Question: Can you tell me where the words "hick" and "hick town" come from?
Answer: The noun "hick" derives from the nickname "Hick," a shortened form of "Richard." The nickname, of course, is no longer used; we're all familiar with Rick and Dick, but who ever heard of Hick? Since "hick" has come to mean "an unsophisticated provincial person" and is nearly always derogatory, it's not hard to understand why it fell out of use as a friendly nickname. But in the Middle Ages "Hick" was just one of many rhyming nicknames that were established in popular use. Besides "Hick," for example, there was "Hob" for "Robert" (along with "Dob" and "Bob" and "Rob") and "Hodge" for "Roger." "Hob" survives now only as the name for a goblin ("hobgoblin"), while "hodge" ended up as a British term for a farm laborer.
Up to the 17th century, shortened names in general, in certain contexts, were used with a touch of derision, somewhat in the way we employ "Tom, Dick and Harry" today. One religious polemicist used "Hick, Hob and Hans" ("Hans" being short for "Johannes") in 1565 to generalize members of an opposing sect. Shakes-peare, in his play "Coriolanus," has the hero referring to the ordinary Roman citizens for whom he feels nothing but contempt as "Hob and Dick." Even much earlier, in the 14th century, we see Robert Bruce of Scotland referred to in a political ditty as "King Hob" and Richard II of England addressed as "Hick Heavyhead" in a poem criticizing his misrule.
But there's no reason to believe that "Hick" was less a friendly familiar name than "Dick" or "Rick" when used among acquaintances. It survives, after all, in the surname "Hickson" alongside "Dickson" and "Richardson." What isn't known is why "Hick" in particular ended up in 1700 as the word for "a silly country fellow" - the definition found in a dictionary of that time.
Nowadays the term is mostly American, having experienced something of a revival in this century. When used attributively, as in "hick town," it means simply "unsophisticated" or "provincial."
Question: My mother was a country schoolteacher in Colorado in the late '30s and early '40s. Within a stone's throw of the school were the teacher's living quarters that were referred to as the "teacherage." It was a tiny separate building provided by the school district. Recently, I attempted to find the word "teacherage" in several dictionaries, for the correct spelling, with no luck. Is there such a word? Perhaps it has no use in today's world, but since it was a big part of my childhood I would appreciate your help.
Answer: The word "teacherage" was popularized in the early years of this century, when state and local boards of education began taking an interest in providing some sort of suitable housing, an alternative to boarding with local families, as an inducement for rural teachers. More ofteacherages, were in the West, but teacherages were eventually known all the way to New England. Teacherages also became widely established in western Canada, and we have evidence that they existed in England as well. The first recorded use of "teacherage" that we know of is from a 1916 American source.
The "-age" in "teacherage" is in imitation of the "-age" in "parsonage," the name of a parson's residence. First used by the French,
from whom it was borrowed into English in the 13th century, "-age" is derived from Latin "-aticum," a noun suffix denoting association. (The Latin suffix is still seen in the English word "viaticum," meaning "an allowance for traveling expenses" or "provisions for a journey."). Originally, "parsonage" was used to denote the living of a parson, that is, the ecclesiastical office as well as its attached endowment for living expenses that included a residence, the parsonage-house. The word for the residence itself was eventually shortened to "parsonage."