Carrion Luggage

Just Kidding

Okay, kids, here's one for the etymology nerds, from NPR:

     Here's looking at you, kid: How the term for a young goat made the leap to children  

Well, they're both annoying, messy, noisy, stubborn and smelly, so it shouldn't be a surprise.

I did, however, briefly have nightmares as a child when I came across the term "kid gloves."

When Deborah Niemann tells you about her kids, ask for clarification: "When people hear me ... talk about my kids, it's not always obvious … are you talking about the two-legged kind, or kids ones in the barn?" she admits.

I know a couple who used to keep goats and other farm animals (they lived on a farm, go figure). They didn't have kids, but they had kids.

Where did the word "kid" come from, and how did it become a synonym for children?

This is another of those things that I'd always been mildly curious about, but never enough to go look it up. I had this idea in my head, though, that it was probably related to "kit" and "kitten," other names for young animals.

Kid entered the English language as a term for the offspring of a goat some 1,000 years ago as Vikings from Scandinavia (mainly modern-day Denmark and Norway) increasingly chose permanent settlement over raiding in northern and eastern England...

All words are made up. Some are made up, and then stolen.

Large-scale Viking settlement in England was established from about the mid-800s to mid-900s A.D., a time known as the Danelaw, or "law of the Danes." It was during this time that "kid" supplanted the earlier English word for a young goat, "ticcen."

Making me wonder: what was the old English word for an adult goat?

Apparently, it was gāt. Boring.

Around the turn of the 17th century, in Shakespeare's time, "kid" was beginning to be used interchangeably to mean either a young goat, a child or young adult. "It must have been something about the goaty vibes—sprightly, energetic, curious, bouncy," Watts says. "That metaphor just caught people's imagination."

Well, it seems my mind was on the right track with that. Just not as positive a spin.

Not so much with the etymology, though. I can't find anything that relates kid to kit, which, at least in the sense of young animal, seems to have come from French, not Scandinavian. It's possible that they share a PIE origin, but a quick glance at online sources doesn't point in that direction.

The word was even used for boxers and thieves. "Billy the Kid comes out of that," he notes.

Now that? That, I didn't know. I always figured he had a youthful appearance.

The word "kidnap" combines the modern sense of kid with the English verb nab or nap, meaning "to seize."

Not to be confused with "catnap." Or "catnip."

The use of kid as a verb also crops up in the 1800s, says Watts. It originates from the idea of playing someone for a kid, which "comes out of the criminal underworld… fooling them while someone steals their money off them while they're not looking," he says. Over time, it "morphed into a word meaning to hoodwink someone or, more playfully, just to joke with them."

Another mystery solved.

But "kidding" is also the season when baby goats are born, a fact that provides Niemann and her fellow goat enthusiasts an occasional bit of mirth.

Ugh. Other people's puns aren't funny. Only my own puns are funny.

As for the "kid gloves" I mentioned above?

"It's not about children at all. It's gloves made of kid skin (goat skin) thought to be particularly soft and delicate," according to Watts.

In fairness, child skin would also make soft, delicate gloves. Or so I would think. Not that I'd ever try. But hey, I've been known to write horror stories.