Etymon #56
Slip before spike
The word entered English in 1940. Its first recorded use appears in a syndicated newspaper column by the American novelist Katharine Brush, who noted that radio broadcasters had two words for an on-air mistake. A small one they called a fluff. A bad one they called by this word. Behind the English lay Yiddish and German, though the precise route is uncertain.
Possibly from Yiddish, itself drawing on German, though the precise route into American English remains disputed. The connection was noted as early as 1959, in Sponsor, a trade magazine for television and radio advertisers, which observed that the word probably came from a German or Yiddish word meaning to slip. From radio broadcasting it crossed into television engineering in the early 1950s, where it named a sudden interference in the picture signal.
Behind both languages lay a Proto-Germanic root, *glīdan, meaning to glide or slip. It named the sensation of smooth, unresisted movement across a surface. The same root gave Old English its word for gliding, recorded in Beowulf describing a ship moving across the open sea. It also gave Dutch glissen and the Frankish word that passed into French as glisser, meaning to slide.
GLIDE and GLISSADE share the same ancient root. GLIDE came directly into Old English from the Proto-Germanic root for slipping and gliding, and has been in the language since Beowulf. GLISSADE reached English in the nineteenth century from French, where the same root had travelled through the early Germanic settlers of northern France, naming first a sliding step in ballet and later a controlled descent down a snow slope.
