Words, words, words…

Miniature Panties and Oscar’s Garlic

A restaurant menu is a cognate of a minute of time. The basic Latin min- root means small or less, as in such words as minor, minus, minimum, and the adjective minute (tiny, with the accent on the second syllable.) One sixtieth of an hour was once regarded as an exceedingly small amount of time, so it was called a minute, with the accent on the first syllable. (When even finer timekeeping became necessary, the minute itself was divided into sixty pieces called “second minutes”, now simply seconds.) Someone who is extremely thorough is concerned with every tiny item, that is, the minutiae or minute details, and this became the ancestor not only of the restaurant or computer menu, scrupulously showing all that is available, but also the minutes of a meeting, recording the details of everything that happened. (Amusingly, scruple is a 2000-year-old metaphor. It literally means “pebble” in Latin. Figuratively, it came to mean “cause of discomfort”, a perfectly obvious meaning to every Roman who ever got a scruple in his or her sandal.) Note that the restaurant menu might mention a mincemeat pie with its finely chopped ingredients. The modern definition, a mixture of raisins, apples, etc. is mid-19th Century; before that it was the literal “chopped meat”, what we would now call hamburger, still seen in the threat “to make mincemeat of” someone with a sword or axe.
The meaning of minister is “servant”, literally an inferior. As a derivative of minus (small), it is the antonym of master, which comes from magnus (big). A prime minister definitely was once an oxymoron, unless one was perhaps speaking of a butler. The related administer retains some of the original “serve” sense, and of course the religious use of minister to mean a preacher is short for “servant of God”. It’s a slight stretch, but minstrel is the same word; it originally meant “servant” before being restricted to a paid musician. Finally, Italian minestrone is a “big serving” at dinner.
Surprisingly, miniature is not a member of this “tiny” family. Instead, it is derived from the Latin minium, a bright red ore, either of mercury (now more usually called cinnabar) or of lead. Minium was used as a pigment, and any painting which was mainly done in red was called a miniature, no matter how large. One common artistic use of minium was in illuminated manuscripts, and since the illuminations were normally quite small, this led to the current sense of a miniature. Red lead is still used as a pigment, particularly in metal primers. Carmine is a blend of minium with kermes, the “worm” that produced a bright red dye. (Crimson and vermilion (little worm) are also from the insect.)
30Oct09 Another surprise — the Germanic minnow, despite being a very small fish, allegedly isn’t a relative either. Instead, it seems to be from a men- root that meant “isolated”. If so, then a minnow is related to monk, monastery, and other derivations of Greek mono-, alone. (A monoplane has a “single plane” or wing, carbon monoxide has only one oxygen atom, and so on.)
A girl’s panties are named for Saint Pantaleone, probably much to the saint’s distress. The holy man (a doctor in life) was one of the patron saints of Venice, and as such it once was a common baptismal name there. (Etymologically, it means “all lion”.) A Venetian became known as a “Pantalone” in the same way as references to the proverbial Irish Paddy, the Scottish Sandy, the Spanish Dago (Diego), the Welsh Taffy (Dafydd, i.e. David), the Prussian Fritz, etc. One of the main characters in the 16th-century Italian Commedia dell’Arte was a “lean and slippered” old Venetian called Pantalone. As seen in the illustration, he and many other male Venetians favored a much-ridiculed article of clothing where the breeches and stockings were in a single piece, and this garment became known as [a pair of] pantaloons, shortened by the Americans to pants. When pantaloons came into fashion in England and America (about 1810) there was great resistance from more conservative breeches-and-stockings types. In one well-known example, someone made a large bequest to his parish on condition no man should ever be allowed to wear pants in the pulpit. “Panties”, of course, is a diminutive, “little pants”, first attested in 1845, when it meant an undergarment for men. The change in meaning to women’s wear didn’t happen until 1908, so Abraham Lincoln and Otto von Bismarck wore panties.
As a side note, zany is from another stock character in the Italian comedies. Zanni is the Venetian pronunciation of Gianni, short for Giovanni, aka John. (The church of St. John and St. Paul in Venice is known as the Zanipolo.) The characters Punch, (Pulchinello), a soldier called Scaramouche (Scaramuccia, Italian for “skirmish”), and Harlequin (Arlecchino) are also from the Commedia dell’Arte. Normally, Zanni carried a slapstick, designed to give a resounding “crack” even when it was merely tapped on another character, and that gave its name to broad physical comedy of the “Three Stooges” type. The Punch and Judy puppet shows are also slapstick descendants of the Italian farces. (Italian Arlecchino looks very suspiciously like it was taken from German elverkönig, king of the elves.) The football scrimmage is the exact same word as skirmish, and the rugby equivalent is a scrum.
While we are meditating on the subject of feminine undergarments, it should be pointed out that American panties are British knickers. That’s short for knickerbockers, breeches gathered at the knee, particularly of the style once worn by golfers, and that is from Washington Irving’s popular History of New York allegedly written by “Dietrich Knickerbocker”, where the illustrations showed the Dutch settlers in exaggerated baggy breeches. (From Irving’s book, “Knickerbocker” meant “descendent of the Dutch settlers of New York”; this was expanded to any resident of New York City, and thus we have the NBA New York Knicks. Now that NBA uniforms are more than knee-length, I guess the original definition is coming back.)
A mendacious person should mend his ways. The actual root means “fault”. A mendicant, beggar, is literally one who is faulty, a cripple. A mendacious liar is “faulty”, but certainly it was associated with mendicant, since beggars are not known as the most truthful of people. Given that meaning, “mend” seems somewhat strange. That’s because it’s a non-word. Both emend and amend mean to remove a fault (ex-mend), and “mend” is a clipped form of one or both.
Rush is just a variant pronunciation of ruse. It was a military term for a sudden movement of troops, either forward (a rush) or backward as a feint.
The gore of a skirt is the same as the first syllable of garlic and the last syllable of Oscar. The Germanic gar- root meant “spear”, and it came to be applied to any pointed object. A dress-making gore is a narrow triangular piece of fabric. To gore someone means to spear them with a pointed object such as an animal’s horn, and to goad is to poke with a sharp stick. (Gore and gory in the sense of a bloody wound are unrelated, however.) Garlic is “gore-leek”, spear-leek, because it can be broken into gore-shaped pieces. (These are called cloves, from the word “cleave”, and are completely unrelated to the spice called a clove, which is from clavis, the Latin term for a carpenter’s nail.) The Germanic root is in several personal names such as Garfield, Gary, Edgar, Gerald/Gerard, Roger, Oscar, Gertrude, and Garth; Rothgar in Beowulf means either “red spear” or more likely, “famous spear”, Garibaldi is possibly “bold spear”, although the first syllable is more likely Germanic her- (army) instead. See below for more words from that root.
Oscar is “spear of God”; the Germanic gods were called the Aesir — related names include Oswald and Osborne. As mentioned elsewhere, an auger started out as a “nauger”, i.e., “navel-piercer”. Lastly, the fish called a gar is named from its long thin shape; biologically it’s a cousin of a pike, also named from its “lean and mean” spear-like shape.
The -ky- in the middle of Germanic Valkyrie is the same as the final syllable of Latin disgust. The Indo-European geus- root meant to taste or choose, leading to the Germanic choose/choice/chosen family as well as the Valkyries, the “choosers of the slain” who carried heroes from the battlefield to Valhalla, the hall of the slain. (Vulnerable is from that same “slay/wound” root, incidentally.) Meanwhile, Latin gust- meant “taste”, as in disgust (bad taste), gusto, and French ragout.
Another common element in Germanic names is her-, meaning war or army. Examples are Herbert, (bright host) Herman (man of war), Oliver (elf host), etc. Harold is hari-wald, army ruler; the same phrase with the words reversed gave Walter. The German Herzog, like its English equivalent “duke”, means war leader. Other words with the element are harbor (at first an army shelter) and probably harness (originally, a soldier’s personal military equipment). A harbinger was a man sent ahead of the army to round up provisions and shelter.
In an odd way, delirium is the opposite of learning. ie leis- meant track or furrow. Germanic learn once meant to follow a track, before being generalized to “follow instructions”. What one learns is, of course, lore. Delirious is literally “out of the furrow” in Latin, a plowing term metaphorically applied to a person who had become irrational. Delirious is therefore an exact parallel of exorbitant, because the original Latin meaning of orbit was “wheel track”. 02Feb10 Another example of the same metaphor is deviate — de-via, leave the road. C.f. the more modern “jump the tracks”.
It’s hard to visualize how anal should be the same word as your high school annual, no matter what your opinion of some of your classmates and teachers, but the two are identical. The Latin ana- meant a ring, so the anatomical use of anus and its adjective “anal” is obvious. An annular solar eclipse shows a ring around the obstructing Moon. Meanwhile, Latin annus meant “year”, regarded as a circle of the seasons, leading to annual (yearly), annuity, perennial (through the years), annal, superannuated, centennial (hundred years), and more.
22Jan10 By the way, this annular eclipse picture is the largest ring for the next thousand years. Both the Earth’s orbit around the Sun and the Moon’s around the Earth are slightly elliptical, and this particular eclipse (January 15, 2010) took place with the Earth nearest the Sun and furthest from the Moon. (It’s also the longest possible solar eclipse, of course; the Moon was ”touching” the Sun’s disk for eleven minutes.)
Maybe one should keep scissors away from schizophrenics, but the terms are closely related. There is a whole family of words in ski- where the root meaning is to split, cut, or separate. Scissors, sickles, shears, saws, plowshares, and scythes are cutting instruments. Scraps, shares, shreds, sections, segments ,and sectors are cut out, and a religious schism can create a new sect cut off from the main body of believers. Sept (clan) is a Gaelic pronunciation of “sect” — see the section on “penguin” for the /K/-to-/P/ substitution. Short objects have been cut down to size, and both a shirt and a skirt are garments shorter than a full-length robe. The shore of the ocean is a “separation” of land and water — it’s another member of the shear/share/shorn tribe. Insects are so-named for their distinctly indented body segments, and biologists sometimes dissect them by cutting them into “two parts”.
Shingles, skis, and skids were originally split pieces of wood (as was the sheath for a knife), score was originally a notch cut as a tally, the verbs to shed and to shit both refer to ways of separating things (a watershed is where water divides), the type of rock called schist splits easily, and a schizophrenic has a “split mind”. The second most serious human illness (second only to malaria) is schistosomiasis, caused by a parasitic worm with a “split body”. A shyster, a tricky or dishonest lawyer, is another member of the family. It is from scheissen, which is the German/Yiddish form of the above-mentioned bodily function. Precise is literally “cut in front”, i.e., trimmed to fit exactly. C.f. précis, an abstract or summary. Rescind is literally to “cut back”. 13Jun09 All the meanings of shift ultimately go back to the sense of divide or seperate.
Another Anglo-Saxon word usually replaced by “excrement” in polite company uses the same metaphor as “shit”. That word is turd, and it is from a der- root that means to split off, flay, or tear. The only other Germanic relative is tart — originally, sharp. Greek derma meant skin or hide, from the “flay” sense, leading to English words like dermatitis (skin irritation), hypodermic (underneath the skin), epidermis (upon the skin), and so on.
By the way, the disease shingles has nothing to do with the roofing material. It’s a perversion of Latin cingulus (belt or girdle) from the characteristic pattern of the rash, so it is really related to cinch, the medical cincture, succinct (compressed), and precinct (a bounded area). The same root gave Greek zone, which also originally meant “belt”. The present meaning of zone comes from the geographical use in reference to the Earth — temperate zone and such. (Cingulus to shingles is another good example of folk etymology, discussed below.)
Yet another “cinch” word is a glorious example of a euphemism. Enceinte is the French word for “pregnant”, and it literally means “no girdle” (un-cinched)! This probably is an example of French folk etymology, however, because there is an ie keue- root that meant to swell, the source of Latin “cumulus” and “accumulate” and Greek “Kyrie”, lord. Latin inciens meant both “swollen” and “pregnant”. 15Nov09 Spanish women, of course, don’t get pregnant, they get embarrassed. There are many, many other ways of avoiding the /P/-word — “in trouble”, “in a family way”, “increasing”, “knocked up”, “bun in the oven”, “wearing her apron high”, and so on. One Victorian woman described herself as “in the happy state of one who loves her lord.”
Getting back to cutting and slicing, sex is also related; it’s basically the same thing as a sector or section of a species, in phrases like “the female sex” or “the same sex”. Yet another group of “cut” words derives from the sense of “separate one thing from another”, most notably in those from Latin scire, to know or sort out — science, conscience, conscious, omniscient (all-knowing), and as mentioned below, nice. The original Latin sense of scire was to sort things into separate categories, to discriminate, discern, decide, or make a decision. See the section on secret for many more relatives.
“Science” in the modern sense is a mid-19th century word; before that it was “natural science”. A phrase like “the conflict of science and religion” is an anachronism before then, because Theology was a science. Darwinian evolution and the geologists’ insistence on the multi-billion year age of the earth were mainly responsible for this split. Late-breaking news flash — in November, 2005, the state of Kansas, USA, voted to redefine “science” to include theology and astrology again, so that biblical “Creation Science” could be taught in Kansas schoolrooms. Further Update — in February, 2007, Kansas decreed that theology and astrology are not sciences any more. Stay tuned for the next election. (The 2007 definition of science is again “a human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations”. The 2005 definition deleted the word “natural”, so that systematic supernatural explanations also were “science”.)
Sigh… Hope springs eternal. Louisiana has now (2008) decreed that forcing a science teacher to admit that evolution, cloning, stem cells, global warming, or birth control exist would be a violation of his or her free speech rights. Again, stay tuned. (Under the law, Louisiana math teachers have the right to teach that two plus two equals five, history teachers can say that Louisiana still belongs to France, and the law presumably upholds the right for said teachers to tell the students that the state legislature is composed of idiots.)
There is actually some debate whether scissors is a “cut” word. There is an ie kaeid- root which means to strike, responsible for chisel, cement (originally, pulverized stone), cestus (a Roman boxing glove), and the -cide in suicide, homicide, genocide, etc. Latin caedere meant “cut”, leading to excise (cut out), circumcise (cut around), the caesura that cuts a line in half, a caesarian section, and so on. (The surgery is not named for Julius Caesar. Despite the legend, his mother had several more children after the future emperor, and it was at least another 1,700 years before any woman survived the procedure.) Concise means “thoroughly trimmed”. While on the subject of killing people, note that patricide is by definition parricide, but the reverse is not necessarily true. (Patricide is killing one’s father, while parricide is killing a relative. The two terms are frequently confused.)

Shot and shoot look as if they might be related to this family, but instead they are from an ie skeud- root that meant to throw. Other relatives are schuss, shout, shut (to close off a door by “shooting” the crossbar), sheet (c.f. a “throw rug”), and the frequentive shuttle, originally a term in weaving. Shove and shovel are not related, though.