"Log"

Where on Earth did this word come from? Short and odd, "log" at first seems to be an English one-off, like "dog" or "boy," with no ascertainable relatives hiding in the Etymological Underbrush. John Ayto begins his entry this way: "Log is a mystery word. It first turns up (in the sense 'felled timber') towards the end of the 14th century, but it has no ascertainable relatives in any other language. Nor is it altogether clear how the sense 'ship's record' came about."

Contrast this with Skeat's redoubtable oaken confidence in his entry, written a century ago: "Log, a block, piece of wood. (Scand.) The vowel has been shortened. Cf. Norw. laag, a fallen trunk; Icel. lāg, a felled tree, log; Swed. dial. låga, a felled tree, a tree that has been blown down. So called from its lying on the ground, as distinguished from the living tree."

Well! What are we to make of this? It makes intuitive sense that logs, what with their lazing about on cozy beds of pine needles, would take their name from the Indo-European base *legh- or *logh-, whence our "lie" and the Swedes' ligga.

But is this all too simple, an incidence of wishful folk-etymological thinking? Did our linguistic forebears really think of logs as "lyers" lolling around on the ancient forest floor, or is that an answer colored by hindsight? Why the dimming of confidence in the hundred-odd years between Skeat and Ayto's books?

After all, Ayto notes that "law" is something "laid down" (in good order), coming from the Germanic base for "put" (*lag-). (This is nicely counterintuitive: ask a contemporary person to talk about what "law" is, and they're unlikely first to describe it as something that's been "put into good order," on the forest floor or anywhere else. This I can attest to first-hand as a lawyer: the practice of law depends not on the law's being in good order, but in its unfailing ambiguities and messiness.)

So, in my gut I prefer Skeat's cocksure explanation to Ayto's wilted mystery. Perhaps that's because I'm a fuzzy-headed know-nothing, eager to discern meaning and logic in the random patterns of verbal tea-leaves, and Skeat's explanation thus just sounds right to the likes of me.

Alas, the OED sets me and Prof. Skeat to rights:

[Late ME. logge; of obscure origin; cf. the nearly synonymous CLOG n., which appears about the same time. Not from ON. lág felled tree (f. OTeut. *laeg-, ablaut-variant of *leg- LIE v.1), which could only have given *low in mod.Eng. The conjecture that the word is an adoption from a later stage of Scandinavian (mod.Norw. laag, Sw. dial. låga), due to the Norwegian timber-trade, is not without plausibility, but is open to strong objection on phonological grounds. It is most likely that clog and logge arose as attempts to express the notion of something massive by a word of appropriate sound. Cf. Du. log clumsy, heavy, dull; see also LUG n. and v. In sense 6 the word has passed from Eng. into many other langs.: F. loch, Ger., Da. log, Sw. logg.]

Thus do I shame-facedly accept the stinging rebuke of the OED's "strong objection." And on "phonological grounds," no less! Are there any grounds more hallowed?