Case File #022.11.24: CRANBERRY

Etymologists, lexicographers, and linguists are not one hundred percent sure about the origins of the word cranberry, though most believe its lineage can be traced to the Low German kraanbere, a noun literally meaning “crane berry” that is itself a compound formed from the Low German kraan, which means “crane” (the bird, that is), and the Middle Low German bere. So now you're probably wondering how the berry got associated with a bird like the crane, right? Well, the experts aren't sure about that either, but the most common belief is that it's because the flower of the plant—especially that of the European variety, Vaccinium oxycoccos—resembles the neck, head, and beak of a crane. Regardless of whether that theory is true, however, one thing is certain: the English noun cranberry first appeared circa 1650, when settlers in America began using it in reference to the North American variety of the plant, Vaccinium macrocarpum, and its berries. And because the European and North American varieties of the plant are so closely related and similar, not to mention the fact that there were both German and Dutch among the American settlers, it's not difficult to accept the predominant idea that cranberry is essentially an Anglicized version of the Low German kraanbere.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.11.11: CORN

Corn is an old word that has been in the English lexicon since at least the eighth century. In the Old English era, however, it didn't denote a particular grain but merely seed grain in general, and in modern times, the specific grain to which the word does refer depends on where you happen to be. In England, for example, corn usually refers to wheat, whereas it refers to oats in Ireland and Scotland and to rye in many of the European countries where English is the lingua franca of business and academics. It was in the mid-seventeenth century that European colonists in North America first used corn in reference to maize, the large yellowish cereal grain indigenous to the New World, and this not only became the word's primary sense in what would later develop into the United States but also caught on in New Zealand, Australia, and most of Canada. Now, some of you out there might this very moment be rubbing your sore feet and wondering about the sense of corn in which it refers to a hard, thick spot on surface of the skin. Well, that word has nothing to do with botany or agriculture and has a different etymology altogether. First appearing in the English lexicon around 1425, that corn was derived from the Old French corne, which meant “horn-like growth” and had itself evolved from a Latin noun, cornu, that meant “a horn, tusk, hoof, or claw.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.10.28: INCUBUS

As you may already know, an incubus is a mythical male ghost or demon that purportedly descends upon sleeping human females and has sexual intercourse with them. What you may not know, however, is that the English noun incubus itself descended from the classical Latin verb incubare, which meant “to keep watch (over)” and “to lie on or sit on.” The Latin word is also the source of the modern English verb incubate, and while that fact may not be too surprising in and of itself, it does raise an interesting question: how did a word associated with incubation, lying and sitting, and keeping watch also come to be associated with sexually active ghosts and demons? Well, a long time ago, many people believed that nightmares were formed when a malevolent demon or spirit sat on the chest of the person sleeping. Sometime during the Late Latin era (a period that spanned roughly from the third century to the sixth), Latin speakers decided there should be a word for those nightmare-causing chest-sitters, and from their verb incubare they derived the noun incubus, which they used to mean both “one who sits or lies on a sleeper” and “nightmare.” Many English speakers of yore also believed in the chest-sitting spirits and demons, and on top of that, the poor sexually repressed bastards imagined that some of these ghostly night visitors took more liberties with their sleeping hosts than just sitting on them. So around 1350, English speakers who were educated (that is, they knew Latin) but were also superstitious and horny decided they needed a term they could apply specifically to those night spirits they fantasized were diddling human women, and to that end, they borrowed the Late Latin incubus and simply altered its meaning. By the way, the English word succubus, which means “a mythical female ghost or demon that has sexual intercourse with sleeping human males,” followed a similar etymological path. It is a semantic alteration of the Medieval Latin noun succubus, which meant “promiscuous woman” or “prostitute” and was itself derived from the classical Latin verb succubare, meaning “to lie under.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.10.12: EERIE

The word eerie descended from the Old English earg, an adjective meaning “cowardly” that itself evolved from either the Proto-Germanic adjective argaz, which meant “unmanly” or “fainthearted,” or the Proto-Indo-European verb root ergh-, which meant “to tremble or shake.” So it's understandable that when eerie first came into use during the late thirteenth century, it meant “fearful or timid.” The eighteenth-century Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns was the first to use the adjective in its contemporary sense of “strange and mysterious in a way that inspires uneasiness, fear, or dread,” and since it was through his influence that this became the word's primary meaning throughout the English-speaking world, it's a wee bit ironic that the Scottish still often use eerie in what is basically its original sense of “frightened or unnerved.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.09.22: AUTUMN

The roots of the noun autumn wind all the way back to the Latin autumnus, which meant “harvest time.” The Latin passed into Old French as autompne, and in the late fourteenth century, Middle English borrowed the Old French term but altered its form to autumpne. Then around 1590, roughly a century after Middle English gave way to modern English, the word's spelling again changed to become the contemporary autumn. The synonym fall—now used primarily in the United States and there the preferred term for the harvest season—came about in the mid-seventeenth century as a shortening of the phrase fall of the leaf, itself an obvious though somewhat poetic alternative to autumn that had been in common use since circa 1540.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

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