When a baby is born its pretty lovable.  New parents are fascinated by the perfect tiny fingernails and soft skin of their new bundle of joy.

What could be more ideal?  What could be more unspoiled?

This was the original idea behind the word “naïve” when it came into English from French around the time that Shakespeare was breathing his last.  “Naïve” is the feminine and “naïf” is the masculine form of the word, and both words came into English around the same time, although we don’t use “naïf” much.  Back through French these words trace to Latin with roots connected to “natural” and “native” as well as “prenatal” which is what shows us that this concept of a baby’s perfection goes all the way back, “natal” being birth.

When I look at the Oxford English Dictionary I see a difference between the entries in the second edition and the new online edition.  When I think of someone as “naïve” I think more along the lines that they are inexperienced and perhaps easily led, maybe even gullible.

Evidently this meaning has evolved over the last half century or so.

It’s fairly common for words to shift meanings over time and often to acquire more critical or pejorative senses.  We may be seeing the beginnings of this with the word naïve.  Originally a word with as wholesome a meaning as might be imagined, now taking on a new tone.  Not exactly negative, but perhaps gently tolerant of weaknesses.

Here’s a neat trick.  It works for me using Microsoft Word 2003.  Type in the word naïve but spell it wrong.  Maybe put the “i” before the “a”—your spell check will tell you it’s wrong and suggest a correction of naïve.  This correct spelling has an “i” with just one dot.  If you put your cursor at the end of the word and hit the spacebar, Word re-corrects it to an “i” with two dots.  What’s that about?  Are we getting a little too enthusiastic in crossing our “t’s” and dotting our “i’s”?

There is a clue back in the OED and also in Fowler’s Modern English Usage.  Both say that this word, “naïve”

“has never been fully naturalized in English.”

That means that we still pronounce it in the French way, and to the extent that it sometimes has two dots riding over the “i” we still spell it in the French way as well.  Those two dots are called an umlaut (oom-lout) [actually I've been corrected on this it isn't an umlaut it's a diaeresis or trema I think]  and as if to reinforce the idea that language is subject to international free trade, the umlaut comes not from French but from German.  It only actually took on the form of two dots around the time “naïve” hopped from French to English.  The origin of the umlaut came from a German  way of expressing emphasis on vowels by which they sometimes, during medieval times moved an “e” from within a written word, to just above it.  This superscript “e” over time morphed to look like two tiny lines, like a sideways equal sign, and then shrunk to two little dots.  We don’t see umlauts too much in English anymore—before I looked it up I didn’t know what it was.  It’s one of those things that appears in some words if you want it to, but if you didn’t bother to, that’s okay too.

To close, here’s a quote from Thomas Szasz, aHungarian-born psychiatrist

“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.”

The word “arrogant” first came into English from French in Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, although it must have been used in speech for some time.  “Arrogance” appears almost 100 years earlier than “arrogant”, so it’s plain the words were being used in discussion, even if we haven’t found written evidence of them before that.

The Parson’s Tale is the last of the Canterbury Tales and also the longest.  Although throughout the Canterbury Tales it is not unusual to hear its various commentators unleashing stinging criticism of the church, and even to get into some pretty spicy descriptions—The Parson’s Tale comes across with the Parson appearing as a pretty fair and sensible guy.  So it is this respectable fellow, in warning against the various different shades of sin, who explains the word for us as follows:

• Arrogant is he who thinks he has within himself those virtues which he has not,
• or who holds that he deserves to have them;
• or else he deems that he is that which he is not.

If you look in a dictionary these days definitions will run something along the lines of “aggressively conceited” or “presumptuous.”

Ultimately “arrogant” and “arrogance” come from Latin where their parent word held a similar sense, but was built on the Latin word for “claim.”  Related words have arisen which have meant “adoption”—which is claiming as your child, one who is not biologically your offspring.

So, people who are arrogant are claiming something of themselves that they are not.

Since I am so often recounting stories that date from the times of Shakespeare or King Alfred, I don’t usually have a sound bite of original material to go along with the word of the day.  Today however I have a little story that is barely a month old.

In the recent Canadian elections the old Liberal government were tossed out and a new Conservative government was brought in.  David Emerson, a senior politician from the old government was reelected but now was on the losing side.  Two weeks to the day, after the election he switched sides to become a cabinet minister in the new government.

This understandably pissed off the people who had voted for him because he was a liberal, as well as the people who had worked on his campaign and spent many thousands of dollars trying not to elect a conservative.

He told the media he was surprised that people were upset, and among other things said: [you'll have to listen to the audio file above]

There’s not much more to say on the subject, is there?

The word “oval”, as I said yesterday, comes from the Latin for egg.

An egg has an elliptical shape and so we call an ellipse an oval.

This word root is why women have something called a monthly ovulation; and how a drink that I could never figure out the popularity of—Ovaltine got its name; it’s made with eggs.

The president of the United States traditionally spends his working day in the Oval Office. We like to hope that a minimum of eggs are laid there. The room takes its name from its shape.

Looking at the whitehouse.gov website I see that the original Whitehouse did not have an oval office.  It was built in 1909, over 100 years after the original Whitehouse was built.  The wikipedia entry on the oval office has some drivel about how George Washington had curved walls put in his offices before the Whitehouse was built so that everyone in the room could stand equidistant from the president.

I can’t believe that has anything to do with why there is an oval office today.

Clearly having an oval office is important to presidents since the one we think of today isn’t the one first built in 1909.  FDR had it moved, marble fireplace and all, in a different part of the Whitehouse so that it would have some windows.

Why is it so important?

I have a suggestion.  The OED has more than one definition for the word “oval.”  One is “egg shaped” as I’ve said, but the first definition, the older one, relates to Roman history.  If you go to a concert or a play and the audience feels that the players have done a remarkably fine job, you are likely to experience a standing ovation.

There’s that “ova” word again.  A standing ovation, however, does not involve throwing eggs or anything.  It harkens back to the second level of honors awarded a victorious Roman general.  The older OED definition of “oval” refers to the crown awarded to the general worthy of the ovation.

Coincidence?

Tomorrow is Valentines Day so I wanted to give a little focus to words related to this annual festival of red hearts.

The reason it’s a big deal is because love is a big deal.

I went to urbandictionary.com and was overwhelmed.  Most words they list have a handful of definitions and maybe a couple of dozen votes.  The word “love” has hundreds of definitions and many thousands of votes, the vast majority of which lean toward the sweet and sticky.

True to his cynical nature Ambrose Bierce claims that love is temporary insanity in his Devil’s Dictionary and goes on to say that the patient can be cured by marriage.

Love comes in many varieties and this leads to a rather extended list of definitions in the OED.  The first one runs:

That disposition or state of feeling with regard to a person which (arising from recognition of attractive qualities, from instincts of natural relationship, or from sympathy) manifests itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, and usually also in delight in his or her presence and desire for his or her approval.

Some of the definitions have pretty subtle distinctions.  Compare that with the fourth:

That feeling of attachment which is based upon difference of sex; the affection which subsists between lover and sweetheart and is the normal basis of marriage.

And of course some aren’t subtle at all,

The animal instinct between the sexes, and its gratification.

Of course Valentines Day is all about “the affection which subsists between lover and sweetheart.”

The word “love” in this context first appears in Aelfric’s translation of Genesis into Old English.  There a fellow named Jacob is hankering after Rachel and agrees to seven years of labor to earn her hand.  Her father is a traditional old devil and so after seven years throws a wedding party but under the veil, he slips Rachel’s older sister instead.  In the morning Jacob opens his eyes and is horrified to be staring into the wrong eyes.  He confronts his father in law who explains that daughters have to be married off in order, you see.  Be a good sport about it and stick with her for a week, then you can have Rachel too—and oh, by the way, you’ll owe me another seven years.

Jacob must have been in love because he agreed to the terms.

And although the bible says he hated the sister, he couldn’t have been all that cut up about it since she bore him four sons.

So that takes our etymology of “love” back 1000 years, but it isn’t difficult to believe that love is a pretty ancient feeling and that the word might go back even further.

It does, 250 more years in English with that first multi-claused definition, but far further in other languages.  Parent and related words run right back through Germanic and Latin and into Indo-European.

Love is one of those primordial factors.  So important that once it had a name, no one ever forgot it.

Something that is way out of town is out in the boonies, the boondocks.  This word has been around in English for 100 years but doesn’t seem to have been written down for the first 40 or so.

By such paths do words move from slang to respectability.

The reason we know that there were 40 years of oral use before it was inked into officialdom is that this word comes originally from Tagalog which is the native language of the Philippines.  There the word was bundok and it meant “mountains.”

In the late 1800s America went to war with Spain and won.  As part of the conditions ending this war America bought The Philippines from the Spanish.  American solders were needed to convince the natives how great it would be to be an American colony since factions within The Philippines had been fighting for independence for decades.

They would have to wait, however, until after the Japanese had their own go at making The Philippines a Japanese colony during the Second World War.

Before that though, American soldiers picked up on the local word for mountains and brought it home with a meaning of wild or rough back-country.  The word has no fixed degree of roughness to it, nor is a specific distance from civilization implied.

In fact people who live in the suburbs are often said to live in the boonies even though they have flushing toilets and high speed internet connections.  This is why the comic strip and TV series is called The Boondocks, since its main characters have moved to the suburbs.

Yesterday I talked about boors.  I hope that your neighbors aren’t boors.  But I also mentioned that the word boor came from an Old English root meaning the place where someone lives.

If you break the word “neighbor” in half you get “neigh” “bor” and since neigh means “near” the word “neighbor” literally means the living space, or the person who lives, near by.

This word was also from Old English and shows up in the writings of King Alfred the Great.

Well, actually it isn’t really true to say they were the writings of Alfred the Great since in fact they were translations.

After King Alfred subdued the Vikings once and for all he took it upon himself to teach his people how to read.  Of course these were very religious times and so it only made sense to choose a religious text.  What Alfred was doing for the first time though was taking those religious works and instead of getting people to learn to read them in Latin as had always been done before, he figured it might be easier to learn to read if you started out with a language you already spoke, so he began translating into Old English.

Now which text to choose first?  Here we get a hint as to why this guy is the only English King that carries the title Great.

Instead of starting at the beginning of the bible as might seem logical to people so steeped in religion, King Alfred chose a document written about 250 years before by Pope Gregory, also called the Great.  Known as Pastoral Care this was an instruction manual on how to take care of the people you are responsible for.  So this first literary project of Alfred’s was an attempt not only to get literacy kick started again in England, but to put tools in the hands of his functionaries so they could provide good government to his people.

That’s a very neighborly thing to do.

Here’s one where Urbandictionary.com and the OED concur.

A boor is a person who you wouldn’t want to invite home, or actually talk to at all.

A boor is a rude and insensitive lout.  You might think that this kind of derogatory term came out of the Boer war—which was actually two wars in the ending decades of the 1800s and involved Britain fighting in southern Africa against the people called Boers who had Dutch and German ancestry.

You might think that.  But it would be a mistake.

Still, the Boers who were getting shot at by the English over 100 years ago do connect etymologically to the rude louts who laugh after burping in your face.

In Old English there was a word bur, which meant “a dwelling place.”  It is at the root of the word “bower”, which I think of in terms of Maid Marion awaiting Robin Hood, or Lady Guinevere and King Arthur—a bower being her private chambers.

But when “boor” first appeared in English in the mid 1500s the Old English bur seems to have transmuted from being the place where someone lived, to the people who lived there.  So that a boor at first wasn’t a vulgar pig, but just some farmer or rural person who’s dwelling was in that part of the country.

It’s easy to imagine how the word for a rural citizen might begin to be used to mean someone without sophisticated manners.  The same thing applies to terms like provincial, hayseed or country bumpkin.

So that’s where boor boor comes from.

The reason that the south Africans of 100 years ago were called Boers, was that this was the Dutch word for farmer and actually was the same word as boor when you consider that both languages reach back to Germanic roots.