Case File #021.04.05: PRODIGAL

The English word prodigal is a descendant of the Latin verb prodigere, which meant “to use up” or “to squander,” though the familial line that connects one to the other is somewhat circuitous. Old French was the first to borrow the Latin, using it as the basis for the noun prodigalité, which meant “wastefulness.” When Old French gave way to Middle French in the mid-fourteenth century, the noun spawned the adjective prodigal, which menat “lavish” or “wasteful,” and in the late fifteenth century, English lifted the adjective directly from the Middle French. But the noun sense of prodigal—that is, “a person who is given to wasteful spending or reckless extravagance”—didn't appear until 1596, when Shakespeare first used it in the second and third acts of his play The Merchant of Venice.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.03.17: PEDAGOGUE

The ancient Greek word paidagogos, the oldest ancestor of the English pedagogue, was formed from a combination of the words paidos, which meant “boy” or “child,” and agogos, which meant “leader.” Thus, paidagogos literally meant “leader of children,” and the term was indeed applied to slaves who were charged with leading their owners' children to and from school and on other outings. When the word later passed into Latin as paedagogus, its meaning shifted from “leader of children” to “tutor of children,” and when the Old French borrowed it from the Latin, the spelling became pedagogue and the meaning became “professional educator of children.” English finally adopted the Old French term in the mid-fourteenth century, retaining the spelling and initially the meaning. But it wasn't until circa 1585—after the related noun pedagogy was formed—that the English word pedagogue was applied to all professional educators rather than just those who teach children, and it wasn't until the twentieth century that the term came to be applied, often disparagingly, to those teachers who are particularly formal, strict, or pedantic.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.02.14: ADULTERY

Etymologically speaking, there is no adult in adultery. Derived from the Latin verb adulterare, which meant “to debase” or “to corrupt,” the English noun adultery was coined circa 1415—back then it was spelled adulterie or sometimes adultrie—not to suggest anything about adults per se but to imply that a sexual hookup with somebody other than one's spouse would irreparably corrupt one's marital union. Also a derivative of the Latin verb adulterare, the English verb adulterate (which retains the Latin's specific meaning) was coined about 150 years after adultery, probably around the same time the noun ended its union with ie and hooked up with y.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.01.20: CAHOOTS

When you're in cahoots with somebody, it generally means that you're colluding or conspiring together for some secret and often nefarious purpose. And the coining of the word cahoots must have been the result of such a conspiracy, because even though English speakers have been using the noun since the early nineteenth century, nobody really knows who coined it or how it originated. Some linguists and etymologists believe the word may have been derived from the Latin cohors, which literally meant “enclosure for animals or soldiers” yet was often used figuratively to mean “enclosed group” or “infantry troop.” But others think it more likely that cahoots was derived from the French cahute, which means “hut” or “cabin,” and was intended to suggest the closed-in, out-of-the-way places in which conspirators often do their caballing and conniving.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.01.04: GNARLED

To be, or not to be—that is the question Hamlet pondered. But for the word gnarled, it took over 200 years to get an answer. Derived from the now archaic English word knar, which refers to a knot or protuberance on the trunk or root of a tree, gnarled first appeared in 1603 when Shakespeare coined it not in Hamlet but in Measure for Measure: “Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak than the soft myrtle....” That was the Bard of Avon's one and only use of his knotty new word, however, and gnarled did not show up again until the early nineteenth century, when it finally managed to twist its way into the English lexicon via the works of British poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and American writers such as Washington Irving.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.12.14: WASSAIL

You've heard the word every December for as long as you can remember. And if you're big on Christmas, you yourself have probably even used the word in song. Yet every year around Christmastime, you still can't help but ask yourself, “What the hell does wassail even mean, anyway?” Well, as the lyrics to the old carol demonstrate, the word in question can be used as both a verb and a noun, and since the noun came first in this etymological family tree, we might as well begin there. Surprisingly, wassail started out in Old English as a two-word imperative phrase: was hal, which was derived from the Old Norse ves heill and basically meant “be in good health” or “be prosperous.” By the beginning of the twelfth century, the English phrase had evolved to become waes haeil (sometimes spelled wes heil), and instead of being a friendly salutation or a cordial acknowledgment of another's departure, it was now a drinking-party toast that meant “to your good health” or “to your good fortune.” It took about another century for the phrase to coalesce into the single noun wassail—the spelling of which varied greatly at first—and by circa 1300, the word had taken on the secondary meaning of “the drink used for toasting, especially the spiced ale used in Christmas celebrations” and was also gaining currency as a verb meaning “to take part in a wassail or a wassail-like toast.” Around 1600, our old friend Shakespeare, who was writing Hamlet at the time, gave the noun a tertiary meaning, “riotous drinking or drunken revelry,” and soon after, the verb took on the related secondary sense of “to engage in drunken revelry.” But it wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century that the verb came to be associated with caroling at Christmastime, and this was likely because many carolers, in an effort to keep warm as they went singing from door to door, brought with them some heated wassail or a similar alcoholic beverage and tended to get a little rowdy as the night—and the drink—wore on. (Some sources say that it was the people on the receiving end of the songs and well-wishing, not the carolers, who provided the warmed libation.) When the nineteenth century rolled around, however, alcohol became less a part of the caroling activities each year, and the verb wassail thus came to mean simply “to go from house to house and sing carols at Christmas.”

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.11.03: BALLOT

In a time long before the days of printed forms and electronic tallying machines, voting was a highly secretive affair, and to help keep their choices a secret, people sometimes cast their votes by surreptitiously dropping little colored balls into marked containers. Around 1540, English speakers began to refer to these balls as ballots, a word they derived from the Old Italian word ballotta, which meant “little ball.” About that same time, the containers into which the balls were dropped became known as ballot boxes, and the verb sense of ballot—that is, “to cast a vote”—came into use soon after. By the time the nineteenth century rolled around, though, slips of paper had replaced the little balls as the voting implements of choice, yet the noun ballot, despite its spherical roots, has to this day remained the common designation for the means of casting a vote and for the act of voting.

©2020 Michael R. Gates