1795 a fellow by the name of Mungo Park was spending some time in Africa.  I don’t know what the name Mungo might suggest to you, but it didn’t suggest to me that he was Scottish, but he was.

He subsequently wrote a book called Travels in the Interior of Africa in which he explains that Mumbo Jumbo

“is a strange bugbear, common to all Mandingo towns, and much employed by the Pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection.”

Evidently a ranking male was decked out in some disguise and brought in to ritualistically intimidate any woman who had become quarrelsome.  This evidently included public beatings while naked and tied to a post.

This account is related in Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and it’s consistent with The Oxford English Dictionary’s citation of mumbo-jumbo’s first appearance in English about 60 years earlier in 1738.

The words themselves are thought to possibly have meant “a revered ancestor”—that’s mumbo—“wearing a pompom”—that’s jumbo; this in reference to the disguise worn by the enforcer.

The most recent OED etymology says the mask itself might have been called maamajomboo.

Our current understanding of mumbo-jumbo is more along the lines of the OED definition number two: “Obscure or meaningless language or ritual; jargon intended to impress or mystify; nonsense.”

Such a meaning was understood in English at the time of those revelations of African wife abuse but it’s unclear—to me at least—whether the meaning derives from the fact that the person representing the mumbo-jumbo was only disguised and not really an important ancestor, or that these guys were babbling meaninglessly as they beat their women.

Most sources seem to point to the former.

Today we have digital cameras and film cameras and video cameras.

Yet when a judge asks people at a trial to discuss something in camera the meaning is totally different from discussing something on camera.

As any politician knows, on camera means whatever you say is going to be made public, but to a judge in camera means “in private,” a discussion not in public as would take place in the court room.  What the judge is suggesting is that the participants go back into his or her office to talk off the record.

How can these two opposing meetings of camera fit together?

According to the OED camera came into English in 1708.

In Latin camera meant room, and usually a room with a vaulted ceiling.

The Romans got this word from the Greeks to whom kamara meant anything with an arched top.

This Latin root explains why a judge uses the expression in camera to mean “in private” but not why the rest of us use a camera to take pictures.

About twenty years after the evidence shows that \ English speakers had begun referring to rooms as cameras, a man with—in this context—the very fortunate name of Mr. Ephraim Chambers published Cyclopædia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences. This work contained our first evidence the use of a camera to create images.

Here Mr. Ephraim Chambers was abbreviating two words camera obscura which is Latin for “darkened room.”

The technique he was describing is one where light is allowed through a small aperture into a darkened chamber and to shine on the opposite wall.

Just as in cameras today—and in fact in our eyeballs—this revealed a reverse image on the opposite wall. In the days before the kind of cameras we know, people would use such darkened rooms to trace an accurate sketch on the wall based on the projected image.

When we think about the riches of King Tut and the mysteries of the Egyptian pyramids we can imagine those big stone coffins that the literati call sarcophagi.

Although it was Egyptian pharaohs that were entombed in the things, it wasn’t the Egyptians that invented that name; that came from Greek.

According to Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable a special kind of stone was to be found at Assos, the now Turkish town where Aristotle lived.  This stone, it was believed, had the rather revolting quality that if one made a coffin out of it, and laid a body inside, the stone itself would eat the dead in a matter of weeks.

And so the Greeks took their word for flesh sarx and their word phagein “to eat” and named the particular stone appropriate for making coffins sarkophagos meaning “flesh eating.”

Pliny the Elder included this little piece of trivia in his book Natural History written more than 2000 years ago and from there the word sarcophagus popped into English in a 1601translation of the Classic work.

In the United States this weekend is one for celebrating.

On the 4th of July there will be fireworks, there will be parties, people will be swilling drinks and laughing.

Historically though, to celebrate was to solemnly honor something very important.

The Latin meaning of celebratus was “to honor in a large group” so that when celebrate arrived in English just before 1500 with the enlightenment, it was associated with rigid rites performed in public as might be done in a church.

It was the large crowd at such celebrations that originally gave the Roman events the term from celeber meaning “populous”.

The modern meaning of celebrate only seems to have arisen in the last 100 years and contrasts somewhat with what The Oxford English Dictionary says about the word.

This highlights the ponderous task it is to keep a huge dictionary like the OED up to date. 

Merriam Webster is no lightweight but it has a pretty modern definition alongside the traditional ones; “to engage in hilarious festivities usually including drinking.”

In contrast, the OED with its enormous ballast of having to include multiple dated first citations of every definition, has not yet gotten around to any hilarious drinking festivities in its definitions.

But you can be certain that eventually it will, and when it does I’ll raise a glass to celebrate.

The black stuff on the road is alternately called asphalt, pavement or tarmac.

Tarmac was originally a registered trademark from 1903 and the black, smelly, gooey consistency of the stuff as it’s steam-rollered in place gives an obvious clue to the tar part of the word.

Before roads were essentially glued in place with tar they began as tracks through the mud.  Horses and wagons regularly almost disappeared into these impediments to transportation and thus a star was born when the Scottish surveyor John Loudon McAdam invented a new kind of road.

First he dumped a bunch of rocks along the surface and after they got trampled into the grime by the passing traffic he added smaller and smaller stones and gravel to eventually form a roadbed similar to that beneath major highways today.

For this wonderful idea the new type of road was said to be McAdamized, after John McAdam.

John was long dead before anyone thought to glue the gravel together with tar, but they kept honoring him anyway and so do we, since its from his name that we get the mac in tarmac.

There are a number of different species of flower with yellow centers and white petals that are called daisies, but the reason they are called daisies is because one of them in particular grew in England as Old English was developing.

That species would spend its days looking up at the sky, rain or shine and then as darkness came on would fold its white petals over its yellow center and settle down for the night.

It was kind of like an eye looking up at the heavens.

That yellow middle gave it an especially sunny look during the day.

So people began calling this cheery little flower the eye of the day, which, rendered as day’s eye you can quickly see becoming daisy.

Another welcome flower is the daffodil.  In Greek a lily was called asphodelos and the “d” at the beginning of daffodil appeared on, and overtook, an already existing English word affodil after that d-less version had been in use for about 150 years.

Perhaps a less delightful etymology than that for daisy is the one for the flower known as cowslip.

The reason cowslip is called cowslip is because it tends to grow well when it has the help of a little extra nutrients and moisture as might be left behind by a passing cow.

That slip part of cowslip really does refer to the sloppy gloppy leavings of those bovine fertilizers.

Pop the word expo into a search engine and you will be rewarded with a long list of trade shows and business conferences.

Expo is an abbreviation of exposition, which from Latin through French has a meaning of “putting something out in the open.”

But the literal meaning can be very easily seen by remembering that the ex in exposition—as in many other words starting with ex—means “not” or “out of.”

Displace the ex from exposition and we get position and thus the literal meaning of exposition is that something has been put “out of position, “it is “out of place.”

Although the word exposition has been around in English since before William Shakespeare was a glimmer in his parents eyes, the truncation down to expo didn’t happen until my own lifetime. The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1963 as the first occurrence of expo, and in this case it was spelled with a capital E.

That’s because it was during the planning stages of Expo 67, the world exposition for which the City of Montreal more or less built new islands upon which to stage the exposition.

I was there.

Expo 67 was such a big hit that two years later when Montreal got a major league baseball team, the team also got named after this wonderful new word; The Montreal Expos.

But I guess the Expos must have been—like their etymology—out of place, because in 2004 the were moved and became the Washington Nationals.

Somehow this too seems to me to be out of place; a team that had been Canadian suddenly becoming Nationals in Washington.