Case File #021.01.20: CAHOOTS

When you're in cahoots with somebody, it generally means that you're colluding or conspiring together for some secret and often nefarious purpose. And the coining of the word cahoots must have been the result of such a conspiracy, because even though English speakers have been using the noun since the early nineteenth century, nobody really knows who coined it or how it originated. Some linguists and etymologists believe the word may have been derived from the Latin cohors, which literally meant “enclosure for animals or soldiers” yet was often used figuratively to mean “enclosed group” or “infantry troop.” But others think it more likely that cahoots was derived from the French cahute, which means “hut” or “cabin,” and was intended to suggest the closed-in, out-of-the-way places in which conspirators often do their caballing and conniving.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #021.01.04: GNARLED

To be, or not to be—that is the question Hamlet pondered. But for the word gnarled, it took over 200 years to get an answer. Derived from the now archaic English word knar, which refers to a knot or protuberance on the trunk or root of a tree, gnarled first appeared in 1603 when Shakespeare coined it not in Hamlet but in Measure for Measure: “Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt split'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak than the soft myrtle....” That was the Bard of Avon's one and only use of his knotty new word, however, and gnarled did not show up again until the early nineteenth century, when it finally managed to twist its way into the English lexicon via the works of British poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and American writers such as Washington Irving.

©2021 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.12.14: WASSAIL

You've heard the word every December for as long as you can remember. And if you're big on Christmas, you yourself have probably even used the word in song. Yet every year around Christmastime, you still can't help but ask yourself, “What the hell does wassail even mean, anyway?” Well, as the lyrics to the old carol demonstrate, the word in question can be used as both a verb and a noun, and since the noun came first in this etymological family tree, we might as well begin there. Surprisingly, wassail started out in Old English as a two-word imperative phrase: was hal, which was derived from the Old Norse ves heill and basically meant “be in good health” or “be prosperous.” By the beginning of the twelfth century, the English phrase had evolved to become waes haeil (sometimes spelled wes heil), and instead of being a friendly salutation or a cordial acknowledgment of another's departure, it was now a drinking-party toast that meant “to your good health” or “to your good fortune.” It took about another century for the phrase to coalesce into the single noun wassail—the spelling of which varied greatly at first—and by circa 1300, the word had taken on the secondary meaning of “the drink used for toasting, especially the spiced ale used in Christmas celebrations” and was also gaining currency as a verb meaning “to take part in a wassail or a wassail-like toast.” Around 1600, our old friend Shakespeare, who was writing Hamlet at the time, gave the noun a tertiary meaning, “riotous drinking or drunken revelry,” and soon after, the verb took on the related secondary sense of “to engage in drunken revelry.” But it wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century that the verb came to be associated with caroling at Christmastime, and this was likely because many carolers, in an effort to keep warm as they went singing from door to door, brought with them some heated wassail or a similar alcoholic beverage and tended to get a little rowdy as the night—and the drink—wore on. (Some sources say that it was the people on the receiving end of the songs and well-wishing, not the carolers, who provided the warmed libation.) When the nineteenth century rolled around, however, alcohol became less a part of the caroling activities each year, and the verb wassail thus came to mean simply “to go from house to house and sing carols at Christmas.”

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.11.03: BALLOT

In a time long before the days of printed forms and electronic tallying machines, voting was a highly secretive affair, and to help keep their choices a secret, people sometimes cast their votes by surreptitiously dropping little colored balls into marked containers. Around 1540, English speakers began to refer to these balls as ballots, a word they derived from the Old Italian word ballotta, which meant “little ball.” About that same time, the containers into which the balls were dropped became known as ballot boxes, and the verb sense of ballot—that is, “to cast a vote”—came into use soon after. By the time the nineteenth century rolled around, though, slips of paper had replaced the little balls as the voting implements of choice, yet the noun ballot, despite its spherical roots, has to this day remained the common designation for the means of casting a vote and for the act of voting.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.10.28: PUMPKIN

While pumpkins have been a part of the Halloween tradition for a mere two centuries or so, the English noun pumpkin has been around for at least twice that long and its antecedents are downright ancient. The current form of the word appeared in the mid-seventeenth century and quickly displaced the previous form, pumpion, which itself had come into use circa 1540 to replace the older pompon, a word borrowed directly from the Middle French at the end of the fifteenth century. Pompon had evolved from the Old French popon—a transformation that likely occurred during the late fourteenth century—and the Old French was a descendant of the classical Latin pepo. But the Latin word didn't mean only “pumpkin”; depending on the context in which it was used, it could also mean “watermelon or other such fruit.” This is because its source was the Greek pepon, which meant “ripened or cooked melon.” Now if you're like me, you're wondering why the ancient Romans thought a Greek word for soft fruit would make a good moniker for pumpkins, and furthermore, you're probably asking yourself why they thought the same word should also be the designation for watermelons. Sadly, the answers to those questions are lost in the fog of history. We can be happy, though, that pumpkin didn't ultimately inherit its ancestor's association with watermelons, because Halloween would be about as spooky as Christmas if jack-o'-lanterns were green and red instead of orange.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.10.14: IMP

Believe it or not, the noun imp doesn't have the fiendish pedigree that its current meanings might suggest. It is a descendant of the Late Latin verb imputare, which meant “to graft (onto)” and was itself the progeny of a Greek verb, emphuein (sometimes transliterated as emphyein), that meant “to implant.” When the Anglo-Saxons adopted the Latin verb, they kept its meaning but changed the spelling to impian, and from that they formed the noun impa and used it to mean “a graft or young shoot.” Impa passed into Middle English as impe, but sometime towards the end of the fourteenth century, the word's meaning shifted from “a young shoot” to “a child of a noble family.” English speakers in the early sixteenth century must not have thought too highly of the children of nobility, however, because they're the ones who changed the spelling of impe to the now familiar imp and used it to mean “a small demon” or “a child of the Devil,” and it wasn't until the middle of the seventeenth century that the noun took on the additional and somewhat softer sense of “a mischievous child.”

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.09.13: ZEPHYR

The English noun zephyr has been in use since at least 1000 CE, but the Anglo-Saxons spelled it zefferus and used it to mean “a westerly wind.” It was derived from the Latin zephyrus, which meant “the west wind” and was itself derived from the Greek Zephyros (also transliterated as Zephuros). While the Greek, too, was sometimes used in reference to a westerly breeze, it was more commonly used as the name of a Greek god who was not only the personification of the west winds but also the god of springtime. Now, as you may have noticed, the contemporary English spelling looks more like that of the Latin and Greek than did the Old English, yet the form zephyr dates back no earlier than the late sixteenth century, having first appeared in George Chapman's initial translations of Homer's The Iliad. And like the current spelling, the word's now familiar and more general sense of “a gentle breeze” is also relatively new—Shakespeare used it first in the fourth act of his tragic play Cymbeline, which was written around 1609—as are its less common senses of “a lightweight fabric or article of clothing” and “something that is airy, insubstantial, or ephemeral.”

©2020 Michael R. Gates