Why is it that meteorology is the study of weather instead of the study of meteors?

The study of meteors is called “meteoritics” and fits in under astronomy which includes the study of lots of other things astronomical.

The root of the word “meteorology” goes back to ancient Greek where meteoros meant “raised” or “lofty.”  The still famous Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote all about it in a piece he actually called something along the lines of “meteorology.”

He didn’t exactly mean weather, but he did bring his understanding of weather into it.

He talked about winds under the earth causing earthquakes and tied the winds above the earth into all kinds of phenomena including—correctly—how water evaporates from the sea to come down as rain.  He thought that not only thunder and lightning were products of this meteorology, but so were meteors and the milky way.  In fact, the first of this pair words “meteor” and “meteorology” to come into English was “meteor” around 1500.  And when it did, it didn’t mean a shooting star, but the study of weather—what meteorology means now.

It took about a hundred years before the two words sorted themselves out and established the meanings we recognize for them today.  When I talked about the word “storm” I touched on the sometimes conflicting superstitions that people used to have.  The same applies to meteors or shooting stars.  Of course the birth of Christ was supposed to have been advertised by a shooting star and according to the Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions the idea that you could wish upon a shooting star is recorded back in the early 1800s.

Even though Shakespeare in Richard the Second says that shooting stars denote the death of kings, as early as 2000 years ago the Roman Pliny the Elder was debunking the belief that they portend any death at all.

As I noted yesterday the word “legal” although it is clearly connected to law in meaning, evolved from a different source.

Whereas law appeared in Old English, “legal” missed out on both Old English and Middle English and didn’t show up until Modern English in the early 1500s.  Unlike “law” that came from Norse roots, “legal” comes to us from Latin and French.  Actually we aren’t sure if it just took a while to emerge from French as used by the ruling elite after the victory of the Normans, or if it was grabbed directly from Latin during the renaissance.  The Latin ancestry applies to either possibility and the root word in Latin was lex meaning “law.”

The first guy to actually set pen to paper using the word “legal” was one Sir Thomas More, or at least that’s the earliest example found so far.

Thomas More was an interesting guy.  He was a lawyer and politician and served up-close and personal under King Henry VIII.  So up-close and personal that he was knighted by King Henry.  Thomas More used the word “legal” in a little thing he wrote called  A Dyalogue of Syr Thomas More, Knyghte, wherein he treatyd divers matters, as of the Veneration and Worshyp of Ymages and Relyques, praying to Sayntys, and goyng on Pylgrymage, wyth many othere thyngs touchying the pestylent Sect of Luther and Tyndale…bla bla bla…a long title that does go on.

From this it is clear that although he was concerned with the law, he was pretty heavily into what he regarded as the law of God as well.

The Tyndale he mentioned was William Tyndale, who had been exiled and got into a war of words with More over Catholicism versus Protestantism. Thomas More felt strongly enough about it that he had a number of protestants burned at the stake.  However, when King Henry decided it was better for his sex life to split with the pope, Thomas More stuck to his guns, and his religious principals and so was executed as a traitor.

By this you might think that Tyndale had won the argument, but the Catholic church didn’t agree—still doesn’t I guess—and so made Thomas More a saint, in fact patron saint of statesmen, lawyers, and politicians.

The words “law” and “legal” would seem to go together pretty naturally.  According to the OED these two words in fact come to us from quite different origins.

I’ll deal with laws today and legalities tomorrow.

The first appearance of the word “law” in English was circa the year 1000, but it appears to have roots that go into prehistoric Old Norse.  Although the word “law” is said to have been Old English, in fact there was an earlier word spoken by the Anglo-Saxons that had the same meaning.

That word was “æ” and it was represented by that letter we rarely ever see these days, the one that looks like an “a” and an “e” jammed together; it’s called an “ash” (æsc).  But because the Vikings for some centuries pretty much laid claim to the north east half of Britain, when England eventually came under more united rule the word “law” was left behind by the Vikings and supplanted the original English word “æ.”

Today we think of “law” as meaning legislation, that body of written rules which we are supposed to obey and from which the police justify their actions and the courts evaluate our transgressions.  But in Old Norse the meaning was more broad.  We now have hundreds of thousands of words in English to express almost every nuance of a situation.  But in other languages, and particularly back then, this was not the case.  Fewer words often meant that each word had to assume a greater variety of meanings.  Rather than mean “legislation” the Old Norse word for law meant something laid down and fixed.  Like the analogy we might make today when saying an agreement was set in stone.  Their word meant law but also something like a layer of bedrock, as well as gentlemen’s agreement.

Our governments and courts set our laws as best they can.  They usually try to set out general rules in society’s best interest—or at least what they see as society’s best interest.  But when a law gets out there in the wild, sometimes it doesn’t exactly apply or always serve justice.  These senses come through in that famous quote from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist where a henpecked Mr. Bumble, when told

“the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.”
“If the law supposes that,” said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass- a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor…”

The phrase “the law’s an ass” may have been made famous by Dickens, but it appeared back in the 1650s in a play called Revenge of Honor, so the feeling of injustice wasn’t new even in Dickens’ day.  And the same tone from the Devil’s Dictionary:

Once Law was sitting on the bench,
And Mercy knelt a-weeping.
“Clear out!” he cried, “disordered wench!
Nor come before me creeping.
Upon your knees if you appear,
‘Tis plain your have no standing here.”
Then Justice came. His Honor cried:
“Your status? – devil seize you!”
“Amica curiae,” she replied -
“Friend of the court, so please you.”
“Begone!” he shouted – “there’s the door -
I never saw your face before!”

Well, the legislators and courts do their best.  But “law” has crept also into slang.  The obvious example is calling the police “the law” but I found an unexpected meaning at urbandictionary.com.

Someone who is “law” is extraordinarily attractive and smart and sexy.  I’m interpreting here, but I would suppose that this slang might evolve out of the phrase “he is a law unto himself”

According to Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable this comes to us from the book of Romans in the bible.  The idea was at first, that where Gods laws didn’t apply to non-believers, but that some conducted themselves honorably in any case.  Today someone who is a law unto themselves, disregards established norms based on their own moral code, good or bad.  Someone with extraordinary magnetism can stretch the bounds of acceptable behavior more than most of us.

The Devil’s Dictionary defines a cat as

“A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.”

The Oxford English Dictionary gives an enormous host of examples of languages in which the word for cat is cat, or something very close to it, and goes on to say that all of this points to a wide discussion of cats over the years (I’m paraphrasing) but doesn’t tell us where it came from in the first place.

Two guesses are

• Teutonic, based on an old Latin quote, or
• Egyptian, where cats were supposed to have first been domesticated.

The image of cats is of being notoriously difficult to control—“like herding cats” is the expression.  This image of the free spirit put the cat at the feet of the Roman goddess of liberty, conveniently named Libertas.

People have been called cats in a broad range of applications.  From the middle of the last century it was cool to be a cat, but evidently before that to be a cat was to be a sort of hobo.  Some of these uses got downright intimate, think of “cathouse.”

Cats wander all through our phrases and idioms.  The play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is named because of the sense of restlessness of the play and is evidently based on an older idiom “like a cat on hot bricks.”

When you tell someone a secret you let the “cat out of the bag” and it is impossible to control where that little bit of information you released might wander.  Letting the cat out of the bag is supposed to stem from a trick played in old markets where buyers were duped when they thought they were buying a suckling pig.  I would guess it would be hard to trick anyone that way and the elegance of the freely wandering secret once released makes me wonder about that source.

Tennis rackets used to be strung with something called catgut, but there never was an industry breeding cats for use in this application.  Instead it was the guts of cattle that were selected for their tensile strength and strung for use on the courts.

The Devil’s Dictionary says that an incumbent is

“A person of the liveliest interest to the outcumbents.”

The Canadian election brought the word “incumbent” into conversation in my house recently.  This was a new word for my kids and I had the pleasure of telling them what it meant.

You see, since I have been working with etymology I have developed the annoying habit of thinking it is interesting and so my family tolerates me with only slightly rolling eyes.

This time they actually wanted to know.  I explained that an incumbent was a politician who was the candidate who won the election last time.  I wondered aloud where the word came from and one of my kids suggested it might be related to “cucumber.”

I was thinking more along the lines of “recumbent” which means “lying down”, although I didn’t suppose politicians would want to be thought of as lying down on the job.

Indeed “incumbent” has other meanings than the political one, as I found upon applying myself to the OED.  Just like “recumbent” the Latin word incumbentem meant to lie down and is used in such applications as describing the wings of moths which lie along their sides unlike butterflies who’s wings stand up off their back.

The political meaning of “incumbent” seems to have arisen during the renaissance when all things Latin and Greek were deemed oh so scholarly and wise.  Whereas other languages leave their incumbents lying down, in English a medieval Latin sense of incumbere meaning “to obtain” or “to possess” was adopted.

As to cucumbers, even though they regularly lie down there is no etymological connection.

Mark Morton’s Cupboard Love tells me that it was kukuon in Greek but that as English adopted it through French the word “horseradish” was also appearing and so people may have thought “cow-cumber” was a good complementary word.  He points out that this would have meant “cow embarrassment” since at that time “cumber” meant “embarrassed.”

As I have repeated endlessly, the bringers of the Germanic roots of Old English to Britain included a bunch of characters known as the Angles.

It is from these folks we get the words England and English.

Much of the evidence for Old English comes from religious texts for the dual reasons that Christianity was just about all they wrote about back then, and churches were one of the sole institutions that have been able to protect these frail scraps of paper over the millennia. [actually vellum not paper]

The bringers of Old English were followed some centuries later by the bringers of Christianity. The story goes that one day in Rome, a guy named Gregory—who would later become pope—was out shopping for slaves and he saw these three boys on offer.

He found them quite attractive and asked where they had been manufactured.

The answer came that they were Angels. He was overjoyed and said it was fitting because they looked like angels.

Finding that their homeland had not seen the light of the holy cross he raced straight off to the reining pope and arranged for England to become Christian. Thus it is no surprise when I look in my Oxford English Dictionary that I see that we get our word “angel” from Latin.

Going further back, it seems that the Greek word angelos actually meant “messenger” and that it’s use in the translation of the bible from Hebrew for a messenger of god is what started the whole angel ball rolling.

Before angels became the subject of a TV series they were much studied in the 5th century and it turns out that just like the military and other important organizations, there is quite a hierarchy. There are nine orders arranged in three triads

• Seraphim, cherubim and Thrones is the first circle;
• Dominions, Virtues and Powers is the second; and
• Principalities, Archangels and Angels is the third.

This word popped out at me from an Oxford English Dictionary newsletter.

The reason it was in there was that lexicographers had recently updated its first citation and pushed it back more than 100 years.  We now know that the word was used in the 1721 Dr. Radcliffe’s Practical Dispensatory.

Up until now we were foolish enough to believe that the first citation was in a book called The Last Days of Pompeii by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton from 1834.

Hindsight is 20/20, but there are two clues that make it not all that surprising that an earlier citation was found.  First of all, The Last Days of Pompeii was a very popular novel.  So popular that it is still in print today and has been made into a movie more than once.

This is the author who also penned the opening line “It was a dark and stormy night.”

What this means is that volunteer readers for the Oxford English Dictionary project would be more likely to pick up  The Last Days of Pompeii than more obscure and possibly boring works that might have contained our word of the day “pharmacist.”

Secondly, the context of the citation in the The Last Days of Pompeii makes it clear that the word is being used as a metaphor.  One of the characters, Glaucus is complaining about people who mix business and pleasure which he feels should be pursued quite independently, and he calls them

“Unskillful pharmacists! pleasure and study are not elements to be thus mixed together, they must be enjoyed separately.”

Clearly a word that is being used as a metaphor must have been used a fair bit in its literal context beforehand.  So much for my examination of the lexicographer’s art; on to the etymology of “pharmacist.”

Although the word for the person behind the counter is about 300 years old, the word pharmacy itself is cited back in Chaucer 700 years back.  We get it from French but earlier than that it comes from pharmakia from ancient Greek, which not only meant medicine, but also poison and witchcraft.  In Greece and later in Chaucer’s time “pharmacy” was likely to be medicine taken as a purgative.

There is an old saw that tells us the Inuit have 200 words for snow.  Is it true?

The English word for snow goes back a long way; right into Indo-European.  So it shows up as a similar word in languages as far flung as Greek, Slavic, Germanic and Celtic.  So it is quite likely that the Celtic peoples who inhabited England before the Anglo-Saxons took over, had at least this word in common with their oppressors.

The word “snow” or something similar to it, with the same meaning, was used in the British isles before the arrival of Old English.  This makes “snow” an unusual word because it is generally considered that Old English didn’t exist before the arrival of the Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes around 450 with their Germanic language. And once they did arrive—from what we can see in English today—they pretty much wiped out the linguistic culture of the earlier inhabitants, although they appear to have lived side by side.

So, snow, as a word goes back long before recorded history.  But not long enough that it shows up in Inuktitut.

Why claim the Inuit have 200 words for snow?

Well evidently it all started with writings from the 1940s by a guy named Benjamin Lee Whorf.  He didn’t actually say that there were a specific number of Inuit words for snow.  He just pointed out that because snow was more important to the Inuit in how they went about their day, one word wouldn’t do for them.

He contrasted this with Aztec that had even less words than English for snow-like things: ice, snow and cold all using the same word.  And also with Hopi who use the same word for things that fly, be they insects, planes or even pilots.

I searched around a bit and I find over 100 words that might be considered Inuit snow words.  For example maujak is deep soft snow while pukak is more like what we would call corn snow.

But it doesn’t take long before you come across words like mapsaq which means snow hanging over.

Now wait a minute.  In English don’t we call that a cornice?

Then there’s kusugaq.  That’s icicle to you and me.

So if there are 200 words—and to get to that number you’d have to accept the same word with different pronunciations from different dialects across the arctic—then we can certainly claim there is more than just “snow” in English.  How about avalanche and sleet?

The place I live was once the bottom of a sea.  I can walk down to the river to see the layers of rock that were laid down in that ancient sea bed, with little fossils imprinted here and there.

These layers are called strata and a single layer is called a stratum.

Some millennia after my local sea dried up, the Romans started marching around Europe.  They are still famous for their roads which they called via.  But a paved road was via strata based on the layer of paving stones on top.

As they expanded their empire they bumped up against the Germanic peoples.  They fought and looked down their noses at each other, but they also established some healthy trading relationships and at times got along quite well with one another.  These German guys had never seen a paved road before and so they adopted the technology and the strata part of the Latin name.

Later, some of their number took off in boats and pretty much over-ran Britain so that when their language emerged as Old English, there among the Germanic words was “street.”

So it’s true, all roads do lead to Rome.

According to the OED the word “street” was used as early as Chaucer to mean not only the road, but the people who hung out on the road.

There also appears to be a fairly long tradition of tying the word street into expressions relating to buying and selling.  Because financial institutions tend to crowd together often on one street—as in the case of Wall Street—as far back as 150 years ago “the street” was said to be making economic decisions.

Drugs are often referred to as having such and such a street value and even consumer products now are said to have a street price. Though curiously this means something like the Wal-Mart price, usually lower than the manufacturers suggested price.

According to urbandictionary.com street also now refers to urban culture so I guess it could be street dictionary dot com – certainly some of the definitions come out of the gutter.

When you leave home there is little confusion about what a lock and key are as you bolt your door.  But what, if any are the connections between these devices—what Ambrose Bierce’ Devil’s Dictionary called

“The distinguishing device of civilization and enlightenment”

and the lock that lifts ships in a canal and the key where a ship docs; or for that matter, the Florida Keys?

It turns out that while a naval key is unrelated to the key on your keychain, a naval lock is etymologically connected to the bolt on your door.

The key you carry in your pocket arrived in English with one of the groups of Germanic peoples back around the year 450.  Key appears in Old English but not in the majority of Germanic languages, only in Frisian.

English had to wait for William the Conqueror before the naval quay appeared in English from French 700 years ago.  They are pronounced the same and used to be spelled the same until French intervened again about 300 years ago when the spelling of the naval quay changed to quay.

This French word for wharf is related to the Spanish word for a low island, which is where the Florida Keys got their name.

As I said, although security keys and nautical quays don’t relate, locks do.  Lock also comes from Old English and arrived with the Frisians, although the other Germanic invaders also had a similar word.  As well as the thing a key would fit into, as early as 700 years ago a lock could mean a gate in a river.  It’s easy to see how this obsolete usage could morph into the enclosure used to lift ships.

Throwing the bolt on this episode I’m Charles Hodgson and that’s podictionary for today.