1295 Agnail

I ran across a weird word the other day and it made me wonder. I was looking in the dictionary for one word and, as is often the case, my eye was caught by another word altogether: “agnail,” a-g-n-a-i-l-. “Agnail,” I said to myself, I’ve never heard of such a thing. Curious, I read the definition.
It said, “1. A hangnail. 2. A painful swelling around a fingernail or toenail, a whitlow.” I’d never heard of a whitlow either and was tempted to look it up, but first, I was caught by the etymology after the definition. Turns out it comes from the Middle English agnail, which in turn comes from the Old English angnaegl, meaning “painful prick in the flesh.”
Aren’t words fun.
To me angnaegl sounds like a pirate, saying hangnail. “Yarr, I gots me a angnaegl.”
But it one of those interesting things about language that it grows away from and back to simplicity. You would think agnail would be a bastardized form of hangnail, mushed down by lazy usage over time, but it’s actually the reverse. Hangnail comes from agnail.
Because “ag” does sort of sound like “hang.” And hangnails often start with a ripped piece of flesh, when you bite or tear off a nail wrong, and it gets infected and swollen. And the ripped flesh is often hanging.
So folk etymology, as the dictionary puts it, transformed the word so it means more. The apparent reverse of the type of word development expressed in terms like “for shizzle.”
Angnaegl itself goes back even further, to Indo-European protowords, the absolute roots of language. The syllable angh means pain. Think anxiety, anguish, and even angina. Or the sound you make when you first rip off a nail.
Angh!....
America, ya gotta love it.