For a while there, couple of decades ago, it was pretty common to hear people talking about “the state of the art” and meaning leading-edge advanced technology.

This really was a fitting phrase since the word technology in most dictionary definitions harkens back to art.

Technology evolved from an originally Greek word technologia, but got imported into English back in 1615.

Now, and even back to the original Greek, technology has been a careful, thoughtful, systematic approach to doing something; a technique.

Technique as a word came from the same source but came to English a little later through French.

The first part of the word, techn actually did mean “art” or “craft” from Greek, while the second half logy means more literally “the writings on” or “the accumulated knowledge about.”

This construct means that technology could be figuratively translated to mean “the field of knowledge about the art.”

The American Heritage Dictionary takes the techn root back beyond Greek to Indo-European teks meaning to weave, linking it to the root of the word textile.

These days the art in question is more likely to be developing the next generation of handheld devices, or the art of decoding DNA sequences, as opposed to weaving skills.

But when technology first arose as a word back in Greek, the arts then being systematically organized were things like grammar.

The first time I looked at the etymology of the word hurricane was in August of 2005.

At that time I don’t think I had really begun to consult Urbandictionary.  I do now, because I think it’s a good vehicle to show how slang usages are evolving.

I just checked now and I see that definition two and three tie the word hurricane to drugs and alcohol.

To some degree this shows that slang is slang is slang because according to The Oxford English Dictionary about the time of Samuel Johnson, 250 years ago, the word hurricane referred to a rip roaring house party.

Of course both the new and the older uses of hurricane in this way are pulled from the “blowout” meaning associated with the main meaning of the word.

That’s what the first entry at Urbandictionary refers to “A temporary alliance formed between the ocean and the sky…”

I posted a podictionary episode about the word hurricane on August 28th, 2005 and listened to news reports over the days and weeks following August 29th when Katrina hit New Orleans.

I look back now at the Google trends data for the use of the word hurricane and see regular blips of search activity every August-September hurricane season.

I guess it’s a reflection of human nature that the highest peak of hurricane searches was around the period of Hurricane Rita, the storm that came right after Katrina.

The word hurricane is a word that evolved from local languages in the Caribbean, was picked up by the Spanish before it made its way into English.

In other parts of the world such a storm is called a typhoon.

Neither the words typhoon, cyclone, or tornado have such a marked regular annual beat, or come anywhere close in frequency of use as hurricane on Google trends.

I suppose this reflects the dominant use of Google by Americans who care more about storms in their part of the world.

The word hurricane appeared in written English in 1555 and coincidentally the word tornado appeared only one year later.  For some decades these two words both applied to Caribbean storms, until hurricane came to dominate and tornado withdrew to a meaning of a more localized blowout by the early to mid1600s.

The word cyclone was an invented word by a fellow named Henry Piddington in 1848.

Piddington took it upon himself to figure out what the heck was happening out there at sea when one of these big blowouts took place.  He became very respected and valuable in India and England because what he found out saved a bundle in shipping losses.

He named the storms cyclones and most etymologies give the Greek root of this as cyclos meaning “circle.” But he actually visualized the storms like a giant snake coiled up on itself and the appropriate Greek word for that was cycloma.

Anatoly Liberman says in his book Word Origins that English is a conservative language when it comes to spelling.

The idea is that even though you might not be able to tell where a word comes from by hearing it, when you see it written down sometimes there are more clues because the spelling often retains evidence of its history.

Such is the case with the word lieutenant.  The word arrived in English from French in 1375 and within 100 years the English were pronouncing it “left-tenant” as if there were a “right-tenant” as well.  Yet the spelling that influences Americans to say “loo-tenant” survived this pronunciation change back in the old country and also shows us in stark clarity where the word comes from.

If you write lieutenant out, but put a space after lieu, the result is two other common English words.

Lieu might have a bit of a legalistic flavor to it but most people recognize that it means “instead of” or “in place of”—for example: “in lieu of paying me the money, she took me out to dinner.”

Of course a tenant is someone who rents an apartment. They hold the lease on the place and if it’s a nice apartment, in a desirable neighborhood, they might hold onto it tenaciously.

From Latin then, lieutenant literally means “place holder” and the military lieutenant acts on behalf of—or in place of—their commanding officer.

No one can really say why in the British Army the word is pronounced “left-tenant” but it’s notable that in the Royal Navy the pronunciation seems half way across the ocean. They drop the “f” and say “le-tenant.”

Something that is miniature is small.

Often a miniature is something that’s a tiny replica of something else that is normally bigger.

It only makes sense that this word miniature would derive from the Latin word minimum, meaning “the smallest.”

It only makes sense, but it’s wrong.

Miniature is one of those strange words that has an etymology that defies logic. The actual truth is that before things that were tiny were called miniature, a certain kind of small portrait was called a miniature.

Before that, the art of illuminating those beautiful letters and figures in hand reproduced ancient books was called miniaire in Italian.

This miniaire art was in turn named for the red color that was especially popular for use in producing this art.

The red color was usually produced by use of a red kind of lead and it was the Latin name of this red lead that gave the color its name because the lead was called minium.

Thus etymologically, miniature and minimum actually don’t even have a small relationship with each other.

Originally, in French, the word embarras meant a blockage or impediment to whatever you wanted to do.

The word found its way into English just after Shakespeare’s lifetime about 400 years ago.

Knowing that embarras meant a blockage, we can easily break the word in two; em bar.  To bar something is to block it.

This word bar arrived in English much earlier, back in the 12th century. It somehow snuck into Latin during the time after Classical times when the Romans were speaking Latin but was already part of the Latin leftover language that then grew into French.

No one knows were it originated before it was picked up by those vulgar Latin speaking pre-Frenchmen.

This sense of “blockage” is further supported by the diaries of early European explorers in North America. They used the rivers for travel and they called the large piles of driftwood that sometimes blocked their way embarras.

So how exactly does a word that means “blockage” come to have a sense of “shame” associated with it?

When embarrass first came into English it was applied to financial situations.  People were said to be embarrassed if they didn’t have enough money.

Not having sufficient funds blocked them or barred them from doing the things that needed to be done.

From there it’s easy to see how being embarrassed came to mean being put in an uncomfortable position and to be ashamed. It’s common for people with less economic means to feel awkward when someone else is conspicuously flashing cash around.

Philately is the term for stamp collecting, yet the Greek roots of the word literally mean “lovers of tax freedom.”

There’s an interesting contrast between the image of a bespectacled stamp collector and a revolutionary in the streets, flaming torch in hand, demanding the overthrow of the tax hungry government.

The phil- in philately is the same as in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, or in audiophile a lover of high end stereo equipment.

The second half of the word philately comes from the Greek ateleia meaning “tax exemption.”

The word philately was invented by a French stamp collector named George Herpin and proposed in a French stamp collecting magazine in 1864.

According to an 1876 edition of the magazine Philatelist, timbromania was the earlier word that Herpin was attempting to oust.

Timbromania means “stamp madness” and it certainly lends a less attractive image to its practitioners than does “lover of tax freedom.”

Timbrophily and Timbrology were also suggested but philately seems to have licked its completion and stuck with us.

It only took a year before this French invention crossed the English Channel—no doubt on a mail ship—to show up as an English word in 1865.

Only one question remains and that is why would stamp collectors consider themselves lovers of tax freedom?

The reason is that there are two ways to have a piece of postal mail delivered.  One involves having the recipient pay a COD charge; that’s “cash on delivery.”  While the charge isn’t strictly a tax, the alternative is (from the recipient’s point of view) tax free.

The fact that a letter has a stamp on it says to the carrier that the sender has already paid the freight and the receiver can have it without charge.

I use the internet so much that it’s hard to believe that when I finished school not only was there not an internet, there weren’t even personal computers.

Okay, that’s not quite true, there were things like Atari and Commodore and Apple II but in 1981 I graduated as an electrical engineer in June and IBM didn’t release its first PC until August.

All these machines certainly couldn’t talk to each other. It was 5 years before the wires were even in place so that computers could get interconnected between universities.

And yet the word internet appeared 18 years before that, when I was only 10 back in 1968.  That’s a year before Arpanet—that’s the project people credit as the very start of the internet.

The reason the word internet preceded the actual network is that it’s such a logical word.

Inter- just like I used earlier in interconnected, and -net, as in network.

And these were logical people, thinking ahead, planning, anticipating.

The first appearance was in conference proceedings from the IEEE—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

The rest of us didn’t notice the internet until the explosion of the World Wide Web in the mid ‘90s.

Everyone knew this was something important. I had an editor at the time and she knew the internet was important and so she made me capitalize it every time I wrote it down—by this time I had a PC, a Mac actually.

Dictionaries still suggest capitalization, but as time marches on the internet becomes so important that it melts into the background and we don’t need to capitalize it any more that we would the word money or food.

I notice that Microsoft Word 2000’s dictionary suggested capitalization, but Word 2003 did not.

The text you just read above was written in 2005 and I’m here to report that in March of 2009 The Oxford English Dictionary updated their entry for internet.

The OED report that I have it backwards. Early examples of the word were not capitalized but later ones were.

I still refuse to do so.

They also say that the adoption of the word was “probably greatly reinforced by use in the compound Internet Protocol.”

At first glance this would appear to be bass akwards, but thinking about it for a moment it actually does make sense.

It wasn’t that IP or Internet Protocol was named because it was a protocol for use on the internet. Instead, Internet Protocol was named because it was a protocol for interconnecting networks.

Techie people who worked in the mines of the early internet would have been first to pick up on the techie jargon and it was from their lingua franca that the rest of us monkeys learned to see and do.

The dashboard in a car has taken on something of the meaning of an instrument panel. So much so that Microsoft, Apple and others have at one time or another come out with software dashboards that you can fiddle with on your computer.

But the dashboard in a car is named after the dashboards of an earlier time.

In 1846, when the word first appeared in the printed record a dashboard was a barrier between the riders of a sleigh or wagon and the flying mud and water coming from a horse’s hooves.

Although a horse and sleigh might be dashing through the snow it wasn’t the meaning of “moving with speed” that made dash applicable to the board that kept riders clean and dry.

At first, back in the thirteenth century the word dash meant to hit violently or to break something into pieces.  In this dash was pretty close in meaning to smash although smash didn’t appear in English until 400 years later.

This is why we still sometimes hear people saying that their hopes were dashed.

The reason we call a broken pencil line a dashed line is because editors violently removed words from manuscripts by striking them out with a dash of their red pencil.

By the 1500s to dash something could also mean “to throw it violently” and by the late 1600s this included throwing water.

So dash had become synonymous with splash, also a word that was only just coming into the language by the early 1700s.

Thus a dashboard was at first really a splashboard.

It was in 1904 that the dashboard appeared in a car and it did so as a sort of analogy to those boards that stood in front of the passengers of a horse drawn vehicle, since in an automobile there would be no hooves to dash water and mud at the riders.

Furthermore when cars were a new phenomenon there were too few of them to worry about water or mud from a car ahead of you.

The very first reference to that legendary activist Robin Hood appears in 1362 in a work credited to William Langland and known as The vision of William concerning Piers Plowman; and so roughly contemporaneous with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

William Langland was a populist sort of guy—which is probably why he mentions Robin Hood—and many people see Piers Plowman as a social critique of the church, which would place it in good company with The Canterbury Tales, but in stark contrast to so many other early English documents.

In any case Piers Plowman was popular enough in its time that scholars don’t have to fight for elbow room to examine it today, because lots of copies were made back then so that quite a number still survive.

That was a time before the printing press though, so all of those copies were hand written.

When documents are copied by hand, sometimes there are changes between the original and the copy.  This must have happened to such an extent with Piers Plowman that scholars have quite a challenge in trying to figure out which version is the more original.

Of course the reason that Robin Hood and Piers Plowman make it into today’s podcast is that this is also the document that first mentions spinsters, making the word about 650 years old.

Spin is the important element here, since at first spinsters were young women whose main labor was to work at spinning flax or sheep’s-wool into tread or yarn.

Spinster was almost like a professional title similar to baker or tailor.

Married women could certainly be spinsters.  As a matter of fact almost all women spun whenever their hands were free of other chores.  They’d spin as they gossiped and they’d spin as they walked to some other task.

This was before the industrial revolution and so without all that spinning there would have been no fabric.

Spinning was such an important activity that according to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable a girl was not thought fit to be a wife until she had spun herself linen sufficient to cover her body, table, and bed.

With this emphasis on maidens learning to spin, by the 1600s women who remained maidens, seemingly perpetually preparing for marriage, gave a new meaning to the word spinster; someone who never married.

Here’s a quote from Cyril Connolly

“Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.”

That describes my memory pretty accurately.

Memory is one of those words that go a long way back.  Spanish, Portuguese, Italian all have it, and of course French where we got it from.

Earlier forms appeared in Latin and Greek and it’s there in Indo-European too, although it seemed to start with an “s” back then.

Here is a word that shows us that lexicographical research is still alive and well.  The word memory is dated as appearing first in English in 1303 according to the Oxford English Dictionary second edition.

But the third edition changes the date of first usage to 1225.

Before, the word’s first usage is credited to a work called Handling Sin by Robert Manning.

From the third edition it is evident that careful scrutiny of the Ancrene Riwle has located the word memory in a marginal note on an old manuscript.

These two citations also underline the fact that so much of old documentation on the roots of English is religiously based. Handling Sin has a self explanatory title and the Ancrene Riwle I’ve mentioned before as a sort of etiquette guide for nuns.

This religous base is due to three factors.

First, people were more religious back then.

Second, people were more illiterate back then and so if you could write at all it’s likely you were educated in association with church scholarship.

And finally churches were safer places for old documents to lie dormant for centuries.

I opened with a quote from Cyril Connolly.  He was a writer and magazine editor from the last century. Here’s in part, what Wikipedia has to say about him:

In 1930, he married the American Jean Bakewell who “was to prove one of the more liberating forces in his life… an uncomplicated hedonist, independent, adventurous, celebrating the moment…an attractive personality: warm, generous, witty and approachable …” She provided modest financial support that enabled him to enjoy travels, particularly around the Mediterranean, hospitality and good food and drink. While tolerant of Connolly’s affairs for many years, to his great grief she eventually left him in 1935.

Now it seems to me that if Connolly’s memory was better of which side his bread was buttered on, he’d not have lost a gal who sounds to me like quite a catch.