shark - podictionary 824

Source: http://podictionary.com/?p=855

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In the summer of 1569 some fishermen caught a strange creature in the English Channel. It was brought to London and butchered and sold as would be any other fish.

Except that this one was approximately 17 feet long and looked pretty weird.

So its skin was saved and stuffed and the curiosity was put on display at the Red Lion tavern and an advertisement for the “marueilous straunge Fishe” was circulated around town.

The ad read, in part:

“Ther is no proper name for it that I knowe, but that sertayne men of Captayne Haukinses doth call it a sharke.”

Captain John Hawkins had recently returned from his third highly profitable voyage. In a time when these things were seen as a good idea, John Hawkins made his name by opening up the slave trade for England.

The English language did indeed already have several names for the creatures we now call sharks.

Before England became a great seafaring nation few Englishmen had ever seen any large oceangoing sharks.

Instead they were familiar with smaller species. These they called dogfish and nurse and we have citations for those uses back about 100 years before this new fancy shark word.

Once people started cruising across the pond to the Americas shark sightings became a little more regular and before English adopted shark they had already adopted a Spanish word tiburon for these same larger creatures.

The Oxford English Dictionary points out that this new word shark appears to have popped into English from the mouths of John Hawkins’ sailors but isn’t exactly clear why.

It does point out that there was an Austrian-German word for a sturgeon that was similar and also that the word shirk was being used in English before this to mean a person of little use, and a cheater.

Even more suspiciously the word shirk and shark around this time held this same identical meaning—though there’s no indication why someone might apply a word meaning “cheat” to a huge weird fish.

Since that OED second edition entry a new theory has been published, although I don’t see it having made it into any of the dictionaries, so who knows if it will withstand lexicographical scrutiny.

The new theory is that our English word shark came from a Mayan word xoc.

What brought me to examine this word today was a prompt from a listener who pointed out an entry at Snopes.com concerning the combination card-shark or card-sharp.

Evidently some people feel strongly that one version is correct and the other is just wrong, oh so wrong.

The Snopes conclusion is that there isn’t enough evidence to say which is right or wrong on a historical basis. Both sharp and shark have meant “cheat” for about the same length of time.

I agree with their conclusion, but for a different reason.

When I plug card-shark into the Oxford English Dictionary I get zero hits. Card-sharp pulls up 8 hits.

So the OED at least thinks the proper usage is card-sharp.

But trying the same trick with Google gets me 200,000 hits for card-shark but only 87,000 for card-sharp, so it seems to me, if it used to be wrong to say card-shark, nowadays it’s the phrase card-sharp that’s swimming upstream.

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