 Yoga is a fascination for many and a way of life for some, while others find the whole idea unthinkable. Whatever your opinion about yoga, I’m hoping you’ll find its etymology as appealing as I do.
Yoga first came to English in 1820 through Hindi from a Sanskrit word meaning union or yoking. That Sanskrit word came from the Proto-Indo-European word *yeugh-, which meant, to join. It takes no imagination to see how the ideas of union, wholeness & joining could come to mean yoga, but what I find truly fascinating is all the other words that proposed root word *yeugh- has grown into. It gave us join, adjoin, conjoin, enjoin & joint. It gave us junction, juncture, adjunct, conjunct & subjunctive. It gave us subjugate, conjugate & conjugal. And how about yoke, zygote, jostle, joust, jugular & junta? *yeugh- to join, gave us all those words while also contributing words to Lithuanian, Old Church Slavonic, Hittite, Greek, Latin, & Old Welsh. Nothing like a little joining, eh? Please leave any comments about yoga and its many family-members in the comments section. Big thanks to this week’s sources: the OED, Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, Merriam Webster, Allfreedownloads & Wordnik.
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 Given our propensity for redundancy, we English speakers have a surprisingly limited number of words to refer to the belly.
The word stomach came to English in the late 1300s from Greek through Latin & Old French. It originally held multiple meanings. 1: the gullet, throat or belly, 2: inclination, taste or liking, & 3: dislike or distaste. Because at the time many believed pride to reside in the belly, stomach also operated as a synonym for the word pride. As of 1867, English speakers could refer to the stomach with the word tummy, which modern dictionaries label as an infantile synonym for stomach. The less formal dictionaries use the descriptor baby-talk. Gut came to Old English from Proto-Indo-European. Most Germanic languages still have some variation of gut. Closely related to the word gutter, gut initially meant channel, a meaning which was soon applied to biological channels and came to mean entrails or bowels. In the 1300s gut picked up the verb meaning entrail-removal & another noun meaning stomach. It wasn’t until 1918 that the idiom to hate someone’s guts was born. The no-longer-in-vogue word paunch came to us from Latin through Old French from a word meaning stomach or swelling. And belly came from a Germanic word meaning belly or pouch. Its Germanic-language sisters have similar meanings including bag, husk, bellows, pod, billow, purse, pod, & wineskin. All these words come from a Proto-Indo-European verb meaning to blow or swell. And the idiom belly up to the bar appeared sometime in the 1930s. Here’s hoping you successfully stomached all that. Anything to say about it? Please use the comments section. My thanks go out to this week’s sources Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, Phrases.org, Merriam Webster, Wordnik, & the OED.  We English speakers have been using the word red as a noun meaning ruddy or red in color since the 1200s. There are versions of red in Old Norse, Middle Dutch, Old Saxon, and most the Germanic languages. In Old English we mostly spelled it read, which gave us the last names Reid & Read (names based on a color, much like the surnames Black, Brown, Green, & White). In 1781 the idiom red-handed came into usage, in 1898 the idiom to see red was born, & the idiom red carpet came about in 1934.
The word orange arrived in English about 1300 through French, Latin, Arabic & Persian from naranga-s, a Sanskrit word meaning orange tree. Interestingly, orange continued to refer to the orange tree until the 1540s, when it finally made its way onto the artist’s palette to label a color. It’s believed the initial n was lost in English due to confusion introduced by the article a/an. The confusion becomes evident by reading this aloud: an orange, a norange. Additionally, in 1795, secret supporters of William of Orange referred to themselves as the Orangemen, in 1961 the US military labeled a toxic pesticide & weapon Agent Orange, & in 1963 we began referring to orange juice as OJ. The Proto-Indo-European root *ghel- gave English speakers the word yellow (which appears in slightly different form in Norse, Swedish, Dutch, & German). Originally, *ghel- meant to shine. Middle English speakers appear confused on yellow’s definition, as at different times it meant blue-grey, hazel, & greenish-yellow, though we appear to have landed on the color we now call yellow by 1400 or so. Once we’d landed there, yellow developed any number of negative, inappropriate, or downright corrosive meanings: -in 1787 English speakers developed the slur yellow to refer to people of Asian descent -in 1856 yellow began to mean cowardly -in 1867 we started referring to a mongrel as a yellow dog -by 1881 yellow dog started meaning contemptible person -in 1898 yellow journalism referred to sensational chauvinism in the media (inspired by an earlier publicity stunt involving yellow ink) -in 1924 yellow-bellied was born, meaning cowardly In the coming week, may all your color-references be positive. My thanks go out to this week’s sources Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, Merriam Webster, Wordnik, & the OED.  Most English words labeling basic colors seem to have been around since Old English was spoken.
Lavender came through Old French from Latin and appeared in English in the 1300s. It originally referred to the lavender plant, which was often used in soaps for washing clothing, giving us the words laundry, latrine, lather & lavatory. It wasn’t until 1840 that the word lavender began meaning a pale purple color. Blue came to English about 1300, meaning the color of the clear sky. Blue was so associated with the sky that by the 1640s, the blue meant the sky, which we still see in the idioms, like a bolt from the blue & the wild blue yonder. Blue came through Old French from a Proto-Indo-European word that meant light colored: blue, blonde, or yellow. Awfully specific, eh? That word comes from an even earlier Proto-Indo-European source meaning to shine, flash, or burn. Purple has been with us since some time during Old English. It came through Northumbrian and Latin from Greek. The original word had three distinct meanings: the color purple, the shellfish from which a purple dye could be extracted, & generally splendid attire. The word green has been around for a similarly long time. It was originally a noun meaning the color of living plants, which gave us the village green & the putting green. For years the word green was used not only to refer to the color green, but to cast aspersions on fickle people, something etymologists guess had to do with the fact that in northern climes anything green will eventually change. In the 1400s, green began to be used to refer to unripe fruit or vegetables, & soon green was not only applied to people of tender age, but to gullible people of immature judgment. Stay tuned for next week’s foray into colors of the warm variety. My thanks go out to this week’s sources Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, Merriam Webster, Wordnik, & the OED.  In this modern world, most of us hear the word bank & think immediately of a financial institution. How did bank make its way there from its original meaning, a lump of mud?
Back in the 1200s, most the Scandinavian languages used a form of bank to mean a swelling or rise of soil in a sea, river or shoal. We still see this meaning when we refer to a river bank. We use the verb form when we bank up the soil to form a berm. When we bank the ball off a harder surface during a game of billiards or basketball, we’re riffing on the idea that something floating in the river might bounce off the river bank. Some of the first bits of “furniture” were earthen structures — heaped up soil or dried mud. When the word bank made its way to Scotland, it grew to mean a raised area on which one might sleep, & the Scots called such a thing a bunker, which eventually broadened to apply to the building in which many sleeping spots exist. In time, the sleeping spots themselves got shortened to bunks. In Old English, bank morphed into the word bench, meaning long seat. And since there’s not that much difference between a bench & a table, both bank & bench began also meaning table — giving us the word workbench & the table at which a moneylender might sit — a bank. Do we speak some kind of nutty language or what? My thanks go out to this week’s sources Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, Merriam Webster, Wordnik, & the OED.  Since last week we took a look at dog idioms, this week we’ll consider the etymologies of some selected dog breeds.
It would be reasonable to assume the word poodle comes from French, but it actually came to English in 1808 from the German word pudelhund, which meant water dog. At the time, poodles swam into bodies of water to retrieve ducks and such. And yes, poodle is directly related to the word puddle. And schnauzer, which sounds as though it came from German, actually did. In 1923 schnauzer came to English to label a particular sort of terrier. Schnauzer meant growler, & came from the word schnauze, which meant snout. And yes, snout, snoot, & schnoz all came from this same source. Chow-chow comes, as one would expect, from Chinese. Though it’s uncertain what the root is, some etymologists argue it’s a reduplication of the Chinese word cha, which means mixed. As every breed is actually a mixture of earlier breeds, this as-yet unproven explanation makes good sense. Back in 1858 an undetermined native language of North America gave us chihuahua, which meant dry place. One of the many dry places in North America earned this moniker, as did the small dogs plentiful in the region. Akita came from a Japanese word meaning field of ripe rice. This description applied to a region of northern Japan. Eventually, the energetic dog of the area also took on the name. Corgi entered English in 1926 from two Welsh word parts: cor- meaning dwarf, & -ci, meaning dog. The word mastiff came to English in the 1300s through French from a Latin word meaning gentle & tame. Though many folks might look at a modern mastiff & not immediately think gentle & tame, guard dogs living in people’s homes have to be well-mannered, & the mastiff was bred to be a guard dog. Many etymologists think the word mastiff might have been additionally influenced by the Old French word mestif, which meant mongrel. Any thoughts on all these dog breeds, or all the dogged work etymologists have done to figure all this out? Please use the comments section. My thanks go out to this week’s sources Etymonline, The Free Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, Merriam Webster, Wordnik, & the OED.  Sometimes what appears to be an unexplainable preference actually has an explanation.
Each year I have the incredible good fortune to attend a writing retreat with children’s writing guru & editing luminary, Patricia Lee Gauch. Now a retired editorial director of Philomel (Penguin), Patti wrote some remarkable children’s books & is a passionate editor & teacher. She was the first editor to hire illustrator extraordinaire, Floyd Cooper. And here's a handful of the many authors whose award-winning books she edited: Jane Yolen, TA Barron, Judith St. George, Lloyd Alexander, Eric Carle, Patricia Polacco, Kathryn Erskine, Andrew Clements, Virginia Hamilton, & Brian Jacques. While discussing making a scene come alive, Patti notes that many editors tend to ask authors for detail, but the word detail has never resonated for her. Instead, she sometimes asks for more specifics. Her default term though -- the word that really latches onto what she’s looking for in a scene that needs to come alive -- is texture. Interesting. The modern word detail, meaning a small, subordinate piece, came to English about 1600 from a French noun that originally meant cut into pieces. Her second choice, the noun specifics, arrived in English about that same time from Latin through French. The original Latin word meant kind or sort, & is also the parent word for the word species. Patti's preferred word, texture, made its way into English two centuries earlier from Latin through Middle French. It’s related to the word textile & comes from a verb that meant to weave or fabricate. In their efforts to help authors craft books, editors are doing all they can to help those authors weave the disparate strands of character, story, setting & tension into something whole, something complete. Nobody wants a story to be cut into pieces. Maybe it's no surprise that a gifted, longstanding editor winces at the use of the word detail, finds the word specifics acceptable, but not quite right, & relishes the word texture. Does Patti’s word choice when it comes to editorial advice reflect a sixth sense regarding the history of these words? Can a word’s origins follow it from language to language & culture to culture, through centuries of change? Readers, writers, what are your thoughts on this? Please chime in by clicking on comments below. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Etymonline, Wordnik, Collins Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, & the OED. Photo by Megan Frances Abrahams.  We English-speakers (& users of the languages that preceded English) have done a whole lot of splitting & cutting. All the following words (& a bunch I couldn’t fit into this post) come from one Proto-Indo-European source. Etymologists write this word *skei-. It meant to cut or split.
It gave us the word shingle, a piece of wood split from a larger piece. The idea that a shingled roof involves overlapping pieces also gave us the meaning overlapping stones on the shore. It also gave us the idiom to hang out one’s shingle, & a hairstyle involving overlapping layers. Appearing in Old English (some time between 400 & 1000 AD), the word shin appears to have come from the knowledge that the fibula in the lower leg appears to have split off from the larger tibia. Shed also showed up in Old English, meaning to divide, separate, part company or discriminate. In modern usage, we still see this meaning in the phrase to shed one’s skin & in the term watershed, in which drops of rain falling on one side of a mountain are divided from the drops of rain fallowing on the opposite side. Shiver, originally a small piece, fragment or splinter, came from *skei-, as did shiver, to break into small pieces (as in shiver me timbers), however the shivering we might do when cold or frightened comes from a different source altogether. Coming to English in 1883 we have the word ski, which came from *skei- through Old Norse from a word meaning a long stick of wood — one split from a larger piece. The root *skei- also made its way through Greek & Latin to arrive in English as the combining form schizo-, which gave us - among other words - schizophrenic, reflecting a condition originally understood to involve a split personality. Though etymologists still argue over the origin of the word ship, one school of thought maintains ship came from *skei- because the building of the earliest vessels involved the cutting or hollowing of a tree. And because knowledge involves distinguishing (or splitting) one thing from another, we have the words science, prescience, omniscience, conscience, & many others. All from cutting & splitting. Who knew? If you found all this intriguing or surprising, I’d love to hear from you in the comments section. Thanks to this week’s sources, Etymonline.com, the OED, Merriam-Webster, Collins English Dictionary, & Wordnik.com.  It shouldn’t be surprising that most words for laughter are imitative of the sound of laughter. Still, I find them intriguing, & occasionally worthy of… a laugh. Cackle came to English in the 1200s, meaning a loud laugh. It’s considered imitative. Its source is the Latin word cacchination, which is also considered imitative, though to be honest, I’ve never heard a laugh that sounded much like cacchination. Giggle appeared in the 1500s with no source. A giggle is a short, spasmodic laugh. Giggle is assumed to be imitative. About a century later, titter appeared, also imitative, defined as a suppressed or nervous giggle. Another century later, in the 1720s, the Scottish term guffaw caught on among English speakers. A guffaw is defined as a loud or noisy laugh, & not surprisingly, is imitative. One term for a laugh that isn’t directly imitative is chortle. Formed through a marriage of chuckle & snort, chortle was coined by Lewis Carrol in 1872 in his brilliant poem, Jabberwocky. And yes, chuckle & snort are both imitative. A snicker is a smothered laugh & came to English in the 1690s. Its sister word snigger appeared in 1706, meaning the same thing. Both are imitative. The word laugh comes to English through Proto-Germanic from Proto-Indo-European. English speakers started using laugh in the late 1300s. And like its funny friends, laugh is imitative. I’m hoping some of the forms of this word may give you a laugh. Old Norse - hlæja Anglian - hlæhhan Old Saxon - hlahhian Old Frisian - hlakkia Dutch & German - lachen Sanskrit - kakhati Lithuanian - klageti Greek - kakhazein Old Church Slavonic - chochotati Boy, those Old Church Slavonic folks must have been a laugh a minute, eh? And on a not-so-laughable note, if you've found yourselves struggling with Latinx/Latine and its variations, click this link, scroll down to "Get Educated" and see what the good folks at Anti Racism Daily have to say about it. Comments? You know where to leave them. Thanks to this week’s sources, Etymonline.com, the OED, Merriam-Webster, Collins English Dictionary, & Wordnik.com.  Over the years we English speakers have had many ways to say that something is truly fine. Here are a few of them.
1702 - tip-top - most excellent, as what is most excellent is top of the heap. 1811 - up to snuff - This idiom showed up some 160 years after the practice of inhaling powdered tobacco into the nose became all the rage in England. Its original meaning was sharp, wide awake, not easy to deceive, & most likely reflects the somewhat caffeine-like effects of snorting powdered tobacco. 1848 - top-notch - Etymologists assume this idiom may come from a game of some sort, but no one is certain. Like tip-top, top-notch denotes something that is most excellent. 1866 - hunky-dory - satisfactory, or just fine. Nobody’s certain of this idiom’s source. One school of etymologists thinks it may have come from the earlier word hunkey - also meaning satisfactory, which came from the word hunk, an inner-city New York slang term used to refer to home-base, a safe place during games like tag. Others suggest hunky-dory is a mispronunciation of Honcho dori, a street in Yokohoma, Japan, infamous for the sailorly diversions it offered. Both are intriguing & believable possibilities, but neither has been nailed down as fact. 1953 - peachy-keen, meaning most excellent. This figure of speech appears to have grown out of peachy, used to mean attractive since 1900, & keen, which in 1900 became a term of approval among the teenage population. Interestingly, keen is a word of many sometimes contradictory meanings: bold, brave, fearless, prudent, wise, able, eager, ardent, sharp, loud, shrill, biting, bitter, & cutting. What other ways do you know of verbally approving of something? Please leave your examples in the comments section. Thanks to this week’s sources, Etymonline.com, the OED, Merriam-Webster, Collins English Dictionary ,& Wordnik.com. |
I write for teens, narrate audio books, bake bread, play music, and ponder the wonder of words in a foggy little town on California's central coast.
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