Case File #018.01.04: ICICLE

Baby, it's cold outside, and with the wintry weather often comes icicles. We know how icicles are formed: on very cold but sunny days, some snow or ice will melt, drip off a roof, and then refreeze, and when this happens enough times in the same spot, a pointy column of ice appears. Now, that basic science stuff is all fine and dandy, you say, but we logophiles want to know how the word icicle was formed. Well, the roots of the noun wind all the way back to the Old English gicel, which meant “ice.” Middle English borrowed the Old English but changed its spelling to ickle and used it to mean “icicle.” Then sometime during the thirteenth century, Middle English speakers added is, their word for ice, to the front of ickle and formed the compound isykle, which thus literally meant “ice icicle.” It wasn't until around 1325 that the modern form icicle finally appeared, somewhat disguising the word's doubly cold tautologous ancestry.

©2018 Michael R. Gates

Case File #017.12.12: MISTLETOE

Old jokes notwithstanding, the Christmassy word mistletoe has nothing to do with the feet of astronauts or cosmonauts. The noun actually started out in Old English as mistiltan—there are no toes there, you see—a compound formed from two other Old English words: mistel, which referred to the mistletoe plant itself, and tan, which meant “twig.” So, then, mistiltan literally meant “a twig of the mistletoe shrub.” Around the end of the twelfth century, speakers of Middle English changed the spelling to mistelta and now used the word in reference to the entire plant, and a few hundred years later, they traded the a for an o and thereby changed the noun's form to mistelto. Early speakers of modern English gave us the contemporary form mistletoe sometime during the fifteenth century, but it wasn't until the early nineteenth century that American writer Washington Irving firmly tied the mistletoe—and thus the already established tradition of kissing beneath it—to Christmas when, in his short story “Christmas Eve,” he cited the plant as a common Yuletide decoration and said, “The mistletoe is still hung up in farmhouses and kitchens at Christmas; and the young men have the privilege of kissing the girls under it....”

©2017 Michael R. Gates

Case File #017.12.04: HOLLY

At Christmastime, by golly, we often think of holly, that green, red-berried shrub with which we deck the halls. But have any of us ever stopped to consider where the word holly came from? Well, etymologists have. They've traced its origins back at least as far as the Old High German hulis, which referred to the holly plant and itself passed into Old English as holegn (sometimes spelled holen). When Old English gave way to Middle English during the twelfth century, the English noun's form changed first to holi and then later to holy. Perhaps in an effort to avoid confusing the word with the contemporary adjective holy—which means, of course, “sacred”—early speakers of modern English added the extra l during the late fifteenth century and gifted us with the now familiar form holly.

©2017 Michael R. Gates

Case File #017.11.12: STAUNCH

The adjective staunch was spelled staunche when it first appeared in the English lexicon in the late fourteenth century, and while it was sometimes used in the senses of “intact” and “secure,” it was most often used to mean “watertight.” This is because it was derived from the Old French word estanche, which meant “waterproof” and was itself derived from the Old French estanchier, a verb that meant “to stop the flow of a liquid.” (For the record, estanchier is the direct source of the English verb stanch, which means “to stop the flow or advance of something” and is used by the medical profession in the sense of “to cease or restrict bleeding.”) In the mid-fifteenth century, staunch essentially lost its association with watertightness and came to mean “of strong or substantial construction,” but it wasn't until circa 1620 that the adjective finally took on the additional sense of “steadfast or loyal in attitude or principle.”

©2017 Michael R. Gates

Case File #017.10.19: OUIJA

A Ouija is a small table or lapboard marked with the alphabet, the numbers zero through nine, and a few words—usually yes, no, good-bye, and hello —and used, with the aid of a planchette (a small triangular or heart-shaped pointer supported on casters), to receive and spell out messages or warnings that are supposedly sent from the spirit world or the realm of the dead. The device was conceived and patented in 1890 by American businessman Elijah Bond, who considered it a harmless parlor game rather than the occult paraphernalia it is often regarded as today, and he coined Ouija (pronounced /wee -jə/ or /wee -jee/) by combining the French and German words for yes: oui and ja, respectively. Although the name Ouija is often bandied about today as if it were a generic term, it is actually a trademark that was owned first by Baltimore's Kennard Novelty Company, to which Bond originally sold his patent rights, and later by the US toy company Hasbro, Inc., which still retains the rights.

©2017 Michael R. Gates

Case File #017.09.10: GROIN

While there is no consensus among etymologists and lexicographers about the ultimate source of the word groin, most do agree that it first came into use circa 1590. The dominant theory regarding the word's beginnings is that it was formed by combining grynde (the Middle English word for the pubic area) and loin (as in flank, not pubis), an idea that seems to be supported by Shakespeare's lengthy narrative poem Venus and Adonis, first published in 1593, in which the Bard uses groin as a double entendre that is suggestive of both Adonis's flank region and his sexuality. Though the architectural sense of the word—that is, “the curved edge formed at the intersection of two vaults”—is semantically related to the anatomical sense, it didn't come into use until the early eighteenth century. And the sense in which groin means “a jetty or similar structure used to protect a beach against erosion” is a different etymological beast altogether. First appearing around 1600, it was derived from the Old French word groign, which meant “snout,” with the likely intention of alluding to the visual similarity between jetties and the longish noses of swine.

©2017 Michael R. Gates

Case File #017.08.24: ECLIPSE

Well, the great American solar eclipse of 2017 has come and gone. And it was pretty freakin' cool, especially for those of us who were lucky enough to see it from the path of totality and thus enjoy the short but breathtaking spectacle of the sun's corona glowing out around the circumference of the moon. But as you watched the moon blot out the life-giving sun, did you pause to wonder how the word eclipse became part of the English lexicon? I didn't think so. Don't worry, though, because I'm going to tell you about it now. The word's roots wind all the way back to the classical Greek verb ekleipein, which meant “to forsake its usual place” or “to fail to appear,” and its derivative noun, ekleipsis. The latter was itself only occasionally used in our modern-day sense of “the total or partial obscuring of one celestial body by another,” but when the noun passed into Latin as eclipsis, Latin speakers dropped the more common meanings of the Greek source and used their new word solely in reference to the astronomical event. Later, Old French speakers borrowed the Latin eclipsis but converted it into two words: the noun eclipse, which retained the Latin's meaning, and the verb eclipser, which meant, natch, “to cause an eclipse.” Sometime during the second half of the thirteenth century, the Old French eclipse passed directly into English, though English speakers used this form for both the noun and the verb (retaining for each, of course, the respective Old French senses). Then around 1385, the English noun acquired its additional figurative senses of “a falling into obscurity or decline” and “the loss of significance or power in relation to someone or something else,” and later that same decade, the verb took on its corresponding figurative senses of “to obscure or block out (something else)” and “to surpass or outshine the importance, fame, or reputation of someone or something else.”

©2017 Michael R. Gates