We don’t like to believe that we have taken so much time and trouble with nothing but a damp squib after all. The tie between the word squib and disappointment only grew as time went on: the phrase damp squib was coined later to refer to someone or something that promised much, but delivered very little: Adam Loftus, letter to Lord Burghley, 4-14 Dec. Yea, even the proudest of them came hither with their hose patched on their heels. They are all of them but a sort of beggars and squibbes, puppies, dogs, dunghill churles. One early meaning was for a petty or insignificant person, likely based on the smallness of the firecracker: The word squib gained several new meanings very early on: a small firework that goes off with one flash of light and is over before you even realize it's begun certainly lends itself to lots of metaphorical comparisons to disappointment. The word squib first entered English in the 16th century, and one of its earliest meanings was "a firecracker." (Yes, there were firecrackers in 16th-century England-fireworks themselves go back to ancient China.) Squibs in the 1500s were not much different technologically speaking from firecrackers today: small paper tubes filled with gunpowder. Much like Muggle, the Potteresque squib shares space with an older squib, but unlike Muggle, Rowling's squib and the real-world squib are related. In the Harry Potter world, squibs are rarer than wizards and witches who are born to Muggle parents. Squibs are people who are born to wizarding parents, but who have no magical abilities of their own. In the Potter universe, there is a person who straddles the line between the wizarding world and the Muggle world, and that is a squib. Fi Rooney, quoted in The Daily Mirror (Ireland), 17 July 2016 You always get what I would call "muggles"-people who aren't in the fell burlesque community. Or a person who doesn't have expertise or experience in a field: The Telegraph-Journal (New Brunswick), 29 Aug. Now, like a Jedi, she has the power to wave through doors that we muggles would need to open by key fob. The twin microchips implanted in the webbing of her left and right hands are keys and wallet, compressed into glass capsules the size of rice grains.
Rowling's Muggle may end up sticking around longer than the earlier muggle, though: it's already gained a more general use that refers to a person who seems to have no supernatural or superhuman skill or ability: We're not quite sure of where this muggle originated, because it was fairly informal-one 1622 treatise on domestic duties warns husbands against calling their wives by "names more befitting beasts then wiues, as Cole, Browne, Muggle, &c."-and it not particularly long-lived. Thomas Middleton, Your Fiue Gallants As It Hath Beene Often In Action At The Black-Friers, 1608 Hath causde me mickle paine, and I shall nere be married There is an earlier muggle that is no longer used: it was a synonym of sweetheart. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Rowling coined Muggle and probably based it on the earlier noun mug, which refers to a foolish or stupid person (though it goes without saying that foolishness or stupidity is not a hallmark of Muggles).īut Rowling wasn't the first to coin the word muggle. It's a noun ("The Dursleys are Muggles") and can be used attributively (as in "the Muggle world," above). Rowling created an entire vocabulary to separate the wizarding world from the Muggle world. The Harry Potter world is divided into the magical and the mundane, and J.K. Rowling, in interview with Christopher Lydon on “The Connection”, WBRU Radio, 12 Oct. Because Albus Dumbledore is very fond of music, I always imagined him as sort of humming to himself a lot. “Dumbledore” is an old English word meaning bumblebee. What about Rowling? Is she somehow implying that Albus Dumbledore is lazy or dull? Not at all: Bumblebees, with their bobbing, wavering, slow flight, might have looked dull or lazy, which accounts for the combination of dore and the dumb-adjacent prefix dumble. Dore, or dor, is a word that dates back to almost 700 AD and refers to bees or flies. What is the burnie-bee? Is it not the humble-bee, or what we call the “dumble dore,”-a word whose descriptive droning deserves a place in song?ĭumble- was a prefix that was used to refer to various insects, and it has close cousins in humble-, bumble-, and dummel-, which some etymologists tie to dumb. Dumbledore, the name given to the headmaster of Hogwarts and one of the preeminent wizards of the Potter universe, is an 18th-century word for a bumblebee: Sometimes, the connection between a borrowed name and the character that bears that name isn’t always clear.
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