 After the negativity of the last two weeks, here are some positive adjectives you might employ.
Brilliant, meaning sparkling with light or luster. Brilliant came from French through Vulgar Latin from a word which meant to shine like a beryl (a precious stone). It was in 1848 that brilliant was first used in regards to humans to mean distinguished by admirable qualities. Insightful was first used in 1881 to mean with penetrating understanding into character or hidden nature. It comes from insight, which was born about 1200 & meant to see with the eyes of the mind. Insightful is of Germanic origin. Warmhearted appeared in English in about 1520, meaning marked by affection, cordiality, generosity. Its parts came from Middle English & Old High German. Thoughtful started out about 1200 & meant both contemplatively reflective, & prudent, moody, & anxious. Its now-lost synonyms included thoughtsome, thoughty, & thoughtive. By 1851 thoughtful meant showing consideration for others. Perspicacious appeared in the 1630s, meaning of acute mental discernment. Most of its parts came from Proto-Indo-European. Back in the 1400s, benevolent showed up, meaning wishing to do good, kindly, well-dispoosed. Its parts come from Latin & translate to good feeling. Compassionate showed up in the 1680s meaning kind, sympathetic. It came from the noun compassion, used as early as the 1200s, meaning feeling sorrow or deep tenderness for one who is suffering. It came to English from Greek through Latin. Peachy is American slang for fine or excellent. This meaning came about in the early 1900s, though before that peachy simply meant like a peach. The adjective dandy is an American term meaning just right, fine, or remarkable. It appears to have arrived in the 1800s as a shortening of jim-dandy. Nifty showed up in 1865 & means pleasing, stylish, witty, or clever. Its origin is unknown. May your next week be spent identifying positive qualities in those around you & throwing around some positivity. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Etymonline, Collins Dictionary, the OED, & Alamy.
2 Comments
 Last week we took a look at put-downs of the noun variety. This week, we’ll consider some adjectival ones.
An abhorrent person is repulsive or reprehensible. It comes from a Latin word meaning to shrink back from, or be out of harmony with. A baleful human is ominous, cruel, dire, or threatening misfortune. Baleful came from Proto-Germanic, where it meant noxious, wicked, mischievous. Someone who is belligerent is pugnacious or argumentative. It comes from Latin & is related to bellicose & ante-bellum. A bilious individual is irritable & bad-tempered. It comes through French from Latin, where it meant peevish & ill-tempered. Someone who is censorious is critical, stern, & disapproving. One who is derogatory is insulting, disparaging, or offensive. Derogatory comes through Latin from a Proto-Indo-European word which meant to reach out the hand (the de- in derogatory suggests that the offered hand has been pulled away). A diabolical person is devilish — wicked or evil. It came through French & Latin from Greek, where it translates to pertaining to the devil. Someone who is disingenuous is insincere, untruthful, & calculating. It showed up in the 1600s. An egocentric person behaves as if s/he is the only one who matters. Makes sense, eh? ego + centric. Someone who is execrable is appalling or disgusting, & deserving of curses. It came through Old French from Latin. May you avoid them all! Big thanks to this week’s sources: Wrath, a Dictionary for the Enraged, Merriam Webster, the OED, Etymonline, & Dreamstime.  It’s election season, so the air is rife with put-downs. Let’s appreciate ten of them.
A troglodyte behaves in an uncivilized & beastly manner. It comes from a Greek word which translates to cave-dweller. A provocateur intentionally stirs up trouble. It’s related to the word provoke. A reprobate is a disreputable & wicked person or degenerate. A tyrant has power and abuses power in an oppressive fashion. Tyrant may have come from the Lydian language. A yahoo is crude, coarse, & boorish (from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels). A miscreant is a villain, evildoer, or law-breaker. It comes through Middle English from Middle French from a word meaning non-believer. A despot is a dominant figure exercising complete & often abusive power. Despot’s roots are in Proto-Indo-European, putting together a word that meant house & a word that meant powerful lord. A gadfly is a pest, named after cattle-biting flies, a gadfly can also be a person who socializes and likes to “go about.” A misanthrope hates all humankind. The word was made popular by a Molière play written in 1666. A bugaboo is a person or thing that causes obsessive fear or anxiety. It comes from either the word buggybow or bugger-bo, & nobody knows where those came from. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Etymonline, the OED, Wrath, a Dictionary for the Enraged, & Alamy.  This week we’ll consider etymologies from one short bit of Mary Oliver’s poem with the unlikely title, “What Was Once the Largest Shopping Center in Northern Ohio Was Built Where There Had Been a Pond I Used to Visit Every Summer Afternoon.”
Where will the trilliums go, and the coltsfoot? Where will the pond lilies go to continue living their simple, penniless lives, lifting their faces of gold? Trillium is a Latin word & appeared in English in the mid-1700s. Tri- means exactly what one would expect. The trillium’s leaves & flowers show up in groups of three. Pond came from Old English & means an artificially banked body of water. It’s related to pound, an enclosed place. Simple came from Old French, appearing in English about 1200. It had—& still has— a plethora of meanings: free from duplicity, guileless, blameless, innocent, & uneducated, unsophisticated, ignorant, & also plain, unmixed, foolish, stupid, wretched, & miserable. Penniless comes from penny. In the USA it showed up in 1889 meaning cent, but back in Jolly Old England it had meant 1/12 of a schilling for over six centuries — the Old English word pence came from an Old High German word which came from a Proto-Germanic word meaning coin. The word face has been a part of English since about 1300. It came through French from Vulgar Latin where it meant appearance, face, figure, or form imposed on something, & the Vulgar Latin word came from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning to set or put. And gold appeared in English before 1100, meaning exactly what it means today. It came from a Proto-Indo-European word meaning to shine. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, the OED, Etymonline, Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early, & Dreamstime.  This week we’ll consider a few diminutives — suffixes that make things small (though some of these suffixes do all sorts of other things, too).
-y or -ie get thrown onto the end of many names. Meet Frannie, Timmy, Ollie, Joey, Rosie & Sadie. . It also works with common nouns: puppy, kitty, sweetie, bunny, & matey. -ling gets employed in a simlary manner: darling, hatchling, duckling, & underling. -ella or -ello are also diminutives: Cinderella, bordello, salmonella, & novella. -el shows up in chapel, tunnel, gravel & gunnel. -et or -ette appear in kitchenette, cigarette, wallet, & faucet. -ine shows up in magazine, figurine, tambourine, & even linguine. -ina, -ino, & -ini diminutize palomino, marina, & zuchini. -kin gives us napkin, mannequin (originally spelled manikin) & bumpkin. -let or lette appear in booklet, omelette, hamlet, & roulette. Dear readers — if someone were to dimunituze your name, which of the above options would you appreciate (or tolerate) most? Let me know in the comments section. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Etymonline, Word Hippo, Merriam Webster, Daily Writing Tips, & Dreamstime.  Sometimes a prefix is a prefix, and sometimes it’s just masquerading as a prefix. Take ig-.
Sometimes ig- fills in as a substitute for the prefix in- (not, or opposite of): In ignorant, ig- means not & -norant comes from Proto-Indo-European through a Latin word meaning to know. ig- also operates in place of the prefix in- (not, or opposite of) in the words ignoramus, ignore, ignoble, ignominious & the name Ignatius. But in words like igloo, the first two letters aren’t a prefix. English simply borrowed (or stole, depending on one’s world view) this word from Inuit (it means house). The word igneous comes fully formed through Proto-Indo-European and Latin from a word meaning fire. Ignescent, ignite, ignition come from this same root. The noun iguana comes from a Haitian word meaning lizard. And the source of the Pig Latin word igarettesay (or igarettecay) is simple foolishness. Did any of these surprise you? Big thanks for this week’s sources: my 1959 Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Partridge’s Concise Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English, Merriam Webster, Etymonline, the OED, & Adobe.  Recent world events led to this post.
Those who prepare for war get it. -Winifred Holtby Militarism…is one of the chief bulwarks of capitalism, & the day that militarism is undermined, capitalism will fall. -Helen Keller I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business. -Bella Abzug The function of militarism is to kill. It cannot live except through murder. -Emma Goldman If we pursue the arms race no other problem will be solved. -Helen Gahagan Douglas Militarism is the most energy-intensive, entropic activity of humans, since it converts stored energy & materials directly into waste & destruction without any useful intervening fulfillment of basic human needs. Ironically, the net effect of military, as opposed to civilian, expenditures is to increase unemployment & inflation. -Hazel Henderson The Pentagon is the greatest power on earth today…There it sits, a terrible mass of concrete, on our minds, on our hearts, squat on top of our lives. Its power penetrates into every single life. It is in the very air we breathe. The water we drink. Because of its insatiable demands we are drained & we are polluted. -Josephine W. Johnson The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class. -Emma Goldman Did any of these quotes or their sources surprise you? Thanks to this week’s sources: A-Z Quotes, Wise Famous Quotes, Quotations by Women, The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women, & Get Drawings.  April 23 is recognized as William Shakespeare’s birthday (since we don’t really know when he was born, so why not celebrate his birth on the day he died?). So here are some of the many words or phrases he is credited with coining. Bedazzled, blinded by excessive light, appeared in The Taming of the Shrew. Heart’s content, as much as one wishes, came from Henry VI. Star-crossed lovers, ill-fated lovers, appeared (where else?) in Romeo & Juliet. Undress, to remove one’s clothing, showed up in The Taming of the Shrew. Brave new world, a future situation or development, showed up in The Tempest. Swagger, to strut in a defiant or insolent manner, appeared in Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, & Henry IV. Eyeball, the globe of the eye, appeared in The Tempest. A plague on both your houses, a curse of frustration, appeared in Romeo & Juliet. At one fell swoop, all at once, showed up in Macbeth. Fancy free, free from the trammels of love, appeaered in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wear your heart on your sleeve, to make one’s feelings obvious, was introduced in Othello. To thine own self be true, be honest with yourself, was introduced in Hamlet. May it be easy for you to follow Polonius’s advice, & to thine own self be true. Thanks to this week’s sources: Merriam Webster, Collins Dictionary, Etymonline, the OED, EF Edu, Phrase Finder, & Stefanie Matulat.  Here’s the first paragraph of Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Long Rain.”
The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and by the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain and it never stopped. Wow. Modern editors might blanch at the semi-colons and suggest the prose is a bit purple, but wow. That is one seroius rain. And here are some etymologies of selected words from the passage. Fountain appeared in English in the early 1400s from an Old French word meaning natural spring. The French word came from Medieval Latin, & that word started out as a Proto-Indo-European meaning to run or flow. Drown came to us about the same time, most likely from an Old English maritime word meaning to be swallowed up by water. Or possibly from an Old Norse word meaning be drowned. Even as you read, hard working etymologists are working to solve which source is true. Hacked showed up in Old English in the 1100s, from a word meaning hack to pieces. It comes from West Germanic languages & may have been influenced by an Old Norse term meaning to hew, cut, strike, or smite. What’s the deal with northern Europeans & smiting, anyway? Jungle came to English in the 1700s from a Hindi word meaning uncultivated ground. The Hindi word came from a Sanskrit word meaning sparsely grown with trees, arid. Hmm. Cultural understanding (or lack thereof) must have contributed to that one. Scissors appeared in English in the 1300s from an Old French word meaning shears. That word came from Latin through Vulgar Latin. Back in the 1840s, oh scissors! was used as a euphemism when someone was impatient or disgusted. In wrestling, scissorhold, leg scissor, & head scissor have been used since 1904. In swimming, scissor kick has been in use since 1902. The noun tunnel showed up in the 1400s from an Old French word meaning net. In English it added the meaning tube or pipe in the 1500s, and by the 1600s it added the meaning underground passage. And wrinkle came to English in about 1400 from the Old English word gewrinclod, which meant wrinkled, crooked or winding. It comes from a Proto-Germanic verb meaning to wind. Thanks for joining me on these etymological ponderings. Big thanks to this week’s sources: Bradbury Classic Stories 1, Merriam Webster, Collins Dictionary, Etymonline, & howtodrawforkids.com.  Slang words can be beautiful things. They can also be tasteless, tacky, &/or rude. Here’s a small selection of family-friendly slang terms I haven’t previously run into. I hope you enjoy them.
A sea-flea is a very fast motorboat that skips & bounces over the surface of the sea. It’s a Canadian term that appeared in 1950s. Geary is an adjective meaning fashionably stylish. Geary showed up in America in the late 1900s. Ratbaggery is a noun that appeared in Australia in the 1930s, meaning a display of eccentricity. Right fanny comes from 1925. It’s a noun meaning pathetic story. Blear is a verb meaning to stroll. It comes from Cambridge student-speak in the 1920s. The mid-1900s gave us the noun scrumpy rat, meaning habitual drunkard. Gen kiddy is a noun referring to a thoroughly good chap. The term was born in the 1950s among Royal Air Force members. And sheep-wash is an Australian/New Zealander term for poor quality liquor. I’d love to hear whether these terms were new for you. Comment away! Big thanks to this week’s sources: Collins Dictionary, Partridge’s Concise Dictionary of Slang & Unconventional English, the OED & Hello Artsy. |
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
