The Heimlich maneuver was named after Dr. Henry Jay Heimlich, who developed the procedure in 1974. That's a German surname originating in fifteenth-century Switzerland which was originally a nickname for a secretive person and comes from an adjective meaning "secret" or "private". -Lich is just an suffix used for forming adjectives (eventually coming from Proto-Germanic likaz and Proto-Indo-European leyg, "like") and heim derives from the Proto-Germanic word haimaz, meaning "home" - the connection was that people do private things in their homes. Finally, that derives from Proto-Indo-European koymos, or "village". After rapidly being popularized in the 1970s and 1980s, literary usage of the phrases Heimlich and Heimlich maneuver peaked in 1995 and have been declining since.
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judith Thurman
5/12/2020 10:55:51 am
I love your blog. You might be interested to note that in Freud's wonderful essay on the uncanny--uheimlich, in German--he
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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