The word aitchbone (H-bone) was originally the nache bone, the root of which through Old French comes from the Latin for buttock-natis .
In modern times the aitchbone is the rump bone of beef or the associated cut.
Through use of language, which I assume was conveyed verbally as opposed to written, ‘A nache bone’ became ‘An aitch bone’.
Likewise the phrase, ‘For the nonce’, came from the original, ‘for then once’.
It means for one occasion.
What is the name of this phenomenon and are there other examples?
And while we are at it, where does the meaning for a nonce being a paedophile come from?
HM Corrections slang. Prisoners have an odd code of honor. There are justifiable crimes like assault, robbery and even murder that people can say they had to commit. And then there are nonsense crimes that can never be justified and that originally included vadalism and that type of thing. But at the top of the list of nonsense crimes were sexual assaults on children.
Over time nonce or nonsense criminal evolved from encompassing all nonsense crime to being restricted to just kiddy fiddlers. I have caught the word ‘nonce’ being used to refer to an arsonist in a film from the late 50s/early 60s, but I can’t remember the name of it.
I can’t remember the name of the process off the top of my head, but it’s a common phenomenon for an initial letter to be attached to the word ahead of it. This happens often with an initial ‘n’.
For example, an apron was once a ‘napron’, an adder was a ‘nadder’ and an orange was a ‘norange’, from the Arabic ‘naranj’.
On preview: This site tells me that an umpire was a ‘numpire’ and the process is called ‘false splitting’, but I’m sure I’ve heard it called something else.
I can’t believe it. It’s been years since I’ve been able to provide original information to a GQ before somebody smarter and faster beat me to it! I’ll probably lose to a cross post though.
Anyway, according to “The Word Detective”, the process is call metanalysis.
Oranges were probably never called noranges in English. According to American Heritage, they lost the ‘n’ already in France, where the italian melarancio became pume orenge, under influence of the city Orange, which was prominent in the orange trade.
(As an aside, this is the same Orange which gave rise to the Dutch royal familly, and those Orangemen in Nirthern Ireland. (Through even more convoluted mechanisms.))