Case File #016.05.24: CONFETTI

As most of you probably already know, confetti is the collective term for those little bits of colored paper that are thrown, usually by the handfuls, during large festive occasions. But when the noun first entered the English lexicon in the early nineteenth century, it was used to refer to a type of candy tossed around during celebratory public gatherings. This is because English speakers borrowed the word directly from their friends in Italy: confetti is the plural for the Italian noun confetto, which means “candy” and was itself once used to denote a small sweet that was thrown during carnivals and parades. (In case you're wondering, the progenitor of the Italian confetto is the Latin confectum, a past participle of the neuter verb conficere, meaning “to put together,” and the ultimate source, via Old French, of the English noun confection.) Around 1895, English speakers began using confetti in its modern sense—that is, in reference to the bits of paper popularly thrown at weddings, parades, and such—and by the start of the following century, the noun's association with sweets had been jettisoned altogether.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.04.05: GOBSMACKED

The slang word gobsmacked (sometimes spelled gob-smacked), which essentially means “dumbfounded” or “flabbergasted,” originated in the UK during the 1980s, though it is now quickly becoming popular among the English-speaking youth of other countries such as the US and Canada. Etymologists and linguists believe the adjective was formed by combining the noun gob, a British slang word for mouth that has Gaelic roots and traces back to the sixteenth century, and the past tense of the verb smack, meaning “to strike or hit,” with the connotation thus being that those who are gobsmacked are as stunned by something as they would be if they were suddenly smacked in the mouth. Some experts claim gobsmacked was coined in the early 1980s by the writing staff of a couple of British TV shows, both of which were about working-class people and were set in industrial towns in Northern England. But others believe the adjective originated within the youth culture of Northern England and Southern Scotland and that the television writers, well versed in the argot of the people about whom they wrote, were simply the first to use the word in the mass media. But whichever the case, gobsmacked remains a popular slang word in the UK today, and though nobody really knows why the word only recently started gaining currency in other English-speaking countries, at least one expert believes the lexemic migration was bolstered in 2009 by Scottish singer Susan Boyle's success on the BBC's TV show Britain’s Got Talent and her subsequent ample use of gobsmacked during interviews.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.03.15: BOOZE

According to a mere handful of etymologists and lexicographers, the English word booze first appeared as a noun around 1840, when American distiller EG Booz began selling bottled whiskey on which he pasted labels that prominently bore his own name. But don't be misled by that lot. While Booz's liquor label might have helped to reinforce the contemporary spelling of booze (both the verb and the noun forms), the roots of the word actually wind back much further than the nineteenth century. Most experts, in fact, believe that the verb came first (that is, before the noun appeared) in the form of the Middle English bousen, which meant “to drink intoxicating beverages, especially to excess” and was an Anglicized borrowing of the similarly defined Middle Dutch busen. Sometime after Middle English gave way to modern English in the late fifteenth century, the form of the English verb changed to bouse, the pronunciation of which was fairly close to that of the modern form of the word. And the word's noun sense, “an intoxicating drink, especially hard liquor,” finally came into use circa 1730, with the contemporary spelling of booze following suit in 1768—nearly seventy-five years before the aforementioned American distiller started gluing his name onto whiskey bottles—when Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, used it in his correspondence with George Montagu.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.02.17: PASSION

It was in the late twelfth century that English speakers started using the noun passion, only back then they spelled it passium (or sometimes passiun) and used it solely in reference to the sufferings of Christ on the cross. It was borrowed from the Old French passïon, which was itself a descendant of the Late Latin passio (the nominative form of passionem) and also meant “the anguish of the crucified Christ.” In a reflection of its French and Latin roots, the English noun's form changed to passioun (sometimes spelled pasion) in the late thirteenth century, though its meaning was extended to include any kind of suffering and not just that of Jesus during the Crucifixion. It was around the middle of the fourteenth century that the word morphed into its now familiar form passion, soon after which it came to mean “strong emotion or desire” and lost its general association with suffering. (The connotation of Christ's anguish remains intact, but when used in this way, the word is customarily spelled with a capital P.) It wasn't until circa 1590, however, that the noun took on the additional meaning of “erotic desire or sexual emotion”—some etymologists claim that Shakespeare, in his play Titus Andronicus, was the first to use it in this sense—and the more general contemporary meaning of “a strong enthusiasm” (as in a passion for art) didn't show up until circa 1640.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.02.03: FONDLE

When the verb fondle first entered the English lexicon in 1694, it meant “to pamper” or “to regard with great affection.” This is because it came about as a back-formation from the now obsolete noun fondling, which in the seventeenth century meant “a much-loved or oft-petted person”—it had previously been used to mean “a foolish person,” but that's the subject of another story—and was itself the descendant of a now obsolete verb form of fond that meant “to lavish affection or dote on (someone).” Fondle didn't acquire its contemporary sense of “to handle or touch tenderly, lovingly, or erotically” until circa 1800, and its now more common licentious sense of “to molest sexually by touching or stroking” is even newer, having first come into use during the latter half of the twentieth century.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.01.20: ABYSS

The English noun abyss, meaning generally “a bottomless or immeasurably deep gulf or great space” and figuratively “anything that seems to be endless, insuperable, or unfathomable,” is a descendant of the classical Greek adjective ábyssos, which meant “bottomless” and was itself a compound formed from the Greek prefix a-, meaning “not,” and the Greek noun bussós, meaning “bottom.” The Greek passed into Late Latin as abyssus, a noun that was commonly used to mean “immeasurably deep pit,” and this later passed into Old French as the noun abisme. (The m appears in the Old French due to the influence of the Vulgar Latin abysmus, a plebeian variant of the aforementioned Late Latin noun.) In the thirteenth century, some English speakers were influenced directly by the Latin word and some by the Old French, the result being that there were initially three forms of the English noun: abissus, abime, and abysm. Abissus and abime both died out during the sixteenth century and were supplanted by the contemporary abyss, but abysm remained in common use until the early seventeenth century and persists even today in literary and poetic application.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.12.09: SLEIGH

The noun sleigh first came into use around 1700, only back then it was spelled slay and was initially linguistic currency solely among North American English speakers. A few etymologists and lexicographers credit the coining of the word to Samuel Sewall, one of the judges at the infamous Salem witch trials, as apparently the noun's first recorded use appears in Sewall's writings about his involvement in the witch trials and his early career in Massachusetts jurisprudence. But regardless of who created the word, experts all agree that it is essentially an Anglicized borrowing of the Dutch noun slee, which is a shortened form of slede (meaning, of course, “sled”) that itself evolved from the Middle Dutch sledde. (Incidentally, the English noun sled, which entered the lexicon in the early fourteenth century, is also a descendant of the Middle Dutch sledde, though a more direct one than its cousin sleigh.) The verb sense of sleigh, meaning “to drive or travel in a sleigh,” appeared as early as the 1720s, but the modern spelling of both noun and verb didn't appear until later: the contemporary form of the noun was first recorded in 1768, and it took another century for the spelling of the verb to follow suit.

©2015 Michael R. Gates