When I use a word...: Rabid responses
Authors: Jeff Aronson
Journal: BMJ (2005)

At last the BMJ has realised that too many rapid responses are actually rabid responses (BMJ 2005;330: 1284. [PubMed]). But Grimm's law predicts it.

The brothers Grimm, Jakob Ludwig and Wilhelm Karl, are best known for the collection of fairy tales that bears their name, first published in two volumes in 1812 and 1814 under the title Kinderund Hausmarchen, with a third volume added in 1822. The tales have enthralled children ever since, but the brothers collected them as an act of serious scholarship, consulting mediaeval manuscripts and talking to villagers and peasants in the districts of Hesse and Hanau and transcribing their tales.

The brothers were also eminent philologists, and Jakob's work is commemorated in Grimm's law. That it is called Grimm's law confirms another law, that of Non-Original Malappropriate Eponymous Nomenclature (NOMEN), which states that no phenomenon is named after its discoverer. The principles of Grimm's law were first described by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1806 and the Danish philologist Rasmus Kristian Rask in 1818; Jakob Grimm discussed them in detail in 1822 in his book Deutsche Grammatik.

Grimm's law is complicated, but it governs the ways in which particular sets of consonants change from one to another as languages develop. The relevant letter sets are the labials p, b, and f; the velars k, g, and h; and the dentals t, d, and th. This explains the Latin-English and Greek-English correspondences of pes-foot, labia-lip, and fundamentum-bottom (labials); cardia-heart, genu-knee, and hostis-guest (velars); and tres-three, duo-two, and thyroid-door (dentals). It also explains the association between rapid and rabid.

The Indo-European root LABH gave the Greeks lambanein (future lcpsomai), “to seize,” from which we get analeptic, cataleptic, epileptic, narcoleptic, and nympholeptic. And a syllable is letters taken together. LABH, by another consonantal shift, became RABH, which gave the Greek word ereptomai, “to feed,” related to ereptein (Latin eripere), “to pluck.” Erepsin was the name that Otto Cohnheim used in 1901, presumably surreptitiously, to describe a group of polypeptidases found in the small intestine. The name came from ereptomai plus pepsin.

RABH also gave the Latin word rabere or, by Grimm's law, rapere, “to seize.” Whence the English words rabies, rabid, rape, raptor, rapture, and rapid. Rabies is the Latin word for fury or madness, because it seizes your mind. In France, by another consonantal shift, it is called la rage. The disease has also been called lyssa, the Greek word for madness, which Homer used to describe battle rage, but which later authors used to refer to other forms, such as Bacchic frenzy, the frenzy of the Furies, and even passionate love, before applying it to rabies in dogs.

Ravenous, ravish, and reverie (which originally meant delirium) also come from RABH, via yet another consonantal shift, this time Verner's law, after the Danish philologist who described it (preceded by Grassman). Henry Fielding well understood how rapid ravishment could be. “Fireblood,” he wrote in Jonathan Wild (1743), “who was no backward Youth, began to take [Loetitia] by the Hand, and proceeded so warmly, that, to imitate his Actions with the Rapidity of our Narration, he in a few Minutes ravished this fair Creature, or at least would have ravished her, if she had not, by a timely Compliance, prevented him.”

So, the next time you are moved to write a rapid response, make sure that it's not so rapid that it becomes a rabid response instead and gets turned down by the editors.