Although the average age of people getting married in North America is creeping upward, people still tend to do it.

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We haven’t yet come up with a universally agreed-upon word to refer to someone we are living with before getting married.

Once you decide though, “yes this is it, we’re going to get married,” the word fiancé becomes available.

Fiancé only lasts a little while until the word husband or wife stuns you by being applicable to your own situation, instead of just to older people.

English speakers have only had fiancés for about 150 years.  The word betrothed goes back more like 700 years.

It is easy to see the word truth in the word betrothed and the same lineage of trust applies to the word fiancé.

Even further back, 800 years ago in French, fiancé meant “trust” and came into English first with that meaning.

From “trust” to “promise” is an understandable change in meaning and so the word fiancé turns up again a century or two before Shakespeare.  In this case it shows up as a verb so that to fiancé was “to promise” and specifically to promise to wed.

Thus as the verb became obsolete the noun referring to the persons who had exchanged promises arose to take its place.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary the first person to be referred to in writing as someone’s fiancé was Blanche Mary Shore Smith who at the time was engaged to be married to Arthur Hugh Clough.

Since you likely don’t recognize either of those two lovebirds I will mention Blanche’s cousin, whose name you will recognize. Arthur worked for years as unpaid secretary for her.

She was Florence Nightingale.

I chose the word skeptical because I was wondering where the phrase “to take something with a grain of salt” came from.

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Of course if you are told to take something with a grain of salt it means that whatever information you are being given should be viewed with skepticism. You should question its accuracy before accepting it.

I’ll start with the word skeptical and sprinkle the salt later.

William Shakespeare hadn’t yet become a teenager when the word skeptic appeared in English in 1575.

It may have arrived from French but this was a time in the development of English when people were pulling words directly from Latin quite freely. So it may have been a direct Latin transplant.

In either case its parent word before Latin is thought to have been skeptikos from Greek meaning “thoughtful” but itself built on the Indo-European root spec.

When you are thoughtful you metaphorically look at an idea from different angles and that’s how this root that means “look” (and is the grandparent of words like spectacles and the scope part of telescope) came to be a part of a word that means to be “doubtful” or “questioning.”

Many of the etymologies I saw make reference to someone called Pyrrho of Elis who lived about 2,300 years ago and is seen as originating a skeptical philosophy.

He must have been a very annoying person because he saw it as his duty not only to play devil’s advocate for any statement of fact presented to him, but to teach others to do it as well.

So much for skepticism.

What about taking things with a grain of salt?

This expression isn’t quite as old as skepticism but it comes pretty close. The story comes from Pliny the Elder almost 2,000 years ago.

The Latin original was cum grano salis and applied not to skepticism but to an antidote to poison. Supposedly the Roman General Pompey had discovered some antidote and part of the recipe was that it be taken with a grain of salt.

We don’t know if Pliny or Pompey or some later person was skeptical of this as effective protection against poison. In any case the phrase didn’t appear in English until 1647 and by then had adopted its skeptical meaning.

In 2001 the Random House Word Maven expressed the opinion that this “skeptical” meaning likely had developed independent of whether Pliny was doubtful. Instead speakers invited their listeners to improve the palatability of a doubtful story by adding a little salt, as they might to food.

One of the efforts people are making to try and reduce the amount of energy they use is to replace their old light bulbs with the new spiral compact fluorescent kind.

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The old kind are called incandescent light bulbs and once upon a time they were new themselves.

You can see the word candle there inside the word incandescent and etymologically it fits. Both words are built on a Latin root candere meaning “to shine” or “to be white” or “to glow.”

The difference is that incandescence means “to shine from within.”

English didn’t invent it; it was already a Latin word and was dragged into English just over 200 years ago and applied to things like hot coals.

That only just predated the invention of the light bulb whose first stirrings began in the early 1800s and finally became a commercial product in the last 20 years of that century.

So a candle has a flame that glows, but a hot coal glows from within.

There was more hoopla surrounding the introduction of incandescent lights than there seems to be surrounding compact fluorescents.

On the 14^th of June in 1881 one of the biggest lumber producers in the world switched on their brand new electric lights for the first time. E.B. Eddy had shut down production for the event and throngs of people showed up; a band played in the streets for two hours to celebrate.

As a bonus, in researching this little factoid I discovered a new word I hadn’t known before; kerf.

When you cut up a log into boards the thickness of your saw matters.

It matters a lot if you run a big lumber mill because with thin cuts you get more boards out of a log; with thicker blades more of what should be sold as boards ends up becoming sawdust—which is harder to make a profit on.

That slot left in the wood after a saw goes through is called the kerf.

It’s an Old English word meaning “to cut” and you can remember it by associating it with another word that is much more common; carve.

Lewis Carol’s work Through the Looking Glass wasn’t called Through the Mirror and that made me wonder if mirror was a word that came along more recently.

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In fact mirror came into English 700 years ago from French where it was about 200 years older.

By the time it arrived in English mirror had already taken on an analogous meaning, since the first citation shows mirror to mean “an example worth imitating.” So with this meaning Mother Theresa would be a mirror.

It was only a few decades later that the meaning we’d recognize in our bathrooms appeared (although at the time glass wasn’t exactly common so mirrors were polished metal.)

The term looking glass didn’t appear until 1562 and that first citation runs “daily & hourly I might look, as in a mirror or looking-glass” which shows mirror as the standard word against which looking glass was being introduced.

All the dictionaries I looked at said that mirror came to English through French from a Latin word mirari meaning “to look at,” “to wonder over,” or “to admire.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots pushes the etymology back to smei, an Indo-European word that meant “to laugh” or “to smile.”

The sense development wasn’t that you smile in the mirror, but instead that something you would smile at might be something you would wonder over or admire.

Both the words smile and admire are thought also to be connected to this Indo-European root.

The sense of a mirror as something that represents the world around it is the reason why a number of newspapers have the word mirror in their names.

Is the game of squash named in any relation to the vegetable squash and either of them related to the action of squashing something?

Yes, they are all related—sort of.

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I’ll start at the beginning, or as close to the beginning as I can get in etymology; Indo-European.

The other day I mentioned an Indo-European root word kwet meaning “to shake.”

This word root is the same parent of the Latin word which though French gave us squash, which according to The Oxford English Dictionary means “to squeeze, press, or crush into a flat mass or pulp.”

I’m only guessing but I’d say that the violent or destructive aspects of the Indo-European kwet “to shake” morphed into the destructive aspects of squashing something.

This version of the word squash didn’t turn up in English until 1565 which is a little late for something that came from Old French with the Normans and perhaps for that reason the OED mentions that squash also might have come about in this form based on the similar word quash that had been known in English since 1275.

You squash a bug but you quash a suggestion.

In either case the result is the same, the bug or the suggestion are dead and gone.

The name of the sport squash comes from this same source. At first it was just the ball that was called the squash, the game was called squash rackets.

The ball was called the squash because it was a soft squishy ball.

I said that the vegetable squash was also etymologically related and in saying that I was stretching the truth.

A squash that you might serve for dinner or cook into some soup is named as an abbreviation of a Narragansett Indian word  asquutasquash.

In fact since most of us only eat one squash at a time the appropriate Narragansett word should be asquutasq since asquutasquash is plural.

Moreover, since we usually eat our squash cooked the appropriate Narragansett word really should be utasq since asquutasquash means plural uncooked squashes.

And how does that remotely relate to Latin and squishiness?

Before the squash ball was called squash there was an earlier English vegetable called squash.

William Shakespeare mentioned it. Back in his day the vegetable squash was immature or unripe pea pods.

The reason pea pods might be called squash was that before the peas are fully formed you can feel the emptiness of the pod by squashing it between your fingers.

The Devil’s Dictionary tells us that weather is:

A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned.

In fact weather is of great concern to us since if it’s good we can enjoy it, and if it’s bad it not only keeps us from getting outside, but can cost billions in insurance payouts and government emergency expenditures.

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Weather the noun is as old as can be, appearing in English pretty much as soon as the language could be called English, in this case 725.

Until the 15th century the word was pronounced “weder” with a “d” instead of a “th.”

In Russian a related word vedro means “good weather” while in Lithuanian vydra means “bad weather.”

The thinking is that the root of the word comes from an Indo-European root we meaning “to blow.” In that sense a day without wind might be a day without weather.

The expression “to weather the storm” means to sit it out, hopefully in a safe place.

According to the OED the expression comes from nautical origins.

The scenario goes like this.  Sailing requires wind.  Storms or sunshine are brought by the wind and so among sailors the words wind and weather became synonyms of a kind.  So when sailing, to weather an obstruction meant to sail to the windward side of it.  When passing along a coast, this usually was the only alternative to crashing into the shore, so that to weather a rocky point meant to get safely by it.

From there it was only a short leap from meaning “to get safely through” that part of the journey, to meaning get safely through other ordeals.

Have you ever noticed how many weather vanes are roosters?

According to Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the reason for this is that in the 9th century the pope—and I couldn’t find out which pope—decreed that all churches should mount a rooster on their spire as a symbol of St. Peter who upon the day of Christ’s arrest denied being a disciple not once, not twice, but three times before the rooster crowed.

Today I was given a demonstration of a rescue sled for injured skiers. The rescue team had the whole kit; oxygen bottle, defibrillator, the works.

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They were equipped to save people in serious trouble; but they admitted to me that usually they are helping out people who are suffering from a broken ski binding or an inability to read a map.

The Oxford Dictionary of English says that rescue means to save someone from a dangerous or difficult situation. They give the example of firefighters rescuing a man from a river.

So today it is appropriate to call what these folks do rescue but before 700 years ago, when rescue came into English, its Latin parent had a slightly different meaning.

The Indo-European root kwet meant “to shake.”

This word made its way eventually into Latin as quatere also meaning “to shake.”

One of the descendents of this Latin word made it into English as excuss which is probably a word you aren’t familiar with.

Just as new words are being brought into English all the time, some words become less and less popular until they are obsolete. Excuss is one of those words.

Around Shakespeare’s time you might come home from a shopping trip and excuss your purchases from your shopping bag; excuss meant to “shake out.”

You can see the ex meaning “out” while the cuss comes from that Latin quatere root.

As well as meaning “shake out,” excuss meant “shake off” or “get rid of.”

Although excuss died the death of an unpopular word, its daughter word rescue survived.

Just as Latin built excuss out of two parent words, they also built rescue by sticking together re meaning “again” and the predecessor of excuss the Latin excutere meaning “get rid of.”

Thus rescue literally means “shake off again” or “get rid of again.”

How might getting rid of something relate to being saved from a dangerous situation like a burning building?

At first the dangerous situation that this word referred to was being attacked by someone or held prisoner by them. So to be rescued was to get rid of the attacker; to shake them off again.

By the time the Latin word made it into English through French in the 14^th century it had already expanded to include most of the meanings we now recognize.

Brent asks, with respect to the word bachelor “What do an unmarried man and a four year college degree have in common; and which came first?”

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They both appeared in the written record pretty darn close to each other in English.

Someone who’d taken the lowest level of courses at an institution of learning is recorded as being called a bachelor as early as 1362.

Geoffrey Chaucer is the first person cited as calling an unmarried man a bachelor around 1386.

These dates point to a French entry point into English after William the Conqueror.

The earliest use of bachelor was recorded in 1297 according to The Oxford English Dictionary with a now largely forgotten meaning of a

• “a young knight, not old enough, or having too few vassals, to display his own banner, and who therefore followed the banner of another” or
• “a novice in arms.”

In both the case of bachelor “a four year college graduate” and bachelor “an unmarried man” it was this sense of youth that lent the word these new meanings.

The French roots of the word are usually presumed to have been from Latin but no one seems to have absolutely hammered down the exact etymology way back then.

There are quite a few suggested etymologies to bachelor but it isn’t uncommon to see several of them being suggested and subsequently shot-down on the same page. For instance the website Wordnik pulls from the American Heritage Dictionary to say “perhaps of Celtic origin” and then follows that up with an extract from The Century Dictionary saying “erroneously referred to a Celtic origin.”

One theory is that a Latin word baccalaria referred to a section of farm land and that the word bachelor came from a subordinate or tenant farmer on such land.

This land in turn might have been used for raising cows because the late Latin bacca had earlier been vacca meaning “cow.”

Another theory takes the Latin word baculum which means “stick” and suggests that the knights in training would practice using sticks instead of real swords.

Although the word bachelorette didn’t show up in English until 1935, one of the etymological theories was that in Old French there had been a word bachelle meaning “young woman” and that bachelor is simply the male equivalent of this.

Helen Rowland quipped that a bachelor thinks of himself as “a thing of beauty and a boy forever.”

When you log into your computer you don’t suspect that typing your password has anything to do with the trunks of trees, but it does.

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The origin of logging-in comes from filling out a daily log book.

Starting about three hundred years ago a log book was the document into which the captain of a ship wrote the important aspects of the day’s proceedings.

The most important of these were the ship’s progress across the face of the deeps.

In those days there were no GPS systems and it is from the relatively crude approach to making these calculations that we get several important words.

I don’t know what I would have done to calculate my surface speed without instruments but here’s what they did.

Every so often they took a chunk of wood tied to a string and tossed it overboard. Depending on how fast the string played out they could calculate their speed.

That chunk of wood was called the log although over time it was engineered into becoming a board designed to stand vertically in the water and resist movement from the cord pulling on it.

From this floating piece of carpentry came the term for documenting progress and eventually the term you use to describe typing in your password at a computer.

Another great word from this practice of ship-borne logging comes from the method used to calculate the length of string the log pulled out.

The sailor tossed the log and turned one of those timers that works by trickling sand through a glass. The string that played out had knots tied in it at regular intervals and he counted the number of knots that went by during the time it took for the sand to run out.

It was just a happy coincidence that the Old English word knot meaning “the tied part of a rope,” sounds the same as the Greek word for “sailor.”  Thus the speed of a ship is measured in knots.

Etymologically being humiliated is the human condition.

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I heard two people this week say that something that had happened to them was humiliating. What they meant was that their pride had been hurt; something had happened that had knocked them down a peg.

Without even opening a dictionary I knew that the uncomfortable experience of being humiliated is named from the same root as the word humility.

Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines humility as freedom from pride or arrogance. That sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?

But being made to feel free from pride is not so good; that’s why being humiliated is not a good thing.

Humility came to English from French after the Norman Conquest but of course that French had come from Latin before it so when English began importing words directly from classical languages the word humiliate was one of the words it adopted from Latin; in this case showing up first in writing in 1533.

Having intuited my way to the word humility I wondered about the difference between humility and humble; particularly when I see that the Latin humilis means “humble.”

In the etymology for humble, The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that humble comes from humilum, a Latin word meaning “low,” “small” and “insignificant.” So it’s no wonder that the words humility and humble have such similar meanings, they come from the same Latin roots.

But then I noticed in John Ayto’s Word Origins, where he says that humble literally means “close to the ground,” that humble is a derivative of humus meaning “earth” in Latin.

Then he goes on to say that this is the same earthy root that gave us the word human.

“How does that work?” I immediately wondered.

Is being “only human” what keeps us humble?

Actually it is being not godly that makes us human, etymologically at least.

Gods are of the heavens, humans are of this earth.