Despite all the myths about storks and red cabbages, we know where children come from. Words sometimes don’t, so in such a case you can fantasize about it. Lurven, for example, which we really only know from the expression ‘grab someone by the guts’, would be the same as trunk. And so the saying would actually mean as much as touching someone’s crotch, because trunk and penis are of course well matched in image and meaning. But what happened to the s of trunk in linguistic history? How is the eclipse month? Moreover, to grab someone by the guts means something different, namely to grab someone by the neck, to take someone by the collar, to take someone down.
Another explanation has been sought in the sound combination lu. That would represent something negative. Just look at the well-known words cock and lumble and the somewhat less common lubbert, a wimp or dummy, lubber, emasculate, lunde or lude, hesitate, hang out, lurk, lanky, and little, a little. But this explanation does not hold up either, because dick, for example, was not originally a protective word. It hit a pipe, through which water flowed, and that was later used as a comparison for penis. Moreover, if lu must necessarily be negative, why don’t we as speakers of Dutch automatically have unpleasant associations with air, loop and lust?
Wood with notch
In older texts, lurf does appear as a technical term for a piece of wood with a notch. Used in fishing or finch hunting to secure nets behind. But where such a stick is with people so that you can grab them by it, remains unclear for the time being. It might therefore be smarter to look at alternative expressions, such as grab someone by the rags or grab someone by the rags. We know what the rags are: ragged clothes. Scratching goes in the same direction. In the past, the word klad could also be used for loose-hanging clothing, or hanging rags.
Catching someone by the guts is not a new discovery. We find the expression as early as the middle of the 17th century, but lurf itself, except as a term for a specific piece of wood, has not been found so far. One way out may be to search in neighboring languages. There too, lurf and related words do not appear frequently, but we do find clues. In Middle English it says luff for a piece of a sail, in old German dialect texts we come lorfe† lorve and larva against. Larva stands for two completely different meanings. Also the larva known to us, but also mask, coming from an old Latin form. But the best clues are found in the Scandinavian languages. Norwegian has a word lurva ‘rag’, and the Swedish lurvig means ‘clothed in rags’. Lurf must therefore originally have struck ragged clothing as well.