In a word

When I was growing up, deep in the last millennium, and heard the word kid, I knew immediately it meant a young goat. Lovely, endearing little creatures which then became adults and fearsome. Not unlike humans.

I remember accompanying my father once as he sought out a mad buck goat of ours that was rampaging through the locality. He was going to shoot it. I was a small boy and wasn’t sure whether to be more afraid of my father-with- the-gun, or the goat.

My father’s record with the gun was not impressive. I witnessed him, literally, with a blast from the same gun, knock a solitary feather off a magpie that had been harassing our hen-house . Eventually, we cornered the goat, which was executed on the spot. My father learned a major lesson from that event. Small boys and animal executions do not mix.

Later, I learned that a kid was also an American child. Soon it included even happy (and otherwise) Irish children. Now it even applies to teenagers of all nationalities, though, let's face it, they belong to a world of their own.

You will be glad to know that kid originally did mean the young of a goat and comes from the Old Norse kið meaning young goat, also German kitze, Danish and Swedish kid.

You may be surprised to know its extended meaning, to include child, was first recorded as slang in the 1590s and became established in informal usage by the 1840s when it also applied to young thieves.

But what of kidnap? It is believed to have originated in English from the 1680s. The novel Kidnapped was written by Robert Louis Stevenson two centuries later, in 1886.

The kid bit is clear, but nap? This word (kidnap) was raised with me recently by a reader named Leonard, from Sallins, Co Kildare, whose surname I cannot make out (at last another with handwriting as bad as my own).

Well, it appears that nap is not a nap at all but a variant on nab, meaning "to catch (someone), to seize, lay hold of". It survives only in kidnap and is believed to have its origins in the Norwegian nappe; Swedish nappa, to catch, snatch; Danish nappe, to pinch, pull; and the Middle English napand, grasping, greedy. And, by any other name, as sweet! inaword@irishtimes.com