Case File #013.10.07: WITCH

In the era of Old English, wicca was the word for a male magician or sorcerer, and wicce was its feminine counterpart. Although both were derivatives of the Old English verb wiccian, which meant “to practice divination and magic,” they generally suggested something much more nefarious than mere fortune-telling or spell-casting and were often used to label men and women who were suspected of having dealings with the devil or of cavorting with evil spirits. When Old English gave way to Middle English during the twelfth century, wicca and wicce became more or less interchangeable, and by around 1250, both had evolved into the single word wiche (sometimes spelled wicche). The noun's current form, witch, finally popped up around the mid-fifteenth century, and its verb senses, “to influence or affect by or as if by magic or devilry” and “to enchant or beguile,” came into use about fifty or so years later. (Some etymologists believe that the verb witch is not a derivation of the noun but rather a back-formation from bewitch, as the two verbs are essentially synonymous and bewitch actually entered the English lexicon first.) But the now common though informal noun senses of witch—that is, “old woman,” “ugly woman,” and “mean, spiteful, or overbearing woman”—are relatively new, having first appeared around the beginning of the nineteenth century.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.10.03: BOO

English speakers have used the interjection boo to startle or frighten people since at least the early fifteenth century, but information about the word's origins is as nebulous as the ghosts whose utterances it supposedly mimics. It was once believed that the word developed as a corruption of Boh, the name of a tyrannical Medieval general whose brutality struck terror in the hearts of his enemies and allies alike, but not a shred of evidence exists to support this idea, and it has thus long been disregarded as mere folk etymology. More recently, some etymologists have suggested that boo may have evolved from the Latin boare, which meant “to cry aloud or bellow,” yet even the extant data supporting this theory is tenuous. Now, while the source of the frightening interjection may still be a mystery, there is no doubt about the origins of the word's contemporary noun sense. Meaning “a shout of disapproval or contempt,” the word first appeared circa 1800 as an onomatopoeia suggestive of the lowing of oxen, and the utterance of such a boo was meant to imply that the person or object of derision was no better than a mere farm animal. Surprisingly, though, the related verb sense, “to deride or express disapproval by uttering a prolonged boo,” didn't show up for another eighty years or so. And the informal use of boo in which it means “any sound or word”—as in, for example, You didn't say boo to me about your plans—appeared no earlier than 1890.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.09.26: MANURE

If you're like me, you probably aren't keen on the idea of getting manure on your hands, so it might surprise you to learn that the word manure ultimately evolved from the Latin verb phrase manu operari, which meant “to work using one's hands.” When the Latin phrase passed into Old French, it became the single word manouvrer and was used to mean “to make or produce” and “to perform manual labor,” but when English speakers borrowed the French in the early fifteenth century, they Anglicized the spelling to the now familiar manure and used it to mean “to work the soil” and “to cultivate and manage the land.” Of course, cultivating the land often involves the spreading of fertilizer, and since the earliest fertilizers were made of animal dung, it wasn't long before manure took on the sense of “to spread dung on the fields.” During the latter half of the sixteenth century, however, the word became more closely associated with the fertilizer than the act of fertilizing and thus took on the noun sense of “animal dung,” and by the time 1700 rolled around, the noun sense had become more prominent and the verb was relegated to the farmers' argot.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.09.23: VULGAR

The Latin noun vulgus meant “common people” or “general public,” and from it the ancient Romans derived the adjective vulgaris, which meant “commonplace” or “of the common people.” As you may have guessed, vulgaris was the source for the English vulgar, and when the latter first appeared in the English lexicon in the late fourteenth century, it essentially meant “common, ordinary, or everyday.” Around the middle of the seventeenth century, vulgar also took on the additional senses of “ill-bred” and “uncultivated, crude, or tasteless,” but the adjective's now more common sense of “lewd, indecent, or obscene” didn't come into use until the late eighteenth century.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.09.16: QUIZ

The ultimate origins of the word quiz are lost in the mists of history, but that hasn't stopped people from offering up a few ideas. One older story purports that the word was invented in the eighteenth century by a Dublin theater owner who, fancying himself a crack neologist, won a bet that his new word would be in wide use within forty-eight hours of its coining, and though this tale has been circulated for at least two hundred years, not a single shred of evidence exists to support it. A more recent hypothesis suggests that quiz was derived from the Latin quis, which was a pronoun meaning “what,” “who,” or “which” and was often used as an interrogative. And while this idea appears to be more logical and historically sound than the older one, most experts dismiss it as a piece of etymological casuistry because it flies in the face of what little actually is known about the background of the word. You see, when the noun quiz first appeared in the English lexicon around 1780, it meant “an odd or eccentric person,” and its derivative verb sense—which came into use about fifteen years later—meant “to mock, jeer, or ridicule.” It wasn't until circa 1850 that the verb came to mean “to question or interrogate” and “to give a student an informal test or examination”—the noun sense of “a brief test or examination” took another decade or so to show up—but what's really interesting is that nobody can figure out for certain why this semantic shift occurred, though the etymologists behind the venerable Oxford English Dictionary have suggested that the change may have been influenced by the long-established and similar-sounding adjective inquisitive.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.09.04: YIP

The Middle English verb yippen meant “to peep or chirp like a small bird,” and when it passed into modern English in the fifteenth century, its form was shortened to yip but its meaning remained essentially the same. During the early nineteenth century, however, the word flew further from its fowl beginnings and came to mean “to talk or cry in a shrill manner,” a change that some linguists and etymologists believe took place because the orthographical and phonological similarities between yip and yap caused English speakers to confuse the two words. The current sense of the verb yip, “to bark or yelp sharply, briskly, and often continuously,” first appeared in American author Kate Douglas Wiggin's novella The Diary of a Goose Girl in 1902, and the derivative noun sense of “a sharp, high-pitched bark or yelp” came into use around 1910.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.09.03: JEANS

If you're anything like me, you favor jeans over just about any other type of clothing. But do you know how the popular denim pants got their name? Well, it all started with the Middle French phrase jean fustian, which meant “fustian of Genoa” and referred to a twilled cotton fabric that was manufactured in Italy. English speakers borrowed the phrase in the mid-fifteenth century, though they soon dropped fustian and simply used jean as a moniker not only for the Italian cloth but also for any twilled cotton fabric, of which denim is one. Thus, when United States clothiers started using denim to make legwear in the nineteenth century, Americans referred to the durable clothing as merely jean. Around 1880, however, the plural form jeans completely supplanted the singular in everyday usage, a change that many etymologists and linguists attribute to the influence of the long-standing usage of the related pants and trousers.

©2013 Michael R. Gates