 Many people don’t notice that quotation books & quote websites are almost entirely dominated by quotes from men. This is a loss. In my continuing efforts toward inclusivity, here’s a collection of wise women’s words on loss.
Absence becomes the greatest Presence. -May Sarton I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss. -Rita Mae Brown No emotion is the final one. -Jeanette Winterson Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either. -Golda Meir There are some griefs so loud They could bring down the sky, And there are griefs so still None knows how deep they lie. -May Sarton Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the day-time, and falling into at night. I miss you like hell. -Edna St. Vincent Millay Grass grows at last above all graves. -Julia C.R. Dorr When you’re away i feel like i’m only wearing one shoe. Alta I hope you’ve found a quote you hadn’t previously appreciated. If so, please spread it around. Big thanks to this week’s sources: The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women. Bartleby, KnowYourQuotes, Quotemaster, & ThoughtCatalogue.
8 Comments
 These days the Supreme Court is in the news for good reason, so how about a brief look into the adjective supreme?
Since the 1520s, supreme has meant highest in authority, holding the highest place in power, command, or rank. By the 1590s, supreme added the meanings greatest possible, or most extreme. The argument could be made that our present court is embracing the latter of the two 1590s definitions. The term Supreme Court was born in 1689. I find it intriguing that the term Supreme Being isn't attested until the following year. We'll wrap up with two supreme quotes to ponder: W. Renwick in 1788 said, "Supremer feelings tend to excite." And S. Butler in 1680 said, "Man is supreme Lord and Master Of his own Ruin and Disaster." Anything to say about supremity? Thanks to this week's sources: The OED, Etymonline, & Merriam Webster  Take a look over these words all starting with gl…
gleet — slimy or filthy — from Latin through Old French gleed — a glowing coal — from Proto-Indo-European gleg — quick in perception or action -- from Old Norse through Middle English glenoid — the socket of a joint or a hollow cavity — from Greek glede — the common red kite of Europe — from Middle Low German glebe -- land belonging to a church — probably from Proto-Indo-European through Latin & French glaucous — green with a grayish-blue cast — from Greek through Latin glim -- a light, lamp or candle — taken from the word glimmer, which came from German through Middle Dutch glister -- to sparkle or gleam — from German through Middle Dutch glomerate — to wind or make into a ball — from Latin gloriole — a halo— from Latin, literally, a small glory An odd post, I know. It was inspired by a search through the dictionary for the etymology of the word glean. Though the etymology was intriguing, I was more fascinated by discovering so many nearby words that were new to me. I’d love to hear how many of these you already knew. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, & Wordnik.  We book-centric people tend to put a lot of our focus on authors. They’re the ones who bring us the stories & information we love, right? We often forget that we readers brings a unique perspective to each thing we read, making the act of reading a more complex alchemy than one might think.
One of my literary heroes is Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, & heaps of other tasty stories. He has some significant things to say about the role of a reader. “…there are different things we as readers bring to a text—our different expectations, our varying intellectual limitations or gifts, our experiences of previous texts, our predictions about this one. These are necessary things; without them we wouldn’t begin to make sense of any text at all; and they’re also inevitable; we can’t look at any text in a state of nature, as it were, and pretend we know nothing, and come to it as complete virgins. We have to bring something to the text, and put something into it, in order to get anything out. This is the great democracy of reading and writing—it makes the reader a true partner in the making of meaning.” His term “democracy of reading and writing” manages to celebrate our differences at the same time it celebrates the connective tissue of our humanity. I say bravo to the democracy of reading. The quote above comes from a 2017 collection of Pullman’s essays and lectures, Daemon Voices: On Stories & Storytelling.  We English speakers aren’t very good at keeping track of our Rs.
Sometimes we lose our Rs through regional dialects. Though Bostonians are famous for dropping their Rs, R-dropping (known in linguistic circles as non-rhoticity) happens in various dialectical ways throughout Britain, the American northeast, the American South, India, Australia, & New Zealand. And - over time - we lose our Rs in standard English. The word burst (to shatter suddenly as a result of pressure from within) appeared in Old English. Then somehow in 1806 we lost track of that R & found ourselves using the word bust to mean exactly what the word burst means. Curse showed up in Old English meaning to wish evil. By the 1300s it picked up the meaning to swear profanely or blasphemously. By the 1800s, that tricky R faded away in what was considered a “vulgar” pronunciation of curse, & voila! The word cuss was born. The Old English word meaning the tail end of an animal, was arse. In time, this word broadened to mean the tail end of anything/anyone. When it ran up against ass, the entirely unrelated word initially meaning donkey, a bit of a smash-up occurred, & they somehow became synonyms, giving us what appears to be one more lost R. The word parcel came to English in the 1400s from Latin through French, meaning a small portion of something. Soon, it picked up the meaning a piece of real estate, or a lot. It appears there may have been some confusion with that meaning a lot, as soon afterward, parcel began to not only mean a small portion, but also a large number. Then after a century or two parcel lost its R, giving us the word passel (a bunch) in 1835. Thanks for coming by, & if you've got anything to say about R loss, please do. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, North American Dialects,, & Wordnik.  In modern America it seems awfully easy to confuse what one wants with what one needs. And so…
To want is to feel need, to crave. Want came to English in 1200 as a noun, meaning insufficiency, shortage, deficiency. Some near-synonyms include: To desire — to long for something with intensity or ardor. To wish for -- weaker than desire, sometimes referring to an unrealizable longing. To crave -- the strong desire to gratify a physical appetite or urgent need. To covet — to ardently desire. Though all the above words involve feeling a need, the need isn’t necessarily essential. I may want, desire, wish for, crave, or covet a $5000 guitar, but when it comes down to it, the three guitars I've already got are already taking good care of me. To need something is to experience an urgent requirement of something essential. Need appeared in English about the same time as want. It came from early Germanic sources originally meaning violence or force. Need broadened on its way from Old English to Middle English to mean distress, peril, hardship, necessity. Some near-synonyms include: To require -- to experience need of something that is indispensable to a particular end or goal. To lack -- to experience an absence or insufficiency of something essential. Dear readers, do you ever struggle with the delineation between want & need? Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, Webster’s 1959 New World Dictionary of the American Language, & Wordnik.  The word kiss has been with English speakers since we were speaking Old English, except that it was spelled cyssan. Even back then it meant to touch with the lips. Though most etymologists are guessing kiss is a word imitative of the sound of a kiss, they haven’t landed on a common root for kiss. Still, these forms of the word exist in these languages:
kysse — Norwegian & Danish kyssa — Old Norse kessa — Old Frisian kussian — Old Saxon cussen — Middle Dutch kyssa — Swedish kuwash-anzi — Hittite Interestingly, English is a language that gives us the same word for both a kiss of mild affection & an erotic kiss, whereas in Latin, an erotic kiss was called saviari, while a kiss of affection was known as osculum (which translates to little mouth). Might the saviari variety kiss — by comparison — involve a larger mouth? The idiom kiss & tell appeared in the 1690s. Kiss my arse has been around since at least 1705. Since 1825 a bit of chocolate or candy has been referred to as a kiss. Since 1911 the acronym SWAK has meant sealed with a kiss To kiss something goodbye appeared in 1935, as did to kiss someone off. Since 1937, we’ve had the term kiss-proof to refer to lipstick. Give me some sugar (a kiss) showed up in the 1940s. The kiss of death has been around since 1944. And we’ve got some kiss synonyms, with buss showing up in 1560, smack (a loud kiss) appearing in the 1600s, neck made its way to English as a verb meaning to kiss in 1825, & smooch arrived in 1932. This week, in lieu of leaving a comment, offer someone a kiss (your choice whether saviari or osculum). Big thanks to this week’s sources: Urban Dictionary, Merriam Webster, Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, & Wordnik.  Say these words aloud (really. It’ll be fun):
bellows - belly - bilge - billow - bolster - bloat - bulge It’s easy to imagine these words all come from an ancient root meaning to swell. But wait, there’s more. Another branch of that same root gave us: ball - balloon - bole - bollocks - bull - bulk - boulder - bowl And another gave us: full - fool - follicle - folly At some point in history, that same root added the meaning to overflow, which gives you the opportunity to say another list aloud: fluid - flux - effluent - flume - confluence - influx - fluvial - influenza - reflux - mellifluous And it takes little imagination to reconstruct why these words all came from a root meaning to swell or overflow. Pretty swell, eh? If you’ve got swell comments, please leave them. And may your week be swell. Big thanks to Sioux Thompson for inspiring this post & to this week’s sources, Merriam Webster, Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, & Wordnik.  Though we English speakers started dabbling in abbreviating in the1500s, we were mostly happy with full-length words until the 1900s. Since then, we’ve gone wild — way beyond our first dabblings. Now, we abbreviate in myriad ways. We initialize, we employ acronyms & backronyms — even syllable acronyms, & of course, we continue to abbreviate things in the manner started back in the 1500s, truncating.
Abbreviate means to shorten, so all the examples in the post are abbreviations. The abbreviating we typically think of is actually called truncating. Examples include admin. (administration), N.Z. (New Zealand), wks. (works), & Hab. (the book of Habbakuk). Traditionally, an abbreviation ends in a period. However, in the last couple decades that terminal period has been evaporating. Initializing looks like this: FBI, CIA, UK, & POW . Since 1957, an initialization is defined as a word formed from the first letters of other words, pronounced as those letters. From 1907 to 1957, words formed in this manner were called alphabetic abbreviations. An acronym is a word formed from the first letters of other words, pronounced as though it is a word. Examples include GIF (graphics interchange format), scuba (self contained underwater breathing apparatus), The zip in zip code (zone improvement plan), kiss (keep it simple, stupid), & hundreds more. Some words appear to be acronyms, but were strategically constructed. The coiners of these words worked backward, starting with their goal word, & finding “source” words to add up to that goal word. Words constructed in this manner are called backronyms (or bacronyms). The computer language BASIC was created from the words Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. SOS was a speedy thing to enter in Morse code during emergencies; after the fact, it came to mean save our ship. The term USA PATRIOT Act was created by stringing together the words Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. The letters forming START were assembled from STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty. BING was manufactured from the words Because It’s Not Google. Then there are words we wish were backronyms/acronyms: some sailors have claimed NAVY actually stands for Never Again Volunteer Yourself, motorists claim FIAT stands for Fix It Again, Tony, & FORD stands for Found On Road Dead. We also create syllable acronyms (also known as syllabic abbreviations) with words like FedEx (Federal Express). Some others include INTERPOL (International Police), COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), HOCO (homecoming), NABISCO (National Biscuit Company), NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), SoHo (New York Neighborhood South of Houston), & WeHo (West Hollywood). Life seems to speed up every day, & language seems to reflect that. Compelled to comment? Please do. Big thanks to Sioux Thompson for inspiring this post & to this week’s sources, All Acronyms, Your Dictionary, Etymonline, Oxford Dictionaries, & Wordnik.  An ancient word for quiet led to a steaming heap of words — not all of them sounding all that quiet.
Words in Old Persian,Old Church Slavonic, Avestan, & Old Norse led etymologists to construct the Proto-Indo-European word *kwyeə-, meaning to rest or be quiet. The big idea is that Proto-Indo-European was an unwritten mother-tongue that led these disparate groups to use similar-sounding words that all meant about the same thing. *Kwyeə- gave us the English word quiet in about 1300. A couple centuries later it also gave us acquiesce, quiescent & quietude. It also gave us a word roughly meaning super-quiet — the word requiem. Apparently being free & clear gives one a sense of quiet, so those who were free & clear of debt, discharged, at liberty, or unmarried, were said in the 1200s to be quit. Hmmm. A legal form of being free & clear is to be acquitted. In time, the freeing sense of quit took over in popular usage: to release, let go or abandon. This free & clear meaning also gave birth to the word quite, (someone who is quite intelligent could also be labelled clearly intelligent). And because getting some rest & quiet takes a little time, *kwyeə- also gave us the words while & awhile. Last but not least, *kwyeə- gave us the word coy. Coy’s original meaning (in the 1300s), was quiet. It only took a hundred years for its meaning to ooze from quiet through placid & gentle to shy & bashful. All that from quiet. Any thoughts? Please let me know in the comments section. Big thanks to Sioux Thompson for inspiring this post & to this week’s sources, Merriam Webster, Collins Dictionary, Etymonline, Oxford Dictionaries, & Wordnik. |
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.
To receive weekly reminders of new Wordmonger posts, click on "Contact" & send me your email address. Archives
November 2023
|
RSS Feed