podictionary - for word lovers - dictionary etymology, trivia & history

My personal understanding of the word thug is that a thug is someone I want to avoid because they are likely to clobber me, either to rob me or just because they think it s some kind of fun. But I see from a few very popular entries at Urbandictionary that rap music and hip-hop have gone some way to changing the meaning of thug. It seems to have become something of a legitimate badge of honor in some circles. I suppose it was a badge of honor anyway for toughs who need to prove themselves through deeds of violence. But the new meaning appears to be that someone from underprivileged origins toughs it through to be a legitimate success; so that in this case to be a thug means you re toughing it through. The origins of the word thug aren t too honorable or legitimate though. The word comes from Hindi and originally held a meaning not all that different from my original English understanding of the word.  It meant a robber or a cheat. The word root reaches back into Indo-European where teg or steg meant to cover ; a robber wants to cover up their crime. But it was the antics of a weird Hindu religious cult a couple of hundred years ago that brought the word into English. Hinduism has numerous gods but one of the main ones is Shiva. Shiva is, among other things, the god of destruction. This particular cult though, they worshipped his wife Kali. She seems to have been a pretty nasty piece of business and her worshippers followed suit.  By some delusion they regarded killing and robbing people as some kind of act of worship. Their usual method was to strangle their victim but there are claims of poison, stabbing and dumping down wells. These guys were called the Thugs in Hindi and the word was adopted by the British government in India. A book published in 1837 called Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs claims that for many years after the British power had gained the ascendant in India the Thugs continued to practice their execrable trade…the evil seems to have been regarded in much the same light as the fixed inconveniences of the climate or the accidental inclemency of unfavorable seasons—as a thing greatly to be lamented but beyond hope of remedy and which it was the part of wisdom to endure with patience. Finally a lowly civil servant named William Sleeman started to point out to his government that it was really irresponsible of any governing body to let this go on. For some time he was ignored as is the familiar lot of so many responsible civil servants even today, but finally a new Governor General arrived from England and took the issue seriously. They say it took 50 years to stamp out the cult. Today s episode brought to you by Ammon Shea s book Reading the OED.

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast When Pervez Musharraf resigned as Pakistan s president he gave his speech in Urdu with a sprinkling of English. I mention this not because there are hordes of people in Pakistan—although there seem to be—but because there is an etymological connection between the name of the language Pervez Musharraf used and today s podictionary word. The roots of Urdu as a name for a language represent a rare mashup of languages. Notably Urdu doesn t come from Urdu. This is one of those cases of one group of people applying a word to another group of people. In this case the namers encountered on the fringes of their empire groups of nomadic peoples wandering around with their animals.  These nomads lived in camps and so when the namers figured out how to communicate with the nomads, they named their language the language of the camps. In Persian that comes out something like zaban i urdu. The word zaban is actually the word that meant languge. Urdu was a word that seems to have meant camp. Like so many other phrases through history zaban i urdu got worn down with use and abbreviated to urdu. So etymologically the name we use for the language of Pakistan actually means camp. There is some discrepancy between dictionaries as to the ultimate source of the word urdu so I guess it s safe to say it moved around from language to language like the nomads.  A look at several dictionaries yields the following list of languages implicated in the travels of the word to English: Persian Hindustani Turkish Russian Polish German Danish Swedish Italian Spanish French Mongolian and Kalmuck (which I d never heard of) The word horde—as in there was a horde of shoppers at the mall —is reported to have come to English from similar roots. No dictionaries actually say so but I m interpreting that while Urdu means language of the camps horde must have evolved from people of the camps or those who live in camps. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines horde as chiefly derogatory, a large group of people. I think derogatory is a bit too strong.  Impersonal is more like it. Notably the homonym hoard—as in I have a hoard of candy to give out at Halloween —is not a related word. The nomads had to travel light and so left hoarding to Germanic speakers who gave the word to Old English meaning treasure and hiding place.

Today s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com Nora Gold asks about the word passionate.  Nora is another one of the authors I met at a conference before the summer.  She wrote a book of short stories called Marrow and Other Stories and at her website she has free PDF downloads of a couple of those stories. Byron wrote His love was passion s essence:—as a tree On fire by lightning, with ethereal flame Kindled he was, and blasted. That really does seem to be passion s essence, to be consumed.  But although Byron was talking about being consumed by passionate love, the image of being struck by lightning and bursting into flames sounds pretty painful and actually, pain is really at the root of passion. The American Heritage Dictionary tells me that there was an Indo-European word root pei to hurt. This word root made its way up into Latin where pati meant suffer. Classical Latin is what the Romans spoke but after the end of the Roman Empire Latin was the language of literacy all over Europe and morphed into Medieval Latin.  One of the main vehicles for Latin s ongoing popularity was the church and this particular word root was applied in a particularly churchy way. About 1000 years ago passion emerged specifically applying to the suffering of Christ. It was the strength of feeling associated with what was considered to be the ultimate in suffering that infused the word passion with a meaning of strength of feeling about 700 years ago. From strength of feeling, a meaning relating to love and sexual passion evolved about 400 years ago. I was interested to see that the first citation for passion as applied to sexual desire was from a book with the unlikely title of Mathematical Magick, or, The Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry. Unlikely where sexual passion is concerned anyway. This book was written by an enlightened theologian named John Wilkins.  In it he was actually saying that the divine frees people from their lusts and passions, not writing anything remotely erotic. John Wilkins was passionate about science though as the book title suggests.  This was a kind of popular mechanics type of approach and it s notable that the book was written in English not Latin. At the time there was hot debate about whether man as created by God was centre of the universe and in particular if the earth represented a planet just like those other things up in the sky. John Wilkins wrote another book called Discourse concerning a new planet; tending to prove, that ( tis probable) our earth is one of the planets.  He was trying to show people not only that the evidence seemed to support this more humble position in the universe but also give religious arguments as to why this might be so. He was also passionate about communication which is why he didn t write his books in Latin. In fact he was one of those guys who springs up from time to time through history advocating a new universal language so that everyone from everywhere can understand each other. I guess he didn t realize that to some measure that s what Latin had been, or what English was going to become.

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast In 1823 Lord Byron was in Genoa in Italy writing poetry including something called The Island. In it, at one point, one character is telling another he s seen a ship. What! could you make her out? It cannot be; I ve seen no rag of canvass on the sea. Belike, said Ben, you might not from the bay, But from the bluff-head, where I watched to-day, I saw her in the doldrums; for the wind Was light and baffling. And this is the first citation we have for the doldrums meaning a ship that is unable to make headway. As The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea explains it [the doldrums are a] belt of low pressure that extends 5° to 10° either side of the equator…[they] were notorious in the days of sail, because vessels could become becalmed there for many days and even weeks…Being in the doldrums has now become synonymous with being listless, depressed, and generally stuck in a rut. It is information like this that must have been stuck in my brain somewhere and made me think that this name of a region of ocean gave us our word doldrums for being down, for feeling melancholy. And I guess it did, but I see that in fact it also has an older history, although it is a short one. That citation of Lord Byron is from 1823 but in 1812 in the newspaper The Examiner there is a citation reading A doldrum is, we believe, the cant word for a long sleeper. So the Oxford English Dictionary has as its first and obsolete definition slang…a dull, drowsy, or sluggish fellow. It s easy to believe that sailors stuck for days or weeks in the hot, humid seas around the equator might use this word to describe the place. The OED etymology for doldrum is not too helpful, it says perhaps from dold, an early variation on dolt meaning dull. Lord Byron is reported to have said who would write who had anything better to do? and I guess he found life in Genoa a little dull around the time he set doldrums to paper, because he promptly set out to join the Greek war of independence and brought along a pile of money to pay to support soldiers under his command. But the Greek military organization was in a bit of a doldrum itself, or maybe a shambles or a mess. The lousy weather didn t help and not only did Byron get discouraged he got sick and died. Maybe dull isn t so bad after all.

Today s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com I ve recently become a member of the board of directors for an association of cottage owners.  I ve been working on a strategy to help protect the natural environment around the lake.  So the word strategy is on my mind. I ll paraphrase here from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary: strategy - the science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces…to afford the maximum support to adopted policies [to protect the bunnies and ducks]. Okay, I put that last part in myself. I don t think I ll be using military force in my strategy but the military does have a deep stake in the etymology of the word strategy. According to the American Heritage Dictionary there was an Indo-European word root ster that meant to spread things out. I came across this root once before in the podictionary episode on the word street which came about because the Romans built their roads in layers and they called the layers strata.  The strata were called strata because each material was spread out before the next one was piled on top. Strategy didn t come through Latin though, instead it came through Greek. That same word root meaning spread out was applied to a big group of people who were spread out over an open space. Sometimes an army was a big group of people spread out over an open space and so the Greek word for army was stratos. An army needs a commander and the Greek word for a general was strategos. Of course it s the general who practices the science and art of deploying political, economic, psychological, and military force to achieve his purpose and so that art and science was named after him.  Since he was a strategos the art and science became a strategy. One of the rules of language is that if you don t have a word for it, you likely don t think about it much. From this little etymology you can plainly see that the ancients were pretty smart in planning out their military operations.  Yet English didn t pick up the word strategy until 1688. What does that say about England s planning capacity? I went looking for synonyms with a deeper history and believe it or not the word plan didn t arrive until 1635. But obviously the English did strategize before that and I did find an Old English word rede that seems to fit the bill.  It relates to a root meaning of understand and could also mean advice, plan or scheme.

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast I plugged the word shambles into The New York Times to check whether or not my use of the word to mean a disorganized mess was consistent with what other people might mean when they use the word. It was, but I almost wish I hadn t looked. According to the search results we are all in deep trouble the economy is in a shambles the transportation network is a shambles Iraq is in a shambles the Democratic Party is a shambles John McCain s campaign appears to be in shambles The list goes on. So let s leave those depressing search results and look instead at why we think being in a shambles is such a bad thing. Although the word is a very old one it was only 1926 when it came to mean what all those doom and gloom citations meant. Back in Latin scamnum meant a stool or bench.  As the Romans rubbed up against the Germanic peoples before the Anglo Saxons took over England this word for stool was adopted into Germanic. So when Old English eventually did become a recognizable language in its own right scomul was one of the words they used for a stool.  We have citations for this word back to the year 825. But what is a stool but a miniature table and as logic would have it by the year 971 sceomolas took on the meaning of table or counter. In particular these tables and counters were ones set out on market days and they were the work surface that people used to do their trade. The word seems to have broken in two from here; in one direction the whole marketplace started to be called the shambles and some old towns still have place names of streets or commons based on this use. But the direction we are more interested in here is the narrowing of use of shambles from meaning a market stall generally to meaning a market stall specializing in meats. If the table at the market where you bought your meat was called a shambles—and by 1305 it was—then didn t it make sense to call the abattoir a shambles too?  It was by 1548. Now an abattoir or slaughterhouse is a pretty messy place with all that blood and guts splattered all over the place.  It is common coin among language users to try and hype their message by overdoing a comparison.  If your office is a big mess someone will really be getting the message across that they think it’s a mess if they call it an abattoir. So that s what brought us the current meaning less than 100 years ago.

Wayne Grady is the current president of the Writers Union of Canada and in the audio version of podictionary gives as his favorite words as Bloody Caesar. He then proceeds to give a recipe for the mostly Canadian drink Bloody Caesar and encourages us to drink them for breakfast. Oh, a writer s life! Vodka Beef boullion Clamato juice Lime Worcestershire sauce Horseradish optional Wayne s latest book is Deserts – A Literary Companion, which might explain why he s so thirsty. He says he met the inventor and by all accounts that inventor was Walter Chell a bartender in Calgary, Alberta in 1969. The combination of clam juice and tomato juice is a bit unusual and evidently it was the popularity of the drink that spawned a concoction called Mott s Clamato. I have to take issue with Wayne s inclusion of beef boullion in a Bloody Caesar because I d always thought there was a different classification of drink called a bull shot that used beef boullion instead of tomato or clamato juice. But enough on drinks. Caesar is our word and we must render unto Caesar that which is Caesar s. Although Wayne s drink has only been around a few decades, the word Caesar is reported to be the earliest Latin word adopted into Teutonic languages. One can imagine why. Julius Caesar was an influential enough character that his name is still very familiar to us and he lived about 2,100 years ago. He was the first Roman leader to be called Caesar but those that followed adopted the name as if it were a title—and so it became a title. In fact it became so much of a title that it migrated into other languages as a title so that the German Kaiser and the Russian Czar both take their titles from the word Caesar and ultimately old Julius. Taking a word back 2100 years isn t a bad trick, but it s kind of boring etymologically if it all flows back to one guy. Wikipedia tells me that the name Caesar goes back at least six generations before the Julius we know. Almost none of the dictionaries even speculate at a meaning for the name. When a woman has a baby delivered by caesarian section the operation is said to be so named because Julius Caesar was brought into the world in this way. However, this is thought to be a myth since until the era of modern medicine such a procedure was uniformly fatal to the mother and Julius Caesar s mother was 20 when she had him but lived to be 65 years old. In fact John Ayto believes that the name evolved from the procedure instead of the other way around; it s all about cutting. Your incisors in your mouth are the teeth that cut and scissors cut. People have been speculating on the origin of the name for a very long time and Pliny the Elder suggested that the name Caesar came from a Latin word for hair due to a full head of hair adorning the first to bear the name. Although Wayne s Canadian drink is named after the ancient Roman, Caesar Salad is not; at least not directly. In 1924 a restaurateur named Caesar Cardini—this time from Tijuana, Mexico—invented the recipe. Today s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast My first real job after finishing a degree in engineering was working at a company building space hardware.  I worked for several years on an antenna that is now flying in space on a satellite. It was fun. What I didn t know at the time was the evolution of the word satellite. I called the thing upon which my antenna sat a satellite because the first man made device flung into the heavens and expected to stay there was sputnik and it had been called a satellite. That was in 1957. But speculation about throwing satellites up into orbit had been going on since the 1870s at least and the reason those guys called the things satellites was that astronomers before them had called moons and other heavenly bodies satellites since Johannes Kepler had applied the word back in 1611 to some little dots he noticed circulating around the planet Jupiter. The world seems a different place back in 1611. For one thing Shakespeare was alive. But another thing that was different was that even though the Roman Empire had been long gone for more than a thousand years, people like Johannes Kepler—serious academic types—still thought if you have something important to say you have to say it in Latin.  So when Kepler was casting around for a word to call these little orbiting dots he reached for Latin. Another thing that was different back in 1611 was that people were more superstitious. The longer I live the more I realize that people are still pretty superstitious, but I think we ve come some way in that we no longer assume that a chunk of rock or a ball of gas up there in space has a personality.  But the ancients did and that s why so many planets are named after ancient gods. And even thought Johannes Kepler was a serious man of science, he still lived in a time when a planet called Jupiter still had some godlike cachet. The Roman god Jupiter was after all the head honcho of the gods. Back in Roman times an important person was followed around by a bunch of bodyguards or helpers. It makes perfect sense that a planet representing an important god like Jupiter would have a few too.  So it was completely logical that Johannes Kepler used the Latin word for bodyguard when referring to these moons. In Latin satellitem was that word. It isn t completely clear why the Romans called their bodyguards satelles but some theories point back to an Etruscan word. The Etruscans had a fair influence on the Romans. So that s why we call satellites satellites. But when Johannes Kepler first called moons satellites he was in a bit of a panic. It was actually Galileo Galilei who first saw these moons around Jupiter and Kepler started talking about them before he d actually seen them because the way to see them was with this new invention called a telescope, and Johannes Kepler couldn t get his hands on one of those. None of the other astronomers had one either and they were all casting scorn on Galileo s findings. Kepler had to find a telescope quick so he could prove he was right in supporting Galileo, or crawl back into his academic hole.  He even asked Galileo to lend him his, but got no answer. Finally he found a rich nobleman in his neighborhood who had the new toy. I m sure he was in orbit himself when he finally saw the things for himself.

Today s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com In 1995 Douglas Coupland wrote a book called Microserfs. Douglas Coupland had made his name in 1991 with his book Generation X and many people—including me until just now—were under the impression that Coupland coined the term Generation X for young adults with an uncertain future. People born after the peak of the baby-boom are often called Gen-X-ers with the thought in mind that early baby-boomers scooped up all the executive positions in a growing economy and Gen-X-ers have to wait until those people ten and twenty years older than they are, die off, before they can get the good jobs.  By which time of course it ll be too late because the technology will have all changed and only the people twenty years younger will know how to use it. But I digress, and since I started off on a digression that makes this a nested digression and I better return to my original digression. Even the Oxford English Dictionary mentions Douglas Coupland in its entry for Generation X. But they mention him as the popularizer of the term, not as the inventor. The inventor is unknown, but the first citation goes back to 1952 appearing in Holiday magazine and so pretty much predates the birth of the people we now think of as belonging to Generation X. The meaning was pretty much the same back those fifty odd years ago too which goes to show that maybe all generations of young adults appear to have uncertain futures. I started off saying that Douglas Coupland wrote another book and in that book Microserfs he may have coined the term flat food. In his book a software designer is holed up in his office and his friends buy him flat food so they can be sure he is actually eating by slipping it under his office door as he is fretting for days over writing his code. There are plenty of references to flat food on the internet and in popular culture but the term hasn t been around long enough that it s made it into any of the respectable dictionaries so I can t be sure it was Douglas Coupland that coined it. But of course among Gen-X-ers and everyone else the leading flat food is pizza. According to Pizza Magazine—yes Virginia there is a Pizza Magazine—in their 2007 Pizza Power Report they say that in a year people in the United States spend more than $32 billion on pizza. According to John Ayto pizza as a word used to be so unfamiliar to English speakers that they felt it necessary to add a descriptor calling it pizza pie. This only emphasizes the long lead up time sometimes needed for words to become widely used.  English readers were first exposed to the word pizza in a dictionary back while William Shakespeare was in his heyday.  But this was an Italian-English dictionary so we can t call it an English word yet. In 1825 Baroness Frances Bunsen wrote of pizza.  She was an English gal who married a German nobleman who just happened to be a diplomat and so she spent a lot of time in Italy.  Since in Italy pizza meant not only cheesy food as we might imagine, but also fruity desert food too, we don t actually know if Baroness Bunsen was actually talking about the pizza we know and love. The citation from 1878 is pretty decisive though since it gives a recipe: Anoint [dough] profusely with oil of olive, and dab in pieces of garlic, anchovy, strong cheese, rancid bacon, and whatsoever else may be highest in flavour and lowest in price; put into a hot oven, bake, and thou hast pizza. The reason Italians have been calling flat food pizza for centuries is a bit of a mystery. The OED heaps scorn on the idea that it might have come from a Greek word placous meaning flat. Instead they prefer the theory that some Germans brought it to Italian when they arrived in Lombardy about 1500 years ago. The reason Lombardy is called Lombardy is because the German s who took over the place had long beards. Anyway they had a word bizzo meaning a bite, a morsel or a cake made of flour.   So the OED gives this word root some credit, even though they won t swear by it. Merriam-Webster offers another theory; that pizza is related to the modern Greek word pitta meaning flatbread. This in turn is thought to be related to the roots of the word pitch which is supposed to relate because it in turn means fat and you d cook your flatbread in a little fat. The OED and John Ayto both take pitta in different directions though. Before I go I just wanted to tell Virginia that not only is there a Pizza Magazine but if she wants she can tune into pizzaTV.com or pizzaRadio.com where she can subscribe to a podcast and receive episodes of This Week in Pizza. Can you believe it?  A podcast on pizza; what s next, a podcast on etymology; on grammar? That s a neat segue to let you know that Grammar Girl s book has made the New York Times Best Seller List.  Congratulations Grammar Girl!

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast When I hear that someone or some group have been conniving I think of it as scheming, or secretly planning something. Looking at the history of the word there has almost always been a sense of secret to connive, but in some senses there also seems to have been an unofficial approval of those secret schemes. The word appeared in English in 1602, 14 years before Shakespeare s death.  This is one of those words pulled straight from Latin that had never been a French word. The Latin root meant to shut the eyes, so the sense is that officialdom conveniently didn t see whatever was being secretly planned. There is even a sense of winking to it so that the planners explicitly knew that their superior knew what they were up to and had unofficially given them the nod. The con in connive has a meaning of together, so that the collaborators can be seen as winking together. The idea that officialdom was closing its eyes to some activity actually fits more closely with the word wink than one might imagine given the meaning of wink today. As I explored in my book Carnal Knowledge although wink means to me and you to shut one eye voluntarily, it didn t originally meant that.  Even though people who are conniving might literally wink at each other, the older meaning of wink - to close both eyes - resonates with the authorities looking the other way. This earlier meaning of closing both eyes still survives for us in the expression to catch forty winks; although wink to close ones eyes goes back to Old English before the year 900 and the expression forty winks didn t show up until the 1800s. I see that one of the citations in the OED for connive is from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she of How do I love thee, let me count the ways fame. In this case however her use of connive is in a poem depicting a conversation between the angel Gabriel and Lucifer. As suspicious as that might sound, this connive is just the opposite; the angel Gabriel is arguing against Lucifer s depressing stance and saying that who despairs, acts; That who acts, connives with God s relations. Since neither Gabriel nor Elizabeth Barrett Browning would think that God would wink at evil behavior, this is a use of connive free of our burden of tricky or covert scheming behavior. Elizabeth Barrett Browning tells another tale of conniving with God. Robert Browning wore a full grey beard that Elizabeth thought looked very fetching.  One day he shaved it off and she said that if he didn t grow it back they were through—I guess beardless wasn t one of the ways she loved him. He conceded and the beard grew back, but when it grew back it was no longer grey, it was white. Elizabeth said this was the just punishment of the gods.

Hi, this is Ammon Shea and I have a lot of favorite words, however one that I think is particularly interesting is complainee. Actually that was a bit of a setup. I learned a while ago about Ammon Shea s project to read through the entire Oxford English Dictionary and I just had to invite him suggest a word for an episode of podictionary. He of course replied that there were quite a few words that he liked and perhaps I should choose one from his book. His book by the way is called Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 pages. Anyway I chose the word complainee on his behalf and he kindly went along with it. Ammon Shea s book Reading the OED does not in fact have an entry for the word complainee.  Instead complainee is listed with a bunch of other –ee words including beatee, borrowee and boree. A beatee is the person who takes a beating given by a beater; a borrowee is someone who lends something to the borrower; and a boree is the person who is put to sleep by a bore. A complainee stood out in this list because unlike these other –ee words which are all about interactions between two people, a complainer and a complainee are only two of a kind of reverse love triangle; there are three people involved. The complainee is the person being complained about. The person who complains has a whole range of names: complainer; complainant, complaintiff, plaintiff and more. Yet the poor soul who is being complained to, who has to sit there and listen to it all, he doesn t seem to have any related name. But podictionary is about etymology so I d better let you know how we got complainee in the first place. Back before recorded history began, a word plak or plag meaning hit is thought to have been in use. This is one of those Indo-European root words that is implied and has been pieced together from the words that grew out of it.  It s not a word that has actually been found in a document anywhere. People who were very upset sometimes beat their breasts in anguish and so this word for hit emerged in Latin with a metaphorical meaning of lament. The com part of complain is just an intensifier because those old Romans who beat their breasts weren t just upset, they were really upset. Complain moved from Latin to French and then from French to English showing up first in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1374. At that first appearance the meaning was still to lament , not to grumble. But by about the same time that our word complainee was invented—in the 1700s—the early breast-beating sorrow of the word complain had been forgotten and the griping, moaning meaning of complain had completely taken over. Before I go I ll read to you the short section of Ammon Shea s book containing our word of the day. -ee (suffix) One who is the recipient or beneficiary of a specific action or thing. [Before I read on I should point out that a complainee is neither the recipient nor the beneficiary of the complainer and so the OED's own complaint that this use of –ee isn't etymologically correct holds true here.] With –ee attaching itself to so many interesting words, it seems rather a shame that the only ones still in common use today are pedestrian examples such as employee, escapee, and divorcee.  In the interest of expanding our descriptive range I have [that's Ammon has] included the following examples [and here I'll skip the ones I've already mentioned]: Affrontee—a person who has been affronted. Discontentee—one who is discontented. Flingee—a person at whom something is flung. Gazee—a person who is stared at. Laughee—someone who is laughed at. Objectee—either a person who is objected against or a person who objects. Sornee—one who has been sponged upon by others for free food or loging. So do check out Reading the OED

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast I had a friend years ago, an older guy, who told me that the persistence of coins of small value was a conspiracy of clothing manufacturers since all that extra weight in your pockets tended to wear them out faster so you had to buy new pants. He wasn t exactly a fashion plate. A dime is a coin of small value but before they get phased out we d have to get rid of pennies and nickels. And dimes are somehow more efficient currency too, packing ten cents worth of value into about half the amount of metal of a nickel. When dimes were first introduced into North America there was another coin of even lower value and that was called the mill.  A mill was worth a tenth of a penny and I guess we re making some progress in protecting the longevity of our trousers because at least the mill isn t in circulation. In fact although the Continental Congress passed an ordinance in 1786 calling for the establishment of mills, cents, dimes and dollars, mills were never minted; the value was already too small to be worthwhile. But the name of the mill leads us toward the etymology of the name of the dime. A mill was called a mill because it was one one thousandth of a dollar. A millisecond is one thousandth of a second. A millimeter a thousandth of a meter. These all from classical Latin where millesimum meant the same division. Similarly a dime is called a dime because in Latin decem meant ten. The American Heritage Dictionary tells me that there was an Indo-European root dek that meant ten. Since ten fingers is the usual number, this word falls into the common experience category. Before that 1786 act of Congress there had been money floating around in North America but it was a pretty mixed bag of currencies and names.  The Encyclopedia Britannica tells me that the very first coin struck in this new decimal based monetary system was a half dime—not exactly base ten—and that it was minted by John Harper in his cellar because he just couldn t wait for the U.S. Mint just down the road to be completed. I also learn that earlier, under British rule, silversmiths in Boston minted shillings, sixpences, and threepences for 30 years but dated all of them 1652 because otherwise they d get in trouble with the British authorities across the pond who still thought they were in charge of coinage.

Today s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com A controversial word is screw. By that I mean not only that it has been used to describe the sex act; and not only that the dictionaries I consulted don t entirely agree on its source; but also that by the most obscure routes possible the word may have evolved from sexual connotations. I ll start with the Oxford English Dictionary, as I usually do. Let me get the immediately obvious sexual connotation out of the way first.  In 1725 something called The New Canting Dictionary was released on the English reading public.  It contained for the first time the word screw defined as meaning to copulate with a Woman. This dictionary was marketed as a tool by which an honest man could protect himself against danger by knowing the language of thieves. Curious though that the contents of the dictionary was largely stolen from an earlier 1698 dictionary.  At least screw with this new meaning was an original entry. The deeper etymology of screw as the OED tells it has the word first showing up in English in 1404 from French, but in French the word applied not to what you might think of as a screw, but instead to the female equivalent, what I d call a nut. The American Heritage Dictionary and A s Word Origins tie this French word back to a Latin word for a female pig. The thinking is that perhaps the curly tail of the pig might have influenced the naming of a similarly twisting piece of hardware. And yet there was another Latin word that might have influenced the naming of the screw, this Latin word meant ditch or trench and might have been applied to the slot in the top of the screw or some say to the gap between threads of the screw. The American Heritage Dictionary actually goes so far as to connect the pig and the ditch meanings back in Indo-European through a root meaning to cut. The thinking here being that a pig roots in the soil and cuts a trench. Of course a word that means ditch or trench is also a good candidate to be a slang expression for a woman s private parts. And so, long before English connected screw to sexuality Latin had already done so.

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast Della Burford asks about the word dodo. In 1628 Emmanuel Altham sent a letter to his brother Sir Edward Altham.  In the letter he mentioned a strange fowle…called by ye portingalls a DoDo. He went on indicate that he was sending his brother through an intermediary named Mr. Perce a jar of ginger and a specimen of the strange fowle —hoping it would still be alive when it arrived. I don t know if that individual dodo survived its shipment, but as a species it certainly did not survive. The dodo is the poster child for extinct species. In not much more than 100 years after Europeans discovered the bird, it was just a memory.  Then the memory almost went extinct too. The Portuguese were the first western power that we know of to have visited the island of Mauritius but it was the Dutch who first set up shop there and killed all the dodos. These were big 40 or 50 pound flightless birds unafraid of humans so although you might assume that the settlers just butchered them and ate them the extinction was actually slightly more subtle than that. By all accounts these birds tasted really bad with all the tenderness of an old boot. The settlers didn t think much of them as food or decoration on the landscape and so hardly shed any tears as the rats from their ships ate the eggs, or more likely the pigs that now roamed the island and the macaque monkeys the Dutch had brought along. People s disregard for the bird is reflected in its name.  Most dictionaries claim it comes from a Portuguese word meaning simpleton or fool.   The American Heritage Dictionary even links it to an Indo-European root meaning buttocks. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the Latin scientific name for the bird as Didus ineptus although this seems to have been changed by botanists since the OED second edition. Since they mostly hated the foul fowl, at first no one mourned the passing of the species. T his all happened before about 1700 and so for some time Europeans began to think the species was some kind of hoax. During the early 1800s elderly inhabitants of the island were queried and none had ever heard of the bird. By that time England ruled Mauritius. Then in the 1860s a keener named George Clark was poking around trying to prove the things existed by turning up some bones.  At one point in his enthusiasms he told a friend who just happened to be working on building the new railway. As workers were laying the rail bed they unearthed a dodo graveyard, actually bones that had been washed down rivers to settle in marsh areas. The Victorian English world was electrified by the news; well, electrified enough that they started believing in the birds again and adopted their name to mean dopey people as well as appointing the bird as the symbol of extinction.

Today s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com In 1935 poet Louis MacNeice wrote a little poem called Sunday Morning. Down the road someone is practicing scales, The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails, Man s heart expands to tinker with his car For this is Sunday morning, Fate s great bazaar. I don t like to tinker with cars, but I do like to tinker with plenty of other things.  I think it s pretty common and as such the word tinker has a vaguely positive tone to it. MacNeice s line that man s heart expands certainly has a positive tone. But this good feeling surrounding the word tinker is a complete turnaround for the word.  There was a time when it represented everything low and evil. Of course to tinker with something makes tinker a verb and the verb first appeared back about 50 years after Shakespeare s death with the meaning I ve been using here.  It was during his lifetime that the earlier noun first showed up as a verb, but more specifically then tinkering was working as a tinker, someone who fixed pots and pans.  The noun appears in the written record considerably earlier, back in 1265. The etymological dictionaries I consulted have quite a range of opinions as to why someone who wandered from village to village fixing pots and pans might be called a tinker. One theory supported by Merriam-Webster is that as they worked to repair the pots the sounds they made—tink, tink, tink—gave them their name. But the Oxford English Dictionary points out that the very first citation for tinker was as a last name, indicating a profession, and predates the earliest citation for the words tink or tinkle that don t show up until the 1600s. The potential etymology that jumped to my mind was that they were working with tin and that might have given them their name. A s Word Origins supports me on this although none of the big dictionaries I saw make any connection here. So far I haven t said anything that might make one suppose that to be a tinker was such a bad thing. I mean how evil can it be to repair pots? That 1265 OED citation begins to give a clue.  The citation is from local government records mentioning that the lowest tax assessment of all was for Edith the tinker. So as a profession being a tinker was about as low as you could get. We still occasionally hear the phrase that something isn t worth a tinker s damn.  This too reflects something of low worth because tinkers were seen as lowlifes who swore and cursed as a matter of course. Particularly in the north of England and Scotland the word tinker was applied not only to people who roamed around fixing kitchenware, but to any vagrant or itinerant.  And that s really where the word gets its distasteful flavor. In ages past when most people were born, lived out their lives and died within a few square miles, these wandering people were seen as strange and dangerous. Sometimes they were indeed cheats, but even when they weren t, they might arrive speaking a strange dialect and not knowing the most basic local etiquette. Outsiders were also associated with trouble because the people who could more easily travel were the rich and powerful and when they blew into town the locals experienced increased taxes and other disruptions to their ordered struggle for existence. A tinker arrived without a bunch of soldiers to back him up and all too often was a target of attack.

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast In the summer of 1569 some fishermen caught a strange creature in the English Channel.  It was brought to London and butchered and sold as would be any other fish. Except that this one was approximately 17 feet long and looked pretty weird. So its skin was saved and stuffed and the curiosity was put on display at the Red Lion tavern and an advertisement for the marueilous straunge Fishe was circulated around town. The ad read, in part: Ther is no proper name for it that I knowe, but that sertayne men of Captayne Haukinses doth call it a sharke. Captain John Hawkins had recently returned from his third highly profitable voyage. In a time when these things were seen as a good idea, John Hawkins made his name by opening up the slave trade for England. The English language did indeed already have several names for the creatures we now call sharks. Before England became a great seafaring nation few Englishmen had ever seen any large oceangoing sharks. Instead they were familiar with smaller species.  These they called dogfish and nurse and we have citations for those uses back about 100 years before this new fancy shark word. Once people started cruising across the pond to the Americas shark sightings became a little more regular and before English adopted shark they had already adopted a Spanish word tiburon for these same larger creatures. The Oxford English Dictionary points out that this new word shark appears to have popped into English from the mouths of John Hawkins sailors but isn t exactly clear why. It does point out that there was an Austrian-German word for a sturgeon that was similar and also that the word shirk was being used in English before this to mean a person of little use, and a cheater. Even more suspiciously the word shirk and shark around this time held this same identical meaning—though there s no indication why someone might apply a word meaning cheat to a huge weird fish. Since that OED second edition entry a new theory has been published, although I don t see it having made it into any of the dictionaries, so who knows if it will withstand lexicographical scrutiny. The new theory is that our English word shark came from a Mayan word xoc. What brought me to examine this word today was a prompt from a listener who pointed out an entry at Snopes.com concerning the combination card-shark or card-sharp. Evidently some people feel strongly that one version is correct and the other is just wrong, oh so wrong. The Snopes conclusion is that there isn t enough evidence to say which is right or wrong on a historical basis.  Both sharp and shark have meant cheat for about the same length of time. I agree with their conclusion, but for a different reason. When I plug card-shark into the Oxford English Dictionary I get zero hits.  Card-sharp pulls up 8 hits. So the OED at least thinks the proper usage is card-sharp. But trying the same trick with Google gets me 200,000 hits for card-shark but only 87,000 for card-sharp, so it seems to me, if it used to be wrong to say card-shark, nowadays it s the phrase card-sharp that s swimming upstream.

I would guess that the first time I saw a carabiner was in the 1980s. I had become a whitewater canoe enthusiast and another guy I knew was selling off some rock climbing equipment, including carabiners.  I thought they d be useful in clipping stuff into the canoe or in rope work sometimes needed to drag canoes off rocks; or even in saving paddlers who had gone for an unintentional swim in a rapid. I see now that according to Merriam-Webster climbers had already established a slang version of the word carabiner more than a decade before my introduction to the things.  They have a 1973 first citation for biner in their Colligate Dictionary although the Oxford English Dictionary doesn t yet list the word. Today people use carabiners or biners to clip water bottles to backpacks, keys to keyrings and tools to carpenter belts. But since my first exposure was in the context of the great outdoors I saw a nice parallel here with an episode I did the other day where I explored the relationship between mosquito and musket. The fact is that a carabiner is closely etymologically related to a carbine. A carbine is a short rifle. It takes its name from the soldiers who carried it.  They were cavalry and it makes sense that you d want something a little shorter if you had to maneuver it around on a horse. Why these soldiers were called carabines is a little up-for-debate.  The German etymology expert Fredreich Diez  linked this back to an ancient name for a weapon of war with Greek roots, but another authority Littré said no, he thought it was because those kind of soldiers had originally come from Calabria. Both the American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster relate the word to a nickname for a grave digger or someone who prepares corpses for burial.  In this they relate it to scarab and dung beetles. I have to use my imagination as to why a group of soldiers might be nicknamed after gravediggers since none of the dictionaries go that far, but if your job is to shoot people, I guess it s a label you d wear with pride. I find it a little unsettling though that in French a carabin is slang for a medical student. Whatever the source of carbine a short rifle, the fact that horsemen had to carry them meant that they had to be clipped onto the horsemen s gear; hence the name of a clip carabiner. The first English work to include the word carbine was by an author named Richard Rowlans Verstegan. Verstegan was one who believed the pen was mightier than the carbine. He got into big trouble with the government of England when he published an account of the death of a contemporary who some now regard as a saint; Edward Campion. Campion was a Catholic who refused to recant his faith and was extensively tortured in the Tower of London for it.  Verstegan at least was able to run away to continental Europe from where he made a career of criticizing the English government and supporting English Catholics. Today s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast In November of 2007 the International Herald Tribune, which identifies itself as the global edition of the New York Times, reported that the high speed train lines in France had been sabotaged. A minor point in the article explained that sabotage was a French word dating from another railway controversy, a strike back in 1910 when workers dug up the wooden railway ties upon which the rails were laid. According to that article the railway ties were called sabots because that was the French word for wooden shoes. I see from comments on that article that readers recognized right away that this etymology was inaccurate. Instead they mentioned something that was sitting hazily in the back of my memory.  Sabot did indeed mean wooden shoes but it wasn t a transference of this meaning to the wooden footings of railway tracks, but the fact that striking workers threw their wooden shoes into the gears of machinery to gum up the works that lead to our word sabotage. When I cracked open my dictionaries however, I see that not only is the International Herald Tribune wrong, but so are the blog commenters and so is my memory. The idea that workers threw their wooden shoes into the machinery seems to be a bit of a folk etymology. The word sabotage certainly did enter the English language with the 1910 French railway strike, but it had already been a French word that had evolved over many years. The first English citation we have for sabot is way back in 1607. The dictionary explanation of the evolution of the word is that because people walking in wooden shoes tend to be noisy walkers, this word for shoe came to be associated with sloppy or clumsy walking, and sloppy or clumsy workmanship.  Sometimes clumsy workmanship can damage equipment and sometimes intentional damage can be passed off as the result of clumsy workmanship. That first citation for sabot back 400 years ago in English was—as so often happens—in a translation.  The translator, Richard Carew also wrote a short work called An Epistle concerning the Excellencies of the English Tongue in which he makes this largely accurate observation. In our native English-Saxon language we find many [words] expressed by one sillable.  Those consisting of more are borrowed from other nations. Carew was an early etymology enthusiast and participated in debates with his contemporaries—including Shakespeare—about whether English should be kept pure and not accept foreign words. I m happy to say that Carew was accepting of these polysyllabic imports borrowed from other nations, as you might expect a translator to be.

Today s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com David Beasley is an author and runs Davus Publishing. He starts of the audio portion of this episode by saying he s very curious about the word curious. The Oxford English Dictionary says that curious is: a word which has been used from time to time with many shades of meaning. They then go on to list 31 shades of meaning, most of which are obsolete or obscure. You are no doubt familiar with the expression curiosity killed the cat.  This expression has been around for at least 400 years but the wording has changed over time and in part, the changing meaning of curiosity is reflected in the change of the proverb. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations claims curiosity killed the cat to be a pretty modern expression not showing up until the 20th century. In fact, when the word curious first appeared in English this expression would have been nonsensical since curiosity would have more likely saved the cat. That first appearance was due to French and the Norman Conquest and shows up first in the 1300s. The Latin root curiosus could mean inquisitive, but more often meant careful.   So it is unlikely that being careful would kill the cat. And yet our first citations for the expression also give a glimpse into the subtleties and evolution in meaning of the word care, since both Ben Johnson and William Shakespeare use the expression as care will kill a cat One of those 31 shades of meaning for curious jumped out at me.  Starting in the second half of the 1800s publishers and booksellers used the word curious as a kind of code-word for erotic books. Both H. G. Wells and Aldus Huxley are cited as using the word in this way.  And curiouser and curiouser, Huxley s citation refers to something called the Purity League producing curious books—meaning dirty books. What, I wondered, was a group called the Purity League doing producing erotic literature? Well, evidently the Purity League was just as much a euphemism in this regard as was the word curious.   The following is from biographies of John O Hara, a member of the Purity League: [he had] an acute vernacular gift and a narrative frankness shocking in his day… he cut a wide swath through a Manhattan demimonde whose fierce friendships and bitter feuds—fueled by oceans of booze—were played out at such institutions as the Stork Club, “21,” and the Algonquin Round Table. The Purity League [was an] ironic reference to their shared interest in girls and alcohol. Of the little I could learn about the Purity League I did come across one curious snippet: The Purity League would hang out at Hodgson s…

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast I sometimes say that a common human experience breeds a word that is common across cultures and changes little over time. There isn t much in the world that s more common to human experience than having a mother, nor anything that means quite as much to most people.  So it should come as no surprise that this word has come down to us almost unchanged for as far back as we can see into the history of words. And also that it is one of the words that spans the entire width and breadth of Indo-European languages. Evidently we only started writing the TH in mother back in the early 1500s but may have been pronouncing it that way for some time beforehand. The Indo-European root was mater. Not too different for five to seven thousand years. Also, languages from Latin to Gaelic, and Greek to Russian share this maternal legacy. This is a word we not only all have in common, it is also a word we all use with great regularity.  Words like that just can t change because there are too many people around who know the word and will correct you if you start to pronounce it wrong or use it with a meaning that is just too far from their understanding of what it should mean. So again it is no surprise that we didn t get mother from Latin or French, but from the oldest Old English. I mentioned Sir Robert Cotton yesterday in my episode on the word mildew at the Oxford University Press blog.  While the meaning of mildew has changed a lot, the word mother has its first citation in the same document set I mentioned yesterday from Sir Robert s library. The Cotton Library is an important resource for people studying Old English. Unfortunately back in 1731almost a quarter of the ancient collection went up in smoke.  The documents had been brought together around the time of Shakespeare by Sir Robert Cotton and then had been moved in the early 1700s to the ironically named Ashburnham House. The librarian was understandably an enthusiast when it came to ancient documents and he had quite a pile of them in his own house nearby when tragedy struck.  In the dead of night his house burned down and destroyed numerous irreplaceable old manuscripts. An eyewitness—the headmaster of the school where this all took place—reported the panic stricken librarian stumbling out through the smoke in his nightshirt with bundles of old documents tucked under his arms.

This episode sponsored by Audible.com. For a free audio bookplease visit audiblepodcast.com/podictionary People have suffered the whining buzzing and itching biting of mosquitoes for time out of mind.  For this reason Old English had a name for these little blood sucking creatures. But it wasn t mosquito. It was gnat. Somehow the word gnat survived the arrival of mosquito although was displaced in meaning and now refers not specifically to mosquitoes, but to little hovering bugs in general. In 1572 a geography enthusiast named Richard Hakluyt got a letter from one Henry Hawks. Richard Hakluyt was in the midst of writing a whole bunch of books that told the tales of English exploration over the high seas and to foreign lands. Richard himself didn’t do much traveling abroad but he read everything he could get his hands on in as many languages as he could manage, then reproduced the stories in English. Henry Hawks was writing to Richard because Henry Hawks had firsthand experience living in Mexico.  In one passage Henry describes high mortality rates due to illness in the cities in Mexico based in part on the heat, and in part on these insects that bite both men and women in their sleep. These he called muskitos. Now you might at first think this was a Native American word to describe these annoying and evidently fatal flies, but in fact the word had arrived with the Spanish and had an Indo-European root. In Latin musca meant fly so mosquito literally means little fly. But this Latin word root appeared in the Americas in another unexpected guise as well, this time in the hands of early settlers. One of the things Europeans brought with them that Native North Americans didn t have was firearms.  These killed more rapidly than mosquitoes but their name had a familiar ring to it, they were called muskets. A musket got its name from the same root as a mosquito.  Here s how that worked. Back in France before the Norman Conquest bird fanciers had a special name for the male sparrow hawk.  These bird fanciers weren t bird watchers as you might think of today, instead they were hunters who used birds of prey to help them hunt.  It just so happens that the male sparrow hawk is quite small compared to the female. For this reason he was called a fly, or musche. Meanwhile other hunters used bow and arrow. One day someone invented a crossbow. The crossbow shoots a powerful arrow, the arrow itself is usually stocky but shorter than that used with a regular bow. Some smart-aleck nicknamed these diminutive arrows after the diminutive birds since they both flew to their target. Over time the name transferred to the crossbow itself. Then when technology replaced crossbows with guns, the name was applied there as musket.

Today s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com Honey is a very old word but it is a bit of an unusual word in that most words that represent something very common to our human experience have a pretty wide usage across many languages. This is only partly true of honey. In most Indo-European languages the word for honey is not related to our word honey, but instead to an actual Indo-European root meaning honey. This root does make its way into English in words like mellifluous and molasses.  But only Germanic based languages use the word honey or its relatives. As logic would have it that means that honey shows up as an English word back in Old English. As a basic word that so many people would have experience with it turned up early too; the Oxford English Dictionary first citation is from the year 875. But Germanic languages are Indo-European languages too, so why did we end up with a different word for honey? It seems that like many words the parent of honey spread in meaning and got applied to numerous things. Etymologists think that perhaps the word root behind honey might originally not have meant this sweet sticky substance, but a yellow honey-like color instead. So honey was an important enough article that in Germanic it overtook other meanings of the word, which in Sanskrit and Greek were retained as color words. Honey from bees is certainly the oldest meaning of the word honey, but the word gets applied to lots of other things we like, especially our loved-ones. The first citation someone calling their sweetheart honey is found in 1350 in a translation of a French story known as William of Palerne or Guillaume de Palerme. This story has an unexpected etymological circularity. I m sure the honey as sweetheart reference was merely incidental in the translation but the main love interest in the story is daughter to the Roman Emperor, a girl named Melior. Clearly Melior is a name chosen for its sweetness and etymological connection to mel the Latin word for honey.

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast [audio clip] I m Christopher Moore and the word I m interested in is itinerary because I m sometimes not sure if it should be itinery or itinerary. Well, Christopher you ve come up with a quandary for me. I always maintain that if people use a word and recognize it, it s a real word. I plugged itinery into Google and more than 100,000 hits came up.  So people certainly use it.  I recognized it when you said it, and I d have recognized it even if you hadn t said it in the context of itinerary. But none of the dictionaries recognize itinery and at first I d have said it was a mistake people were making, spelling it in the abbreviated way that some people pronounce it. But since I ve given the benefit of the doubt to so many other words I guess I ll concede that perhaps this is a word in transition. Except that Google reports more than 24 million hits for itinerary so if less than half a percent of users use the new pronunciation and spelling, the word certainly hasn t come very far in its transition and maybe never will catch on in wider usage. That makes it a mistake again. I think of an itinerary as a sort of plan.  I ve even heard people referring to those little calendars sometimes kept in a pocket as an itinerary.  One web citation refers to a reading itinerary. But the roots of itinerary relate more specifically to travel.  So when you hear about the itinerary of the pope s visit or something, it s called an itinerary not because it s a plan, but because it s a plan of his travels. The American Heritage Dictionary tells me that there is an Indo-European root ei that means to go.   This made its way into Latin iter which is what the Romans called the routes they took, particularly when extending the reach of their empire into new and hostile territories. Thus an itinerarium was a list of the places that the route passed through, and often included information such as how long it took to march the army there. Roman itineraries were more than just travel plans though. In some cases they were commemorative pillars and public monuments that actually reinforced the political control the Romans exerted over foreign lands by making visible and enduring proclamations of that control. Since maps were pretty crude in those days itineraries were also a really important means of understanding geography. The first time itinerary showed up in English was back in the middle 1400s and it was drawn directly from Latin. The sense of travel embodied in itinerary shows up also in itinerant.  An itinerant salesman is a traveling salesman. While the devout might pray to St. Christopher as the patron saint of travelers, the actual prayer has itself also been called an itinerary.

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast Allow me to read you a little of the Wikipedia entry for trampoline: According to circus folklore, the trampoline was supposedly first developed by an artiste called Du Trampolin who saw the possibility of using the trapeze safety net as a form of propulsion and landing device and experimented with different systems of suspension, eventually reducing the net to a practical size for separate performance. It goes on …the story of Du Trampolin is probably a myth and no documentary evidence has been found to support it. I m here to tell you that not only has no documentary evidence been found to support it, there is good evidence to refute it.  Every dictionary I checked gives an etymology for trampoline that does not derive from a personal name. The Oxford English Dictionary says it s from an Italian word trampoli but the American Heritage Dictionary says the Italian word came from Spanish. On the other hand Merriam-Webster says Spanish got it from Italian, but at least they both agree that before either Spanish or Italian the word root was likely Germanic. In Italian trampoli meant stilts and although none of the dictionaries go this far, it seems to me logical that the up-in-the-air function of a trampoline might well have adopted the high walking name from stilts. The Germanic connection brings us back to a more familiar English word with a connection to walking; tramp. Much is made in various internet articles of the invention of the modern trampoline in 1934 but the OED has as its first citation 1798 from the Times of London in what appears to have been an advertisement for a circus.  It reads Equestrian Performances with Oranges, Forks, Skipping Rope, Hat, Handkerchief, and a curious Equilibrium with a Hoop and Glass. Wonderful Trampolin Tricks, by Messrs. Smith [etc.]. Though this is the first citation, people obviously must have known what a trampoline was, since there is no explanation contained in the advertising copy. Forks, skipping ropes and hats as inducements to come to the circus may seem quaint but I note that oranges would have been an expensive and relatively rare food item in England in 1789, though perhaps not worth the price of admission if you only got to see it and not eat it.

Today s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com Here s a word with a lot of meanings and an unusual history. You can canvass for votes—which means you want people to vote for your candidate; or you can canvass public opinion—meaning you re taking a survey; or canvassing can mean examining or discussing something thoroughly. But canvas also means the fabric used for the sails of a boat.  It seems that the voting and surveying canvass grew out of the sailing canvas, although exactly how isn t completely clear. There are a few theories. It was once a form of punishment to get someone onto a sheet of canvas so that a bunch of other people could hoist it up and bounce the victim around a bit.  Sort of like a trampoline that you have no control over.  Back in 1508 this lead to canvass as a verb meaning to inflict this treatment. Over the next few centuries to canvass seemed to split in at least two directions, one with a meaning of shaking things out to examine them carefully; the other to criticize destructively. One theory is that people canvass for votes by criticizing their opponent and so that s how the word gained its new meaning. A less likely theory is that a piece of canvas can be used sort of like a sieve through which the facts and arguments can be strained. Although I don t see it in any of the dictionaries it would seem logical to me that you d use canvas to sort things out just as a broad clean surface upon which to work; you see it every day in markets where people spread their wares out on a tarpaulin. The sense of punishing someone as relates to canvas does not come from the use of canvas as the flooring in a boxing ring since the sense of punishment is 500 years old while the first citation we have for canvas in boxing is from 1910. So now we know that to canvass for votes is etymologically related to the canvas in a ship s sail.  But the word goes quite a bit further back than that, and takes another unexpected turn. The fabric that is called canvas got its English name back in 1260 from French and the word had originally been a Latin word referring to the plant from which this fabric was made. That plant was hemp and it s Latin name is cannabis. So canvas is actually just a morphed pronunciation of cannabis.

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast When I peer into the dictionaries they tell me that the word nefarious means wicked and unlawful. This may be true but it seems to me that nefarious is sometimes used in a lighter tone. I said to someone the other day that Google could use all the data that they are constantly gathering for nefarious purposes. By that I didn t mean I expected Google to become some master criminal corporation, but rather that they could use it in sneaky ways that were to their advantage. The word nefarious appeared in English in writing 12 years before William Shakespeare died.  The work that nefarious appeared in is reputed to be the first monolingually English dictionary, written by a guy named Robert Cawdrey. The word came from Latin and back in Latin had been one of those words that got squished together from two other words.  Both of those words trace back to Indo-European roots. Ne is simple enough and it means not.   The Latin fas meant according to divine law so that nefas meant against divine law. The Indo-European parent of fas meant to set so that the divine law would have been seen as set and fixed. That Robert Cawdrey guy was an appropriate fellow to bring nefarious to English since he seemed to go against divine law himself to some extent. First let me tell you about his dictionary.  The title alone is quite something: A table alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latine, or French etc with the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit s not why he was nefarious though. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells me that this Table Alphabetical was largely copied from other people s work, though that wasn t nefarious either since it was totally legal in those days.  Today we d call it repurposing because the earlier works were intended to be used translating between languages such as Latin and English. The Table Alphabetical was the first dictionary of words in English, defined in English. What was nefarious about Robert Cawdrey is that he stood up to the church. He d been a deacon and a priest but his thinking ran counter to his peers and he was charged, tried and booted out of the church before ever his dictionary came to print. His crime? He wouldn t read certain official church missives from the pulpit. He felt that a Christian was a Christian and the church fathers were acting as if they were more Christian than other people. I guess they did feel that he was less Christian.

Today s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl s new book.  Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com There is definitely a churchyness to the word amen. This is largely appropriate, but there is an irony too.  I ll get to that later. The word amen first appeared in English more than eleven hundred years ago.  It was one of those words that came with church-Latin to England before the arrival of French; that makes it Old English. The Latin word was taken from Greek and the Greek was taken from Hebrew. Hebrew is not an Indo-European language.  It along with Arabic and a number of other languages fall into a category now called Afro-Asiatic languages. The Hebrew, Greek, Latin path of the word amen fits well with the path of Christianity. Back in Hebrew the roots of amen meant to be firm.   So that a statement of amen was intended to add weight to what had already been said by agreeing with it—much like today. The document in which amen is first found as an English word is a very important manuscript.  The Lindisfarne Gospel is a showpiece now in the hands of the British Library.  It is beautiful but it holds meaning beyond the religious meaning it was originally intended to portray. Sometime around the year 700 a fellow named Eadfrith began to work on producing this book.  He wrote it in Latin and decorated it with all manner of gorgeous pieces of art with vivid colors that still sparkle today. Later in about 970, a guy named Aldred felt that the messages contained in this valuable book were so important that they should be understandable by not only scholars of Latin, but also English speakers.  And so, between the lines of Latin on the page are written an English translation. Instead of translating the Latin word amen into the English word truly, as can be seen in some other old documents, in this case the English translator borrowed the Latin word right into English and thus made it an English word. We will never know how many old manuscripts have been lost over the centuries but the fact that this particular one has survived underlines its value.  At every stage along its path to us its owners knew it was something special and so kept it safe; that literally includes keeping it safe from Viking attack. That original artist though lived in interesting times and how those times are reflected in his work give the Lindisfarne Gospel added meaning. In the year 664, only a few decades before Eadfrith sat down with pen in hand, there had been a big meeting now known as the Synod of Whitby.  At that meeting various factions of the various churches then operating in England had agreed on most of their differences. Their differences were based on the fact that Christianity had first arrived with the Romans just before the fall of the Roman Empire, and then been reintroduced by St Augustine after the Anglo-Saxons had moved in.  The result was that there were Celtic believers with their traditions and Anglo-Saxon believers with their traditions plus Roman church influences and others. Looking at the amazing graphics in the Lindisfarne Gospel you can see elements from all of these traditions blended so skillfully they all fit peacefully together. Clearly this manuscript is valuable and it is value that is also at the heart of the etymological irony I mentioned earlier. One of the stories about Jesus is how he lost his cool over the money changers in the temple. The Semitic root of the word amen means to be firm but also happens to be the root of the word mammon. Mammon in English holds a meaning of wealth or possessions but with a negative undertone. The Semitic root of firmness expressed itself through mammon as something that could be believed in, something that held its worth.

Today s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast Today enthusiasm is a good thing. Employers want their workers to be enthusiastic, teachers want their students to enthusiastic, parents want their children to be enthusiastic about one thing while kids want their parents to be enthusiastic about something else. I m enthusiastic about etymology and I think that s a good thing. But enthusiasm hasn t always been greeted with such enthusiasm.  That s because enthusiasm when it first arrived in English had a bit of a different meaning. The word enthusiasm comes from Greek and although you might not think so on the surface, it is a bit of a religious word. Inside the word enthusiasm is the Greek theos which also figures in the word theology. Theos means god so entheos means god within. In 1603 when this word was hauled into English from Latin there were tensions in English religious life.  Both sides held a bit of a feeling of my way or the highway and as The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy puts it, the word enthusiasm was used as a putdown to Puritans, evangelicals, and low-church born-again zealots. This was the more figurative meaning: they were possessed by a god. This derogatory meaning of enthusiasm persisted for a few centuries.  Scottish philosopher David Hume said that enthusiasts were gloomy and hare-brained and only got along with people who were as delirious and dismal as they were. Gradually the meaning of enthusiasm softened by being applied to less annoying people. Such is the way with words, they are sometimes applied to add strength to expression—like I m a maniac for word histories—but when the strength isn t actually there in the object, the word itself loses some of its edge. Having lived his live in moderation and gladly moved into retirement David Hume himself became a bit of an enthusiast, although not for religion. He was only saved by the death of a French nobleman. Hume was of moderately modest birth and rose to international fame on the strength of his writings. He prided himself in being levelheaded.  But in the 1760s he started getting fan mail from Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Campet de Saujon. Now Marie-Charlotte was one of the women of Paris who arranged salons where all the best and brightest French minds hung out, drank wine and had sparkling conversation. She liked his philosophizing and so did her friends. She also happened to be married to the Count of Boufflers and at the same time be the mistress of Louis François de Bourbon, prince de Conti. David Hume eventually went to Paris and at first was overwhelmed by the reception he got there. Everyone seemed to love him. He got used to the adulation and after a while imagined that the charming Marie-Charlotte loved him; he certainly seemed head over heels for her. His friends warned him he was acting the fool and he got offended, but before he could well and truly embarrass himself the count died and Marie-Charlotte set her cap to marry the prince de Conti.

This episode sponsored by Audible.com. For a free audio bookplease visit audiblepodcast.com/podictionary I always like it when I have a word to play with that does not have the standard French/Latin or Old English roots.  Pundit is one such word. But it is a word that also presents a few angles of the challenge of etymology. A pundit in this day and age is most often a commentator; some expert who is asked onto a news show to give his or her opinion. The dictionaries give this definition but hidden within it is an earlier meaning: expert. The word appeared first in English 1661 and the Oxford English Dictionary gives its source as Sanskrit. The British began trading with India right at the beginning of the 1600s when Shakespeare was in his prime and the East India Company grew to be the defacto government of India over the following 250 years until the real British government took over officially in 1858.  To continue that little timeline it was 1947 when Britain finally handed India s government back to Indians. At the time that the British began their Indian adventures a pundit was someone who had studied Sanskrit history and tradition and was more or less considered a keeper of those traditions and pieces of traditional knowledge. India was of tremendous value to England and so in trying to govern the place it didn t just hammer down laws that had evolved over the centuries in England, since that wouldn t have worked very well in India. Instead the English government in India was forced to take into account the systems of laws and customs already on the ground. To do this they needed local area experts. In the local language these people were called pundits or pandita. Hence the second meaning identified in the OED is an official court title appearing first in 1827, Pundit of the Supreme Court.  These were Indians who worked alongside the English and applied their specialized knowledge of the local legal landscape. Even before this title was recognized however, in 1816, experts in this, that, and the other thing began being called pundits, at first satirically, and later seriously. This word exposes for me how opaque our western understanding of other cultures is. First in its etymology.  Here we have a word that clearly has a very long history but what do we know about it before some English guy wrote it down? Almost nothing. Somebody must know, but the information is beyond my reach, which means it s beyond the reach of the vast majority of English speakers. But pundit points to other tricky angles in crossing cultures. Not only did those British legal experts find that their systems failed them in the new Indian environment, but the word pundit points to other stumbles and trip-ups. The American Heritage Dictionary identifies the word pundit is by the as possibly of Dravidian origin. Dravidian is a family of languages from India first identified to our western eyes as distinct by a guy named Robert Caldwell back about the time the British government officially got to running India. To underline how complicated understanding the related cultures might be, I see that in Wikipedia it says there are 37 languages within the Dravidian group—most in southern India. Dravidian as word itself was invented by Caldwell, based on the names of cultural groups that also gave us the word Tamil. I m skating on thin ice here because I of course don t speak any of these languages and even for Caldwell who immersed himself and did speak several the subtleties were legion. You have to be a true pundit to avoid getting into trouble. And Caldwell did get into trouble.  He chose one unfortunate word to describe one cultural group he was writing about and it blew up in his face. People were writing angry letters not only to Caldwell s boss but even to the Archbishop of Canterbury and he was never welcome in that part of India again.

Today s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com Like a belt around the belly of a very fat man the equator runs around the middle of our planet earth.  To the north of the equator is the northern hemisphere, to the south the southern hemisphere. The equator divides the world into two equal halves and although the word equator literally means something that makes things equal, such as halves of a planet, it is not this particular equalization that gave the equator its name. It was Geoffrey Chaucer in approximately 1391 who put pen to paper and scribbled out the word equator for the first time in English. This was not as part of one of his Canterbury Tales, but instead, it is believed, a piece he wrote for the son of a friend.  The piece is entitled A Treatise on the Astrolabe and is dedicated to Little Lewis. For a while it was assumed that Little Lewis was Chaucer s own son.  In fact that s how the work was republished when Walter Skeat, the great etymologist gave it a close going over back in 1872. But researchers now think Little Lewis was Lewis Clifford and that poor Lewis passed away before the treatise was complete, explaining why Chaucer never finished the thing. What the thing was is now believed by some to be the oldest known technical manual in English. An astrolabe is a kind of tool used by ancient sailors, mapmakers and astronomers.  With an astrolabe you could figure out based on the time of day and the position of the sun or stars where you were on the globe. So this work of Chaucer s wasn t a story like his more famous Canterbury Tales, it was a practical instruction manual for Lewis further edification. You can see that an instruction manual for such a practical navigational tool would logically refer to the equator from time to time. But that doesn t tell you why the equator is called the equator. The reason is due to a natural phenomenon observed much earlier than Chaucer. In fact our term equator is actually a contraction of a whole Latin phrase circulus aequator diei et noctis or in modern English the circle that makes day and night equal. You see, we in the northern hemisphere have longer days in summer and shorter days in wi