Case File #021.09.06: SCYTHE

The moniker for the Grim Reaper's favorite tool, scythe, is one of those few extant English words that date all the way back to the days of the original Anglo-Saxons, and though its spelling has changed a little over the years—the Old English form was sithe—its meaning has remained essentially the same. According to linguists, the word is semantically a direct descendant of the Proto-Germanic segitho, a noun that itself descended from the Indo-European root sek-, which basically meant “cut.” The shift in spelling from sithe to scythe occurred in the mid-fifteenth century, likely due to the influence of the Latin verb scindere, which meant “to divide” or “to split.” And yes, as that sharp mind of yours has surely guessed, that Latin term is also a progenitor of the English verb scissor and its related noun scissors.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.08.18: UTOPIA

In the year 1516, English social philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas More published a book in which he described what he deemed to be the ideal society, and he referred to this exemplary but fictional community as Utopia. More coined the word by combining the Greek words ou and topos, which meant “not” and “place,” respectively. Thus, utopia literally means “not a place” or “nowhere,” and this was indeed the idea More intended to suggest, as he believed that people should always strive to create a perfect world but that they will never be able to fully attain such a goal. Around 1610, however, the word utopia sort of lost that original implication of impossibility when English speakers started using it to mean “any agreeable or harmonious place, community, or state of being,” and that's essentially the sense it retained for the next two and half centuries or so. Then in the mid-nineteenth century—probably around the time that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto—More's original intent was revived but carried to its ultimate extreme when utopia took on the secondary and pejorative sense of “a highly impractical or ludicrous scheme for social improvement or reform.”

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.07.14: MONKEY

Although most scientists believe that humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, many etymologists and lexicographers believe the word monkey shares its pedigree with a fox. Specifically, it's Reynard the Fox, an anthropomorphized canine who is the titular hero of a satirical beast epic, told mostly in verse, that was popular throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and up into the sixteenth century. In a Middle Low German version of Reynard's poem that was published circa 1500, a new character appeared: Moneke, the son of a secondary character named Martin the Ape. According to literary scholars, this new version of the poem was not initially translated into English via the printed page; rather, it was relayed to English-speaking audiences by way of itinerant entertainers such as minstrels. Thus, some etymologists posit that this is when the word monkey swung onto the scene, as they believe the sixteenth-century minstrels who performed the poem made a monkey out of Moneke when they tried to Anglicize the young ape's name.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.06.16: CROON

The Middle Dutch verb kronen meant “to mourn or groan loudly,” and believe it or not, it is from this that the English word croon ultimately evolved. When English speakers borrowed the Dutch word circa 1400, they Anglicized it to crownen (sometimes spelling it croynen) and used it to mean “to low like a bull.” At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the word came to mean “to murmur mournfully,” and not long after, the spelling finally changed to the now familiar croon. But it took another three hundred years or so for the word to gain its now primary sense of “to sing or speak in a soft, often sentimental manner,” and the derivative noun crooner, which means “one who sings sentimental or romantic songs in a soft, low voice,” wasn't coined until about 1930.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.05.19: TOWHEAD

Ever wonder why we use towhead when we refer to someone who has white or pale-yellow hair? Well, the term was coined in the United States circa 1830, but it actually has its beginnings in an older, lesser-known meaning of the noun tow. Sometime during the fourteenth century, you see, English-speaking spinners and weavers began using tow in reference to the fibers extracted from plants such as flax and hemp. (The Middle English word itself likely evolved from the Old English adjective towlic, which meant “fit for spinning.”) Such fibers are generally white or a very faint yellow, and when they are gathered together and combed in preparation for spinning, the resulting bundles—or rovings, as spinners call them—are not only essentially colorless but also have a texture and a sheen similar to those of human and animal hair. So now you get it, right? We call someone a towhead when they have a head of hair that resembles rovings of tow.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.04.05: PRODIGAL

The English word prodigal is a descendant of the Latin verb prodigere, which meant “to use up” or “to squander,” though the familial line that connects one to the other is somewhat circuitous. Old French was the first to borrow the Latin, using it as the basis for the noun prodigalité, which meant “wastefulness.” When Old French gave way to Middle French in the mid-fourteenth century, the noun spawned the adjective prodigal, which menat “lavish” or “wasteful,” and in the late fifteenth century, English lifted the adjective directly from the Middle French. But the noun sense of prodigal—that is, “a person who is given to wasteful spending or reckless extravagance”—didn't appear until 1596, when Shakespeare first used it in the second and third acts of his play The Merchant of Venice.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.03.17: PEDAGOGUE

The ancient Greek word paidagogos, the oldest ancestor of the English pedagogue, was formed from a combination of the words paidos, which meant “boy” or “child,” and agogos, which meant “leader.” Thus, paidagogos literally meant “leader of children,” and the term was indeed applied to slaves who were charged with leading their owners' children to and from school and on other outings. When the word later passed into Latin as paedagogus, its meaning shifted from “leader of children” to “tutor of children,” and when the Old French borrowed it from the Latin, the spelling became pedagogue and the meaning became “professional educator of children.” English finally adopted the Old French term in the mid-fourteenth century, retaining the spelling and initially the meaning. But it wasn't until circa 1585—after the related noun pedagogy was formed—that the English word pedagogue was applied to all professional educators rather than just those who teach children, and it wasn't until the twentieth century that the term came to be applied, often disparagingly, to those teachers who are particularly formal, strict, or pedantic.

©2021 Michael R. Gates