Case File #022.01.12: OXYMORON

Did you know that the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron? True story. First appearing circa 1657, the English noun was derived from the ancient Greek adjective oxymoros, and though the Greek means “markedly foolish,” it was formed from the roots oxys, which means “keen” (like the edge of a knife), and moros, which means “stupid.” So in an etymological sense, an oxymoron is a sharp dullard.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.12.17: ICONOCLAST

The noun iconoclast is an Anglicized form of the Medieval Latin iconoclastes and literally means “image breaker.” The Latin was derived from the Late Greek eikonoklastes, itself a combination of the Greek noun eikon, which meant “portrait” or “image,” and a past-tense form of the Greek verb klan that meant “to break.” During the eighth and ninth centuries, the Latin term was used as a designation for certain radical members of the Eastern Orthodox Church who believed the veneration of religious imagery was a form of idolatry and therefore sought to destroy such objects. And when iconoclast became a part of the English lexicon in the late sixteenth century, it was used in reference to extreme Protestants who, like the Eastern Orthodox radicals before them, vehemently and sometimes violently expressed their opposition to the use of graven images—and, for that matter, to any vestiges of papal practice—in churches and religious services. The now more common use of iconoclast in which it means “a person who attacks or seeks to subvert traditional or popular ideas and institutions” is relatively new, having first been recorded in the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning circa 1842.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.11.21: NOVEMBER

Novem was the Latin word for the cardinal number nine, and to this the ancient Romans added -bris—a suffix meaning “month”—to form the word Novembris, which literally meant “month nine.” Probably due to a bit of apocope, Novembris soon became November, though this formal shift didn't affect the semantics and the word remained the designation for the ninth month of the year. But wait—isn't November the eleventh month of the year? Well, yes. Now. The original Roman calendar, however, had only ten months, with March as the first, December as the last, and November thus the ninth. This calendar was based on a lunar cycle rather than a solar one, though, and it turned out to be off by about sixty-one days. So around 713 BCE, Numa Pompilius, the reputed second king of Rome, tried to compensate for the error by extending the calendar with two new months: Ianuarius and Februarius, which we English speakers now call, respectively, January and February. Since Numa placed these new months at the beginning of the year (that is, in front of March), November was pushed from the ninth spot to the eleventh, and despite some later tweaking by Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII, this has remained the month's place on the calendar ever since. As for the word November, it passed into Old French as Novembre, carrying over the adjusted Latin meaning of “the eleventh month of the calendar year.” Middle English borrowed the Old French circa 1200 CE—it replaced the Old English Blotmonath, which literally meant “blood month” and was so named because it was the time of year when animals were slaughtered in preparation for the coming winter—although it took a couple of centuries for the English word's form to shift to the current November.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.10.13: MUMMY

As Boris Karloff surely knew, the word mummy came to English via the Medieval Latin noun mumia, which means “embalmed body” and is itself a variation on mumiya, an Old Persian word for bitumen. Bitumen is a form of asphalt once commonly used in cements and mortars, so the Latin mumia was likely coined as an allusion to the gluey resins that the ancient Egyptians used in their embalming process. And one could say, then, that a mummy is merely a sticky stiff.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.09.06: SCYTHE

The moniker for the Grim Reaper's favorite tool, scythe, is one of those few extant English words that date all the way back to the days of the original Anglo-Saxons, and though its spelling has changed a little over the years—the Old English form was sithe—its meaning has remained essentially the same. According to linguists, the word is semantically a direct descendant of the Proto-Germanic segitho, a noun that itself descended from the Indo-European root sek-, which basically meant “cut.” The shift in spelling from sithe to scythe occurred in the mid-fifteenth century, likely due to the influence of the Latin verb scindere, which meant “to divide” or “to split.” And yes, as that sharp mind of yours has surely guessed, that Latin term is also a progenitor of the English verb scissor and its related noun scissors.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.08.18: UTOPIA

In the year 1516, English social philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas More published a book in which he described what he deemed to be the ideal society, and he referred to this exemplary but fictional community as Utopia. More coined the word by combining the Greek words ou and topos, which meant “not” and “place,” respectively. Thus, utopia literally means “not a place” or “nowhere,” and this was indeed the idea More intended to suggest, as he believed that people should always strive to create a perfect world but that they will never be able to fully attain such a goal. Around 1610, however, the word utopia sort of lost that original implication of impossibility when English speakers started using it to mean “any agreeable or harmonious place, community, or state of being,” and that's essentially the sense it retained for the next two and half centuries or so. Then in the mid-nineteenth century—probably around the time that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto—More's original intent was revived but carried to its ultimate extreme when utopia took on the secondary and pejorative sense of “a highly impractical or ludicrous scheme for social improvement or reform.”

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.07.14: MONKEY

Although most scientists believe that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, many etymologists and lexicographers believe the word monkey shares its pedigree with a fox. Specifically, it's Reynard the Fox, an anthropomorphized canine who is the titular hero of a satirical beast epic, told mostly in verse, that was popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and up into the sixteenth century. In a Middle Low German version of Reynard's poem that was published circa 1500, a new character appeared: Moneke, the son of a secondary character named Martin the Ape. According to literary scholars, this new version of the poem was not initially translated into English via the printed page; rather, it was relayed to English-speaking audiences by way of itinerant entertainers such as minstrels. Thus, some etymologists posit that this is when the word monkey swung onto the scene, as they believe the sixteenth-century minstrels who performed the poem made a monkey out of Moneke when they tried to Anglicize the young ape's name.

©2021 Michael R. Gates