Words, words, words…

Rehearsing the Syncopation

At first glance, there seems no possible point of contact between hearse and rehearse, but be patient and all shall be made clear. Everything starts with the Latin root hirpic-, which meant rake or harrow. The verb became generalized in the sense “to pulverize, to flatten” which in turn led to harry, a military term for making repeated raids on the same territory, something which the poor residents who had been “pounded into the ground” found quite harrowing. Since raking and harrowing often involved going over the same territory again and again, to re-harrow or re-hearse came to have the general sense of “repeat an action over and over” — a person might rehearse his prayers. (We still use “rake up” in a similar metaphor — “Don’t keep raking up that argument!”)
OK, fine, we’ve gotten from “harrow” to “rehearse”, but how do we get to a funeral vehicle? From the literal sense of a farmer’s rake, “hearse” came to be used as the name of a holder for multiple candles, a candelabrum or chandelier, and in particular a hearse was the special framework holding a large number of candles over the coffin at a funeral service. From there it came to be applied to the actual platform holding the coffin, now called a catafalque or bier. Since these were sometimes on wheels (presumably when the deceased could afford a lot of candles, the coffin might be too heavy and elaborate for the usual pallbearer scheme), the usage gradually changed to “a carriage constructed to carry around a coffin”, and that is now the only sense of the word!
Scaffold is the same word as catafalque, and once simply meant a platform of any kind. Actors performed on a scaffold. Bier is a member of the bear (carry) family, so it’s related to things like burdens, births, berths, and barrows or wheelbarrows, and also to board in the sense of “table”, as in “room and board” or aboveboard, i.e., keeping one’s hands in plain view, as opposed to underhanded or under the table behavior. (The other “barrow”, a burial mound, is not related. That’s a variant of Germanic berg, mountain.) In Latin, the root is fer- (See Grimm’s Law yet again), leading to transfer (carry across), refer (carry back), etc. Fertile means “able to carry [children]”, and euphoria means “very fertile”. Phosphorus and Bosporus are still more “bear” words — see below for the details — and the Greek jug called an amphora was originally an “amphi-phora”, to carry on both sides, because it had two handles. A really, really small amphora is an ampoule. See Euphrates for a whole bunch more members of this tribe.
Changing the subject slightly, other Greek “both” words include amphibian (“both-life”), and amphitheater (“both-theater”, i.e., having seats in a full circle, since Greek theaters were normally semicircular.) A few hundred years ago when one called a person an amphibian it didn’t have anything to do with their swimming ability, but rather their swinging ability — it implied they were bisexual. The restriction of the word to frogs and such is quite modern. The Latin equivalent of amphi- was ambi-, as in ambidextrous and ambient, that is, on both sides. (Note that “ambidextrous” also can be used in modern slang to denote someone who, as Woody Allen noted, has twice the chance of getting a date on Saturday night.) To amputate originally meant to prune in the garden sense, that is, to walk around a tree or shrub lopping off branches on both sides. To amble is to walk around, and a preamble is doing so beforehand. (Amblyopia looks like it might mean “wandering eye”, but it is actually from a Greek word that means “dull”. Ambulance is from “amble”, though; it was coined in French during the Napoleonic Wars as an adjective: hôpital ambulant, a “walking hospital” following an army around. The current sense dates from the Crimean War fifty years later by way of “ambulance cart” or “ambulance wagon”.) Ambiguous is Latin ambi-agere, to be driven in both directions, and as mentioned elsewhere, ambition is ambi-itere, to “travel around” for votes. The Scandinavian ombudsman “understands both sides” — check out the discussion of Buddha elsewhere. 15Oct09 In case it comes up in conversation, a pun or grammatically ambiguous sentence exhibits amphibology — “both meanings”.
Amphetamine looks like it might be a relative, but it’s not. It is an extreme example of chemical syncopation, short for AlphaMethylPHEneThylAMINE. Aspirin, originally a Bayer trademark, is shortened down from German Acetylierte Spirsäure, acetylated spiraeic acid (the old name for salisylic acid — salix is the willow genus, while spiraea is a member of the rose family).
In grammar, syncopation means to eliminate sounds or syllables out of the middle of a word, as opposed to abbreviation, to leave things off the back, or clipping, off the front. A lot of well-known British proper names are syncopated in pronunciation, spelling, or both. Austin is English for Augustine. Bedlam is from Bethlehem — the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem was the London insane asylum, where they used to sell tickets so the lunatics outside could watch the ones inside. Covent Garden started life as “Convent”, and Worcester is pronounced “Wooster”. Exeter is the modern spelling of “Exchester”. Cheshire and Lancashire are “Chestershire” and “Lancastershire”, from their chief cities, and Londonderry is pronounced “Londonry”. In the United States, Frisco as a shortening of Francisco, and Balmer, which is how the natives pronounce Baltimore, are other good examples of syncopation, and I understand residents of Philadelphia tend to say something approximating Fluffya. New York is “Nyawk” and Carolina is “Calina”. In Canada there is a large city called “Trawna”. Northerners seem to think that “New Orleans, Louisiana” has nine syllables, but the natives insist there are only five. The original pronunciation of Jamestown, Virginia is indicated by jimson weed, which was found there by the first settlers, and tidewater Virginia also has the family names Talliaferro (Tolliver), St. John (Sinjin), and Thoroughgood (Thurgood). American newspapers routinely syncopate Guantanamo down to Gitmo.
Santa Claus is a Dutch syncopation of “Saint Nicholas”. Almost a worst case is the English surname Featherstonehaugh, pronounced “Fanshaw”. Another syncopated British name is that of John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount Dundee. The pronunciation of his name is familiar from Scott’s poem and song Bonny Dundee -- “To the lairds of Convention ’twas Claverse who spoke…”. He has gone down in history with rather a split vote by the 17th-century Scots, being known as “Bonny Dundee” by the Jacobites and “Bloody Claverse” by the Covenanters. Maudlin is a British syncopation of Magdalene, and is pronounced that way for both Magdalen College at Oxford and Magdalene College at Cambridge.The current meaning is from conventional images showing Mary Magdalene weeping. Karen and Karin are syncopated forms of Catherine.
Getting away from cities and names, the preferred pronunciations of boatswain, forecastle, victuals, and waistcoat are “bosun”, “foksle”, “vittles”, and “weskit”. Prudent is a syncopated form of provident, proctor is from procurator, balm is for balsam, and SPAM® is for “spiced ham”. (The Hormel people have bowed to the inevitable, and now only ask that spam, junk e-mail, be written in lower-case to distinguish it from their trademarked canned meat product.) The name for a two-week period has gone from “fourteen-night” to “fortenight” (three syllables) to fortnight. Computer engineers, always interested in speed, speed, speed, have coined many shorthand terms, of which perhaps the best-known is bit, a violent syncopation of “binary digit”. See above for a discussion of the syncopation involved in none, nor, not, and nil, and to those common words the computer people have added nand, “not and” and xor, (pronounced ex-or or zore), “exclusive or”. Electricians commonly use an ammeter, short for “amperemeter”.
As a side note, syncope is a medical term for fainting, because a period has been “left out of the middle” of someone’s life. See the section on “haplology” for a special subset of syncopation.
There are quite a few more words related to Catherine, by the way. The ie root really meant to cut away, but it also had the strong sense of purification. Catherine, Karin, etc. are from a Greek word for “purity”, also seen in catharsis and the medical cathartic. In addition, the “pure” sense is responsible for chaste, chastity, chasten, castigate, and chastise (the last three meaning “purify through punishment”), while incest is Latin for “not pure”. The Indian castes are also related; Portuguese casta meant “pure race”. (Fidel Castro gets a lot of bad press considering his names mean “faith” and “purity”.) The religious sect called the Cathars translates as Puritans.
Meanwhile, the “cut away” branch led to Latin castra, which meant a cleared area of ground but became specialized to a military camp. This in turn led to British place names such as Winchester, Lancaster, Worcester and Cheshire (see above), as well as the English castle, French chateau, and Spanish alcazar. Castration is also quite definitely a “cut away” word. Surprisingly, the name of the proofreading symbol ^ is quite closely related to “castrate”. It’s straight third person singular present tense Latin caret, “it is missing”.
As long as we’re talking about a candle (remember that hearse?), it should be pointed out that the word is related to a candidate. The cand- root in Latin meant to shine, so the relation to candle and incandescent is obvious. A secondary meaning in Latin was to kindle, leading to incendiary and both definitions of incense (perfume which is burned, and to make angry). Those persons running for office in Rome, on the other hand, were called candidati (the shining ones) because by law they wore pure white togas while campaigning. Also from the “shining” sense are candid and candor, although only a true optimist would apply those words to the average political candidate, either in ancient Rome or today.
The car you drive is related to the charge account you maintain at a store. The basic car- root was borrowed from Keltic into Latin to mean a wheeled vehicle, also seen in such words as carry, chariot, carriage, cart, and cargo. It seems to be a derivative of the Indo-European kers-, to run. A carpenter was a person who made wagons. The literal meaning of a charge is “load, burden” (i.e, that which is carried); this is more obvious in the electrical charge of a battery, the charge (load) of a gun, and a charger, which is both a large platter and a heavy military horse. (A couple of hundred years ago, of course, it was possible to say things like “There was a pause in the battle while Napoleon recharged his batteries.” I.e., he reloaded his artillery.) As a financial term, a charge was (and is) a burden or obligation, and such items are “carried” on a company’s balance sheet. Also from the “burden” sense is the verb to charge, meaning to assign (“I charge you with this duty…”), most commonly seen in the phrase “in charge of” and in the criminal charge or accusation. The military sense of a charge — a headlong attack — is of uncertain origin; perhaps it originally meant to “burden” the enemy with one’s full force. Discharge in all its senses (e.g., to fire a gun or a person, to drain a battery) is literally to “unload”. Poets have always loved the alliterative phrase, “carking care”, where “carking” is an obsolete word that meant burdonsome or troubling, from the “carry” root.
Care (q.v.) is not related, however, and neither is caravan. The latter is a Persian word for “desert travellers”, and a caravanserai is a “caravan inn” (serai). In the 18th century, “caravan” came to mean “wagon”, and it has now been shortened to van. (Seraglio, a harem, is another Persian word via Italian; there “serai” means “palace”.)
Nobody should be too startled that alma mater is related to the alumni thereof, but most people would raise an eyebrow to find out those words are closely related to alimony. The Latin alere meant to nourish, and its adjective was almus, nourishing; hence the adjective alimentary to refer to the digestive system. Alimony is literally a “meal payment”. Alma mater itself — nourishing mother — was an epithet of various goddesses; particularly Ceres (q.v.) and the many-breasted Mother Goddess Cybele or Artemis. Around 1700 the phrase became slang for a university as a student’s intellectual mother, and the person so nourished at one of the many nipples was an alumnus or alumna, words which had meant “foster child” since the time of the Romans.
The ie al- root, by the way, also meant “grow”, leading to Germanic old (“grown”) and all its relatives. Adolescent is a Latin present participle (“growing”) while adult is the past participle (“grown”). To coalesce is to “grow together” and to abolish (Latin abolere) is to stop growth. In a victory for common sense over appearance, “adult” is not related to adultery or adulterate. Those are both from Latin adulterare, to corrupt, from alterare, to alter. It does mean that the old line about “adults having more fun in adultery than infants do in infancy” probably can be traced back to the Romans.
07Oct09 The Greek root for “nourish” was troph-, and it also had the subsidiary meaning of “grow”. In English this is seen in atrophy (no growth), distrophy (bad growth), and hypertrophy, overgrowth. Biologists make a fundamental division of organisms by how they grow. At the bottom of the food chain are the “self-feeding” autotrophs that create their own complex chemicals from simple sources like air and water, typically using the sun for energy — plants, algae, and some bacteria. The “other-feeding” heterotrophs (animals, fungi, and most bacteria) cannot pull off this trick, but must acquire their proteins, carbs, and energy sources by eating them ready-made.
Several biblical words describing the Israelites and their customs are not Hebrew or Aramaic, as commonly supposed, but Greek or Latin. For example, sanhedrin is “sit together” in Greek. Synagogue is Greek for “bring together”, so it’s exactly the same thing as the Latin “congregation”. Tabernacle is Latin for “little booth” or “little tent”; it’s also the source of tavern. The dance called a hora is also Greek; it’s related to “chorus”. Greek psallein means to twitch, so a psalm is a harp song. (Other descendants of that ie pal- root include palpitation, quivering, and Ptolemy, one who causes opponents to quake with fear.)
To tediously harp on a subject is from the musical instrument. The original phrase was “to harp on one string”, i.e., to be monotonous (one tone) in the literal sense.
Latin grex/greg- meant “herd” or “flock”, from an ie ger- root which meant to gather. Besides congregate (gather together), English has gregarious, aggregate (add to the group), its opposite, segregate, (cut from the group), and egregious (“out of the flock” — first remarkable, then unacceptable). In Greek, agora meant “gathering place” or public square, seen in agoraphobia, fear of crowds. In Germanic, Grimm’s Law changed the /G/ to a /K/, leading to cram. Exaggerate looks as if it ought to be a member of the family, to “pile higher and deeper”, but the gurus insist it’s from Latin gerere, to carry. See the section about a belligerent jester. Gather itself and its derivative together look like they might be ger- descendants, but since they are Germanic, Grimm’s Law says “Not So!”
One thing a clam absolutely cannot do is climb, so it is curious that they are the same word. The original root means to hold fast, to stick to, also leading to clamp. (Clammy is not related, though. That’s related to glue, q.v.) A climbing plant like ivy was so-called because it clung to things, not because it ascended. The modern sense of climb — to climb a cliff or a ladder — still has a strong sense of hanging on tightly, and this is made more obvious by the fact that one can climb up or climb down. To climb is therefore a synonym of to clamber, where the sense of holding tight is even more obvious. Yet another “hold tight” word is to glom onto something, and a conglomerate has been glommed together. The archaic verb cleave as in the marriage service’s “cleave to one another” is another “hold tight” derivative — it is no relation to the other cleave meaning “split”. Cleavage, the cleft between the breasts, is not recorded until 1946! It was invented by the Hollywood film censors to describe the offense of showing too much skin. A Middle English term for that portion of the anatomy was slot.)
17Apr09 Speaking of cleavage, a low-cut dress is said to be décolleté, literally “off the neck” (col) in French. Collar is of course a close relative, and a collet is a “little collar”, but somewhat surprisingly, the next closest English relative is accolade. An accolade was the formal tap of a sword to the neck (ad-col) or shoulder of a newly-created knight. Col itself is sometimes seen as a geographical term with the meaning of “mountain pass”, borrowed from French.
Climb is not related to climax. That one (Greek for “ladder”) is a “lean” word, q.v.
I mentioned “harping on a subject” as a cliché that doesn’t make sense unless it’s expanded into the full version. Another one is “happy as a clam”. It makes much more sense in full: “Happy as a clam at high tide,” because people and birds can’t dig clams out of the sand when it’s under water.
Some experts think that cloth (and its verb to clothe) is another “adhere” word, although the majority view is that it’s a pure Germanic term of unknown origin. The original meaning was what we now call clothing; it still has that sense in the other Germanic languages — Dutch kleed and German Kleid mean garment. Eventually English decided that logically it should be a plural, leading to clothes. Note there is a second plural, cloths, more than one cloth. Clad is the past tense of clothe.
Ok, if “climb” actually means “hold on”, then what’s the real root with that meaning? The answer is skand-, which meant both climb and fall down or stumble. The former sense gives words like ascend, descendant, transcend, and scan. Once upon a time, it wasn’t a put-down to say someone acted condescending. Literally, it’s “climbing down with”, and referred to a superior who was comfortable interacting with lower-class people; for instance, asking advice of his or her servants or employees, or merely being very polite to them. It was the opposite of being “on his high horse”. It didn’t take too much effort to add the current senses of snobbishness and insincerity, however. An intermediate Latin scantla managed to lose the -nt- and become the ancestor of scale in both the climbing and musical senses, as well as escalator and echelon. (See below for the unrelated scales of a fish.) The famous opera house called La Scala isn’t named for the scales sung within; it’s situated at a set of steps in Milan.
From the “stumble” sense, meanwhile, we get scandal and slander. Note that “scandal” had the sense of “slander” in the now-obsolete criminal offense scandalum magnatum, i.e., bad-mouthing your betters. The liability to a jail term for, e.g., cursing the king in public, lasted well into the 20th Century in England.
The history of condescend is exactly parallel to that of patronize. As late as the 18th century the latter still meant to act as a father or patron, as in “He patronized widows and orphans.”
Shell and scale are from an Indo-European skel- root that meant to split. A set of scales, the weighing device, is so-named from the pans of the balance resembling shells. A scallop is a kind of shellfish. Shale splits easily, both a shelf and a shield are a split piece of wood, i.e., a board, and the scalp is the “shell” of the head. 28Apr09 Using a shield provides shelter. Shellac is “shell-lac”, lac in thin plates. (Lakh is the Sanskrit name of the substance; it is dissolved in alcohol to produce French lacquer.) A scalpel cuts things, and one way of cutting leads to a sculpture. 16Feb10 With the /S/ detached and Grimm’s Law applied twice (/K/-to-/H/ and /P/-to-/F/), we get Germanic half, a division. A school or shoal of fish is another division; it originally meant “troop”. The other “shoal” and its cousin shallow might also be related through a sense of “thin”.
“To divide up” was a common metaphor for “to discern” or “to know” (c.f. science and incisive, from the same “cut” root that gave scissors, q.v.), and so another “shell” relative is skill, which originally meant knowledge.
An Indo-European bhrem- root meant edge or point. The “edge” sense gave brim and berm, while the “point” meaning produced bramble and, somewhat surprisingly, broom. (Broom was originally the name of a bristly plant whose stems were used for the sweeping tool; c.f. the dual sense of brush.)
Indo-European spel- meant to split or break off. Obvious relations include split, splint, splinter, and splice. Less obviously, both spill and spoil mean to strip away, while spelt (a variety of wheat) seems to be named for its easily-removed husks. Detaching the initial /S/ and applying Grimm’s Law produces flint, flinders, and flense, to remove the blubber from a whale.
18Jan10 Another detachable /S/ is seen in Latin spuma, froth, which not only gave English spume but also pumice (from the porous texture of the rock) and, via Germanic, foam.
A budget is the same thing as a belly. Both are from a root which means swollen, expanded to mean a sack or pouch. The original meaning of budget was a wallet where one’s money was kept. Bellows started out as the plural of belly. Bulge is clearly another member of the family, and so is bilge, originally the “bulge” at the water line of a ship. A bolster is a swollen cushion, and a billow is a swelling wave. From Latin, a fool and his folly are from bellows — the literal meaning is “over-inflated”, a “windbag”. A hair follicle is a “little pouch”.
The experts claim there are five different Indo-European root words with the definition of “to swell” or “blow up”: bhel-, bhelgh-, bhleu-, bhlei-, and blei-. Allegedly these are independent, but I don’t believe it. Anyway, from one or the other of these cousins, English has acquired a lot more words: blow, blister, bladder, blast, inflate, flush, bloat, bowl, ball, balloon, full, bale, bold, and hundreds more. Bulb and blob certainly look like they ought to be members of the set, but the word mavens say, “not so!” The original meaning of “bulb”, in both Greek and English, was “onion” which, by the way, is the same word as “union”. Light bulbs were preceded some fifty years earlier by thermometer bulbs. Blob seems to have been associated with the lip motion involved in blowing bubbles — c.f. the verb to blubber.
It’s quite possible that the “ripen” words (bloom, blossom, blade, flower, etc.) are also “swell up” derivatives.
A Wall Street company has the same derivation as a pantry. Latin panis meant “bread”, and a pantry was the bread room. Meanwhile a companion (com-panis)was someone you ate bread with, a messmate, leading first to the military sense of “company” and then enlarged to any group of people with a common purpose. We still use the original sense in the phrase “to have company for dinner”. After dinner, one might smoke a panetela cigar. This is “little bread loaf”, from the thin tapered shape of the French baguette. (The opposite of a panetela is a cylindrical cheroot, from a southern Indian (Tamil) word meaning “roll”.)
Before getting away from “companion”, comrade certainly looks like it should be another “with” word, but it isn’t. Indo-European kam- and kemb- roots meant to bend or turn; in Latin they produced camera, originally an arched room, and the same word as chamber. A comrade is therefore a roommate. Chum started life as university slang for “chamber-mate”. 30Jul09 From “turn”, Latin also led to change and exchange as well as canton, which originally meant a corner. and canted, bent or slanted. With the normal /K/-to-/H/ change of Grimm’s Law, we get Germanic ham. For hundreds of years it meant the back of the knee in phrases like “He bent his ham to the king,” but that sense is now only seen in the hamstring tendons. The meaning has migrated northward over time so that now it means the thigh or buttock. Hump is a distantly-related Germanic bend. Despite the apparent similarity, kam-/kemb doesn’t seem to be related to a third bend root — genu- — which is behind knee and pentagon, q.v.
A torpedo is usually regarded as very fast, so it certainly doesn’t look as if it could be a relative of torpid, but it is. Torpid is from a Latin word that means “numb”, and “torpedo” was a perfect fit for its original meaning, which was the electric eel. The current sense (no pun intended) came both from the shape of the animal and from the ability of a mechanical torpedo to “stun” its object. A full-grown electric fish (they really aren’t eels) can generate 650 volts at 1 ampere, which is more than enough to kill a human. Until the “discovery” of electricity a couple of hundred years ago, the electric fish fascinated people because it could stun an unwary fisherman who hadn’t even touched it, and scientists had no idea how the fish did it. (Despite its sleek shape, the “electric eel” torpedo is a very slow fish. Most of its body is taken up with “generators” instead of muscles, but of course it doesn’t need to chase its prey, and anything which wants to chase and eat it gets a rude surprise. It also has sensors for its own electric field, which help it find prey in muddy water.)
Stun, astound, and astonish all originally meant to be knocked unconscious — they are from the Latin ex-tonare, to thunderstrike, originally in the literal sense, to be struck by lightning. To detonate is to “thunder out”, and tornado is another “thundering” word via Spanish. (It started out as tronado, thunderstorm, but was confused with Spanish tornado, turning.) The German form of thunder is donner — the two reindeer whose hind ends Santa is most familiar with are Donner and Blitzen, Thunder and Lightning. None of these are related to the musical tone, which, as mentioned elsewhere, is a “stretched” word.
A fact to amaze your friends: All of Santa’s reindeer as normally pictured must be female. Male reindeer shed their horns in the winter, while the females do not. Therefore, Rudolph is a biological impossibility on more than one ground. (I suppose “he” could have been a transvestite, a female pretending to be male, with fake horns. One more reason to be shunned.) Late note — a recent article by an expert on reindeer pointed out that castrated males shed their horns later than “entire” ones, and that Santa might quite well choose reindeer steers to pull his sleigh, since they would be more docile. I guess this won’t be answered until someone gets a good photograph from the back.
It’s perfectly reasonable that someone might feel claustrophobia in a closet, but it’s not obvious what those words have to do with a musical clef or the spice called a clove. The basic klau- root meant peg or hook, particularly a door fastener or primitive lock. From the “fasten” or “lock” sense comes close and its diminutive closet, as well as a bunch of Latin-based words in -clude such as include and its opposite exclude, locked in and out, respectively. Seclusion is “locked away”, and a recluse is “thoroughly locked [away]”. Claustrophobia, of course, is Greek for the fear of enclosed places. On English maps, one sees names like “Hampton Close”, where the meaning is a dead-end street. From the original “peg” sense, Latin clavis meant “key” or “nail”. The “nail” sense led to the clove spice, since they look like old hand-made nails, while the “key” sense led to the musical clef, as well as clavier and clavichord, musical instruments with keys. Getting back to the “lock” sense, a conclave is “locked together”, possibly in an enclave. The collarbone is technically called the clavicle, or little key, but I’m not sure I see the resemblance. By the way, a clause was originally a closure, when a topic was exhausted or a speaker paused for breath. Cloy originally meant to pound in a nail (Latin inclavare), but it has been generalized to “fasten tightly”. Last but not least, my wife really dislikes tight spaces, but she hates to admit it. You got it — she’s a closet claustrophobe.
While on the subject of clavicles, conjugal bliss is closely related to the jugular veins in the neck and to Yogi Berra’s nickname. The Indo-European root yugom meant to join. Latin jugum is the same word as Germanic (English) yoke, to join together. Conjugal is literally “joined together”, while the jugular veins pass under the yoke-like collarbone, the jugulum in Latin. Some one-celled organisms reproduce by conjugation, where two cells merge into one, combine their genetic material, and then split again. To conjugate a verb seems odd, but it once meant to “group together” all possible forms of the verb. Subjugation is literally “under the yoke”. (The Romans often symbolically paraded prisoners of war under a real yoke.) Another Latin relative was jungere, to join, producing the obvious English join, joint, and junction as well as the less-obvious joust (join in combat), juxtaposition (placed together), adjust (Latin adjuxtare, put close to) and the Spanish junta, a group of people originally “joined together” for any purpose, but now for government by a committee. At the other end of the ie range, the ascetic Hindu philosophy of Yoga means “union” (with God), and a practitioner is a yogi. Also from Hindi, juggernaut is a corruption of Sanskrit Jagganath, “lord of the world”, i.e., of everything put together. The English use of juggernaut is from the alleged custom of fanatics throwing themselves under the cart carrying a huge image of Jagganath in a religious procession.
08Mar10 Somewhat surprisingly [to me], thirst and torrent are from the same root. Indo-European ters- meant to dry, making “thirst” obvious, as are toast and torrid. Other “dry” words include all the family from Latin terra, i.e., dry land — terrace, terrier, territory, inter (bury, literally [place] in the earth), subterranean, Mediterranean, terra cotta (baked earth), and so on. A tureen is an earthenware pot and science fiction authors use Terran to mean “earthling”. The oddball “torrent” originally meant “burning” — it’s the present participle of torrid. The sense migrated to “boiling”, and then rushing or impetuous. The oed mentions the parallel of Latin aestus, fire, which acquired a second meaning of the surging tide.
A truck garden or truck farm has nothing to do with an eighteen-wheeler truck on the highway. The first is from a root that has to do with buying and selling, so a truck farm is the same as a market garden, i.e., one which raises produce for sale rather than for consumption by the grower, and the phrases are hundreds of years older than motorized vehicles. The phrase to “have no truck with” means “have no commerce with”. Meanwhile, the truck with wheels goes clear back to Roman times as a device for moving heavy objects. Originally it meant roller or pulley, then a low platform on heavy wheels. For centuries “truck” was the normal word for the undercarriage of a cannon. The wheel assemblies of railroad cars and skateboards, and the rollers on which tank and tractor treads move, are still called trucks. When first introduced, the highway vehicle was called a “motor truck” to distinguish it from the earlier uses. A truckle bed is on rollers to slide under a regular bed. (Truckle certainly looks like a “little truck”, but not so. The original Latin was trochlea, system of pulleys, so the /L/ is original, and “truck” is a clipped form of the earlier word.) 30Jul09 Truckle beds were normally used by servants, so the verb to truckle [under] means to be subservient, to acknowledge one’s inferiority.
Interestingly, a cannon is essentially the same word as a canon. The root is cane, borrowed by both Greek and Latin from the Semitic term for reed. (C.f. Hebrew qaneh and Arabic qanah.) The word came to be applied to other straight and narrow objects — canon as in canon law meant “support” or “rule” and is the same as the walking cane. (A canon is also a cleric attached to a large church; c.f. staff — a staff officer both carried a baton of office and supported his superior.) A cannon, meanwhile, is a “big tube”, while canals, channels, and canyons are other straight, narrow, and hollow objects. Getting back to reeds, the original meaning of canister was a wicker container; Spanish canasta still means basket. Italian cannelloni are “big tubes” of pasta filled with meat or cheese, while cannoli (singular cannolo) are “little tubes” with a creamy filling. (A Germanic tin can does not seem to be related to a canister, though.)
Some people have attempted to link the “cane” words to cannabis and hemp, although most experts think there is no connection, particularly because the plant is not a cane. (The Semitic word for hemp is hashish, Arabic for “grass”.) C.f. assassin, literally “hashish-eater” in Arabic.
02May09 Tube is an orphan. Of course it is the same word as the musical tuba — tubus meant “war trumpet” in Latin — but nobody knows from where the Romans acquired the word.
Since Barack Hussein Obama is going to be prominent on the world stage for the next few years, I should point out the etymologies. “Barack” is Arabic and Swahili for “blessed”. (As mentioned elsewhere, Swahili is a blend of Bantu and Arabic, so many eastern and southern Africans have names of Arabic origin.) The Hebrew version of that Semitic BRK root is normally spelled Baruch in English. Many etymologists think that BRK got metathesized (transposed) into KRB, in which case it would also be responsible for cherub. (Akkadian karabu meant to praise or bless.) The president’s middle name is “handsome” or “excellent” (hasan), very popular as a personal name in both Arabic and Swahili. “Obama”, on the other hand, is a pure African (Kenyan) word. The root is bam, to bend, and it was originally a birth name, not a surname. Opinion is divided on whether it originally was given to a child with a bent arm or leg, or one born in the breech position.
Speaking of a tread, English has several other derivatives of the Indo-European der-, to step or run. Trip originally meant “step” (c.f. to “trip the light fantastic”), from which it developed parallel meanings of “stumble” and “short stage of a journey” in phrases like “The journey to London required six trips.” 20Oct09 To stumble is to “suddenly fall or fail”, leading to tripping a switch or circuit breaker and the triphammer used in forging. Trap is another “stumble” word, while trade started out as another “journey” variant, still seen in “trade winds”. Still more Germanic motions with the feet include tramp, trot, and teeter. Trampoline originally meant walking on stilts before being transferred to a different circus act. Meanwhile, the Greek word for “run” was dromos, leading to hippodrome, (horse-running), and dromedary, a camel bred for running instead of carrying freight. A palindrome (e.g., Napoleon’s “Able was I ere I saw Elba”) “runs back again”. A syndrome, Greek syn-dromos, is a set of symptoms which “run with” each other, so it translates exactly into Latin as con-currere, English concurrent and concourse. The original English definition of concur was “run together” in the literal sense, i.e., to collide — “The two ships concurred and sank.”
An even better palindrome than Napoleon’s apocryphal remark is one that Nikola Tesla might have said:
“I, madam, I made radio! So I dared! Am I mad? Am I?”

To appreciate it, one must know that Tesla established the basic patents on radio several years before Marconi, even though the latter had a better public-relations firm. Tesla was not quite a mad genius, but he certainly stretched the boundary of an eccentric one. For example, he was obsessive-compulsive — a germophobe who also avoided round objects of any kind, would not eat anything green, etc. He had frequent hallucinations which, when he snapped out of his trances, turned out to be perfectly practical inventions. He seems to have been a synesthete — “seeing” sounds as colors, and so on — and so maybe round objects sounded like fingernails on a blackboard. He also had a photographic memory. He cared little for money, and gave away a patent that could have made him America’s first billionaire because enforcing his patent would have bankrupted George Westinghouse, a friend and benefactor.
In addition to radio, Tesla invented and patented Alternating Current electricity, the transformer, and the induction motor, demonstrated X-rays by photographing the bones of his hand well before Röntgen, built the first practical fluorescent lamps, made a working broadcast power system, etc. The scientific unit of magnetic induction is called the tesla in his honor. In true mad-genius fashion, he spent some time developing a death ray; unlike most, his would have worked — it’s the fore-runner of modern work on plasma energy beams, and the high-voltage Tesla Coil is the source of all the artificial lightning that is obligatory in Mad Scientist movies. One biographer called him “The Man who Invented the 20th Century”.
Tesla may not have cared for money, but he intensely disliked liars. While working for Edison, he was promised $50,000 if he successfully redesigned the Edison generator. When the work was complete, Edison told him it had been a joke, and offered him a five dollar per week raise instead. Needless to say, Tesla quit and was not a notable Edison fan thereafter. He and Westinghouse drove Edison’s ideas for Direct Current power transmission into the ground. Edison invented the electric chair as part of this war against Westinghouse and Tesla. It was a propaganda device to demonstrate that AC electricity was lethal while DC was not. 06Feb10 (The big problem with DC was that it could only be transmitted a couple of miles; AC (using Tesla’s transformers) could be stepped up to very high voltage and transmitted for long distances, and then reduced to working voltage by another transformer quite close to the destination. The first triumph of AC was using a generator at Niagara Falls to provide electricity to Buffalo, about 20 miles away.)
He probably didn’t care, but note that Marconi and Röntgen both received Nobel Prizes for work first done by Tesla. In both cases, the other men did the “engineering” work to commercialize the discoveries. Note my comment elsewhere about Gauss, another genius with an “OK, that works. Now let’s try something else…” attitude, as well as the whole discussion on ideas being “in the air”.
Home economics is redundant — Greek oikos meant “house”, so economy originally meant household management, and an economist was the steward of a large house. The main current sense was originally “political economy”, a phrase dating to the time of the first modern economists like Adam Smith. The original domestic sense is still felt in both an economical purchase and to economize, i.e., show prudent [household] management. Eventually the Greeks generalized the word to mean “living space”, leading to Ecology, the science of living spaces, and ecumene and ecumenical, the entire world treated as the “home planet”. Oikos also came to mean “area to be administered”, resulting in Greek diocese (dia-oikos, to thoroughly manage), the regular term for a governor’s province in the Roman/Byzantine Empire, but now restricted to a bishop’s area of authority.
Village and parish both refer to housing developments, and they are both from this same “house” root! The original Latin vilcus, from the same root as oikos, mutated into both villa (see below) and vicus, the Latin for village, which in turn led to both vicinity and the English -wick and -wich on the end of village names like Berwick and Greenwich. Viking certainly looks like a Scandinavian word — vik- means “inlet” in Norse, so a vikingr would be a man who lived near a fjord. This is perfectly reasonable, so it is somewhat distressing to find a fly in the ointment. “Viking” is known in English two hundred years before it is found in Scandinavia. Therefore it seems that the first syllable is really Old English “wick” again, and that the sense was “camper”, applied to the invaders.
Parish and parochial are Greek para-oikos, beside the house, used to mean “neighborhood.” (Note that neighbor itself is oe nigh-boor, a near farmer.)
21Jun09 Before getting entirely away from Greek governors, I must point out that govern is the same word as the cyber- prefix on computer terms. Greek kybern- meant to steer. Cybernetics was the origin of all the more recent terms; it was coined in 1948 as the title of Norbert Wiener’s book on the science of machine control, but in modern use the prefix (cyberspace, cyborg [appropriately, a blend of cyber- and organism], cyberwar, etc.) simply means “computer”.
Menial originally had no disparaging sense. It is from the same root as mansion; it originally meant “household” or “family” in the extended sense. Scottish meinie still has the sense of the entourage of an important person, and angels were called the “meinie of God”. “Menial servant” was therefore a synonym of “domestic servant” — one who worked in the house. The degradation now implied in “menial labor” presumably accurately reflects the attitude of the rich and powerful toward their servants. 30Oct09 The underlying Indo-European men- root meant to remain. Other relatives include manor, manse, ménage and menagerie (both from the French word for “household”), permanent, and immanent.
Digressing slightly, there are quite a few insulting words that etymologically boil down to “farmer” — the dictionaries were obviously created by townsmen. Boor, clown, churl, lout, villain, and nasty all mean farmer, as does pagan. This last was from Roman army slang. Paganus meant farmer in Latin, and it was the soldiers’ derogatory term for a clumsy new recruit or even worse, a civilian. When the early Christian church adopted the “Army of God” metaphor (the Church Militant, “Onward, Christian Soldiers”, etc.) it also started using “pagan” to refer to those who were not good soldiers of Christ. Heathen is used as a synonym of “pagan”, and it also describes someone living in the boondocks far from civilization, i.e., on a heath. It seems to have originated as a loose translation of “pagan” into Germanic. 26Jun09 (A minority view thinks that heathen is really Greek or Armenian ethnos, used to render Hebrew goyim. Germanic didn’t normally borrow from those languages, but “heathen” first appears as the rendering of ethnos in the translation of the Bible from Greek into Gothic, and the translator (Ulfilas) was of Armenian extraction.) Hoyden is the same word as “heathen”, used in the sense of “uncultured” or “barbarian”. Pagan in its agricultural meaning, by the way, is the ancestor of peasant — yet another insult. To illustrate this sort of thing isn’t limited to the Indo-Europeans, Kaffir, a disparaging term in South Africa for a “native”, is “unbeliever” in Arabic, but literally means “villager”.
Villains were simply those who worked at a villa or lived in a village, from the Latin word for a country estate. (See economy, above, for more members of this family.) After “villain” acquired its present meaning, the “estate worker” sense was distinguished by the re-spelled villein. Even though there is only one letter retained, nasty is from “villain”! It’s shortened from French villenastre, infamous or ignoble, where the “-aster” was a derogatory suffix. Boor is of course the same word as the Dutch boer and the German bauer. As mentioned previously, the original Bowery in New York City was a farm. In German, “bauer” is also the term for the knave or jack in a suit of cards, leading to the use of “right bower” and “left bower” for the jack of trumps and the other jack of the same color in the game of Euchre. On the other hand, civil and civilized behavior meant the perpetrator behaved like a citizen, that is, city-dweller. The Latin for “city” was urbs, so a resident was urbane. Getting back to the opposite of a town-dweller, a savage lives in the forest (Latin silvaticus, from which English gets sylvan.
21Dec09 The Romans probably associated humble and humiliation with farmers, too. The original meaning of humble is “lowly, insignificant, base‘, and it is derived from Latin humus, soil.
Unlike pagan and heathen, a few names for persons with whom you do not see eye-to-eye on religious matters at least are etymologically to the point. An infidel is “unfaithful”, and a miscreant is a “mis-believer”. Persons with a distaste for organized religion love to point out that heretic is Greek hairetikos, “able to choose for oneself”, in contrast to the orthodox faithful who presumably are not given choices. Heretic thus translates into Germanic as freethinker. (As a collective noun, a heresy simply meant a group with a common opinion. The various Greek philosophical schools were called heresies, and the word is normally translated as “sect” in English versions of the New Testament.)
Oh, yes, boondocks is from Tagalog bunduk, mountain, picked up by U.S. Marines in the Philippines during World War II. It’s a word the Marines like almost as much as gung ho, q.v., which ironically is the Chinese Communist slogan kung he, achieve together. (During WWII, both Russian and Chinese communists were good guys, of course. In a famous line, Churchill said, “If Hitler invaded Hell, you would hear me making favorable references to the Devil in the House of Commons.”) A direct translation of “gung ho” into Greek produces synergy. There are at least two other slang terms that the U.S. military picked up from Japanese. One is honcho, a boss. This is straight Japanese han’cho, group leader. Another is hootch or hoochy, a hut or temporary living quarters. This seems to be Japanese uchi, dwelling place. The British military in Palestine in World War I acquired bint as a disparaging term for a woman, sort of equivalent to “chick” or “broad”. It’s Arabic for “daughter”, and the word is often used sarcastically among the Arabs, too. See Bin Laden and Ben Hur elsewhere in this document for her siblings.
Marine is a straightforward adjective from the ie mori-, meaning a body of water. (It probably meant “lake” originally; the Indo-Europeans seem to have been fairly land-locked, and they picked up quite a few nautical terms at a later time from Baltic and Mediterranean non-ie sources when they finally migrated as far as the ocean.) 21Aug09 In any case, other more- or less-obviously splashy terms include marsh, morass, moor (originally, a wetland), mermaid, cormorant (sea-crow), maritime, marinate (to pickle in brine), marinara sauce (Italian alla marinara — sailor-style), and as mentioned elsewhere, rosemary. Gaelic mor- means “sea” and is in several personal names: Murphy (sea-warrior), Murdoch (sea riches), Morgan (seashore), Murray (sea village), and Muriel (sea-bright), for example.
On the other hand, Moore, Morris, Maurice, etc. are not related — they’re from a “dark” root, Greek mauros, which may or may not be in Moor and Mauretania. (There is a debate whether the Greek word was acquired from the Berbers via Egypt, with an original meaning of “native of North Africa”. Certainly it didn’t seem to exist in Greek before Hellenistic times. See “Nigeria” and “Berber” for other sources of confusion and/or coincidence.) 30Jun09 There are two food items called a morel. Biologically they are unrelated, but etymologically they are identical. One is a black cherry. The Italian form of the cherry is marasca, and it is distilled to produce the liqueur called maraschino. The other edible morel is a dark kind of mushroom.
Incidentally, distill is basically the opposite of instill. Both are from Latin stilla, a drop — either taking out or putting in, respectively.
Morose looks like it might be a member of the “dark” family just described, since the primary meaning is “gloomy”, but it’s actually a relative of moral and morale instead. 01Jul09 The original meaning was “hard to please”, from which it is a short path to the current “gloomy” or “pessimistic”.
The original definition of ultramarine is the literal one — “beyond the sea” — in phrases like “ultramarine provinces” and “ultramarine cargo”. The blue pigment (made from powdered lapis lazuli) is named for its origin, not its color, although most people vaguely assume it means “deep sea” or something of the sort. A marina was originally an esplanade along the water; the sense of a dock for small boats is modern. (To digress, lapis lazuli is Latin “stone” plus lazward, the Arabic word for blue. Since this term was often encountered with the Arabic definite article (al-lazward), some European languages managed to erroneously combine the two /L/’s, treat the result as “l’azuli” and create azure.)
In addition to lapis lazuli, other words with the “lapis” root include lapidary and, somewhat surprisingly, dilapidate. A lapidary is one who cuts and polishes gemstones, but a lapidary inscription isn’t “polished” but rather one suitable for engraving on the stone of a monument. The sense of dilapidated (dis-lapidated) seems to be from the practice of looting old buildings for stone to build new ones, a perfect example being the remains of the Colosseum in Rome. Another possibility is that it meant an old jewelry setting after the gemstones had been pried out and reused.
Peon looks like it might be a relative of peasant, but it isn’t. It’s from Latin pedones, foot soldier, and it is related to all the other “foot” words like pedestrian and pedal. Pawn, originally in the chess sense, is the same word. Pioneer is derived from the military sense of peon; the original pioneers were foot soldiers who went in advance of the main army armed with spades, axes, hammers, and saws to dig trenches, cut down trees, make or repair roads, build bridges, and clear brush for the main body of troops — what a modern army would call the engineers. The current main sense of “pioneer” is thus “one who prepares the way”. Note that this ties in with the chess sense of pawn, since the pawns go in advance of the more important pieces. In all armies the peons (i.e., the infantry) do the dirty work, so the word acquired its modern Spanish meaning of day laborer or serf. (Obviously the mounted aristocracy didn’t think much of the skills of common foot soldiers, because “infantry” means “babies.”) Both the military and chess senses led to the current usage of pawn to mean something expendable which can be shoved around at will, an attitude that foot soldiers have attributed to their commanding officers since prehistoric times. One 17th-century general said, “Of course we take better care of our horses. They are expensive and hard to replace, whereas pioneers are free and plentiful.” See forlorn hope for more on this subject.
While on the subject of a subject, it is literally something which “lies below” (the king’s subjects) or is “thrown down” (a subject for discussion). Latin jacere, meant to throw, but also to lay down (to be thrown on the ground). One or the other of these is responsible for inject, project, reject, eject and ejaculate (throw out), reject (throw back), interject, trajectory, abject (thrown away), dejected (thrown down), adjacent (laying next to), jet, jettison, jetsam, jut, joist, etc. An objection is “thrown against” something. As mentioned elsewhere, an adjective “lies next to” a noun. You probably don’t want to know that the Greek version of the root blessed us with catheter and enema.