Case File #020.12.14: WASSAIL

You've heard the word every December for as long as you can remember. And if you're big on Christmas, you yourself have probably even used the word in song. Yet every year around Christmastime, you still can't help but ask yourself, “What the hell does wassail even mean, anyway?” Well, as the lyrics to the old carol demonstrate, the word in question can be used as both a verb and a noun, and since the noun came first in this etymological family tree, we might as well begin there. Surprisingly, wassail started out in Old English as a two-word imperative phrase: was hal, which was derived from the Old Norse ves heill and basically meant “be in good health” or “be prosperous.” By the beginning of the twelfth century, the English phrase had evolved to become waes haeil (sometimes spelled wes heil), and instead of being a friendly salutation or a cordial acknowledgment of another's departure, it was now a drinking-party toast that meant “to your good health” or “to your good fortune.” It took about another century for the phrase to coalesce into the single noun wassail—the spelling of which varied greatly at first—and by circa 1300, the word had taken on the secondary meaning of “the drink used for toasting, especially the spiced ale used in Christmas celebrations” and was also gaining currency as a verb meaning “to take part in a wassail or a wassail-like toast.” Around 1600, our old friend Shakespeare, who was writing Hamlet at the time, gave the noun a tertiary meaning, “riotous drinking or drunken revelry,” and soon after, the verb took on the related secondary sense of “to engage in drunken revelry.” But it wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century that the verb came to be associated with caroling at Christmastime, and this was likely because many carolers, in an effort to keep warm as they went singing from door to door, brought with them some heated wassail or a similar alcoholic beverage and tended to get a little rowdy as the night—and the drink—wore on. (Some sources say that it was the people on the receiving end of the songs and well-wishing, not the carolers, who provided the warmed libation.) When the nineteenth century rolled around, however, alcohol became less a part of the caroling activities each year, and the verb wassail thus came to mean simply “to go from house to house and sing carols at Christmas.”

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.11.03: BALLOT

In a time long before the days of printed forms and electronic tallying machines, voting was a highly secretive affair, and to help keep their choices a secret, people sometimes cast their votes by surreptitiously dropping little colored balls into marked containers. Around 1540, English speakers began to refer to these balls as ballots, a word they derived from the Old Italian word ballotta, which meant “little ball.” About that same time, the containers into which the balls were dropped became known as ballot boxes, and the verb sense of ballot—that is, “to cast a vote”—came into use soon after. By the time the nineteenth century rolled around, though, slips of paper had replaced the little balls as the voting implements of choice, yet the noun ballot, despite its spherical roots, has to this day remained the common designation for the means of casting a vote and for the act of voting.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.10.28: PUMPKIN

While pumpkins have been a part of the Halloween tradition for a mere two centuries or so, the English noun pumpkin has been around for at least twice that long and its antecedents are downright ancient. The current form of the word appeared in the mid-seventeenth century and quickly displaced the previous form, pumpion, which itself had come into use circa 1540 to replace the older pompon, a word borrowed directly from the Middle French at the end of the fifteenth century. Pompon had evolved from the Old French popon—a transformation that likely occurred during the late fourteenth century—and the Old French was a descendant of the classical Latin pepo. But the Latin word didn't mean only “pumpkin”; depending on the context in which it was used, it could also mean “watermelon or other such fruit.” This is because its source was the Greek pepon, which meant “ripened or cooked melon.” Now if you're like me, you're wondering why the ancient Romans thought a Greek word for soft fruit would make a good moniker for pumpkins, and furthermore, you're probably asking yourself why they thought the same word should also be the designation for watermelons. Sadly, the answers to those questions are lost in the fog of history. We can be happy, though, that pumpkin didn't ultimately inherit its ancestor's association with watermelons, because Halloween would be about as spooky as Christmas if jack-o'-lanterns were green and red instead of orange.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.10.14: IMP

Believe it or not, the noun imp doesn't have the fiendish pedigree that its current meanings might suggest. It is a descendant of the Late Latin verb imputare, which meant “to graft (onto)” and was itself the progeny of a Greek verb, emphuein (sometimes transliterated as emphyein), that meant “to implant.” When the Anglo-Saxons adopted the Latin verb, they kept its meaning but changed the spelling to impian, and from that they formed the noun impa and used it to mean “a graft or young shoot.” Impa passed into Middle English as impe, but sometime towards the end of the fourteenth century, the word's meaning shifted from “a young shoot” to “a child of a noble family.” English speakers in the early sixteenth century must not have thought too highly of the children of nobility, however, because they're the ones who changed the spelling of impe to the now familiar imp and used it to mean “a small demon” or “a child of the Devil,” and it wasn't until the middle of the seventeenth century that the noun took on the additional and somewhat softer sense of “a mischievous child.”

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.09.13: ZEPHYR

The English noun zephyr has been in use since at least 1000 CE, but the Anglo-Saxons spelled it zefferus and used it to mean “a westerly wind.” It was derived from the Latin zephyrus, which meant “the west wind” and was itself derived from the Greek Zephyros (also transliterated as Zephuros). While the Greek, too, was sometimes used in reference to a westerly breeze, it was more commonly used as the name of a Greek god who was not only the personification of the west winds but also the god of springtime. Now, as you may have noticed, the contemporary English spelling looks more like that of the Latin and Greek than did the Old English, yet the form zephyr dates back no earlier than the late sixteenth century, having first appeared in George Chapman's initial translations of Homer's The Iliad. And like the current spelling, the word's now familiar and more general sense of “a gentle breeze” is also relatively new—Shakespeare used it first in the fourth act of his tragic play Cymbeline, which was written around 1609—as are its less common senses of “a lightweight fabric or article of clothing” and “something that is airy, insubstantial, or ephemeral.”

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.08.19: NOISOME

Appearances can often be deceiving, and when it comes to English vocabulary, the adjective noisome is a case in point: in spite of the word's spelling and the way it sounds when properly pronounced, it has no etymological or semantic connection to the word noise whatsoever. Noisome is actually a descendant of the Middle English noun anoi, which meant “nuisance” or “annoyance” and was itself derived from anoier, an Old French verb that meant “to disturb or irritate.” (As you may have guessed, anoier is also the source of the English verb annoy.) During the thirteenth century, English speakers would sometimes shorten anoi to noi (also spelled noy or noye) and use it to mean “misfortune, danger, or harm,” and around the mid-fourteenth century, the suffix -some, which meant “characterized by” or “tending to cause,” was added to noi and—voilà—the adjective noisome was formed. Thus, noisome means “dangerous or harmful”—a definition that obviously has nothing to do with the word noise, though noise can sometimes be dangerous and harmful—and this was its sole meaning until circa 1570, at which point it took on the additional and still current senses of “obnoxious or offensive” and “malodorous or fetid.”

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.07.29: PATZER

Whether you're an avid chess player or just an occasional dabbler in the game, you've likely run across the term patzer (sometimes written as potzer), which means “an inept chess player, especially one who is oblivious to the caliber of his or her own incompetence.” The first recorded use of the noun dates back to 1948, yet despite this relatively recent neology, the word's exact origins have become obscured by the pall of time. Still, there are a few theories. According to a handful of lexicographers, patzer has its roots in the Yiddish putz (sometimes transliterated into English as puts or pots), a noun generally used to mean “a foolish or useless person” but sometimes used more colloquially as a vulgar slang for penis. Most other lexicographers and etymologists reject this origin story, however, pointing out that putz didn't pass into the English lexicon until the mid-1960s, nearly twenty years after patzer was coined. They instead believe the chess term was borrowed from the German Patzer, a noun meaning “blunder” or “slip-up” that is itself a derivative of the German verb patzen, which means “to bungle” or “to botch.”

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.06.22: BUNK

In American English, the noun bunk has essentially two meanings, the first being “a narrow shelflike bed that is typically one in a tier of such beds” and the second “nonsense.” Not surprisingly, the history behind the first meaning is a bit of a snoozefest: derived from the word bunker, the term was coined in the mid-eighteenth century as a designation for the space-saving beds and benches used in military bunkers. But the story behind the second meaning of bunk is, like the meaning itself, less soporific. It all started in 1820 during a debate in the United States Congress over the Missouri Compromise. In the midst of the proceedings, a congressman named Felix Walker, who hailed from Buncombe County in North Carolina, demanded an opportunity to speak. After he had droned on for a considerable length of time, his fellow congressmen entreated him to stop, but he emphatically refused, proclaiming that he had every right “to speak for Buncombe.” His congressional peers did eventually convince him to give up the floor, but because the bulk of his speech had been fatuous and meaningless, bunkum (a simplification of Buncombe) quickly became a popular synonym for political claptrap. By the turn of the century, the term had been shortened to bunk, and it was also now used in reference to any kind of nonsense, not just the more abundant political type.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.05.13: GADGET

The history of the word gadget, originally spelled gadjet, is almost as nebulous as the word's meaning is vague. Some etymologists and lexicographers say the word dates back to the 1850s, claiming it started out as some sort of naval jargon used to reference small mechanisms or fittings of unknown or indefinite name. Others claim the term was invented by British author Robert Brown for his Victorian seafaring tale Spunyarn and Spindrift, which was published in 1886. (For the record, the term does indeed appear on page 378 of that book and is used in basically the same way we use it today.) And still a few others claim the word was coined around 1875 and derived from Gaget, Gauthier, & Cie, the name of the French foundry at which sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi had then begun working on the full-scale version of the Statue of Liberty. But regardless of which claim (if any) is true, most etymologists and lexicographers agree that the word was in wide use by the end of nineteenth century, and the majority believe it was probably derived from the French word gachette, which means “little mechanical thing.” The contemporary form gadget didn't appear until 1904, however, when author Rudyard Kipling used it in his short-story collection Traffics and Discoveries. And no, Kipling's book does not include a dim-witted cyborg detective among its cast of characters.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.04.22: PICNIC

Picnic is an Anglicized form of the French piquenique. The French word came into use in the mid-seventeenth century, and while there is no tangible evidence regarding its specific origins, linguists and etymologists have developed a cogent theory: they believe it was formed from a combination of the French verb piquer, which means “to pick,” and the Old French noun nique, which means “a trifling thing.” If this is true, then piquenique literally means “to pick a trifling thing,” and this seems plausible when you consider that the French word and its English spin-off, picnic, were originally used to mean “potluck dinner” and that the dishes at a potluck are usually easy-to-prepare and easy-to-carry trifles from which daring diners are encouraged to pick and choose. It wasn't until the early nineteenth century, however, that the English noun came to mean “a meal eaten outdoors,” and its related verb sense, “to eat a meal in the open air,” was coined soon after, making its debut in 1842 in the opening lines of Tennyson's poem “Audley Court.” But the figurative use of picnic in which it means “easy task” or “pleasant experience”—as in, for example, “Finishing the job before the deadline was no picnic”—came late to the proverbial table, having appeared in the English lexicon no earlier than the first quarter of the twentieth century.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.03.18: ROBOT

Robot is a relatively new word, having first appeared in Paul Selver's English translation of Czech writer Karel Čapek's popular 1920 play R.U.R.(Rossum's Universal Robots). The word that Selver translated as robots is roboti, a term Čapek and his brother, Josef, derived from the Czech word robota, which means “forced or compulsory labor” or “drudgery.” (Incidentally, robota itself evolved from the Old Slavic rabǔ, which meant “serf” or “slave.”) In the play, the characters referred to as robots—or roboti in the Czech version—are humanlike machines constructed solely for performing manual labor and other subservient tasks, and soon after the play debuted in New York in 1923, the word robot passed into the English lexicon as a designation for any machine resembling a human and capable of replicating, at least to some degree, human movements and functions. It was only a year or two later that the noun also took on the senses of “an apparatus that can carry out a complex series of actions either automatically or by remote control” and, figuratively, “a person who behaves in a mechanical or unemotional manner,” but it was another fifty or so years before it became the name of the dance style made famous by Michael Jackson.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.02.13: GLUE

English speakers started using the noun glue around 1225, only back then it was spelled glu or gleu and was used to refer to any viscid substance. It was borrowed from the Old French glu, which meant “birdlime”—birdlime is an adhesive made from tree bark and was once commonly used to snare small birds—and was itself derived from the Latin gluten, a noun that meant “gummy paste or wax.” The verb sense of glue, however, came to English via a slightly different route. Derived from the Old French gluer, which meant “to paste, fasten, or cause to adhere,” the verb entered the English lexicon around 1380, though it was first spelled gliwen and then changed to glewen about two decades later. As Middle English evolved into modern English during the fifteenth century, the forms of both the verb and the noun shifted to glew, which in turn became the now familiar glue sometime during the first half of the sixteenth century.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.01.08: URCHIN

The noun urchin has prickly and ugly roots. It evolved from the Middle English urchoun (sometimes spelled yrchoun), which meant “hedgehog” and ultimately came from the Latin ericius (also meaning “hedgehog”) by way of the Old Northern French herichon. When the English form changed to urchin circa 1528, the word soon took on additional meanings and was applied to things regarded in those days to be as ugly as a hedgehog: hunchbacks, goblins and elves, ill-tempered old women, and, of course, mischievous and raggedy youngsters. During the early seventeenth century, however, the word lost all senses but that of “an impish and unkempt child,” though an allusion to the original sense of “hedgehog” has been retained in the open compound sea urchin.

©2020 Michael R. Gates