Case File #013.09.26: MANURE

If you're like me, you probably aren't keen on the idea of getting manure on your hands, so it might surprise you to learn that the word manure ultimately evolved from the Latin verb phrase manu operari, which meant “to work using one's hands.” When the Latin phrase passed into Old French, it became the single word manouvrer and was used to mean “to make or produce” and “to perform manual labor,” but when English speakers borrowed the French in the early fifteenth century, they Anglicized the spelling to the now familiar manure and used it to mean “to work the soil” and “to cultivate and manage the land.” Of course, cultivating the land often involves the spreading of fertilizer, and since the earliest fertilizers were made of animal dung, it wasn't long before manure took on the sense of “to spread dung on the fields.” During the latter half of the sixteenth century, however, the word became more closely associated with the fertilizer than the act of fertilizing and thus took on the noun sense of “animal dung,” and by the time 1700 rolled around, the noun sense had become more prominent and the verb was relegated to the farmers' argot.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.09.23: VULGAR

The Latin noun vulgus meant “common people” or “general public,” and from it the ancient Romans derived the adjective vulgaris, which meant “commonplace” or “of the common people.” As you may have guessed, vulgaris was the source for the English vulgar, and when the latter first appeared in the English lexicon in the late fourteenth century, it essentially meant “common, ordinary, or everyday.” Around the middle of the seventeenth century, vulgar also took on the additional senses of “ill-bred” and “uncultivated, crude, or tasteless,” but the adjective's now more common sense of “lewd, indecent, or obscene” didn't come into use until the late eighteenth century.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.09.16: QUIZ

The ultimate origins of the word quiz are lost in the mists of history, but that hasn't stopped people from offering up a few ideas. One older story purports that the word was invented in the eighteenth century by a Dublin theater owner who, fancying himself a crack neologist, won a bet that his new word would be in wide use within forty-eight hours of its coining, and though this tale has been circulated for at least two hundred years, not a single shred of evidence exists to support it. A more recent hypothesis suggests that quiz was derived from the Latin quis, which was a pronoun meaning “what,” “who,” or “which” and was often used as an interrogative. And while this idea appears to be more logical and historically sound than the older one, most experts dismiss it as a piece of etymological casuistry because it flies in the face of what little actually is known about the background of the word. You see, when the noun quiz first appeared in the English lexicon around 1780, it meant “an odd or eccentric person,” and its derivative verb sense—which came into use about fifteen years later—meant “to mock, jeer, or ridicule.” It wasn't until circa 1850 that the verb came to mean “to question or interrogate” and “to give a student an informal test or examination”—the noun sense of “a brief test or examination” took another decade or so to show up—but what's really interesting is that nobody can figure out for certain why this semantic shift occurred, though the etymologists behind the venerable Oxford English Dictionary have suggested that the change may have been influenced by the long-established and similar-sounding adjective inquisitive.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.09.04: YIP

The Middle English verb yippen meant “to peep or chirp like a small bird,” and when it passed into modern English in the fifteenth century, its form was shortened to yip but its meaning remained essentially the same. During the early nineteenth century, however, the word flew further from its fowl beginnings and came to mean “to talk or cry in a shrill manner,” a change that some linguists and etymologists believe took place because the orthographical and phonological similarities between yip and yap caused English speakers to confuse the two words. The current sense of the verb yip, “to bark or yelp sharply, briskly, and often continuously,” first appeared in American author Kate Douglas Wiggin's novella The Diary of a Goose Girl in 1902, and the derivative noun sense of “a sharp, high-pitched bark or yelp” came into use around 1910.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.09.03: JEANS

If you're anything like me, you favor jeans over just about any other type of clothing. But do you know how the popular denim pants got their name? Well, it all started with the Middle French phrase jean fustian, which meant “fustian of Genoa” and referred to a twilled cotton fabric that was manufactured in Italy. English speakers borrowed the phrase in the mid-fifteenth century, though they soon dropped fustian and simply used jean as a moniker not only for the Italian cloth but also for any twilled cotton fabric, of which denim is one. Thus, when United States clothiers started using denim to make legwear in the nineteenth century, Americans referred to the durable clothing as merely jean. Around 1880, however, the plural form jeans completely supplanted the singular in everyday usage, a change that many etymologists and linguists attribute to the influence of the long-standing usage of the related pants and trousers.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.08.27: TANTALIZE

According to Greek mythology, King Tantalus was a mortal son of Zeus who one day displeased the immortal Olympians—the many versions of the myth differ in the details of the king's offense, though all say it somehow involved food—and received a most apropos punishment for his sin. The gods placed the king in a lake with waters that reached up to his chin and with luscious fruit that hung from branches over his head, but whenever he would attempt to drink or eat, the waters would recede from his lips and the fruit would shrink from his grasp. Thus was Tantulus held in a perpetual state of sensual frustration, and it is from his name that sixteenth-century English speakers derived the verb tantalize, which means “to tease or torment with the promise of something that is difficult to obtain” and “to excite the senses or incite desire.” Reflecting the spirit of the myth even more is the English noun tantalus: clearly a direct borrowing of the mythical king's name, the word was coined in the nineteenth century as the name for a small cabinet or sideboard in which decanters of liquor can be locked out of reach but still remain visible.

©2013 Michael R. Gates

Case File #013.08.12: WALL

“Stone walls do not a prison make,” wrote the seventeenth-century poet Richard Lovelace, and while we might agree with the philosophical sentiments that underlie his words, we'd be foolish to deny that a well-built wall usually makes a pretty good physical impediment. In fact, if we look at the history of the word wall, we find that the idea of wall-as-barrier has been there all along. Derived from the Latin vallum, which meant “palisade” or “bulwark,” the word was spelled weall in the Old English era and was used to mean both “rampart” and “levee or dike.” When it passed into Middle English in the twelfth century, its form changed to walle and it took on the additional meanings of “a side of a room or building, typically connecting the floor to the ceiling or the foundation to the roof” and “any continuous vertical structure that encloses or divides an area of land,” and the verb senses of the word—that is, “to divide or separate with or as if with a wall” and “to enclose, surround, confine, or block with or as if with a wall”—came into use during the thirteenth century. The form of both the verb and the noun changed to the current wall around the end of the fifteenth century, and not long after, the noun also took on the additional and more general senses of “any material layer enclosing a space” (as in the abdominal wall) and “anything that resembles a wall in structure or function” (as in socioeconomic wall and wall of silence).

©2013 Michael R. Gates