Fun with language

A couple words obtruded themselves upon my notice in the last week or two. First, a friend of mine was unfamiliar with the word "cull", which I used when talking about our church library and the need to do some weeding (a metaphor itself). He's not to be censured at all, of course, for not knowing the word. Give anyone a list of 100 vocabulary words and odds are that most folks will not know all of them. We all have lacunae in our vocabulary that seem odd to others. We'll consider the words themselves after the jump.

To return to "cull". After giving him the sense of the word in the context, I decided to look it up when I got home. Lo, and behold:

cull, v.¹

 1. trans. To choose from a number or quantity; to select, pick. Now most frequently used of making a literary selection. cull out: to pick out, select (arch.).

I would not have thought it was most commonly used with making literary selections, but there you go. And this is the oldest sense by a good 300 years, dating to the 14th century. The sense I knew it from and thought was oldest in my unthinking way was 4.b. referring to killing of animals, but the earliest reference given for that is only 1934.

The other word that came up was "upshot". I was already thinking about "cull", when in composing an e-mail at work I used "upshot" and began to wonder where it came from and what it originally meant. To the OED!

ˈupshot, n.

†1. A final shot in a match at archery; chiefly fig., a closing or parting shot. Obs.

From there it moved to mean the end or conclusion and eventually the result. First citation for the result? Shakespeare in Hamlet, 1604 about 70 years after the first citation of the first sense. So all kinds of fun stuff, but wait! Why "up-"? What does that have to do with being the last shot? What does the etymology say? "Etymology: up- prefix 1b."

Okay, off to that entry...

b.
(a) In the sense of ‘upwards’ Old English had compounds of up- with nouns, mainly derived from intransitive verbs, as up-cyme, -færeld, -ryne, -spring, -stige, rarely from transitive, as upwearp. Of these only upspring and upsty survived in Middle English, but a number of new formations were added, as the obsolete uparist, -brixle, -brud, -ras, -rist, and the surviving upbraid, -come, -rise, -set. Between 1450 and 1800 new formations are rare, the chief being upcast and upstir in the 16th cent., with upskip and upstart (as designations of persons) from the same period; also upshot (with variants -shoot and -shut), in which the force of the up- is not clear.

What, what? It's not clear why the "up-" is there in "upshot". No one knows why the last shot in archery matches was the "upshot". Fascinating; 480 odd years later, we're still using the word in a modified sense, but we have lost to the mists of time why it was formed the way it was in the first place.