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The word chain is one of those words that came with the French at the time of the Norman Conquest and replaced an earlier Old English word for the same article—a series of linked metal loops—sending the Old English word into obscurity.

It is often said of these words with French heritage that they were the more aristocratic words and that the native English words that survived were more utilitarian. But a chain seems to me to be pretty utilitarian.

Perhaps it is the use to which the chains were put that caused the French word to be uttered frequently enough that it displaced the Old English.

Before the arrival of William the Conqueror English men and women referred to a chain as a rackan or a rackanteie.

I can’t find evidence that this word was related to rack as you might hang something on, but both rackan and rack appear to have been common kitchen words. Imagine how food was cooked before the coming of closed stoves. A pot was hung over a fire, there would have been a rack to hang it from and a rackan or chain to make it easy to adjust the height.

So it seems to me likely that these two words are related.

Today rackan is a completely obsolete word but I do see citations for its use as recently as 130 years ago and in that most utilitarian of places, the kitchen. So although the word died out, it took a long time to do so simply because people who prepared food kept passing it on to their children for hundreds of years.

Whatever the French overlords were using their new word for—be it torture or other more aristocratic activities—their higher social status gave the word prestige and so it stuck.

Actually the first citation we have in English for the word chain is for its use in leading a colt. Since poor English commoners would not have had horses this too is a more aristocratic usage.

The French word of course came from Latin catena and I find a very few references to an etymological connection to an Indo-European root kat that meant “to twist.”

I chose chain as today’s word because I found out the origin of the phrase chain reaction.

Of course a chain reaction is a series of events where one incident has an outcome that unavoidably causes a series of other events to follow, and that can’t be stopped until it reaches the last link in the chain.

What happened was that in 1913 two German chemists Max Bodenstein and Walter Dux were trying to figure out why a certain chemical reaction was behaving in just this way when Max pulled out his pocket watch and undid the chain that secured it to his vest. He handed one end to Walter and wiggled his own end theorizing on the analogy to the chemical reaction.

Walter thought this was so significant that years later when he found out that Max no longer had the original watch chain, Walter had a replica made and presented it to their University in Hanover.

Okay, hands up. Who knows the word dilettante?

I must admit that although it was part of my vocabulary I didn’t actually have the definition quite right. I thought of a dilettante as a sort of a snob, but a more accurate definition is that a dilettante is someone who pursues art or some other branch of knowledge but does so only frivolously.

This seems to be a word that—like amateur—started out as a good thing but has come down to us as a bit of a not-so-good thing.

In the year 1733 a club was formed called the Society of Dilettanti. Its purpose was to discuss the appreciation of the art and architecture of antiquity.

The word dilettante itself didn’t appear until 15 years later and, like the art forms being appreciated, came via Italian from ancient Rome and hence Latin.

The Latin word had been delectare, clearly related to our delectable, and meant “delight.”

So people who were dilettantes were those who “delighted” in the arts, just as people who were amateurs were “lovers” of their particular subject. Over time the sense of both of these words sagged a bit so that now we think of an amateur as someone less than professional and a dilettante amounts to about the same thing.

Although dilettante had been around for a while already, I thought it was delightful that the woman who introduced the word dilettantism to the world was Hannah More.

Why? Because she was an original bluestocking.

And what is a bluestocking?

A bluestocking is someone who imagines themselves to be an expert in art or music. Just like amateur and dilettante, bluestocking originally meant the real deal—someone who did indeed have an expertise in art or music.

I mentioned Hannah in the episode on cuisine and I’ll mention her again tomorrow in the episode being carried on the Oxford University Press blog.

Around 1750 a group of London ladies got tired of social gatherings where everybody just played cards. They resolved to start having little parties where the purpose was to talk about higher things, about art and music and especially literature.

That’s where Hannah More came in.

The group wasn’t strictly a ladies club and the name bluestockings actually refers to men’s apparel, not women’s. In those days the done thing was to attend such a social event well dressed and for men this included black silk stockings.

But the literary group were free spirits, they more or less invited their guests to come-as-you- are. The more casual attire included blue woolen stockings and this was shocking enough that the group gained their name from this habit.

I love to eat.

I love to eat junk food and I love to eat haute cuisine.

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t get to eat either all that often.

The word cuisine appeared first in English in 1786 in a poem by a woman named Hannah More. Her writing kind of makes my mouth water.

O’ th’ hogs of Epicurus‘ sty;
Yet all so foreign and so fine,
‘Twas easier to admire, than dine.
O! if the muse had power to tell
Each dish, no muse has power to spell
Great Goddess of the French Cuisine!

There you go, she’s told us: French cuisine.

In French cuisine means “kitchen” but because food makes up such a big part of French culture the word is bigger than our English kitchen. It means cooking and ways of cooking and philosophies of cooking; and of course philosophies of eating.

The French might be seen as great cooks these days but the etymology of the word cuisine reveals the dirty little secret that they learned it from someone else.

Before being French cuisine was Italian and in fact the French only got really turned on to cooking after Henry II of France married Catherine de’ Medici. When she moved up from Florence she brought along her cookbook, or at least her retinue of cooks, and got the French juices flowing.

Having been an Italian word it won’t surprise you that it had been a Latin word before that and quite likely an Indo-European word as well, although even back in Latin the word had changed form. Our English words kitchen and cook came through Old English and its Germanic roots, but ultimately link up to cuisine etymologically.

When that poet Hannah More wasn’t thinking about food she was thinking about literature.

She was born near Bristol in England and when she was 22 was pledged to be married to a guy. Somehow that didn’t work out, but the guy felt so bad that Hannah was given a lifelong allowance that would look like about $20,000 per year today. This allowed her to dedicate herself to literature and every year she would travel to London and join the literary set there.

She had a good heart as well as a good appetite and brought to the attention of the London Literati the poetry of a destitute milkmaid with a young family. A book by this diamond in the rough was published and made a bundle.

Hannah wanted to protect this unsophisticated country lass and so put the money in a trust account so that the milkmaid’s free drinking husband couldn’t get his mitts on it.

Unfortunately this looked like theft to the unsophisticated country lass who refused to stay barefoot in the cuisine and took her complaints public to the great embarrassment of Hannah More.

I’ve mentioned before that some people get all uptight at the use of words like irregardless.

The objection is that the ir in irregardless is unnecessary because its negative meaning is already there in the less part of irregardless. Today’s word deliver is offered up as an example that such “ignorant” word construction has a very long history.

Deliver was delivered to England’s shores with French after the year 1066 although it didn’t show up in written form until 1225—or at least that’s the earliest surviving record that we have of the word.

Being French the parent of deliver was Latin deliberare.

The very first meanings of deliver in English had to do with something being set free. That meaning is right there in the Latin too since the Latin word for “free” is liber. This of course shows up for us in liberate.

So it seems that somewhere back in the mists of time people started thinking that setting something free with the word liber wasn’t highfalutin enough and felt the need to add a de to it without actually changing the meaning.

But as the Cat in the Hat said, “that is not all, oh no, that is not all.”

I said that irregardless was in some people’s minds an ignorant word construction. Evidently so must have been deliver back in Latin because just as now there are numerous types of English spoken, history saw many different flavors of Latin as well.

The deliver we received came from what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “late popular Latin.” That’s what happened to Latin as it disseminated across the Roman world. People who had never heard a Roman senator speak felt free to use Latin and so used it with all kinds of “ignorant” twists thrown in.

Same with English.

People who listen to me hear a combination of things that are quite different from how they talk on the BBC. My accent is a product of where I grew up and my vocabulary and pronunciation too; with a few errors I learned from parents and friends thrown in; and even more errors I myself have invented on top of that.

Back in Latin the supposedly correct vocabulary, accent and pronunciation would have been called Classical Latin.

In Classical Latin deliberare had a completely different meaning than what those supposedly ignorant proto-Frenchmen assigned to it. I did not mean “to set free.” It meant what we mean by deliberate.

When you deliberate over a decision or act deliberately it isn’t because you are acting without freedom, it is because you are acting out of a balancing of the options. The liber in our English deliberate is from the Latin word for “scales” or “balance” libra.

Hence liberate and deliberate grew from different roots.

In keeping with this electoral year in the United States, the other day I explored a political word that evolved out of the same roots as freebooter. The political word was filibuster and the etymological source was a Dutch seafaring word vrijbuiter that basically meant “pirate.”

Obviously freebooter had less pronunciation change to go through from this Dutch source than did filibuster, but the “pirate” sense turns out to be logical for filibuster when you think of how political filibusters hijack the business of government.

Whereas filibuster no longer means pirate, freebooter does.

The Dutch parent word is from a Germanic source and so maps pretty nicely to the English components free and boot that came to us from Old English and its Germanic roots.

In this case boot doesn’t mean the thing you pull onto your foot.

That boot only arrived with the French of William the Conqueror. There was an earlier English boot already afoot in the land before the arrival of the Norman invaders. We still see its footprints when we talk about “treasure” as booty—a very piratey word.

Another example of this older boot’s longevity is there in the phrase to boot to mean “as well.” As in:

I went out to buy a cake and came home with ice cream and candles to boot.

The older meaning of boot included “to the good” and “to advantage” and is etymologically related to the word better.

So a freebooter is someone who wants all that good; all that treasure; all that betterment, for free.

The first citation we have for freebooter comes to us from someone who was definitely not a freebooter. Thomas Gresham was a merchant about a generation or two before Shakespeare. In one of his many trips to the European continent he was robbed by pirates on the…well, I guess you can’t call the English Channel “the high seas.” He referred to these pirates as the Duke of Alva’s freebooters.

The Duke of Alva was also known as the Duke of Alba and The Iron Duke. He was Spanish and at the time Spain controlled the Netherlands.

He wasn’t called The Iron Duke out of respect.

He governed the Netherlands like a cruel dictator, trying thousands of people for resisting Spanish rule and putting them to death. This was partly motivated by a Catholic/Protestant difference of opinions.

Thomas Gresham, that English trader makes it sound like the Duke’s freebooters were operating under the Duke’s authority.Another word for “pirate” is privateer that does indeed apply to “official” pirates that have some kind of government approval to rip-off property from ships from other countries. But in this case the Duke’s freebooters were actually against the Duke.

The population of the Netherlands were so alienated by The Iron Duke’s appalling governing style that they were willing to put up with all kinds of rebellious behavior, including the establishment of a pirate fleet. So the freebooters who stole Thomas Gresham’s booty were actually fighting the good fight in opposing The Iron Duke. But being pirates, they extended that fight to a few innocent bystanders when it looked like there would be some profit in it for them.

But we don’t need to feel too sorry for Thomas Gresham; he was a real mover and shaker. Actually it’s great to be able to report on his good deeds since I’m so often talking about little scandalous moments from history.

I guess that’s because people are more apt to make note of scandal than good citizenship and so scandal is easier to find in the old records.

Thomas Gresham made a lot of cash in his trading and he was what we’d now call a facilitator as well. It was his private initiative that started the first stock exchange in London. Lots of people made money, and so did he.

But he had a good heart as well as a good head for money and he built houses for the poor and arranged that his money after he died be used to found a college.

Even his family crest was appealing. A grasshopper likely etymologically connected to his name Gresham.

A filibuster is something that happens in government. When one party wants to pass some law or something and their opposition doesn’t have the legal means to stop it, but tries to stop it anyway, by hook or by crook.

The Oxford Dictionary of English says that a filibuster is:

An action such as prolonged speaking which obstructs progress in a legislative assembly in a way that does not technically contravene the required procedures.

Where might such a word as filibuster come from?

There is that buster part in there that seems to match up with the busting action the opposition is taking. But if that has anything to do with the etymology it’s because English speakers thought it made sense, not because it had any historical validity.

More accurate might be the idea that the opposition party was acting in a sort of outlaw manner by hijacking the business of government. They could be seen as some sort of pirates, at least in the eyes of the group who were trying to move their legislation forward.

Back in the century before Shakespeare the Dutch had more ships afloat than any other European country and so it’s understandable that some of their nautical jargon might find its way into English.

The Dutch term for a pirate was vrijbuiter and this appears to have quite quickly have been mutated in English mouths into filibuster.

There’s a first citation in the late 1500s and then the word must have simply been circulating verbally because it next turns up more than 200 years later, still meaning pirate.

By the middle of the 1800s the word was shifting in meaning and being applied to Americans who worked for regime change in South and Central America in contravention of international law. This specific reference to pirates in a specific application broadened quickly to be applied to people fighting unconventional wars against foreign governments generally.

Finally just before the start of the 1900s the word turned in on itself and applied to actions against one’s own government, this time not with guns but with political tactics.

I should say also that it isn’t always the party in power that suffers filibuster from the opposition party. There are plenty of cases where an opposition group has found some dirt on the governing party and is working the government channels to bring it to light so the governing party themselves turn pirate on their own government processes to try and keep the embarrassing details hidden.

I usually drink my coffee black.

Strong and black.

I do enjoy cappuccino from time to time, but it is more of a fancy kind of coffee than I usually have time for. The fact that cappuccino is a fancy kind of coffee is sort of at odds with its etymological history.

For a few decades either side of the year 1200 there walked this earth a guy now known to us as St. Francis of Assisi. He built up quite a following with his ideas of simplicity and poverty and the movement he founded became known as the Franciscans.

One of the things he is famous for is his love of nature. Reportedly he preached to the birds and advocated the feeding of even wild wolves rather than hunting them when shepherd’s flocks were being picked off.

But by 300 years after his death some of his Franciscan followers were of the opinion that others of his followers weren’t living simply enough or in enough poverty. So they started their own sub-group of monks within the Franciscan order. This new group wore very simple garments. You might imagine the classic long plain robe with a big hood hanging down the back.

At the time this must have been a bit distinctive because the Italian word for a “hood” was cappuccio and so this new sub-order of monks became known as the cappuccino monks, at least in Italian.

So the fancy cappuccino coffee you order in an upscale coffee bar with its foamy head of steamed milk and a little dash of cinnamon is a long way from the avowed simplicity of these monks.

But how then did a group of monks give their name to a fancy coffee drink?

Some of the sources I checked claim that it is the white foamy head on the drink that is being recalled in the name, even going so far as to say these monks wore some kind of white headgear as part of their habit or uniform. This appears to be false. I think it comes from the etymology of the word pointing to something one wears on one’s head.

The Oxford English Dictionary says instead that it was the color of their robes that was likened to the color of the coffee with milk in it. But there’s something wrong with this description too because this color is described as gray and any cappuccino I’ve ever seen is brown; as appear to be all the modern photographs of the robes of Capuchin monks.

The problem appears to be that we Anglophones have only been drinking cappuccino for about 60 years, while the Italians have been drinking it much longer. The transference of the word cappuccino from monk to beverage happened in Italian before coming to English and so the citations we have came later and the etymology is second hand.

I suppose that would be okay with true Capuchin monks; hand-me-downs would fit well with their vow of poverty.

Molière wrote:

It is public scandal that constitutes offense, and to sin in secret is not to sin at all.

Molière was a French playwright who lived just after Shakespeare.

I don’t think I can agree with his assessment here.

To you and me a scandal is a public outcry at some event judged to be wrong.

That’s what the word meant to Molière too. It was shortly before the time of Molière that scandal came into English, and it like Molière came from French.

In fact this was the second coming for the word into English because we see citations for it hundreds of years before, but that first time it mutated into another English word slander and so scandal had to be rediscovered.

There is a strange twist in meaning as this earlier form of scandal moved through history.

Back in ancient Greek the word meant a trap and so then came to mean a trap that you might set for your enemies and particularly a trap that might cause moral stumbles.

In those earlier senses there is an element of victimization to the person at the center of the scandal. At the time it first appeared in English the sense was of public outcry but particularly to events in which a church official had crossed moral lines. Our current sense of the word slander also carries the implication that there is a victim against whom false accusations have been made.

Did the meaning of this word move away from victimhood and back again in its evolution?

While I can’t find dictionary evidence to support me on this I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that the belief system back 800 years ago would have supported the perception of a church official as victim because the view was that the whole game was a battle between God and the devil for people’s souls. The church official could have been seen as having been tricked into Satan’s trap.

As I said, when scandal reappeared in English just before Shakespeare’s time it held just about the meaning we think of today.

I’ve dug up an example of a scandal with two interesting attributes.

In 1963 John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in England. He had to give up that nice job because he had an affair and it became a scandal. According to Molière if the details had stayed in the bedroom it wouldn’t have mattered.

Except that the gal that John Profumo was getting cozy with was Christine Keeler and she just happened to also be mighty friendly with another guy who surprise surprise was a Russian spy. These were the days of the cold war.

I think that most people would agree with the idea that even if this little affair didn’t blow up into a public embarrassment, there was something wrong about it.

The other interesting thing about this scandal is its echoes in the ancient Greek meaning of the word. Clearly John Profumo was a bit of a dunce to put his foot in the trap, but when pretty girls with Russian spy boyfriends start getting friendly with high government officials somebody’s going to end up a victim.

I hold in my hot little hands a brand new copy of Anatoly Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology.

Today I’m going to use the word dwarf as a kind of vehicle to describe what I see between this book’s covers.

To begin with let me read to you the full etymology for dwarf as reported in the American Heritage Dictionary:

[from] Middle English dwerf, from Old English dweorh

That’s it, the whole entry.

Compare this with Anatoly Liberman’s information which I estimate to run in excess of 12,000 words of text. I think it’s safe to say that Professor Liberman’s treatment of this word dwarfs the etymologies in other dictionaries.

I’ll get to what he has to say in a moment, but first I want to tell you about the philosophy behind this dictionary of English etymology.

Not all dictionaries are particularly strong on etymology and part of the reason is that etymology takes up valuable space on the page where not all dictionary buyers are as keen on the subject as you and I might be.

Also, even though the word etymology means “the true sense of words,” in practice there is often a lot of opinion involved in what the true history of a word might be. For this reason, as Professor Liberman explains, the compilers of even strong English etymology dictionaries have tended to include etymologies where they themselves were convinced by the research and arguments of experts. But all too often felt justified in claiming an etymology was unknown when there was no clear winner among a host of theories on a word’s background. The result is, that for you and me who don’t know multiple languages alive and dead, we have no idea what the competing theories might have been.

Even when the dictionary editor does believe one line of thinking, we have no way of knowing why he or she believes that.

Anatoly Liberman has taken a different approach. He feels that what we have in English, as far as etymology dictionaries go, lags far behind those of many other languages because past efforts have not brought together and openly sifted-through the various theories and pieces of evidence.

Because he’s been willing to do so, each entry in his dictionary is comparatively huge. Consequently, when finished his dictionary will also be a rather ponderous size.

But it isn’t finished yet.

The book that I cradle in my arms is subtitled An Introduction because in it Professor Liberman treats a total of fewer than 60 words.

That’s not very many by most dictionary standards.

You might even say that it’s a bit of a dwarf of a dictionary that way.

In this, and in my earlier mention, I’ve used the word dwarf to mean something small. That’s certainly its current meaning, and in fact the Oxford English Dictionary first cites the word back in the year 700 as meaning a person of less than normal dimensions.

But Professor Liberman has taken a long view and applied his best judgment to the scraps of evidence that trail back into pre-history and come up with the idea that dwarf didn’t always mean small.

In fact, in some ways in an ancient world view, dwarves were seen on a par with the gods.

What etymology my usual dictionaries do have on dwarf agrees with him that it is an ancient Germanic word. He feels that the evidence points further back to a time when the mythical beings that came to be dwarves were conceived to be helpers to the gods and of normal stature.

Our current mythology associates dwarves with caves and Professor Liberman suggests that this may be because one of the earlier forms of the word dwarf sounded a lot like the then contemporary Germanic word for “mountain.” Imagining a race of beings that lived in caves in the mountains would support their being of a smaller scale.

As I said, his entry for the word dwarf goes on for many pages and I can’t cover it all here.

What’s more, it isn’t always easy going. There’s some deeply academic content that sometimes takes a will to get through.

But Professor Liberman has tried to make it easy. He opens the book with a section called The Etymologies at a Glance where he boils the analysis down to a single paragraph for each word. But once you get interested in a word it’s definitely worth plowing on into the main bulk of the entry because there is obviously more meat there than he could fit into one paragraph.

He also breaks the main entry into somewhat logical parts. In relation to dwarf he spends some time discussing the word’s association to insanity; the ancient thinking being that people who were “a little off” had been affected by the gods—or in this case the sub-gods, dwarves.

When you think that this first portion of Professor Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology holds entries for fewer than 60 words, the hope of ever seeing a full and complete dictionary itself seems a little insane.

But think back to the Oxford English Dictionary. Its first publication took more than 20 years to produce and only went up to the word ant.

To get close to a complete etymology dictionary Anatoly Liberman will need some help, so here’s the help that you can give him.

Convince his publisher that they weren’t insane to produce the thing by buying a copy.

Or, get your local library to buy three.

The etymology gods—or at least their dwarves—will smile on you. Plus it’ll give me more to talk about

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Long John Baldry but he was a musician who palled around with Elton John and Rod Stewart.

One of Long John’s songs is Everything Stops for Tea. Therein he claims

Every nation in creation has its favourite drink
France is famous for its wine, it’s beer in Germany
Turkey has its coffee and they serve it blacker than ink
Russians go for vodka and England loves its tea

Oh, the factory may be roaring
With a boom-a-lacka, zoom-a-lacka, wee
But there isn’t any roar when the clock strikes four
Everything stops for tea

This little ditty feeds off of and reinforces the image of a cup of tea being a very British thing to enjoy.

Long John says it’s coffee in Turkey but you might be surprised to learn that people were drinking coffee in England for quite a while before anyone there had ever heard of tea.

Actually both coffee and tea show up in the written record in the same year—1598—and in the same document, but tea came out as chaa and didn’t turn up again as tea until 1655, forty years after that other English icon—Shakespeare—was six feet under.

That document was something called John Huighen Van Linschoten, his Discours of Voyages into the East and West Indies.

John Huighen Van Linschoten was Dutch and the Dutch were big into sailing around discovering things and then becoming middlemen selling those things here and there around the world.

And so it was that Dutch traders to Malay or Formosa brought back the Amoy dialect word tea to Europe—or something like tea—while Mandarin Chinese chai found its way to Europe courtesy of Portuguese traders; Arabs via the silk route; and overland to Russia.

Tea drinking in England took a while to get going. It was 1660 when Samuel Pepys reported tasting the stuff for the first time.

So tea changed its pronunciation back in the Far East before Europeans discovered it and it’s also a good example of how pronunciation change continues. While Long John Baldry rhymed tea with wee and Germany, The American Heritage Dictionary offers up a passage by Alexander Pope that shows the pronunciation of tea back in 1714 as “tay,” rhyming with obey.