A rerun podcast from 2006

This word highlights the dangers of electronic media.

I looked up bamboozled in the Oxford English Dictionary online, that’s where the draft third edition can be found.

There is a verb to bamboozle and a noun bamboozle so I clicked on the etymology for the first one listed online, the noun, and it said to check the etymology of the preceding word; which is “bamboos” and is defined as a wooden drinking vessel for milk or water etc.

The implication is that it may derive from drinking vessels made from a piece of bamboo.

Aha, I think, maybe the word comes from drinking, I mean to be bamboozled is sort of being confused, and this work sort of contains the word booze.  Let’s look at the definitions here, to deceive by trickery, well that’s got nothgin to do with drinking or drinking vessels.  Let’s check Etymonline, no, American Heritage dictionary, no.

Well, to be truthful, none of my sources go down that path, so what’s the OED telling me.

Well it turns out that the lexicographers at Oxford haven’t yet gotten around to this particular word so its entry is still the same as the one in the second edition.  Except that in their electronic database, the order that they list the noun and the verb has been reversed so that while in the second edition the verb comes first, and the noun references its etymology to the preceding word, in the online version, the noun comes first so it is referencing a word that isn’t even related.

Bamboozle has nothing at all to do with wooden drinking cups.

So the real etymology is that it appeared, evidently as slang, in around 1700.

Evidently people have always complained that the English language was going to hell in a hand basket because “bamboozle” appeared as one of the words in a publication called the Tatler 300 years ago in an article about

the continual corruption of our English tongue

Etymonline agrees with the slang origin but also offers a couple of words from Scottish dialect and French that could have lead to bamboozle.

From 2006

Some listeners have been asking for words that arose from languages other than Latin.  I chose hyena out of the blue, thinking, that’s likely to be African isn’t it?

Which just goes to show how hard it is to get away from Latin and Greek roots since hyena too arrived in English after the Norman invasion.  Ultimately the word is from a Greek word meaning “swine” or “pig.” And more than one source tells me that this is due to the ruff of hair on its back and shoulders that supposedly reminded people of similar hair on pigs—presumably wild boars, since the rest of a hyena doesn’t look like any kind of other animal.

There appears to have been a longstanding revulsion of hyenas although two references I came across said they were also held in high esteem but for different reasons.  The Devil’s Dictionary says hyenas were once revered because they visited graves at night, then old Ambrose Bierce goes on to say that that’s nothing to look up to since physicians do that—presumably he’s referring to grave robbing for anatomical study, I don’t know.

But there seems to be a low opinion of hyenas among Africans, at least in the literature I looked over, due to this very habit, not just visiting graves, but eating dead people.

Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable steers us back to Latin in explaining that Pliny thought hyenas had a kind of stone in their eye, that if you put under your tongue gave the gift of prophecy. So that to the ancient Romans at least hyenas were looked up to, but only if they were dead.

Medieval Europeans would not likely have seen too many hyenas but they still had opinions about them.  For some reason they considered hyenas to be far too interested in sex, and in some cases accused them of homosexuality or even of gender changing through their lives, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

While these assertions are pure myth, the truth is strange enough that we can forgive our ancestors their misconceptions.  I have never had the pleasure of examining the private parts of a hyena, but from what I’m told, the females have something that so resembles a penis it makes mating downright tricky.  In fact the females are the dominant sex among hyenas.  They are larger and more aggressive and researchers are finding that this is due to what we would normally associate with male hormones, that in hyenas females seem to apply to themselves as well.  It’s this exposure to male hormones that makes the female’s genitals look like a penis.  In addition to the likelihood of ancient people seeing females and thinking they were male; when male hyenas are young pups, they exhibit a behavior called play mounting which is the only practice they will get before later having to approach a slavering, dominant, aggressive penis wielding female and trying to figure out how to get it on.

No wonder people were confused.

The Zulu name for a hyena is impisi, that means “the one who cleans up.” The Sestwana name is sephiri that means the ‘animal of the secret’.

A repeat episode from May 2006 

I got the idea for this word of the day from reading more about the Oxford English Corpus, that dictionary maker’s tool said to have a billion words in its database.

One of the things that lexicographers have been able to do, that they weren’t able to do before, is give words more flavor along with their meaning.  I don’t have access to the Oxford English Corpus so I don’t know exactly what it would make of “proclivity” but here’s what I did.

Traditional dictionaries include a definition for a word. In the case of “proclivity” it might run something along the lines of “an inclination or predisposition toward something.”  That’s actually from Merriam Webster.  But there is a tone to proclivity too.  I was listening to the radio where they were talking about a natural history exhibit on the mating habits of wild animals.  The word proclivity came up in the conversation more than once.  The tone was one of titillation.  I thought…is there a kind of cheeky aspect to the word proclivity?  Something not exactly disapproved of, but not exactly respectable either?

The Oxford English Corpus would have let me look at numerous contexts of the word to tease out whether this was the case.  Since I don’t have the Corpus I had to settle for Google.  I actually used the search engines within newspapers like the LA Times and The New York Times.  Sure enough proclivities came associated with not buying new underwear, mincing around in bathing suits—sun tanning while visible from the street, cross dressing, overspending and more.  So even if the dictionary tells you that proclivity means a predisposition, it doesn’t tell you that most people use proclivity when talking with light disapproval…or is that winking approval?  The etymology of the word proclivity is ironically appropriate for this flavor of usage.  The word comes from Latin and is related to “incline,” where cl?vus means slope.  So that proclivity holds a figurative etymology of “going forward down a slope.”  And in practice our proclivities are things we allow ourselves, like a ball rolling down its natural course.

From June 2006

The podictionary word for today is “mall”:  I’m not a mall person, but of course every now and then I need to go to the mall to buy something.  Would you have suspected that the word we use to describe this collection of stores originates in a word for “hammer?”  The word I’m thinking of is the Latin ancestor of “mallet” and it shows up in other words too.  Something that can be banged into different shapes is “malleable.”

Some theories on why the chain armor that knights used to wear was called mail include the idea that it was hammered together.  In the game of croquet uses a wooden hammer to whack wooden balls through little hoops.  When I was in my twenties we somehow turned this into a drinking game fully equipped with rules that legitimized smacking someone else’s ball into the woods, or on a good day, into the river.  This game, or a game like it has been around for a long time.

The oldest name for it is closh and the name it had prior to being croquet was pall-mall.  You may recognize the name of a landmark of London England in the name of this game which translates simply as ball-mallet.  Of course in order to play croquet you need a stretch of green space and the name of the game of pall-mall is what gave the alley where it was played its name.  The place in London is only one of many where this games space gave its name to a later street called “the mall.”  And of course many of these became shopping streets and in turn, first in America, Australia and New Zealand the name started to be applied to enclosed shopping areas.

The first citation for this was in 1959 in what I’ll assume was a trade magazine, unbelievably titled Chain Store Age.  I was surprised to see in looking this stuff over that the game of closh had for many years been outlawed in England along with such other questionable pursuits as tennis, horseshoes and bowling.  Why would these innocent activities—my own version of croquet aside—be made illegal I wondered.  The explanation I found upon looking into it seems to be based on three things.  Henry VIII was the first to pass legislation against such unlawful gaming.

At the time it was felt that gambling between participants on such games was immoral in that the more talented player was depriving the loser of his hard earned cash through little better than trickery.  The legislation itself compares it to stealing.  A second reason was that anyone who had time to get really good at such games wasn’t out there working and contributing to the national economy.

Finally, in those days national defense was a much more grass roots operation.  Almost everyone in the country—anyone who owned property anyway—was legally required to keep weapons in their house so that in times of war, the king could call on them to fight.  It wasn’t the right to bear arms, it was the obligation.  It was also considered that if someone had hours to wile away, they should be practicing their archery, not whacking at wooden balls with mallets.

An old episode from May 2006

The other day I mentioned that Richard Lederer had brought up a word with an interesting background and “umpire” is the word.

An umpire is of course the official who enforces the rules in baseball and a number of other sports.  In some sports the official isn’t called an umpire but a referee instead.  Obviously a referee is someone to whom we refer such decisions.  Referees have been around for about 400 years but only about 160 as sports officials.

Umpires have been around for 600 years and about 300 years in sport.

But before they were umpires the title came to English from French and it was noumpere.

Even in today’s English we can understand the meaning of this word if we break it into “non” “peer” so the umpire was someone who didn’t have any equals—no peers—he was above the people he was judging.

It didn’t take English speakers long to confuse the phrase “a noumpere” and move the N across to the first word “an umpire.”

This happened with a number of words.  An adder, a snake, was in Old English “a nadder”; and an auger, the thing you dig holes for fence posts with, was “a nauger”.

The opposite happened as well.  Some words started in English without a leading N but had one attached because people thought it sounded better.  One example of this is “nickname.”

Do you have a nickname?  700 years ago I would have asked you if you had “an eke name” and before that “eke name” was two words.  “Eke” in Old English meant “something added” and that is why we eke out our existence.

In order to keep existing we constantly have to keep adding something, particularly to our mouths in the form of food.

A rerun from May 2006

I can think of three meanings for the word train right off the top of my head.

• There is the train that people might ride on either to go to work every day or when traveling around Europe.
• There’s the training that takes place in classrooms and
• there is the train that drags along the ground behind a woman’s wedding dress.

All of these trains, and more, do in fact relate to the same word root.  In Latin the root word came from the same root for the word “tractor” and meant to pull something.  From there in English over 700 years or so the word has been pulled in all sorts of directions from meaning the track of an animal to the gait of a horse.

It’s easy to see how the train of a woman’s dress could evolve from this pulling sense, and about 500 years ago how it began to apply to the direction of pupils, pulling them along in their course of study.  By the early 1800s it began to be applied to physical activity as well, as you might train for a race.

It was still well before Shakespeare’s time that “train” began to apply to a connected series of events or a line of some kind. And it was around the same time that people began to do athletic training that locomotive or railroad trains were first called trains.

I see a reference here to “train oil” that clearly predates railroads and the reason is that this was not oil to be used on trains, but oil that was drawn from whales, often boiled from their blubber.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary trainspotting is the hobby of hanging around beside railway lines and taking careful note of the details of the trains that go by.  There is a particularly successful movie called trainspotting that isn’t about trains at all but about junkies.  Taking a look at Urbandictionary I see that there are three definitions there for trainspotting.  One is the OED version, another is heroin injection, which would make sense in connection with the book and the movie.

Before I looked this up I had always assumed that the tracks in an addict’s arm were the source for the title. But the third Urbandictionary definition is people who hang around the DJ at a dance and take careful note of all the music he plays.  This is clearly more along the obsessive line of people who make notes on locomotives than a connection to junkies.

There is an implication in one of the entries at least that the course of the word trainspotting from hanging around railways to heroin addiction is because people obsessive about the music were also people who were shooting up.  However, I find that according to the British Council of the Arts on contemporary writers, the title of the book is supposed to be an inside joke on the fact that the junkies were hanging around an old train station in a part of town that was run down and hadn’t seen a train go through in years.

While we are taking cues from Urbandictionary I find that their entries for “train” are a little off-putting, think of a lineup of people and sex in the same context.  At first I just assumed this was one of the weaknesses of Urbandictionary, allowing almost any jerk to input whatever crude insider slang they wanted, no matter how small the circle might be of people who actually used the word in that sense.  But then I found in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang a very similar entry supposedly dating from the 1980s in Britain.

Being the happily married guy that I am, I never knew—and maybe I didn’t want to.

From April 30, 2006…

I find in the Oxford English Dictionary that there are ten words pale spelled pale.  None of them are a bucket, which would be spelled pail.

One at least is short for pale ale, so that’s okay, but I want to talk about the one that’s behind the phrase “beyond the pale.”

Five of the ten are nouns so that “pale” a noun meaning a lack of pallor is obviously only subtly different from “pale” the verb to lose ones pallor, or “pale” the adjective.  But none of these are related to “beyond the pale” which means something that is improper or as the OED defines it

“outside the limits of acceptable behavior”

Here’s the story: more than 2000 years ago Roman soldiers were like modern soldiers in that they needed to train against enemies to prepare for war.  Before going into any battles at all they used to take a wooden stick and plant it in the ground, standing up, and pretend it was the enemy they had to fight.  This stick was called in Latin a p?lus and according to the American Heritage Dictionary it comes from an Indo-European root meaning to fasten.

A whole row of sticks stuck in the ground was a palisade and we still use that word for the kind of rudimentary protective walls built around early European settlements in North America.

But the word for a stick in the ground alone came to English through French and appeared not as p?lus but as “pale” about 600 years ago.  Over time, and perhaps even before, a pale was not just a stick, but a fence, and then it was the area within the fence.

By about the time of Shakespeare’s birth, just over 400 years ago a pale was an area which was under your control, and specifically the areas of Ireland that were under English control were called the pale.

There were other areas of the world as well called the pale; the OED mentions Calais in northern France.  So things that went on “beyond the pale” were things out of control so that by 1658 it was being used metaphorically to mean out of control and by implication unacceptable.

This word “pale” is also where we get our word “impale” that is, to poke a stick through. For the sake of completeness, the word “pale” meaning the color in our faces also comes from Latin through French, but it’s root is instead pallidum.

A rerun from 2006

If I am doing a good job at podictionary I hope that I’ve astonished you with some of my unexpected histories of words you thought you already knew.

Well, at least I hope I have astonished you in the modern sense, not in the sense the word held when it first appeared in English.

In 1530 it meant to paralyze, deaden, stupefy, to stun or deprive of sensation, as by a blow.

The OED points back to a French root for the word, but others including Etymonline and the American Heritage point further back into Latin where we are told that the “tonare” in astonish means thunder.

The ass in astonish is supposed to mean “out” so astonish is said to mean thunderstruck.

Now I’m not sure if the literal “out thunder” is supposed to mean you were out in the thunder or that you are out of it because of the thunder, but in the sense used here they aren’t actually talking about thunder at all, but lightning.

Thunderstruck shows up in English about 100 years after astonish.

Even though “thunder” had been in the language for more than 800 years at that point, and had always meant the sound, not the electrical discharge, people still associated the power of the strike with the sound.  Think of Thor, the god of thunder, he wasn’t just a god of noise.

By the time you download this I will have surpassed 700,000 downloads of podictionary episodes.  If I haven’t astonished you yet, keep listening.  It may take another year, but I looked up the statistics and there is a one in 1.7 million chance of getting hit by lighting.

[NOTE at Feb '08 - downloads at this date approaching 4 million]

A repeat episode from April 2006.

Right around the time when Shakespeare was alive there was another guy in Germany by the name of Johannes Kepler.

He was quite the guy.

Wikipedia tells me that he wrote science fiction.  He must have put his imagination to good use in the realm of science fact as well because if you recognize his name at all, it is because he came up with mathematical formulae that finally explained to all those guys who had been trying to figure out how the stars and planets moved around up there in the sky, what was going on.

Even more remarkable was the fact that he was blind as a bat and couldn’t see them himself.

He comes into my little story here because it was he, in explaining not how planetary motion worked but how light bent through lenses, it was Kepler who coined the term focus.

If you look at wikipedia at Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, you’ll see that the authors use the word focus to describe the points around which celestial bodies orbit. So today the word focus has a geometric meaning.

Figuratively we all use the word.

I have to focus on the job at hand.  If you have glasses you know that optically focus has to do with bringing the light to a focal point in the back of your eye. It was something along these lines that Kepler was thinking when he borrowed this word from Latin.

If you take a magnifying glass outside into the sunshine you can focus the sun’s rays on a tiny little point and actually start a fire.

In Latin, focus means hearth or fireplace.

Of course Johannes Kepler was writing in German, actually no, he’d have been writing in Latin.  So it was 14 years after his death that the word appeared in English.  In this case the mathematical sense was retained, but instead of appearing in a document about planets or optics, the word appeared in someone’s diary referring to acoustics and a particular place where sound seemed naturally amplified.

Again from 2006 – This is a fairly well known story due to a great book that I’ll mention later.

In the year of our lord 1247, in the City of London was founded the priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem.

As a rich person might do now for tax purposes, the land for this priory was donated by one of the sheriffs of London Simon Fitz Mary.

This priory had two reasons for being.  One was to pray for the immortal soul of Simon Fitz Mary and a few of his friends.  So today you could save taxes and feel good about it, then you could save your soul and help out a few starving friars as well.

The second job of the priory was to act as a London home for the Bishop of St. Mary of Bethlehem.  Since he actually was bishop in o-little-town-of-Bethlehem his visits to London must have been infrequent.

They stopped all together after the crusades died out and Europe lost control over the holy land.

Within 200 years instead of praying for Simon Fitz Mary the place had become a hospital for lunatics.

That’s not bad since tax deductions are only good for one year.

With time, people referred to the insane asylum less as St. Mary of Bethlehem and more as a contraction Bethlehem.

Even o-little-town had been further contracted to “bedlam” as early as the year 971 so that it was only natural that the hospital too would be called bedlam.  It’s easy to see how the name of an insane asylum might evolve into, as the definition puts it:

a scene of mad confusion and uproar

Here’s the well known part.  In his book The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester talks about James Murray, the professor in the title, and one of the prime movers and editors in the publication of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and a fellow named William Minor one of the star volunteer readers for OED.

The way it worked was that the staff at the dictionary could never hope to read all the books, much less make notes on each word, that was needed to sort out how old every word was and how many meanings it had experienced etc.  So they asked for volunteers.  Some of these volunteers did yeoman service, bringing in evidence of many thousands of words.

William Minor was one of these.

The board of the OED decided they would throw a party for these hard working volunteers and give them a little thank you memento.  The invitations went out and the party was thrown, but William Minor was unable to attend.  James Murray thought it was a shame and went to personally present the award.

He was more than a little shocked to find that the address he had been corresponding with was in fact St. Mary of Bethlehem hospital and that his star researcher was in fact locked up there for being totally off his rocker.