Case File #018.12.19: WIZARD

Say the word wizard today and your listeners are likely to conjure up mental images of cinematic magicians such as Mickey Mouse in “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” segment of 1940's Fantasia or Dumbledore in the more recent Harry Potter series. But etymologically speaking, there is nothing supernatural or magic about origins of the word. In fact, the roots of wizard wind all the way back to the innocuous Old English word wys, which simply meant “wise,” and from this those early English speakers derived the word wysard and used it to mean “sage” and “philosopher.” During the early fifteenth century, however, the form of wysard changed first to wisard and then to the current wizard, and it also began to acquire the connotation of prescience or prognostication. Not surprisingly, it didn't take long for the idea of a person who gains wisdom through foresight to give way to the idea of a person who gains wisdom (or power) by calling on supernatural forces, and by 1550, wizard had thus completely lost its association with the wise and had come to mean “one skilled in the arts of magic or the occult.” The now common informal sense in which the word means “one who is very skilled in a particular field or activity,” as in computer wizard or financial wizard, is much newer, though, having first come into use in American English during the 1920s.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.11.02: ALLURE

The verb allure evolved from the Middle English aluren, which meant “to entice” or “to seduce” and was itself derived from an Old French falconry term, aleurier, that meant “to bait or lure.” The spelling of the English shifted to allure around 1400, and though its meaning has remained essentially the same—to this day, in fact, the verb still retains its original underlying connotations of emotional enslavement and carnal corruption—the noun sense of “the quality of being powerfully attractive or fascinating” didn't appear until circa 1550.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.10.30: DELIRIUM

If we trace the noun delirium all the way back to its earliest tangible roots, we find that it started with the Latin prepositional phrase de lire, which meant “from the furrow” or “off the track.” The ancient Romans transformed the phrase into the verb deliriare, which initially meant “to wander from the furrow (while plowing)” but was later used figuratively to mean “to deviate from the rational or emotional norm” or “to become deranged,” and from this they derived the Latin noun delirium and used it to mean “insanity.” When the noun passed directly into English circa 1590, the meaning was softened a bit to “a temporary state of acute mental or emotional instability resulting from high fever, intoxication, shock, or other such causes,” but the informal sense in which delirium is softened even further to “frenzied excitement” or “ecstasy”—as in, for example, The sports fans jumped about in delirium after their team's championship victory —didn't appear until the mid-nineteenth century.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.10.11: ZOMBIE

Zombie became part of the English lexicon circa 1871, coming first to American English via the voodoo cults in the Southern United States and the Caribbean. One theory has it that the word was borrowed directly from the name of a snake-like god who was once worshiped throughout West Africa, but many etymologists and linguists believe zombie was derived from either the Kimbundu word nzambi, which means “god,” or the Kikongo word zumbi, which means “fetish” (religious, not sexual) or “ghost.” The sense in which zombie metaphorically and often humorously refers to the slow-witted, the lethargic, or the clueless first appeared in American English circa 1936, and not long after, restaurateur and bartender Donn Beach invented the now famous cocktail that bears the moniker zombie, most likely naming it such because the drink's high alcohol content makes those who consume it seem slow-witted, lethargic, and clueless.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.09.12: EXECUTE

When we say that you execute your duties, we mean that you carry out your legal or social obligations. But when we say that the state executes a criminal, we mean that it kills someone! How did the word execute come to have two such disparate definitions? Well, it might shock you to learn that the two meanings are actually kind of similar. Etymologically speaking, that is. Derived from the Medieval Latin verb executare, meaning “to fulfill” or “to carry out,” execute became part of the English lexicon around the end of the fourteenth century. In the context of legal proceedings, the word was used (as it still is today) in the sense of “to carry out a judgment” or “to carry out a sentence,” and since the courts doled out a lot of death sentences in those days, it only took about a century for execute to become, in addition to its original and more general meaning, a synonym for “to put to death.” So, if you work for the state and it's your job to pull the switch, pull the lever, drop the pellet, or insert the needle, we can now rightly say that you execute your duty when you execute a criminal.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.08.15: XYLOPHONE

Xylophone was formed by combining two ancient Greek words: xylon, which meant “wood,” and phone, which meant “voice” or “sound.” Thus, xylophone literally means “wooden sound,” and this makes sense when you consider that the tuned bars or keys of the instrument are traditionally made of wood—some modern versions also have keys made of synthetic materials such as fiberglass or acrylic—and that xylophones are often played using wooden-headed mallets. Although the instrument has been around since at least the ninth century and its most closely related precursors since the sixth century, the word xylophone itself wasn't coined until 1866. And the derivative xylophonist didn't show up until 1927, so who knows who was playing all those unnamed xylophones during the millennium prior.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.07.04: BRIBE

The Old French word bribe referred to a morsel of food given to a beggar, and when it was first adopted into the English language in the late fourteenth century, it basically meant “alms” or “to give alms.” Some time later, the public began to lump beggars in with vagrants and thieves, and since the English word bribe was still associated with begging, it was now applied rather disparagingly. But the term's current connotations of political payola and monetary malfeasance didn't really come about until the mid-sixteenth century, when bribe was used in connection with judges and legal authorities who were known for “begging” the accused to provide money or other favors in exchange for leniency.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.06.13: VACCINE

At the end of the eighteenth century, English physician Edward Jenner was studying the smallpox disease and noticed that dairy farmers who had previously suffered from cowpox, a cattle-borne disease similar to smallpox but much less virulent, were resistant to smallpox infection. He therefore reasoned that healthy people might become immune to smallpox if injected with a little pus from a cowpox lesion—a supposition that turned out to be correct—and he referred to the medicinal cowpox matter as a vaccine and his method for using it to shield against smallpox as a vaccine inoculation (a phrase he soon contracted to vaccination). Jenner used the Latin adjective vaccinus, meaning “of a cow,” as the basis for vaccine, and by 1803, his new English noun and its logical derivative, the verb vaccinate, were already in wide use. It was another forty years, however, before the terms were freed from their bovine roots and used in reference to all inoculating medicines rather than just the one derived from the cowpox virus.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.05.10: DANDELION

The modern French word for a dandelion is pissenlit, which is formed from two words that, when taken together as a phrase, translate as “piss the bed.” This literal meaning may be a reference to the dandelion flower's urine-like color, though some linguists and folklorists believe that it alludes to an old wives' tale about the correlation between the eating of dandelions and involuntary nocturnal urination. But this is a moot point for us English speakers, because our word dandelion evolved from an older French term that alluded to a different (and far more awesome) feature of the weed's yellow flower: its fang-shaped petals. The Middle French moniker for a dandelion, dent de lion, came by way of the Medieval Latin dens leonis, and both terms literally translate as “lion's tooth.” Middle English borrowed the Middle French circa 1375, though the spelling was altered to dent-de-lyon. Barely fifty years later, the spelling was Anglicized to dandelyon, and by the time Early Modern English rolled around, the y had been ditched in favor of the original i. Now, with all that in mind, which do you think is better—French, or English? Or let me put it another way: would you want to tell your gardener that a bunch of bed wetters have popped up in your yard, or would you rather say your lawn has a bad case of lions' teeth?

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.04.25: THRILL

Thrill is the progeny of the Old English thyrlian, which meant “to pierce or penetrate.” The Old English verb passed into Middle English as thirlen, but the spelling shifted to thrillen in the early thirteenth century, and the form became the now familiar thrill circa 1325. The contemporary sense of “to cause or experience a sudden sharp feeling of excitement or pleasure,” however, didn't appear until around 1592—some etymologists say Shakespeare used it first in his play Romeo and Juliet—though this soon became the verb's primary meaning and the earlier perforation connotation was completely jettisoned. The noun sense of thrill—that is, “an intense feeling of excitement or horror, or an experience that causes such a feeling”—came into use in the late seventeenth century, and its derivative thriller, which means “something that thrills, such as a suspenseful or exciting novel or play,” was coined circa 1889.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.03.15: SHAMROCK

Many English speakers probably know that shamrock essentially means “clover.” But what many may not know is that the noun first appeared in 1571 in British author Edmund Campion's History of Ireland, and Campion spelled it shamrote. Campion derived the word from the Irish Gaelic seamrog, which is the diminutive form of the Irish seamar and means “little clover.” The modern English spelling didn't appear until six years after Campion's coining, however, when the Dubliner Richard Stanihurst, an acquaintance of Campion's, used shamrock in his book A Treatise Containing a Plain and Perfect Description of Ireland.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.02.14: DESIRE

The noun desire, which means “a longing, a craving, or something that is wanted or hoped for,” didn't appear in the English lexicon until around 1300, but the verb form—that is, “to long or hope for” and “to express a wish for”—is about a century older. Most etymologists believe the verb was borrowed from the Old French cognate desirer, itself a derivation of the classical Latin verb desiderare. But the Latin verb was developed from the Latin phrase de sidere, which meant “from the stars” and seems to suggest that the ancient Romans expected the fulfillment of their hopes and wishes to come by way of the heavens. Before you laugh at the superstitions of ancient Rome, however, keep in mind that there are still people today who, halfheartedly at least, believe their dreams will come true if they simply wish upon a star.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.01.04: ICICLE

Baby, it's cold outside, and with the wintry weather often comes icicles. We know how icicles are formed: on very cold but sunny days, some snow or ice will melt, drip off a roof, and then refreeze, and when this happens enough times in the same spot, a pointy column of ice appears. Now, that basic science stuff is all fine and dandy, you say, but we logophiles want to know how the word icicle was formed. Well, the roots of the noun wind all the way back to the Old English gicel, which meant “ice.” Middle English borrowed the Old English but changed its spelling to ickle and used it to mean “icicle.” Then sometime during the thirteenth century, Middle English speakers added is, their word for ice, to the front of ickle and formed the compound isykle, which thus literally meant “ice icicle.” It wasn't until around 1325 that the modern form icicle finally appeared, somewhat disguising the word's doubly cold tautologous ancestry.

©2018 Michael R. Gates