2890: Crabs and Circuses: A Vast Web of Words Nov 19, 2024
Follow the path of some etymological mysteries and a wider picture begins to emerge. Cancer likelihood is increased by carcinogens, named after ‘carcinoma’. Both of these words come from the same source, even though they do not look particularly related. All of those cancer-related words come from the Ancient Greek καρκίνος (karkínos) though in the case of ‘cancer’ this was from a Latin calque of the Greek, meaning ‘crab’. This is from the veiny appearance apparently looking like a crab, also seen in the word ‘canker’ and indeed crab. A full explanation of the sound changes and relation to the zodiac can be found here.
The fact that so many words descend from the shape of crabs is interesting, but the story does not end there. Looking even further, ‘curve’, ‘curb’, and words related to ‘circle’, like ‘circus’ and ‘circuit’ etc., and perhaps more surprisingly ‘shrink’ also are all related to those above. This is from an even older root, meaning ‘to turn’ or ‘to bends’.
2889: A History of Serifs Nov 18, 2024
Serifed typefaces are no longer as popular as they once were, but at one point they were a practical necessity. It is not clear, for any writing system, even the quintessential case of Latin, why serifs developed, nor is it clear where the name comes from. One leading theory is that they were used to neaten out the ends of the lines when chiseling into stone. That said, lots of other writing systems, from Greek to Cyrillic, and arguably Hebrew and even very modern ones like the Cherokee syllabary, developed in the early 19th century, have serifs, despite having very different histories.
Part of this may be due to parchment, which does not absorb ink but rather the ink is dragged over and dries as a layer on top of the base. Since the ink does not naturally absorb into the parchment, serifs help to get the ink started with a small scratch, and to finish the line so that the ink does not run.
Of course, they persisted well after the invention of paper, still being used today, as a stylistic choice. For certain purposes, it does not function as well as sans-serif fonts, especially fitting lots of text into a small or narrow space while maintaining legibility, and it comes across as more old fashioned, so particularly in the internet age it has begun to be usurped in those contexts.
2888: Book: Surviving Against the Odds Nov 17, 2024
The word ‘book’ is an old one in English, with roots going back to Proto-Germanic thousands of years ago, and possibly has to do with a common material for carving runes: beech wood. It is rare that over the course of Middle English, it would eclipse another term of the same meaning, especially a foreign one. After the Normans invaded, many scholarly terms shifted from Old English roots to Romantic ones, but in this case, ‘book’ replaced the Old French based term, ‘livret’.
Plenty of Old English terms were replaced by other, also Germanic terms, such as ‘ened’ (related to German ‘ente’’) being replaced by ‘duck’, but in this case ‘book’ was replaced by an Old French term and then went back. What was lost was a number of compounds involving books, like ‘bochus’ (book-house) for ‘library’, a Latin based word.
2886: Burn and Brand Metathesis Nov 15, 2024
A number of words from Old English experienced metathesis wherein the first vowel and the [r] would switch, as in bird from brid and so to with horse. This did not happen uniformly, however. The word ‘burn’ experienced this metathesis, appearing for instance in German as ‘brennen’ despite Old English ‘birnan’, i.e. with the -R- before the vowel, but there are English words where the same feature is present. ‘Brand’ as in to put burn a mark into something used to be the past participle of ‘burn’ in Old English, and semantically narrowed during Middle English—the sense of brand as the essence of a manufacturer or other business is from the 17th century based off of that.
Even earlier than ‘brand’ was ‘brew’, that developed from the same root ultimately, but appeared in Old English as ‘brēowan’, in the sense of burning, then boiling, and potentially related to the word ‘barely’ to lead to the specific meaning it has now.
2885: Rickets is not from Rachitis Nov 14, 2024
The disease known as rickets, a lack of vitamin D leading to soft bones, is known in New Latin as Rachitis, from the Greek ῥαχίτης (rhakhítēs) , but those terms as names for the disease actually come, in part, from English rather than the other way around as one might expect. To be clear, the Ancient Greek ῥαχίτης (rhakhítēs) does exist, and obviously before English, meaning ‘spine’, but this is not the origin of the term rickets.
It is not entirely clear where this term comes from, other than that it was a local term used in Southeastern England after which Daniel Whistler named it in the 17th century. He took the English term, backformed it from a semantically related Greek term, and developed the New Latin word Rachitis, which is also used in some modern languages now like German.
This is also where the term ‘rickety’ comes from, in the sense of having weak structural support.
2884: Godspeed and [secular?] Speed Nov 13, 2024
The phrase ‘Godspeed’ might sound like a strange compound, or as with ‘goodbye’, a clipping from a longer, and more overtly religious phrase. The answer is somewhere in the middle.
Godspeed does literally come from ‘God + speed’ but this was when ‘speed’ meant something else. In Old English, ‘spēd’ meant ‘success’, definitely Germanic but also probably related to the Latin ‘spēs’ meaning ‘hope’. This word overtime experienced semantic narrowing, moving from any type of success, to success in work and travel, to efficient and most importantly fast activity. A similar sort of semantic narrowing occurred in the Russian cognate спеши́ть (speshíty) meaning ‘to hurry’.
The original meaning is retained in ‘Godspeed’ but since most people will be unaware of this earlier meaning, it is somewhat confusing, as an abbreviated phrase for “[may] God give you speed”, what would now be, ‘Godsuccess’.
2883: Clean Eating: Old Food Safety Marketing Nov 12, 2024
Lots of Victorian and Edwardian era foods were either actually poisonous or were so contaminated after heavy industrialization and few regulations as to make them very dangerous. This led to branding around food designed to sound very pure and clean. Hydrox for example was named for “hydrogen and oxygen”, and though to modern ears it might sound like a house cleaning product, it was designed to evoke a sense of high standards in the food. Likewise, this is understood to be the source of the names “Dr. Pepper” and “Pepsi”.
In the latter case, this was from a benefit of unregulated marketing, where it was sold as a cure for dyspepsia otherwise known as indigestion, despite the sugar, caffeine and carbonation doing the opposite. That sort of marketing is now illegal, though the name stuck around, as did the term “digestive biscuit” or “digestives” which is still popular in the UK, but illegal as false advertising in some countries.
2882: Complex Verbal Agreements Nov 11, 2024
In most languages, even ergative-absolutive languages, the verb simply needs to agree with the subject [agent] but does not have any morphosyntactic relationship to the object, or indirect object etc.. Some languages, like Ubykh, once recently spoken in the Caucasus, needs to show agreement with the subject*, direct object, and any indirect object (i.e. also benefaction and ablative objects). With only 2 vowels and over 80 consonants—among the most in the world—this made Ubykh’s highly agglutinative also very nuanced phonetically to most outsider's ears.
Other languages as well, including Basque also require verbs to agree with subject*, direct object, and any indirect objects, but also for agreement with the listener, for instance singular or plural.
*Ubykh and Basque are ergative-absolutive languages so it’s not entirely true to call it a subject
2881: Coke As Soda: A Slightly Different Eponym Nov 10, 2024
Lots of brands' names take on the generic meaning of their main product, from kleenex to hoover and so on. Plenty of these are basically global and some belong to specific regional dialects. That said, it is a slightly different story with how ‘Coke’ became the generic term for a soda in much of the Southern US.
While usually a brand becomes eponymic from traditional market dominance, a sort of top-down approach, Coke on the other hand, which eventually developed into the most popular of the sodas, had an early lead, and before there was much centralization or even bottles, soda jerks would make their own syrups and also call them coke. This, later reinforced with market dominance, has helped to maintain the generic use of ‘Coke’ as soda.
2880: Antic, Antics, & Antique Nov 9, 2024
‘Antic’ and ‘antics’ in practice are very different words, with the former referring to things that are grotesque and offputting, and the other is much softer referring to amusing our even outlandish behavior. Far more different to either of those that diverged in the late 15th or early 16th century, is ‘antique’, from the same root.
The meaning of ‘antique’ is the original sense of the word, from ‘ante-’ meaning ‘before’ in Latin and specifically ‘antiquus’ (venerable), but in terms of pronunciation and spelling ‘antic’ was the original for English. While the meaning of grotesque [both it and ‘grotesque’ came to have negative connotations from Roman murals] came later and led to the sense of ‘antic’, the spelling was reverted to the French style and pronunciation in the 17th century.
2879: The Dominance of ‘-ez’ in Spanish Surnames Nov 8, 2024
Out of the top 20 most common Spanish derived surnames, almost every single one ends with ‘-ez’ (or ‘-es’, a regional variant, and ‘-iz’ / ‘-oz’ as a phonotactic variant), like Lopez, Martinez, and Gonzalez, but it’s not entirely clear how the practice became so common. In most cases, the name is patronymic, with names like Hernandez from [child of] Hernando, though many others morphed like Perez from Pedro or Diaz from Diego. Gonzalez is actually from a Germanic, Visigoth origin, from ‘gunþo’ meaning “army / war elf” (see more on elf-based names in Germanic cultures), and related to Gunther and Gunnar. Cortez is not patronymic, and means ‘courteous’.
In general, many of the names that led to these surnames are no longer so popular, but offer a snapshot to a time when they were. The ‘-ez’ suffix possibly developed out of the genitive form in Latin, meaning “of [name]” but this progression is not clear looking at Medieval Spanish. It could be related to an instrumental suffix from Basque, or another pre-Roman language, but this is also difficult to evidence.
2878: Basque Surnames in Spanish Nov 7, 2024
The Basque language is a mysterious isolate, found between formerly Celtic-, now Spanish- and French-speaking regions, but its impact on them has been significant. Many Spanish words, some of which have even entered English, come from Basque, like ‘avalanche’ and potentially ‘cony’, and ‘silo’, as well as ‘vega’ as in ‘Las Vegas’ (lit. the meadows).
One of the greatest impacts it has in the modern day is the many surnames that come from Basque. Many of these come from inheriting the names of previous farms when new tenants bought the land. Names like Mendoza (“cold mountain”), Iñigo (with many variations including ‘Iniguez’) for ‘beloved’ or literally “my little” and Garcia come from Basque ‘gartzea’ meaning ‘young'. These are among the most popular of the Basque-originating Spanish names, with Garcia being one of the top 5 most popular Spanish / Hispanic names globally.
2877: What the H: Jesus H Christ Nov 6, 2024
The phrase Jesus H Christ is a curious one at first glance. First of all, Christ is not a surname but rather a moniker equivalent to Messiah, from Greek, though in a sense many surnames began as titles or descriptions, like Smith or Carpenter. The bigger problem is a matter of what the H would stand for.
It would be incorrect to assume that this is a middle name, which was not the practice until quite recently anywhere. Rather, it most likely comes from the Latin Jesus Homo Salvator meaning “Jesus, savior of man(kind)”.
2876: A Berry [Confusing] Problem Nov 5, 2024
In Modern Hebrew, תות (tut) means ‘strawberry’, but in Arabic توت (tut) at least colloquially refers to blueberries. In Persian, Georgian, and Aramaic, the word by default from the same root means ‘mulberry’, and indeed most of the languages from the former Russian, Ottoman and Persian empires’ spheres of influence use this root to mean ‘mulberry’ . This would have been the origin of the word, also appearing in numerous Indian languages; given the mulberry’s East Asian origins, that is not by itself surprising. What is more interesting is the fact that modern Semitic languages used the term to generically refer to berries, and then eventually that coalesced around one or another different type. In Arabic in particular, the word is used in combination to just mean ‘-berry’ such as توت العُليق (tut aleulyq) for raspberry/blackberry or توت أرضي (tut ardeiyy) for ‘strawberry’, literally “(mul)berry of the ground”.
2875: Gopher (Animal), Nov 2024
Last week, ‘gopher’ as a type of wood was explored, but not the type of animal, more specifically the pocket gopher. This word is definitely unrelated, but it’s not clear exactly where it comes from. One leading theory is that it is related to ‘waffle’. The ways in which the sound changes from ‘gopher’, or really from French ‘gaufre’ can be explored more here, but the name refers to the holes they dig, like the shape of a waffle or literally (originally anyway) a honeycomb. It may also be a native word from a Muskogean language.
2874: Turnpike: More like Turn-spike Nov 3, 2024
The term "turnpike" originally referred to a spiked barrier or gate designed to control access to roads. A ‘turnpike’ was a pivoted barrier, bristling with spikes—or rather, pikes—that rotated to allow or block passage, commonly used to prevent unauthorized travel or enforce tolls. In England, turnpikes were often found on toll roads, where travelers had to pay a fee to bypass these barriers. Over time, the name of the barrier itself became synonymous with the roads they guarded, eventually leading to the modern meaning of "turnpike" as a toll road, especially in the United States.
2783: Handsome – Gender Connotations Nov 2, 2024
Although the disparity has grown over time—especially in the last half-century or so—never has “handsome woman” been more common than “handsome man” etc. even going back to the 18th century. Comparatively, other words for beauty, like ‘beautiful’, ‘attractive’ and ‘cute’ (which used to be somewhat of an insult) have always been used more for women.
Usually, reasons of why are rarely fruitful in the humanities, but in this case the reason is because of the changing meaning of ‘handsome’. Before it gained connotations of looks, it had the same meaning as ‘handy’ today, in the sense of skillful. Eventually this took on more the sense of desirable and from there, attractive, but since it had originally referred to handiness and workmanship, it has always been a dominantly masculine word.
2872: Panzer – Older Than You Think Nov 1, 2024
One of the most famous words to have entered English from Axis languages, along with ‘blitz’ and ‘honcho’ is ‘panzer’ referring to the German tanks. While some tank names are new, or named after other people, like the Abrams, named after General Creighton Williams Abrams, Jr., but ‘panzer’ is also found around medieval texts. There, the term referred to chainmail, or other sorts of overlapping armor. That itself comes from Latin ‘pantex’ ultimately referring to a paunch.
2871: Mason Oct 31, 2024
If you hear the word ‘mason’ now, this is going to specifically relate to someone who works with stone, but there’s also the word ‘stonemason’ which would be redundant if that were completely true, as for instance no one refers to ‘wood carpenters’. You might think this is to distinguish from a bricklayer, who is also a mason, but deals not with stone, bricks being baked clay. Rather, it’s due to the word’s semantic narrowing over many centuries, having once denoted anyone involved in building a house, including carpenters. Just take a look at the surname of zoologist, James Wood-Mason.
‘Mason’ is not related to the French ‘maison’ meaning ‘house’ nor of course by extension the English word ‘mansion’, the middle-N of which is actually more authentic to the original Latin ‘mānsiōnem’ (dwelling). It is, however, distantly related to the word ‘make’; the word came to English through Norman French via Latin 'maciō (“carpenter, bricklayer”), hence why the C→ Ç→S, but that is from a Germanic origin related to ‘make’.
2870: Slush Fund Oct 30, 2024
A slush fund is any store of money which is used for illegal or otherwise immoral things, but while it comes up now in the world of politics, big business, and accounting, it had far more humble origins. It began as nautical slang, referring to leftover grease and fat from cooking or other uses of reducing scraps. This was expected to be discarded, but could be sold for various purposes like making tallow or presumably soaps and candles.
While this wasn’t on the scale of slush funds that come up in the news today, it was an under-the-table means of small added profit on top of everything else. It was used in the 19th century but rapidly took off in popularity since the beginning of the 20th.