“Logy” Meaning and Origins

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey there. My name is James Dykstra from Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Hi, James.

How are you?

Doing well. We’re glad to have you. What’s on your mind?

I’m from southwest Michigan, which, as I understand it and experienced it growing up, is a bit of a Dutch Christian Reformed Calvinist enclave.

Could be because I was from a particularly insular Dutch community.

But basically, I didn’t realize until I left Kalamazoo and actually went to the Peace Corps in Mexico from 2013 to 2017 that some of the words I use may have origins in Dutch.

I guess, you know, my great grandparents are the last people to actually speak Dutch in our family.

And so that kind of got lost, which I think is a shame.

But there’s one word in particular that we would use, logi.

So like maybe after a big meal, we might say, I’m feeling really loggy, which I always understood to be like sluggish or lethargic.

But I said that in Mexico with other Peace Corps volunteers, and they were all like, what?

What is that?

They had no idea what that meant.

So I guess my question is, is that word from Dutch?

Are there other parts of the country that use it?

Or maybe it’s totally normal, and it was just a fluke that they didn’t understand what I was saying.

Interesting.

Loggy.

So your theory is it’s just because of your Dutch roots that you know the word.

Yeah.

And since coming back to Michigan then the last three or so years, I’ve asked other people and find quite a few people who haven’t heard of it.

Obviously, my family, if I check, they’re like, oh, yeah, I know, you know, Logie.

And I think what kind of clued me in was I think I looked it up in a bunch of dictionaries and one said Dutch origins or like Dutch.

Yeah.

Dutch roots.

Okay.

So we can do a little digging on this.

The best work that I know of to look for this sort of thing is the Dictionary of American Regional English, which has an entry for this.

And it does have a map as well and has a note about regional use.

And it says that it is a little more common outside the American South, but it shows that its use doesn’t really match exclusively the traditional Dutch settlement areas.

Huh.

So based on that, it’s not perfect data, but based on that, I would say that it’s not only used in Dutch settlement areas.

And as a matter of fact, there’s another book that I would recommend to you if you really want to get into the Dutch contributions into English, which has a lot more to say about this word.

And this is called Cookies, Coleslaw and Stoops, the Influence of Dutch on North American Languages.

It’s by Nicolene Vandersis.

I think that’s how you say the last word.

It’s S-I-J-S.

Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops.

It’s a wonderful book.

It’s a very reliable, thoroughly researched compilation of all the contributions of Dutch into French and English in North America.

It’s fantastic and has a really good entry,

And it kind of points out that Logie came into English a couple different ways.

It shows up not only in North American English,

But in English dialects in the British Isles.

So it’s possible that it was already in English before English speakers came into the New World,

Which would explain why it pops up in places where there are no real Dutch settlements.

Interesting.

Yeah.

A little more complicated than I thought then.

Yeah, so we have it in print from as early as the 1840s.

And one of the clues that she comes across is that it shows up first as the spelling of loggy, L-O-G-G-Y.

This tells us that because of the way that Dutch was spelled at the time, that it came from a Dutch word, L-O-G-G-E.

So that places it around the 17th or 18th centuries, as when it was first borrowed into English.

And that’s the anglicizing of that word, L-G-G-E, into L-O-G-G-Y, kind of proves that point.

It’s one of the things etymologists and word historians can do, kind of to connect two languages when there’s a transfer from language A to language B.

So, no, you probably don’t know it exclusively because of your Dutch heritage,

But I would also say there’s a strong chance that it’s reinforced in your vocabulary because of your Dutch heritage.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does.

Very cool.

Yeah, it is cool.

Anyway, I do recommend that book if you want to explore more of your Dutch heritage.

I recommend it to anyone, by the way.

Again, that’s Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops by Nicolene Van Der Sys, S-I-J-S.

Well, thank you so much for your help.

Yeah, our pleasure.

Thanks, James.

Thanks for calling.

Absolutely. Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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