Case File #019.08.06: MALAPROPISM

In Richard Sheridan's 1775 comedic play The Rivals, Mrs. Malaprop is a bombastic character who often ludicrously misuses words, and it is from her name that the English noun malapropism evolved. Sheridan based the character's name on the word malapropos, an adjective meaning “inappropriate” or “inopportune” that has been around since the mid-seventeenth century and is itself an Anglicized borrowing of the French phrase mal à propos, which means “bad for the purpose.” As for the coining of malapropism—the definition of which is, of course, “the mistaken and often humorous use of a word or phrase in place of a similar-sounding one, or a word or phrase so misused”—etymologists and lexicographers agree on neither when the deed occurred nor who should get the credit, though many do believe the word's first printed appearance was in Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley in 1849.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.07.18: VISOR

When visor first entered the English lexicon circa 1300, it was sometimes spelled vesour or viser and referred to the movable faceplate of a military helmet such as that used with a suit of armor. The word was derived from the Old French visiere, which was itself derived from a Latin noun, visus, that meant “a sight” or “a vision.” (In post-classical times, visus came to mean “face,” and it is from this sense that the English word visage developed.) The sense in which visor refers to the stiff bill of a cap or headband was first recorded around 1847 in the writings of American historian Francis Parkman, and the use of the word in reference to the sunshade in an automobile dates back to the 1930s.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.06.05: ASTRONAUT

Astronaut was coined in 1880 by English author Percy Greg, who formed the noun by combining the Greek word astron, which means “heavens” or “stars,” with the Greek nautes, which means “sailor.” Thus, astronaut literally means “star sailor,” and Greg used it as the name for a Mars-bound spaceship in his science-fiction novel Across the Zodiac: The Story of a Wrecked Record. But when American science-fiction writers appropriated the word in the late 1920s, they used it to refer not to spaceships but to the people traveling within the spaceships, and by the time the United States established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (or NASA) in 1958, astronaut had become the common English term for “a person trained to work as a crew member aboard a spacecraft” and, more generally, “any person who travels beyond the Earth's atmosphere.”

©2019 Michael R. Gates

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