Case File #022.07.26: WOEBEGONE

Have you ever wondered why woebegone seems as if it should mean “no more woe” or “the woe is gone” when it really means the exact opposite? Well, turns out it's a homonymic issue. That is, even though the begone in woebegone looks and sounds exactly like the contemporary imperative that means “leave” or “go away,” it's actually a different word altogether. Still confused? Okay, perhaps it will help if we go back to the beginning. The beginning for woebegone, I mean. You see, it all started in the late twelfth century and with these two words: wo, which meant “sadness” or “grief,” and bigon, which meant “to beset” or “to overwhelm.” Thus, the Middle English verb phrase wo bigon meant “to be overwhelmed with grief.” When, during the thirteenth century, the spelling of wo changed to woe and bigon became begone (sometimes spelled begon), the phrase wo bigon naturally followed suit and became woe begone. Yet the meanings of the words didn't change—the poetic imperative begone, which means “go away,” wasn't coined until the end of fourteenth century—so when the phrase finally contracted into a single word circa 1300, it became woebegone, the now familiar but seemingly misleading adjective that means “full of woe” or “sad or miserable in appearance.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.06.23: QUASH

When you quash something, you generally crush it in a figurative manner rather than a physical one. But as the pedigree of the word quash reveals, it was once the other way around. The original form of this English verb was quaschen (sometimes spelled quashen or quassen), and when it first came into use sometime during the thirteenth century, it meant “to smash.” It was derived from the Old French quasser, a verb meaning “to break” or “to damage” that had evolved from the Latin verb quassare, which means “to shake apart” or “to shatter.” Furthermore, the Latin quassare is itself a variation on the older Latin verb cassare, which means “to make empty” or “to destroy.” So quash is clearly the progeny of a long line of vandals and wreckers, and it wasn't until around 1380 that it finally veered a bit from the familial path and took on its current and less violent sense of “to void, extinguish, or suppress.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

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