Word of the Week: Klug
Da steh’ ich nun, ich Substacker, und bin so klug wie einer wär’
This week’s word is, of course, close to my heart—though some would say it’s far from my brain.
Klug in German means something along the lines of “smart.” (More on that in a moment.) It derives from the Proto-Germanic root *klōkaz, which has no surviving descendents in English1 but has been conserved in most other Germanic languages including Dutch, the Scandinavian languages, and Yiddish.
German has other common adjectives with a similar meaning, namely intelligent and schlau—and choosing among them might be purely a matter of Sprachgefühl.
This StackExchange thread (in German) gives a sense of how fuzzy the distinctions are. One answerer suggests that schlau indicates knowledge but not necessarily creativity, intelligent indicates problem-solving ability, and klug indicates a kind of practical wisdom which requires neither learning nor creativity, but simply a knack for finding the right outside resources. But another says that intelligent and klug both imply knowledge, while schlau has more to do with creative problem-solving.
Reverso Context (a sloppy but powerful tool) gives “smart,” “wise,” and “clever” as the most common translations for klug, with “prudent” as a notable downlister. Intelligent is usually “intelligent,” because German and English are most similar where they are both undigested French. Schlau is “smart,” “clever,” or “cunning”—and schlau is the word used to describe the cunning of foxes.2
Klug, for what it’s worth, is the most common of the three terms in print.
Prudence and practicality are concepts that seem to come up a lot in discussions of klug. And here’s a dot to connect to that: *klōkaz can refer not only to intelligence, but also strength or speed; and its Dutch descendent kloek denotes bodily robustness. It may be that the German word still carries a trace of this, and that Klugheit basically just means “efficacy.”
Kluge
Although klug has no living relative in standard English, it is the direct source of one English slang term: kluge (rhymes with huge),3 defined in the Jargon File4 as “Something that works for the wrong reason.” Outside of hackish circles, it can mean an inelegant but stable way of doing something.
There are a couple of other English-language slang terms that sound like they should be related to klug, but aren’t. False acquaintances, if you will.
Clock
In Green’s Dictionary of Slang, clock is defined as “to see, to recognize, to notice, to watch, to understand, to work something out.”5
This seems to resonate with klug, but in fact they’re unconnected no matter how far back you go: the verb clock comes directly from the English noun clock, as in the round thing on the wall that your twelve-year-old nephew can’t read.6 The image is either a policeman’s speed gun (“I clocked you going 80 in a 55”) or a person’s face being compared to that of a clock.7
(Dumb) cluck
This is a word I dearly wish were klugish. Wouldn’t it be nice if dumb cluck originated as a witty oxymoron, and literally meant something like “morosoph”? But no.
Cluck, it turns out, is exactly what you’d expect: It means someone with a brain like a chicken’s (or with chicken salad for brains). Three of the four dictionaries I consulted agree on this: Etymonline explains that “chickens and turkeys are famously foolish,” Green’s definition speaks of “the brains of a chicken,” and the OED treats this sense together with cluck-the-sound and mentions no separate origin.8 (I also note a resemblance to chucklehead, a much older term—and chuckle can be used in a galline context as well.)
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Except possibly gleg, which sure looks like a loanword from Scots—though the OED makes it a Norsism from a different Germanic root.
Though it is, remarkably, not a true cognate of English sly.
Any resemblance to a reference book I should own (but don’t yet) is pure coincidence.
A fascinating window into a foreign culture. One of its editions has a print version, titled The New Hacker's Dictionary.
I would call it synonymous with dope, scope, suss out, and twig, and a close cousin to peg for and rumble.
Etymologically, clock means “bell.” It is related to German Glocke. I suspect that a “dandelion clock” may be called that because of its rounded, bell-like shape, with the time-telling game being a later development.
Among trans people, clock has a slightly narrower sense. This Reddit conversation gets into the intricacies of that usage, and this one addresses it in relation to the other ways the word is used as a verb.
Wiktionary is an outlier: its entry for dumb cluck claims that that term is a minced obscenity.
However, there’s little reason to believe that the obscene term came first. The OED cites cluck in the sense “a stupid, inept, or unsuccessful person” from 1906, and dumb cluck from 1922. They do not include the obscene word compounded with dumb, but they do include it singly, and its first citation in the sense “a worthless or despicable person” is also from 1922.
If you run a Google Ngram of the two compounds, you will find that “dumb cluck” peaks in the late ’30s while its obscene counterpart doesn’t begin to take hold until the ’60s. Then again, that could simply be down to the latter term being considered unprintable. Indeed, Green’s first citation for it is from 1952 in the novel From Here to Eternity, where it is censored with hyphens.