Case File #016.01.20: ABYSS

The English noun abyss, meaning generally “a bottomless or immeasurably deep gulf or great space” and figuratively “anything that seems to be endless, insuperable, or unfathomable,” is a descendant of the classical Greek adjective ábyssos, which meant “bottomless” and was itself a compound formed from the Greek prefix a-, meaning “not,” and the Greek noun bussós, meaning “bottom.” The Greek passed into Late Latin as abyssus, a noun that was commonly used to mean “immeasurably deep pit,” and this later passed into Old French as the noun abisme. (The m appears in the Old French due to the influence of the Vulgar Latin abysmus, a plebeian variant of the aforementioned Late Latin noun.) In the thirteenth century, some English speakers were influenced directly by the Latin word and some by the Old French, the result being that there were initially three forms of the English noun: abissus, abime, and abysm. Abissus and abime both died out during the sixteenth century and were supplanted by the contemporary abyss, but abysm remained in common use until the early seventeenth century and persists even today in literary and poetic application.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.12.09: SLEIGH

The noun sleigh first came into use around 1700, only back then it was spelled slay and was initially linguistic currency solely among North American English speakers. A few etymologists and lexicographers credit the coining of the word to Samuel Sewall, one of the judges at the infamous Salem witch trials, as apparently the noun's first recorded use appears in Sewall's writings about his involvement in the witch trials and his early career in Massachusetts jurisprudence. But regardless of who created the word, experts all agree that it is essentially an Anglicized borrowing of the Dutch noun slee, which is a shortened form of slede (meaning, of course, “sled”) that itself evolved from the Middle Dutch sledde. (Incidentally, the English noun sled, which entered the lexicon in the early fourteenth century, is also a descendant of the Middle Dutch sledde, though a more direct one than its cousin sleigh.) The verb sense of sleigh, meaning “to drive or travel in a sleigh,” appeared as early as the 1720s, but the modern spelling of both noun and verb didn't appear until later: the contemporary form of the noun was first recorded in 1768, and it took another century for the spelling of the verb to follow suit.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.11.11: VANILLA

While the vanilla plant and its flavorful bean have been a part of Western cuisine since the early sixteenth century, when Cortés acquired the plant from the Aztecs and first exported it to Europe, the word vanilla didn't enter the English lexicon until the mid-seventeenth century. The roots of the noun (not the plant) ultimately wind back to the Latin word vagina, which means “scabbard” or “sheath” and is also the source of the modern English noun vagina. (Sorry, feminists and lesbians, but it's true: etymologically speaking, the English vagina means “scabbard” and was once meant to imply just what you're thinking it did.) The Latin passed into Spanish as vaina, the diminutive form of which is vainilla (meaning, literally, “little scabbard”). As the story goes, when Cortés and his men saw the vanilla bean for the first time, they thought its long curving pod resembled a small sheath for a sword. Hence, they referred to the bean, as well as its source plant, as vainilla, and the name stuck. Around 1660, English speakers began using the Spanish name in reference to the plant, but as they were wont to do when borrowing from another language, they quickly Anglicized the word's form to vaynilla. It was another fifteen years or so before the English spelling changed to the now familiar vanilla, and it wasn't until 1728 that the word came to refer to not only the plant but also the flavoring extracted from its bean. The adjective form of vanilla that means “plain or ordinary” is an even later development, although etymologists and lexicographers do not all agree as to when it first came into use: some claim as early as 1846, whereas others say no earlier than the mid-twentieth century. But regardless of when the adjective sense was coined, all the experts agree that it was born out of the erroneous but commonly held notion that vanilla must be bland and boring because the things that it flavors are often white and colorless.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.10.27: HORRIBLE

The earliest ancestor of the English adjective horrible is the Latin verb horrere, which meant “to bristle with fear or dread.” From the verb came the Latin adjective horribilis, meaning “awful, terrible, or monstrous,” and this eventually passed into Old French as horrible. Around the dawn of the fourteenth century, the Old French passed into the English lexicon, and though English speakers sometimes spelled it orrible or orible, the word today retains the French's original form as well as its essential sense of “extremely unpleasant, dreadful, or shocking.” By the way, the Latin horrere spawned not only horrible but also three other similar English words: the noun horror, which came into use around 1325 and generally means “an intense, painful feeling of fear or dread” and “an intense dislike or abhorrence”; the adjective horrid, which first appeared circa 1590 and initially meant “bristling” but is now used to mean “offensive or repulsive” or “inspiring shock, disgust, or loathing”; and horrendous, which entered the English lexicon around 1660 and means “extremely terrifying, hideous, or dreadful.”

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.10.07: GARGOYLE

If you stopped random people on the street and asked them to define the word gargoyle, most would be able to give you a basic answer: it's one of those stone carvings depicting fanciful or grotesque creatures and often seen jutting out from the upper edges of old tall buildings. And some may even be able to tell you that a gargoyle—or rather its throat and mouth—is usually part of a gutter or waterspout that carries rainwater clear of a building's edge. But few could tell you that thirteenth-century English speakers derived the noun gargoyle from the Old French gargole (sometimes spelled gargoule or gargouille), which meant “throat” or “gullet” and was itself derived from the Latin gula. Most would not know that the English word's original form was gargurl (or sometimes gargurle or gargule) and simply meant “carved mouth of a downspout,” nor would they be likely to know that the modern form gargoyle didn't appear until the early fifteenth century, when the word also came to denote only the grotesquely ornamented waterspouts. And it's doubtful that any of your average on-the-street respondents could tell you that the Old French gargole is the progenitor of not only the English noun gargoyle but also the verb gargle, even though the connection should be conceptually obvious if not etymologically so: gargle means “to wash one's mouth or throat with a liquid kept in motion by exhaling through it,” and that's pretty much what a gargoyle looks like it's doing as it throws water away from a building during a rainfall.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.09.16: RAVENOUS

Though it has no real relationship to hunger, the Latin verb rapere, which means “to violently snatch or grab” or “to pillage,” is the ultimate source of the English adjective ravenous. The Latin passed into Old French as raviner, a verb that could mean either “to ravage” or “to forcibly seize” (depending on context), and from this speakers of Old French derived the adjective raveneux (sometimes spelled raveneus or ravinos), using it to mean “violently greedy” or “aggressively grasping.” At some point during the fourteenth century, English speakers borrowed the French adjective, Anglicized its form to ravenes, and started using it to mean “extremely hungry”—the leap from “violently greedy” to “extremely hungry” came via the observation of the way many predatory animals seize and devour their prey—but it wasn't until around 1405 that the English word took the contemporary form ravenous and gained the additional secondary meanings of “so great as to seem insatiable” and “inordinately eager for satisfaction or gratification.”

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.09.02: LEPRECHAUN

In Irish folklore, a leprechaun is a mischievous sprite or goblin that resembles a little old man, so it should come as no surprise that the word leprechaun is often said to literally mean “tiny person.” The noun evolved from the Old Irish luchorpán, a compound formed from the adjective lu, which meant “little,” and the diminutive form of the noun corp, which meant “body” and was itself an altered borrowing of the Latin corpus. As Old Irish transitioned to Middle Irish in the tenth century and, in turn, Middle Irish gave way to Classical Irish (aka Early Modern Irish) in the thirteenth century, luchorpán underwent metathesis and became lupracán, and this made its way into the English lexicon as lubrican circa 1605. The contemporary English form leprechaun didn't come into use until around 1860, but most etymologists believe that its modern Irish cognate, leipreachán (sometimes taking the form leipracán or lioprachán), appeared much earlier and thus influenced the nineteenth-century English alteration.

©2015 Michael R. Gates