There is a reassuring progression in the coming of the word “independence.”  “Independence” appeared in 1640, but despite being “independence” it relied on the word “independent” to precede it by 29 years in 1611.  Neither word could avoid the need for another word “dependent” to have already been established just 16 years before that in 1594.  In fact the word “dependent” had already been in use for about 150 years before that but had a different meaning.  At first it meant “a thing that hangs below,” like a “pendulum” or a “pendant.”  This came to mean relying on the thing above and therefore subordinate.

Today’s podictionary word is flip-flops.  Flip-flop is the most popular name given to those inexpensive foam sandals, but not everyone calls them flip-flops.   Flip-flop seems to have been around for longer than you’d expect since it’s first recorded occurrence was in 1661, but in that reference it meant the “earlobe.” 

In 1889 it showed up again, this time as the sound of footsteps (we’re getting closer).  The phrase took a left turn in 1902 when flip-flop seemed to be commonly used to mean “somersault.”  More confusion in 1935 when an electronic switching circuit is assigned the name flip-flop (I remember this one since I’m an electrical engineer, although I don’t quite remember 1935). 

At long last, in 1970 flip-flops appeared on people’s feet.  These and similar sandals have had other names over time.  Some people call them “zorris” from the Japanese zori sandal.  Just before flip-flops got called flip-flops, in 1967 they started being called “thongs.” 

Today a thong evokes thoughts of something a little more exciting, but the word has been in English since circa 950 AD and meant a narrow strip of hide or leather used as a cord.  Back then it was pronounced more like “thwang.” So the straps on the footwear and the cord on the underwear (which isn’t much but cord) give each entire article its name. 

A sandal has been called a sandal since 1392.  Thong as underwear first appeared in 1975 and the part of the thong that isn’t just strap is called “cache sexe” from French, which doesn’t mean “money sex” but “hide sex”—though it doesn’t hide much.

A fort is a stronghold and that’s what’s at the root of comfortable.

Comfortable is made up of three parts each of which comes to us via Old French and ultimately Latin.  We’ll start at the end with -able. This suffix has a meaning of “likelihood,” so that something that is comfortable is likely to give comfort, someone who is agreeable is likely to agree, something that is stable is likely to stay or stand.

The com- in comfortable was once a con —but that didn’t mean “not” as in pros and cons, it is a prefix that intensifies the main meaning of the word.  Con appears also in other words, so that confess literally means “intensely declare” and confide means “intensely trust.”

When comfort first appeared in English in 1225 it meant “encouragement” and “support”—and we still give each other comfort during trying times.   So that the literal meaning of comfort makes sense; intensifying someone’s strength, their fortitude.

Our word for today, comfortable, appeared 200 years later and still held its meaning of giving moral support for 300 years or so until 1770 when it took on the more soft and cushy meaning that chairs and couches evoke.

The first English bastard appeared in 1297, although you can be sure people were born out of wedlock before that.

Today people get called bastards all the time without reference to their parents’ state of marriage, and increasingly people are being born of non-married couples and find it offensive to be called bastards.

Around the time when bastard first appeared in English William the Conqueror was known also as William the Bastard.  This isn’t because he was a dirty rotten conqueror—the word bastard hadn’t taken on its insulting meaning yet—he was William the Bastard because his parents hadn’t been married.

Having babies out of wedlock has until very recently been something to be terribly ashamed of and downright impractical.  So it makes sense that bastard has been used as an insult for some time, but it only made it into print as an insult in 1830.

The root of the word is from Old French and grew out of bast,  the name for a packsaddle, which was the structure used to load packs onto a mule.  Travelers with romantic intention and opportunity may not have had a convenient bed nearby so the blankets and saddle would serve as bedding and pillow.

Thus children who were not conceived in the marriage bed, were said to be conceived “on the bast” and were therefore bastards.

At least that’s what the Oxford English Dictionary says.

But there, the entry for bastard is perhaps not the most up-to-date.  This word has not yet received the repeat scrutiny of the third edition now in progress.

As such the citations given there for bastard are mostly more than a century old.

Other fresher dictionary etymologies decry this pack-saddle theory, saying the chronology of appearance of the supposed source and resulting words are wrong.  A better guess (they say) might be a Germanic source word bost meaning “marriage” and that somehow bastards relate to offspring from polygamous marriages.

This is a case where accuracy and advancement of research has struck a blow against entertainment value.

When I think of laundry I think of that pile of stuff that gets dragged or tossed down into the basement to be put into the machine, and later the things that need to be put back in drawers and hung in closets.

But although the word first laundry came into English in 1530, it didn’t mean what I mean here until 1916.

For most of the time it didn’t mean the stuff that got washed but the action of washing and the place where you did the washing.

Going further back, in 1377 it wasn’t laundry but lavandry from Old French.  In French lavé is “to wash” and that’s why we sometimes call the bathroom the lavatory.

The French word came from Latin lavandarius, also “to wash,” but that in turn came from another Latin word lavanda which were “the things to be washed,” so we’ve come full circle.

There is a striking similarity between the medieval word lavandry and the name of the flower lavender and this caused early etymologists to go digging for evidence that lavender scent was used for washing or bathing.

Hard looks at the scanty clues got them thinking instead that maybe the blue flower’s name was more related to turning blue with livid anger than to laundry the word or odiferous pile.

Tracing word histories always isn’t a clean process.

Out there the woods are full flora and fauna.

In fact, the woods are flora since flora are plants and fauna are animals.

Flora take their name from the Roman goddess of flowers. This is why those stores that sell flowers are called florists‘.

In fact it is why flowers are called flowers; they all have the same Latin word root.

Flora is not only a goddess but also a Latin word that means “flower.”  Before she was a Roman goddess, Flora was a Greek goddess by the name of Khloris, and in Greek that doesn’t mean “flower” but it does mean “green,” which is why the green stuff in leaves is called chlorophyll.

Although in many cases Latin words came from Greek words, and in this case flora does sound sort of remotely like khloris, this appears to be somewhat coincidental.  The root of the Latin flora is thought to come from an Indo-European word bhlo that also percolated up through Germanic and Old English to give us bloom.

Turning from the vegetable, fauna as the collective for animals was a relative latecomer, even though the word has similar Greek and Latin roots.  While flora entered English at the beginning of the 1500s, fauna waited close to 300 years to make its showing.

There was an important Swedish guy named Linnaeus who died around then—in the 1770s—who was responsible for drawing up the system of taxonomy by which all those Latin names are assigned to plants and animals.  He used the word fauna in the title of his work on animals and that’s why English speakers began using it.

Fauna was a minor Roman goddess but her brother was more famous, his Roman god name was Faunus but in Greek he was known as Pan.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the phrase mind-boggling to 1955 and defines it to mean “overwhelming,” “startling” or “amazing.”

The word boggle however is a little older; 400 years older.

Originally it wasn’t people who were boggled but horses.

A boggled horse was a horse that had been spooked by something their drivers or riders couldn’t see.  The reason such a spooked horse was called boggled was because people were superstitious and they thought what might be spooking the horse might be a ghost or supernatural spirit.

These mythological beings went my many names including bogey-man and boggard, which was one of the breeds of little nasties in Harry Potter.

A related beast of superstition is the bugbear.  Now we think of a bugbear as something annoying, a thing that bugs you, but originally a bugbear was thought to be a supernatural creature in the form of a bear that specifically preyed on children.

That first 1955 usage of mind-boggling was by Erich Fromm in a book called The Sane Society.

He called American culture of the 1950s mind-bogglingly banal and stiflingly homogenous.

According to one review his recipe for success called for individual development and democratic self-expression within the context of a vibrant communal life, including relatedness; transcendence; rootedness; identity; and a framework of orientation and devotion.  Which itself sounds pretty supernatural and mind-boggling.

An oxymoron is a contradiction in terms, like “industrial park” or “holy war” or “jumbo shrimp.”

It’s sometimes used derisively, for example suggesting that “business ethics” or “military intelligence” are oxymorons.

Oxymoron as a contradiction in terms didn’t show up until 1902 when someone who worked hard at being lazy was said to be a living oxymoron.

Before that oxymoron was a technical term describing a rhetorical device. The word first showed up as an English word in 1657 in a book called The mysterie of rhetorique unvail’d where the editor, John Smith, defined oxymoron as “subtly foolish.”

You might think that being subtly foolish is an oxymoron in itself, yet this definition goes a long way to uncover the etymology of oxymoron.

The word has Greek roots but didn’t exist in classical Greek. Instead it was constructed from parts that did exist way back then.

The first half of the word oxy- means “sharp.”

This meaning is contained also in oxygen, the name of the element we need to breathe to live.

During the late 1700s when chemistry was not quite as sophisticated as it is today it was thought that acid was produced from oxygen. Since acid has a sharpness to it, the stuff that creates acid was called “sharp maker.” Or, if you translate that into fancy scientific Latin and Greek, oxy-gen; since gen means “make” or “generate.”

The second half of oxymoron is -moron and yes, it really does mean “stupid” in Greek.

So that first English citation defining oxymoron as “subtly foolish” is a literal translation, oxymoron really does mean sharp and stupid at the same time.

And if that’s the case, then the word oxymoron is itself an oxymoron.

The podictionary word for today is dumb.  In conversation today we usually understand the word dumb to mean stupid, but those of us who think of ourselves as smart know that the “proper” meaning of dumb is really “mute.” 

Now it is certainly true that when the word came into English a thousand years ago it was used to mean devoid of speech, and that English speakers really didn’t start to use the word to mean stupid until the 1500s. 

This is likely one of those words that came across the English Channel with the Saxons in around 450 AD because it existed with the same meaning in Old Saxon and Gothic as well as Old Norse.  But here’s the thing.  In Old High German it did also mean stupid, and deaf to boot. 

So dumb meaning “dopey” has a 500 year pedigree in English and at least a 1500 year pedigree in one of it’s ancestor languages—so maybe it has two “proper” meanings.  A dumbbell is what you use to work out with in a weight room.  The reason it’s called that is because originally it was meant to mimic the weight of a real hand bell. 

As early as 1711 it is mentioned as a form of exercise which the participant refers to as “ringing.”  These dumbbells must have looked like the ones we are familiar with, but possibly a century earlier there were dumbbells built with ropes for pupils to practice for church bell ringing.

The podictionary word for today is lake.  I chose this word because over the coming months many of us will be swimming or fishing or waterskiing or doing something in a lake. 

Before I looked it up I never suspected that lake might have so many meanings, there are six nouns and three verbs all spelled lake and considered to be different words by the Oxford English Dictionary. 

The first one is a noun that showed up in Beowulf—that thousand year old poem that makes up about a tenth of the surviving English documentation that we have from a millennium ago.  That meaning of lake was “a sacrifice” or “a gift,” a meaning that seems to have dropped out of sight.  In fact lake hasn’t been used that way in 750 years. 

The next noun appeared around 800 years ago this time from Old Norse and meant “a game,” “play” or “sport.”  Still pretty uncommon but Charlotte Bronte used the word only 150 years ago, so it may be poised for a comeback in light of all the sport and game of our summer lakes.  

The third lake is perhaps a little more familiar to us even though it is the oldest word, dating from 950 AD and is thus Old English.  Here it means “a stream” or “rivulet” and is related to the word “leak” as well as “leach,” as in “water flowing through soil can leach the minerals out of it.”  The OED asserts however that this “river” lake is not related to the lake that we recognize as a large standing body of water.

Our lake comes instead through Old French and ultimately from Latin.  Even for this meaning of lake the OED offers 6 different meanings, and dedicates well over 3,000 words to it—that’s about 10 typewritten pages. 

The last two nouns I’ll dispense with quickly—they meant a kind of Dutch lace and a sort of red dye—both meanings flitting in and out of usage over a couple of hundred years either side of Shakespeare’s time.  The nouns of course were built on the verbs: to play, to sacrifice and to dye—dye something red that is. 

A couple of lakes feature in mythology: the Romans held that the entrance to hell was through the lake Avernus, which really does exist in Italy.  This lake stinks of sulfur and its very name means “no birds,” presumably because of the smell.  More pleasant is the lake from which the lady gave King Arthur his sword Excalibur.