Transcript of “Take a Licking and Get Your Licks in”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi there, this is Paul Velleman.
Hi Paul, where are you calling from?
Camden, Maine.
Camden, Maine. Welcome to the show, Paul.
Well, I have a new puppy. He’s a beagle mix.
And when I get him up in the morning, he’s all wags and kisses.
And he was licking my face a few mornings ago, and I said, you’re getting your licks in.
And then I paused for a minute and realized, oh, gee, that’s like hitting somebody.
And that shouldn’t have anything to do with my puppy’s tongue.
I’d better call Grant and Martha.
What is your cute little puppy’s name?
You have to tell us.
His name is Max.
Max.
Oh, Max.
Getting your morning kisses from Max.
He’s partly beagle.
Partly beagle.
Well, what we can tell you about lick, Paul, is that it’s a really, really old word.
It’s been around for more than a thousand years.
It goes back to Old English, liceon, which means the way you use the word to describe what your dog is doing.
It means to pass the tongue over a surface.
But this word lick gives us a great example of what we call polysemy, when a word has a lot of different meanings.
It’s this simple, basic word that’s had a lot of time to put out a lot of different shoots and branch out in different ways to indicate different things that are related to that fundamental root.
And by the 16th century, the word lick also came to mean alongside that original meaning, it came to mean to beat or strike or thrash, which is kind of an intensification of that motion, I suppose.
But also at that time, there was the verb to lick up, which meant to defeat or vanquish.
And that was used in an early influential translation of the Bible, which talks about an army licking up the enemy the way that an ox would lick up the grass in a field.
So there was that sense of it as well, but as you noted, it means a whole lot of different things like a small amount.
You know, he hasn’t done a lick of work.
And I think most recently, kids on TikTok have been posting video of things that they’ve licked, that is, things that they’ve stolen.
They show off their latest devious lick on TikTok.
So it’s kind of a Swiss Army knife of a word.
Interesting.
Give us some scratches behind the ears to Max for us, will you?
Well, thank you very much for explaining that. I was flummoxed.
Well, glad we could sniff it out for you.
Take care now.
Appreciate it. Thanks very much.
All right.
