Case File #014.03.26: APOGEE

Apogee dates back to the late sixteenth century, when it first appeared in an edition of English explorer John Davis's The Seaman's Secrets. While some etymologists believe Davis simply borrowed the French noun apogée, others think he skipped back over the French and drew directly from the Latin adjective apogeum, which meant “moving away from the land” and was itself derived from the Greek apogeios (sometimes transliterated apogaios), meaning “far from the Earth.” Davis used apogee to specifically mean “the point at which the moon is farthest from the Earth,” but by circa 1600, astronomers were already using it more generally to mean “the point at which an orbiting object is farthest from the planet or satellite it orbits” and navigators were using it to mean simply “apex or summit.” It wasn't until the late seventeenth century, however, that the noun took on the figurative sense of “the climax or culmination of something, especially as attained over a long period of time,” as in, for example, The product was the apogee of twenty years of research.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.03.19: OGRE

The English word ogre, meaning “a man-eating giant of fairy tales and folklore,” is essentially a direct borrowing of the French. And while etymologists and linguists aren't 100 percent certain as to how the French word itself originated, most believe that its roots ultimately trace back to the Latin Orcus, the name of the Roman god of the underworld and that of his domain, by way of the Italian orco (or one of its dialectical variants, orgo and ogro), which means “monster” or “demon.” Charles Perrault was the first French writer to use the word in print: it appeared in his Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, avec des moralités: Contes de ma mère l'Oye (Stories or Tales of the Past, with Morals: Tales from My Mother Goose), which was originally published in 1697 and is better known to English speakers as The Tales of Mother Goose. It was not via Perrault's work that ogre passed into English, however, but through a 1713 translation of the French version of The Arabian Nights, one in which the translator inexplicably used the form hogre. And hogre it remained until circa 1786, when English speakers not only adopted the French spelling but also gave the word its secondary sense of “a particularly cruel, brutish, or terrifying person.”

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.03.12: KIBOSH

Though the word kibosh means “something that serves as an end or a stop,” it is rarely used in anything other than the verb phrase to put the kibosh on (something), which, of course, is used to mean “to put a stop to (something)” or “to decisively end (something).” English speakers have been using kibosh since the early nineteenth century, but interestingly enough, nobody really knows where it came from. Because the word sounds somewhat Yiddish, some etymologists and linguists believe that it may be of Germanic origin, but as of yet, there is scant evidence to support this idea. Another theory is that kibosh could be a phonological attrition of the Old Irish Gaelic phrase cie bas (sometimes spelled caip bháis or caipín báis), which meant “cap of death” and supposedly referred to the hat an Irish judge would don while delivering a sentence of capital punishment. But as with the other theory, no solid evidence has been uncovered to tip the scales in favor of this idea. On the other hand, there is one thing about kibosh that is known for certain: the first person to use it in print was none other than Charles Dickens. Spelling it kye-bosk, Dickens used the word in a bit of Cockney dialogue in one of the stories that would ultimately become part of his collection Sketches by Boz, the first edition of which was published in 1836. The now familiar spelling of kibosh wasn't established until 1865, though, making its first appearance in the third edition of John Camden Hotten's The Slang Dictionary.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.03.05: QUILT

English speakers were using the noun quilt as early as 1300, only back then it was spelled quilte (or sometimes quhilt) and referred not to a mattress cover but rather to the mattress itself. The word was derived from the Old French cuilte (sometimes spelled coute), which meant “mattress” and was itself a descendant of the Latin word culcita, meaning “a stuffed pillow or cushion for a bed or couch.” It wasn't until the late fifteenth century, at about the time that Middle English was giving way to modern English, that quilt took on its current form and also acquired the contemporary sense of “a bedspread made of two layers of cloth filled with padding (such as down or batting) and held together by ties or decorative stitching.” And the word's verb senses—“to make a quilt by sewing together layers of fabric and padding” and "to pad and stitch ornamentally, as when making a quilt”—didn't come into use until the latter half of the sixteenth century.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.02.26: LIMPET

As you probably know, a limpet is a marine mollusk that has a shallow conical shell, a broad muscular foot, and a proclivity for tightly clinging to rocks. But what you may not know is that the roots of the word limpet ultimately wind back to the classical Latin verb lambere, which meant “to lick” and “to suck up.” In the Late Latin era, the verb was combined with the noun petra, meaning “rock,” to form the noun lampetra, which was used to mean “lamprey” but literally translates as “rock licker” or “rock sucker.” Lampetra became lampreda when it passed into Medieval Latin, and for reasons not entirely clear, lampreda came to mean both “lamprey” and “limpet.” When speakers of Old English borrowed the Medieval Latin term, they Anglicized its form to lempedu but continued to use it as a moniker for the two different aquatic animals. However, as Old English gave way to Middle English in the twelfth century, English speakers started using lamprey—derived from the Old French lampreie, it was thus originally spelled lamprei or sometimes laumprei—to refer to the eel-like creature, and they now applied lempedu solely to the rock-clinging mollusk. As you may have already guessed, the spelling of lempedu eventually evolved into the now familiar limpet (sometimes spelled lempet before the form was standardized), though etymologists and lexicographers are not all in agreement as to when this took place: some claim it happened in the early fourteenth century, whereas others say the contemporary form appeared no earlier than 1602.

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.02.19: RIGMAROLE

Rigmarole is essentially a phonological attrition of rageman rolle, a thirteenth-century term that referred to a long roll of parchment used in a then-popular party game. Written on the parchment was a series of verses that each described the personality of a colorful made-up character, and attached to the heading of each verse was a piece of string. The object of the game was for a partygoer to select a piece of string at random, read aloud the verse to which the string was attached, and then assume the described persona for the remainder of the party. (Supposedly, hard-core gamblers of the era played a more serious version of the game that operated under slightly different rules.) Since the first character listed on the parchment was Rageman the Good (whose name was likely derived from Ragemon le bon, the name of a popular character in Anglo-French poetry), the game was called Rageman and the roll of verses Rageman's rolle, though the moniker for the latter was quickly corrupted to rageman rolle and later to ragman roll. Interest in the game died out during the early sixteenth century, and while the term ragman roll was still in wide use, it had by then acquired the more figurative sense of “any long list or catalog.” By the early eighteenth century, however, the term had contracted to the now familiar rigmarole and had come to mean “confused, incoherent, or rambling discourse.” And in the mid-twentieth century, the word rigmarole—now sometimes spelled rigamarole to reflect a common pronunciation—acquired the additional secondary sense of “a complex but often trivial procedure.”

©2014 Michael R. Gates

Case File #014.02.12: PERSIFLAGE

Lord Chesterfield introduced English speakers to the noun persiflage, which means “light but slightly contemptuous mockery or banter,” in his Letters to His Son, a collection of missives from Chesterfield to his illegitimate son, Philip, that were written in the early eighteenth century but not compiled and published until circa 1774. Chesterfield borrowed the term directly from French, and the French noun was derived from the French verb persifler, meaning “to banter.” That verb, however, was itself derived from the French verb siffler, which means “to whistle or hiss” and is a descendant of the Latin sibilare, meaning “to hiss.” Thus, one could cogently argue that persiflage is simply a friendlier and more articulate form of the mocking hiss or the deriding boo.

©2014 Michael R. Gates