Puss 'n Boots

No, this is not about the lead character in the 1667 Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Charles Perraut story. And, in case you are as confused as I have been, the story is not about two characters, one named Puss and one named Boots (if it were, the contraction between the names should have an apostrophe both before and after: ‘n’.) In the story, the Puss wore Boots. 

This post is about the words puss and boot.

First, puss: actually, puss, pus, pussy and pussycat; what, other than their first three letters, do they have in common?

Pus is the oldest of these words, having arrived in English from Latin in the late 1300s. The vowel is pronounced as if spelled puhs or as if it had a double s (like muss and fuss) while our other puss words are pronounced like poo-s, as the u in push. The Latin word pus is used for any matter coming from a sore. Pus is much easier to say but sounds less innocuous than “a liquid plasma in which white blood cells are suspended” but that is essentially what it is.

As for puss, it has several meanings. In the United States it refers to a cat, while in Britain it may refer to a rabbit. The cat meaning likely comes from the sound made when trying to get a cat’s attention. It is, according to etymonline.com “A conventional name for a cat in Germanic languages and as far off as Afghanistan; it is the root of the principal word for ‘cat’ in Rumanian (pisica) and secondary words in Lithuanian (puz), Low German (puus), Swedish dialect katte-pus, etc.” Its first recorded appearance in English was in the 1520s, but it was likely in use much earlier than that. By the 1600s the word puss developed a negative sense, implying and applying the negative qualities of a cat to women, but by the mid-1800s it had regained its affectionate use as well.

By the 1580s the word pussy was being used as a term of endearment for a girl, woman, or (perhaps not affectionately) of effeminate men, but was not first used as a diminutive http://larry-whatsthegoodword.blogspot.com/2013/03/futpnbciii-follow-up-pedantic-night.htmlform of puss to refer to cats until 1726 (while rabbits were called pussies in 1715). In 1879 we find the first recorded use of pussy as a slang word for female genitalia, but it was likely in use long before being put into writing. Etymonline.com quotes a reference from Philip Stubbes’ 1583 “The Anatomie of Abuses” that says merely “The word pussie is now used of a woman.” Etymonline also states that its use in mainstream literature (like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852 where it was used as a term of endearment) argues against its more delicate use much prior to 1879.

And just to confuse matters, in 1890 the word puss was used, particularly in street fighting, to refer to the face. This use likely came from the Irish word for the lip or mouth: pus. Which takes us full circle to our first word, pus.

Our other set of words today, boot, is only a little older in English than pus. It came into use in the early 1300s, from the Old French word bote. Originally it was used only of riding boots, but now refers to any footwear that covers the foot and part (or all) of the leg. My dictionary says that in Britain it is used of any shoe or outer foot covering that reaches the ankle.

The first recorded instance of bootstrap (or boot-strap) is from 1870; perhaps that is when someone first placed a tab or loop at the top of the boot to aid in pulling the boot over the foot.

Then in 1877 the word boot was first used in writing to describe a kick. By 1880 the sense of kicking someone out (probably from a saloon in the wild west) came into being. In 1888 Steele’s school book entitled “Popular Physics” had the question “Why can not a man lift himself by pulling up on his boot-straps?” By 1916 that idea of “lifting oneself up by his own bootstraps” had expanded to mean improving oneself by one’s own effort.

Believe it or not, it was less than 40 years later (in 1953) that the word bootstrap was used to describe the “fixed sequence of instructions to load the operating system of a computer” or what we now call “booting up.” Why bootstrap or boot? Because the first-loaded program’s role is to “pull itself up” along with the rest of the programs that are needed to begin computing.

And you thought puss 'n boots was a nice little story, didn't you?