“Snap the Whip,” Winslow Homer, 1872
30 August 2023
Wipe, whip, lash, and whiplash are all words that, at their core, refer to some sort of back-and-forth motion. While we know the etymologies of these words in general terms, some of the specifics are uncertain.
Wipe and whip can be traced back to the proto-Indo-European root *weip-, meaning to turn, vacillate, tremble. Wipe is the Present-Day English form of the Old English verb wipian, which has essentially the same meaning as our current word. An example of the Old English verb is found in Ælfric of Eynsham’s life of Saint Lawrence, in the description of the martyr’s death:
On ðære tide gelyfde an ðæra cempena, ðæs nama wæs romanus, & cwæð to ðam Godes cyðere laurentium; Ic geseo Godes engel standende ætforan ðe mid handclaðe; & wipað ðine swatigan leomu.
(At that time, one of the soldiers, whose name was Romanus, believed and said to God’s martyr, “Lawrence, I see God’s angel standing before you with a hand-cloth and wiping your sweating limbs.)
The verb to whip appears in Early Middle English. It may be a development of the Old English verb, or the sense may be borrowed from a cognate in another language, such as the Middle Low German and Middle Dutch wippen, meaning to move back and forth, oscillate, dance. We see this verb, meaning to flutter or rapidly move back and forth, in the thirteenth-century poem The Owl and the Nightingale. In this passage, the owl berates the nightingale for tempting women into illicit amorous affairs with its song:
Enes þu sunge—ic wod wel ware!—
Bi one bure, & woldest lere
Þe lefdi to an uuel luue,
An sunge boþe loȝe & buue,
An lerdest hi to don shome
An unriȝt of hire licome.
Þe louerd þat sone underȝat:
Liim & grine & wel eiwat
Sette & leide, þe for to lacche.
Þu come sone to þan hacche:
Þu were inume in one grine.
Al hit aboȝte þine shine!
Þu naddest non oþer dom ne laȝe
Bute mid wilde horse were todraȝe.
Vonde ȝif þu miȝt eft misread
Waþer þu wult, wif þe maide!
Þi song mai bo so longe genge
Þat þu shalt wippen on a springe!(Once you sang—I know well where—by a certain bedroom and would lure a lady into a sinful love, singing both low and high, and lured her to do a shameful and immoral thing with her body. Her husband soon found out: lime and snares and everything he set and laid, in order to catch you. You soon came to the window: you were quickly trapped in a snare. It was all around your shins! You had no other judgment nor law except to be drawn by wild horses. Why don’t you try again, if you wish, to lead a wife or maiden astray? Your song may be so effective that you end up whipping in a snare.)
The noun whip, referring to a scourge, is in place by the early fourteenth century, and the more specific sense of the verb, meaning to beat with a scourge, is in place by the end of that century. From Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale:
This ydelnesse is the thurrok of alle wikked and vileyns thoghtes, and of alle jangles, trufles, and of alle ordure. Certes, the hevene is yeven to hem that wol labouren, and not to ydel folk. Eek David seith that “they ne been nat in the labour of men, ne they shul nat been whipped with men”—that is to seyn, in purgatorie. Certes, thane semeth it they shul be tormented with the devel in helle, but if they doon penitence.
(This idleness is the storehouse of all wicked and lowly thoughts, and of all gossip, trifles, and of all filth. Certainly, the heaven is given to them who will labor, and to idle folk. Also, David says that, “they are not in the labor of men, nor shall they be whipped by men”—that is to say, in purgatory. Certainly, then it seems they shall be tormented by the devil in hell, unless they do penance.)
Whip also has a parliamentary sense on both sides of the Atlantic. In the first half of the eighteenth century, we start to see whipper in used as a term for the assistant huntsman who uses a whip to keep hounds from straying from the pack. It’s not uncommon to first see the earliest recording of a slang or jargon term in the name of a racehorse, and that’s the case with whipper in. The name Whipperin is recorded of a gelding in the 12 September 1728 edition of London’s Stamford Mercury.
A few years later we see whipper in used in a satirical newspaper piece that uses the term to literally mean a huntsman’s assistant and metaphorically to refer to a political party official whose duty it is to keep the members in line and voting for the party’s policies. From London’s Fog’s Weekly Journal of 28 May 1737:
Since I have been taken into the Pack of Court Hounds, and have had my feeding from the Hands of the Huntsman, Gratitude exacts of me, the contributing so far as my Experience will permit (and I flatter myself I am esteemed a pretty Staunch Dog) to better the Kennel, by either encouraging your slow, or retraining your too forward Whelps; some of which latter, will open upon a wrong Scent, mislead a raw Pack and disappoint a Morning’s Sport by their babling. A Babler of a Puppy, may be excused, the Whipper in, may, by his Correction, reclaim him and he may make a good Hound, but when an old Dog will mislead the Pack, there is no other Remedy than the Cord; he is immediately tuck’d up as irreclaimable.
To be more intelligible, and let my Reader know what I open upon, I shall inform him that the Game I have in view is the Reduction of the Interest of the redeemable National Debt, which has happily miscarried in the House of Commons.
We see whipper-in used directly to refer to a party disciplinarian in London’s Annual Register of 1771. The piece gives brief biographies of people in various professions, and the following appears in one on a politician:
That he was first a whipper-in to the Premier, and then became Premier himself; that he led the House of Commons by the nose and hated the city; that he drained the Treasury to enrich his friends and parasites; that he dreaded general warrants, was for a standing army, and constantly opposed the liberty of the subject; and that if he was not beheaded, he ought to have been.
By 1850 the parliamentary sense of whipper-in had been clipped to simply whip, and it eventually crossed the Atlantic to appear in American political jargon as well.
Lash, on the other hand, is of more uncertain etymology. It is possibly echoic and formed analogously with words such as dash, flash, mash, and smash. But it shares the same general sense of beating or striking with whip. (The sense of lash meaning to tie or fasten, is from a different root, borrowed from the Anglo-Norman lasce [ribbon, string] and lascher [loosen] and is related to lace.) Both the noun and verb appear in the poem Of Arthour and of Merlin, probably composed prior to 1300 and copied into the Auchinleck Manuscript c. 1330:
One passage in that poem describes a battle, using the verb to lash (note also the multiple uses in this passage of dash, meaning both to rush and the strike at):
He [tok] kniȝtes þousandes to
And out of his cite dassed him þo
Among þe ribaus anon he dast
And sum þe heued of he laist,
Þis þre þousand he slouȝ anon(He [took] two thousand knights and dashed out of his citadel. He clashed among the foot soldiers, and some he hewed off, he lashed them, three thousand he quickly slew.)
And another passage uses the noun to mean a blow:
Kehenans com wiþ gret rape
And ȝaf king Arthour swiche a las
Þat Arthour al astoned was,
Arthour smot þat geant oȝan
A dint þat fro main cam
He smot his schulder, wiþ arm and scheld
Þat it fleiȝe in þe feld,(Kehenans came on with great haste and gave King Arthur such a lash that Arthur was stunned; Arthur smote the giant again, a blow that came with might. He smote his shoulder, against arm and shield, so that it flew onto the field.)
By the end of the fourteenth century, the more specific sense of lash meaning a whip or to beat with a whip was in place.
The redundant compound whiplash, meaning a scourge, appears in the middle-to-late sixteenth century. We see it in Thomas Tusser’s 1573 poetic Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry in a list of things a good farmer has ready for the fall harvest:
Strong exeltred cartt, hat is clowted & shod,
cart, ladder & wimble, with percer & pod.
whele ladders for haruest, light pitchfork & tough
shaue, whyplash well knotted, & cart rope enough.(Strong axled cart, that is patched and shod,
cart, ladder, and auger, with piercer and support.
Wheel-ladder for harvest, light pitchfork, & tough
sheaf, whiplash well-knotted, & enough cart-rope.)
But the sense of whiplash meaning an injury to the head or neck caused by a rapid and forcible oscillation is much more recent, coming into use with the automobile and injuries related to high-speed travel. It appears in the mid twentieth century. The earliest example I’ve found is from an advertisement for a chiropractor in the 25 September 1950 Columbia Record of South Carolina:
A blow to the head, or a fall may cause the neck to be wrenched out of place. Whiplash injuries, wherein the head is thrown forcibly forward or backward can cause severe trouble. Auto accidents frequently cause this injury.
Sources:
Ælfric. “Passio beati Laurentii martyris.” The Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church, vol. 1. Benjamin Thorpe, ed. Ælfric Society. London: Richard and John E. Taylor, 1844, 426. Archive.org.
———. “Passio Sancti Laurentii.” Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, The First Series. Peter Clemoes, ed. Early English Text Society S.S. 17. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997, 424.
American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, 2022.
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2012, s.v. lasce, n., lascher, v.
Cartlidge, Neil, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale, revised ed. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2003, 26, lines 1049–66. fol. 240va–b.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Parson’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales. The Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, 312, lines 10.1.715–16.
“Damaging Neck Injuries Often Bring Trouble in Later Years” (advertisement). Columbia Record (South Carolina), 25 September 1950, 3-A. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Essay Towards the History of Mankind.” Annual Register, fifth edition. London: J. Dodsley, 1771, 196. NewspaperArchive.com.
Fog’s Weekly Journal (London), 28 May 1737, 1/1. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Nichols Newspapers Collection.
“A List of the Horses Matches to be Run at New-Market in September and October, 1728.” Stamford Mercury (London), 12 September 1728, 72. NewspaperArchive.com.
Macrae-Gibson, O.D., ed. Of Arthour and of Merlin. Early English Text Society. London: Oxford UP, 1973, 309–10, lines 7581–85; 356, lines 9374–80. ProQuest. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1 (Auchinleck Manuscript).
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. whippen, v., lash(e, n., lashen, v.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. whip, v., whip, n., lash, v.1, lash, v.2, lash, n.1, lush, v., whiplash, n.
Tusser, Thomas. Fiue Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry. London: Richard Tottill, 1573, fol. 14v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Image credit: Winslow Homer, 1873. Butler Institute of American Art. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.