Case File #019.11.25: YAM

“I yam what I yam,” said the twentieth-century cartoon character Popeye the Sailor, “and that's all what I yam.” But his utterance of yam was in no way a reference to the root vegetable: it was, of course, simply the result of his slurring of the phrase I am. Furthermore, no credible scholar would claim that Popeye's poor diction played any part in the coining of the English term for the tuber that has long been a staple of American Thanksgiving dinners. In regard to the origins of yam, however, etymologists and lexicographers are not of one mind. Some believe the English noun first came into use around the end of the sixteenth century, and they cite the Portuguese inhame, the French igname, and the Spanish ñame as likely source words. Others concur with that time frame yet argue that yam came not via Portugal, France, or Spain but by way of West Africa, where the Twi language's phonetically similar anyinam refers to a yam-like vegetable. (This idea is bolstered by the fact that the first British mercantile efforts in West Africa took place during the second half of the sixteenth century.) But still others posit that the English word developed more recently, claiming its first recorded use was in colonial America circa 1700. According to this argument, yam was borrowed from the pidgin and creole languages used by African-American slaves, languages in which similar-sounding words such as nyaams and ninyam referred to tuber-like foodstuffs.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.11.06: GRAVY

When gravy first came into use in the late fourteenth century, it referred to a thick, spicy stew that was served as a dressing or side dish for fish or fowl. The word is an Anglicized form of the Old French grané —most etymologists and linguists believe the v came about as a misreading of the n in handwritten manuscripts, but there are some who postulate the existence of the unrecorded Middle French word gravé, a logical and likely descendant of the Old French, as the immediate antecedent of the English—and though grané meant “broth or stew,” it was itself a derivative of the Latin granum, which meant “grain or seed.” (Grains and seeds, or rather their flours, are traditional thickening agents for stews and gravies.) It wasn't until the sixteenth century that gravy came to mean “a sauce made from the thickened and seasoned juices of cooked meat.” And it was in the early twentieth century that it acquired its informal senses of “payment or benefits in excess of what is expected or required” and “unfair or unlawful gain.” The related slang phrase gravy train, which means “a source of easy money,” is also a twentieth-century neologism, one that originated among American railroad workers as a way of referring to any short but profitable haul.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.10.22: SKULL

Old English had several words for the bone that encloses the brain, though all of them were compounds using either brain (brægen in Old English) or head (Old English heafod ) as a base: brægenpanne, which translates as “brain pan”; heafodpanne, which translates as “head pan”; heafodbolla, which translates as “head bowl” or “head cup”; heafodloca, which translates as “head enclosure”; and finally heafodban, which translates as “head bone.” Around the end of the twelfth century, these compounds were all abandoned in favor of the now common skull, but curiously enough, nobody knows for sure where the newer noun came from. Among etymologists, the traditional belief has been that the word was derived from the Old Icelandic skalli, which meant “bald head” but was also sometimes used to mean “head bone.” However, a more recent theory suggests that skull evolved from the Old English noun scealu, which meant “husk or shell” and was often used as a generic term for cup- and bowl-like containers.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.10.02: GRIMOIRE and GRAMMAR

If, like me, you believe in the magical power of words and language, you'll be interested to know that grimoire, a noun meaning “a book of magic spells and incantations,” and grammar (the meaning of which is likely already familiar to you word lovers out there) have a common ancestry. Their shared family tree is rooted in the ancient Greek phrase grammatike tekhne (sometimes transliterated grammatike techne), which meant “the art of letters” and referred to both philology (that is, the study of the history, structure, and cultural nature of a language or languages) and literary scholarship. When Latin speakers borrowed the phrase, they turned it into the single word grammatica and, depending on the context, used it to mean either “philology,” “grammar,” or “literary scholarship.” The Latin term eventually passed into Old French, though its form became gramaire and it was used to refer not only to grammar and literary studies but also to scholarship in general, and scholarship in the Old French era, which was encompassed by the Middle Ages, often included the study of magic, alchemy, and other supernatural esoterica. Thus, as Old French gave way to Middle French and, later, modern French, gramaire ultimately but not surprisingly evolved into two words: grammaire, which means “grammar,” and grimoire, which means “a book of sorcery or witchcraft.” But wait—what about English? Well, it certainly wasn't dormant and unresponsive while all this French neologism was taking place. At the end of the fourteenth century, in fact, English speakers took the Old French gramaire and changed its spelling first to gramere and a little later to the now familiar grammar, though they used it only in its basic contemporary sense—that is, “the collective rules and guidelines that govern a language's usage”—and jettisoned all the magical mumbo jumbo. Then grimoire finally entered the English lexicon around 1850, but unlike its cousin grammar, it retained the French form in addition to its meaning.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.09.12: UMBRAGE

The word umbrage has a shady past. Literally. It came to English via the Middle French ombrage, a noun meaning “shade or shadow” that was itself derived from the Latin adjective umbraticus, which meant “shadowy” or “of the shade.” When English speakers borrowed the French term in the early fifteenth century, they changed the spelling to umbrage yet kept the original shadowy meaning. The English word's usage became more figurative than literal during the sixteenth century, however, and its meaning shifted first to something like “indistinctness” or “haziness” and then later to “doubt” and “suspicion.” But seventeenth-century English speakers must have been a little piqued by all those former shady and suspicious meanings of umbrage, for it was they who gave the noun its current primary sense of “resentment, insult, or offense.”

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.08.06: MALAPROPISM

In Richard Sheridan's 1775 comedic play The Rivals, Mrs. Malaprop is a bombastic character who often ludicrously misuses words, and it is from her name that the English noun malapropism evolved. Sheridan based the character's name on the word malapropos, an adjective meaning “inappropriate” or “inopportune” that has been around since the mid-seventeenth century and is itself an Anglicized borrowing of the French phrase mal à propos, which means “bad for the purpose.” As for the coining of malapropism—the definition of which is, of course, “the mistaken and often humorous use of a word or phrase in place of a similar-sounding one, or a word or phrase so misused”—etymologists and lexicographers agree on neither when the deed occurred nor who should get the credit, though many do believe the word's first printed appearance was in Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley in 1849.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.07.18: VISOR

When visor first entered the English lexicon circa 1300, it was sometimes spelled vesour or viser and referred to the movable faceplate of a military helmet such as that used with a suit of armor. The word was derived from the Old French visiere, which was itself derived from a Latin noun, visus, that meant “a sight” or “a vision.” (In post-classical times, visus came to mean “face,” and it is from this sense that the English word visage developed.) The sense in which visor refers to the stiff bill of a cap or headband was first recorded around 1847 in the writings of American historian Francis Parkman, and the use of the word in reference to the sunshade in an automobile dates back to the 1930s.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.06.05: ASTRONAUT

Astronaut was coined in 1880 by English author Percy Greg, who formed the noun by combining the Greek word astron, which means “heavens” or “stars,” with the Greek nautes, which means “sailor.” Thus, astronaut literally means “star sailor,” and Greg used it as the name for a Mars-bound spaceship in his science-fiction novel Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record. But when American science-fiction writers appropriated the word in the late 1920s, they used it to refer not to spaceships but to the people traveling within the spaceships, and by the time the United States established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (or NASA) in 1958, astronaut had become the common English term for “a person trained to work as a crew member aboard a spacecraft” and, more generally, “any person who travels beyond the Earth's atmosphere.”

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.05.08: LUDDITE

In Nottingham, England, circa 1589, a man by the name of William Lee invented something he called a stocking frame, which was essentially a machine that could knit stockings. Due to resistance from both the British monarchy and the working class—not to mention that the machine only produced a low-quality fabric—Lee was ultimately unsuccessful in getting the British stocking industry to accept his machine, and he died a pauper in the early seventeenth century. After Lee's death, however, other inventors refined his original design for the stocking frame, and by the mid-eighteenth century, the stocking and textile industries were well on their way to becoming mechanized. Legend has it that around 1779, a working-class Brit by the name of Ned Ludd wasn't too happy about the prospect of losing his job to a machine, and he therefore broke into his place of employment after hours and destroyed the factory's newly installed stocking frames. Some thirty years later, workers in Leicester, England, protested the low wages at their own place of employment by destroying the factory's machinery during nighttime raids, and such wage-based riots eventually spread throughout industrialized England. Around 1816, government intervention and wage increases brought the protests and the property damage to a halt, but not before the public and the media had bestowed upon the protesters the moniker Luddites, a heavy-handed allusion to the similarities between the protests and the legend of Ned Ludd. Since then, the term Luddite has been used as a historical reference to the individuals who took part in those riotous early nineteenth-century protests, but it wasn't until around 1961, at the advent of the computer age, that the term took on its current popular sense of “one who is inept in the use of technology.”

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.04.22: GOOD-BYE

The word good-bye is a phonological attrition of the phrase God be with ye, the latter being a way to say farewell that first appeared around the late fourteenth century. By the sixteenth century, God be with ye had phonetically reduced to God b' wi' ye, and during the early seventeenth century, it was contracted to the single word godbwye. Most etymologists think the shift to the form good-bye didn't occur until the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and they also believe the substitution of good for God was likely due to the influence of other popular and less formal salutational phrases such as good morning, good day, and good night. For some eighteenth-century folks, however, good-bye still seemed too stodgy for friendly or familial situations, so they sometimes jettisoned the good and simply used bye. Around 1739, the even less formal-sounding reduplication bye-bye appeared, but it would be another 255 years before Jim Carrey's Ace Ventura would turn that into the contraction b'bye.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.03.13: WHISKEY

The earliest form of the English word whiskey (or whisky for you Brits) was iskie bae, which appeared circa 1585. It was derived from the Gaelic usige beatha, which means “whiskey” but literally translates as “water of life.” By around 1700, the English iskie bae had become the single word usquebea (sometimes spelled usquebaugh), and by 1715, it had been completely Anglicized to whiskie. There is a bit of a dispute over the dating of the modern spelling with the y ending, as some etymologists claim the form appeared as early as 1746, while others say it occurred around sixty years later. But regardless of which claim is true, there is no doubt that there were English speakers getting soused on something specifically called whiskey (or whisky) by at least the mid-nineteenth century. Now, for you lovers of libations who might take a little smug delight in the fact that the original Gaelic term for whiskey translates as “water of life,” I offer this final note: during the European settlement of the Americas, Native Americans often called the white man's whiskey either fire water, a reference to the unpleasant burning sensation one often feels while drinking it, or stupid water, a reference to the way some people behave after drinking it.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.02.20: UNICORN

As you may know, myths, legends, and folktales involving the unicorn have been around since antiquity. Images of the unicorn appeared in the governmental seals of the Indus Valley Civilization, a bronze-age culture that was roughly concurrent with ancient Egypt; ancient Grecian writers referred to the animal in numerous texts; and even Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder described the beast in his notable encyclopedic work Naturalis Historia [Natural History]. But in the overall history of the mythical creature, the word unicorn and its immediate antecedents are relatively new. First appearing in the English lexicon at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the noun was derived from the Old French unicorne, which in turn descended from the Vulgar Latin noun unicornus. And the Vulgar Latin noun itself evolved from the classical Latin adjective unicornis, which meant “having one horn” and was likely used to describe not the mythical unicorn but the real-world rhinoceros.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.01.21: AMBULANCE

As I'm sure you already know, an ambulance is a siren-equipped motor vehicle used for transporting the sick and the injured to the hospital. But I'll bet you didn't know that the word ambulance is related to the adjective ambulatory, which means “capable of walking” and “related to walking” and was derived from a Latin verb, ambulare, that meant “to walk about” or “to travel on foot.” So how did a wheeled, motorized emergency vehicle get a name that essentially means “walking”? Well, it all started around the middle of the eighteenth century when the French military developed the first truly mobile medical facility, a sort of modular hospital that was rather easy to assemble, disassemble, and carry from battlefield to battlefield. The French referred to the portable facility as hôpital ambulant, which literally translates as “walking hospital,” but by the 1790s, the phrase had evolved into the single word ambulance. During the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century, the British copied the French mobile-hospital concept and also borrowed its name, but when the Americans got wind of the idea, they put their portable hospitals (or ambulances, if you will) inside of covered wagons, thus making the facilities even easier to transport—not to mention eliminating the need for assembly and disassembly—and making it possible to quickly move the injured and the medics off the battlefield and out of harm's way. The British and the French soon followed suit, of course, and by the late nineteenth century, ambulance had basically come to mean “a field hospital on wheels.” After the invention of the faster and more powerful automobile, however, the ambulance became less of a portable hospital and more of a mobile but temporary life-support capsule in which the sick and injured can be quickly transported to a fully equipped medical facility.

©2019 Michael R. Gates