/bi m/het f, all cis, contemporary, erotic) by Sierra Simone. When I pick up a Sierra Simone book, I always know the sex is going to be well-written, but what I’m learning is that I should also expect a good helping of heartbreak. I was—perhaps foolishly—not expecting this to go quite as hard as it did, emotionally. But it was spectacular. Content warnings: PTSD, fatphobia, sex.
The Remaking of Corbin Wale (m/m, both gay and cis, contemporary, fantasy??) by Roan Parrish. I read this while looking for queer holiday romances, and first of all, it’s a Chanukah romance, which is rare and which I found more personally moving than I expected. I’m Jewish, but really only in it for the latkes. Somehow this book saw into my heart and addressed things I wasn’t even aware were there. Second of all, it’s gorgeous. I love the kind of magical realism feel of it, where one character sees the world as full of magic and none of the others do, and the text leaves it up to you. With prose this lyrical, I’m inclined to believe it. Content warnings: past abuse and bullying, past deaths of parents, a supporting character escapes an abusive marriage, sex, kink.
A Delicate Deception (m/f, both bi and cis, historical) by Cat Sebastian. There is so, so much to love here—a prickly heroine with severe anxiety, a large engineer with a slightly different flavor of anxiety, funny and smart conversations about society and railways and history and grief, cake, dogs, an illicit erotic novel, a French urchin, a lovably mean duke, a bossy former governess, and best of all, two epistolary chapters. God, I love anything epistolary. This book is delightful and I tore through it. I don’t regret reading it fast and yet I also wish I had taken my time. Good thing it still exists so I can go back to it later. Content warnings: main characters both have anxiety, grief, past deaths of parents and siblings, sex. Disclaimer: I was consulted about some of the French in this book.
Well, it is the middle of the night (for me, anyway—you live in the future) and my house smells like a latke fry, but there are no more latkes, which is a minor personal tragedy. But at least there were latkes in the first place. I think that’s the sort of thing people write poems about, when they’re not exorcising their political despair.
Anyway, I do not write poems. I write this newsletter and the occasional romance novel, and here is a post I wrote about the latest one at Queer Books Unbound, just in case that’s relevant to your interests.
Good night or possibly good morning. Either way, I wish you a good week!
