Case File #018.07.04: BRIBE

The Old French word bribe referred to a morsel of food given to a beggar, and when it was first adopted into the English language in the late fourteenth century, it basically meant “alms” or “to give alms.” Some time later, the public began to lump beggars in with vagrants and thieves, and since the English word bribe was still associated with begging, it was now applied rather disparagingly. But the term's current connotations of political payola and monetary malfeasance didn't really come about until the mid-sixteenth century, when bribe was used in connection with judges and legal authorities who were known for “begging” the accused to provide money or other favors in exchange for leniency.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.06.13: VACCINE

At the end of the eighteenth century, English physician Edward Jenner was studying the smallpox disease and noticed that dairy farmers who had previously suffered from cowpox, a cattle-borne disease similar to smallpox but much less virulent, were resistant to smallpox infection. He therefore reasoned that healthy people might become immune to smallpox if injected with a little pus from a cowpox lesion—a supposition that turned out to be correct—and he referred to the medicinal cowpox matter as a vaccine and his method for using it to shield against smallpox as a vaccine inoculation (a phrase he soon contracted to vaccination). Jenner used the Latin adjective vaccinus, meaning “of a cow,” as the basis for vaccine, and by 1803, his new English noun and its logical derivative, the verb vaccinate, were already in wide use. It was another forty years, however, before the terms were freed from their bovine roots and used in reference to all inoculating medicines rather than just the one derived from the cowpox virus.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.05.10: DANDELION

The modern French word for a dandelion is pissenlit, which is formed from two words that, when taken together as a phrase, translate as “piss the bed.” This literal meaning may be a reference to the dandelion flower's urine-like color, though some linguists and folklorists believe that it alludes to an old wives' tale about the correlation between the eating of dandelions and involuntary nocturnal urination. But this is a moot point for us English speakers, because our word dandelion evolved from an older French term that alluded to a different (and far more awesome) feature of the weed's yellow flower: its fang-shaped petals. The Middle French moniker for a dandelion, dent de lion, came by way of the Medieval Latin dens leonis, and both terms literally translate as “lion's tooth.” Middle English borrowed the Middle French circa 1375, though the spelling was altered to dent-de-lyon. Barely fifty years later, the spelling was Anglicized to dandelyon, and by the time Early Modern English rolled around, the y had been ditched in favor of the original i. Now, with all that in mind, which do you think is better—French, or English? Or let me put it another way: would you want to tell your gardener that a bunch of bed wetters have popped up in your yard, or would you rather say your lawn has a bad case of lions' teeth?

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.04.25: THRILL

Thrill is the progeny of the Old English thyrlian, which meant “to pierce or penetrate.” The Old English verb passed into Middle English as thirlen, but the spelling shifted to thrillen in the early thirteenth century, and the form became the now familiar thrill circa 1325. The contemporary sense of “to cause or experience a sudden sharp feeling of excitement or pleasure,” however, didn't appear until around 1592—some etymologists say Shakespeare used it first in his play Romeo and Juliet—though this soon became the verb's primary meaning and the earlier perforation connotation was completely jettisoned. The noun sense of thrill—that is, “an intense feeling of excitement or horror, or an experience that causes such a feeling”—came into use in the late seventeenth century, and its derivative thriller, which means “something that thrills, such as a suspenseful or exciting novel or play,” was coined circa 1889.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.03.15: SHAMROCK

Many English speakers probably know that shamrock essentially means “clover.” But what many may not know is that the noun first appeared in 1571 in British author Edmund Campion's History of Ireland, and Campion spelled it shamrote. Campion derived the word from the Irish Gaelic seamrog, which is the diminutive form of the Irish seamar and means “little clover.” The modern English spelling didn't appear until six years after Campion's coining, however, when the Dubliner Richard Stanihurst, an acquaintance of Campion's, used shamrock in his book A Treatise Containing a Plain and Perfect Description of Ireland.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.02.14: DESIRE

The noun desire, which means “a longing, a craving, or something that is wanted or hoped for,” didn't appear in the English lexicon until around 1300, but the verb form—that is, “to long or hope for” and “to express a wish for”—is about a century older. Most etymologists believe the verb was borrowed from the Old French cognate desirer, itself a derivation of the classical Latin verb desiderare. But the Latin verb was developed from the Latin phrase de sidere, which meant “from the stars” and seems to suggest that the ancient Romans expected the fulfillment of their hopes and wishes to come by way of the heavens. Before you laugh at the superstitions of ancient Rome, however, keep in mind that there are still people today who, halfheartedly at least, believe their dreams will come true if they simply wish upon a star.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.01.04: ICICLE

Baby, it's cold outside, and with the wintry weather often comes icicles. We know how icicles are formed: on very cold but sunny days, some snow or ice will melt, drip off a roof, and then refreeze, and when this happens enough times in the same spot, a pointy column of ice appears. Now, that basic science stuff is all fine and dandy, you say, but we logophiles want to know how the word icicle was formed. Well, the roots of the noun wind all the way back to the Old English gicel, which meant “ice.” Middle English borrowed the Old English but changed its spelling to ickle and used it to mean “icicle.” Then sometime during the thirteenth century, Middle English speakers added is, their word for ice, to the front of ickle and formed the compound isykle, which thus literally meant “ice icicle.” It wasn't until around 1325 that the modern form icicle finally appeared, somewhat disguising the word's doubly cold tautologous ancestry.

©2018 Michael R. Gates