Case File #013.06.13: FOMENT

Foment first appeared in the English lexicon circa 1425, but it originally meant “to bathe a part of the body in hot liquids, especially for medicinal purposes.” It was derived from the Old French fomenter, which meant “to apply hot compresses to a wound” and was itself ultimately a derivation of the Latin fovere. The Latin term, however, actually had two meanings: “to warm or heat” and “to foster or encourage.” During the sixteenth century, educated English speakers who were cognizant of the Latin roots of foment began to sometimes use the word to mean “to encourage or promote,” and by about 1600, this had taken over as the word's primary sense and the thermic meaning had become secondary. The now familiar use of foment in which it has negative connotations—that is, “to instigate or stir up trouble”—was first recorded in Francis Bacon's The History of the Reign of King Henry VII in 1622, and not long after, this became the verb's only meaning and thus its sole semantic connection to any type of hot water.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.06.04: DUNCE

When dunce came into use in the early 1500s, it was originally spelled Duns. The word was derived from the name of John Duns Scotus, a thirteenth-century Scottish philosopher and theologian who had once been revered in intellectual circles but whose writings and ideas were dismissed by Renaissance thinkers as fatuous sophistry. Thus, any scholar in the early sixteenth century who still upheld the works of Scotus was often derogatorily referred to as a Duns man (sometimes spelled Dunsman), though the label was quickly shortened to just Duns. Around 1575, the spelling changed to the now familiar (and uncapitalized) dunce, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the term had lost its association with Scotus and had come to simply mean “a dim-witted or stupid person.” The conical dunce cap, however, didn't start showing up on the heads of slow-learning grade-schoolers until the mid-nineteenth century.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.05.29: NICKNAME

In the late thirteenth century, the Middle English word eke meant “additional,” and eke name—often condensed into ekename—referred to an additional (and usually informal) moniker used in place of a person's given name. But people hearing the phrase an ekename frequently mistook it to be a nekename, and by the mid-fifteenth century, ekename had been completely supplanted by nekename, which in turn became nickname before passing on to modern English. The verb sense of nickname—that is, “to give a nickname to somebody or something”—developed in the late 1530s, and the sense in which nickname refers to a shortened version of a proper name (such as Mike for Michael) came into use circa 1605.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.05.22: JEEP

You've probably heard the claim that the word jeep was borrowed from the name of Eugene the Jeep, the fictional creature who sometimes appeared with Popeye the Sailor in comic strips and animated cartoons. But is this ubiquitous origin story true? Well, yes...more or less. In early 1940, the vehicle we now refer to as jeep was designed for the U.S. military by an American company called Willys-Overland Motors, and when the vehicle was first deployed later that year, the official military designation for it was GP, an initialism derived from the phrase General-Purpose Motor Vehicle. Of course, American servicemen and servicewomen who were pop-culture savvy soon recognized that the burly little buggy figuratively resembled the indomitable Eugene the Jeep—the character first appeared in Thimble Theatre, the then-popular comic strip in which Popeye also appeared, just a few years before the military vehicle went into production—and when they also realized that a slurred pronunciation of the initialism GP sort of sounded like jeep, it didn't take long for the slurred pronunciation to usurp the letter-by-letter pronunciation or even for the spelling to change to jeep. In fact, jeep caught on so fast that it was showing up in official military documents and the public media as early as February 1941, and Willys-Overland Motors finally adopted the moniker (as a designation for the vehicle, not the company) in 1942 and filed an application to trademark it in early 1943. The trademark wasn't granted until 1950, however, and by then jeep had already passed into common usage with a lowercase j, and the verb sense—that is, “to travel by jeep”—was also already in widespread use.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.05.14: FOCUS

Focus might seem like a dull, cold word, but from an etymological standpoint, it's actually kinda hot. You see, it was borrowed from the Latin focus, which meant “hearth” or “fireplace” in the classical era and was later sometimes used to mean simply “fire.” And when the word first appeared in the English lexicon in the mid-seventeenth century, it was used only in the scientific sense of “point of convergence,” as in that smokin' spot at which light rays converge after being refracted or reflected through a lens or a mirror. It took another hundred years or so for the other now common meanings of the noun—that is, “an act of concentrating on something or the thing on which one is concentrating,” “a guiding or motivating purpose,” and “clear visual or mental definition”—to show up, and the verb senses of focus (such as “to adjust a lens or one's eye to a particular range” and “to concentrate on something or to bring something into emphasis”) weren't seen until around 1775.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.05.02: SLEUTH

Sleuth was derived from the Old Icelandic noun slodh, which meant “track” or “path,” and when the Middle English word first came into use in the fourteenth century, it essentially meant “the trail of a person or animal.” By the time sleuth passed into Early Modern English in the late fifteenth century, it was primarily used in compounds, and the word sleuthhound was one of the most common. As the detective in you may have already deduced, sleuthhound literally meant “trail dog,” and it was used to refer to the types of dogs, such as bloodhounds, that are used to track down other animals and people. But around 1850, American English speakers started using sleuthhound to refer to police detectives in addition to the canine trackers, and about twenty-five years later, the word was finally shortened back to sleuth and now used in reference to detectives of only the Homo sapiens variety. Incidentally, the verb sense of sleuth—that is, “to act as a detective” or “to search for something”—didn't show up until the early twentieth century.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.04.09: MONETARY

The ancient Romans didn't exactly think of the goddess Juno—wife of their chief god, Jupiter, and the patron goddess of the Roman Empire—as an advocate of economics or a champion of the wealthy, but they did operate a mint out of her primary temple nonetheless. And because of this connection to the manufacturing of currency, one of Juno's popular epithets, Moneta, was also the Latin term for “coin” or “mint” and the root of the Late Latin monetarius, which meant “of the mint” or “relating to money.” It is no surprise, then, that the English word monetary, though it did not come into use until the early nineteenth century, is a direct descendant of that Latin adjective. Of course, the related English words money and mint also have a kinship with the epithet of the Roman goddess, and while they actually came to the language earlier than monetary, they arrived via more circuitous routes: money evolved from the Middle English moneye, an Anglicized version of the Middle French word moneie that itself evolved from the Latin moneta, and mint grew out of the Old English mynet, which came from the Latin by way of the Old Saxon word munita.

©2013 Michael R. Gates