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.

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?

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.

We can see in the second half of “etymology” our word “logo” which fits into “logophile” –“word lover.”

Logo is Greek for “word.”

The first half of “etymology” also comes from Greek, in this case their word for “truth” which is etymon.

It would be easy to translate etymology to mean “true word” but in this case the logo isn’t strictly a word, but the knowledge and understanding that goes with a word.

Also, the pros who dig around in old words don’t interpret etymon to literally mean “truth”, but instead apply it as the name of root words from which others are derived.  So etymology more figuratively means “the knowledge and understanding of the roots of a word.”

Etymon must be a more poplar word among dictionary makers than it used to be because I see in my OED 2nd edition less than 50 instances of its use, while the OED online coughs up more than 1500.

Today is Friday the 13th and triskaidekaphobia was originally a clinical term appearing in the professional journal Abnormal Psychology.

Although I try to stick to common words, this one has a kind of funny side to it that has helped it leak out of psychologist’s clinics and even into a song I heard once.  Triskaidekaphobia means fear of the number 13.  It is built on four parts, all Greek, and meaning literally “three and ten fear.”

Are you scared yet?

There are a lot of things to be scared about, but maybe 13 isn’t one of them.  I decided to use this as an opportunity to explore the comprehensiveness of various dictionaries.  I looked for words ending in -phobia and found that while Merriam Webster had 62, The New American Oxford Dictionary only had 26.

Oxford makes up for this with its high octane versions.  The OED 2nd edition had 115 phobias while the OED online has 121.

So which are the six phobias that were added since 1989?

• Computerphobia: 1972
• Cyberphobia: 1981 at first not internet related
• Dysmorphophobia: a fear of becoming deformed, they must have missed this one before because the citation is from 100 years ago.
• Monophobia: the fear of being alone, which is what you’ll be if you spend too much time with your computer—also has been around for more than 100 years but just didn’t make it into the earlier edition.
• Motorphobia : from 1983 from the wonderful Richard Lederer in the wonderful Verbatim magazine.  A fear or hatred of cars.
• And finally social phobia.  Although this might seem a disorder of those who decidedly don’t suffer from computerphobia, it has actually been around since 1917.

The word widow is an empty, tragic word.  As poet Sylvia Plath put it,

the word consumes itself.

It has historically occasionally applied to men as well as women, but for the most part it is a woman’s word.

Because the aching emptiness of life’s loss has been with us since before we were human it isn’t surprising that this word has roots that go back to Indo-European, that prototype language that stands as the mysterious ancestor to virtually all of the languages from India and Europe as well as a good chunk of Asia.

Lexicographers have picked apart this short word and found links in its two syllables to sorrowful concepts from antiquity.

An entrepreneur I talked to once talked about product potentials as fitting into two categories, vitamins and headache cures.  You can sell vitamins but people only take them because they should, headache cures they are sure to buy because they need them.  Similarly the heartache of widowhood proved too great a revenue opportunity for the kings of England and thus was born the legal concept of the “King’s Widow.”

If a man was a tenant farmer to the king—and evidently the law extended to the benefit of other aristocracy as well—and he died, his widow did not have the right to remarry without the blessing of her master the king.  If she went ahead anyway, one year’s worth of her income went to the king.

Conflict of interest. 

And of course, just like today, the government became addicted to this stream of revenue so that money coming in was more normal than blessings on the union going out.  Another instance of mans inhumanity to woman.

Today we think of a villain as the bad guy.

I’m thinking of the silent movies where the villain ties Pauline to the train tracks; his shifty eyes, thin moustache.

Historically though, this guy is far too sophisticated.  A villain used to be a villein, which was what feudal serfs were called.  The rich landowner would live in his manor house out in the country.  In more southerly countries such a house would be a villa from Latin.  In the lands around the villa would live the people who worked the fields for the landowner.  Their grouping of homes was called a village and the people who did the work in the fields were the villeins.

Because these people were poor and uneducated they were looked down upon by the ruling classes and expected to participate in a little thievery when the boss wasn’t around.  Already by the time villain appeared in English 700 years ago it meant a bit of a crook, although, curiously it shows up in writing about 20 years before its parent word villein—which still retained its meaning of low born country bumpkin.

I wondered if this group of words was related to the French word vie meaning life.  I mean the villa is where the landowner lived.   But I couldn’t find any connection among the sources I checked.