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How do the words ‘Bar’ & ‘Gain’ come to make the word Bargain? Gordon, Vic
The word bargain is a bit of a mystery, although one thing I can say for sure — it has absolutely nothing to do with the words bar and gain. The fact that it looks like a compound of bar plus gain is just a coincidence.
Both the verb and the noun bargain first appeared in print in the 1300s. They derive from Old French bargaignier and bargaigne, respectively. The history of the word is not clear, although according to etymologists like John Ayto, the root is probably originally Germanic (the reconstructed verb form borganjan ‘protect’). If this is true, then the word bargain is actually related to borrow and borough (and therefore possibly also the name Burridge). The meaning shifts would have gone something like: ‘look after, protect’ to ‘take on loan, borrow’ to ‘take or give’ to ‘haggle, trade’.
Can ‘Ho’ still be used in ‘Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas’? Naomi, SA
When I first heard this some time back, I assumed it was another satirical invention — much like those celebrated examples of so-called PC-speak (the person with hard to meet needs for ‘serial killers’ or the differently pleasured for ‘sado-masochists’). But certainly talk of replacing Santa’s ho with Ha hit the news here after the celebrated Santa incident in Queensland in early December 2007. The facts surrounding the story are not clear, but it would seem that a store Santa received his marching orders after his department store decreed that women might be offended because ho sounds like the American slang for the word whore. Instead, he was supposed to say Ha-ha-ha.
It is true that taboo words or risqué words are such attention-grabbers that they dominate and therefore often bump off innocent vocabulary items that just happen to sound the same or similar — people won’t risk appearing to use a tabooed word when none was intended. (As an example, over the years English has lost a lot of single syllable words beginning with ‘f’ and ending with ‘k’.) Certainly, the interjection ho does happen to coincide with the Black English version of whore. However, ho (i.e. whore) is probably not widespread enough in Australia and its contexts of use are different enough that Santa’s catch cry Ho-ho-ho is probably quite safe for the time being — and so is the garden hoe!