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How did "poll" ("top" or "head") semantically extend to "cut someone's hair"?

English Language & Usage Asked on March 30, 2021

I don’t understand this semantic extension (cf. Etymonline) because it hasn’t happened to "head" or "horn"! Unquestionably, "head" isn’t the same thing as "cut someone’s hair".

Poll Definition and Meaning – Bible Dictionary

Neither shall they shave their heads, nor suffer their locks to grow long; they shall only POLL their heads. ( Ezekiel 44:20 )

E.g. you can’t replace "poll" with "head", because "head" doesn’t mean "cut someone’s hair".

Neither shall they shave their heads, nor suffer their locks to grow long; they shall only HEAD??? their heads. ( Ezekiel 44:20 )

poll [13]

‘Head’ is the original and central
meaning of poll, from which all its modern uses
have derived. The ‘voting’ sort of poll, for
instance, which emerged in the 17th century, is
etymologically a counting of ‘heads’, and the poll tax is a ‘per capita’ tax. The verb poll
originally meant ‘cut someone’s hair’, a clear
extension of the notion of ‘top’ or ‘head’ (the
derived pollard [16] denotes an ‘animal with its
horns removed’ or a ‘tree with its top branches
cut off’); this later developed to ‘cut evenly
across’, which is what the poll of deed poll
means (originally it was a legal agreement cut
evenly across, signifying that only one person
was party to it – agreements made between two
or more people were cut with a wavy line).

Word Origins (2005 2e) by John Ayto. p 385 Left column.

2 Answers

From Wikipedia: "Polled livestock are livestock without horns in species which are normally horned."Polled livestock
For an Old Testament prophet living in the time of animal sacrifice, it doesn't seem too much of a stretch for him to refer to cut hair as polled.
Just a few verses earlier he refers to the "uncircumcised in heart".

Answered by gorlux on March 30, 2021

Compare bald head, and bald. I suppose you can synchronically form to boldly bald someone where no man has balded before.

I guess to poll may be similar. So far my thoughts a priori. This mostly disagrees with the quote that clearly distinguishes shaving from to poll, unless they distinguished only shaving the mustache specifically. If the quote is far removed from the original word (certainly not of biblical age), it might be indecisive.

The Ayto entry may have followed the written evidence, without giving too much consideration to semantics because it's actually not too difficult.

For analogy, consider a) German Schopf. As far as I understand it, that's lexically hair, a tuft or tail, but figuratively the whole head, metaphorically too (e.g. you have to grab the luck by the Schopf). b) Cp. Frisur "hair-do", frisieren "to do sb. hair", Friseur "coiffeur". Admittedly that's rather abstract, still, not exactly top-hair, but French frisure at least may mean "curl" (seems to come from Germanic but further origin uncertain, as are a surprising number of hairy words).

So (a) and (b) together allow to infer (head ~ top hair) > (head dresser ~ barbar) > (to head ~ to do hair) and all the same for poll.

By the way, I guess we may cp. shape and scape.

Answered by vectory on March 30, 2021

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