2755: Piggyback Jul 6, 2024

It is typical that a familiar word will influence a less familiar word to more closely resemble it, sometimes to the detriment of the original. The word ‘piggyback’ has nothing to do with pigs in the way riding horseback obviously is related to horses. Instead, the phrase before it was ‘pickaback’ meaning “over one’s back”, though unlike ‘piggyback’ it was an adverb not a noun, i.e. “to be carried pickaback”. That, however, was also a corruption of an earlier term, “pick-pack”, and probably an example of emphatic reduplication, not adding semantic depth to ‘pack’—in the sense of something carried, not filling—that then morphed into the narrow, corrupted sense English has today.