Most all of us have heard that the word hippopotamus means river horse, & it does. What most of us don’t know is that -potamus (the part that means river) comes from a word meaning rushing water which came from a root word meaning to rush or fly. From the meaning to rush or fly feather was born, as was pinnate (feather-shaped), pinion (wing joint), & pterodactyl (wing-finger). Stretch your imagination a bit further (imagine someone swaggering with a fancy feather on his/her hat), & the word panache makes sense. Imagine the pointy part of a feather pen, & you see why pin & pen share a root This meaning also gave us pinnacle (pointed peak),& pinniped (fin or pin-footed sea mammal). Some of this root’s progeny include ornithopter & helicopter. But along with meaning to fly, this root meant to rush, which morphed into words meaning to rush in, to grasp, to desire. From these we get the words: petition, appetite, centripetal, compete, perpetual, impetus & impetuous. Because what goes up must come down, & this root is all about flying, it also gave us the words symptom, & ptomaine. Who knew? Please be kind enough to use the comments section to let me know what was most surprising in all this. My thanks go out to this week’s sources, Etymonline.com, Merriam-Webster.com, Wordnik, Collins Dictionary, & the OED.
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Wouldn’t you think the words farm & ranch would have pretty simple etymologies? I did, & I was dead wrong. Ranch showed up in English in 1808 meaning country house. By 1831 ranch also referred to a stock-farm & herding establishment. What I find interesting, though, is the long, twisted road back to this word’s roots. Ranch’s great grandmother-word was a Proto-Germanic word meaning something curved. Its next incarnation was in the Frankish language, where it meant row or line. From there it moved to French to mean install in position, and from there it became a Spanish verb meaning to lodge or station. From there, different forms of that Spanish verb were born, first meaning group of people who eat together, then mess hall, then small group of farm huts. It was this last one, rancho, that became the English word ranch in 1808. Wild, eh? The same goes for the word farm, which started out as a Proto-Indo-European verb meaning to hold firmly. From there it moved into Latin, meaning constant, firm, strong, stable. That form gave birth to a Latin verb meaning to fix, settle, confirm, or strengthen. And when Medieval Latin came along, a form meaning fixed payment was born. This word moved into Old French to mean a rental or lease agreement, & when farm finally made it into English in the 1200s, it meant fixed payment or fixed rent. By the 1300s, farm meant a tract of leased land, & it wasn’t until the 1400s that farm came to mean cultivated land. What a long, strange trip our simple four-letter word farm has had. Who knew? Thanks for coming by, & feel free to leave a comment about these long, strange trips. . My thanks go out to this week’s sources, Etymonline.com, Merriam-Webster.com, Wordnik, fineartamerica.com, Collins Dictionary, & the OED. We are ramping up toward a big event -- October 23 -- mole day. The creators of mole day had a very particular mole in mind, but I’m not one for mole restraint, so here are the etymologies of a healthy variety of moles. The mole being celebrated on October 23 was born of the word molecule, & was coined by German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in 1900. This particular mole establishes a unit of measurement helpful to chemists. It reflects Avogadro’s Number (6.02×10^23), the number of molecules or particles in one mole. A mole can also be a structure of stones, earth, or concrete creating a breakwater or pier. This mole comes through Middle French & Latin from a Greek word meaning effort, & appeared in English in the 1500s. A mole can also be the small, burrowing mammal, Talpa, europea. This mole came to English in the 1300s, most likely from the word moldwarp, which translates to earth-thrower. In the last century, this sort of mole can also be a large machine that tunnels through rock. From this same shade of meaning came the sort of mole that is a spy that operates secretly within an organization (another sort of burrowing altogether). And coming to us during the long, darkish time of Old English, another mole meant spot, mark, or blemish. This mole originally applied to spots & blemishes on fabric, & comes from a Proto-Indo-European verb meaning to stain, soil, or defile. And let’s not forget the amazingly tasty chocolate/chile condiment, molé. Molé appears to have made its way into English in 1900s. For decades, historians have been engaged in academic knock-down-dragouts regarding the birth of the sauce itself, but at least linguists are sure about its etymology. Molé comes from a Spanish root meaning sauce. It’s the same root that added to the Nahuatl word for avocado, gives us the word guacamole. Thanks for coming by & celebrating all things mole (& molé) with me. Please leave any comments, whether for mole or for mole, in the comments section. . My thanks go out to this week’s sources, Etymonline.com, vexels.com, Mexonline, National Day Calendar, Merriam-Webster.com, Wordnik, Collins Dictionary, & the OED. These days we’re hearing a lot about privilege. The word privilege showed up in English in the 1200s. It came through Old French from the Latin term privus legis, private law — a law applying to or giving favor to one individual — a law that by design did not apply equally to everyone. The term was used in France to apply to a privileged class that was exempt from taxes. Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley scholar who spent years studying the darker side of privilege found this way to help root out her own privileged thinking: I asked myself, on a daily basis, what do I have that I didn’t earn? It was like a prayer. Over the years, other wise women have had things to say about privilege: No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims. -Elizabeth Cady Stanton Privilege is the greatest enemy of right. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach It is natural anywhere that people might like their own kind, but it is not necessarily natural that their fondness for for their own kind should lead them to the subjection of whole groups of other people not like them. -Pearl S. Buck Privilege, almost by definition, requires that someone else pay the price for its enjoyment. -Paula Ross I’ll close off with a tribute to the spelling mnemonic method of Mrs. Fern Byrne of Capistrano Elementary School. To remember how to spell privilege, just remember that within it is a four-letter word starting with v. Comments? Comment away! My thanks go out to this week’s sources, Etymonline.com, The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women. Washington Post, Merriam-Webster.com, Wordnik, Collins Dictionary, & the OED. So often, words that look similar have no etymological ties at all. But wreak, wrack, wretch, rack, & wreck are similar-looking words that actually are kissing cousins. In the late 1300s, wrack referred to the bits that float onto shore after a shipwreck. It probably came from the Old English word wræc, which meant misery or punishment. By the 1500s, wrack could be anything washed up on shore, including seaweed. This gave us the term wrack line. The oft-combined words wrack & ruin appeared together in the 1400s. Though this term seems to have come from the original Old English word wræc, the spelling from the shipwreck meaning infiltrated people’s thinking, and voila! wrack & ruin. These days shipwrecks aren’t so common. Car wrecks are another matter. The word wreck comes from that same Old English term meaning shipwreck. And when it comes to wreaking havoc, what a surprise — that old word wræc, meaning misery or punishment, had a verb form which meant to avenge or punish. And that form morphed to become our modern word wreak. Those unfortunate souls who were the targets of all that havoc-wreaking got their title from the same Old English root, & were known as wretches. Another Old English form of wræc gave us the word rack (which initially referred to an instrument which stretched leather (think punish). By the 1400s that leather-stretcher had found another use: a device of torture. Probably because this device was a series of connected bars, rack also means a device to support or hold items, antlers, to achieve or add up (rack up), a framework for displaying clothing, (off the rack), & a bed or cot (hit the rack). And many of you might remember one of the many scourges of 1960s home fashion known as rickrack. As it happens, rickrack came to English in the 1880s as a reduplication of the word rack — the sort of rack used to stretch leather or torture people. So, we were correct back in the ‘60s when we claimed rickrack was a torturous fashion concept. Sorry for all the torture & punishment in this post — if you’ve got comments, leave them in the comment section. . My thanks go out to this week’s sources, Etymonline.com, Merriam-Webster.com, Sue's Beach art, Wordnik, Collins Dictionary, & the OED. The word punctuation showed up in English in in the 1530s. Its source was a Latin word meaning to mark or point with dots, to prick or pierce. By the 1660s punctuation had morphed to mean a system of inserting pauses into written material. In the 1200s, the word question appeared in English, meaning a philosophical or theological problem. It came to us from Latin through an Old French word that meant question, problem, interrogation or torture. Hmmm. It wasn’t until 1849 that an orthographic mark denoting a question was referred to as a question mark (before that we called such a thing an interrogation point). In the 1300s the term exclamation made its way to English from Latin through Middle French. By 1824, the exclamation point could be used to denote surprise or increased volume. It wasn’t named the exclamation mark until 1926, and what a crying shame we lost the intermediary term for it, the shriek-mark. The colon, period, & comma have more interesting tales to tell. They didn’t start out as orthographic marks at all. Each of them started out as a part of a sentence — as a string of words. The word colon was first used to denote a limb, member, or part of a verse. This meaning morphed in the mid-1500s to mean a clause of a sentence. In time, we began to call the punctuation mark that sets off a list or independent clause a colon. The word comma also first denoted part of a sentence; a short phrase or clause of a sentence or poem. Comma comes from a Greek word that meant that piece which is cut off. Now a comma is that orthographic mark that signifies a break between parts. And period came to us through Latin and Middle French from Greek, where it meant a going around (it’s related to perimeter). By the time period made its way to Latin, one of its meanings was a complete sentence, & darned if we didn’t start using period to denote the mark that shows we’ve come to the end of a sentence. What a wacky language. I’d love to hear whether any of this surprised you. My thanks go out to this week’s sources, Etymonline.com, Merriam-Webster.com, Wordnik, Collins Dictionary, & the OED. Lately, much of my writing & revising is happening in the garden shed I re-built for recording audiobooks. I call it the Shedio. So this week’s post is a re-posting from six years ago, considering the word 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 possible have come from ramshackle (both of which predate it). Others claim it may have come from the Nahuatl word xacalli, wooden hut, through Mexican Spanish. Still nobody really knows from whence the 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, I couldn’t sit on the toilet with the bathroom door closed, & 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 when it comes to my old 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.” My thanks go out to this week’s sources, etymonline.com, merriam-webster.com, painting valley.com, & the OED. In the last couple of weeks we’ve considered rarely-sighted words (#1 & #2). Now it’s onto rarely-sighted idioms. Making whim-wham for a goose’s bridle is a British & Australian idiom. Its meaning rests somewhere between go away kid, you bother me, & none-of-your-business. It was/is typically used to deflect a nosy child’s questions. “What are you doing Grampa?” can be answered with, “I’m making a whim-wham for a goose’s bridle.” To throw a tub to a whale is to create a diversion. This idiom comes from whaling times. It seems when a whale got close enough to the whaling ship to threaten the safety of the whalers, they could sometimes divert its attention by slinging a barrel or tub into the sea. Amazingly, some whales were pleased to play with the tub instead of the ship. In Britain & Australia, a supercilious, pretentious, or self-important individual can be referred to as toffee-nosed. This slang term is considered rude, but then, isn’t self-absorption a bit rude? It comes from the word toff, a British term for a flashy dresser. The phrase to make a hames of something means to make a mess of something — to spoil something through ineptitude. It’s an idiom born in Ireland, & refers to a draft horse’s collar. The hames of the collar are the bits that connect to the traces, & apparently it’s easy to set them up backward, making a hames of it. And then there’s don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs, which means It’s seldom a good idea for the young to offer advice to their elders. This idiomatic advice was offered as early as the 1700s. Apparently egg-sucking in the 1700s was something everyone knew how to do, so why teach grandma how? If you’ve got the screaming ab-dabs, you either are experiencing extreme anxiety, or suffering from delirium tremens. When this idiom appeared in the early 1930s, it referred only to the DTs, but within twenty years or so it generalized to mean extreme anxiety. Though most etymologists believe it is British in origin, some wonder whether it may have started in America, as evidenced by the 1914 Fields & Donovan tune “Abba-Dabba Honeymoon” — Hmmm. I hope these have offered a chuckle or two & I haven’t made a hames of it & given you the screaming ab-dabs in the process. Any response? Please leave a comment. My thanks go out to this week’s sources: Phrases.org, Collins Dictionary, WorldWideWords, English Forums, & Free Dictionary. Here’s a second installment of words we English speakers have mostly lost (the first installment can be found here). I think at least some of them deserve a rebirth. A quodlibet was initially a topic up for philosophical discussion, though in time, the meaning morphed to mean a medley of well-known tunes. Either meaning works just fine for the word’s Latin source, which translates to what pleases you. I find myself envisioning a group of philosophers meeting at the pub & saying to the dude with the fiddle, “Play us a quodlibet while we discuss our quodlibet!” An inanimate item that is responsible for a person’s death is called a deodand. Back in the day, English law required the owner of the murderous object pay the grieving family in the amount of the value of the object. Owners of murderous objects didn't complain much when the object was a length of rope, a pitchfork, a plough — but as soon as the industrial revolution kicked in & these expenses bumped up to the cost of a carpet-making loom, a steam engine, a train (& the payments had to be made by corporations that just might have had the ear of Parliament members), the law was abandoned. Arfanarf is Cockney slang for half-and-half, but it does not refer to a dairy product. The term was used in the late 1800s & early 1900s to order up a drink that was half porter & half ale, or in some regions, a mixture of beer & whisky. Nothing like a little arfanarf to get the conversation flowing, eh? To be erumpent is to burst out of something. It’s related to interrupt, erupt & abrupt. It’s a rarely sighted word unless you happen to be a mycologist (a studier of mushrooms) — given the habits of mushrooms, mycologists use the term erumpent frequently & with gusto. An embuggerance is a niggling or irritating barrier encountered when trying to solve a problem. The term was born in the British military some time around 1950. Though bugger in modern usage is sexual in nature, both terms come from a much older expression, “to bugger one about” -- to irritate one. So, do you have any quodlibets regarding all this, or do you find all this wordmongering to be an embuggerance? Please let me know in the comments section. My thanks go out to this week’s sources: Dictionary of Slang & Euphemism, Merriam Webster, Collins Dictionary, WorldWideWords, Vectorstock.com, & Wordnik, Here are some words that most English speakers have left behind. Which one(s) do you think might be worth the concerted effort to bring back into common usage? Sometime in the 1800s the word quockerwodger (or quocker-wodger) appeared in English. Its literal meaning refers to a wooden toy whose legs and arms are connected loosely to its body, so that any movement at all causes it to flap around. This meaning was quickly eclipsed by the word’s figurative meaning: a politician whose strings are clearly pulled by someone else. Spiv is British slang from the 1930s. It’s most likely derived from the word spiffy. It means a flashily dressed petty crook who does anything to avoid honest work. A disproven - yet intriguing - folk etymology is that a spiv is the opposite of a Very Important Person, so the pluralized acronym (VIPs) was reversed to create the word spiv. About 1800 this French word made its way into English — gobemouche. It’s constructed of a word meaning housefly (mouche) & a word meaning swallow (gobe). This latter bit is related to words like gobsmacked & the phrase shut your gob! The word’s literal translation is flyswallower. A gobemouche is a painfully naive & gullible individual — amazed by the world, & therefore standing around with his/her mouth wide open. A word born in the 1960s among the historical re-enactment crowd is farb. A farb is a historical re-enactor whose efforts don’t come close to authentic. Blivet showed up in American English in the 1940s. It originally referred to a useless, superfluous, or unnecessary object. In time, it came to refer to a self-important person. And likely coming from the word nit is the word nitnoid. A nitnoid is either a person who crushes the life out of something through nitpicking detail, or the detail itself. This word appeared in American English in the 1900s. A blatteroon is a person who boasts, blathers & babbles (often about him/herself). Blatteroon appeared in English in the 1600s from a Latin word meaning babbler. So which one(s) of these deserves a rebirth? Please let me know in the comments section. My thanks go out to this week’s sources: Oxford Reference, Merriam Webster, WorldWideWords, & 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.
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November 2023
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