They Came, They Saw, They ‘Conkered’?
Conkering Etymology
A student recently asked whether ‘conker’ and ‘conquer’ are simply coincidental homophones, or whether they are in fact the same word. Later, I sneaked off to think about this – with the help of one of the table-sized tomes of the OED. Now, I had initially formed the pleasingly neat idea that the childlike noun ‘conker’ represented our legacy of Old English spelling (the hard -k-), while ‘conquer’ as a higher-order verb harked back to a Norman influence (the introduction of -qu-). As always, the etymology was not to be that simple…
The OED tells us ‘conker’ is probably a dialectal simplification of ‘conquer’ presumably alluding to the act of domination necessitated by the game of smashing two organic objects together until one fails (much like British party politics – or indeed some students’ approach to A2).One complication comes from the fact that earlier conker games used snails (poor snails!) and not horse chestnuts. The OED’s earliest written citation, 1847, refers to snail-shells. Only by 1886 does ‘conkers’ actually record of a game with horse chestnuts.
“Ha! I conquer you!” One might well imagine how this robust� phrase became the stuff of children’s competitive games. Ames, in his West Country lexicon: Country Words, claims ‘conkers’ simply to be a contraction of ‘conquerors’. So, it is agreed that the name of the game is derived from the grand Latinate verb ‘conquer’. Well… maybe not!� Turning elsewhere in the OED (I know, it’s a bad habit but oh so tempting!) one notes that a ‘conch’ and its hardened-phoneme friend a ‘conk’ which the OED accepts as ‘nose’ may have come from the French ‘conque’ for shell, implying a figurative link between size and shape. What’s the� link with conkers? Well this adapted French borrowing opens the possibility that the game played with shells may have been called ‘conkers’ simply because of the weapon of choice from earlier games. Conker could be an extension of the old shell label ‘conch’ but attached to the game itself - a broadening.There’s one last semantic twist. A ‘conk’ can also mean a strike upon the nose (conk was so used at least from 1812), ‘to conk’ was to hit on the nose, and ‘konk’ or ‘conk’ from 1918 also meant to break down or give out – a phrase well-rehearsed to any classic Jaguar driver… This ‘conk’ is likely a narrowing of the ‘conquer’ verb in informal use. ‘Conquer’ itself had already shifted from meaning its early ‘seek out or find’ to our more recognisable ‘beat or win’.So ‘conker’ might not be from ‘conque’ relating to snails, or it might indeed be an adaptation of ‘conquer’ showing how a different context can shuffle the spelling of a word. Game on!
October 3rd, 2006 at 4:39 pm
Thank you, I could not have said it better my self.