Case File #022.05.18: CARNATION

If you wanted to use etymology to demonstrate the ethnocentrism of sixteenth-century Western Europeans, the history of the word carnation would be a good place to start. When it found its way into the English lexicon circa 1540, carnation originally meant “the color of skin.” This definition makes sense when you consider that the noun was borrowed from the Middle French carnation, which meant “complexion” and was itself derived from a classical Latin adjective, carnosus, that meant “fleshy” or “flesh-like.” Yet sometime during the 1590s—an era when most, if not all, English speakers were Caucasian—the English carnation came to be applied not to skin pigmentation in general but to a specific rosy pink color and a naturally pink flower (Dianthus caryophyllus), and if a semantic shift from “skin color” to “rosy pink” isn't an indicator of sixteenth-century Caucasoid conceit, nothing is.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.04.14: YOLK and YELLOW

The yolk is the yellow part of a bird's egg, so it's not too surprising that the words yolk and yellow share a common ancestry. Linguists tell us that yellow ultimately traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root ghel-, which meant “yellowish” and was used to form the names of colors that fall in the range of yellow to yellowish green. When Old English inherited the root—probably, say linguists, via the Proto-Germanic cognate gelwaz—it became geolu (sometimes spelled geolo or geolwe) and meant simply “yellow,” and from this Old English speakers derived the word geolca (sometimes spelled geoloca or geolelca), the meaning of which was literally “the yellow part,” and used it as the designation for an egg yolk. Sometime during either the eleventh or the twelfth century—linguists and etymologists don't all seem to agree on the chronology here—the spelling for geolu changed to yelowe (or sometimes yelwe) and geolca became yelke. At the end of the fourteenth century, yelowe was finally transformed into the yellow with which we contemporary English speakers are all familiar, but at the same time, yelke received only a minor facelift and became yolke. The form yolk didn't make its first appearance at breakfast tables until the early fifteenth century.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.03.16: HOOSEGOW

During the final quarter of the nineteenth century, a lot of people came up from Mexico to work on farms and ranches in Texas and the American Southwest, and as you might suspect, these Spanish-speaking workers had a little bit of influence on the tongue of their English-speaking employers and coworkers. Not all of the Spanish words borrowed by the Americans came across unadulterated, though, and the English slang word hoosegow is a case in point. Like their American coworkers, Mexican ranch hands sometimes got a little rowdy during their time off and therefore ended up spending a day or two in jail and missing a little work, but when the Spanish-speaking jailbirds were later asked by their employers to account for the absence, they would often say not that they'd been to jail but that they'd been to court. Instead of using the English word court, however, they used the Spanish word juzgado, and since the Spanish j is aspirated like the English h in hotel, the z is pronounced like an s, and the d is soft like the th in thousand, many nineteenth-century gringos thought the word sounded like hoosegow and, aware that the workers had been incarcerated, assumed it meant “jail.” By the turn of the century, then, hoosegow had become common American slang for jail. Incidentally, the original source of the Spanish noun juzgado is the Latin verb judicare, which means “to judge” and is also the source of the English word judge and related terms such as judgment and judicial.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.02.17: KEEN

Here's something really keen: In the era of Old English, the adjective keen was originally spelled cene and meant “brave” or “daring,” but sometime during the eighth century, the spelling changed to kene and the meaning shifted to “skilled” or “adroit.” The senses of “sharp” (as in the edge of a blade) and “enthusiastic or eager” came into use circa 1200, which was also about the same time the spelling changed to keen, yet it wasn't until the mid-fourteenth century or so that the senses of “intense” and “mentally alert or intellectually shrewd” first appeared. Interestingly, the verb keen (“to lament, mourn, or complain loudly”) and its associated noun (“a loud wailing or lament”) are etymologically unrelated to the adjective. Both verb and noun were actually derived from the Irish Gaelic verb caoin, which means “to grieve” or “to weep in mourning,” and neither entered the English lexicon until around 1810. A little more than a hundred years later, American teenagers developed the informal usage in which keen means “wonderful” or “excellent,” but alas, the majority of today's hip youth aren't all that keen on the slangy word.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

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