Words, words, words…

Believe It or Not

Amazingly, the dictionaries swear up and down that to bounce and to bound (the motion, as in “leaps and bounds”) are unrelated. Bounce is Germanic, and originally meant to beat or thump — bouncing a door once meant knocking loudly. (Dutch bonzen and German bunsen still have the meaning of “beat”, and the bouncer at a bar might derive from that sense.) From there, it came to mean “make a loud noise or explosion” — cannon once bounced when fired. (Note that “bang” also changed meaning from hitting to making an explosive noise.) Finally came the sense of elastic movement — the bouncing ball or check. Meanwhile, “bound” is French, meaning to spring or leap up. The fact that rebound has the same definition as “bounce” shows that bound itself implied only a one-way motion. The similarity of the two words has of course led to considerable cross-pollenation over time — “bounding” is now often used incorrectly as a synonym for “bouncing”, as in a “bounding ball”. Another example of confusion is the nasty type of land mine known as the “Bouncing Betty” which, when triggered, springs up to waist level before exploding. That is, it bounds (once); it most definitely does not bounce (repeatedly). (The other bound — tied up — is a member of the band/bend/bind/bond family.)
By the way, to dribble, advance a ball with short bounces, was used for the action in both rugby and soccer well before the invention of basketball. It’s a member of the drop/drip/droop/drizzle family, with the liquid sense being generalized to “little by little”. Other members of the family include drivel (the same word as dribble), and dreary, whose first meaning was to drip blood.
I mentioned that bang means “hit”. Although it seems most unlikely, bhang is the same word in Hindi. It means “pounded” hemp. Another Germanic relative is bungle, which originally meant to break. Some authorities claim the bank/bench family is related, but it seems like a real stretch to me. A more likely set of distant cousins is the break and fraction cluster.
Jubilee and jubilation are another pair of “believe it or not” words which are completely unconnected despite the similar meanings. Jubilee is a Hebrew (Semitic) word, and technically, it is an adjective, modifying “year”. In Leviticus xxv, the Jubilee Year was laid down as a year of celebration proclaimed every fifty years by blowing trumpets throughout Israel, and it is from yobel, a ram’s horn trumpet. It could be considered a year-long Sabbath, when fields were supposed to lie fallow, leases were terminated and property returned to the original owners, and slaves were emancipated. This last, of course, made the Year of Jubilee an important part of Black slave lore and spirituals. Jubilation, on the other hand, is Indo-European. It’s from the Latin jubilare, to shout for joy. Related Germanic shouts are yowls and yodels. Unfortunately, the shared sense of “celebration” means that jubilee and jubilation have been confused for sixteen hundred years, ever since the Bible was first translated into Latin. (When Jerome made his standard translation (the Vulgate), his Old Testament was taken directly from the Hebrew, rather than using the existing Greek text (the Septuagint, translated some six hundred years before) and so he introduced quite a few Hebrew words that had not been in the Greek version. “Messiah” is another of Jerome’s Hebrew imports — see the above discussion of “Christos” for the Greek.)
While I’m on an “I don’t believe it” kick, island is etymologically unrelated to isle, and neither one has any connection to the aisle of a church. The Germanic word for “land in the water” was ieg, which like most such terms, lost its /G/ and turned into ey. The last syllable of Orkney, Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, etc. means “island”. 24Apr09 (The first syllable of Orkney is Old Norse orkn, seal. An orca was any large carnivorous sea animal, now restricted to the killer whale.) Ieg is distantly related to the aqua/water family, so it could also mean “on the water”, as seen in Eton (town on the water) and the tail end of Scandinavia. In mainstream English, “land” got appended onto the end of “ey”, leading to Middle English iland.
Meanwhile, isle is a descendant via French of Latin insula, also seen in such words as insular, insulin, and peninsula (almost-island). Isolate is the French form of insulate. About the time of Shakespeare, “iland” acquired a fake /S/ and became “island” because someone erroneously decided that it was somehow connected to “isle”. Modern French has meanwhile condensed insula all the way to ile, thus dropping the legitimate /S/. The church aisle also acquired its /S/ due to confusion with isle and island — it used to be ele and is derived from the Latin ala, wing. As implied by the source, the original usage of an aisle was for a section of a building, so sitting in the aisle didn’t cause an obstruction until recently. Incidentally, ala is from a root that means “pivot point” which also produced axis, axle, axilla (the medical name of the armpit), and axon, the central stem of a neuron.
13Jul09 A hawser is a heavy cable which goes through a hawse-hole at the bow of a ship. Amazingly, the two terms are not etymologically related. Hawser is ultimately a “high” word, originally used for the ropes which raised the sails. Hawse, on the other hand, is an old term for the bow of a ship. It began life as Germanic hals, neck, related by Grimm’s Law to the Latin col- root seen in collar and collet. A col is a geographical term for a mountain pass.
Here’s another one: Despite the fervent belief of the generation which came of age in the ’60s and ’70s, that enemy of enjoyment the nark has absolutely no connection to narcotic. The latter is from Greek narkos, numb. Most other words from the same root like narcolepsy (sleeping sickness) and narcosis have stayed in the medical realm without escaping into general circulation. About the only other common word is narcissus, from the numbing effect of the plant. (The opiates like heroin, morphine, and codeine are narcotics, but stimulants like crack, speed, or cocaine quite definitely are not; narcotic is not a synonym for “controlled substance”!) Nark, meanwhile, is a British slang term picked up from the Gypsies; it’s Romany nak, which means “nose”, and the phrase “copper’s nark”, an informer for the police or stool pigeon, has been in English for a hundred and fifty years. (Note that in England, “nark” is indeed pronounced “nahk” — see the section below on rhotic and non-rhotic accents for much more on this subject.) In Australia, nark progressed from “informer” to “spoilsport” to “troublemaker”.
As an aside, cocaine is almost always mispronounced. It is coca-ine and should be pronounced co-ca-een. The “-ine” on the end of chemical names usually means “active ingredient”, as in caffeine (coffee), morphine (sleep), theobromine (see below), nicotine (the tobacco genus is named from Jean Nicot, who introduced it to France), atropine (see below), codeine (from the Greek name of the poppy), etc. etc. 02Jul09 (Morpheus was the Greek god of dreams, not sleep, which is why his name is derived from morphos, form. C.f. all the English words in morpho-.) Quinine is pronounced with -een everywhere except the United States, and cocaine is of course the active ingredient of the coca plant. (The original Coca-Cola, a mixture of cocaine, caffeine (from the Kola nut), and alcohol, certainly gave people more of a jolt than the wimpy current product!)
Yet another cause of amazement — survey is at most very distantly related to surveillance! Survey is Latin supervidere, to see over, a relative of vision, so it’s the same word as supervise. Meanwhile, surveillance is a French member of the awake/vigilant/vigorous family.
Jocular is not connected to jocund. Jocular is from Latin jocus, joke. Juggler is essentially the same word. Jocund, however, is from Latin jucundus, pleasant or cheerful. The change of vowel from /U/ to /O/ is probably due to a perceived connection to jocular, though.
To be earnest, serious, is a completely different word than earnest money. The former goes back to an Indo-European root that meant to rise up, with most of its relatives having to do with struggle, vigor, or firmness. The pledge or surety word, though, is Semitic, although it has been significantly warped over the centuries. Hebrew arabh meant “he pledged”. The Greeks borrowed this as arrhabon, earnest money, and this in turn became Latin arrabo, shortened to arra and Old French erres, with the same meaning. Old English turned this into ernesse by confusion with the Germanic “-ness” suffix, and finally it acquired the terminal /T/ because people figured that if you pledged ernesse (surety) then you ought to be earnest (serious) about it.
And yet again … Mound isn’t related to mount. Mound is Old English, and the original definition was a hedge or fence. Much later it came to mean “embankment”; the current sense of “rounded lump” is only two hundred years old. Mount and mountain, meanwhile, are Latin mons/mont-, from an ie root that meant to project or jut. Other Latin derivatives include eminent, prominent, promenade, and promentory. An extension of “stick out” to “threaten” created imminent (literally, hanging over), menace, and amenable. A related root meant “neck”, leading to Germanic mane.
To pose for a picture is not connected to a position. Pose and pause are the same word, from Latin pausare, to hold still. Position, meanwhile, is a descendant of Latin ponere, to put or place, whose participle was posit-. See component and deposit for the rest of the tribe.
Gloom, darkness, does not seem to be related to gloomy, unhappy or pessimistic. They are both Old English, but the darkness word was once glome, which still survives in the poetic term gloaming. The origin of gloomy, meanwhile, would be more obvious if it was spelled and pronounced “glummy” — it is from glum, depressed. As a noun gloom (gloom and doom) is a back-formation from gloomy.
The cashier who is in charge of the money isn’t related to the verb to cashier, to dismiss, especially from the army. The root meaning of cash is a box, so it’s a first cousin of case and capsule as well as all the capture (hold) tribe mentioned elsewhere. The first meaning of a “cash” was a strongbox or safe before it migrated to the money inside. French cache tooks like it should be related, but instead it’s from a “hide” root. Meanwhile, to cashier a soldier is to “break” him or her — that word is related to quash.
Query is not related to querulous. Query is one of the Latin “question” words from quo, while the origin of querulous would be much more obvious if it was spelled “quarrelous” — inclined to fight.
Recoil is not related to coil. As mentioned elsewhere, “coil” is a member of the “collect” family. Recoil, however, is Latin reculare, from culus, backside. C.f. French cul-de-sac, where the first word means “end”, and culottes. To recoil is therefore etymologically to fall on one’s butt.
27Jan10 Snug and snuggle seem to have originated as separate words, although they have drifted toward each other in modern times. The adjective snug (evidently from Low German/Dutch) originally meant neat or tidy, and was mainly a nautical word (a snug ship). On the other hand, the verb to snug, now usually seen only in “snuggle”, meant to make warm and comfortable. The overlap of the two words was probably through “neat” coming to mean streamlined and then tight, as in a snug sweater, and snug garments could also be warm ones. Going the other way, to snug (get warm) in a blanket meant wrapping up tightly. The rhyming cliché “snug as a bug in a rug“ goes back to at least 1769 — note that to the English, a bug was and is specifically a bedbug, and as mentioned under “rugged“, for hundreds of years a rug was a blanket. Snogging is British slang for kissing and cuddling, which is certainly one way of keeping warm.
28Apr09 Shine and sheen don’t seem to have any connection. Shine is from a root that means “faint light”, so it is related to shimmer, shadow, and sheer. Greek skene meant “tent” (i.e., a shadowed place), and by way of the booths used for plays, became the theatrical scene. Sheen, on the other hand, is evidently the same word as German schön, beautiful or fine. A scone was once Dutch schoonbrood, fine bread.
The Latin word for shadow was umbra. English descendants include umber as a dark color, umbrella (a little shade — c.f. parasol, literally “against the sun”), and umbrage. The phrase “under a shadow” (sub-umbra) produced somber and sombrero.
Coward and cower are another pair of words that look as if they should be connected, but are not. Coward is definitely from Latin cauda, tail, although there is debate whether the original sense was someone “turning tail” and running away, or an image of a frightened dog with its tail between its legs. Either way, coward is related to queue in both senses — a pigtail, and a line of people waiting. Coda is an Italian musical term for something tacked onto the end of a longer work. Meanwhile, “cower” is a Scandinavian word that means to crouch, not necessarily in fear. Despite some similarity in form and meaning, the verb to cow, to intimidate, isn’t related to either coward or cower, nor to the four-legged animal, for that matter. It is Old Norse kuga, to subdue or tyrannize.
Timid and intimidate are from Latin timor, an unreasonable fear. A justified fear was metus, so being afraid of a lion made a person meticulous, while being afraid of a mouse was timorous.)
To pet and to pat are not related. To pet is to stroke a tame animal; the noun “pet” is originally Gaelic for a hand-raised lamb. Pat has gotten much tamer itself. It originally meant to strike — there is a quotation in the oed about David patting Goliath with a stone, and to pat the neck once meant to break it.
While on the subject of stones, to stonewall is indeed from the nickname of Stonewall Jackson, but it went completely around the world by way of English cricket and Australian politics! General Jackson received his epithet because he and his men “stood like a stone wall” at the battle of Bull Run. Immediately after the US Civil War, cricketers started using the term for a batter who played strictly a defensive game. (In US baseball terms, a stonewaller would be a batter who fouled off everything anywhere near the strike zone.) Within ten years, the verb, “to stonewall” became an Australian synonym for obstinate and determined blocking of a legislative action. Americans became very familiar with the word through the antics of the Nixon administration in the 1970’s, although presumably the process itself is thousands of years old.
Somewhat surprisingly, there is no connection between fund and refund. Fund is a “base” word related to fundamental and foundation. Founder is another relative — it means to sink to the bottom — and profound means “very deep”. Refund, however, is a “pour” word from the same family as foundry and confuse (pour together). To refund is to “pour back”, hence the current sense of restore or replenish. An early anatomy text speaks of the heart refunding blood into the body. To refuse is the same word, and it also originally meant to “pour back” — c.f. reject, to “throw back”. To diffuse is to “pour away”, while profuse means “poured forth” — c.f. abundant, another “pour out” word. In Germanic, the “pour out” sense led to gut.
There actually is a second verb to refund, probably better spelled “re-fund” to avoid confusion, as in “Congress passed a budget measure to re-fund the project.”
To refrain from doing something is not related to the refrain of a song. The verb is from Latin frenum, bridle, so it means “hold back” or “restrain”. The noun, however, is from Latin refrangere, to “break back again” or “break off”. The past participle gave us refract, while the simple frangere is responsible for fracture, frail, break (by Grimm’s Law), etc. as mentioned elsewhere.
I defy anybody to recognize that tempt is closely related to tentacle. Both are ultimately from Latin temptare, to handle, touch, or feel. The original meaning of tempt was to test or try, a sense more obvious in attempt (to reach towards) and tentative. All these are probably cousins of Latin tendere, to stretch. See tent for many more words from that root.
From the form, contempt looks like it might be another cousin, but it is instead from a Latin word that meant to despise. To contemn is almost obsolete in English; people who run across it probably mistake it for the unrelated condemn. Most Americans have encountered the word only in the third verse of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:
```
   I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: 
   “As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal; 
   Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, 
   Since God is marching on.”
```
Leave, to depart, is not related to the leave that a person may receive to be absent from his or her duties. The latter is from an ie leubh- root that means “desire” or “permission”. The military leave is synonymous with a furlough, borrowed from Dutch verlof. The closest relatives in English are love, libido, belief, etc., all with a sense of “desire”. On the other hand, the departure “leave” is ie leip-, to lack or leave behind. The past participle “leaved” is, of course, now spelled left. Complicating this picture is the root leguh-, unrelated to either of the above, which means light [in weight] and therefore to rise. This one is responsible for relieve, elevate, lever, leaven, and the Levant where the sun rises. Also, the first syllable of leprechaun means light in weight. Legerdemain is French “light of hand”.
This one is even more fun — lite as in Lite Beer is not related to light in weight, calories, or whatever. The latter strictly means “low in weight” — light is the opposite of heavy, as mentioned in the previous paragraph. Meanwhile, lite is a relative of little and is the Germanic opposite of fine or luxurious. The word has meant “few”, “meager”, or “of poor quality” since Old English.
I love it when I see products where the advertising agency obviously does not know the definition of the word:
- The Miller brewery is inadvertantly telling people that their Miller Lite® Beer is “of poor quality”.
- There is a snack food called Poppycock®, which is straight Dutch poppekak, literally “doll shit” as something tiny and worthless. 19Dec09 (The first syllable is also seen in poppet, and the second in cack as a slang term for excrement and in Greek words in kakk-, a root that was generalized to “disgusting”. For example, cacophony is to sound like shit. Note that cack-handed means left-handed — yet another put-down of sinister humans.)
- The US military health insurance program is called TriCare®, and I’m sure many people filling out the paperwork would appreciate knowing that Latin tricare means subterfuge or entanglement. See “trick” for more on that subject. (The New York Life Insurance Company used to promote a health insurance program called NYLCare®; customers whose claims had been denied obligingly pronounced it “nil-care”.)
- The skin cream called Porcelana® probably doesn’t sell too well to etymologists, since as mentioned in the discussion of “porcelain”, it implies the product will make one look like the hind end of a pig.
- My favorite Linux distribution (Ubuntu) decided that one version should be codenamed Feisty. Unfortunately, the literal meaning is “stinking”, from Middle English fysten, to fart. The current meaning developed from “fysting cur”, a stinking dog. Now you understand puns about “making a fist” in Shakespearean times. The next Ubuntu distribution was code-named Gutsy. No comment required. It was followed by Hardy, which was much better — it means “strong” and is related to hard and the -crat in Aristocrat, q.v. 19Dec09 The next version was Intrepid, literally “fearless”, followed by Jaunty (well-bred), Karmic (fateful), and the upcoming Lucid (clear). Maybe they now have an etymologist on the payroll.
- Health-food advocates might pause to reflect on the fact that bran seems to be the Keltic word for “shit” — c.f. excrement vs. excrete and shit vs. shed for other examples of the “separated out” metaphor.
- 29Dec09 The reason one sees so many cute spellings, BiCapitalizations, and RunTogetherNames of products is that if a product uses a “real” word — Light Beer for example — it often can’t be copyrighted. Sometimes a phrase can be protected even though the main term cannot. C.f. Microsoft Windows©, but “My Linux operating system uses windows.”
While I’m on a roll… A jock-strap is only indirectly related to a jockey, despite the seeming need of the latter for the former. Both are from the Scots form of Jack, a nickname of John, but that’s it. Jockey (little Jack) started out in the 15th century as a general contemptuous term for a small or insignificant person, a lackey. John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was sarcastically so-called for his services to Richard III — the day before the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, he received a note saying, “Jockey of Norfolk be not too bold, For Dickon thy master is bought and sold”. Evidently neither the Duke nor the King paid any attention to this rudeness, since Norfolk and Richard his master were both killed in the following battle. It’s been said by die-hard supporters of the House of York that the only accurate historical detail in all of Shakespeare’s Richard III is his quotation of that couplet over a hundred years later. Shakespeare, knowing very well on which side his bread was buttered, didn’t say anything kind about Richard or anything unkind about the victorious Henry VII, the first of the Tudor dynasty and the paternal grandfather of Elizabeth I. On the other hand, John Howard was Elizabeth’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side — Anne Boleyn was his granddaughter — so perhaps Shakespeare considered not writing the play at all.
In the 16th century jockey came to mean horse dealer and/or swindler, postilion, and then professional race rider. In a completely separate use of “Jack”, jock was a slang term for the penis from about 1800. The first recorded use of jock-strap (by that time persons had evidently forgotten the indelicate origin) came in advertisements of about 1900. (Men seem to like giving affectionate nicknames to their masculine equipment — consider jock, dick, willie, peter, john thomas, and other creative nomenclature.)
As an aside, the city and state of New York aren’t named for the royal House of York which opposed Lancaster in the War of the Roses, but from an unrelated Stuart a couple hundred years later. James, the younger brother of king Charles II, was known as the Duke of York until he succeeded as James II, and it was he who, as head of the navy, had recommended the capture of New Amsterdam from the Dutch. James II was the last Stuart king — he was succeeded by his daughters Mary and Anne, and then by George I of the German House of Hanover. Many unkind things have been said about James II, but at least he honored his brother’s final wish. “Pretty, witty” Nell Gwyn was the long-term mistress of Charles II, and his dying words were, “Don’t let poor Nellie starve.” She got a quite adequate pension for the rest of her life, her son by Charles was made a duke, and her granddaughter married the last Earl of Oxford. (Note that the English have a thousand-year-old tradition of giving illegitimate sons of the reigning monarch the title of duke.)
And again… Everyone is familiar with the archaic quoth from Poe’s “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore!’” and everyone assumes it is an old-fashioned way of saying “quoted”. Nope — it has no connection at all to quote and quotation. Quoth was the past tense of the Old English (Germanic) cwethan, to speak out. Its modern relatives are bequeath and bequest. Quote, meanwhile, is a member of the prolific Indo-European kwo-/kwi- family used to form question words. The Latin side includes quorum (from qui, who), quote, quotation (quot, how many), quantity, quantum (quanta, how large), quality (qualis, what kind), and the theatrical cue (quando, when). The literal “how many” sense of “quote” is still seen in a stock market quotation. The original Latin words are still used in several familiar phrases in English — quo vadis (who goes there?), quid pro quo (something for something), qui bono (who benefits?), and so on. Quasi- is quam-si, as if. Astronomers didn’t take long to shorten “quasi-stellar radio source” down to quasar — the long name was because they were point sources that looked like stars but obviously were not.
Grimm’s Law changed the Indo-European /kw-/ to /hw-/, so the Germanic branch of the family is the entire who, why, which, when, where, whither, whether, what, how… tribe that’s drummed into reporters. Even though the miracle of modern English spelling has reversed /hw-/ to /wh-/, the pronunciation is still /hw-/ except for “who” and “how” that have lost the /w/ sound .
P.S. — Question itself does not seem to be a member of this family! Latin quaerere/quest-, to ask, seek, or gain does not seem to be ie, and no trace of it has been found in any other languages. There is quite a respectable set of descendants in English — question, quest, query, inquiry, inquest, request, acquire, require, inquisition, requisition, and so forth. Exquisite means “sought out”, while conquer and conquest mean to “seek out together”, the job of the Spanish conquistadores. In Scotland, “conquest” simply meant “acquisition” without any aggressive sense, and it was applied to purchases, gifts (bridal dowries in particular), etc. Essentially, anything which was gained other than by inheritance was a conquest.
Although it seems impossible, sorrow is not related to sorry. Sorrow has always meant just about what it does now — disappointment, grief, sadness, regret. Sorry, on the other hand, is the adjective form of sore (it should be spelled “sory”), so the literal meaning is “physically painful”. (After a workout, I have sorry muscles.) In Middle English, the current confusion didn’t exist, because both “sore” and “sorry” were formerly spelled with an /A/ — sare and sary. The Scots and northern English still pronounce (and sometimes spell) the word as “sair”.
Aviation is related to ovulation. On reflection, I suppose it won’t surprise many of my readers to find out that the Latin for “bird” (avis) is a cousin of the Latin for “egg” (ovum), so that an aviator and an ovulator are both imitating birds in their own ways. Indo-European scholars love to point out that they have solved the age-old question — the word for “bird” definitely came before the word for “egg”. Caviar is “little eggs” in Old Persian, and of course many eggs are more or less oval. Ovary is shortened down from Latin ovarius, egg-keeper. Some scientific terms begin with /OO/ (two syllables), from oon, Greek for egg. For instance, oolite (oo-lith) is a type of rock that looks like fish roe. The oed calls the relationship between Germanic egg itself and these Greek/Latin words “probable but not yet demonstrated.” (P.S. — none of these are related to an ovation, which comes from Latin ovare, to rejoice. Just to complicate things even more, Latin ovis meant “sheep”, so that the adjective ovine means “sheepish”.) Getting back to an egg, the Middle English form of the word was ey (see “island” above for loss of the /G/), and the oval kidney seems to mean “belly egg”.
21Jun09 To egg a person is to throw rotten eggs at them, but to egg on is not related. The latter verb is actually from the Norse form of edge.
It once was common for diviners to try to predict the future by interpreting the flight of birds. Auspicious is from avi-spek, to watch birds. Since the beginning of a new enterprise was incomplete without a formal prediction of success, it was under the auspices of an augur (bird-proclaimer) who performed an inauguration.
The Greek god Apollo is the same word as an insect repellent. The ie pel- root meant to push or drive. Greek A-pol therefore meant “one who drives away [evil]”. The Latin equivalent pel/puls- family gave quite a few English verbs having to do with pushing something — repel, impel, compel, expel, propel, etc., with the corresponding nouns in “-pulsion” — and your pulse is due to the push of your heart. The Greek catapult is another relation. From the “drive” sense, Germanic relatives usually mean to beat with a hammer. Felt cloth is made by beating the fibers, and a filter was originally made of felt. An anvil is another item that is subjected to a beating. 29Aug09 Polemic is possibly related — it’s the Greek word for “war-like”.
An auger technically is an instrument for drilling navels, which sounds like an extremely painful procedure. “An auger” began life as “a nauger”, and a nauger was used for boring the axle hole in a wheel — the nave. (The second syllable of “nauger” is the Germanic gar- root that means “spear” — see the section on Oscar and garlic.) The anatomical navel is derived from the fundamental sense of nave as “the hole in the center” of a wheel. This word is attested in all the Indo-European languages, showing the antiquity of the wheel. Indeed, some archaeologists speculate that mastery of the horse and the wheeled wagon were fundamental to the Indo-European spread over all of Europe and half of Asia in prehistoric times. 24Jun09 The ie root is nobh-, and obviously the Romans and Greeks didn’t like that initial /N/ either, because Latin umbo meant the boss of a shield (c.f. umbilical) and the Greek for “navel” was omphalos.
To digress, the nave of a church is unrelated to the nave of a wheel. The architectural feature is from Latin navis, ship, because the ceiling ribs of a Gothic church looked like an under-construction ship. (Wooden boats were normally built upside down.) Naval, navy, nautical, and navigation are other “ship” words, and nausea is what happens when a ship moves too energetically. (A person who is violently seasick will not be happy to learn that noise is the same word as nausea — it’s by way of a French intermediate that meant “confusion.”) The -naut suffix (astronaut, Argonaut and now Taikonaut) means sailor, as does the chambered nautilus. British slang for a laborer is a navvy; it’s short for “navigator” and was originally sarcastically applied to the men who dug canals with pick and shovel, and then to the railway builders.
While on the subject of Jason and the Argonauts, it should be mentioned that argosy is not related to their ship Argo. Originally, an argosy was a trading fleet (or even a single ship) from the Dalmatian port of Ragusa.
Getting back to the Indo-European mastery of the wagon, there are a lot of words from the ie wegh root, to transport or carry. Some obvious ones are way, always, convey, vector, vehicle, via, convoy, voyage, and so on. Some less obvious cousins include weigh (to “carry” on the pan of a balance), previous (going before), and many more. The original definition of vogue was to row a boat, but in French became “succeed”. A convex shape is “carried together” to a point, and a viaduct “leads a path” over another. 23Jan10 Yet another derivative is Germanic wag, and to repeatedly wag is to wiggle.
Invade is to carry in, and something pervasive has “thoroughly invaded”. To evade something is to get “out of the way” (ex-via), and if you cannot get out of the way of something, it is in-ex-via — inevitable. Deviation is swerving “out of the way”, and if you do so quite often, you are a devious deviate.
Some “way” relatives aren’t quite as obvious, though. Trivial literally means “three ways”, and was literally applied to a place where three roads met. Such places tended to be natural gathering places, markets, town plazas, etc. so the current meaning might come from “gossip one could learn by the roadside”. If so, it is the exact same transfer of meaning that occurs in commonplace, that which is known on the village commons. Unfortunately for this fine story, it is perhaps more likely that the word began as university slang. In the Middle Ages, the liberal arts curriculum was divided into the trivium — rhetoric, logic, and grammar — and the quadrivium — music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Since the trivium was seen as preparation for the quadrivium, “trivial” could easily have come to mean “less important”. The quadrivium was, in its turn, regarded as the preparation for the highest subjects, philosophy and theology. This three-part curriculum is still echoed in the concept of Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctor’s degrees.
12Apr09 Most other relatives of three are very obvious — tripod, trio, trinity, and so on, but a few are quite well-disguised. Surprisingly, a tress is a first cousin of drill, a strong fabric. The original meaning of “tress”, from Italian trecciare, is a braid or plait, presumably of three strands, and “drill” cloth is woven with three threads, just as twill has two. 20May09 Trellis is the same word as “twill”; from “heavy woven fabric” it was generalized to anything woven, particularly a grill or grate. 07Oct09 Another unlikely “three” derivative is tribe. Latin tribus originally referred to one of the three divisions of early Roman society — perhaps the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans — before being generalized to “band of people” and applied to the twelve tribes of Israel. (Shakespeare was the first to use it in the current sense of “group of people under a chief”.) A tribune was originally the leader of a tribe, who presided over a tribunal. A tribute, contribution, or distribution was the money paid to keep a tribe from invading, an attribute was the share they received, while retribution was getting your money back again. A tributary “contributes” water to a larger stream. Even these aren’t as unlikely “three” words as testicle! The authorities are agreed that Latin testis, a witness, is whittled down from tri-stat, a “third person standing [at the scene]”. Testis gave English testify, attest, etc. as mentioned elsewhere. C.f. umpire, an “unequal” third person.
Despite appearances, tribulation is not a “tribe” word, however. It’s really related to “throw”.
Getting back on the road, the original meaning of vex was “set in motion”, but in Latin it came to mean “agitate”. C.f. emotion, which literally means “move out” and was once used as a synonym of “migrate” — “The Huns emoted all the way from central Asia.” 02May09 As mentioned elsewhere, agitate is another “move back and forth” word. (“Viable” looks like it might mean “passable, able to be traveled” but it doesn’t; it’s actually “livable” from the Latin vivi- root seen in revive, vivisection, vital, etc. The literal meaning is still seen in an animal’s “viable offspring”.)
Convex and concave are good examples of the two different meanings of the com- prefix — “together” and “thoroughly”. Convex means “carried together”, as mentioned in the previous paragraphs, but concave is “very hollow”, from the Latin cavea root seen in cave and cavity, q.v.
Evict looks like it should be “carry out” (ex-via), but it isn’t. Latin victus is the past participle of vincere, to conquer, so the relatives of “evict” are really victory, vanquish, invincible, the names Victor/Victoria and Vincent, and so on. The original meanings of convict and convince were identical — once you have been convinced you have a conviction, and a criminal is convicted when the judge and jury are convinced of the guilt. For that matter, evict and evince were once synonyms.
Despite the appearance, victim isn’t related to victory or conviction. It’s actually from a root that means “consecrate”, and the original meaning of victim was a sacrificial animal. Other relatives are the wicked witch who practices Wicca. Wicca meant “witch” in Old English, but it recently has been revived for followers of a modern version of the pre-Christian Keltic religious tradition. Witch was once a synonym of priestess, but needless to say, priestesses of pagan religions were not particularly popular in medieval Christendom.
Indo-European had two closely related roots gal- and kele-, both meaning to shout or call out. From one or the other we get call, clatter, claim, exclaim, declaim, clamor, acclamation, council (a calling together), and class, originally a draft of citizens “called up” for military service. The Roman calends were the first days of each month, when the upcoming holy days, etc. were officially proclaimed, leading to calendar. Ecclesiastical is from the Greek version of “council”, i.e. a group called together. Note that gallo is Spanish for “rooster”. Nomenclature means “call by name”. Russian glasnost literally means “publicity”, but it has come to mean “openness”.
In Germanic, to hail is to call out, and sea chanteys like “Haul Away, Joe” make it obvious that haul was originally to shout out commands. A naval halyard is a “hauled yard”.
Straw is closely related to street. The normal verb related to straw is strew, to lay out or scatter something. Straw was scattered on the floor of stables and houses. There’s a well-known line from Kipling: “We have strawed our best to the weed’s unrest, the shark and the sheering gull.” A streusel has a topping scattered upon it. Also from the “lay down” sense is the Latin struere/struct-, to pile up or arrange, which led to structure, construct and its doublet construe, destruction, destroy, etc. 14Oct09 Students everywhere will appreciate the irony that instruct is to pile on. C.f. obstruct, to pile against. Instrument is even less obvious; the original sense was “apparatus”, from the “arrange” sense. Stray looks like it should be related, but the best authorities consider it a contraction of extravagant, to wander outside. 01Aug09 (The oed points out that “construe” had to have been borrowed directly from Latin “construere”, because if it had come through French the form would be “constroy”.
It seems possible that star is yet another relative; stars would be the items which are scattered across the sky. Some experts think the word is from the “stand/stationary” root instead, in which case “fixed stars” would be redundant. Yet more experts insist “star” is from ater, to burn (c.f. atrium, atrocity, etc.) in which case the meaning would be “ember”. I’ll let them fight it out. It’s barely possible that ater is also behind Persian zar-, which means both “fire” and “gold”. As mentioned elsewhere, this led to the zircon and the elements zirconium and arsenic.
Getting back to solid ground, the original meaning of prostration (spread before) was to lie flat on one’s face, arms outspread, in submission or surrender. Most etymologists think that the strawberry was named for the way the plant is strewn over the ground instead of forming a bush like other berries, although it’s possible that the tiny bristles on the ripe fruit also contributed.
25Sep09 There are several geological and medical terms in stroma-, Greek for “layered”. The most common is stromatolith, layered stone. The related Latin strat- words also mean “layer”, as in geological strata, stratus clouds, and the stratosphere. The original meaning of street (Latin via strata) was a paved roadway where stone or brick had been laid out on the surface, as opposed to the much more common dirt track. In the Middle Ages, the word normally meant one of the ancient Roman cross-country roads, some of which were built so well that they still, two thousand years later, carry modern auto and truck traffic.
Someone once described Roman road-building techniques as “burying a wall”, and as far as I can tell, the Italians try hard to live up to their ancestors. For anyone who has driven on an Italian expressway (autostrada), it seems as if the engineers pointed a laser from the beginning to the ending point. Wherever the line was above ground they built a bridge, and wherever it touched the ground they built a tunnel, completely ignoring such minor nuisances as rivers, valleys, mountains, cities, and the curvature of the Earth. In the Alps or Apennines, one can drive for miles without ever actually being on the surface — a tunnel through a mountain opens directly onto a bridge across the valley, which in turn leads directly into the next tunnel mouth.
Speaking of driving in the Alps, there was a recent news article about a driver being seriously injured by a falling cow. Evidently the cow had been grazing on the mountainside above the mouth of a tunnel, and it lost its footing and fell directly onto an emerging car. Totaled the car, and of course also totaled the cow. I can just imagine the discussion with the insurance company. Hmmm… This isn’t as rare as I thought — another news story described the unpleasant aftermath of a moose falling off a mountain onto a car somewhere in Norway, while recently a car was damaged by another falling cow in the state of Washington.
I suppose the fact that most cows and mooses (meese?) are sure-footed can be attributed to Darwinian selection — clumsy ones would tend to have less offspring. A famous example of this sort of thing is the fact that, on average, rabbits are faster than foxes. The short explanation is that the rabbit is running for its life while the fox is running for its dinner, but in the long run Selection is definitely in action. There are many cases where a rabbit outran a fox but the fox still went on to have a long and happy life with lots of (possibly slow) offspring, but there are no examples of a rabbit losing a race to a fox and passing on its genes thereafter. Put another way, a rabbit has to be faster than every fox it might encounter, whereas a fox only has to be better than some rabbits — the slowest, dumbest, or unluckiest.
Apropos of roads and walls, boulevard is the French form of the Germanic bulwark. In the 18th and 19th centuries, most European cities had far outgrown their medieval walls, and when the walls were finally torn down, many city planners used the cleared space to build broad highways in their place. As a result, European cities often have a “Ringstrasse” following the line of the old walls around the city center. Here are street plans of modern Moscow and Vienna showing the ring boulevards quite well. As you can see, Moscow actually built and then tore down several walls as the city expanded.
These boulevards thus have the same origin as Wall Street in New York City, which was built on the line of the wall across lower Manhattan which had protected the original Dutch settlement on the southern tip of the island. The historical etymologist would therefore infer that the street and district called The Bowery (“farm” in Dutch) should be north of Wall Street, and that is indeed the case.
Another “road” word is avenue, which is from the French form of Latin advenire, “come to” or approach. Uses like “Having failed to bunt, the hitter picked a different avenue for advancing the runner,” are now felt as metaphors, but actually retain the original sense. Advent is an obvious relative. Adventure is not as obvious, though — that’s from the sense of “happening”, i.e., that which comes upon one. It was clipped down to venture in the 16th century.
Advance and advantage certainly look like they are ad-venire, too, but instead they are ab-ante, “from before”. The Italian form was avanti, and English mistakenly inserted the /D/ because of a supposed connection to the “advent” words. (See the section on admiral for a lot more examples of this.) About 1300, “advantage” got itself shortened down to vantage. Van, the leading element of something, is shortened from French avant-garde and has no relation to the moving van. See “caravan” for that one.
Technically, No! as the answer to a question is a different word from the adjective no in phrases like “no shirt, no shoes, no service”. The latter is actually none (i.e., “not one” or “not any”). Like several other terms in English, the /N/ was dropped before a consonant, leading to “no more” but “none other”. (As mentioned elsewhere, a/an, my/mine, the/then, and thy/thine exhibit the same behavior. In all these examples, the “real” word is the form with the /N/.) Nor is condensed all the way down from “none other” and not is from “none ought”, i.e., “no anything”. This habit was not exclusive to English — Latin (and now English) nil is shortened from nihil, that is, ni-hilum, not a bit.
It doesn’t seem that an attack with a thumbtack would be too serious, but you never know. To attack is exactly the same word as to attach. The root definition is to join or fasten, and the current military meaning of attack is, by way of some Italian term like attaccare battaglia, join battle. Another aggressive attack is the football or soccer tackle. Stake, stick, and their little brother tack are “fasten” words, as is the adjective tacky, i.e., sticky. (The real ie steik- root means to pierce or prick, so the original sense was something like “pin down” or “nail down.") Amusingly, a steak is also derived from the same root; it once meant a piece of meat which was roasted on a spit. To stoke a fire is to poke it with a stick, not add fuel. Stigma (plural stigmata) is another pierce word, first used to mean “brand of infamy”. In an astigmatic lens, light rays form “no point” at the focus. An unlikely-looking relative is tiger, from the Sanskrit word for a [pointed] arrow, describing the stripes. See Stacy the Prostitute for many more relatives of this family.
Latin stinguere literally meant to pierce or prick, but it apparently only meant snuff out or extinguish to the Romans. Extinct is the past participle. To distinguish things is to “prod them apart”, and distinct is its past participle. The literal meaning of instigate is to stab or prod someone (with a stick), and an instinct is an internal prodding.
Despite the similarity in sound and meaning, sting is not related to Latin stinguere; it is a purely Germanic word, meaning to stab with a knife. Stingy certainly looks like it should be the adjective form of “sting”, and surprisingly, it is, no matter what the pronunciation. The original definition was “stinging” or “sharp”. That migrated to “biting” (used of cold weather), and that became bad-tempered or peevish. Next came narrow-minded, and then niggardly or close-fisted, the current sense. (Sting itself was sometimes pronounced “stinge” in Old English, by the way.)
Geology was originally the opposite of theology. Just as theology meant the study of godly things, in medieval times geology was the study of earthly things, and the term was first applied to such secular activities as the study of Law. The change in sense to “study of the planet Earth” occurred in the 17th Century, and “study of the Earth’s crust” not until the beginning of the 19th. It’s interesting that “geology” was not applied to the other major secular university study of those times, Medicine. I assume that medieval medical treatment was regarded more as a branch of theology, probably with good reason, but that nobody ever claimed lawyers were on the side of the angels.
The word female has nothing to do with male. The latter is from the French form of Latin masculus. Female, on the other hand is corrupted from French femelle, literally, little femina, the opposite of masculus. The Latin root fe- meant to suckle, seen in other words like fetus, filial, fecund, felicity, and fellatio. Therefore, feminist dislike of the word “female” is misplaced; it’s actually a compliment to the nourishing/nurturing aspect of the sex.
While feminists have no legitimate etymological complaint with “female”, the same cannot be said about woman. The problem isn’t with the “man” syllable, which as mentioned simply meant person of either sex in Old English. Woman is the oe compound wif-man, wife-person. The kicker is that wife was originally a very vulgar term for the female genitals — it comes from an Indo-European root that means “shame” — so the literal meaning of “woman” was “cunt-person”. The definitions of both “wife” and “woman” have gotten much more polite over time, but they started out as chauvinistic and insulting as one can get. (The male equivalent of wif-man was wapen-man, “weapon-person”, and you can’t be much more sexually explicit than that!)