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Winterbourne

Here is one more lexical snowball for your winter word fort. A winterbourne is a stream that flows only in winter. British writer about games, sports and nature Richard Jefferies in Wild Life in a Southern County published in CE 1879 gives this clear explanation: “The villages on the downs are generally on a bourne, or winter water-course . . . In summer it is a broad winding trench along whose bed you may stroll dryshod . . . In winter, the bourne often has the appearance of a broad brook.”

Barn-Born or Burn-Borne?

The second root in the word winterbourne is Old English burn ‘a stream,’ whose fellow Germanic reflexes include modern Dutch born, modern poetic German Born, and the Vikings’ Old Norse brunnr. In all these languages, the root is an old and frequent part of surnames like Kaltenbrunner and Burnham and sometimes Burns ‘lives beside a well or small stream.’ The Viking root lies, hidden by time’s insistent metamorphoses, in English surnames like Brumby, a dwelling name from a place in Lincolnshire, Brumby, from the Old Norse brunnr ‘well’ ‘stream’+ býr ‘farmstead.’

Found as localities throughout Wiltshire and Dorset with one or two popping up on the maps of Berkshire and Gloucestershire, Winterbourne or its variants are common place names. My country of Canada has its Winterbourne too. It’s a small village in the province of Ontario north of Kitchener-Waterloo. Founding ancestors of English families who lived in or near these communities took their surnames from such places.

 

Oxonian Blooper

In the new online Oxford English Dictionary there is a mistake where the OED lexicographer has written “The modern use of the word [winterbourne] as a common name has not been satisfactorily accounted for.” Yes it has! That sentence displays sloppy research and ignorance of English surnames. Winterbourne is a locative surname. It is NOT modern. It is (see below) more than 800 years old as an English surname. As a last name, Winterbourne locates the residence or farm of the founding ancestor of the family whose dwellings perhaps bordered these winter-wet watercourses. Locative surnames by themselves account for tens of thousands of English family names.

As I have written often: everyone wants to be an expert. All they lack is expertise. Even a pontiff wishing to pontificate must now and then slip out of his altar boy and HIT THE BOOKS.

The Real Master of English Surnames

The expert on British surnames is not the OED writer who carelessly scribbled that bit of “knowledge.” The authoritative source on British surnames is Wilson’s edition of Reaney’s A Dictionary of English Surnames, which gives this date under the name “Henry de Winterburna,” 1175 A.D. !

Not the Error but Its Snooty Presentation

The provenance of this word winterbourne as a surname is fully accounted for — by scholars, even if not by the alarming number of erroneous entries in the OED by lexicographers pretending an expertise they so obviously lack. As annoying as the ignorance displayed is the pompous manner in which the certitude is stated. I would suggest a footnote be appended to that snotty sentence: “The dictionary-writer’s shallowness of research has been satisfactorily accounted for.”

 

Oxford English Dictionary Replies to the Above Column

 December 20, 2010

Dear Bill

Thanks for your note about ‘winterbourne’. In the OED’s defence I’d say that the text derives from 1926 (see the note at the foot of the entry: winterbourne, n. Second edition, 1989; online version November 2010. Earlier version first published in New English Dictionary, 1926), and reflects what the editors were able to discover about the word at that time.

We’re in the process of revising the text of the dictionary, as you know, and we’ll be working on the winter- words soon. I’ll add your comments to our revision file, for the relevant editor to see.

With best wishes

John Simpson

Chief Editor, OED

 

As usual, my attack is too harsh, while the OED reply is moderate, helpful and that of a gentleman. As a friend said about me years ago, “Casselman, you might have gone to the top; you lacked only two qualities: charm and tact.”

Ouch!

 

copyright © 2010 William Gordon Casselman

 

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