Case File #015.07.08: OK or OKAY

With their LOLs, BTWs, OMGs, ROTFLs, and the like, those of the Internet generation might be inclined to think they were the first to use clever initialisms as conversational shorthand, but they'd be wrong. In fact, in the 1830s—nearly 150 years before the first so-called millennials were born—the use of abbreviations in place of common phrases and expressions was all the rage among young and hip Americans, and even more popular, especially in New England, was the use of abbreviations to represent deliberate misspellings of those same phrases and expressions. Of the latter, one example has actually survived into the twenty-first century: the initialism O.K., which is now often spelled OK or okay. This one started as an abbreviation of oll korrect, a facetious spelling alteration of all correct that had the youth of the early nineteenth century LOL or ROTFL. Unlike the other similar faddish initialisms of the day, however, O.K. gained linguistic legitimacy in 1840 when the Democratic party in New York City formed the O.K. Club, with the club's name intended as an allusion to “Old Kinderhook,” the nickname of the party's 1840 presidential candidate, Martin Van Buren, who was born in Kinderhook, NY. (Some suggest it was the other way around, that is, that Van Buren's supporters gave him the nickname “Old Kinderhook” to capitalize on the already popular initialism O.K. But this is the minority opinion among etymologists, lexicographers, and other logophiles.) While Van Buren lost the election, O.K. was here to stay. As early as 1841, though, the periods were often being left out of the abbreviation so that it became a true initialism, and instead of being used only as an adjective meaning “all correct” or “satisfactory, acceptable, or agreeable,” the word was now also being used as an adverb meaning “adequately or satisfactorily,” as a noun meaning “an approval or endorsement,” and as an interjection to express assent, acceptance, or enthusiastic approval. But it wasn't until around 1890 that the verb sense—that is, “to approve or authorize”—came into use, and the non-acronymic form okay didn't appear until the late 1920s (an earlier spelling, okeh, didn't catch on), which was also about the time word acquired its alternate adjectival meaning of “barely adequate” or “mediocre.”

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.06.17: YEN

When you say you have a yen for something, you likely mean that you have a current desire or enduring predilection for the something in question. But the nineteenth-century precursors of the word yen denoted something a tad grimmer than mere hankerings or inclinations. When Chinese workers started to immigrate to the United States around 1850, some of them brought opium—and their addiction to it—right along with them, and in the Chinese-American subculture of the time, the compound noun yin-yahn (sometimes transliterated yin-yan or in-yan) was used to mean “a craving for opium” (the Cantonese yin means “opium” and yahn means “craving”). English speakers assimilated the word circa 1885, and after first spelling it in-yun or yin-yun, they soon settled on the form yen-yen and used it to mean “an addiction to opium.” At the dawn of the twentieth century, however, the reduplication was jettisoned and the English form became the now familiar yen, and by no later than 1906, the word had also lost its connection with opium addiction and had come to mean simply “a desire or strong inclination.” It was another fifteen or so years, though, before the verb sense—that is, “to feel a strong desire or yearning (for something)”—was coined and passed into common use.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.05.20: LICORICE

The flavoring for licorice—the black kind, that is—comes from the root of a perennial Mediterranean plant (Glycyrrhiza glabra) that is related to the pea family and has blue flowers and compound pinnate leaves. (Some commercial brands of licorice are flavored instead with anise, a less costly Eurasian herb, but we're not talking about the cheap stuff here.) With that in mind, it shouldn't surprise you to learn that the noun licorice has its roots (no pun intended) in the Greek noun glukurrhiza (sometimes transliterated as glykyrrhiza), a compound formed from the Greek words glukus, meaning “sweet,” and rhiza, meaning “root.” The Greek passed into Latin as glychyrrhiza, but during the Late Latin era, the form changed to liquiritia, an alteration likely influenced by the Latin verb liquere, meaning “to become liquid” or “to dissolve,” as a reference to the way the plant root is processed in order to obtain its flavorsome extract. Old French borrowed the Late Latin noun but changed the spelling to licorece, and this later became the Anglo-French lycoryc before English speakers got their mitts on it in the early thirteenth century and transformed it into the now familiar licorice.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.05.06: IMPEDE

When it comes to the origins of the word impede, meaning “to slow, obstruct, or prevent the progress of (something),” etymologists are not all of one mind. Some say that the verb is a direct descendant of the Latin impedire, which literally means “to shackle the feet”—it's a combination of the prefix im-, meaning “on,” and the locative noun form pedis, meaning “foot”—but was used by Latin speakers to mean “to hinder, obstruct, or prevent.” Others, however, say impede is a back-formation from the noun impediment, meaning “a hindrance or obstruction,” and they lend credence to their claim by pointing out that the noun entered the English lexicon no later than 1400, more than two centuries before the verb came into use. (By the way, impediment was derived from the Latin noun impedimentum, which also means “a hindrance or obstruction.”) But one thing the two camps do generally agree on is this: credit for the coining of impede belongs to our old friend and prolific neologist William Shakespeare, who was apparently the first to put the verb down on paper when he used it in the first act of his play Macbeth circa 1606.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.04.22: THUG

Religious activity is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word thug, so it may surprise you to learn that the term originated in India circa 1810 as the British designation for a group of religious zealots. But these particular zealots were devotees of Kali, a Hindu goddess associated with (among other things) death and destruction, and they thus embraced violent criminal behavior and were especially notorious for waylaying, robbing, and strangling foreigners and unwary travelers. Of course, such behavior was unacceptable to the British, who in the early nineteenth century were already working to subjugate the Indian subcontinent and its people, and they managed to completely wipe out the Thugs by the end of the 1830s. The term thug, however, was here to stay. The Brits had derived the word from the Hindi thag, which means “thief or swindler” and was itself derived from the Sanskrit sthaga-s, meaning “cunningly deceitful.” So after obliterating the religious cult for which the noun was created, the British began to use thug as a general designation for any violent criminal. (Some etymologists give credit for coining this sense of the word to the Scottish essayist, historian, and social commentator Thomas Carlyle, who may have been the first to use it in print when his essay “Chartism” was published in 1839.) It wasn't until the early twentieth century, though, that English speakers in the United States appropriated the noun and used it to mean “a strong, tough minion in a crime syndicate” or, more generally, “a gangster.”

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.03.11: POMADE

Anybody who has seen the Coen Brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) knows that the meticulous dandy Ulysses Everett McGill (portrayed by George Clooney) wouldn't be caught dead without some Dapper Dan pomade on his scalp. But even if you haven't seen the film, you still may know that the somewhat dated term pomade means “a fragrant ointment, especially one used for grooming hair.” What you probably don't know, however, is that the ancient Romans used apple pulp to make their hair ointment, and believe it or not, it is back to that old Roman grooming aid that we can ultimately trace the roots of the English word pomade. The classical Latin word pomum meant “apple,” you see, and since their hair treatment was made from apples, the Romans used pomum in reference to both the fruit and the ointment. Thus, when the Latin term passed into Italian, it became the basis for two words: pomo, meaning “apple,” and pomata, meaning “ointment” or “emollient.” Speakers of Middle French later borrowed the Italian pomata, though they changed its form to pommade. Then around 1560, English speakers borrowed the Middle French but Anglicized its spelling to pomade, and the English noun remained in common use until the 1960s, when young men started wearing their hair long and dry rather than slicking it back with an ointment like McGill's Dapper Dan.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.01.21: SAWBUCK

The slang term sawbuck, meaning “a ten-dollar bill,” is an Americanism that first appeared around 1850, and according to most etymologists, the term was derived from the similar-sounding Dutch word zaagbok, which means “sawhorse.” But why, you may ask, did nineteenth-century Americans use a word meaning “sawhorse” as the basis for a reference to the ten-dollar bill? Well, many experts believe the slang term was meant to be an allusion to the resemblance between the Roman numeral X (for ten) and the X-shaped ends of some sawhorses, and this theory seems to be substantiated by the fact that sawbuck later became a standard English synonym for sawhorse. I should note, however, that some lexicographers date the English noun's sense of “sawhorse” before its informal pecuniary sense. But such a stance is not supported by the extant evidence, which indicates that the word's sense of “sawhorse” came into use no earlier than 1862.

©2015 Michael R. Gates