The Long Linguistic Journey

to ‘Dagnabbit’
Among the most hilarious words in the English language is "dagnabbit." It’s full of very funny hard syllables and, for most Americans, it’s
most often heard coming out of the cartoon mouth of Yosemite Sam, who has a funny voice and a big hat (big hats are also funny). But the
way the word evolved is not really funny. It is dark and ominous and paved with fear. "Dagnabbit," along with the English words "bear" and
"wolf," are creations of a terrified populace, scared of beings visible and not.
These words are called, among linguists, taboo deformations. They are words we created because, in a very fantasy-novel sort of way, we
are scared of the True Names of our enemies and overlords. Dagnabbit is an example of the perceived power of words to hurt us.
It’s easy to assume that language is, for all its variations and complexities, a shortcut, a way to convey meaning through sounds that
represent concepts. But language itself has power. The word for a certain concept isn’t just a symbol; it is tied in some fundamental way to
the concept itself. This pops up in humanity’s oldest stories: the idea is that each thing – person, god, object – has a true name, and that
knowledge of that true name conveys power.
"Taboo deformation is one possible way for a word to change its meaning," says Andrew Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of
Kentucky who specializes in Indo-European languages. Basically, we are scared of the true names of certain beings or concepts, because
to use them might mean we summon them, which we don’t want, or anger them, which we definitely don’t want, or simply make other
humans mad at us, which is slightly less bad but still not ideal. The true name is powerful, and we normal humans can’t handle that power.
So we avoid using the true name, but sometimes we still
need to communicate with each other about those beings
or concepts. That means we have to figure out a way to
talk about something without using the actual word for it.
A great example of this is the word "bear," in English.
"Bear" is not the true name of the bear. That name is
h₂ŕ̥tḱos, or at least it was in Proto-Indo-European, the
hypothesized base language for languages including
English, French, Hindi, and Russian. The bear, along with
the wolf, was the scariest and most dangerous animal in
the northern areas where Proto-Indo-European was
spoken.
H₂ŕ̥tḱos, which is pronounced with a lot of guttural noises,
became the basis for a bunch of other words. "Arctic," for
example, which probably means something like "land of
the bear." Same with Arthur, a name probably constructed
to snag some of the bear’s power.
Another example is the way Jews refuse to use the true name of God, which is made up of four Hebrew letters which roughly correspond to
the Latin letters Y, H, V, and H. Anyway, Jews traditionally do not speak this word, and when it’s written, there are specific rules about how
to treat the paper it’s written on.
But YHVH appears throughout holy books, and so to talk about God, Jews have come up with dozens of options. Hashem means, literally,
"the name." Adonai means "lord." With some taboo deformations, like "bear," we’ve basically replaced the true name with something else;
not many people know that it’s even a replacement. The Jewish name of God is written down, and so remains known, but in other cases, the
deformation can take over.
A fundamental issue with changing a true name is that you can’t completely change it. You can describe it, as with "bear," but if you decided
that instead of h₂ŕ̥tḱos you’d just call the bear bing-bong, nobody would know what you meant, and the whole exercise would be pointless.
So one very sneaky way to avoid using a true name is to just tweak it a bit. There are rules for how you can tweak a name. If you change it
too much, nobody will know what you mean; if you don’t change it enough, people might assume you’re using the true name, which is what
you’re trying to avoid in the first place.
So to find the right balance, you can only change certain sounds for certain other sounds, in a strategy called dissimilation. Individual sounds
that make up words are called phonemes, and they come in groups. There are the nasal phonemes, which are sounds that are made by
releasing air through your nose, like "m" and "n." The consonants "k" and "g," and "b" and "p," are pairs: they’re produced very, very similarly
in the mouth. Vowels like "oh" and "oo" are similar, too; just minor adjustments to the position of your tongue.
The strategies get more in-depth than that, and we have to venture further to decode "dagnabbit," which is, of course, a taboo deformation
of the word "goddammit." To do that, let’s break down "goddammit" into two parts: "god" and "dammit."
One strategy is called metathesis, which is pronounced with an emphasis on the second syllable, like "meh-TAGH-thuh-sis." ("Agh" is the
way I’m typing the vowel sound in "cat.") Metathesis is a switch of sounds within a word. Pretty simple: instead of "god," you’d say "dog."
Use some dissimilation for the vowel – change "ah" to "agh" – and you end up with "dag." Excellent! Halfway done!
"Nabbit" as a switch for "dammit" is more fun, because we get to use both dissimilation and metathesis. "M" and "n," remember, are paired
together, very similar sounds. So swap out one for another. "D" and "b" are also pairs: they’re called stops, which means that you halt the
movement of air from your mouth. So using dissimilation, we get to "bannit." Pretty good, but not great. What if we use metathesis to swap
the position of our new consonants within that word? Ah ha! Nabbit. Put them together and we’ve figured out dagnabbit.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-does-dagnabbit-mean