Case File #021.06.16: CROON

The Middle Dutch verb kronen meant “to mourn or groan loudly,” and believe it or not, it is from this that the English word croon ultimately evolved. When English speakers borrowed the Dutch word circa 1400, they Anglicized it to crownen (sometimes spelling it croynen) and used it to mean “to low like a bull.” At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the word came to mean “to murmur mournfully,” and not long after, the spelling finally changed to the now familiar croon. But it took another three hundred years or so for the word to gain its now primary sense of “to sing or speak in a soft, often sentimental manner,” and the derivative noun crooner, which means “one who sings sentimental or romantic songs in a soft, low voice,” wasn't coined until about 1930.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.05.19: TOWHEAD

Ever wonder why we use towhead when we refer to someone who has white or pale-yellow hair? Well, the term was coined in the United States circa 1830, but it actually has its beginnings in an older, lesser-known meaning of the noun tow. Sometime during the fourteenth century, you see, English-speaking spinners and weavers began using tow in reference to the fibers extracted from plants such as flax and hemp. (The Middle English word itself likely evolved from the Old English adjective towlic, which meant “fit for spinning.”) Such fibers are generally white or a very faint yellow, and when they are gathered together and combed in preparation for spinning, the resulting bundles—or rovings, as spinners call them—are not only essentially colorless but also have a texture and a sheen similar to those of human and animal hair. So now you get it, right? We call someone a towhead when they have a head of hair that resembles rovings of tow.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

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