Sounds

I learned two etymologies from my new favorite YouTube Channel, The Salisbury Organist, created by a young Brit named Ben Maton. Actually, one I was reminded of, and the other I learned from Ben.

Ben’s videos include a lot of organ explaining, which necessarily includes a lot about organ stops. If you know the expression “pull out all the stops,” you probably already know its origin. A pipe organ has as many as 150 stops, that is, mechanisms that admit or stop air from moving into a pipe to make a particular sound. If you pull them all out at once, allowing air into all the pipes, you create a blast of sound. In a figurative sense, pulling out stops means increasing effort, making use of all your resources. The English poet Matthew Arnold of “Dover Beach” fame may have been the first to use this expression non-literally:

Proud as I am of my connection with the University of Oxford, I can truly say, that knowing how unpopular a task one is undertaking when one tries to pull out a few more stops in that powerful but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman, I have always sought to stand by myself, and to compromise others as little as possible.
— Essays in Criticism, 1865

Nowadays, an athlete, a political party, or Bruce Springsteen might be pulling out all the stops at any given time.

Smarter than I, you may already know the other derivation that Ben shared.

In this recent video, when Ben gets caught in a thunderstorm on his way to a lovely English church, he points out a gargoyle channeling the water from on high, the etymology of which I had never considered. If I had noted that gargoyles have open mouths, the better to channel rain water down from roofs, I might have connected the term with gargle, an onomatopoetic borrowing from French. The sound of gargouiller and our word gargle is roughly the sound we make when we, you know, “hold a liquid in the mouth or throat and agitate it with air from the lungs.” I knew gargling was the sound we make, but I never associated it with gargoyles.

I was thinking that the creature pictured above might, more accurately, make the sound gurgling, rather than gargling. But that would be a a different etymology: gurguliare is Latin for making a gurgly sound. And that would make our monstrous creature a gurgoyle.