Case File #015.10.07: GARGOYLE

If you stopped random people on the street and asked them to define the word gargoyle, most would be able to give you a basic answer: it's one of those stone carvings depicting fanciful or grotesque creatures and often seen jutting out from the upper edges of old tall buildings. And some may even be able to tell you that a gargoyle—or rather its throat and mouth—is usually part of a gutter or waterspout that carries rainwater clear of a building's edge. But few could tell you that thirteenth-century English speakers derived the noun gargoyle from the Old French gargole (sometimes spelled gargoule or gargouille), which meant “throat” or “gullet” and was itself derived from the Latin gula. Most would not know that the English word's original form was gargurl (or sometimes gargurle or gargule) and simply meant “carved mouth of a downspout,” nor would they be likely to know that the modern form gargoyle didn't appear until the early fifteenth century, when the word also came to denote only the grotesquely ornamented waterspouts. And it's doubtful that any of your average on-the-street respondents could tell you that the Old French gargole is the progenitor of not only the English noun gargoyle but also the verb gargle, even though the connection should be conceptually obvious if not etymologically so: gargle means “to wash one's mouth or throat with a liquid kept in motion by exhaling through it,” and that's pretty much what a gargoyle looks like it's doing as it throws water away from a building during a rainfall.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.09.16: RAVENOUS

Though it has no real relationship to hunger, the Latin verb rapere, which means “to violently snatch or grab” or “to pillage,” is the ultimate source of the English adjective ravenous. The Latin passed into Old French as raviner, a verb that could mean either “to ravage” or “to forcibly seize” (depending on context), and from this speakers of Old French derived the adjective raveneux (sometimes spelled raveneus or ravinos), using it to mean “violently greedy” or “aggressively grasping.” At some point during the fourteenth century, English speakers borrowed the French adjective, Anglicized its form to ravenes, and started using it to mean “extremely hungry”—the leap from “violently greedy” to “extremely hungry” came via the observation of the way many predatory animals seize and devour their prey—but it wasn't until around 1405 that the English word took the contemporary form ravenous and gained the additional secondary meanings of “so great as to seem insatiable” and “inordinately eager for satisfaction or gratification.”

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.09.02: LEPRECHAUN

In Irish folklore, a leprechaun is a mischievous sprite or goblin that resembles a little old man, so it should come as no surprise that the word leprechaun is often said to literally mean “tiny person.” The noun evolved from the Old Irish luchorpán, a compound formed from the adjective lu, which meant “little,” and the diminutive form of the noun corp, which meant “body” and was itself an altered borrowing of the Latin corpus. As Old Irish transitioned to Middle Irish in the tenth century and, in turn, Middle Irish gave way to Classical Irish (aka Early Modern Irish) in the thirteenth century, luchorpán underwent metathesis and became lupracán, and this made its way into the English lexicon as lubrican circa 1605. The contemporary English form leprechaun didn't come into use until around 1860, but most etymologists believe that its modern Irish cognate, leipreachán (sometimes taking the form leipracán or lioprachán), appeared much earlier and thus influenced the nineteenth-century English alteration.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.08.11: SPOIL

The verb spoil first entered the English lexicon circa 1300, though back then it was spelled spoulen and meant “to strip someone, especially a slain enemy, of arms, clothes or armor, and other valuables.” English speakers derived it from the Old French verb espoillier, which meant “to strip, plunder, or pillage” and was itself derived from the similarly defined Latin verb spoliare. In the middle of the fourteenth century, the spelling of the English verb changed to spoilen, and soon after, the noun form spoil, generally used in the plural (that is, spoils) and meaning “the goods or property seized by the victors from their enemies after a military conflict,” became part of the lingual currency. The form and definition of the noun have since remained relatively unchanged, but not so the verb's. As Middle English gave way to modern English in the fifteenth century, the spelling of the verb shifted once again to become spoil, the now familiar homographic homonym of the noun. Then in the mid-sixteenth century, the verb's original war-like meaning was jettisoned and replaced by the contemporary and now primary sense of “to lessen the value or quality of (something),” and right on its heels came the secondary meaning of “to become inedible or unusable as a result of decay.” But the verb's modern tertiary sense, “to impair someone's character, such as a child's, by overindulgence or excessive leniency,” is a much later development: it didn't appear until 1693, when English playwright William Congreve used it in the third act of his comedic play The Double Dealer.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.08.05: DETERGENT

The adjective detergent was derived from the Latin verb detergere—or rather, from its present participle, detergentem—which meant “to wipe away or clear off” and was itself formed from the Latin prefix de-, meaning “off” or “away,” and the verb tergere, meaning “to rub, wipe, or polish.” Thus, when the English word first appeared in the early seventeenth century, it meant “cleansing” or “purifying,” though it was initially used only as a medical term. It wasn't until around 1675 that English speakers started using the adjective in a non-medical context, and not long after, the noun sense—that is, “a cleansing agent”—also came into use. The association of detergent with a factory-made chemical cleanser, however, is a relatively new phenomenon that originated in the 1930s.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.07.22: QUELL

While it isn't exactly an innocuous word itself, the verb quell has an even more sinister ancestry. Its family tree is ultimately rooted in the Proto-Germanic verb kwaljan, which meant “to make suffer” or “to inflict pain.” This passed over to Old English as cwellan, meaning “to kill or murder,” but when Old English gave way to Middle English during the twelfth century, the spelling changed to quellen and the word was used to mean “to put to death” and “to destroy.” At the dawn of the thirteenth century, the verb's form changed again to the now familiar quell, and not long after, its mortiferous meanings were jettisoned and the milder contemporary senses of “to suppress, subdue, or silence” and “to forcibly induce submission or passivity” came into use.

©2015 Michael R. Gates

Case File #015.07.08: OK or OKAY

With their LOLs, BTWs, OMGs, ROTFLs, and the like, those of the Internet generation might be inclined to think they were the first to use clever initialisms as conversational shorthand, but they'd be wrong. In fact, in the 1830s—nearly 150 years before the first so-called millennials were born—the use of abbreviations in place of common phrases and expressions was all the rage among young and hip Americans, and even more popular, especially in New England, was the use of abbreviations to represent deliberate misspellings of those same phrases and expressions. Of the latter, one example has actually survived into the twenty-first century: the initialism O.K., which is now often spelled OK or okay. This one started as an abbreviation of oll korrect, a facetious spelling alteration of all correct that had the youth of the early nineteenth century LOL or ROTFL. Unlike the other similar faddish initialisms of the day, however, O.K. gained linguistic legitimacy in 1840 when the Democratic party in New York City formed the O.K. Club, with the club's name intended as an allusion to “Old Kinderhook,” the nickname of the party's 1840 presidential candidate, Martin Van Buren, who was born in Kinderhook, NY. (Some suggest it was the other way around, that is, that Van Buren's supporters gave him the nickname “Old Kinderhook” to capitalize on the already popular initialism O.K. But this is the minority opinion among etymologists, lexicographers, and other logophiles.) While Van Buren lost the election, O.K. was here to stay. As early as 1841, though, the periods were often being left out of the abbreviation so that it became a true initialism, and instead of being used only as an adjective meaning “all correct” or “satisfactory, acceptable, or agreeable,” the word was now also being used as an adverb meaning “adequately or satisfactorily,” as a noun meaning “an approval or endorsement,” and as an interjection to express assent, acceptance, or enthusiastic approval. But it wasn't until around 1890 that the verb sense—that is, “to approve or authorize”—came into use, and the non-acronymic form okay didn't appear until the late 1920s (an earlier spelling, okeh, didn't catch on), which was also about the time word acquired its alternate adjectival meaning of “barely adequate” or “mediocre.”

©2015 Michael R. Gates