December 21, 2016

Case File #016.12.21: MAGI

According to the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible, the baby Jesus was visited by a group of Eastern wise men or philosophers who also gifted him with expensive items such as gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Some English translations of the New Testament refer to these visitors as Magi, and probably because of their three flashy presents, the men are traditionally characterized, especially during the Christmas season, as a trio of Eastern kings. But the word magi, which came to English directly from Latin, suggests something else, as it is the plural form of the Latin word magus, which means “magician” or “sorcerer.” We can substantiate this as the Gospel author's intended definition for magi simply by looking at what is purported to be the original Greek manuscript: magoi is the Greek word translated in English-language Bibles as magi or wise men, and magoi is itself the plural form of magos, which means “magician” or “sorcerer.” So in the biblical narrative, neither kings nor philosophers journeyed to the Bethlehem manger; rather, the Eastern gift bearers who came to honor the baby Jesus were essentially well-heeled wizards. Even so, you shouldn't let this fact influence your Christmas traditions or festivities. After all, it would look kind of silly for a crèche to depict three wizards kneeling at the manger. And a song title such as “We Three Sorcerers” just doesn't have the poetic cadence of “We Three Kings.”

©2016 Michael R. Gates

November 23, 2016

Case File #016.11.23: LETTUCE

Not many people would think of lettuce and milk as culinary partners, yet it turns out there is a palatable affinity between the two. Well, etymologically speaking, that is. First appearing in the English lexicon circa 1300, lettuce was derived from the Old French plural laituës, which meant “lettuces” and the singular of which evolved from lactuca, the Latin word for lettuce. But lactuca was itself derived from the Latin adjective lacteus, which meant “of milk” or “abounding in milk” and was most likely an allusion to the milky juices of certain varieties of lettuce and other edible greens. The Americanism in which lettuce refers to paper money, however, makes no such insinuations about the plant's milkiness or the word's milky past. First recorded around 1930, the term actually alludes to the lettuce-like green color of US currency, but given the twenty-first century's move towards a cashless world economy, the Yankee jargon is now considered passé.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

October 20, 2016

Case File #016.10.20: SPOOK

The word spook first appeared as an Americanism circa 1800. Borrowed directly from the Dutch spook, a descendant of the Middle Dutch spooc that was itself a close relative of the Middle Low German spok, the English noun was at first used to mean merely “ghost” or “a visible disembodied spirit.” By the end of the century, however, it had also come to mean “any frightening and seemingly preternatural creature” and was starting to take on its now lesser-known figurative sense of “a haunting or disturbing idea or prospect.” (Today, words such as specter and phantom have all but supplanted spook in denoting the aforesaid figurative meaning.) It wasn't until the early 1940s that spook acquired the additional sense of “an undercover agent or spy,” and the same decade saw the unfortunate development of the noun's offensively disparaging (and now highly indecorous) use as a term for a black person. By the way, spook also has two verb senses: the first, “to haunt, frighten, or otherwise behave like a ghost,” appeared in the English lexicon circa 1865; and the second, “to become suddenly frightened or nervous,” came into general use around 1935.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

October 11, 2016

Case File #016.10.11: WEB

Web is another one of those English words that can be traced all the way back to the Anglo-Saxon era. Originally spelled webb, it was derived from the Old English verb wefen (also spelled webben or webbian), which meant “to weave yarn or thread,” and was thus the general term for woven fabric. (Webster and weber, also derivatives of wefen, were once common terms for “a person who weaves fabric,” but they were supplanted by weaver in the fourteenth century and survive today as surnames only.) Surprisingly, the sense in which web refers to a spider's silken network didn't show up until the late thirteenth century, and it wasn't until the late sixteenth century that the word also came to mean “the membrane between the toes of ducks and other aquatic animals” and, figuratively, “a snare or trap.” The verb senses of web—that is, “to ensnare or entangle” and “to form a web-like shape or network”—are even newer, having first appeared in the writings of Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

September 28, 2016

Case File #016.09.28: FIEND

Linguists and etymologists believe that the noun fiend can be traced all the way back to the Proto-Germanic verb fijaejan, which meant “to hate.” Old English speakers inherited the verb but Anglicized the spelling to feogan, and from this they derived the noun feond and used it to mean “foe” or “enemy.” When feond passed into Middle English, the spelling first changed to fend and then later to feend, and the word was used now as a designation not for foes in general but for one specific foe: the Devil. By the time modern English started to displace Middle English in the fifteenth century, feend had transformed into the now familiar fiend—the ie spelling was likely influenced by the many Middle French words, such as brief and fierce, that English borrowed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—and had also acquired the more general meaning of “a person of great wickedness or maliciousness.” But the sense in which fiend refers to an obsessed or addicted person, as in golf fiend or drug fiend, is a relatively new one that first appeared circa 1886.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

August 17, 2016

Case File #016.08.17: OAF

Once upon a time, people believed that elves and fairies sometimes snatched human children from their cribs or beds, and when abducting human offspring, the mischievous sprites supposedly swapped them with physically frail or mentally stunted children from their own broods. Up until the mid-sixteenth century, people in English-speaking countries generally used the noun changeling when referring to a child believed to have been left behind by the elves or fairies. But by the time 1600 rolled around, English speakers had also started using oph (sometimes spelled auf or aulf) as a term for such a child, oph being an Anglicized form of the Middle Norwegian álfr—or perhaps, say some etymologists, the related Icelandic álfur—which literally meant “elf  but was often used to mean “silly person, fool, or imbecile.” Thus, if a child was a bit peculiar or had some mild physical deformity, its parents could invoke the word oph and thereby suggest that the youngster was not human but was instead the offspring of an elf or a fairy. During the first twenty or thirty years of the seventeenth century, however, the word's form evolved into the contemporary oaf, and rather than being used in reference to an ersatz human child, the noun came to generally mean “a slow-witted, uncultured, or clumsy person.”

©2016 Michael R. Gates

July 20, 2016

Case File #016.07.20: SHAMBLES

If you think of a slaughterhouse or a butchery as a place of confusion or disorder, then you probably won't be surprised to learn that the word shambles, which generally means “a state of complete disorder or ruin,” evolved from a Middle English word that meant “meat market.” But most etymologists and lexicographers say the roots of shambles ultimately wind back to the Sanskrit skambha, a word that meant “pillar” or “supporting member” and was in no way associated with the butchering of animals. So how did an ancient architectural term that evoked the idea of stability evolve into a word associated with carnage and chaos? Well, Sanskrit's skambha eventually passed into Latin as scamnum, which meant “bench,” and Old English speakers took the diminutive form of the Latin—scamillus, that is, meaning “little bench” or “pedestal”—Anglicized it to sceamel (sometimes spelling it scamol or scomul), and used it to mean “a table for vending.” When Old English gave way to Middle English during the twelfth century, sceamel became shamel (the spelling varied greatly), and the word was by then used solely in reference to marketplace tables from which fish or meat was sold. Sometime around the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, the word's form evolved to become shambil, and its plural, shambiles, passed into Early Modern English as sheambles but was used as a singular noun meaning “meat market.” The modern form shambles finally appeared around 1550, at which time the word also came to mean “slaughterhouse” (a sense that is now essentially archaic except in the case of place names), and the figurative sense of “a place of carnage or great bloodshed” soon followed and became commonplace by 1595. The noun's contemporary sense (that is, “a condition of complete confusion, disarray, or ruin”) didn't come until much later, however, making its debut in print circa 1900. By the way, the verb shamble, which means “to move with an awkward and slow or shuffling gait,” first appeared in the English lexicon around 1700, though experts are divided as to whether it is etymologically related to the noun shambles: many say yes, asserting that shamble harks back to the usually bowed legs of the trestle tables used at meat markets in days of yore; others say no, claiming the evidence more cogently suggests that the verb's development followed a course from a now unknown bygone—and likely dialectical—word meaning something like “clumsy” or “ungainly.”

©2016 Michael R. Gates

June 22, 2016

Case File #016.06.22: MILQUETOAST

Caspar Milquetoast was the central character in a once popular American comic strip called The Timid Soul, which was created by HT Webster in 1924 and appeared in countless newspapers until shortly after the cartoonist's death in 1952 (his assistant continued the strip for about six months following Webster's passing). Webster himself described Milquetoast as the sort of man who “speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick,” meaning, of course, that the fellow's excessively craven and submissive nature made him stifle his own predilections and instead submit to the will of the comic strip's other characters. Because the strip was so popular and ubiquitous, Americans soon started to use its main character's name in reference to real-life people—usually men, though sometimes women also—who seemed spineless and overly deferential, and by around 1940, the general noun milquetoast, meaning “a timid, unassertive, and easily manipulated person,” had become firmly ensconced in the English lexicon. As to how HT Webster came up with the name, some etymologists and lexicographers believe the cartoonist was humorously alluding to the weak consistency of the once popular breakfast dish called milk toast (sometimes spelled milk-toast or milktoast), which was typically made by soaking toasted bread in a thin liquid composed of milk, sugar, and butter. But other experts think the cartoonist was making a play on the noun milksop, a term that dates back to the late fourteenth century (Chaucer used it first in The Canterbury Tales), is also an allusion to limp or mushy food, and to this day still means “an effeminate man.”

©2016 Michael R. Gates

May 24, 2016

Case File #016.05.24: CONFETTI

As most of you probably already know, confetti is the collective term for those little bits of colored paper that are thrown, usually by the handfuls, during large festive occasions. But when the noun first entered the English lexicon in the early nineteenth century, it was used to refer to a type of candy tossed around during celebratory public gatherings. This is because English speakers borrowed the word directly from their friends in Italy: confetti is the plural for the Italian noun confetto, which means “candy” and was itself once used to denote a small sweet that was thrown during carnivals and parades. (In case you're wondering, the progenitor of the Italian confetto is the Latin confectum, a past participle of the neuter verb conficere, meaning “to put together,” and the ultimate source, via Old French, of the English noun confection.) Around 1895, English speakers began using confetti in its modern sense—that is, in reference to the bits of paper popularly thrown at weddings, parades, and such—and by the start of the following century, the noun's association with sweets had been jettisoned altogether.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

April 5, 2016

Case File #016.04.05: GOBSMACKED

The slang word gobsmacked (sometimes spelled gob-smacked), which essentially means “dumbfounded” or “flabbergasted,” originated in the UK during the 1980s, though it is now quickly becoming popular among the English-speaking youth of other countries such as the US and Canada. Etymologists and linguists believe the adjective was formed by combining the noun gob, a British slang word for mouth that has Gaelic roots and traces back to the sixteenth century, and the past tense of the verb smack, meaning “to strike or hit,” with the connotation thus being that those who are gobsmacked are as stunned by something as they would be if they were suddenly smacked in the mouth. Some experts claim gobsmacked was coined in the early 1980s by the writing staff of a couple of British TV shows, both of which were about working-class people and were set in industrial towns in Northern England. But others believe the adjective originated within the youth culture of Northern England and Southern Scotland and that the television writers, well versed in the argot of the people about whom they wrote, were simply the first to use the word in the mass media. But whichever the case, gobsmacked remains a popular slang word in the UK today, and though nobody really knows why the word only recently started gaining currency in other English-speaking countries, at least one expert believes the lexemic migration was bolstered in 2009 by Scottish singer Susan Boyle's success on the BBC's TV show Britain’s Got Talent and her subsequent ample use of gobsmacked during interviews.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

March 15, 2016

Case File #016.03.15: BOOZE

According to a mere handful of etymologists and lexicographers, the English word booze first appeared as a noun around 1840, when American distiller EG Booz began selling bottled whiskey on which he pasted labels that prominently bore his own name. But don't be misled by that lot. While Booz's liquor label might have helped to reinforce the contemporary spelling of booze (both the verb and the noun forms), the roots of the word actually wind back much further than the nineteenth century. Most experts, in fact, believe that the verb came first (that is, before the noun appeared) in the form of the Middle English bousen, which meant “to drink intoxicating beverages, especially to excess” and was an Anglicized borrowing of the similarly defined Middle Dutch busen. Sometime after Middle English gave way to modern English in the late fifteenth century, the form of the English verb changed to bouse, the pronunciation of which was fairly close to that of the modern form of the word. And the word's noun sense, “an intoxicating drink, especially hard liquor,” finally came into use circa 1730, with the contemporary spelling of booze following suit in 1768—nearly seventy-five years before the aforementioned American distiller started gluing his name onto whiskey bottles—when Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, used it in his correspondence with George Montagu.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

February 17, 2016

Case File #016.02.17: PASSION

It was in the late twelfth century that English speakers started using the noun passion, only back then they spelled it passium (or sometimes passiun) and used it solely in reference to the sufferings of Christ on the cross. It was borrowed from the Old French passïon, which was itself a descendant of the Late Latin passio (the nominative form of passionem) and also meant “the anguish of the crucified Christ.” In a reflection of its French and Latin roots, the English noun's form changed to passioun (sometimes spelled pasion) in the late thirteenth century, though its meaning was extended to include any kind of suffering and not just that of Jesus during the Crucifixion. It was around the middle of the fourteenth century that the word morphed into its now familiar form passion, soon after which it came to mean “strong emotion or desire” and lost its general association with suffering. (The connotation of Christ's anguish remains intact, but when used in this way, the word is customarily spelled with a capital P.) It wasn't until circa 1590, however, that the noun took on the additional meaning of “erotic desire or sexual emotion”—some etymologists claim that Shakespeare, in his play Titus Andronicus, was the first to use it in this sense—and the more general contemporary meaning of “a strong enthusiasm” (as in a passion for art) didn't show up until circa 1640.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

February 3, 2016

Case File #016.02.03: FONDLE

When the verb fondle first entered the English lexicon in 1694, it meant “to pamper” or “to regard with great affection.” This is because it came about as a back-formation from the now obsolete noun fondling, which in the seventeenth century meant “a much-loved or oft-petted person”—it had previously been used to mean “a foolish person,” but that's the subject of another story—and was itself the descendant of a now obsolete verb form of fond that meant “to lavish affection or dote on (someone).” Fondle didn't acquire its contemporary sense of “to handle or touch tenderly, lovingly, or erotically” until circa 1800, and its now more common licentious sense of “to molest sexually by touching or stroking” is even newer, having first come into use during the latter half of the twentieth century.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

January 20, 2016

Case File #016.01.20: ABYSS

The English noun abyss, meaning generally “a bottomless or immeasurably deep gulf or great space” and figuratively “anything that seems to be endless, insuperable, or unfathomable,” is a descendant of the classical Greek adjective ábyssos, which meant “bottomless” and was itself a compound formed from the Greek prefix a-, meaning “not,” and the Greek noun bussós, meaning “bottom.” The Greek passed into Late Latin as abyssus, a noun that was commonly used to mean “immeasurably deep pit,” and this later passed into Old French as the noun abisme. (The m appears in the Old French due to the influence of the Vulgar Latin abysmus, a plebeian variant of the aforementioned Late Latin noun.) In the thirteenth century, some English speakers were influenced directly by the Latin word and some by the Old French, the result being that there were initially three forms of the English noun: abissus, abime, and abysm. Abissus and abime both died out during the sixteenth century and were supplanted by the contemporary abyss, but abysm remained in common use until the early seventeenth century and persists even today in literary and poetic application.

©2016 Michael R. Gates