Case File #023.07.11: GNU

It is often claimed that German-born naturalist and travel writer Georg Forster, whose many journeys included Captain James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific, gave the word gnu to the English language when he published his book A Voyage Round the World in 1777. Yet he used the form gnoo, not gnu, and because of this, a growing number of etymologists are now cogently arguing that Forster simply Anglicized the Dutch gnoe, that language's term for the African wildebeest, and thus does not deserve credit for coining a brand new word. So then, you ask, what's the skinny on the Dutch word? Well, the Dutch gnoe first came into use in the mid-seventeenth century, initially appearing in the patois of Dutch explorers who had just returned from Africa. The explorers derived the term from the Khoikhoi word t'gnu (sometimes transliterated i-ngu), which speakers of that African language used in reference to various types of antelope, and so popular were the explorers' stories about the Dark Continent's flora and fauna that by the early eighteenth century, gnoe became the common Dutch word for the wildebeest. When Forster introduced his Anglicized version, gnoo, in the late eighteenth century, English speakers in the scientific community readily adopted it as a term for the African antelope. But the word's spelling fluctuated during its first several years of use, and for reasons not completely understood, the current gnu became the conventional form circa 1786.

©2023 Michael R. Gates

Case File #023.06.21: HUSSY

In the era of Middle English, hussy was merely an informal variation of housewife—the latter was spelled husewif back then—and had no negative connotations whatsoever. The two words remained synonymous into the early years of modern English, but sometime during the first half of the sixteenth century, hussy came to be applied to any woman or girl whether married or not. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the upper class adopted hussy as a derogatory designation for women of lower rank. And by around 1800, the word had generally come to mean “a woman of low moral values,” though it was often used, as it is today, with an air of jocularity.

©2023 Michael R. Gates

Case File #023.05.24: SEERSUCKER

Like many people in the English-speaking world, you've probably at least heard of a seersucker suit. And you may even know that the suit gets its name from the striped and intermittently puckered cloth out of which it is made. But do you know where the cloth itself got the name? Well, the word seersucker, which first appeared in the English lexicon circa 1735, is an Anglicized borrowing of the Hindi word sirsakar, which means “striped cloth” and is itself a borrowing and phonological attrition of the Persian shir o shakkar. Yet even though the Persian phrase is also commonly used as the moniker for seersucker material, it literally translates as “milk and sugar,” and it is likely meant to allude to the way in which the alternately smooth and puckered stripes of the material resemble, respectively, the smooth surface of milk and the bumpy texture of sugar.

©2023 Michael R. Gates

Case File #023.05.09: NERD

Although there is evidence that the slang term nerd was used by members of the American hot-rod and surfing subcultures of the 1950s, the earliest examples of its current senses of “an intellectual but socially inept person” and “a single-minded expert in a particular pursuit or discipline” date back no further than 1965. Prior to that, a nerd was simply somebody regarded as foolish, stupid, or crazy. Now, while most word nerds are in agreement about this timeline and semantic shift, there is a minor controversy over the term's ultimate roots. Some lexicographers and etymologists claim that nerd was coined by Dr. Seuss (nom de plume of Theodor Seuss Geisel) in his children's book If I Ran the Zoo (1950), and this is, in fact, the etymology proffered by the tenth and eleventh editions of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. But even though nerd is indeed uttered by a character in Seuss's book, it is used merely as a nonsensical word, and in no way does the context suggest that the author intended anything even remotely related to the now familiar slang. So instead of buying into the hypothesis of the Seuss source, a majority of etymologists believe nerd actually developed as a variation of the earlier 1940s slang word nert, which means “a stupid, eccentric, or crazy person” and was itself derived from nut.

©2023 Michael R. Gates

Case File #023.04.24: JUGGERNAUT

In the Hindi language, Jagannath is a title for Krishna, the eighth incarnation (or avatar) of the god Vishnu. A compound formed from two Sanskrit words—jagat, which means “world” or “universe”; and nathas, which means “lord” or “master”—the term was also once used as a name for the large cart or wagon upon which an image of Krishna is carried during certain Hindu festivals in eastern India. In the fourteenth century, European missionaries returning from the Indian subcontinent recounted tales in which they described how the god's devotees, caught up in the religious fervor of the festivals, would sacrifice themselves to him by jumping in front of the Jagannath wagon and getting crushed beneath its massive wheels. While such stories were likely exaggerated for the sake of drama and Christian expediency, they were nonetheless quite popular in England, and Jagannath soon became a somewhat informal English term for anything deemed to be both compelling and destructive. By the time the nineteenth century rolled around, however, English speakers had long since forgotten the word's connection to India, and circa 1840, the word was Anglicized to juggernaut and took on its now familiar sense of “an overwhelming and unstoppable force or object.” In contemporary Britain, juggernaut is also a designation for any large commercial truck, a usage that dates back to the 1940s.

©2023 Michael R. Gates

Case File #023.04.05: ICON

Say the word icon today and people immediately think of those little squarish pictures they tap or click in order to launch an app on their phones, pads, and computers, but that meaning is relatively new, having originated not long after the advent of personal computing in the late 1970s. Icon actually has its roots in the ancient Greek word eikon, which meant “portrait” (as with a painting) or “reflection” (as in a mirror), and when it first appeared in the English lexicon circa 1572, it meant “visual likeness” and was used in reference to paintings and statues and such. More than two and a half centuries would pass, however, before the word would start taking on the other nuances of meaning with which we contemporary English speakers are familiar. In fact, it wasn't until 1833 that certain Christian sects first used icon in reference to religious devotional images and artifacts. Just a few years after that, though, the word was already being used ironically to refer to anything that people “worship” with uncritical devotion, and by the 1860s, icon had become a synonym for symbol or emblem and had also taken on the sense of “highest example” or “paragon.” It was then another century or so before icon finally became the moniker for the little app launchers that reside on the screens of all those electronic gadgets people currently worship.

©2023 Michael R. Gates

Case File #023.03.08: EGREGIOUS

The Latin term egregius, which meant “outstanding” or “extraordinary,” was derived from the earlier Latin phrase ex grege, ex meaning “out of” or “above” and grege meaning “flock or herd.” Thus, egregius literally meant “that which stands out above the herd,” and when English borrowed the term as egregious circa 1535, the English word initially retained the Latin's basic sense of “distinguished” or “noteworthy.” Around 1570, however, an antithetical meaning developed when egregious was used ironically in reference to people or things that were notably bad or flagrantly offensive, and this pejorative sense rapidly supplanted the original and has remained the word's meaning to this day. So when Pistol calls Nym an egregious dog in the second act of Henry V—penned by the venerable Bard of Avon circa 1599—you can be certain that Pistol is accusing Nym of being a notably bad dog indeed.

©2023 Michael R. Gates

Case File #023.02.22: VOCATION

Vocation came to English via the Latin vocatio, a noun that meant “calling” and was itself a derivative of the Latin verb vocare, which meant “to call or summon.” It's not surprising, then, that when English speakers first started using vocation in the early fifteenth century, the word meant “a spiritual calling.” This meaning became secondary in the early sixteenth century, however, when the more worldly sense of “a strong inclination towards a trade or occupation” came into popular use. And during the latter years of the century, that secular meaning of vocation evolved into the noun's contemporary sense of “one's primary profession or career.”

©2023 Michael R. Gates

Case File #023.02.07: NEIGHBOR

Neighbor is a true purebred, one of those rare contemporary English words that can be traced back directly to the Anglo-Saxon period. Its Old English ancestor was a compound formed from two components: neah, which meant “near” or “nigh,” and gebur, which meant “dweller” or sometimes “farmer.” Thus, to the old Anglo-Saxons, neahgebur simply referred to another farmer who dwelled nearby. When the word passed to Middle English, it transformed into neighebour and then became the more familiar neighbor (or neighbour for you Brits), but all the while it retained its original meaning of “nearby dweller.” It wasn't until some time after the late fifteenth century, when the variant neighborhood was formed, that neighbor also came to mean “something immediately adjoining or relatively near something else” instead of only being used to designate a nearby dweller like the one whose music is always too...damned...loud.

©2023 Michael R. Gates

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

Case File #022.07.26: WOEBEGONE

Have you ever wondered why woebegone seems as if it should mean “no more woe” or “the woe is gone” when it really means the exact opposite? Well, turns out it's a homonymic issue. That is, even though the begone in woebegone looks and sounds exactly like the contemporary imperative that means “leave” or “go away,” it's actually a different word altogether. Still confused? Okay, perhaps it will help if we go back to the beginning. The beginning for woebegone, I mean. You see, it all started in the late twelfth century and with these two words: wo, which meant “sadness” or “grief,” and bigon, which meant “to beset” or “to overwhelm.” Thus, the Middle English verb phrase wo bigon meant “to be overwhelmed with grief.” When, during the thirteenth century, the spelling of wo changed to woe and bigon became begone (sometimes spelled begon), the phrase wo bigon naturally followed suit and became woe begone. Yet the meanings of the words didn't change—the poetic imperative begone, which means “go away,” wasn't coined until the end of fourteenth century—so when the phrase finally contracted into a single word circa 1300, it became woebegone, the now familiar but seemingly misleading adjective that means “full of woe” or “sad or miserable in appearance.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.06.23: QUASH

When you quash something, you generally crush it in a figurative manner rather than a physical one. But as the pedigree of the word quash reveals, it was once the other way around. The original form of this English verb was quaschen (sometimes spelled quashen or quassen), and when it first came into use sometime during the thirteenth century, it meant “to smash.” It was derived from the Old French quasser, a verb meaning “to break” or “to damage” that had evolved from the Latin verb quassare, which means “to shake apart” or “to shatter.” Furthermore, the Latin quassare is itself a variation on the older Latin verb cassare, which means “to make empty” or “to destroy.” So quash is clearly the progeny of a long line of vandals and wreckers, and it wasn't until around 1380 that it finally veered a bit from the familial path and took on its current and less violent sense of “to void, extinguish, or suppress.”

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.05.18: CARNATION

If you wanted to use etymology to demonstrate the ethnocentrism of sixteenth-century Western Europeans, the history of the word carnation would be a good place to start. When it found its way into the English lexicon circa 1540, carnation originally meant “the color of skin.” This definition makes sense when you consider that the noun was borrowed from the Middle French carnation, which meant “complexion” and was itself derived from a classical Latin adjective, carnosus, that meant “fleshy” or “flesh-like.” Yet sometime during the 1590s—an era when most, if not all, English speakers were Caucasian—the English carnation came to be applied not to skin pigmentation in general but to a specific rosy pink color and a naturally pink flower (Dianthus caryophyllus), and if a semantic shift from “skin color” to “rosy pink” isn't an indicator of sixteenth-century Caucasoid conceit, nothing is.

©2022 Michael R. Gates

Case File #022.04.14: YOLK and YELLOW

The yolk is the yellow part of a bird's egg, so it's not too surprising that the words yolk and yellow share a common ancestry. Linguists tell us that yellow ultimately traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root ghel-, which meant “yellowish” and was used to form the names of colors that fall in the range of yellow to yellowish green. When Old English inherited the root—probably, say linguists, via the Proto-Germanic cognate gelwaz—it became geolu (sometimes spelled geolo or geolwe) and meant simply “yellow,” and from this Old English speakers derived the word geolca (sometimes spelled geoloca or geolelca), the meaning of which was literally “the yellow part,” and used it as the designation for an egg yolk. Sometime during either the eleventh or the twelfth century—linguists and etymologists don't all seem to agree on the chronology here—the spelling for geolu changed to yelowe (or sometimes yelwe) and geolca became yelke. At the end of the fourteenth century, yelowe was finally transformed into the yellow with which we contemporary English speakers are all familiar, but at the same time, yelke received only a minor facelift and became yolke. The form yolk didn't make its first appearance at breakfast tables until the early fifteenth century.

©2022 Michael R. Gates