Case File #015.03.11: POMADE

Anybody who has seen the Coen Brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) knows that the meticulous dandy Ulysses Everett McGill (portrayed by George Clooney) wouldn't be caught dead without some Dapper Dan pomade on his scalp. But even if you haven't seen the film, you still may know that the somewhat dated term pomade means “a fragrant ointment, especially one used for grooming hair.” What you probably don't know, however, is that the ancient Romans used apple pulp to make their hair ointment, and believe it or not, it is back to that old Roman grooming aid that we can ultimately trace the roots of the English word pomade. The classical Latin word pomum meant “apple,” you see, and since their hair treatment was made from apples, the Romans used pomum in reference to both the fruit and the ointment. Thus, when the Latin term passed into Italian, it became the basis for two words: pomo, meaning “apple,” and pomata, meaning “ointment” or “emollient.” Speakers of Middle French later borrowed the Italian pomata, though they changed its form to pommade. Then around 1560, English speakers borrowed the Middle French but Anglicized its spelling to pomade, and the English noun remained in common use until the 1960s, when young men started wearing their hair long and dry rather than slicking it back with an ointment like McGill's Dapper Dan.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.01.21: SAWBUCK

The slang term sawbuck, meaning “a ten-dollar bill,” is an Americanism that first appeared around 1850, and according to most etymologists, the term was derived from the similar-sounding Dutch word zaagbok, which means “sawhorse.” But why, you may ask, did nineteenth-century Americans use a word meaning “sawhorse” as the basis for a reference to the ten-dollar bill? Well, many experts believe the slang term was meant to be an allusion to the resemblance between the Roman numeral X (for ten) and the X-shaped ends of some sawhorses, and this theory seems to be substantiated by the fact that sawbuck later became a standard English synonym for sawhorse. I should note, however, that some lexicographers date the English noun's sense of “sawhorse” before its informal pecuniary sense. But such a stance is not supported by the extant evidence, which indicates that the word's sense of “sawhorse” came into use no earlier than 1862.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.11.12: BOMBAST

Since you probably already know that bombast means “pompously inflated speech or writing,” it's unlikely that the word makes you think of soft, pleasant things such as silk or cotton. So you just may be surprised to learn that the word originated with the classical Greek noun bombyx, which meant “silk” and “silkworm.” Classical Latin borrowed the Greek and used it to mean simply “silk,” but by the time the word passed into Medieval Latin, its form had changed to bambax and it had come to mean “cotton.” The Latin bambacem, the accusative declension of bambax, was the basis for the Old French bombace, meaning both “cotton” and “cotton wadding,” and when English speakers borrowed the French word in the mid-sixteenth century, they initially used it to mean “cotton padding” but soon changed its meaning to “any soft fibrous material used as padding.” It wasn't until circa 1575, though, that English speakers Anglicized the noun's form to the contemporary bombast, and it took yet another decade or so for the word's literal sense of “fibrous padding” to shift to the current figurative one that alludes to the padding often found in highfalutin and grandiose language.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.10.22: DIABOLICAL

Though there is nothing evil about the word itself, the adjective diabolical is of the devil. Etymologically speaking, that is. The word's ultimate ancestor is the Koine Greek (aka New Testament Greek) noun diabolos, which means “accuser” or “slanderer” but is often translated as “devil” or “Satan.” Eventually, the Greek became the basis for the Late Latin diabolus, meaning “devil” or “Satan,” and from this came the Late Latin adjective diabolicus, meaning “devilish” or “from the devil.” (The form of the Latin adjective was probably influenced by the Greek diabolikos, which also meant “devilish” and was, of course, derived from the aforementioned Greek word that translates as “devil.”) The Late Latin passed into Old French as diabolique, and around 1399, English borrowed the Old French but Anglicized it first to deabolik and a little later to diabolic. The contemporary diabolical finally appeared around 1500, but that didn't mean the end of diabolic. Indeed, most modern English dictionaries declare both forms to be perfectly legit—though nowadays you may find that just a single entry, often with diabolical as the head word, covers them both—and if that isn't a bit of lexicographical devilishness, nothing is.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.09.24: RIBALD

We English speakers in the twenty-first century commonly use the word ribald as an adjective meaning “amusingly and irreverently vulgar or lewd,” but believe it or not, linguists and etymologists trace the word back to the Proto-Indo-European verb root wreip- (sometimes transliterated as wrip-), which meant “to turn.” From that, they say, came the Proto-Germanic verb wribanan, meaning “to bend,” and this in turn passed into Old High German as riban, which literally meant “to rub” but eventually became a euphemism for the sex act and was therefore often used to mean “to be licentious or lascivious.” Speakers of Old French borrowed the Old High German verb but changed its form to riber, and from this they derived the noun ribalt (sometimes spelled ribaut) and used it to mean one of two things: “a licentious or lascivious person” or, more generally, “a rogue or scoundrel.” When English speakers borrowed the Old French noun in the early thirteenth century, they Anglicized it to ribaude (sometimes spelling it ribaud or ribalde) and dropped the sexual associations, thus using it to mean only “a scoundrel or an otherwise worthless person.” During the fifteenth century, however, the English noun began to take on some sexual connotations of its own, and by around 1500, the word's form had changed to the current ribald and it was being used to mean “an irreverently wanton or lewd person.” Not long after, ribald also more or less took on its contemporary adjective sense—Scottish poet William Dunbar gets the credit for the coining, as the adjective apparently first appeared in print when Chepman and Myllar Press (aka Southgait Press), Scotland's first commercial printer, published some of the poet's work in 1508—and by the time the twentieth century rolled around, the adjective was showing up in everyday usage much more frequently than the noun. In fact, though the noun sense still appears in most contemporary dictionaries, few of today's English speakers are aware that it exists and even fewer use it.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.09.10: ARDENT

If you have an ardent interest in some item or another, it means you are burning with enthusiasm or ablaze with passion for the thing in question. It should come as no surprise, then, that the adjective ardent has a fiery family tree. Indeed, its earliest ancestor is the Latin verb ardere, which meant “to burn.” From the verb came the Latin adjective ardentem, meaning “burning or ablaze,” and this eventually passed into Old French as ardant. English speakers borrowed the Old French (sometimes spelling it ardaunt) circa 1335, but in the early fifteenth century, the English word's form changed to the now familiar ardent and, the occasional poetic throwback notwithstanding, its meaning shifted from “burning” to the current and more figurative “enthusiastic, fervent, or passionate.”

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.08.20: NOOSE

Although the English noun noose means “a loop in a rope or cord, specifically one formed by means of a slipknot so that it can be made to shrink and bind tightly around something when one end of the rope or cord is pulled,” the word's family tree is more firmly rooted in the notion of the knot than it is in that of the loop. You see, the noun's oldest ancestor is the Latin noun nodus, which meant “knot” or “node.” The Latin passed into Old Provençal (aka Old Occitan) and, in turn, Old French as nous or nos, and in the early fifteenth century, English speakers borrowed the Old French, Anglicized it to nose, and used it to mean “slipknot.” It took about half the century, however, for the word's meaning to shift to something like “the loop formed by a slipknot in a rope or cord,” and it wasn't until the end of the century, when Middle English started giving way to modern English, that the spelling changed to the contemporary noose and the noun began to take on the more specific denotation of a loop that tightly binds or snares. Around 1600, noose also took on two verb senses, “to capture or secure by or as if by a noose” and “to make a noose of or in,” but here in the twenty-first century, the verbs aren't used as commonly as they once were.

©2014 Michael R. Gates