Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
SNICKERSNEE
You are probably most familiar with this word for a large knife (pronounced SNICK-er-snee) from Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado: "As I gnashed my teeth, / When from its sheath I drew my snicker-snee."
But the word we have not from Japan but from the Netherlands. The Dutch steken, "to stab," and snijden, "to cut," appear to be the roots. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1727 entry from Abel Boyer's Dictionnaire Royal, "Snicker-snee (the Dutch way of fighting with pointed Knives)." The OED also lists an early eighteenth-century sense as a verb, "to fight with knives."
So it appears that the word was a noun and a verb for the fight before it developed its current sense of the weapon involved.
Knife itself we have from the Old Norse knifr, which became the Middle English knif. (The k was pronounced then.) The bodkin, a stiletto or instrument for making holes in cloth, was also a Middle English word, bodekin, from the fourteenth century. The cutlass, from the Middle French coutelas, came into English in the sixteenth century. The machete was lifted straight from Spanish in the sixteenth century. And the bowie knife is all-American, having been named in 1846 for James Bowie, soldier, slave trader, speculator, and Texas revolutionary.
To add an irrelevant detail, once when editing an article on the enduring popularity of the distinctive Malaysian edged weapon, I indulged myself in the headline, "A kris is still a kris."
Look sharp.
Example: From Ray Bradbury's Golden Apples of the Sun (1953): "Here we've come armed to the teeth, I with my snickersnee and Sam with his academic blunderbuss, but the victim has fled."