I’m going to tell you a yarn.

One year my mother asked me what I wanted as a gift and I asked for a sweater.  She didn’t have time to knit one so she gave me first a miniature sweater of a size suitable for a keychain.  Later she gave me the full sized article.

That’s a useful yarn because yarn not only means story, but also the spun or twisted wool that the sweater was made out of.

Actually in some ways that wasn’t a yarn at all because yarns are often stories that are long and stories that are untrue—neither of which is the case here.

The reason that a story might be called a yarn could possibly be because it was long like the strand of wool.

This meaning of yarn came from nautical traditions so starting in the early 1800s a sailor might have told you a yarn. But the nets and ropes that fishermen worked with had been called yarn for 300 years before that.

The word yarn showed up meaning “spun fiber” back in Old English before the arrival of the Norman invaders a thousand years ago. This means it was from a Germanic root.

That Germanic root and its connections go much further back to Indo-European and lead us to another ancient technology for producing string like strands.

Earlier in the week I looked into the word tennis.

When I first picked up a tennis racquet it didn’t have nylon strings, it had strings made of something called catgut. This stuff was in fact not made from the innards of cats but from the innards of cattle—cattle defined loosely, to include sheep and goats.

It was the ancient word for this kind of binding line, made from the inside of animals, that grew into our word yarn.

In Indo-European the word was ghera and in Greek this turned into khord meaning “string.”

The Romans took this word root with its sense of “gut” and applied it to situations when people’s guts began to protrude through a tear in their abdominal muscle.  We still use the same word, it’s hernia.

Those Romans put a lot of store in their soothsayers and one way to predict the future was to look at the entrails of sacrificial animals.  Such forecasters were called haruspex which literally means “guts looker.”

As Shakespeare said

“the web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”

Perhaps that’s a better use of yarn in both its senses—though the “story” sense hadn’t yet developed when Shakespeare said that.

I was a young boy there weren’t many channels on TV.

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To change channels you got up off the couch, walked across the room and turned a dial.

These days you can channel surf using your remote control.  Those remote controls usually use an infrared frequency signal to communicate with your TV but the first remote control I ever saw used high frequency sound instead of infrared.  This was fine except that when our dog scratched and jingled her dog tags the channels started flipping around.

The fact that everybody channel surfs these days is etymologically appropriate since surfing was originally done on water and channels were, and still are, watercourses.

Channel first turns up in English back around the year 1300 at which time it certainly meant a stream or river.

The English word had come from French but by 1500 people had realized that there was an old Latin word canalis or canalum from which French had formed channel and so into English sprang this new word canal right alongside channel.

It makes sense that a word describing a watercourse or a passage through which boats might travel could metaphorically be applied to an electronic channel through which TV signals might be delivered. The first inkling for this was in 1848 in a description of telegraph circuits.

If you were to guess, what date might you place on the a first citation for the following Oxford English Dictionary definition?

“That through which information, news, trade, or the like passes; a medium of transmission, conveyance, or communication…”

Does 1537 surprise you?

I mentioned channel surfing.  This got me wondering why it was called channel surfing.

It seems a no brainer that since the internet became big after the advent of TV remote controls that surfing the web grew out of channel surfing and sure enough the first citation for channel surfing was 1986 while web surfing seems to have been 1992.

But what about surfing was it that leant its name to these activities?

According to The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms the reason is that surfers are in quest of a good wave, TV watchers and web browsers are in quest of a good show or a good website.

The etymology of the word gasoline is dead boring.

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Some chemists named the first thing that comes off in the distillation process of petroleum by plugging together the words gas—being the state of the stuff—ol—being the conventional suffix of something to do with oil—and ene—another suffix organic chemists like to use for this class of matter.

We in North America call the stuff we put in our cars gas because it’s an abbreviation of gasoline, but if we look at why gasoline begins with gas and why air is a gas and the steam out of our teakettle is called a gas, that’s where things get interesting.

Around 1600 this Flemish chemist named Jan Baptist van Helmont was one of the first to figure out what a gas was.

As we know now, a gas is a state of matter in which the molecules are bouncing around in  space in no particular order, pranging into each other and into everything around them.

van Helmot called this stuff after the Greek concept of chaos, except with his Flemish accent he transcribed the Greek to the word gas instead of chaos.

Chaos from Greek was supposed to be that mixed up state of things before the world formed—not a bad theory on the ancient Greek’s part given what we now know about the formation of the stars and planets out of space dust.

So good on the Greeks and good on van Helmot.

Except that von Helmot died in 1644 and no one looked at his notes for quite some time. People used his word gas but they didn’t know exactly why he had chosen it.

They interpreted a spiritual element and for a while it was thought that he named gas after the Dutch word for ghosts geest.

I was listening to some commentary about the grunting sounds emanating from professional tennis players as they whack away at the ball.

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Some players are said to be emitting sounds that peak around 100 decibels and are compared to the volume of a lion’s roar—though of shorter duration and with less teeth showing.

Some say that these loud noises are a form of intimidation.

In this I see an etymological connection.  But then I see an etymological connection in practically anything.

The name of the game is tennis and it’s been around for a while.  The earliest reference we have for tennis is from Italian from 1325. Supposedly some French knights were hanging out in Florence and introduced the game there.

It was 1400 before the word turned up in English and that happened in a poem by a fellow named John Gower who not only lived at the same time as Geoffrey Chaucer, but was actually buddies with him.

Just like soccer and rugby and American football are offshoots of an earlier form of one sport, tennis also diverged in several directions.

It’s thought that tennis originally didn’t use racquets but was more like handball and in some cases was named for the French word for “hand.”

Over time different forms of tennis were called real tennis, lawn tennis and field tennis.

Real tennis was and still is played in an enclosed court with walls, some of which it is legitimate to ricochet your shot off of.

Until 1800 field tennis was still played with the open hand instead of a racquet.

The game we usually recognize as tennis, and from which all those loud grunts are emanating was until 1877 known as lawn tennis.

If the grunting players are indeed trying to intimidate their opponents with these noises it’s a little like shouting “take that” as they wallop the ball.  Tennis is called tennis because its early players did shout something like “take that.”

It is thought that the word tennis comes from the French word tenir meaning “to hold” or “to take.”

Some tennis players may be harder to intimidate than others though; Serena Williams is quoted as saying “ If you can keep playing tennis when somebody is shooting a gun down the street, that’s concentration. I didn’t grow up playing at the country club.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that the axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town.

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This quote appeared on my computer screen within 24 hours of my reading in an old book that Boston was the hub of the universe, and in conjunction with an etymological note telling me that many placenames ending in –ton arose from the same root as the word town.

The city of Boston, Mass. is named after the town of Boston in Lincolnshire, England and popular legend has it that Boston is a development of Botolph’s Stone and that a saint named Botolph or Botwulf once preached his holy messages in that location.

If true that would have been in the mid 600s.

That famous document The Doomsday Book was written up after the Normans arrived in 1066 and was meticulous in its detail because it was intended to be an inventory of every piece of property—right down to the farm animals—in England so that the new French masters knew what to tax. Yet that very detailed inventory neglects to mention a town called anything like Boston.

Evidently Botolph did have a number of churches dedicated to him though, and so it could be that instead of Botolph’s Stone, Boston grew up as Botolph’s Town, being the settlement that accumulated in the vicinity of one of these churches.

In its most ancient sense town meant “an enclosed space” and as such was more likely to apply to a farm than an urban center. In some languages the related words mean “fence” or “hedge.”

It was the collection of buildings that accumulated on a farm that likely gave town its modern meaning. So places like Northampton, Sutton, Taunton and Wolverhampton were named originally after farmsteads.

As Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests, everyone thinks that their particular town is the very best place to live.

I don’t live in Boston Lincolnshire or Boston Mass. but I do have some associations with the American Boston—my brother lives there for one thing.  A former mentor if mine was a Bostonian and it was from him that I first heard that Boston was the hub of the universe.

He went on to explain that the hub is that dirty greasy thing in the middle of the wheel that stands still while everything else goes on around it.

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Now this is the Law of the Jungle
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk
the Law runneth forward and back
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

That’s Rudyard Kipling.

Environmentalists have changed the use of the word jungle. Even the OED notes the similarity in sound between the words jungle and tangle and we often use jungle to mean an almost impenetrable tangle of some sort. The concrete jungle is a phrase used to convey a sense of a threatening place that is confusing and wild at times.

That’s the same reason that Kipling’s jungle comes across as a dangerous place.

Break the law of the jungle and you die.

A tropical jungle, full of snakes and parrots and vines is now called, instead, a rainforest.  Its value is justly recognized by this name change since jungle denotes something that is more than we can deal with, and so is kind of useless to us.

The word jungle comes to English from Hindi, but in some senses there, and even more so earlier in Sanskrit, it didn’t so much denote a lush rainforest, but a dry desert.

So in jungle this sense of useless land is retained, although the amount of water, wildlife and leafy overhead cover is reversed.

Jungle has only been part of English for a couple of hundred years, since the times when England was building her Empire and began taking on such words from the lands she claimed as hers.

In 1933 Franklin D Roosevelt made his famous “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” speech.  In another part of his speech he mentioned that happiness lies in the thrill of creative effort. He coupled this notion with the joy of achievement.

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One of Roosevelt’s contemporaries, Winston Churchill was asked if the fact that huge crowds gathered for all his speeches was thrilling.

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York said it was thrilling to get fired from the big financial company he’d been working for—but he only said that because he got $10 million as a severance package.

The point of all of these little stories is that we see something thrilling as something good. Joy is good; crowds gathering on your behalf is good; $10 million is good.

But the word thrill has only been something “good” for a little over hundred years.

The roots of thrill are particularly ancient, going back to Indo-European and arising in Old English.

In Modern English there are piles of words that relate in the most unexpected ways.

Believe it or not the name of the little pictures people put up on the internet to represent themselves—avatar—is related to thrill;

the name of the holes in your nose—nostril—is related to thrill;

the name of that handy household tool that makes holes—drill—is related to thrill.  (I was challenged on this one and dagnabbit, I was wrong.)

All this is possible because back in Indo-European there had been a word tera that meant to “cross over” or to “pass through.”

As I explained in my episode on the word avatar, that word came from Sanskrit and is supposed to be some kind of image of a god.

The way that worked out was that most gods don’t pad around here on terra firma and so the god has crossed over to our world; that’s the tar part of avatar.

If that old Indo-European word meant “pass through” then it is logical that it might lead to a word meaning “hole” since things can pass through holes.

What makes holes? A drill makes holes, so there’s that connection.  But a drill is called a drill because it comes from the same Old English source as thrill and that brings us to nostril.

The Old English word for “hole” was thirl and a nostril is a “nose hole” or a “nose thirl.”

In Old English we don’t see evidence of people extending the metaphor of something going through you—like a hole or a thirl—to emotions going through you. But as soon as the word morphed to thrill around 1300 we see both meanings.

Thus a thrill was for at least 500 years something that passed through you in an emotional sense, but only in the last 100 plus years was specifically a pleasurable sensation.

I don’t know if Winston Churchill was thinking of the “crossing over” etymology of the word thrill when he answered his admirer.  She’d asked about the thrill of large crowds.

He said that he always tried to remember that if he was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big.

We all recognize curry as the name of a spicy, aromatic food, but the etymological storytellers tend to give this kind of curry short shrift in favor of another older word curry that isn’t used much except in the expression “to curry favor.”

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Curry the food came into English from Tamil in 1598 but the other curry came to English from French along with William the Conqueror.

It isn’t strictly true that curry the food came into English from Tamil.

The first Englishman to write about curry hadn’t actually tasted it.  He was translating a kind of travel guide that was actually written by a Dutchman.

The Dutch were aggressive traders and had been looking for new ways to make money and had sent a pair of brothers, Cornelis and Frederik de Houtman, to check out what the Portuguese were doing. The brothers got arrested in Portugal for what amounts to industrial espionage; they tried to steal the maps of East Indian trade routes that were valuable for the spices they might provide.

Despite killing more than half the crew on their subsequent journey to get the spices, these brothers were successful and made a bundle when they arrived home with their precious cargo. A book was written about them in Dutch and translated into English and was such a success that the Translator did it again for another voyage.

It was that second one that brought to us this word curry, that had in Tamil meant “sauce for rice.”

About 300 years before, an earlier meaning for the word curry appeared.

To curry favor means to ingratiate oneself, usually with a superior.

There is a slight sense of sucking up about the expression curry favor.

It didn’t used to be favor, but instead favel so people used to curry favel.  This is a word we don’t use any more but it in turn is related to fallow—a field that hasn’t been planted is left fallow.

A fallow field looks like dead grass and has a tan brown shade.  Thus these words fallow and favel also took on a meaning of light brown color.  From there horses that were of similar color began to be called favel. That earlier existence of the word curry meant to “brush” or “rub down,” so that to curry favor originally meant to rub down a brown horse.

No one really knows why this equine image should mean to “suck up,”—perhaps it was the stable hand sucking up to the horse’s owner, maybe it was just that rubbing down made the horse happy—but there are identical expressions in French and German.

Before I go, some weeks ago I mentioned a top secret word website that was getting ready to launch.  It’s out there now so I’m officially allowed to tell you—though you may already know—the website is wordnik.com.

That famous dictionary maker Samuel Johnson had a party trick he liked to play.

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He was obviously a pretty smart guy and to prove  how smart he was he’d claim to people that he could recite an entire chapter from memory out of the book The Natural History of Iceland.

I don’t know if he took bets on this feat, but his delivery was thus:

“Chapter LXXII, Concerning snakes: There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island.”

I guess it must be true because I see that the Oxford English Dictionary believes that in Old Norse the use of the word snakr was chiefly poetic. Which is to say that the fame of snakes is such that even in northern places where there are no snakes, people still think about them.

So our word snake is from Old English and as such it comes from Germanic roots, as does the Icelandic language.

A less common—and perhaps more poetic—word for a snake in English is serpent.

While the word snake comes from Germanic, serpent comes to English from French and from Latin before that. Like many Latin words this one was founded on a Greek root.

The reason a snake is called a snake is actually the same reason that a snake is called a serpent.  Both the words snake and serpent—despite their differing etymologies—slither back to a root meaning of something that creeps and crawls.

The word srp in Sanskrit means “to crawl.”

There are other things in the world that creep and crawl and according to the OED, back in Latin the word serpens could be applied to such things as lice.

Since people in northern Europe were thinking about snakes even when they didn’t have the things, you can be sure that people in those places where Greek and Latin arose were thinking about them too.

It’s likely they were thinking about them in less poetic terms and using more specific words than might be equally applicable to lice.

A clue to what one of those words might be is found right in the OED definition for snake.  Right there along with the fact that the things are limbless and sometimes venomous the OED says a snake is “an ophidian, a serpent.”

Ophidian isn’t a word that I use very often (whic is to say I’d never heard it before) but it does come from a Greek root that actually meant “small snakes” back in ancient Greek.

This definition is one of those that makes me smile.  If someone didn’t know what a snake was, would the be too likely to know what an ophidian was?

In the olden days people made their own mistakes.  They were called typos.

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For a few decades now we’ve had the advantage of computers that can help us make mistakes more efficiently.  One typo you may have come across—and because it revolves around childish humor it’s also one you’re likely to remember coming across—is when the word pubic is mistakenly used instead of public.

I see that this occurred to a news writer recently. Canadian Parliamentarians are reported to risk having their attendance records put on pubic display.

Having the fact publicized that you skipped a bunch of the meetings you were elected to attend is embarrassing enough, but to be put on pubic display, that’s even worse.

Now it turns out that this particular typo has some roots deep in the etymology of the word public.

English took the word public from French. The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that it was an Anglo-Norman word, which is an unequivocal indication that it was introduced to England by William the Conqueror and his buddies starting in 1066.

It didn’t show up as an English word until 1394.  What that means is that when the French-speaking conquerors used the word it was still a French word, but eventually the English speaking public picked up on the word and began dropping it into their English dialogue and eventually, after more than 300 years, into their written English documents.

Like most of French the word public had been a Latin word before it became a French word. The American Heritage Dictionary tells me that it is likely that before the ancestors of public were Latin words, they were likely Etruscan words.

Pretty well all the meanings you can imagine that apply to the word public in English, were in use back when the word was still Latin, so not much of interest there etymologically.

Latin had poplus meaning “people” and it is thought that public grew out of this “people” word, but that the “b” got mixed in there by the influence of another Latin word pubes.

In English the word pubes refers to the crotch area of the human body but back in Latin it meant “grown up” or “adult” and according to the OED, specifically a “grown man.”

Hence our word puberty the word we use to describe the time when boys and girls begin to become men and women. The etymology of pubes and puberty are clearly related to the observable changes to our bodies that take place at this time.

Although we might find it embarrassing to make a typo that confused public and pubic, when the word pubes was influencing public back in classical times there wasn’t any sexual innuendo. Poplus meant “people” and pubes meant “man.” Since society was pretty well male-dominated at the time there wasn’t a huge distinction between things that related to “the people” and things that related to “men.”