They say it's not easy to find a good mentor, but my experience suggests otherwise. In my writing life alone, I've run into bunches of superb mentors. They include Alexis O’Neill, Kathi Appelt, Andrew Karre, Kathleen Duey, Anne R. Allen, Nick Thomas, the inimitable Patti Gauch & heaps more. 

Mentor is defined as a wise & trusted teacher. ​These folks certainly fit that bill.

The Greek name, Mentor first appeared in Homer’s Odyssey, Mentor was the name of a friend and advisor who just happened to be the goddess Athena in disguise. There’s nothing like advice from a deity. It’s likely that Homer based his character’s name on the Greek word mentos, which meant intent, purpose, spirit or passion. Mentos traces its roots back to Proto-Indo-European & Sanskrit, & was used to mean one who thinks & one who admonishes.

Thoughtfulness, intent, purpose, spirit, & passion (& admonishment when necessary) still figure highly in the role of a mentor. Even the goddess/god connection fits at times. Writerly friends, jump on any chance you have to work with any of the folks listed above.

Good followers, what qualities do you look for in a mentor? What mentors have helped you along your path & what qualities do you most appreciate in them? 

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My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, dictionary.com, & the OED.

At first, the etymology of the word fiction doesn’t seem to hold any surprises. The word showed up in English in the 1300s meaning something invented. It came from the French word ficcion, which meant ruse, invention or dissimulation. Ficcion came from the Latin word fictio, a fashioning or feigning.

Nothing particularly unexpected there.

But wait. The Latin word fictio’s source is the Latin verb, fingere, to devise, form or shape, It comes from a Proto-Indo-European verb meaning to knead, to build, to form;
all the things one might do with dough.

In fact, through a long series of side-by-side mutations, the word fiction and the word dough come from the same root (as do the words lady & paradise).

It’s the rare writer who’s rolling in the dough (that meaning kicked in about 1851), but the literal side of the breadmaking connection offers some intriguing ways to think about writing fiction:

Bread baking involves simple, everyday ingredients, mixed into something new. 

Without leavening, it’s not bread. 

It needs to be proofed. 

It needs a bunch of manhandling.

It has to rest between stages.

It’s best when shared with others.

Dear followers, what connections have I missed?

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My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, take our word, & the OED.

Last week’s post dealt with the etymology of the word lady. But if lady originally referred to the gal who made the bread, when and how did lady get a promotion to become the gal who watched the servant bake the bread while the lady nibbled bonbons? 

In terms of written English, I can’t find evidence of lady referring to a woman who was likely to get her hands mussed in such things as dough. In the year 1000, the word was used to mean both a mistress in charge of servants or slaves & a woman who rules over subjects, to whom feudal homage is due. However (as noted in the previous post), lady was constructed of parts that meant one who kneads bread. Interestingly, lord literally translates to he who guards the loaves. These two etymologies together suggest that bread may have metaphorically represented home (being the staff of life & all).

The word lady takes up nearly three pages of the print version of The Oxford English Dictionary, offering eighteen shades of meaning for the noun & two for the verb (to make a lady of, & to render lady-like or feminine). Some notable first sightings of various meanings of lady include:

900 – Lady in reference to the Virgin Mary
1205 – lady recognized as a more courteous term than woman
1206 – lady as a synonym for wife or consort (though “yeah, she’s my old lady,” didn’t kick in until the late 60s)
1489 – lady as the queen in chess
1611 – lady as a kind of butterfly (later to become the painted lady)
1704 – lady as the calcerous structure in the stomach of a lobster (I don’t make this stuff up)

& the list goes on.

Trusty followers, what thoughts have you regarding lady, its checkered history & various permutations?


My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, OxfordDictionaries.com, The Chicago Tribune & the OED.

Who would imagine the words dough, lady, & paradise would have a common root?

The connection hearkens back some 6000 years to the Proto-Indo-European word dheigh, dough. In a mere sixty centuries, dheigh morphed into the following words in the following ways:

Lady – At some level, the word lady is redundant. It certainly is breadworthy, It was constructed of the Old English term for one who kneads dough, dage, plus the Old English word for loaf, hlaf. A hlafdage was originally one who made loaves of bread. Over time, the pronunciation and spelling morphed to lady.

Paradise – Half this word started as the Greek combining form peri-, meaning around. We modern English speakers know this bit of Greek from the words perimeter, periscope, period, & periphery. The second part of paradise is our old Proto-Indo-European friend, dheigh, which may have started out meaning dough, but in time added the meaning to form or to build. History suggests the word paradise (form or build around) refers to a wall formed around such a garden or treasured place. 

A bonus thought – in another branch of this twisted linguistic tree, the term dheigh or dough, also came to be spelled dey & referred to the servant who made the dough. We still see vestiges of dey in the modern name Doubleday, servant of the twin. 

Of course, Proto-Indo-European was never written down. It’s a language reconstructed by linguists, “believed to have been spoken well before 4000 B.C. in a region somewhere to the north or south of the Black Sea” (OxfordDictionaries.com). Though hard-working forensic linguists would disagree, the very existence of Proto-Indo-European as a language adds up to well-researched conjecture…

My fellow junior etymologists, what comments do you have regarding bread-making servants, or redundant ladies, or the wall around paradise? Offer up some well-researched (or completely non-researched) conjecture.


My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, OxfordDictionaries.com, take our word, & the OED.

It occurred to me the other day that based on their word parts, substance & understand could almost be synonyms, or might at least work in concert to tell an interesting story. Doesn’t sub-mean under? Don’t stand & stance mean pretty much the same thing?

The word understand takes up a page and a half in the Oxford English Dictionary with its fourteen shades of meaning. Understand comes from the Old English word, understandan. Stand means exactly what one might expect, to stand, but under - in Old English - meant something other than the under we Modern English speakers know today. Instead, it meant in the midst of. So to understand something is to stand in its midst. 

Substance takes about two full pages in the Oxford English Dictionary. Like understand, it has fourteen shades of meaning. Substance comes from the Latin substare, literally, to stand firm. Its primary meaning now is essential nature or essence. 

Understand & substance aren’t synonyms at all, but together, they inspire some pondering.

To understand something’s substance, one must stand in the midst of its essence. When we really want to grasp something, isn’t that exactly what we do? Don’t we surround ourselves as much as possible with whatever it is, then stand there, & breathe it all in? 

Some of the substance I’m working on understanding this year includes (but isn’t limited to):

            -baking a loaf of bread with those nifty, sourdough-ish 
                holes in it,
            -stepping up my guitar-playing skills, &
            -improving my methods of novel revision.
     

Followers, what substance are you throwing yourself into the midst of? What essence has got your attention? 

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My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, OxfordDictionaries.com, & the OED.

Like a good teaching friend of mine, I find myself cringing when someone addresses women or a mixed group of people as, guys or dudes. Language changes & grows, & I find its growth fascinating. Still, I cringe. So why not dive into guys & dudes.

This particular change seems to have started on this side of the pond. The American-based Merriam-Webster's entry on guy lists guy's first meaning as man or fellow, & its second as person, while England-based Collins Dictionary waits until the  third definition to note that Americans sometimes address a group of people, whether male or female, as guys.

Dude first appeared in print in New York in 1883, meaning a fastidious man & member of “an aesthetic craze” that was popular at the time. By 1921, dude had lost any hint of luster, and was being used in the country in a derogatory fashion to label city slickers ignorant of country ways. Dudes showed up to work the cattle, their faces shaved, hair oiled, in comically exaggerated hats and chaps. By the 1940s, dude was given a positive shine by zoot suiters acknowledging one another’s trendiness. In the 1960s dude became cool on three fronts: the African American scene, the jazz scene, & the surfing scene. Since then, dude has grown from a mere noun to both noun & interjection meaning nearly anything the speaker intends. Part of this recent change is dude's loss of gender specificity. Dude! Look at Travis & Edna run. Those dudes are fast.

Guy hit the printed page much earlier in 1350, meaning guide or leader. It’s related to the English word guide & the Italian name, Guido. Guy established its nautical meaning by 1603, a rope used to guide a load being raised or lowered. Another meaning of guy was inspired by the infamous Guy Fawkes, instigator of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot (a plan to explode not only the King, but the entire Parliament). This meaning referred to the burning effigies of Guy Fawkes paraded through the streets of London once the plot was revealed. Guy reached the New World in 1836, meaning a grotesquely or poorly dressed man, believed to have been born of all those shabbily constructed effigies. It wasn’t until 1898 that guy simply meant a man or fellow. Today, there are those who argue it maintains that meaning, yet modern American usage has removed any sense of gender. Hey guys, check out that shabby, flaming effigy. Dude!

So followers, what are your thoughts on whether guy has maintained its original gender association, or whether dude is mostly complimentary? Or if you’d like to open up a true can of worms, what do you have to say about guys & dudes?

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My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, urbandictionary.com,  OxfordDictionaries.com, & the OED.

This week it’s time for a birdwalk inspired by a conversation with fellow writer Dennis Miller - a little wordplay – the spoonerism.

Spoonerisms are named after the Reverend William A. Spooner, who suffered from a speech disorder involving involuntary transposition of sounds in words, typically initial sounds. Though historians question the authenticity of many gaffes attributed to Reverend Spooner, lists of his gaffes typically include this bungled tribute to Queen Victoria, “Three cheers for our queer old dean!” 

In tribute to Reverend Spooner, those who enjoy playing with language have mercilessly tweaked any number of perfectly fine stories, many of which can be found on Matthew Goldman’s Goonerisms Spalore, the most well known being the many versions of Indercella (in which our unhortunate feroine attends a bancy fall and slops her dripper). 
For something a bit different, here’s Goldman’s take on the climax and denouement of another old fairy tale: 

“May I come in, and hee your sitty prome?" 

"Tho, Tho, a nousand times, Tho, " pied the crig, "Not by the chair of my hinny hin, hin!" 

"Then I'll huff, and I'll duff, and I'll hoe your blouse down," growled the wolf. 

And with that, the wolf chuffed up his peeks, blew the smith to housereens, and sat down to a dine finner of roast sau and pigerkraut.

If you haven’t indulged yourself in this manner before, take the hull by the borns & spoonerize the following list of random well-known names:

William Shakespeare
Judy Garland
Ella Fitzgerald
Trevor Noah
Marie Curie
Groucho Marx
Benito Mussolini
Virginia Woolf

Thanks for putting up with this week’s wirdbalk. Please comment with any favorite spoonerized names, or a spoonerization of your own name.


My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, Spoonerisms Galore, & the OED.

Last year I had the pleasure of producing The Long Steep Path, the audio version of an intriguing & inspirational book written by award winning author Catherine Ryan Hyde.  I really enjoyed recording & producing it, & spending some time with Catherine. Her earnest narration sets her book off perfectly. So why not look into the word record?

Both the noun & the verb showed up in English in the early 1300s, the noun meaning testimony committed to writing & the verb meaning to get by heart. We can see that heart in the second bit of the modern word record, as –cord. It comes to English through French, from the Latin –cordis, meaning heart (related to cardiac). We’ve hung onto that original meaning in terms like learn by heart. I like the fact that the folks who recorded records (whether vinyl, cassette, audiobook, CD or MP3) all offer us a little bit of heart.

It wasn’t until 1892 that the verb record meant to put sound or pictures on disks, though the noun record (with emphasis on the first syllable) meaning disk on which sounds & images have been recorded appeared as early as 1878.

This post is concise, as I’m hoping you’ll have time to zip on over to Audible to listen to a brief sample of Catherine reading from The Long Steep Path.


My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, OxfordDictionaries.com, & the OED.

In stuffy, book-filled offices all over the English speaking world, hard-working etymologists & Irish folklorists are duking it out over the source of the word leprechaun.

The word leprechaun involves the blending of Gaelic and Latin. The earliest written English record of the term occurred in 1604, spelled lubrican. This spelling - and a boatload of early alternate spellings - start with lu-. the Gaelic combining form for small. In Old Irish leprechaun was spelled luchorpan, which allows us to see a hint of the Latin part of this word (chor- or cor-, meaning body. This same combining form is used in the words corpuscle, corporation, Corpus Christi, and corporeal. So leprechaun translates simply to little body.

Irish folklorists, however, argue that because leprechauns are sprites known for making or repairing a single shoe, the name comes from leithbragan, which marries leith, meaning half to brag, (a form of brogue), or shoe.

While one source bestows leprechauns with little lisping, falsetto voices, another Irish tale defines the leprechaun as a pygmy sprite who always carries a purse containing a schilling. 

Despite all this information, if you're ever at a bar & someone sits at the next stool, slaps a single shoe onto th bar & begins repairing it while speaking in a lisping falsetto, &/or carrying a purse, it’s wisest to keep your assumptions to yourself. And isn’t that always true.

Good followers, what do you have to say about leprechauns, or about the wisdom of keeping one’s assumptions to oneself?

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My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, OxfordDictionaries.com, & the OED.

Inspired by my little recording/writing space out in the veggie garden (known as the shedio), I find myself intrigued by the etymologies (or lack thereof) of shed & its various synonyms.

Shed is of questionable parentage. It appeared in English in the 1400s. It may have its roots in the word shade, but no certain evidence has jumped forth into the sunlight to prove this theory.

Similarly, the term shack has no definite parentage. It first appeared in print in 1878. Some etymologists argue that it may be a variant of shake, or may have come from ramshackle (both of which predate it). Others claim it might have come from the Nahuatl word xacalli, wooden hut, through Mexican Spanish. Still nobody really knows from whence the word shack came.

The word hovel isn’t really a synonym for shack or shed, but a hovel is a small building, & I have a fondness for the word. I lived a year in a place friends & family referred to as "hovel sweet hovel." It was one of seven tiny, decrepit buildings near San Luis Obispo Creek. I had to duck to enter, it wasn't possible to close the bathroom door if one was sitting on the toilet, & the mushrooms growing from the floor were not an interior decorating decision. Hovel showed up in English back in the 1300s, meaning a vent for smoke, & within a century had come to mean a shed for animals. It wasn’t until the 1600s that it came to mean a rude or miserable cabin. This last definition is particularly apropos for my hovel. I learned afterward that the compound of seven hovels had been used in the 1940s to house the county’s Japanese residents as they waited to be delivered to internment camps. Misery indeed.

So, dear readers, please leave a comment with a tidbit of a tale regarding any shed, shack, or hovel experiences you’ve “enjoyed.” 

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My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, merriam-webster.com, & the OED.