Case File #018.10.30: DELIRIUM

If we trace the noun delirium all the way back to its earliest tangible roots, we find that it started with the Latin prepositional phrase de lire, which meant “from the furrow” or “off the track.” The ancient Romans transformed the phrase into the verb deliriare, which initially meant “to wander from the furrow (while plowing)” but was later used figuratively to mean “to deviate from the rational or emotional norm” or “to become deranged,” and from this they derived the Latin noun delirium and used it to mean “insanity.” When the noun passed directly into English circa 1590, the meaning was softened a bit to “a temporary state of acute mental or emotional instability resulting from high fever, intoxication, shock, or other such causes,” but the informal sense in which delirium is softened even further to “frenzied excitement” or “ecstasy”—as in, for example, The sports fans jumped about in delirium after their team's championship victory —didn't appear until the mid-nineteenth century.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.10.11: ZOMBIE

Zombie became part of the English lexicon circa 1871, coming first to American English via the voodoo cults in the Southern United States and the Caribbean. One theory has it that the word was borrowed directly from the name of a snake-like god who was once worshiped throughout West Africa, but many etymologists and linguists believe zombie was derived from either the Kimbundu word nzambi, which means “god,” or the Kikongo word zumbi, which means “fetish” (religious, not sexual) or “ghost.” The sense in which zombie metaphorically and often humorously refers to the slow-witted, the lethargic, or the clueless first appeared in American English circa 1936, and not long after, restaurateur and bartender Donn Beach invented the now famous cocktail that bears the moniker zombie, most likely naming it such because the drink's high alcohol content makes those who consume it seem slow-witted, lethargic, and clueless.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

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