hamstring

Hamstring is an anatomical term that now commonly refers to any of the three large tendons and assoc‌​‍​‍​‌​‌​‍​‍​‍​‍​‌​‍​‍​‍​‍​‌​‍​‍​‌​‌​‌​‍​‌​‍​‌​‍​‍​‍​‌​‍​‌​‍​‍iated muscles at the back of the human knee — the semitendinosus, semimembranosus, and biceps femoris — and, by extension, to the verb meaning to cripple, to disable, or to undermine the effectiveness of a person, plan, or institution. The word is a compound of two Old English elements: ham, meaning the hollow or bend behind the knee, and string, meaning a cord or tendon. It has nothing etymologically to do with the cured pork called ham, though the two nouns became identical in form by the early modern period and still confuse speakers who assume the tendons were named for the cut of meat. Hamstring belongs to the Germanic branch of Indo-European, and its elements carry the record of a very old body-part vocabulary preserved across the North Sea languages.

The first element, Old English hamm, is attested from the earliest period (Bosworth and Toller list it in Ælfric's Glossary, c. 1000) with the meaning "the part of the leg behind the knee, the hollow of the knee, the crook of the leg." Outside the body, hamm also meant a piece of land enclosed by a bend of a river or stream (still surviving in English place-names such as Buckingham, Nottingham, Rotherham, Oldham, Durham, and the district of Hammersmith in London), because both senses share the idea of a crook or bend. The Proto-Germanic ancestor is reconstructed as *hamma- (bend of the knee, ham of an animal), cognate with Old Norse höm (haunch, back of the thigh), Middle Dutch hamme (ham, back of the knee), Old High German hamma (haunch, back of the knee), and probably with Greek knēmē (κνήμη, shin, leg below the knee) through a PIE root *konh₂-mo- or *knām- (leg, shin). The meat-sense of ham — the salted thigh of a pig — is a specialisation of the same word: the ham of the pig is the back part of the thigh, taken from the animal's "bend of the knee." The two senses diverged in culinary and anatomical use, but share the same origin.

The second element, string, comes from Old English streng (cord, rope, line, sinew), from Proto-Germanic *strangiz, and is cognate with German Strang, Dutch streng, Old Norse strengr, ultimately from a PIE root *strenk-/*streng- "to draw tight." In Old and Middle English streng could mean any taut cord — bowstring, harpstring, sinew, tendon — and this sinew sense is the one preserved in compounds such as hamstring, drawstring, heartstrings, and apron strings. The combined noun hamstring therefore meant, transparently in Old English and early Middle English, "the tendon behind the knee." Its earliest attestations in the compounded form date to the early sixteenth century; it appears in a medical treatise by Thomas Phaer (c. 1545) and in agricultural handbooks soon after. Andrew Boorde's Breviary of Health (1547) discusses the hamstrings among the sinews of the leg.

By the late sixteenth century the verb was established in a grim literal sense: to hamstring a horse or an ox was to cut the sinews behind its hocks, rendering it permanently lame. The practice was used in warfare to disable enemy cavalry and in rustling to prevent livestock from being driven away. Shakespeare uses the figure in Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), and the word appears in English military manuals throughout the seventeenth century. The figurative sense — to cripple a policy, a reform, an argument, or an opponent — is in place by the mid-seventeenth century and becomes the dominant modern meaning. The King James Bible (1611) does not use hamstring itself, but the related verb hough (also meaning to cut the hamstrings) appears in Joshua 11:6 and 2 Samuel 8:4, describing the ancient Israelite practice of houghing captured Canaanite horses. Cognates of the anatomical sense exist in Dutch hamspier, German Kniekehlensehne (literally "knee-hollow-sinew"), and Swedish hälsena (though these are compound descriptions rather than inherited forms of hamstring as a unit).

In modern usage hamstring denotes, in everyday speech, the belt of tendons and muscles running from the ischial tuberosity to just below the knee — its injury is one of the most common in sprint athletics, and "pulled hamstring" has entered general vocabulary through football, cricket, and athletics commentary, so much so that broadcasters routinely use the word without explanation. Medically, the muscles of the posterior thigh (semitendinosus, semimembranosus, long and short heads of biceps femoris) are sometimes called the hamstring group, and hamstring strain or hamstring tear is a standard injury code in sports medicine. The figurative verb is fully alive in political and journalistic prose: budgets are hamstrung, legislation is hamstrung by amendment, armies are hamstrung by poor logistics, courts are hamstrung by procedural rules. The past participle hamstrung (rather than the regular hamstringed) preserves a minor irregularity: it is formed by analogy with strung, the past of string, even though in the original compound the verbal element was the denominal "to cut the hamstring." The place-name element ham (enclosed land in a river bend) remains one of the most common endings on the English landscape, from Birmingham and Nottingham down to small villages like Ham in Kent and Wiltshire — a silent reminder that the tendon behind the knee and the bend of a river were once the same word.