Well, that excursion got us quite far from word origins, so I solemnly swear to “return to the muttons”. A 15th-century French farce featured a lawsuit over some stolen sheep, but the litigants kept wandering away from the point. The exasperated judge kept saying “revenons à ces moutons!” — let’s get back to the sheep — and it’s been slang for “return to the subject” ever since. (And if you believe I’m really going to live up to that promise, please contact me to inquire about the TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS IN A NIGERIAN BANK ACCOUNT THAT IS WAITING JUST FOR YOU.)
By the way, one could win a few bets by asking people if any common personal names come from extra-terrestrial aliens. The answer is yes — Michael, Gabriel, Rafael, and all their masculine and feminine variants. It is hard to come up with a definition of “ET” aliens that doesn’t include angels. They are an intelligent non-human life form, not native to Earth, with abilities and lifestyle very different from humans. Since angels as usually depicted have six appendages — two arms, two legs, and two wings — it would seem they are more closely related to insects than to mammals, all of which have or had only four. (The only common mammal with six appendages is of course the centaur, although at least one flying horse has been reported in the literature.) If genetic engineering proceeds as rapidly as it now seems, it won’t be too long before some mad scientist manages to create a flying pig just to show off. The newspaper headline, of course, will be “Swine Flew!”
25Aug10 The Acropolis of Athens wasn’t meant to be defended. In ancient times, a walled city could not be taken except by starvation, but Athens made itself essentially siege-proof by having a strong navy and then building the famous long walls connecting the city to its port of Piraeus so that it could be supplied by sea indefinitely. (C.f. Constantinople, built on a peninsula, whose triple walls protected the city on the landward side for over a thousand years until the invention of cannons.) The most impregnable fortress in Greece was not Athens but Acrocorinth on an 1,800-foot-high sheer monolith towering above the Isthmus of Corinth. For two thousand years, whoever occupied that rock cut Greece in half. Acrocorinth and two other powerful fortresses in northern Greece were known as the “Fetters of Greece” — the Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, and Turks only bothered to garrison the three fetters, since no revolt or invasion could succeed as long as they were held. (For completeness’ sake, the other two were Chalcis in Boeotia and Demetrius in Thessaly.)
Meanwhile, Akron is perfectly good Greek for “high point” and is geographically appropriate — it straddles the continental divide between the watersheds of the Atlantic (via the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence) and the Gulf of Mexico (via the Ohio and Mississippi), and it’s the seat of Summit County, Ohio.
Greek polis (city), seen in acropolis, metropolis (mother city), and cosmopolitan (citizen of the world) is also Indo-European, because it’s the same word as the -pore in Singapore (Lion City), as well as the -pur on the end of cities in India — Kanpur, Jodhpur, and hundreds more. Constantinople has polis on the end, and when the Turks took over, it was renamed Istanbul, still the same ending but borrowed from Sanskrit. Minneapolis is half Algonkian and half Greek.
Even so, that’s a better fraction than Athens, which isn’t a Greek word at all. The city, of course, is named for grey-eyed Athena, goddess of wisdom, strategy, and technology. Even the ancient Greeks recognized that she was one of the “old gods” like Gaea and Chronos; Zeus, Hera, and so on are explicitly referred to as the “new gods” in Homer. Nobody has ever found what language “Athena” might be — one guess is that it’s a reversal of the ancient Egyptian goddess Enatha, who was mother of the sun.
Before we get entirely off the subject of apples, cider is regarded as a humble drink of the rural countryside, which makes it all the more surprising that the word is from shekar, a general Semitic term for any intoxicating beverage other than wine. Greek borrowed it from Hebrew and Latin from Greek by way of Bible translations (it is rendered sicera in the Vulgate), but it had become restricted to fermented apple juice even before English picked it up. (Modern versions of the Bible usually say “strong drink” to translate the Hebrew word.)
Still on the subject of Semitic drinks, the Arabic root responsible for coffee was also their original word for wine. It’s assumed the common meaning was “dark beverage”. Eventually both Hebrew and Arabic adopted the vine/wine words, q.v.
These days one can get a pedicure or manicure (foot or hand care) at a spa. That’s a generalization from the resort of Spa, Belgium, famous for its medicinal waters. It was “medicinal” because it tasted horrible, of course. 26Aug10 Many other sites blessed with foul water (Bath and Epsom, England, Marienbad, Czech Republic, Baden-Baden, Germany, and Saratoga Springs, New York being perhaps the most obvious) got rich that way. The medicinal spring at Epsom was saturated with magnesium sulphate, now usually called Epsom salts. Saratoga Springs once had the largest hotel in the world.
Surprisingly, the word mavens insist that care itself is not related to cura. That word is Germanic and meant to lament. The ie root meant to cry out; it is also seen in Gaelic slogan (sluagh-ghairm, army cry) and Latin garrulous.
To confuse things even further, an unrelated Indo-European kar- root meant to desire or love, which led to Latin caress, cherish, and charity, the Sanskrit Kama Sutra, and Germanic whore! (This last is presumably a euphemism, since it literally means “dear, sweetheart”. 31May10 Cf. tart, which originally meant a delicious pastry, then a pretty girl or sweetheart, and finally (about 1880) a prostitute.)
Digressing slightly, hinge once was a two-syllable word with a hard /G/, so that the plural “hinges” sounded more or less like the tennis player Martina Hingis. This pronunciation makes it more obvious that hinge is a derivative of hang. Stonehenge is Old English for “hanging stone”. There were several natural hanging or balanced rocks elsewhere in Britain called stone henges, in addition to the famous prehistoric man-made ring on Salisbury Plain. (The change from “-eng-” to “-ing-” is normal; the original “senge”, “weng”, “crenge”, and “frenge”, for example, have become modern singe, wing, cringe, and fringe.)
Getting back to stone henges, there is a funny anecdote about Logan Rock, an 80-ton stone balanced on a 100-foot spire in Cornwall, which could be rocked back and forth by hand. In 1824 a certain Lt. Goldsmith of the Royal Navy and some of his crew, presumably influenced by alcohol, decided it would be fun to tip the rock into the sea. The public was so outraged that the Admiralty ordered Lt. Goldsmith to put it back at his own expense, an effort that nearly bankrupted him. It took seven months and sixty men to get the stone back up on its perch, but it never could be balanced again so as to move. Cornish log means to move to and fro, so it presumably was once the “logging rock”.
05Dec09 Latin spectrum meant “apparition” or“ghost”, a sense still seen in specter and spectral. The colors-and-prism sense of a spectrum is due to Newton. An early sense of a spectacle was a glass window (“the castle’s throne room had a pair of spectacles”), hence the current plural use for eyeglasses. Something spectacular is, of course, worth looking at. Latin speculari meant to spy out, observe, or study, hence English speculate.
A few other “look” words are not quite as obvious. A gyroscope is evidently a compound of Greek giro-, to turn, but “see a turn” doesn’t seem to make sense until you know that the original gyroscope was invented by Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth, since the axis of the instrument stays stable while the Earth rotates underneath it. (Every science museum in the world has a Foucault pendulum which likewise demonstrates the Earth’s rotation while you watch.) Both sniperscope and snooperscope are not only Greek-Latin blends, they logically should mean an instrument for observing snipers or snoopers, which in reality only happens if you look in the front end of it while it’s in use. Kaleidoscope was coined by the inventor from Greek kalo-, beautiful, and a stereoscope “looks at solid objects”. Stethoscope is from Greek stethos, chest, but the gadget has nothing to do with vision. There, the “look at” definition has been generalized to “observe” or “learn about”.
To expect is to “look out”, while conspicuous means “quite visible”, to prospect is to “look forward”, to suspect is to “look underneath” (the surface of things), inspectors “look intensively”, retrospection and introspection are looking backwards or inwards, to respect something is to examine it closely, a circumspect person carefully “looks around”, etc. etc. etc. Cf. the famous inscription on the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren in his masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London: Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice, — “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around.” Some wag “translated” circumspice as “Sir! Come, spy, see!”, which is right up there with the person who submitted an “Alfred David” to a court in connection with a request to “Have His Carcass”. (See the section on Folk Etymology for many more examples of this sort of thing, although I have to point out that “have his carcass” is in fact a legitimate translation of habeas corpus.)
Still on the subject of watching over things, overlook now has opposite meanings — to watch closely and to fail to see. Oversee also once had both definitions, as its noun oversight still does.
As a side note, for fifteen hundred years the word was messias in Greek, Latin, and English — an English Bible translation of 1560 created “messiah” to look more like the original Hebrew. That same translation re-created seraphim and cherubim, replacing seraphin and cherubin. Cf. Ashkenazim and Sephardim as Hebraic-style plurals designating the major divisions of European Jewry — northern or central European and Spanish/Portuguese, respectively. Sanhedrim was formerly common in England for the Jewish council mentioned in the New Testament, but that’s a mistake — the proper Sanhedrin is a Greek word, not Hebrew, and is a member of the “sit” family as mentioned below. On the other hand, the festival of Purim (lots) is a plural, as is Elohim, gods. Taliban is also a plural; one member of the movement is technically a talib, borrowed into Pashto from the Arabic word for “theological student”. The Semitic TLB root means to seek out. C,f, assassin (from hashish), Bedouin (from badw, desert), and Sudan (from suda, black), all Arabic plurals now treated as singular in English.
Here are several very unlikely relatives of Peter and petroleum. First on the list is parsley; it is what the French did to Greek petroselinon, rock celery. In Old English, the name of the plant was petersilie, which shows the ancestry somewhat better. Another cousin of Peter is the sea bird called the petrel. This is literally “little Peter”; the bird flies so close to the water that its feet often touch, and the name seems to be an allusion to the biblical story of St. Peter walking on water. Thus, a petrel is (etymologically at least) related to the limpet and the lamprey, both from Latin lampetra. For 1,500 years this has been explained as lambere, to lick, plus petra, stone, because both animals adhere themselves to a rock and hold on for dear life. It is possible, of course, that this is folk etymology by the Romans, modifying some unknown word.
Chain, by the way, is the French version of Latin catena, with the same meaning. The only other relatives in English are catenary, the curve formed by a hanging cable, as in a suspension bridge, and concatenate, to link several items together.
A famous hero in early English history was Hereward the Wake (the Wary or the Watchful), an Anglo-Saxon (or perhaps Anglo-Danish) leader who led several years of cat-and-mouse warfare in the fen country against the invading William the Conqueror and his Normans. (Cf. Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, in the American Revolutionary War.) A couple of centuries after Hereward, some of his legendary exploits were applied to Robin Hood instead. (He had a nicely appropriate name for a military leader — “Here-ward” is Old English for “Army Guardian”. The first syllable is also in Walter, Harold, Herman, Herbert, Oliver, etc.) Meanwhile, other members of the “watch” family include the French surveillance (over-watching), reveille, and bivouac, borrowed from German “by-watch”. Surprisingly, velocity is another relative; the original definition was “liveliness”.
Another contemporary name from popular literature of the time is Kim. As a stand-alone boy’s name it is from Kipling’s 1901 novel of that name, whose hero was named Kimball O’Hara. Feminine Kim is clipped down from Kimberley — Kimberley is “royal meadow” and Kimball is “royally bold” in Irish. On the other hand, the very common Vietnamese and Korean name Kim means “golden”,(twenty per cent of the Korean population is surnamed Kim), and it’s the first syllable of kumquat — “golden orange” in Cantonese. I’ve been told there are also a few Kims floating around Germany, where it is short for Joachim.
Korea, Sweden, and a few other countries suffer from phonebookitis, the problem of having too few family names. Think of the Seoul phone book — the city has almost two million people named Kim. Iceland has the opposite problem, because they still commonly use patronymic names that change every generation — Peter Olafsson might have children named Ragnar Petersson and Inger Petersdottir, a grandson named Sven Ragnarsson, etc. Somewhere I read the Reykjavik phone book is unique because it’s alphabetized by first name. The Beijing Olympics popularized the fact that the Chinese “alphabetize” by the number of strokes in a written character.
Vanessa is another invented name from English literature. Jonathan Swift created it as a pet name for a girl he was courting, Hester Vanhomrigh, in about 1710. He wrote the poem Cadenus and Vanessa about her.
All the meanings of type are from the same figure of speech. Greek typos meant a mark or emblem, from an Indo-European teu- or steu-root that meant to push, stick, or strike. Therefore we have the literal printing type and typewriter, and also the sense of a general characteristic, as in typical. The same “strike” root produced tympanum, which meant both drum and panel of a door in Greek. The singular now means eardrum, while the plural tympani means a set of kettledrums. The original meaning of timbre was the sound of a bell or gong, toil came from a Latin word for a hammer, and a contusion is the result of a beating. Latin tussis meant a cough, and pertussis (strong cough) is the medical term for Whooping Cough. It’s the /P/ in the standard DPT immunization shots given to infants. (The other two initials are for Diphtheria (q.v.) and Tetanus, a member of the tenacious tenor family.) 04Oct09 Stupid means “stunned” by a blow to the head — “The boxer lay stupid on the canvas after being counted out by the referee.” Cf. stupor. (For stupendous, cf. shocked, amazed, astonished, and other similar metaphors for “speechless”, all of which literally mean “knocked insensible”.)
04Dec09 French has totally disguised pierce, which began life as Latin pertusiare, to “push through” — cf. the Nez Percé (pierced nose) Indian tribe. Study and studio are from using “push ahead” to mean “diligent”. A French ratatouille is a vegetable stew, where the second element is touiller, to stir up. The Greek Styx is probably also a family member — it literally means “hatred”. In Germanic the word got weakened to “poke” or “project”, leading to stoke, stub, stump, steep, and steeple. Last but not least, the step- in stepmother, stepsister, etc. means “pushed out” [of the family]. 26Sep09 Stubble looks like it should be a “little stub”, but it is unrelated, being instead a descendent of Latin stipula, stem. The original meaning of “stub” was a stump, and so everyone has always assumed that stubborn meant “as unmovable and obstructive as a stump,” but nobody has been able to account for the form. To “stub your toe” is an Americanism from about 1850.
An extreme but well-attested change takes “character” to gash! Old French adapted the original Greek into garser, to cut. This became garse and then garsh in English, with the same meaning. Since the British don’t pronounce an /R/ before a consonant, this latter was pronounced “gash”. The re-spelling was probably helped along by poets conveniently rhyming “garsh” with “slash”. Nothing to it when you know the secret! (The spelling had already been changed before bash, crash, clash, smash, dash, mash, hash, lash, splash, thrash, quash, squash, and gnash came along. Obviously English thinks the -ash ending is appropriate for violence.) By the way, the original Indo-European root gher- seems to have meant both “scratch” and “grind”, so there are several more relatives from the latter sense. grind itself, plus grit, groat, grout, grist, and gravel, among others. Through Greek, a related “scratch” root also led to the whole graph family — autograph, diagram, grammar, carve and about a hundred more ranging from graphite (used for writing) to pornography. (The first use of “pornography” in English was with the etymological definition — description of prostitution — in a 19th-century medical report on the plight of London streetwalkers.)
The first meaning of program was a public notice; literally “words put in front” of the public. The term came to be used for a prospectus (“see in front”) or syllabus, as in “the government’s program for housing”. From there, it progressed to “public list” of any kind (a television program was what we would now call a station’s listing), and on to a list of any kind. Cf. the theatrical or sports sense of a list of performers, acts, etc. (“The bassoon quartet was the third item on the program,” or “Kobe Bryant is number 24 in your program.”) A computer program goes back to the “prospectus” sense — a list of items to be accomplished in order to complete a task.
Germanic produced groove, grub (to dig), and grave, while geologists use the German graben to refer to a block of crust that has sunk below its surroundings because the crust has pulled apart. The African Rift Valley is a really big graben, while Death Valley and the Rio Grande valley in Albuquerque are smaller ones. The first meaning of “groove” in English was a mine shaft, by the way, and miners were called groovers — someone named Grover presumably has an ancestor who was a miner. 21Aug10 (Cf. Baxter, Butler [bottler], Carter, Cartwright, Chandler, Collier, Cooper, Currier, Fletcher, Forester, Fowler, Fuller, Gardner, Glover, Harper, Mercer, Palmer, Parker, Sawyer, Skinner, Tanner, Taylor, Teller, Thatcher, Tyler, Walker and many other surnames from obsolete professions. Saylor means “dancer”, not “boatman”. See exult for lots more relatives.)
A pervert was once a religious apostate, a convert as seen from the rear. Politicians who change parties to facilitate re-election are perverts. The adjective perverse has kept the original meaning of “contrary”, — a perverse opinion is not a perverted opinion. Perversion maintains a sort of middle ground; “This is a perversion of Einstein’s theory” does not imply a moral failing, but it does imply someone trying to stir up trouble, a “devil’s advocate” who knows they are wrong. (Note that “wrong” itself means “turned”. It’s yet another vers- word as described below.)
A poetic verse is literally a “turning”, and the original definition of versatile was variable or easily changed. The eyeball was once described as a versatile organ, meaning it could pivot in any direction. To reverberate is to twist back and forth like a whip. For three hundred years, the only meaning of version was a translation of a text, “turning” it (i.e., a conversion) into another language. The current usage is from phrases like “The English version of the Bible”. The Latin phrase vice versa means “turned in place”, i.e., reversed. (The vice- prefix attached to another noun means “in place of” — vice-president, viceroy, viscount, vicar, vicarious, etc.) Numismatists call recto (q.v.) or verso when flipping a coin.
Sticking to Latin, the joints of your spine are called vertebrae even though most of them can’t twist and turn that much. The term was especially used for the ball and socket “first vertebra” connecting the skull to the neck, and other ball and socket joints like the hip and shoulder were once also called vertebrae.
Getting back to wer- again, rhapsody is from Greek rhaptein, to sew. Other Germanic relatives are writhe, wreath, wrath, worry, wring, wry, wriggle, wrest, wrestle, wrinkle, warp, wrap, and wrong (originally, crooked in the geometrical sense). Wrangle is to “wring” as “wrestle” is to “wrest”. The original meaning of warble was to oscillate back and forth before it modulated to “quaver” instead. (As one might expect by this point, whirl is another Germanic descendant of wer-, and swirl is almost certainly related. Swerve looks like it should be a connection, but the experts are undecided.)
And finally, the last word(s)…. Another interesting set starts with vertex, which in Latin meant a (rapidly turning) whirlpool. From that, it came to be applied to the crown of the head, from the swirling pattern (whorl) of hair at that spot, and eventually vertex came to mean “that which is overhead, the highest point” in general. In particular, astronomers used the word for the heavenly point directly overhead, in the vertical direction. Note that vortex still retains the original meaning of a whirlpool.
