Case File #021.12.17: ICONOCLAST

The noun iconoclast is an Anglicized form of the Medieval Latin iconoclastes and literally means “image breaker.” The Latin was derived from the Late Greek eikonoklastes, itself a combination of the Greek noun eikon, which meant “portrait” or “image,” and a past-tense form of the Greek verb klan that meant “to break.” During the eighth and ninth centuries, the Latin term was used as a designation for certain radical members of the Eastern Orthodox Church who believed the veneration of religious imagery was a form of idolatry and therefore sought to destroy such objects. And when iconoclast became a part of the English lexicon in the late sixteenth century, it was used in reference to extreme Protestants who, like the Eastern Orthodox radicals before them, vehemently and sometimes violently expressed their opposition to the use of graven images—and, for that matter, to any vestiges of papal practice—in churches and religious services. The now more common use of iconoclast in which it means “a person who attacks or seeks to subvert traditional or popular ideas and institutions” is relatively new, having first been recorded in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning circa 1842.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.11.21: NOVEMBER

Novem was the Latin word for the cardinal number nine, and to this the ancient Romans added -bris—a suffix meaning “month”—to form the word Novembris, which literally meant “month nine.” Probably due to a bit of apocope, Novembris soon became November, though this formal shift didn't affect the semantics and the word remained the designation for the ninth month of the year. But wait—isn't November the eleventh month of the year? Well, yes. Now. The original Roman calendar, however, had only ten months, with March as the first, December as the last, and November thus the ninth. This calendar was based on a lunar cycle rather than a solar one, though, and it turned out to be off by about sixty-one days. So around 713 BCE, Numa Pompilius, the reputed second king of Rome, tried to compensate for the error by extending the calendar with two new months: Ianuarius and Februarius, which we English speakers now call, respectively, January and February. Since Numa placed these new months at the beginning of the year (that is, in front of March), November was pushed from the ninth spot to the eleventh, and despite some later tweaking by Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII, this has remained the month's place on the calendar ever since. As for the word November, it passed into Old French as Novembre, carrying over the adjusted Latin meaning of “the eleventh month of the calendar year.” Middle English borrowed the Old French circa 1200 CE—it replaced the Old English Blotmonath, which literally meant “blood month” and was so named because it was the time of year when animals were slaughtered in preparation for the coming winter—although it took a couple of centuries for the English word's form to shift to the current November.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.10.13: MUMMY

As Boris Karloff surely knew, the word mummy came to English via the Medieval Latin noun mumia, which means “embalmed body” and is itself a variation on mumiya, an Old Persian word for bitumen. Bitumen is a form of asphalt once commonly used in cements and mortars, so the Latin mumia was likely coined as an allusion to the gluey resins that the ancient Egyptians used in their embalming process. And one could say, then, that a mummy is merely a sticky stiff.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.09.06: SCYTHE

The moniker for the Grim Reaper's favorite tool, scythe, is one of those few extant English words that date all the way back to the days of the original Anglo-Saxons, and though its spelling has changed a little over the years—the Old English form was sithe—its meaning has remained essentially the same. According to linguists, the word is semantically a direct descendant of the Proto-Germanic segitho, a noun that itself descended from the Indo-European root sek-, which basically meant “cut.” The shift in spelling from sithe to scythe occurred in the mid-fifteenth century, likely due to the influence of the Latin verb scindere, which meant “to divide” or “to split.” And yes, as that sharp mind of yours has surely guessed, that Latin term is also a progenitor of the English verb scissor and its related noun scissors.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.08.18: UTOPIA

In the year 1516, English social philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas More published a book in which he described what he deemed to be the ideal society, and he referred to this exemplary but fictional community as Utopia. More coined the word by combining the Greek words ou and topos, which meant “not” and “place,” respectively. Thus, utopia literally means “not a place” or “nowhere,” and this was indeed the idea More intended to suggest, as he believed that people should always strive to create a perfect world but that they will never be able to fully attain such a goal. Around 1610, however, the word utopia sort of lost that original implication of impossibility when English speakers started using it to mean “any agreeable or harmonious place, community, or state of being,” and that's essentially the sense it retained for the next two and half centuries or so. Then in the mid-nineteenth century—probably around the time that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto—More's original intent was revived but carried to its ultimate extreme when utopia took on the secondary and pejorative sense of “a highly impractical or ludicrous scheme for social improvement or reform.”

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.07.14: MONKEY

Although most scientists believe that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, many etymologists and lexicographers believe the word monkey shares its pedigree with a fox. Specifically, it's Reynard the Fox, an anthropomorphized canine who is the titular hero of a satirical beast epic, told mostly in verse, that was popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and up into the sixteenth century. In a Middle Low German version of Reynard's poem that was published circa 1500, a new character appeared: Moneke, the son of a secondary character named Martin the Ape. According to literary scholars, this new version of the poem was not initially translated into English via the printed page; rather, it was relayed to English-speaking audiences by way of itinerant entertainers such as minstrels. Thus, some etymologists posit that this is when the word monkey swung onto the scene, as they believe the sixteenth-century minstrels who performed the poem made a monkey out of Moneke when they tried to Anglicize the young ape's name.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.06.16: CROON

The Middle Dutch verb kronen meant “to mourn or groan loudly,” and believe it or not, it is from this that the English word croon ultimately evolved. When English speakers borrowed the Dutch word circa 1400, they Anglicized it to crownen (sometimes spelling it croynen) and used it to mean “to low like a bull.” At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the word came to mean “to murmur mournfully,” and not long after, the spelling finally changed to the now familiar croon. But it took another three hundred years or so for the word to gain its now primary sense of “to sing or speak in a soft, often sentimental manner,” and the derivative noun crooner, which means “one who sings sentimental or romantic songs in a soft, low voice,” wasn't coined until about 1930.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.05.19: TOWHEAD

Ever wonder why we use towhead when we refer to someone who has white or pale-yellow hair? Well, the term was coined in the United States circa 1830, but it actually has its beginnings in an older, lesser-known meaning of the noun tow. Sometime during the fourteenth century, you see, English-speaking spinners and weavers began using tow in reference to the fibers extracted from plants such as flax and hemp. (The Middle English word itself likely evolved from the Old English adjective towlic, which meant “fit for spinning.”) Such fibers are generally white or a very faint yellow, and when they are gathered together and combed in preparation for spinning, the resulting bundles—or rovings, as spinners call them—are not only essentially colorless but also have a texture and a sheen similar to those of human and animal hair. So now you get it, right? We call someone a towhead when they have a head of hair that resembles rovings of tow.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.04.05: PRODIGAL

The English word prodigal is a descendant of the Latin verb prodigere, which meant “to use up” or “to squander,” though the familial line that connects one to the other is somewhat circuitous. Old French was the first to borrow the Latin, using it as the basis for the noun prodigalité, which meant “wastefulness.” When Old French gave way to Middle French in the mid-fourteenth century, the noun spawned the adjective prodigal, which menat “lavish” or “wasteful,” and in the late fifteenth century, English lifted the adjective directly from the Middle French. But the noun sense of prodigal—that is, “a person who is given to wasteful spending or reckless extravagance”—didn't appear until 1596, when Shakespeare first used it in the second and third acts of his play The Merchant of Venice.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.03.17: PEDAGOGUE

The ancient Greek word paidagogos, the oldest ancestor of the English pedagogue, was formed from a combination of the words paidos, which meant “boy” or “child,” and agogos, which meant “leader.” Thus, paidagogos literally meant “leader of children,” and the term was indeed applied to slaves who were charged with leading their owners' children to and from school and on other outings. When the word later passed into Latin as paedagogus, its meaning shifted from “leader of children” to “tutor of children,” and when the Old French borrowed it from the Latin, the spelling became pedagogue and the meaning became “professional educator of children.” English finally adopted the Old French term in the mid-fourteenth century, retaining the spelling and initially the meaning. But it wasn't until circa 1585—after the related noun pedagogy was formed—that the English word pedagogue was applied to all professional educators rather than just those who teach children, and it wasn't until the twentieth century that the term came to be applied, often disparagingly, to those teachers who are particularly formal, strict, or pedantic.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.02.14: ADULTERY

Etymologically speaking, there is no adult in adultery. Derived from the Latin verb adulterare, which meant “to debase” or “to corrupt,” the English noun adultery was coined circa 1415—back then it was spelled adulterie or sometimes adultrie—not to suggest anything about adults per se but to imply that a sexual hookup with somebody other than one's spouse would irreparably corrupt one's marital union. Also a derivative of the Latin verb adulterare, the English verb adulterate (which retains the Latin's specific meaning) was coined about 150 years after adultery, probably around the same time the noun ended its union with ie and hooked up with y.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.01.20: CAHOOTS

When you're in cahoots with somebody, it generally means that you're colluding or conspiring together for some secret and often nefarious purpose. And the coining of the word cahoots must have been the result of such a conspiracy, because even though English speakers have been using the noun since the early nineteenth century, nobody really knows who coined it or how it originated. Some linguists and etymologists believe the word may have been derived from the Latin cohors, which literally meant “enclosure for animals or soldiers” yet was often used figuratively to mean “enclosed group” or “infantry troop.” But others think it more likely that cahoots was derived from the French cahute, which means “hut” or “cabin,” and was intended to suggest the closed-in, out-of-the-way places in which conspirators often do their caballing and conniving.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.01.04: GNARLED

To be, or not to be—that is the question Hamlet pondered. But for the word gnarled, it took over 200 years to get an answer. Derived from the now archaic English word knar, which refers to a knot or protuberance on the trunk or root of a tree, gnarled first appeared in 1603 when Shakespeare coined it not in Hamlet but in Measure for Measure: “Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak than the soft myrtle....” That was the Bard of Avon's one and only use of his knotty new word, however, and gnarled did not show up again until the early nineteenth century, when it finally managed to twist its way into the English lexicon via the works of British poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and American writers such as Washington Irving.

©2021 Michael R. Gates