Case File #014.05.28: WACKY

First appearing in the English lexicon circa 1935, the adjective wacky evolved from the noun whacky, a British slang term meaning “a fool” that reached its peak of popularity at the close of the nineteenth century. Whacky itself was a derivative of the verb whack, meaning “to strike or chop,” the idea being that a fool is an individual who acts as if he or she has received a few too many blows to the head. Not surprisingly, then, wacky first came about as a way to denote the imprudent quality of a whacky's behavior, but when the noun whacky fell out of use soon after, the adjective wacky quickly acquired the broader sense of “absurdly or amusingly eccentric, irrational, or crazy.”

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.05.21: ZERO

Zero ultimately comes from the Arabic word sifr, which is used to mean either “nothing” or “empty.” (Yes, the English word cipher, which once meant “zero” or “null” before it came to mean “code” or “to encode or to compute arithmetically,” stems from that same Arabic source.) In the early thirteenth century, Medieval Latin used the Arabic as the basis for the word zephirum, meaning “of nothing” or “with nothing,” and sometime during the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, the Latin passed into both French and Italian as zero. It wasn't until the early seventeenth century, however, that English speakers borrowed the French and Italian word and applied it to the arithmetical figure 0 and its related concepts, and it was as late as 1813 before the English zero took on its now common but informal noun sense of “a person or thing of no importance or having little measurable influence.”

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.05.14: FALSETTO

If you're like me and you grew up groovin' to the vocal intonations of Smokey Robinson, Eddie Kendricks of the Temptations, and Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons, you're probably already familiar with the noun falsetto. Still, you probably don't know much about the word's background, so listen up. Borrowed directly from Italian circa 1774, falsetto is the diminutive form of the Italian adjective falso, which itself is a direct descendant of the Latin falsus, meaning “false” or “feigned.” Thus, the literal translation of falsetto is “artificially small.” But when eighteenth-century English speakers got hold of the word, they chose to use it as a noun and to apply it to something that is conspicuously fake in its smallness: a voice (especially one used by an adult male singer) that is affectedly high in pitch, or a singer who uses such a voice.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.05.07: MAVEN

If you've ever been referred to as a maven, it's probably because somebody recognizes you as an expert in some special field or discipline, or maybe it's because you're known to be a connoisseur of wine, fine dining, and the like. Or perhaps you are, like me, an avid fan of the cinema and are thus a movie maven. Whichever the case, you were labeled with maven because it means “one who has special knowledge of or extensive experience with something,” and English speakers have been applying the handle to experts and connoisseurs since the mid-twentieth century. The word is actually an Anglicized form of the Yiddish meyvn, which means “expert or authority”—whether literally or sardonically is a matter of context—and is itself a derivative of the Hebrew mebhin, meaning “one who understands.” So the next time somebody calls you a maven, it'll be okay if you kvell a little. But try not to overdo it, 'cause God forbid you should make yourself look like a schmuck.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.04.30: EMBALM

When embalm first appeared in the English lexicon around 1385, it was spelled enbaumen (or sometimes embawmen), and this makes sense when you consider that the verb was derived from the Old French embaumer, which meant “to preserve a corpse through the use of spices or other substances.” In the mid-fifteenth century, the form of the English word changed to enbalmen, with the u (or w ) being replaced by an l due to the influence of the Latin balsamum, meaning “balm.” (Latin was kind of a big thing among the learned during the Renaissance, what with a lot of stuff from classical antiquity having just been rediscovered and all.) The spelling of the English finally shifted to the current embalm during the early sixteenth century, at which time the verb also took on the secondary meanings of “to fix (someone or something) in a static state” and “to infuse with a sweet or pleasant fragrance,” though the olfactory one is now considered archaic and generally used only by poets.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.04.23: BEDLAM

You may find this a little ironic, but the roots of the noun bedlam wind all the way back to a thirteenth-century priory. Established in London in 1247, the Saint Mary of Bethlehem Friary was initially set up as a monastic community for monks and nuns, but by 1330, it had been converted to a hospital for the poor and had come to be known as the Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem. The hospital was taken over by the state in 1375, and by 1405, it was being used, at least in part, as a public insane asylum, one of the first such institutions in England. That's all very interesting, you say, but what does any of it have to do with the word bedlam ? Well, in the colloquial speech of fourteenth-century London, the hospital in question was often referred to as simply Bethlehem. As the years went by, however, this was contracted first to Bethlem and then to Bedlem, and by the time the hospital became an institution for the insane in the early fifteenth century, people were calling it Bedlam. It didn't take too long, of course, for people to associate the hospital's informal moniker with the tumultuous behavior that was often exhibited by the institution's mentally disturbed residents, and by the end of the seventeenth century, bedlam had become a generic term meaning “a place, scene, or state of uproar, confusion, or chaos.”

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.04.16: YAWN

Yawn started out as the Old English verb ginian (sometimes spelled gionian or geonian), which simply meant “to open the mouth widely.” During the late thirteenth century, the spelling of ginian shifted first to yenen, then to yonen, and then again to yanen, changes that occurred mainly because Middle English speakers were abandoning some of the Old English pronunciation practices, especially that of pronouncing a g like a y when adjacent to an i or an e. It was around 1430 that English speakers started using yanen to mean “to involuntarily open one's mouth wide and inhale deeply due to fatigue or boredom,” but it wasn't until circa 1550, nearly a century after Middle English had given way to modern English, that word's form changed to the now familiar yawn. And the noun senses of yawn were even later developments: the common “an act of yawning” appeared no earlier than 1697, while the colloquial “a thing that causes boredom” didn't show up until as late as 1890.

©2014 Michael R. Gates