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.”

While you and I know what an hour is, the people who invented the word had no clocks and for them an hour was not so much a length of time as a milestone through the course of the day.

In English the word appears first in 1225 and at that time an Englishman’s understanding of hour would have been the hour for waking or the hour for the mid-day meal.  This didn’t mean 60 minutes for lunch but the point in time when lunch was to be taken.

Monks had more rigorous daily schedules with all the various prayers they had to perform so they were more likely to be chronologically regular in their habits—as it were.

Before appearing in English the word can be traced back through French, Latin and Greek.  The American Heritage Dictionary even points the word back to the same Indo-European root as “year” where it shares a relation to time, if not to divisions of the day.

According to The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium in the Byzantine civilization people figured that there were 12 hours in the day and 12 in the night.  Sound familiar?  Well the difference here is that since they hadn’t invented clocks yet the felt it was perfectly acceptable for an hour of day in the summer to be longer than an hour of day in the winter.  Day meant daylight.

It was only at two points in the year that the night and the day were of equal length and that was at the spring or fall equinox.  As such hours as we know them were called equinoctial hours.  “Equinox” is Latin for “equal night.”

When you do something at the last minute it is sometimes said to be done at the eleventh hour.  The phrase didn’t appear until 1829 in a poem, but it is based on a biblical reference.

In the book of Matthew a tale is told about an employer who keeps recruiting guys to help him in the vineyard.  The workday is the 12 hour variety and so the guys who have been toiling away in the sun all day object to the fact that the people who were hired at the eleventh hour are getting the same pay.  The reason Matthew tells the story has been explained in various ways by various religious scholars but basically the idea is that it doesn’t matter how late in the day you come to God, if you’re saved, you’re saved.

The reason people use it today is to mean that although you delivered that university essay, or your tax returns right at the last moment, you did it, and you did it before the deadline.

Somehow the story doesn’t seem quite right in today’s world.  The union would have been pissed off that workers were not being treated equally and management would have objected to paying one guy 12 times the hourly wages of another guy when he was arguably lazier anyway—having not gotten to the hiring hall until almost sundown.

I can’t help thinking that people might have felt the same way way back when.  Maybe this just isn’t one of Jesus’ best parables.

It was only in the centuries after “hour” first appeared in print in English that people slowly began to think of an hour as a specific length of time.  According to the Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages this was tied to the spread of town clocks which rang off the hour beginning around the 14th century.

When historians look back thousands of years, sometimes the evidence begins to get a little sketchy, so whether it was 2000 years ago or 3000 years ago or maybe far longer, the idea that the pattern of the heavens might have some influence on our lives down here on the ground evolved independently in China, Central America, what is now Iraq and who knows were else.

Today my horoscope says that I should start a fitness regime.

To me the idea that the positions of the planets and stars could give factual information about how I should live my life seems pretty, well to be polite about it, fanciful.

I mean, I did get out for two sessions of skate-skiing this week already, about 30 kilometers each.  As if to underscore this point, an alternative horoscope tells me that now is a good time to collect on old debts.

If you look at your horoscope at all it’s likely for fun.  Yet the roots of astrology aren’t as ridiculous as the hucksterism that seems to surround professional fortunetellers.

Somewhere back there in the mists of time people noticed that changes in how the sky looked related to the turn of the seasons.  If the sky can effect the weather, my crops and the animals I hunt, why can’t it effect me?  Without the benefit of scientific method this line of thinking evolved into the horoscopes we see today.

Now somewhere between the invention of astrology and the broad availability of literacy and higher education people only had half the facts and put more stock in astrology than we do today.  Thus at the time of Shakespeare the idea, if not exactly highly credible, had not been ruled out as an influence on the lives of men and women.

And the emergence of the word “disaster” did come about during Shakespeare’s lifetime.

It was borrowed from French but it is built on the Greek word for “star”, aster.  So that a disaster is something that befalls you because of a bad alignment of the stars.

There are a family of flowers called asters named because most of them have flowers with petals that radiate from a centre, star-like.

While casting about for something to say about the word “aster” I confused it with the name Astor, remembering the famous quote of Winston Churchill’s.

Lady Nancy Astor and he were both guests at a castle one weekend and were getting on one another’s nerves.  She quipped

“Winston, if I were your wife I’d put poison in your coffee.”

He shooting back

“Nancy, if I were your husband I’d drink it.”

Born in the states, she certainly had no bad stars tracking across her heavens.  Her father-in-law was William Waldorf Astor who built the Waldorf Astoria hotel before slipping across the pond buying a castle and becoming a British member of parliament and then becoming a viscount.

In looking all this up I at first thought she was illuminated in history from the reflected glory of others since her husband also was a member of the British parliament.  But no, it turns out that with that mouth on her, combined with her economic throw-weight, she too became a member of parliament.  One site about her says

One of her political legacies is of a champion of women’s and children’s rights.  A less flattering look at her political views paints her as an elitist who felt she and her social cast (the cultured elite) could better benevolently lead the rest of us commoners than we could lead ourselves.”

The word “bye-bye” is a duplication of “bye” and both are more likely to be used between people who are very close—say members of a family—than between more formally related people.

It’s easier to imagine heads of state parting with “goodbye” than “bye-bye.”

But we all know that “bye” is just an abbreviation of “goodbye.”  What’s interesting is that “goodbye” is a contraction itself of a string of four words.

The first citations in the Oxford English Dictionary for the entry for “goodbye” are from Shakespeare.  There are several of them.  There’s Loves Labors Lost, Henry VI and two from Hamlet.  It’s said that Shakespeare himself spelled his own name in several different ways.  The reason that he is cited several times in Oxford’s entry for goodbye is that he spelled goodbye several different ways as well.

What is strange is that none of the ways he spelled it are actually the word “goodbye.”  And that’s how we know it was once four words instead of one.

The four words are “god be with you.”

• In Loves Labors Lost he uses “god be wy ye.”
• For Henry VI he uses “god b’uy” with an apostrophe after the b in b’uy.
• In Hamlet the same word in the same place in the play is rendered differently in two different manuscripts.

Whether we can blame this on Shakespeare himself or on some anonymous copyist is beside the point.  The point the OED is making is that our word “goodbye” used to be an invocation of holy protection for a journey or time apart.

A secondary point is that it consistent spelling is only a few hundred years old.  Before the invention of dictionaries people spelled words as they heard them.  People began thinking about dictionaries within Shakespeare’s lifetime but the first dictionaries focused on improving people’s vocabulary with unusual or particularly difficult words, assuming that the common words were already understood.

The first dictionary to attack the bulk of words used every day in English was that of Samuel Johnston in 1755.  Fifty years later across the pond Noah Webster produced his first dictionary.

Before these events any English speaker could get away with spelling a word three different ways in the same document; afterwards Americans wondered why the British spelled things so strangely, and the British looked down their noses at the improper American spellings.

In the olden days when people wrote to each other on pieces of paper they would often sign off with “sincerely” or “yours truly.”

These formalities above the signature have a name; the “subscription” which makes sense because they are “sub” or below the “script” or writing.

Another name for them is more formal and called the “eschatocol” from the Greek eschatos meaning “last” or “furthest”, and with the same ending as “protocol” since such formal signoffs are the closing protocol of the letter.

I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of sign-offs that go further, into the realm of “I remain your humble servant.”

These days they may be used jokingly but the idea behind them runs along the same lines as the greeting “ciao.”  The word is from Italian and actually means “servant” or “slave.”

English speakers use it as do the Italians not to mean “slave” but to mean “hello” or “goodbye”; something along the lines of “hey.”

Now the word “ciao” is casual, but its meaning “slave,” harkens back to “I am your slave,” the same sense of respect a person signing off with “your humble servant” tried to convey.

It was Ernest Hemmingway who brought the word into English.

He was a man’s man.  A huntin’ fishin’ type of guy.  He tried to fight in the first world war but they rejected him based on his eyesight so he joined an ambulance unit and was sent to fight in Italy.

He’d only been there a week when his legs got nearly shot off and he became a passenger in the ambulance.

Like so many war veterans he came home after the war but had a hard time settling and eventually joined a group of artîsts in Paris.  With a couple of books already under his belt he wrote A Farewell to Arms in 1929; a love story set in Italy in the war.  This was the book that made him as a writer and also the book that brought “ciao” into English.

It’s pretty certain he learned the word during his spell in Italy.

Hemmingway loved hunting as I said, and it was during a big game expedition in Africa that he was killed in 1954 in an aircraft crash.

He was particularly lucky to have survived this death however and was especially pleased that the newspaper obituaries were so glowingly positive about him.

The love story in Farewell to Arms doesn’t end happily, and neither did old Ernest.  In 1961 he shot himself.

From time to time on the radio I hear some investigating officer in a news clip talking about a crime suspect and calling him a gentleman.

Seems to me the guy they’re holding on suspicion of assault, or worse, is anything but a gentleman.

Now you might think that the word “gentleman” evolved referring to men who were gentle, meaning not rough or violent.  Let’s examine that idea.

The word “gentleman” is pretty old; I see the first citation here is coming up on 800 years ago.  You’d think “gentle” would be even older, but in fact both words came into English from French after William the Conqueror, and looking here in my Petit Robert it looks like the words don’t trace much further back in French either.

But all sources do point to Latin roots.  Back there in Latin the word meant “family” and is related to our English words “genitals” with which we produce families, and “generation”, the parents, children and grandchildren within families.

Even the word “gentile” is related, being those families of peoples not Jewish.

The sense as the word “gentle” came into French and English is also along the lines of a “good family.”  That is, being high-born and noble.

So a “gentleman” was a “nobleman” and then, just as now, “old money” was seen as being more understated.  So in English the word “gentle” began to mean more reserved; calmer.  This was already the case by Shakespeare’s time, and he used the word in both senses.

In The Merchant of Venice he writes

The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

While in Henry V in that stirring call to arms

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England, now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day

Here “shall gentle his condition” means fight with me and you’ll be a nobleman.

In French the word changed meaning in parallel with its changes in English and then was re-imported into English as “genteel” with a meaning of “elegant.”

A gentleman farmer is the guy who owns the place but doesn’t actually have to pull on his coveralls.  This sense extended to give “gentleman” the meaning of a person who doesn’t actually have a job—mostly because he doesn’t have to.

When the cop refers to the guy in handcuffs as a gentleman, however, it isn’t because the guy is unemployed.

It’s likely more along the lines that police procedure dictates you shouldn’t refer to a suspect as a “thieving crooked liar”, as that may be seen as prejudicing the case.

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?

An allegory is a story told in which the characters and plot are intended to reflect another, totally unrelated situation.

An example might be Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible that tells the story of the Salem witch trials but was seen as an allegory to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and McCarthyism.

MASH was set in Korea but it was really about Vietnam.

English got the word “allegory” from French, who got it from Latin, who got it from Greek.

The literal translation of the Greek word would be “other speaking” but as the OED explains it more figuratively means “speaking otherwise than one seems to speak”.

We can break the Greek root of the word in two. The alle part means “other”—and its also there inside the word “parallel.”  The second half—gory—relates to public speaking as the ancient Greeks would have done in their agora.

The word “allegory” appeared in English around the time of Chaucer, just over 600 years ago, introduced by a translator of the Bible names John Wycliffe.  But the reason I chose the derivative word “allegorical” is that it was introduced by another Bible translator named William Tyndale 100 years later.

Both of these English Bible makers raised the hackles of the established church and when Tyndale first began to publish his New Testament it wasn’t exactly a best seller.  The Bishop of London, a guy named Cuthbert Tunstall, was pissed off enough at Tyndale that when he met a merchant who said he could round up all the copies to be burned, the Bishop happily handed over the necessary cash.

The merchant was in fact a friend of Tyndale’s so in one fell swoop the entire print run was sold out and the publicity surrounding the burning of Bibles stimulated the market for a second edition.

Tyndale duly tripled the print run.  This made the Bishop hopping mad and he called for the merchant and demanded to know why, if he had paid to have all the copies bought, there were still so many floating around?  The merchant explained that what the Bishop really needed to buy were the blocks used to do the printing.

We now call this moving up the value chain.

The penny must have dropped for the Bishop because he did one better—William Tyndale was burned at the stake.

There is allegory in William Tyndale’s life since although his predecessor John Wycliffe died of natural causes, the church was pissed off at him too and some years after his death burned his books and dug up his bones and had them burned too.

Pour yourself a drink.  Plop some icecubes in and stare across the top surface.  There isn’t really much ice sticking out is there?

This gives a pretty graphic view of how much of an iceberg is below the waterline when you see those huge mountains of ice in National Geographic pictures or whatever.

This is of course the notion behind the phrase “the tip of the iceberg”—the meaning being something like, if you caught one person driving above the speed limit the likelihood is that there are lots of other people doing it too.  There’s more where that came from.

Evidently the quarterback who won the 2006 Superbowl, Ben Rothlisberger, was thinking along these lines when in 2004 he claimed that he was

“just beginning to hit the iceberg”

I guess he was right.

Go to any dictionary and you will see what you already know, that an iceberg is a huge chunk of ice floating in the sea.  But I’m here to tell you there’s more below the surface on this one.  English seems to have borrowed the word “iceberg” from Dutch almost 250 years ago.  But when it was first used in English it did NOT refer to those massive sinkers of luxury liners.

In fact within the first 50 years there are citations that specifically state that an iceberg isn’t the floating bit, but instead the mother glacier from which the floating bit’s break off.

The etymology of iceberg clearly breaks into “ice” and “berg.”  Ice is clear enough—as it were—but evidently “berg” meant mountain, so it was the huge heaps of ice on land that were at first being referred to.  The idea is that from the sea, the face of a glacier juts up like a cliff or a mountain.

It was 1820 before the floating bits carried the name of their parent out to sea.

I also note that in my memory of those National Geographic icebergs, there is a complete lack of greenery growing on them; clearly iceberg lettuce must come from somewhere else.

I looked it up and about 70% of the American crop of iceberg lettuce comes from California.

The reason it’s called iceberg lettuce isn’t because of where or how it’s grown—obviously.

It was once called crisphead lettuce and I have uncovered three theories as to why it’s now called iceberg.

One claim is that it was shipped by the trainload, packed in crushed ice and the piles of ice are said to have reminded people of icebergs.  My problem with this theory is that the first OED citation for iceberg lettuce is in 1904 when crushed ice in California is likely to have been in short supply.

A second claim is that iceberg lettuce retains its crispness longer than other lettuces and so was analogized to being cool and crisp as an iceberg.

Finally, the OED doesn’t actually say so, but there is an implication that it is the pale color of the lettuce that is the source of it’s name.  They combine their definition of iceberg lettuce in the same entry, and side by side with a definition for a color “iceberg green.”

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?