Case File #016.11.23: LETTUCE

Not many people would think of lettuce and milk as culinary partners, yet it turns out there is a palatable affinity between the two. Well, etymologically speaking, that is. First appearing in the English lexicon circa 1300, lettuce was derived from the Old French plural laituës, which meant “lettuces” and the singular of which evolved from lactuca, the Latin word for lettuce. But lactuca was itself derived from the Latin adjective lacteus, which meant “of milk” or “abounding in milk” and was most likely an allusion to the milky juices of certain varieties of lettuce and other edible greens. The Americanism in which lettuce refers to paper money, however, makes no such insinuations about the plant's milkiness or the word's milky past. First recorded around 1930, the term actually alludes to the lettuce-like green color of US currency, but given the twenty-first century's move towards a cashless world economy, the Yankee jargon is now considered passé.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.10.20: SPOOK

The word spook first appeared as an Americanism circa 1800. Borrowed directly from the Dutch spook, a descendant of the Middle Dutch spooc that was itself a close relative of the Middle Low German spok, the English noun was at first used to mean merely “ghost” or “a visible disembodied spirit.” By the end of the century, however, it had also come to mean “any frightening and seemingly preternatural creature” and was starting to take on its now lesser-known figurative sense of “a haunting or disturbing idea or prospect.” (Today, words such as specter and phantom have all but supplanted spook in denoting the aforesaid figurative meaning.) It wasn't until the early 1940s that spook acquired the additional sense of “an undercover agent or spy,” and the same decade saw the unfortunate development of the noun's offensively disparaging (and now highly indecorous) use as a term for a black person. By the way, spook also has two verb senses: the first, “to haunt, frighten, or otherwise behave like a ghost,” appeared in the English lexicon circa 1865; and the second, “to become suddenly frightened or nervous,” came into general use around 1935.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.10.11: WEB

Web is another one of those English words that can be traced all the way back to the Anglo-Saxon era. Originally spelled webb, it was derived from the Old English verb wefen (also spelled webben or webbian), which meant “to weave yarn or thread,” and was thus the general term for woven fabric. (Webster and weber, also derivatives of wefen, were once common terms for “a person who weaves fabric,” but they were supplanted by weaver in the fourteenth century and survive today as surnames only.) Surprisingly, the sense in which web refers to a spider's silken network didn't show up until the late thirteenth century, and it wasn't until the late sixteenth century that the word also came to mean “the membrane between the toes of ducks and other aquatic animals” and, figuratively, “a snare or trap.” The verb senses of web—that is, “to ensnare or entangle” and “to form a web-like shape or network”—are even newer, having first appeared in the writings of Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.09.28: FIEND

Linguists and etymologists believe that the noun fiend can be traced all the way back to the Proto-Germanic verb fijaejan, which meant “to hate.” Old English speakers inherited the verb but Anglicized the spelling to feogan, and from this they derived the noun feond and used it to mean “foe” or “enemy.” When feond passed into Middle English, the spelling first changed to fend and then later to feend, and the word was used now as a designation not for foes in general but for one specific foe: the Devil. By the time modern English started to displace Middle English in the fifteenth century, feend had transformed into the now familiar fiend—the ie spelling was likely influenced by the many Middle French words, such as brief and fierce, that English borrowed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—and had also acquired the more general meaning of “a person of great wickedness or maliciousness.” But the sense in which fiend refers to an obsessed or addicted person, as in golf fiend or drug fiend, is a relatively new one that first appeared circa 1886.

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.08.17: OAF

Once upon a time, people believed that elves and fairies sometimes snatched human children from their cribs or beds, and when abducting human offspring, the mischievous sprites supposedly swapped them with physically frail or mentally stunted children from their own broods. Up until the mid-sixteenth century, people in English-speaking countries generally used the noun changeling when referring to a child believed to have been left behind by the elves or fairies. But by the time 1600 rolled around, English speakers had also started using oph (sometimes spelled auf or aulf) as a term for such a child, oph being an Anglicized form of the Middle Norwegian álfr—or perhaps, say some etymologists, the related Icelandic álfur—which literally meant “elf ” but was often used to mean “silly person, fool, or imbecile.” Thus, if a child was a bit peculiar or had some mild physical deformity, its parents could invoke the word oph and thereby suggest that the youngster was not human but was instead the offspring of an elf or a fairy. During the first twenty or thirty years of the seventeenth century, however, the word's form evolved into the contemporary oaf, and rather than being used in reference to an ersatz human child, the noun came to generally mean “a slow-witted, uncultured, or clumsy person.”

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.07.20: SHAMBLES

If you think of a slaughterhouse or a butchery as a place of confusion or disorder, then you probably won't be surprised to learn that the word shambles, which generally means “a state of complete disorder or ruin,” evolved from a Middle English word that meant “meat market.” But most etymologists and lexicographers say the roots of shambles ultimately wind back to the Sanskrit skambha, a word that meant “pillar” or “supporting member” and was in no way associated with the butchering of animals. So how did an ancient architectural term that evoked the idea of stability evolve into a word associated with carnage and chaos? Well, Sanskrit's skambha eventually passed into Latin as scamnum, which meant “bench,” and Old English speakers took the diminutive form of the Latin—scamillus, that is, meaning “little bench” or “pedestal”—Anglicized it to sceamel (sometimes spelling it scamol or scomul), and used it to mean “a table for vending.” When Old English gave way to Middle English during the twelfth century, sceamel became shamel (the spelling varied greatly), and the word was by then used solely in reference to marketplace tables from which fish or meat was sold. Sometime around the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, the word's form evolved to become shambil, and its plural, shambiles, passed into Early Modern English as sheambles but was used as a singular noun meaning “meat market.” The modern form shambles finally appeared around 1550, at which time the word also came to mean “slaughterhouse” (a sense that is now essentially archaic except in the case of place names), and the figurative sense of “a place of carnage or great bloodshed” soon followed and became commonplace by 1595. The noun's contemporary sense (that is, “a condition of complete confusion, disarray, or ruin”) didn't come until much later, however, making its debut in print circa 1900. By the way, the verb shamble, which means “to move with an awkward and slow or shuffling gait,” first appeared in the English lexicon around 1700, though experts are divided as to whether it is etymologically related to the noun shambles: many say yes, asserting that shamble harks back to the usually bowed legs of the trestle tables used at meat markets in days of yore; others say no, claiming the evidence more cogently suggests that the verb's development followed a course from a now unknown bygone—and likely dialectical—word meaning something like “clumsy” or “ungainly.”

©2016 Michael R. Gates

Case File #016.06.22: MILQUETOAST

Caspar Milquetoast was the central character in a once popular American comic strip called The Timid Soul, which was created by HT Webster in 1924 and appeared in countless newspapers until shortly after the cartoonist's death in 1952 (his assistant continued the strip for about six months following Webster's passing). Webster himself described Milquetoast as the sort of man who “speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick,” meaning, of course, that the fellow's excessively craven and submissive nature made him stifle his own predilections and instead submit to the will of the comic strip's other characters. Because the strip was so popular and ubiquitous, Americans soon started to use its main character's name in reference to real-life people—usually men, though sometimes women also—who seemed spineless and overly deferential, and by around 1940, the general noun milquetoast, meaning “a timid, unassertive, and easily manipulated person,” had become firmly ensconced in the English lexicon. As to how HT Webster came up with the name, some etymologists and lexicographers believe the cartoonist was humorously alluding to the weak consistency of the once popular breakfast dish called milk toast (sometimes spelled milk-toast or milktoast), which was typically made by soaking toasted bread in a thin liquid composed of milk, sugar, and butter. But other experts think the cartoonist was making a play on the noun milksop, a term that dates back to the late fourteenth century (Chaucer used it first in The Canterbury Tales), is also an allusion to limp or mushy food, and to this day still means “an effeminate man.”

©2016 Michael R. Gates