Case File #018.09.12: EXECUTE

When we say that you execute your duties, we mean that you carry out your legal or social obligations. But when we say that the state executes a criminal, we mean that it kills someone! How did the word execute come to have two such disparate definitions? Well, it might shock you to learn that the two meanings are actually kind of similar. Etymologically speaking, that is. Derived from the Medieval Latin verb executare, meaning “to fulfill” or “to carry out,” execute became part of the English lexicon around the end of the fourteenth century. In the context of legal proceedings, the word was used (as it still is today) in the sense of “to carry out a judgment” or “to carry out a sentence,” and since the courts doled out a lot of death sentences in those days, it only took about a century for execute to become, in addition to its original and more general meaning, a synonym for “to put to death.” So, if you work for the state and it's your job to pull the switch, pull the lever, drop the pellet, or insert the needle, we can now rightly say that you execute your duty when you execute a criminal.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.08.15: XYLOPHONE

Xylophone was formed by combining two ancient Greek words: xylon, which meant “wood,” and phone, which meant “voice” or “sound.” Thus, xylophone literally means “wooden sound,” and this makes sense when you consider that the tuned bars or keys of the instrument are traditionally made of wood—some modern versions also have keys made of synthetic materials such as fiberglass or acrylic—and that xylophones are often played using wooden-headed mallets. Although the instrument has been around since at least the ninth century and its most closely related precursors since the sixth century, the word xylophone itself wasn't coined until 1866. And the derivative xylophonist didn't show up until 1927, so who knows who was playing all those unnamed xylophones during the millennium prior.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

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