Case File #020.04.22: PICNIC

Picnic is an Anglicized form of the French piquenique. The French word came into use in the mid-seventeenth century, and while there is no tangible evidence regarding its specific origins, linguists and etymologists have developed a cogent theory: they believe it was formed from a combination of the French verb piquer, which means “to pick,” and the Old French noun nique, which means “a trifling thing.” If this is true, then piquenique literally means “to pick a trifling thing,” and this seems plausible when you consider that the French word and its English spin-off, picnic, were originally used to mean “potluck dinner” and that the dishes at a potluck are usually easy-to-prepare and easy-to-carry trifles from which daring diners are encouraged to pick and choose. It wasn't until the early nineteenth century, however, that the English noun came to mean “a meal eaten outdoors,” and its related verb sense, “to eat a meal in the open air,” was coined soon after, making its debut in 1842 in the opening lines of Tennyson's poem “Audley Court.” But the figurative use of picnic in which it means “easy task” or “pleasant experience”—as in, for example, “Finishing the job before the deadline was no picnic”—came late to the proverbial table, having appeared in the English lexicon no earlier than the first quarter of the twentieth century.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.03.18: ROBOT

Robot is a relatively new word, having first appeared in Paul Selver's English translation of Czech writer Karel Čapek's popular 1920 play R.U.R.(Rossum's Universal Robots). The word that Selver translated as robots is roboti, a term Čapek and his brother, Josef, derived from the Czech word robota, which means “forced or compulsory labor” or “drudgery.” (Incidentally, robota itself evolved from the Old Slavic rabǔ, which meant “serf” or “slave.”) In the play, the characters referred to as robots—or roboti in the Czech version—are humanlike machines constructed solely for performing manual labor and other subservient tasks, and soon after the play debuted in New York in 1923, the word robot passed into the English lexicon as a designation for any machine resembling a human and capable of replicating, at least to some degree, human movements and functions. It was only a year or two later that the noun also took on the senses of “an apparatus that can carry out a complex series of actions either automatically or by remote control” and, figuratively, “a person who behaves in a mechanical or unemotional manner,” but it was another fifty or so years before it became the name of the dance style made famous by Michael Jackson.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.02.13: GLUE

English speakers started using the noun glue around 1225, only back then it was spelled glu or gleu and was used to refer to any viscid substance. It was borrowed from the Old French glu, which meant “birdlime”—birdlime is an adhesive made from tree bark and was once commonly used to snare small birds—and was itself derived from the Latin gluten, a noun that meant “gummy paste or wax.” The verb sense of glue, however, came to English via a slightly different route. Derived from the Old French gluer, which meant “to paste, fasten, or cause to adhere,” the verb entered the English lexicon around 1380, though it was first spelled gliwen and then changed to glewen about two decades later. As Middle English evolved into modern English during the fifteenth century, the forms of both the verb and the noun shifted to glew, which in turn became the now familiar glue sometime during the first half of the sixteenth century.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #020.01.08: URCHIN

The noun urchin has prickly and ugly roots. It evolved from the Middle English urchoun (sometimes spelled yrchoun), which meant “hedgehog” and ultimately came from the Latin ericius (also meaning “hedgehog”) by way of the Old Northern French herichon. When the English form changed to urchin circa 1528, the word soon took on additional meanings and was applied to things regarded in those days to be as ugly as a hedgehog: hunchbacks, goblins and elves, ill-tempered old women, and, of course, mischievous and raggedy youngsters. During the early seventeenth century, however, the word lost all senses but that of “an impish and unkempt child,” though an allusion to the original sense of “hedgehog” has been retained in the open compound sea urchin.

©2020 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.11.25: YAM

“I yam what I yam,” said the twentieth-century cartoon character Popeye the Sailor, “and that's all what I yam.” But his utterance of yam was in no way a reference to the root vegetable: it was, of course, simply the result of his slurring of the phrase I am. Furthermore, no credible scholar would claim that Popeye's poor diction played any part in the coining of the English term for the tuber that has long been a staple of American Thanksgiving dinners. In regard to the origins of yam, however, etymologists and lexicographers are not of one mind. Some believe the English noun first came into use around the end of the sixteenth century, and they cite the Portuguese inhame, the French igname, and the Spanish ñame as likely source words. Others concur with that time frame yet argue that yam came not via Portugal, France, or Spain but by way of West Africa, where the Twi language's phonetically similar anyinam refers to a yam-like vegetable. (This idea is bolstered by the fact that the first British mercantile efforts in West Africa took place during the second half of the sixteenth century.) But still others posit that the English word developed more recently, claiming its first recorded use was in colonial America circa 1700. According to this argument, yam was borrowed from the pidgin and creole languages used by African-American slaves, languages in which similar-sounding words such as nyaams and ninyam referred to tuber-like foodstuffs.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.11.06: GRAVY

When gravy first came into use in the late fourteenth century, it referred to a thick, spicy stew that was served as a dressing or side dish for fish or fowl. The word is an Anglicized form of the Old French grané —most etymologists and linguists believe the v came about as a misreading of the n in handwritten manuscripts, but there are some who postulate the existence of the unrecorded Middle French word gravé, a logical and likely descendant of the Old French, as the immediate antecedent of the English—and though grané meant “broth or stew,” it was itself a derivative of the Latin granum, which meant “grain or seed.” (Grains and seeds, or rather their flours, are traditional thickening agents for stews and gravies.) It wasn't until the sixteenth century that gravy came to mean “a sauce made from the thickened and seasoned juices of cooked meat.” And it was in the early twentieth century that it acquired its informal senses of “payment or benefits in excess of what is expected or required” and “unfair or unlawful gain.” The related slang phrase gravy train, which means “a source of easy money,” is also a twentieth-century neologism, one that originated among American railroad workers as a way of referring to any short but profitable haul.

©2019 Michael R. Gates

Case File #019.10.22: SKULL

Old English had several words for the bone that encloses the brain, though all of them were compounds using either brain (brægen in Old English) or head (Old English heafod ) as a base: brægenpanne, which translates as “brain pan”; heafodpanne, which translates as “head pan”; heafodbolla, which translates as “head bowl” or “head cup”; heafodloca, which translates as “head enclosure”; and finally heafodban, which translates as “head bone.” Around the end of the twelfth century, these compounds were all abandoned in favor of the now common skull, but curiously enough, nobody knows for sure where the newer noun came from. Among etymologists, the traditional belief has been that the word was derived from the Old Icelandic skalli, which meant “bald head” but was also sometimes used to mean “head bone.” However, a more recent theory suggests that skull evolved from the Old English noun scealu, which meant “husk or shell” and was often used as a generic term for cup- and bowl-like containers.

©2019 Michael R. Gates