When you’re “stumped”, you’re stopped in your metaphorical tracks by a puzzle, a conundrum, something you can’t immediately figure out. And various things can leave a stump when the main part of it is removed, the best example being what’s left in the ground when a tree is cut down.
“Stump” came (in the 1300s) from the Germanic word “stump,” and there are several ways to use “stump” in English, all related. You can “stump along a path”, which means to walk with a heavy gait. That might be something one would do with a wooden leg, which of course would be connected to the “stump” of the original leg that was lost. A politician might make a “stump speech,” which comes from the act of climbing up on a tree stump so you can be seen and heard by your (you hope) adoring fans. But what about being stumped as in baffled? That’s the same sort of thing too. While you might climb onto a tree stump to make a speech, another thing you might do is trip over it, and that would stop you in your tracks. You’d be “stumped”.
If you trip over a stump, that would be a form of “stumbling.” But even though there’s a close resemblance in both sound and meaning between “being stumped” and “stumbling,” the words have different origins. “Stump” is from the ancient Germanic word that’s remained pretty much the same for centuries, and made its way into German, Norse, Swedish, and Danish as well as English. “Stumble” arrived in English about a century later, and without the “b.” “Stomle,” which is the original, seems to be closely related to “stammer.” The modern word “stammer” stems from the Old English “stamerian,” and similar words have been appearing in any number of northern European languages for the past couple of millennia. “Stammer” refers to halting speech, which seems similar, in a way, to walking that’s “halted” when you stumble. The family trees of these words are probably connected if you go back far enough — but the words are so old that “back far enough” is really far.
Another word for “stammer”, back around the year 1000, was “wlaffe.” “Wlaffe,” or “wlaffering,” disappeared sometime in the intervening years, but was still in use around 1387 in something called Polychronicon by Ranulf Higden: “By comyxtioun..wiþ Danes and..Normans, in meny þe contray longage is apayred, and som vseþ straunge wlafferynge.” (Yeah I can barely make sense of that either.)
By the late 1300s Mr. Higden would have had more options than just “stammer” or “wlaffe;” he could also have used “stote” or “stoting.” “Stote,” possibly because nobody had to look carefully at it to figure out how to pronounce it, lasted longer than “wlaffe,” and was used in 1567 by Matteo Bandello in Certaine tragicall discourses: “He was so tongue-tied in presence of his lady that he colde neither pleade for hymself at lardge, nor yet playe the parte of a stotting solicitor.”
But wait just a second, you say, in the enlightened age of the mid 1500s, wouldn’t Bandello himself have had some new options for referring to a stammering lawyer? That’s an excellent question, and in fact he would have had, at his fingertips, words such as “maffle,” which appeared around the late 1300s, “famble,” which showed up a century later, “mammer,” from about 1425, and even “drote,” which first appeared around 1440 and seems to have disappeared shortly thereafter.
Nowadays, of course, we might refer to a fambling, droting, maffler as someone who’s “hemming and hawing.” When we do that, we’re harkening back to the late 1400s when “hem” began to be used to mean a form of stammering that also involved stalling for time with a brief cough or clearing of the throat. In Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in 1470, “hemming” appears in this form: “She coughed soo lowde that syre launcelot awaked and he knew her hemynge.” At about that same time, “wallow” was used to mean stammering, as in The Babees Book from 1475: “Yf any man speke þat tyme [i.e. when thy mouth is over-full] to the, And þou schalle onsware, hit wille not be But waloande, and a-byde þou most.”
“Wallow,” in the 1400s, was a well-established word, having originated centuries earlier. Both before and after the 1400s “wallow” meant to roll around in some sort of fluid like mud. Its use to mean floundering speech seems to have been a passing linguistic fad, since that usage didn’t persist past about the following century. Even today it could reasonably be used that way in a figurative sense though; if you heard about someone “wallowing around trying to explain supply-side economics,” you’d probably recognize that it meant “floundering.”
And since it just came up, there’s nothing at all fishy about “floundering.” Nobody is quite sure where it came from, but it might be a combination of “founder” (falling to the bottom of something — nowadays only a sinking ship is said to “founder,” but it used to be used much more widely) and “blunder.” For some reason, beginning a verb with “fl” seems to be very common for expressing clumsiness, as in “flounder,” “flop,” “flap,” the obsolete “flodder,” and so on. As to why should the sound of “fl” imply clumsiness, though, I’m…um…er…ah… stumped.
Shoutout to Mark Forsyth for some of the details on today’s word!
