August 27, 2013

Case File #013.08.27: TANTALIZE

According to Greek mythology, King Tantalus was a mortal son of Zeus who one day displeased the immortal Olympians—the many versions of the myth differ in the details of the king's offense, though all say it somehow involved food—and received a most apropos punishment for his sin. The gods placed the king in a lake with waters that reached up to his chin and with luscious fruit that hung from branches over his head, but whenever he would attempt to drink or eat, the waters would recede from his lips and the fruit would shrink from his grasp. Thus was Tantulus held in a perpetual state of sensual frustration, and it is from his name that sixteenth-century English speakers derived the verb tantalize, which means “to tease or torment with the promise of something that is difficult to obtain” and “to excite the senses or incite desire.” Reflecting the spirit of the myth even more is the English noun tantalus: clearly a direct borrowing of the mythical king's name, the word was coined in the nineteenth century as the name for a small cabinet or sideboard in which decanters of liquor can be locked out of reach but still remain visible.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

August 12, 2013

Case File #013.08.12: WALL

“Stone walls do not a prison make,” wrote the seventeenth-century poet Richard Lovelace, and while we might agree with the philosophical sentiments that underlie his words, we'd be foolish to deny that a well-built wall usually makes a pretty good physical impediment. In fact, if we look at the history of the word wall, we find that the idea of wall-as-barrier has been there all along. Derived from the Latin vallum, which meant “palisade” or “bulwark,” the word was spelled weall in the Old English era and was used to mean both “rampart” and “levee or dike.” When it passed into Middle English in the twelfth century, its form changed to walle and it took on the additional meanings of “a side of a room or building, typically connecting the floor to the ceiling or the foundation to the roof” and “any continuous vertical structure that encloses or divides an area of land,” and the verb senses of the word—that is, “to divide or separate with or as if with a wall” and “to enclose, surround, confine, or block with or as if with a wall”—came into use during the thirteenth century. The form of both the verb and the noun changed to the current wall around the end of the fifteenth century, and not long after, the noun also took on the additional and more general senses of “any material layer enclosing a space” (as in the abdominal wall) and “anything that resembles a wall in structure or function” (as in socioeconomic wall and wall of silence).

©2013 Michael R. Gates

August 7, 2013

Case File #013.08.07: EPICURE

The English word epicure comes from Epicurus, the Latinized name of a Greek philosopher (the Greek form was Epikouros) who lived from the mid-fourth century BCE to the early third century BCE. Epicurus believed that pleasure is life's highest measure of goodness, but he defined pleasure as the absence of pain and the cultivation of virtue, and he therefore taught his students that the only way to achieve true pleasure was to lead an essentially ascetic life—the pursuit and accumulation of material goods and the concomitant fear of failure and loss, he believed, would only lead to mental and physical pain—dedicated to improving one's own ethical judgment and moral behavior. However, successive generations of his followers twisted his ideas into a credo that extolled selfish indulgence of the senses, and during the first century or two following his death, his name ironically became associated with sensuality and hedonism. Thus, when epicure became part of the English vocabulary around the end of the fourteenth century, it originally meant “hedonist or glutton.” This pejorative sense softened over time, though, and by the end of the sixteenth century, the word had acquired its current meaning of “a person with refined and discriminating taste, especially in food and drink.”

©2013 Michael R. Gates

August 5, 2013

Case File #013.08.05: ONION

Onion was derived from the Old French oignon, which was itself derived from the Latin noun unio. Unlike its French and English progeny, however, the Latin word refers not to the pungent and bulbous herb but to the precious gem we English speakers call a pearl. Interestingly enough, unio shares its stem with the Latin verb unire, which means “to combine many into one,” and some etymologists believe the noun's formal kinship to the verb is an intentional allusion to the fact that both onions and pearls are multilayered objects. (For the record, a pearl is created when an irritant, such as a piece of coral or a parasite, gets inside the shell of a particular type of mollusk and the animal attempts to relieve its discomfort by slowly depositing concentric mineral layers around the offending particle.) In post-classical times, in fact, Roman soldiers used unio as a colloquialism for “onion,” and it is undoubtedly from this slangy sense that the Old French oignon was derived. When the word passed from French to English circa 1130, it was Anglicized to ungeon, but it became unyon around 1356 and later spent a few decades as onyon before the y was changed to i at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

August 1, 2013

Case File #013.08.01: FOOL

The ultimate source of the word fool is the Latin follis, which means “a pair of bellows” or “an inflated bag.” In post-classical times, the Latin noun was also used as a slang meaning “windbag” or “chatterbox,” and when this colloquialism passed into Old French, it became fol and was used to mean “buffoon” and “jester.” Middle English borrowed the Old French noun (and its form) in the early thirteenth century, though English speakers used it to mean not only “jester” or “clown” but also "an unwise person." When the verb sense first appeared in the English lexicon around 1350, it was originally spelled folen and meant “to act unwisely,” and while it took only another twenty-five years or so for the spelling of both the verb and the noun to become the current fool, it took more than six centuries for the verb to accumulate all of the additional meanings it has today: the sense of “to trick or deceive” and its related connotations, such as “to surprise” and “to joke,” didn't appear until 1595; “to tamper, toy, or contend,” usually used in the phrasal form fool with, appeared no sooner than the mid-seventeenth century; “to pass time idly,” often rendered as the phrasal form fool around, didn't come into use until circa 1875; and “to have sexual relations,” often rendered phrasally as either fool around or fool around with, wasn't coined until the early 1960s.

©2013 Michael R. Gates