An entire cycle of Medieval French epic poems is devoted to the adventures of Reynard the Fox, a hero who was so popular that he gave his name ("renard") to all the foxes in France. This swashbuckling fox also inspired an Opera-ballet by Igor Stravinsky among other retellings of his myth in film and literature.
Metaphorically speaking, humans can absorb the fox archetype's qualities like sympathetic magic. To "out fox" is to defeat a superior opponent through cleverness. Someone who is "crazy like a fox" is only concealing their shrewdness, feigning irrationality or stupidity. Likewise, to "smell a fox" is to become suspicious of another person's motives, and one should always be mindful of letting the "fox guard the hen house."
On the other hand, the fox can also be sexual totem. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, both an attractive man or woman can be described as a "fox," although I personally haven't heard the term used since Wayne's World was in theaters. Apparently, according to the same source, you have to be a female (human or fox) to be a "vixen."
In this edition of the Word of the Moment, we'll consider in greater detail the history of the word "fox," as well as "vixen," and in doing so follow our swift-footed animal friend all the way down to the roots of the Indo-European language family tree.
The word 'fox' comes from the oldest strata of words in our language. Found even in Old English, its pronunciation has remained more or less the same over the centuries. As with most old words in English, it has cognates in most of the modern Germanic languages: Dutch "vos," German "Fuchs," and the Frisian "foks."
"Vixen," which originally only meant a female fox (like "mare" for female horse or "doe" for female deer), is interesting for what it show us about the historical changes in our language. Old English used to have a robust gender system which distinguished a masculine "fox" and a feminine "fyxen." A similar system survived in our cousin German, where "Fuchs" is masculine, but to derive the feminine you change the vowel and add "-in" to get "Füchsin."
| Male Fox | Vowel change | Suffix | Female Fox |
| (Old English) fox | O → Y | add "-en" | fyxen |
| (Modern German) Fuchs | U → Ü | add "-in" | Füchsin |
Overtime, pronunciation and spelling changes turned "fyxen" into "vixen," but it remains the only modern remainder of the Old English feminine suffix "-en." Sort of like our language's version of a vestigial tail.
None of this historical discussion, however, explains why a human female can be called a "vixen." The term originally conveyed only the sense of a mean and harsh tempered woman, although it seems to have been associated with sexual misbehavior (at least from one perspective) as long ago as 1621 in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy: "She is a foole, a nasty queane, a slut, a fixen, a scolde." In any case, today the term tends to connote a more unequivocally sexual sense, perhaps because of an association with a "foxy" woman. The word also seems less negative, but that may have as much to do with differing cultural attitudes about the sexuality of the double X-chromosome crowd.
However the association with sexuality came about for both "fox" and "vixen," it is appropriate (if perhaps coincidental) as foxes have long been associated with seduction in mythology. Chinese fox spirits or "húli jīng" (狐狸精) can appear as beautiful young women, or sometimes possess their bodies. Like the Japanese "kitsune" or the Korean "kumiho," these spirits can be seductive or romantic, harmlessly mischievous or sadistically cruel. Of course, isn't that the way it always is with supernatural beings?
If we continue to excavate our word's history past Old English, we will uncover Proto-Germanic, the prehistoric language from which English and Norwegian and German (and Frisian and Gothic and Afrikaans, etc) descend. And the Proto-Germanic word for fox is *fuH, where the capital-H represents a voiceless velar fricative as in the last sound of the Scottish "loch," German "Bach" or Klingon "nuqneH." (The asterisk, by the way, tells us that this is not a word that anyone has heard or read in a book, but a theoretical word reconstructed on the basis of similarities between Germanic languages).
During the 19th century, a scholar by the name of Jacob Grimm was working on just this sort of work, reconstructing a common German mother-language, looking for similarities between the various dialects spoken in the German states. He noticed something else, too. There were suggestive similarities between German languages and Greek and Latin as well.
Grimm's Law is a list of sound changes that Germanic languages underwent when they split off from the common ancestor they share with Greek, Latin and the Romance languages. For example, if a Latin word has a P, then it's Germanic counterpart will have an F in the same location. Likewise, a T will show up as a TH:
| Latin | English | |
| PATER | → | FATHER |
Applying Grimm's law to our Proto-Germanic *-fuH, gives us the Proto-Indo-European *-puk, which is close enough to the Tocharian B "puka" and the Sanskrit "puccha," (both of which mean tail) to suggest a common ancestry that extends all the way back to the early migrations of prehistoric peoples into Europe and India and the Middle East.
Although Jacob Grimm is well known to linguists, he is far more famous for the book he wrote with his brother: Grimm's Fairy Tales, which contains a half dozen fox-related folktales, not to mention such Germanic legends as Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. And, although these Disney heroines could hardly be described as vixens, the anthropomorphic hero of 1973's animated Robin Hood bears a striking resemblance to a certain medieval, swashbuckling trickster-fox named Reynard.
Research for this article came from the Oxford English Dictionary, Random House Dictionary (2009) and the Online Etymological Dictionary, as well as Vladimir Orel's A Handbook of Germanic Etymology, Wikipedia and oracles obtained by examining the viscera of a sacrificial bull. All rights are reserved and no results are guaranteed. If you would like to be notified whenever a new Word of the Moment is posted, send an eMail to Schendo.
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