Case File #023.01.09: CRONY

When crony first appeared in the mid-seventeenth century, it was a slang term used mainly by university students and simply meant “a longtime friend or close companion.” It was derived from the Greek adjective khronios, which meant “lasting” and itself came from khronos, the Greek word for “time.” (For the record, khronos is also the ultimate source of other English time-related words such as chronology, chronicle, and chronic.) The derogatory sense of crony—that is, “a friend or acquaintance with which one engages in some unscrupulous activity”—didn't develop until around 1900, probably as a semantic back-formation from cronyism (“political or economic favoritism to friends and associates without regard to their merits or qualifications”), which came into use about fifty years earlier.

©2023 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.12.29: FACADE

The principal meaning of facade is “the front or face of a building,” and it's therefore no surprise that the word is a descendant of the Latin noun facies, which meant “face” or “appearance.” But English wasn't the Latin's immediate heir. Italian was actually the first in line, using the Latin as the basis for the word faccia, which means “face,” and in turn using that as the basis for the noun facciata, which means “the face of a building.” The next beneficiary was French, taking the Italian facciata and keeping its meaning but changing its form to façade. Finally, English became a heritor when it acquired the French word in the mid-seventeenth century, and while this was pretty much a direct transfer, most English speakers today slightly Anglicize the word's form by replacing the ç with a c. By the way, the figurative use of facade in which it means “an often deceptive outward appearance” is relatively new to the English language, having first appeared around the close of the nineteenth century.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.11.24: CRANBERRY

Etymologists, lexicographers, and linguists are not one hundred percent sure about the origins of the word cranberry, though most believe its lineage can be traced to the Low German kraanbere, a noun literally meaning “crane berry” that is itself a compound formed from the Low German kraan, which means “crane” (the bird, that is), and the Middle Low German bere. So now you're probably wondering how the berry got associated with a bird like the crane, right? Well, the experts aren't sure about that either, but the most common belief is that it's because the flower of the plant—especially that of the European variety, Vaccinium oxycoccos—resembles the neck, head, and beak of a crane. Regardless of whether that theory is true, however, one thing is certain: the English noun cranberry first appeared circa 1650, when settlers in America began using it in reference to the North American variety of the plant, Vaccinium macrocarpum, and its berries. And because the European and North American varieties of the plant are so closely related and similar, not to mention the fact that there were both German and Dutch among the American settlers, it's not difficult to accept the predominant idea that cranberry is essentially an Anglicized version of the Low German kraanbere.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.11.11: CORN

Corn is an old word that has been in the English lexicon since at least the eighth century. In the Old English era, however, it didn't denote a particular grain but merely seed grain in general, and in modern times, the specific grain to which the word does refer depends on where you happen to be. In England, for example, corn usually refers to wheat, whereas it refers to oats in Ireland and Scotland and to rye in many of the European countries where English is the lingua franca of business and academics. It was in the mid-seventeenth century that European colonists in North America first used corn in reference to maize, the large yellowish cereal grain indigenous to the New World, and this not only became the word's primary sense in what would later develop into the United States but also caught on in New Zealand, Australia, and most of Canada. Now, some of you out there might this very moment be rubbing your sore feet and wondering about the sense of corn in which it refers to a hard, thick spot on surface of the skin. Well, that word has nothing to do with botany or agriculture and has a different etymology altogether. First appearing in the English lexicon around 1425, that corn was derived from the Old French corne, which meant “horn-like growth” and had itself evolved from a Latin noun, cornu, that meant “a horn, tusk, hoof, or claw.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.10.28: INCUBUS

As you may already know, an incubus is a mythical male ghost or demon that purportedly descends upon sleeping human females and has sexual intercourse with them. What you may not know, however, is that the English noun incubus itself descended from the classical Latin verb incubare, which meant “to keep watch (over)” and “to lie on or sit on.” The Latin word is also the source of the modern English verb incubate, and while that fact may not be too surprising in and of itself, it does raise an interesting question: how did a word associated with incubation, lying and sitting, and keeping watch also come to be associated with sexually active ghosts and demons? Well, a long time ago, many people believed that nightmares were formed when a malevolent demon or spirit sat on the chest of the person sleeping. Sometime during the Late Latin era (a period that spanned roughly from the third century to the sixth), Latin speakers decided there should be a word for those nightmare-causing chest-sitters, and from their verb incubare they derived the noun incubus, which they used to mean both “one who sits or lies on a sleeper” and “nightmare.” Many English speakers of yore also believed in the chest-sitting spirits and demons, and on top of that, the poor sexually repressed bastards imagined that some of these ghostly night visitors took more liberties with their sleeping hosts than just sitting on them. So around 1350, English speakers who were educated (that is, they knew Latin) but were also superstitious and horny decided they needed a term they could apply specifically to those night spirits they fantasized were diddling human women, and to that end, they borrowed the Late Latin incubus and simply altered its meaning. By the way, the English word succubus, which means “a mythical female ghost or demon that has sexual intercourse with sleeping human males,” followed a similar etymological path. It is a semantic alteration of the Medieval Latin noun succubus, which meant “promiscuous woman” or “prostitute” and was itself derived from the classical Latin verb succubare, meaning “to lie under.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.10.12: EERIE

The word eerie descended from the Old English earg, an adjective meaning “cowardly” that itself evolved from either the Proto-Germanic adjective argaz, which meant “unmanly” or “fainthearted,” or the Proto-Indo-European verb root ergh-, which meant “to tremble or shake.” So it's understandable that when eerie first came into use during the late thirteenth century, it meant “fearful or timid.” The eighteenth-century Scottish poet and lyricist Robert Burns was the first to use the adjective in its contemporary sense of “strange and mysterious in a way that inspires uneasiness, fear, or dread,” and since it was through his influence that this became the word's primary meaning throughout the English-speaking world, it's a wee bit ironic that the Scottish still often use eerie in what is basically its original sense of “frightened or unnerved.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.09.22: AUTUMN

The roots of the noun autumn wind all the way back to the Latin autumnus, which meant “harvest time.” The Latin passed into Old French as autompne, and in the late fourteenth century, Middle English borrowed the Old French term but altered its form to autumpne. Then around 1590, roughly a century after Middle English gave way to modern English, the word's spelling again changed to become the contemporary autumn. The synonym fall—now used primarily in the United States and there the preferred term for the harvest season—came about in the mid-seventeenth century as a shortening of the phrase fall of the leaf, itself an obvious though somewhat poetic alternative to autumn that had been in common use since circa 1540.

©2022 Michael R. Gates