Some friends over lunch suggested this word.

“Sounds African” they said.

Does elbow sound African?  Does bimbo or gumbo?

Okay, well gumbo is, but bimbo, elbow and akimbo are not.

Akimbo is a position of the arms, elbows bent with hands on hips.

All derivations of this word connect the bo ending of the word with the bow meaning “to bend.” That is also why the elbow has a bow as part of its name, it bends.

The word akimbo is at least 600 years old and one source points to a literal meaning of “a keen bow” meaning “a sharp bend”—which is fairly apt since in this stance the arms are bent about 90 degrees or more.

English got the word from Old Norse, not Africa.

We’d never know that however, if it were not for the efforts of the Early English Text Society.  This was a group formed back in 1864 under the influence of Frederick James Furnivall.

The objective was to bring ancient musty texts out of inaccessible libraries and reproduce them in modern volumes for all to see and study.

It was in one of these that our word akimbo unexpectedly appeared more than 200 years earlier than the next citation in the 1600s.

Furnivall went on to be the second editor of what became The Oxford English Dictionary. Although unquestionably a critically important figure in the development of the documentation of the record of the English language, some accounts say that Furnivall nearly killed the OED in its infancy.

Evidently he was not the easiest man to work with and he set records for employee turnover.

Just for the record, bimbo comes from Italian, from bambino meaning “little child” or “baby.”

Before bimbo referred to an attractive but stupid woman, it meant a tough but stupid man.  These changes came over pretty quickly since bimbo hasn’t been part of English for 100 years yet.

In 1565 Sir Thomas Gresham lamented the fact that he would be unable to go to the Spa for the winter.

Sir Thomas was a royal financial agent to Queen Elizabeth I and not long after she ascended to the throne he was required to spend more time in London than had been his custom.

The Spa for which Sir Thomas hankered was in a little town in Belgium, a sort of hideaway really because almost no one had heard of it.  It had springs of waters with reputed healing properties, and the name of the little town was … Spa.

It wasn’t just that Sir Thomas hated missing his holidays, he was concerned about his health, maybe even whether he’d be able to survive the dreary winter.  The idea that waters such as those at the town of Spa were health-giving is what drew the crowds.

By 1626 we have a citation for an English Spa and by 1777 the name of the town of Spa became truly generic so that any town with a hot spring where you could soak your ills away was called a spa.

It wasn’t until about 1960 that people began opening health clubs and calling them spas without having a hot-springs on the premises.

After that everyone wanted one; in 1974 you could get an aerated bathtub in your own house and call it a spa.

Sir Thomas evidently needn’t have worried too much about his health for that particular winter because he lived another 14 years.

The waters of Spa issue forth from the ground already carbonated and fizzy and are still attracting visitors as well as now being bottled and sold.  The town’s name Spa had originally been Espa which meant “fountain” in the French dialect of the area.

Strip away the ment from amendment and you get amend.

Go further and strip away the leading “a” and you get mend.

This is the place to start in building up the history and meaning of the word amendment.

We may think of the mend in our clothing as the place where a tear has been fixed, but the Latin from which this word comes—as usual via Old French—the Latin mendum or menda meant “fault.”

So from the Latin perspective the mend isn’t the repair, it’s the original rip.

Again from the Latin perspective the way to fix it is with an emendare, that meant “to take out the fault,” which became our amend.

When amend and amendment appeared in English in the 13th century the word mend hadn’t yet broken through from Latin so in English this word had to deconstructed out of amend.

Amendment seemed to have arrived from French with most of the meanings we give to it today, plus a few more.

An amendment to a document is supposed to improve it by removing its faults.

Soil amendments made things grow better—we’re talking manure here, it’s just coincidence the word also relates to legal procedure.

The meanings we no longer recognize relate to people’s behavior and health both of which seemed to improve by amendment.

Another surviving related word is amends.  We “make amends” when we repay an injured party.  700 years ago we would have made amendment.

I have been told by one person with lots of post graduate education that PhD stands for “pig-headed determination.”

Another less charitable soul explained it as “piled higher and deeper.”

In truth PhD is the abbreviation of Philosophiae Doctor, which is the Latin for “Doctor of Philosophy.”

These degrees are the highest that are awarded by universities and originally the title was given because once a candidate had achieved this level he—and back in the 1300s it was always he—was qualified to teach.

In fact at first doctor meant “teacher.”

The root of the word doctor is from the Latin word docere, meaning “to teach” and also unexpectedly shows up in the roots of the word docile because someone who is docile is easy to teach, and also the word document, which was originally the thing from which you took information that was to be taught.

Some sources point to an Indo-European root dek meaning “to take” or “to accept.”

The sense as it moved from accepting to teaching was that a teacher caused one to accept information.

Right from the entry of the word doctor into English in it also referred to physicians.  So there has always been that mild confusion as to whether someone with the title doctor actually has patients.

Although the verb to doctor must have originated with a sense that a doctor changes things for the better, the sense of doctoring things for the worse emerged first in the written record.  A meaning of “patch up” and “set to rights” isn’t seen before 1829 but doctoring wine shows up in 1820.  Altering someone’s appearance “doctoring his face” comes through 1774.

Like doctor the word physician came to English with the French of the Norman Conquest and so had to wait until after 700 or 800 years ago before being called an English word.

Skilled medical personnel before that were known as leeches in Old English.

When you get a letter in the mail and it has fancy letterhead from some government agency or something you might say it’s an official letter.

At a sports event the people who make the calls are the officials.

In both these cases it’s official because the thing being represented is “the office.”

Office and official both go back through French to Latin where the roots of the words were ob ficium, literally meaning “toward doing” so an office is a place where things get done.

This Latin ficium shows up also in the phrase fait accompli meaning something “already done,” as well as in the word benefit meaning “good works” and also in the word edifice meaning “building works.”

When the word office first appeared in English 700 years ago it was used to mean an act that one was responsible for—something you were obliged to do—your duty to your children as a parent, to your subjects as a lord.

In particular the first citations were for the Divine Office. That is, the religious rites that were thought to be required by god.

Within 100 years this sense of something that one must do transposed itself into a parallel definition; office meaning the act of answering the call of nature.

It was Geoffrey Chaucer who first used the word office to refer to a place of work in a similar sense that we use today.

Chaucer being the first use the word in this way is particularly appropriate considering the earlier use in a church sense.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were filled with religious characters and some of these were particularly holy, but there were plenty who were not.

Chaucer seemed comfortable pointing out the flaws in the men and women of God and a writer of 350 years ago thought he knew why.  According to Thomas Fuller, author of The Church History of Britain the source of Chaucer’s disregard for church officials was based on an urge for vengeance:

“Chaucer [was] fined in the Temple two shillings for striking a Franciscan friar in Fleet Street; and it seems his hands ever itched to be revenged and have his pennysworth out of them.”

That steaming mixture of meat and potatoes, carrots in a sort of gravy got its name from the pot in which it was cooked.

The food itself wasn’t called stew until about 250 years ago, but the stew pot was called a stew 700 years ago and more.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that this is a common word in languages descended from Latin.

It seems that stew is one of those words that has been formed by squishing two words together, and then squishing the single word some more.

I implied that the word stew today refers to a steaming mixture of food.  It is the steam that in turn gave the name to the pot.

The original two Latin words were ex meaning “out of” and tufus meaning “vapor.”  Thus the words referring to the vapor rising out of the pot got combined into extufare and then further compressed down to stufa.

And that was just in Latin, once the word got into French the final fa was boiled away and left stew in English.

Stew shares its etymology with stove. Around 500 years ago both stew and stove shared a meaning of “a heated room” before they parted company to assume their current meanings.

From a “heated room” stew took on quite a different meaning of “heat” when it was used as a euphemism for a prostitute’s room—the thinking being not that hot things went on there, but that hookers plied their trade in bath houses.

The first time that we know of the word stew being applied to a meal was from the writings of Margaret Calderwood in 1756.

She lived with her family in Edinburgh, Scotland but her brother had to flee the country when he was wrongly accused of being a traitor.  Since he was living in Holland she decided to pack up her family and take a European vacation . . . and she kept a diary.

In addition to being the first to mention stew as food, she left a great record of life at the time including what people wore, how cheese was made, who used what kinds of money, and how one traveled as an eighteenth century tourist.

She also tells of being robbed a highwayman, meeting a Hungarian princess at a ball, and the specifics of how her husband lost their guidebook.

The fact that there was a guidebook tells us that it wasn’t her travels that were so groundbreaking but her ability to document them.

My kids tell each other that something is random when it is unexpected, or they think it is weird or even when they think it is uncool—or even when it is cool.

To most of the rest of us something that is random has no predictable pattern. But 700 years ago when this word came to English from French it meant “to rush headlong” so that the lack of predictability was more a sense of being out of control due to speed.

The French were thought to have gotten the word from a Germanic word.

In French the word was randon with an N not an M and has since developed into randonnee which means a long outing or a hike. So in French there isn’t the sense so much of unpredictability, but wandering is still retained.

In English, before it arrived at its current meaning random evolved into “at full speed” and from there in a military sense to “at full range” for gunnery pieces, so that gunners would be given random tables that they would use to calculate at what angle they needed to set their guns to achieve the correct range.

This sense of random as “an angle” seeped into mining where it described the directions seams of ore took, and into printing where a frame set on an angle to make up the page out of pieces of type was called at random.

The sense we normally give to the word random has more to do with statistics.  We’ve all heard of random numbers and random samples.  Although the word has been kicking around in English for 700 years with these earlier meanings and more, this new statistical sense of the word didn’t emerge until 1898.

As far as the seemingly new slang use of the word goes, Urbandictionary says it is “the latest buzzword.”

But a word that has been around for 700 years is likely to hold a few surprises.  Does this quote from the 1800s sound a bit like the latest buzzword?

“Men who were random grow steady when they have children to provide for.”

Here’s a word where the etymological authorities appear to be at odds.

From The American Heritage Dictionary: “hostage, noun; a person held by one party in a conflict as security…etymology: Middle English, from Old French, probably from host…”

And from John Ayto’s Word Origins: “despite its similarity, hostage is not related to any of the English words host.”

The Oxford English Dictionary appears to come down on the same side as Ayto while Merriam Webster looks as if it agrees with American Heritage. Everybody agrees though that the roots of the word go back to Latin.

Although I’m sure both American Heritage and Merriam Webster had all kinds of etymological information to back up their opinions, they show less of it than does the OED and John Ayto and so the non-association between hostage and host appears from my vantage point to be the more credible.

Both sources walk us back through French into Latin where the word for hostage was obsidem or obsidatus. The OED explains that when hostage first appeared in Old French, where we got it from, there, as in Latin, it didn’t have an “h” in front of it; it was ostage.

In those very olden days a hostage wasn’t someone taken in a terrorist attack.  Instead, powerful men gave their subordinates and often family members in hostage to someone with whom they had made a deal. When the conditions of the deal were fulfilled—say, pay money or move your troops—the hostages were released.

In the mean time the hostages were still important people and had to be treated as befit their station in life.  The OED speculates that the “h” in hostage got tacked on because this old style of hostage got associated with a whole family of words that arose out of the Latin hospitem meaning both “host” and “guest” as well as “stranger” and “foreigner.”

That Latin hospitem gave us hospitality, hospital as well as host so that if you were required to show hospitality and be a good host to your ostage you might start calling them a hostage instead.

Kudos means “praise.” Here’s how it’s used in a sentence according to a pieces from the New York Times:

“Kudos to Peter & Sam who highlight the fact that statistical sampling is far more accurate…”

While many, many English words are built on Greek roots, the word kudos is a direct borrowing from Greek.

In Greek it held the figurative meaning of “praise” but the more literal meaning of “fame” and “renown.”  So when someone is given kudos it is as if the person praising them was saying “you deserve to be famous.”

Even more literally kudos meant “that which is heard of” and you can see the same root in kudos that also exists in acoustic which Francis Bacon plucked from the Greek word akouein meaning “to hear.”

Kudos is said first to have been used as slang at universities where in the late 1700s Greek would have held a far more important position than it does today. It isn’t given credit as actually being an English word until 1831.

As a Greek word that ends in “s” it isn’t plural, although sometimes people treat it as if it were and give a single kudo as if they were saving higher praise for greater achievement. The Oxford English Dictionary still says this is an erroneous use but Merriam-Webster accepts the false-singular as a word as early as 1926.

Merriam-Webster now lists kudo [coo-doe] the singular form as the main entry for the word with a plural and a whole second entry for kudos [coo-doss, more Greek sounding] being another word.

I did a search on the last decade of the New York Times and found hundreds of uses of kudos but the 40 or so uses of kudo that came up seemed all to be people’s names. This could mean that New York Times journalists are familiar with Greek, or that they aren’t stingy with their praise.