Case File #019.05.08: LUDDITE

In Nottingham, England, circa 1589, a man by the name of William Lee invented something he called a stocking frame, which was essentially a machine that could knit stockings. Due to resistance from both the British monarchy and the working class—not to mention that the machine only produced a low-quality fabric—Lee was ultimately unsuccessful in getting the British stocking industry to accept his machine, and he died a pauper in the early seventeenth century. After Lee's death, however, other inventors refined his original design for the stocking frame, and by the mid-eighteenth century, the stocking and textile industries were well on their way to becoming mechanized. Legend has it that around 1779, a working-class Brit by the name of Ned Ludd wasn't too happy about the prospect of losing his job to a machine, and he therefore broke into his place of employment after hours and destroyed the factory's newly installed stocking frames. Some thirty years later, workers in Leicester, England, protested the low wages at their own place of employment by destroying the factory's machinery during nighttime raids, and such wage-based riots eventually spread throughout industrialized England. Around 1816, government intervention and wage increases brought the protests and the property damage to a halt, but not before the public and the media had bestowed upon the protesters the moniker Luddites, a heavy-handed allusion to the similarities between the protests and the legend of Ned Ludd. Since then, the term Luddite has been used as a historical reference to the individuals who took part in those riotous early nineteenth-century protests, but it wasn't until around 1961, at the advent of the computer age, that the term took on its current popular sense of “one who is inept in the use of technology.”

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.04.22: GOOD-BYE

The word good-bye is a phonological attrition of the phrase God be with ye, the latter being a way to say farewell that first appeared around the late fourteenth century. By the sixteenth century, God be with ye had phonetically reduced to God b' wi' ye, and during the early seventeenth century, it was contracted to the single word godbwye. Most etymologists think the shift to the form good-bye didn't occur until the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and they also believe the substitution of good for God was likely due to the influence of other popular and less formal salutational phrases such as good morning, good day, and good night. For some eighteenth-century folks, however, good-bye still seemed too stodgy for friendly or familial situations, so they sometimes jettisoned the good and simply used bye. Around 1739, the even less formal-sounding reduplication bye-bye appeared, but it would be another 255 years before Jim Carrey's Ace Ventura would turn that into the contraction b'bye.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.03.13: WHISKEY

The earliest form of the English word whiskey (or whisky for you Brits) was iskie bae, which appeared circa 1585. It was derived from the Gaelic usige beatha, which means “whiskey” but literally translates as “water of life.” By around 1700, the English iskie bae had become the single word usquebea (sometimes spelled usquebaugh), and by 1715, it had been completely Anglicized to whiskie. There is a bit of a dispute over the dating of the modern spelling with the y ending, as some etymologists claim the form appeared as early as 1746, while others say it occurred around sixty years later. But regardless of which claim is true, there is no doubt that there were English speakers getting soused on something specifically called whiskey (or whisky) by at least the mid-nineteenth century. Now, for you lovers of libations who might take a little smug delight in the fact that the original Gaelic term for whiskey translates as “water of life,” I offer this final note: during the European settlement of the Americas, Native Americans often called the white man's whiskey either fire water, a reference to the unpleasant burning sensation one often feels while drinking it, or stupid water, a reference to the way some people behave after drinking it.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.02.20: UNICORN

As you may know, myths, legends, and folktales involving the unicorn have been around since antiquity. Images of the unicorn appeared in the governmental seals of the Indus Valley Civilization, a bronze-age culture that was roughly concurrent with ancient Egypt; ancient Grecian writers referred to the animal in numerous texts; and even Roman naturalist and philosopher Pliny the Elder described the beast in his notable encyclopedic work Naturalis Historia [Natural History]. But in the overall history of the mythical creature, the word unicorn and its immediate antecedents are relatively new. First appearing in the English lexicon at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the noun was derived from the Old French unicorne, which in turn descended from the Vulgar Latin noun unicornus. And the Vulgar Latin noun itself evolved from the classical Latin adjective unicornis, which meant “having one horn” and was likely used to describe not the mythical unicorn but the real-world rhinoceros.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.01.21: AMBULANCE

As I'm sure you already know, an ambulance is a siren-equipped motor vehicle used for transporting the sick and the injured to the hospital. But I'll bet you didn't know that the word ambulance is related to the adjective ambulatory, which means “capable of walking” and “related to walking” and was derived from a Latin verb, ambulare, that meant “to walk about” or “to travel on foot.” So how did a wheeled, motorized emergency vehicle get a name that essentially means “walking”? Well, it all started around the middle of the eighteenth century when the French military developed the first truly mobile medical facility, a sort of modular hospital that was rather easy to assemble, disassemble, and carry from battlefield to battlefield. The French referred to the portable facility as hôpital ambulant, which literally translates as “walking hospital,” but by the 1790s, the phrase had evolved into the single word ambulance. During the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century, the British copied the French mobile-hospital concept and also borrowed its name, but when the Americans got wind of the idea, they put their portable hospitals (or ambulances, if you will) inside of covered wagons, thus making the facilities even easier to transport—not to mention eliminating the need for assembly and disassembly—and making it possible to quickly move the injured and the medics off the battlefield and out of harm's way. The British and the French soon followed suit, of course, and by the late nineteenth century, ambulance had basically come to mean “a field hospital on wheels.” After the invention of the faster and more powerful automobile, however, the ambulance became less of a portable hospital and more of a mobile but temporary life-support capsule in which the sick and injured can be quickly transported to a fully equipped medical facility.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.12.19: WIZARD

Say the word wizard today and your listeners are likely to conjure up mental images of cinematic magicians such as Mickey Mouse in “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” segment of 1940's Fantasia or Dumbledore in the more recent Harry Potter series. But etymologically speaking, there is nothing supernatural or magic about origins of the word. In fact, the roots of wizard wind all the way back to the innocuous Old English word wys, which simply meant “wise,” and from this those early English speakers derived the word wysard and used it to mean “sage” and “philosopher.” During the early fifteenth century, however, the form of wysard changed first to wisard and then to the current wizard, and it also began to acquire the connotation of prescience or prognostication. Not surprisingly, it didn't take long for the idea of a person who gains wisdom through foresight to give way to the idea of a person who gains wisdom (or power) by calling on supernatural forces, and by 1550, wizard had thus completely lost its association with the wise and had come to mean “one skilled in the arts of magic or the occult.” The now common informal sense in which the word means “one who is very skilled in a particular field or activity,” as in computer wizard or financial wizard, is much newer, though, having first come into use in American English during the 1920s.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #018.11.02: ALLURE

The verb allure evolved from the Middle English aluren, which meant “to entice” or “to seduce” and was itself derived from an Old French falconry term, aleurier, that meant “to bait or lure.” The spelling of the English shifted to allure around 1400, and though its meaning has remained essentially the same—to this day, in fact, the verb still retains its original underlying connotations of emotional enslavement and carnal corruption—the noun sense of “the quality of being powerfully attractive or fascinating” didn't appear until circa 1550.

©2018 Michael R. Gates