 Read any news source these days, & you finish reading with more questions than you started with. So this post we're looking into questions.
Indira Gandhi said, “The power to question is the basis of all human progress,” whereas L.E. Landon wrote, “Curiosity is its own suicide.” The noun question came to English in the early 1200s, meaning a philosophical or theological problem. In the next century it added the meaning a difficulty or doubt, and by the 1500s we could use question as a verb. If we look back a bit further, things get a little dark. Question came from an Old French word meaning difficulty, problem, legal interrogation, or torture, which causes one to wonder about those Old French folk, as quaestionem, the Latin source of the Old French word, simply meant a seeking, a question, or judicial inquiry. Free of that more menacing shade of meaning are the words querulous & query, which came to English in the 1400s & 1500s as an adjective meaning quarrelsome & a noun meaning a question, from the Latin word quaerere, meaning to seek, strive, endeavor or demand. Query became a verb in the 1600s, meaning simply, to question. It would be fair to say that behind most questions & queries we find curiosity, a word that arrived in the language in the late 1300s, meaning both the desire to know or learn & careful attention to detail. Arriving about that same time was the word curious, which meant both inquisitive, & the somewhat less positive odd, anxious, & strange. During a spate in the 1700s when curious was seen to mean exciting curiosity, curious operated in genteel circles as a euphemism for erotic or pornographic. We’ll close off with author Fran Lebowitz’s addition to the conversation: “Children ask better questions than do adults. ‘May I have a cookie?’ ‘Why is the sky blue?’ and ‘What does a cow say?’ are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than ‘Where’s your manuscript?’ ‘Why haven’t you called?’ and ‘Who’s your lawyer?’” Please use the comments section for any questions (or answers) about questions. Big thanks to this week’s sources: The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women. Merriam Webster, Wordnik, Etymonline, & the OED.
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 Meet Amigo. He moved in about five years ago as one in a long line of my wife Ellen’s foster dogs (130+ & counting). Though many folks use the words rescue & foster interchangeably when it comes to animals, Though dictionaries might agree that Amigo became a rescue dog the minute Ellen determined he was too darned anxious to move in with anyone else, those in the Big World of Dog Care would argue that Amigo never became a rescue dog because he never made his way from our house to a rescue organization.
Foster came into English so early it was Old English, meaning food, nourishment, bringing up. It appears to have come from the Proto-Indo European word, pa, meaning to protect and feed. Pa also appears to be the source of the word food. In English, as early as the 1200s, foster meant to bring up a child with parental care. By the 1300s, foster added the meaning to encourage or help grow. These meanings apply pretty well to Amigo for the last five years (he's now about ten). He’s getting nourishment, both edible and emotional. He’s getting the parenting he hadn’t previously received, & he is definitely receiving encouragement. Though the dictionary doesn’t label fostering as temporary, it is considered temporary in the Big World of Dog Care. A foster dog is being nourished and encouraged by its foster family until a life-long home can be found. This doesn’t always work out (as Amigo & any number of other dogs who stayed with their foster families forever can argue). On the other hand, the verb rescue came to English from the French word rescorre in the 1200s, meaning to protect, keep safe, free, or deliver. The French word came from Latin, & is related to the word quash, (in simplified terms, rescue means ex-quash). The associated noun showed up in English about a century after the verb. Though it could be informally said that Ellen rescued Amigo from the pound, those in the Big World of Dog Care save the word rescue for the 501c3 non-profit groups that pull critters out of pounds and shelters, house them & promote them to those who might eventually adopt them. Sounds a lot like fostering, but to all those hardworking people shuffling animals around, there’s a big difference. Any thoughts about rescuing, fostering, or quashing? Leave them in the comments section. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Wordnik, Etymonline, & the OED.  We have some intriguing ways of referring to those in our world who hold more wealth than the rest of us.
Elite came to English in 1823 from French, meaning a choice or select body, the best part. Its French source came from a Latin word meaning choose. Swank came to the language in 1913, meaning classy or stylish. It appears to have come from the Proto-Germanic word meaning to swing, turn or toss. Linguists suggest that those with means may have been perceived to swagger, an act that might involve a bit of swinging, turning, or tossing. Nobody knows for certain where posh came from, but it showed up in 1914. Folk etymologies tell the tale of wealthy travelers who insisted on the very best cabins ships sailing from England to India had to offer, creating the acronym posh: port outward, starboard home, as such cabins would keep the travelers out of the sun on both stretches of the voyage. Though it’s a fine & plausible tale, etymologists can find no evidence to support the claim. A more possible source is the now-lost Romany word, posh, which meant half & was used by London street folk in the early 1800s to refer to a half penny. Posh was apparently also used to refer to passersby perceived as dandies. The etymological posh jury is still out. In 1872 the term well-heeled appeared in America, meaning both having much money & being well-armed. In the mid-1800s in cock-fighting, a well-heeled bird had sharp spurs, allowing it to inflict maximum damage on its unfortunate opponents. Further back, 1817 a well-heeled Brit was one of the lucky folks who owned shoes. Though it might appear that the Old French word riche, meaning wealthy & sumptuous, is the source of our modern word rich, it was actually the Old English term rice, meaning strong, powerful, of high rank, that gave birth to rich. The Old French word riche influenced how people used the word, but rich really started out as a word of power & strength, not wealth. Intriguing, eh? So good readers, was any of this surprising, unlikely, or worthy of remark? Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Wordnik, Etymonline, & the OED.  In my world as an audiobook narrator, I occasionally find myself researching dialects, -- a rich source of words that are just plain fun.
Throwing an intriguing light on JK Rowling’s enigmatic headmaster, the word dumbledore became a part of the language in 1787, from a dialect spoken in the Cornwall region. It means bumblebee. A Scottish dialect gave us spree, a frolic or drinking bout, which came to English in 1804 (though drinking bouts had been around for centuries). A Kentucky dialect gave us splurge. Meaning ostentatious display, it came to English in 1828, possibly from a mashup of the words splash & surge. From a dialect spoken near Norfolk, dumpling came to be officially a part of English in 1600. It may have come from a German word meaning lump. In 1738 we gained the word kasbah (or casbah), which came to us through French from a dialect of north African Arabic. The original word meant fortress. The Cockney dialect gave us ain’t. Well, sort of. In the early 1700s ain’t was considered a proper English contraction for am not. A century later, people started using ain’t to mean are not & is not, causing ain’t to lose favor among grammarians, oozing its way into the category of Cockney slang. A northern British dialect gave us keister, or buttocks. This meaning arrived in 1914, extrapolated from earlier meanings of keister – safe or strongbox, & burglar’s toolkit. And the Scots have keisters, too. From a dialect of Scotland we have the word fud, meaning buttocks. It’s a mystery where fud came from, but it is most likely from a Scandinavian source. Fud entered English in 1785. And though I’d planned on ending with keister & fud, I can’t resist yen, which came from a Beijing dialect. Yen originally meant smoke, then grew to mean intense desire for opium. Today yen means a dreamy desire or hunger. It arrived in English in 1906 after making earlier attempts in the forms of yen-yen & yin. Any thoughts on keisters, fuds, splurges, dumplings, casbahs, sprees, dumbledores or aunt's? Big thanks to this week’s sources: Word Detective, Wordnik, Etymonline, & the OED.  Idioms. You gotta love ‘em. This one has a particularly interesting history.
The word starkers showed up in English in 1923, meaning completely naked. Its roots appear in the term stark naked, which English speakers were using as early as 1520. At this point in the family roots, there’s an unexpected fork. One would expect stark naked & starkers’ origins to be stark, which came from the Old English word stearc, which meant obstinate, severe, rigid, stiff, stern, strong or violent. By the 1400s, the idiom stark dead came about. Though stark actually referred to the rigidity of a corpse, popular understanding led to the belief that stark was intensifying dead, much like saying truly dead or very dead. It appears this caused the meaning of stark to shift to mean utter, sheer or complete. By the 1640s, that newly established meaning contributed to the Idiom stark raving, possibly translatable today as totally psycho. By the 1830s, likely due to the idiom stark naked, stark added a new meaning, bare or barren. Some other words that were born into Old English of the stiff meaning of stearc include stork, thorn (who would’ve thunk?) & possibly stretch. A century or more later, starch, stereo, & sterile all came from the stiff or rigid meaning of stark. But wait. What about that previously mentioned “unexpected fork” in the family roots? The two words or terms above that didn’t come from stearc are stark naked & starkers. They came from another Old English word, steort, which is also the root of the name of a bird called a redstart, a colorful critter named for its red derriere. All this because steort meant rear end, rump or buttocks, which leads to the realization that stark naked actually translates to ... butt naked. Idioms. You gotta love ‘em. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Wordnik, Etymonline, & the OED.  The following idioms don’t follow a theme or tell a story. They simply have individual elements I find fascinating. I hope you’ll agree.
The term blubbermouth, a crybaby or weepy person, has been around since 1400. Originally, blubber (spelled blober) referred to the bubbling, foaming sound & product of the tide. By the 1500s the term picked up the meaning whale oil, and a century later the meaning whale fat. Some weeping-related synonyms that have since fizzled out include blubberguts, blubberhead, & blubbercheeks. Our figurative term can’t hold a candle to has wonderfully literal beginnings. Back when candles were first created, if a task needed to be completed after sunset, the most able person performed the task while a less able person held the candle. The term is a double whammy insult, as it suggests someone who's deemed incompetent to do the work turns out to be unable to manage the menial task of holding the candle while the work's being done. A goody-two-shoes is an obnoxiously good individual. The term was born in the 1700s in John Newbery’s children’s collection, Mother Goose’s Melody: or Sonnets for the Cradle. One of the stories featured a painfully poor girl who was fortunate enough to be given a pair of shoes. She was so pleased, she started most interactions by pointing at them & exclaiming, “Two shoes!” It’s not entirely clear how an eternally grateful individual morphed into an obnoxiously good individual, but we’ll let that mystery be. Contrary to popular assumptions, the idiom out of sight, meaning excellent, has been in existence since 1896. The term whipper-snapper, or small, cheeky person, appeared first in the 1670s. A century before that, the term snipper-snapper held a similar meaning, which is cited by some sources as whipper-snapper’s origin, though other sources claim whip-snapper, person in charge, is the origin of whipper-snapper. The term narrow-minded, meaning small-minded & bigoted, was born in 1625. Interestingly, its sister-word narrow-hearted, meaning mean, ungenerous & ignoble, has not survived. So, did anything in that somewhat arbitrary list pique your interest? If so, please leave a comment. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Hugh Rawson’s book Wicked Words, Merriam Webster, Etymonline, & the OED.  Sometimes our words come from mispronunciations.
An apprentice or lackey for a more talented individual can be referred to as a student, at one time pejoratively mispronounced stugent. Though it’s not nailed down, some linguists assert that in 1913 this purposeful mispronunciation spawned the word stooge. The Spanish word juzgar means to judge. The court or tribunal where a judge might be employed is a juzgao. Some time around 1911 we Americans mispronounced juzgao & misunderstood its meaning, and voila, hoosegow was born, In Turkish, the letter g can represent a sound somewhat close to an English w. The Turkish word yog, meaning to condense, is the root of the Turkish word yogurt (pronounced in Turkish yowurt). The spelling led to the English mispronunciation of yogurt, which entered the language in the 1620s. The word for golden in Middle Dutch was gulden. In the late 1400s, English speakers mispronounced gulden, morphing it into guilder, the primary currency used by the Dutch before the Euro kicked in. The word bulge, meaning a rounded projection or protuberance, appears to have been dialectically mispronounced about 1872 as bug, giving us the term bug-eyed. So even though some insects may be bug-eyed, the bug in bug-eyed doesn’t mean bug. The word haphazard, meaning unplanned, random or ineffectual, appears to be the source of the crass & initially purposefully mispronounced word half-assed, which came to English in 1913. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Etymonline, & the OED.  Language grows and changes, often with some sort of epicenter. This week’s post takes a look at several words born in very specific spots. In Maine in the 1830s, the word sumptuous gave birth to the word scrumptious, meaning splendidly stylish. Within fifty years scrumptious spread across the country and came to mean tasty & delicious. Another Maine-born word that arrived in the 1870s is the regional term moxie, which was originally written with a capital letter, as it was the brand of a bitter beverage & patented medicine said to “build up the nerve”. It appears to have its roots in the Abenaki language, in which moxie meant dark water. These days moxie means both courage & intelligence. The term jarheads arrived in English in 1979, & refers to US Marines. It's generally associated with the classic Marine haircut. Jarhead came to English in the state of Georgia in the 1920s, meaning mule. Connection? Another word born in Georgia & its environs is juke. Today, juke generally appears as half of a compound word or paired words (jukebox, juke joint, jook organ). Originally, juke was considered so derogatory and inappropriate it was not used in polite society. It meant wicked, disorderly, nasty, & showed up in English in the 1930s. When juke was first associated with coin operated phonographs, the industry fought the association, fearing the negative image would hurt business. In time, though, the negative connotation was eclipsed by the magic of choosing one’s tunes at the diner. Tump is used in the American South and means to turn over or knock down. Though nobody knows its etymological roots, it was first written down in England in 1589. And those wild folk of Connecticut have the word bundling, which means to share a bed for the night with someone of the opposite sex, fully dressed. The term has been used since the 1780s & many stalwart, upstanding Connecticuters (yes, I looked it up) have defended the moral nature of the practice. So good readers, what regional usages are you aware of in this wacky language? Big thanks to this week’s sources:, Wordnik, Etymonline, Merriam Webster, & the OED.  The words science, conscience, omniscient & many others having to do with thought, knowledge & internal understanding all come through French from the Latin word scire, to know. Most of these words have been with us since the 1300s- 1600s – a part of our collective consciousness.
What I find fascinating about these scire-derived words is how they reflect, or even constrict the ways we imagine what thought & internal understanding are. The Proto-Indo European root of scire was skei, which meant to separate one thing from another, to cut or divide, to sort. Skei also gave birth to schism, rescind, schizophrenic, & shed (as in bloodshed or the shedding of skin). Does knowledge & understanding really involve disjointed, separate facts more than the relationships between those facts? What happened to the value of the bigger picture? Inclusion? Fullness? Might our collective understanding of learning be weakened when our vocabulary devalues larger patterns, connections, & non-linear processes, even spiritual pursuits? Could basing our understanding of knowledge and conscience on separation, cutting & division be responsible for an over-reliance on the value of discrete facts, on multiple choice tests, specialists, Jeopardy, a dwindling reverence for generalists, & the loss of what we used to call a well-rounded education? Might such a misunderstanding lead to phenomena like sexism & racism? Hmm. Maybe I’m just an etymology-fascinated crackpot. Maybe this line of reasoning includes some shred of truth. Please leave a comment (& I won’t be offended at all if you think I’m a crackpot). Big thanks to this week’s sources: Wordnik, Etymonline, Merriam Webster, & the OED.  The Latin word meaning to fall is cadere. It’s sister word (a combining form with the same meaning), is cidere. Before reading on, sort through your brain’s language center for English words that have to do with falling & might have grown out of cadere or cidere.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Cascade, meaning waterfall, came to English in 1640 through Italian & French. Cadence, meaning a flow of rhythm in music or verse, appeared in the 1300s through Middle French. Decay showed up in the late 1400s through several varieties of French from the Latin decadere, to fall off. Decadence arrived in the 1540s, meaning behavior that shows low morals. Deciduous, meaning that which falls off, came to English in the 1680s straight from Latin. Originally, the falling items included petals, leaves and teeth. It wasn’t until the 1778 that deciduous referred to trees that drop their leaves (as opposed to evergeeens). In 1705, the word coincide came to English straight from Latin, meaning to fall together, or to agree. In the late 1300s accident was born, meaning an occurrence, incident, or event. Over the centuries, that simple event definition morphed to mean a chance event, & then a mishap. And we’ll finish off with a real killer, the English noun marker –cide, also from cadere/cidere, an important element in pesticide, homicide, genocide, suicide, & many other English words, all suggesting some sort of fall. Followers, can you come up with other cidere/cadere words? If so, please add them to this post in the comments section. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Wordnik, Etymonline, Merriam Webster, & the OED. |
I write for teens & tweens, bake bread, play music, and ponder the wonder of words in a foggy little town on California's central coast.
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