Somehow it hadn't occurred to me 'til just now to wonder about the etymology of the word "solstice." The first part is obviously "sol," sun. Turns out the second part comes from a form of the Latin "status"/"sistere," having to do with standing (see also English words like "static" and "stasis"); basically, it's the moment when the sun "stands still." Nifty.
I recently read a submitted story in which someone who seemed to be from Africa used the word "sahib." "That's not right," I said to myself; "there's another word like that that's used for some of the same kinds of things pertaining to Africa. Now what is it?"
I did some web searches; no dice. I went back to the story, but I couldn't focus on it.
I did some more web searches. Fruitless. I tried again with the story, but the word I was missing was driving me crazy.
I picked up Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga and flipped through it. Nothing. I had a vague idea that there was a feminine form of the word, often used in reference to white girls in Africa in the colonial adventure-story tradition, so I picked up Beryl Markham's West With the Night and leafed through that; still nothing. Tried to read the story again. Couldn't.
Looked in Hemingway. Nothing.
Had a sudden brainstorm. "Aha! I know what the word is! It's 'sahib'! ...Oh, wait, no, that's the one I started with."
Finally decided to drop Mary Anne a note and see if she could tell me the word; she's done post-colonial studies. Surely she would know.
Halfway through the note, I remembered the word.
I'm gonna use the "Extended Entry" feature for once, to give you a chance to think of the word before I say it. Do you know which word I mean? Hint: turns out there isn't a feminine version; I was confused.
In a submission, I encountered the phrase "can of corn" as a baseball term; hadn't heard it before, so went and looked it up. Apparently it refers to a baseball hit in such a way that it's particularly easy to catch.
John Marshall, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's "Answer Guy," says that there are several possible origin stories for the phrase. The most accepted one, he says, is this: In olden times, "[...] a grocer would use a stick to tip a can of vegetables off a high shelf, then catch it in his hands or outstretched apron."
A British site, The Phrase Finder, gives a somewhat different explanation: it repeats a story to the effect that the phrase refers to a shopkeeper lightly tossing a can of food to a customer, and notes that it's a can of corn because the outfield is sometimes called "the cornfield."
But the P-I answer sounds better-researched.
Also, the Phrase Finder answer claims that the phrase was first used by announcer Red Barber, but the P-I answer says it was first used in 1896, which was twelve years before Barber was born.
Sarah told me she was groggy this afternoon, and I asked "From too much grog?" and the ensuing discussion led me to realize I didn't know where the word "grog" came from.
Turns out, believe it or not, that it's an eponym: comes from "Old Grog," the "nickname of Edward Vernon [...,] English admiral responsible for diluting the sailors' rum." Says MW11.
Of course, there's also the question of why Vernon was known as Old Grog.
Anyway, hoping your New Year is as ungroggy as can be reasonably expected.
This is the best etymology I've seen in months. Wikipedia on "filibuster":
The term comes from the early 17th century, where buccaneers were known in England as filibusters. This term had evolved from the Spanish "filibustero" which had come from the French word "flibustier," which itself evolved from the Dutch "vrijbuiter" (freebooter).
That brings up all sorts of other interesting words, of course. I had heard "vrijbuiter" before, but I don't think I had ever previously looked up what it meant; turns out it essentially refers to "free booty." (Note that English "booty" in the sense of "plunder" comes ultimately from Middle Low German "bute," meaning "exchange"; while "booty" in the sense of "ass" comes from Early Modern English "bottie," meaning "buttocks." I think of the latter "booty" as a very modern word, but it dates back in printed English to at least 1928.)
I could have sworn I had talked about "buccaneer" before, but apparently not. It's from French "boucanier," "woodsman"; Wikipedia's entry on buccaneer says that "Boucaniers originally were hunters who were poaching cattle and pigs. They would smoke the meat on wooden frames, 'boucans', so that it could be saved for a later time." (It also notes that the Boucaniers learned to do this from local Arawak, who called it "barbicoa," whence "barbecue.")
"Corsair," another word for pirate, derives eventually from Latin "cursus," meaning "course"; someone who travels along a course? Not sure. And another pirate word, "picaroon"--don't think I've encountered that one before--derives from Spanish "pícaro," meaning "rogue."
And I almost forgot to mention that "pirate" itself comes eventually from Greek "peira," to attempt; interestingly, it's distantly cognate with "fear."
I recently encountered the word "agida," though I'm no longer sure where. Turns out MW11 spells it "agita," and defines it as a feeling of anxiety. One might assume that it derives from "agitation," but MW11 says it's a "South Italian dialect pronunciation of Italian 'acido,'" meaning "acid" or "heartburn."
Word Detective noted, back in 2000, that "agita" is "more or less the Italian-American equivalent of the Yiddish 'tsuris,'" and that nobody's sure of its origin; he mentioned "acido" as a possible source, but also Italian "agitare."
(Later in that same column, btw, he discusses cock a snook, which we also discussed a few months back.)
Kam tells me that in Spanish, firefighters are "los bomberos"; turns out that "bomba" means both "bomb" and "pump."
The similarity of the two words made me wonder if they might be related in English, even though I know that etymology by sound is not sound etymology. So I looked them up.
It turns out that English "pump" may actually derive, distantly, from Spanish "bomba," but my dictionaries are unclear on whether that's related to the Italian "bomba" that's the root for English "bomb." So it's possible that Spanish "bomba" is actually two etymologically distinct words--a Spanish homomorph.
Interestingly, both Spanish "bomba" meaning "pump" and Greek "bombos" (the source of Italian "bomba" meaning "bomb") are, according to MW3, "of imitative origin"; I guess bombs and pumps both can sound a little like the word "bomba."
I'm always a little surprised to find that a common English word that I don't associate with Asia derives directly from an East Asian or South Asian root.
I've known for a while, for example, that "honcho" (which always sounded Spanish to me) comes from Japanese "hansho," "squad leader." (First appeared in English in 1955! Much more recent than I'd have expected.)
But it was only recently that I learned that "cushy" comes from a Hindi word meaning "pleasant." And ultimately from Persian, so I guess that's originally more Middle Eastern than South Asian; still, not where I would've expected it to come from.
It turns out that the word "canvas" derives ultimately from the Latin word "cannabis"; which, of course, means "hemp."
Not only that, but apparently the word "hemp" itself may be distantly related to the Greek "kannabis," which was the source of the Latin "cannabis."
(All this according to MW3; I first encountered the connection between "canvas" and "cannabis" in a New York Times article on attempts to legalize industrial hemp production.)
"Presbycusis" is the condition of hearing less well as you get older.
And yes, the "presby" part is as in "Presbyterian." In Greek, "presbyteros" apparently means (or meant) "priest" or "elder"; "presbys" means "old man." The "cusis" part is from Greek "akousis" meaning hearing, which is the root of "acoustic."
I always vaguely wondered how "lysergic acid diethylamide" got abbreviated as "LSD." I think I figured (or had been told) that the S came from "lySergic," but that didn't make much sense.
Turns out, according to Wikipedia, the acronym is from the German name: "Lysergsäure-diethylamid," where the S is for "säure."
Related to that last entry, the etymology of "sneeze" is pretty cool:
MW11 says it's from Middle English "snesen," alteration of "fnesen,"; related to Middle High German "pfnusen," to snort or sneeze, and to Greek "pnein," to breathe.
We've got a lot of "sn-" words in English, and some "pn-" words, but not so much with the "fn-".
Thanks, Will!
I always used to mix up Limbo and purgatory. Well, okay, to be honest I still do. But now at least I know that "Limbo" is called that because the unbaptized souls had to bend over backwards as they tried to dance under--
You're not buying it, are you.
Okay. Actually the term derives from Medieval Latin "limbus," which derives from the Latin word for "border."
I'm uncertain, however, whether that word is at all related to Latin "limen," meaning "threshold" (hence "subliminal," et alia), or whether they just happen to share some sounds and related meanings.
I've known what caltrops were since I was a kid: those four-pointed metal things, scattered in roadways to damage tires or hooves or feet.
But as with so many words, somehow it didn't occur to me 'til recently to wonder about this word's origins. It turns out that the word "caltrop" (also spelled "calthrop") also refers to any of a variety of plants (the star thistle, the puncture vine, and others) that bear spikes. (And/or look like they bear spikes.)
I'm a little uncertain how the etymology fits together (because Wikipedia seems to suggest that at least one of the plants was named after the weapon, rather than the other way 'round--but then, I don't really trust Wikipedia to be 100% accurate about such things), but MW3 indicates that the word derives from Medieval Latin calcatrippa, which probably derives eventually from roots meaning "heel" and "trap."
Meanwhile, a "caltrap" or "galtrap" is a heraldic representation of the weapon. Like the device at the top of this Heraldry of some Yorkshire Families page. Would that be azure three caltraps or? I loved heraldry when I was a kid (all those cool weird words!), but I'm way rusty at this point.
There's a park area in Santa Cruz called Pogonip, but it turns out the word itself refers to "a dense winter fog containing ice particles," making it another in a series of nifty weather words.
MW11 says it's from the Shoshone word "paγinappih," meaning "cloud."
Actually, it turns out this word isn't new to me; I had a vague idea it looked familiar, so I searched old email and discovered it was proposed as a fictionary word in a long-running game of email fictionary at least three times in a four-year period, but someone knew what it meant so it was never used. But still, I like it enough to post it here, and the definition here is slightly more detailed than the last one I saw, and at any rate the etymology (which I think is cool) was previously unknown to me.
Here's a question: how many other Shoshone words have become English words? Are there any common ones? I have no idea.
I wasn't planning to run an item today, it being my birthday, but then I learned my favorite bit of etymology in ages:
It turns out that "soccer" was originally an abbreviation for "association football."
My initial gut feeling was that that sounded awfully unlikely (just because the sounds of the words are so different, even though I know that that's no indication), but MW11 confirms it.
I'm guessing that the term "association football" (first appearance 1873, according to MW11) had to do with the Football Association, founded in 1863.
I've known the word "gunnysack" (for a burlap bag) since I was a kid, but it was only a few days ago that it finally occurred to me to wonder where the term came from. Turns out it's from "gunny," an Indo-Aryan-derived word referring to coarse fabric; there are related words in Hindi and Punjabi.
Specifically, I think "gunny" is a fabric made from jute (the plant fiber, not the Germanic people). I've know the word "jute" since I was a kid, too, but I never had a clear idea of what it was or what it was used for 'til I read that Wikipedia article recently.
I had always assumed that "widdershins" derived somehow from "widow shins," though I was never quite sure what that had to do with anything (something about witches and shinbones, no doubt). Turns out that no, it's from various German words eventually deriving from "widersinnen," meaning "to go back" or "to go against." Distantly related to "with" and "send."
[...] he had wedged himself in the coign of a double-stemmed meshwood trunk[...]
--On, by Adam Roberts, p. 225 of the 2002 Gollancz paperback edition
This one looks even more familiar than the last one; and even if I didn't know what it meant before, I could get a decent idea from context. So I almost didn't list it, but then I saw that MW3 lists it as a variant spelling for "quoin," which I didn't think I'd ever seen, and which means "angle" or "corner." It can also refer to a wedge, a keystone (or a "voussoir" (!)), or a lozenge (in the sense of a cut gem facet). Or the bricks (or other pieces) that make up the exterior corner where two walls meet; and actually, the illustration for that looks familiar, so maybe I've seen "quoin" before after all.
So that's interesting, but even more interesting is that MW3 lists two different entries for "coign"; the other says that it's derived from "coin," which turns out to be an archaic term for "corner" or "cornerstone" (from Middle French coin meaning "wedge," "stamp," or "corner"). And "quoin" derives from "coin."
Also showing up when I searched in MW3 for these words were phrases like "canting quoin" (also "canting coin"): "a triangular block for steadying stowed casks in a ship." And "coign of vantage": "a position advantageous for action or observation."
And in fact if you look up "coign" in MW11 (abridged), the only entry that comes up is "coign of vantage." So I guess the spelling "coign" is at least somewhat obscure after all.
Somehow it never occurred to me before (unless I've forgotten) to wonder about the etymology of the word "mile."
In Adam Roberts's novel On, there's a moment when a character learns the meaning of a foreign word, "mile," as something like "thousands of arm-lengths." (Don't have the book handy for exact quote.)
Which immediately (because of the interesting linguistic context in which that passage appeared) led me to wonder if "mile" was derived from "thousand" in the real world. And, sure enough, it's from Latin milia passuum, meaning "thousands of paces." Nifty.
I've known the term "dum-dum," referring to a particular kind of ammunition, for years, but it was only just now that I found out where the word comes from: the Wikipedia entry for dum-dum says it originally referred to ammunition "produced in the early 1890s at the Dum-dum arsenal near Calcutta in British India."
Wikipedia isn't always accurate, but I'm inclined to believe that, because it corroborates my guess about the etymology; what led me to that guess was a reference to "a factory in Dum-Dum" that made bullets, in Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth.