quword 趣词
Word Origins Dictionary
- feisty
- feisty: [19] Feisty, nowadays a colloquial Americanism for ‘quarrelsome’ or ‘spirited’, originated in Middle English as a term for a ‘farting dog’. It goes back to the now obsolete English verb fist ‘fart’, which came ultimately from Indo-European *pezd- (source also of Latin pēdere ‘break wind’, whence English petard ‘small bomb’ [16], as in ‘hoist with one’s own petard’); like *perd-, the Indo-European ancestor of English fart, this was probably of imitative origin.
In the 16th and 17th centuries the expression fisting dog, literally ‘farting dog’, was applied contemptuously to a ‘mongrel’ or ‘cur’. This eventually became shortened to feist, and (mongrels being notoriously combative) feisty was born.
=> fizzle, petard - feist (n.)
- also fist, "a breaking wind, foul smell, fart," mid-15c. (Old English had present participle fisting, glossing Latin festiculatio), a general West Germanic word with cognates in Middle Dutch veest, Dutch vijst; see feisty.