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