Case File #019.10.22: SKULL

Old English had several words for the bone that encloses the brain, though all of them were compounds using either brain (brægen in Old English) or head (Old English heafod ) as a base: brægenpanne, which translates as “brain pan”; heafodpanne, which translates as “head pan”; heafodbolla, which translates as “head bowl” or “head cup”; heafodloca, which translates as “head enclosure”; and finally heafodban, which translates as “head bone.” Around the end of the twelfth century, these compounds were all abandoned in favor of the now common skull, but curiously enough, nobody knows for sure where the newer noun came from. Among etymologists, the traditional belief has been that the word was derived from the Old Icelandic skalli, which meant “bald head” but was also sometimes used to mean “head bone.” However, a more recent theory suggests that skull evolved from the Old English noun scealu, which meant “husk or shell” and was often used as a generic term for cup- and bowl-like containers.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.10.02: GRIMOIRE and GRAMMAR

If, like me, you believe in the magical power of words and language, you'll be interested to know that grimoire, a noun meaning “a book of magic spells and incantations,” and grammar (the meaning of which is likely already familiar to you word lovers out there) have a common ancestry. Their shared family tree is rooted in the ancient Greek phrase grammatike tekhne (sometimes transliterated grammatike techne), which meant “the art of letters” and referred to both philology (that is, the study of the history, structure, and cultural nature of a language or languages) and literary scholarship. When Latin speakers borrowed the phrase, they turned it into the single word grammatica and, depending on the context, used it to mean either “philology,” “grammar,” or “literary scholarship.” The Latin term eventually passed into Old French, though its form became gramaire and it was used to refer not only to grammar and literary studies but also to scholarship in general, and scholarship in the Old French era, which was encompassed by the Middle Ages, often included the study of magic, alchemy, and other supernatural esoterica. Thus, as Old French gave way to Middle French and, later, modern French, gramaire ultimately but not surprisingly evolved into two words: grammaire, which means “grammar,” and grimoire, which means “a book of sorcery or witchcraft.” But wait—what about English? Well, it certainly wasn't dormant and unresponsive while all this French neologism was taking place. At the end of the fourteenth century, in fact, English speakers took the Old French gramaire and changed its spelling first to gramere and a little later to the now familiar grammar, though they used it only in its basic contemporary sense—that is, “the collective rules and guidelines that govern a language's usage”—and jettisoned all the magical mumbo jumbo. Then grimoire finally entered the English lexicon around 1850, but unlike its cousin grammar, it retained the French form in addition to its meaning.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.09.12: UMBRAGE

The word umbrage has a shady past. Literally. It came to English via the Middle French ombrage, a noun meaning “shade or shadow” that was itself derived from the Latin adjective umbraticus, which meant “shadowy” or “of the shade.” When English speakers borrowed the French term in the early fifteenth century, they changed the spelling to umbrage yet kept the original shadowy meaning. The English word's usage became more figurative than literal during the sixteenth century, however, and its meaning shifted first to something like “indistinctness” or “haziness” and then later to “doubt” and “suspicion.” But seventeenth-century English speakers must have been a little piqued by all those former shady and suspicious meanings of umbrage, for it was they who gave the noun its current primary sense of “resentment, insult, or offense.”

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.08.06: MALAPROPISM

In Richard Sheridan's 1775 comedic play The Rivals, Mrs. Malaprop is a bombastic character who often ludicrously misuses words, and it is from her name that the English noun malapropism evolved. Sheridan based the character's name on the word malapropos, an adjective meaning “inappropriate” or “inopportune” that has been around since the mid-seventeenth century and is itself an Anglicized borrowing of the French phrase mal à propos, which means “bad for the purpose.” As for the coining of malapropism—the definition of which is, of course, “the mistaken and often humorous use of a word or phrase in place of a similar-sounding one, or a word or phrase so misused”—etymologists and lexicographers agree on neither when the deed occurred nor who should get the credit, though many do believe the word's first printed appearance was in Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley in 1849.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.07.18: VISOR

When visor first entered the English lexicon circa 1300, it was sometimes spelled vesour or viser and referred to the movable faceplate of a military helmet such as that used with a suit of armor. The word was derived from the Old French visiere, which was itself derived from a Latin noun, visus, that meant “a sight” or “a vision.” (In post-classical times, visus came to mean “face,” and it is from this sense that the English word visage developed.) The sense in which visor refers to the stiff bill of a cap or headband was first recorded around 1847 in the writings of American historian Francis Parkman, and the use of the word in reference to the sunshade in an automobile dates back to the 1930s.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.06.05: ASTRONAUT

Astronaut was coined in 1880 by English author Percy Greg, who formed the noun by combining the Greek word astron, which means “heavens” or “stars,” with the Greek nautes, which means “sailor.” Thus, astronaut literally means “star sailor,” and Greg used it as the name for a Mars-bound spaceship in his science-fiction novel Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record. But when American science-fiction writers appropriated the word in the late 1920s, they used it to refer not to spaceships but to the people traveling within the spaceships, and by the time the United States established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (or NASA) in 1958, astronaut had become the common English term for “a person trained to work as a crew member aboard a spacecraft” and, more generally, “any person who travels beyond the Earth's atmosphere.”

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.05.08: LUDDITE

In Nottingham, England, circa 1589, a man by the name of William Lee invented something he called a stocking frame, which was essentially a machine that could knit stockings. Due to resistance from both the British monarchy and the working class—not to mention that the machine only produced a low-quality fabric—Lee was ultimately unsuccessful in getting the British stocking industry to accept his machine, and he died a pauper in the early seventeenth century. After Lee's death, however, other inventors refined his original design for the stocking frame, and by the mid-eighteenth century, the stocking and textile industries were well on their way to becoming mechanized. Legend has it that around 1779, a working-class Brit by the name of Ned Ludd wasn't too happy about the prospect of losing his job to a machine, and he therefore broke into his place of employment after hours and destroyed the factory's newly installed stocking frames. Some thirty years later, workers in Leicester, England, protested the low wages at their own place of employment by destroying the factory's machinery during nighttime raids, and such wage-based riots eventually spread throughout industrialized England. Around 1816, government intervention and wage increases brought the protests and the property damage to a halt, but not before the public and the media had bestowed upon the protesters the moniker Luddites, a heavy-handed allusion to the similarities between the protests and the legend of Ned Ludd. Since then, the term Luddite has been used as a historical reference to the individuals who took part in those riotous early nineteenth-century protests, but it wasn't until around 1961, at the advent of the computer age, that the term took on its current popular sense of “one who is inept in the use of technology.”

©2019 Michael R. Gates