THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE ADJECTIVE SKROZEKOZNY REVISITED

This short paper is devoted to the etymology of the rare adjective skrozekozny ‘≈ malicious, causing trouble’, which was attested in the “Lamentations of the Northern Region” written down in the 19th century by E. V. Barsov. The etymological solutions proposed earlier by O. D. Surikova and T. V. Shalaeva presuppose that the second stem of this adjective is identical to the noun kozni. On the contrary, we attempt to prove that the similarity between the words skrozekozny and kozni can only be the result of folk etymological rapprochement. We assert that, considering the meaning the fi rst part skroz(e)- is ‘through’, the second part of a compound word should naturally designate the substance through which something passes. This assertion is substantiated, in particular, by the fact that in Russian dialects there is a word skrozzemelny with the main range of meanings like ‘observant, insightful, knowledgeable’ (based on the metaphor ‘seeing through the earth’). Accordingly, for the word skrozekozny we reconstruct the original form *skrozekozhny, literally ‘penetrating the skin (like parasitic insects)’ with subsequent distant assimilation z...zh → z...z. The issue of the relationship between the adjective skrozekozny and the epithet koznekozny with an identical or close meaning, also attested in Olonetsky laments, is briefl y considered as well. The most probable scenario is that the “opaque” form skrozekozny (occasionally?) transformed into a form with an intensive reduplication similar to the model of vekovechny ‘everlasting’.