Case File #015.08.11: SPOIL

The verb spoil first entered the English lexicon circa 1300, though back then it was spelled spoulen and meant “to strip someone, especially a slain enemy, of arms, clothes or armor, and other valuables.” English speakers derived it from the Old French verb espoillier, which meant “to strip, plunder, or pillage” and was itself derived from the similarly defined Latin verb spoliare. In the middle of the fourteenth century, the spelling of the English verb changed to spoilen, and soon after, the noun form spoil, generally used in the plural (that is, spoils) and meaning “the goods or property seized by the victors from their enemies after a military conflict,” became part of the lingual currency. The form and definition of the noun have since remained relatively unchanged, but not so the verb's. As Middle English gave way to modern English in the fifteenth century, the spelling of the verb shifted once again to become spoil, the now familiar homographic homonym of the noun. Then in the mid-sixteenth century, the verb's original war-like meaning was jettisoned and replaced by the contemporary and now primary sense of “to lessen the value or quality of (something),” and right on its heels came the secondary meaning of “to become inedible or unusable as a result of decay.” But the verb's modern tertiary sense, “to impair someone's character, such as a child's, by overindulgence or excessive leniency,” is a much later development: it didn't appear until 1693, when English playwright William Congreve used it in the third act of his comedic play The Double Dealer.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.08.05: DETERGENT

The adjective detergent was derived from the Latin verb detergere—or rather, from its present participle, detergentem—which meant “to wipe away or clear off” and was itself formed from the Latin prefix de-, meaning “off” or “away,” and the verb tergere, meaning “to rub, wipe, or polish.” Thus, when the English word first appeared in the early seventeenth century, it meant “cleansing” or “purifying,” though it was initially used only as a medical term. It wasn't until around 1675 that English speakers started using the adjective in a non-medical context, and not long after, the noun sense—that is, “a cleansing agent”—also came into use. The association of detergent with a factory-made chemical cleanser, however, is a relatively new phenomenon that originated in the 1930s.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.07.22: QUELL

While it isn't exactly an innocuous word itself, the verb quell has an even more sinister ancestry. Its family tree is ultimately rooted in the Proto-Germanic verb kwaljan, which meant “to make suffer” or “to inflict pain.” This passed over to Old English as cwellan, meaning “to kill or murder,” but when Old English gave way to Middle English during the twelfth century, the spelling changed to quellen and the word was used to mean “to put to death” and “to destroy.” At the dawn of the thirteenth century, the verb's form changed again to the now familiar quell, and not long after, its mortiferous meanings were jettisoned and the milder contemporary senses of “to suppress, subdue, or silence” and “to forcibly induce submission or passivity” came into use.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

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