The choice of the word doohickey as today’s word gives me a chance to go back and revisit a little doohickey I talked about some weeks ago when I covered the word “naïve.”

At the time I explained that sometimes over the “i” in naïve there are two dots instead of one.  I said that the double dot doohickey was called an umlaut.

Let me tell you, I heard from my listeners on this one.

I was wrong.  The two dots over the “i” in naïve isn’t an umlaut, it’s a dieresis.

Please forgive my confusion.

It seems that these are two completely distinct punctuation marks from non-English languages, both of which are a double dot hanging over a letter.  The umlaut was from German and the dieresis from Latin.

In case any other listeners want to compain let me say right now that the dieresis is also sometimes called a “trema.”

The reason it matters is that the reason these doohickys are even there is to help instruct on word pronunciation.  The diaresis comes from Greek and means “to separate,” so that’s why we pronounce the “a” and “i” distinctly in “naïve.”  In explaining this I hope that I have also explained our word of the day, “doohickey.”

A doohickey is a thingamajig.  That is to say a doohicky is what we call something that we aren’t exactly sure what the name is.

I am told by the Oxford English Dictionary that a doohicky is actually a word built on two earlier words; a doodad and a hicky.  All of these seem to have appeared as if tumbling out of a toolbox around the beginning of the 20th century.  Doohickey was first cited in 1914 and at first applied to the nameless little knobby devices that are screwed and bolted to military vehicles and equipment.  A doodad came only slightly earlier and appeared to have more of a decorative connotation—like all the doodads that decorate the façade of a building. While a hicky appeared to be a one of any number of small specialized tools.

Not long ago I heard the Word Nerds talking about spoonerisms.

I know they mentioned how William Spooner was supposed to have referred to God not as our loving shepherd but our shoving leopard.

Somehow that seemed to relate to my episode from yesterday with the slang expression involving ferrets.

Anyway they also mentioned Spooner’s transposition of a well oiled bicycle to a well boiled icicle.  Which is a great oxymoron made greater because and icicle is sharp and the oxy in oxymoron means sharp too.  T

he reason I chose icicle today is that this old English word is actually a redoubling of its own meaning.  It appears in an early manuscript as a gloss, that is an explanatory note translating, often a Latin word.  But there the gloss doesn’t appear as the word icicle, rather as two words meaning an ice icicle, as if there were another kind.

This is because there is also an Old English word icel, or it might be ichel—I’m working on my Old English pronunciation—and it too means icicle.

So the first I C in icicle is a duplication of the second I C.

I don’t find too many other interesting references to icicles in my usual sources; something smutty at urbandictionary; people referring to other people as icicles if they have an aloof manner.  Ah, here, Shakespeare used the word a few times.

What caught my eye was not icicle, but where in Loves Labours Lost

“icicles against the wall”

are used to evoke winter while

“when daises pied”

is used to evoke spring.  What’s that mean?

“Pied” means multicolored or at least two colored, black and white like a magpie, the bird that gave us this not-very-often-used word.  So that’s who the pied piper of Hamlin was, he had multicolored clothes.

The Devil’s Dictionary seems most cutting with the shortest definitions.

He defines truce as “friendship.”

When I was in my first job I was working on the design of an antenna that was going to be launched on a spacecraft.  When these things go up there is a lot of sound and fury, and when they get on-station the weather tends to be a little extream—I guess there’s no weather in space, but the high vacuum dries out anything that could evaporate, the sun is unfiltered so hot and chock full of ultraviolet and then when the darkness falls, which could simply mean your spacecraft has turned its other side to the sun; when darkness falls your looking at empty space at darn near 200 degrees below freezing.

Anyway, to be sure this antenna wouldn’t die from exposure we had to do a bunch of environmental testing on it.  I was a keen young engineer, I had a job to do, things were ticking along.  Suddenly the technologists running the big vibration table meant to simulate the stress of launch, just turned it off.  What’s going on, I asked.  Oh, coffee time the unionized operators answered.

I don’t imagine that’s how it felt to soldiers around 1000 years ago, but it really is true that they observed something called God’s Truce, a sort of extended holy coffee break from killing one another from Saturday night to Monday morning.

This happened also in the modern age when during the first Christmas of the first world war the common soldiers of both sides stopped shooting each other and began exchanging Christmas presents and singing carols.  They weren’t unionized however and the senior officers saw this as quite an inefficient way to win a war so it wasn’t allowed to happen again.

The word “truce” appeared after those medieval fighters got their weekends off, but it is built on an older English word “truth.”  In fact if you think of the agreements that opposing sides have to make to establish a truce, and the fact that each has to trust the other as well as hold up their side of the bargain, it’s easy to understand that “truce” is actually, literally the plural of “truth”—”truths.”

In Old Norse if you were rowing your ship toward a point of land, that point of land was called an oddi.

If you pointed a spear or an arrow at the poor suckers standing on the point of land, the spear or arrowhead was called the oddr.

The idea here being that in Old Norse the word for a triangle, and particularly for the pointy end of a triangle, was related to our word “odd”, in fact gave us our word “odd.”

A triangle of course has three sides and three is an odd number.  This logic was applied by the norse in their decision making processes so that when they voted on something they liked to have an uneven number of people to vote so that the odd man, and that’s pretty well what they called him, could break a tie vote. This odd man took his title from the three-ness of a triangle.

And so we in English absorbed this new word “odd” and began to extend its meaning.

For the same reason that you call that extra sock left over after you do the laundry an odd sock, anything that didn’t have a matching opposite was odd.  After a while people who didn’t fit in were seen as different and so the same word applied to them.  Odd took on the meaning of being different so that when comparing two numbers that didn’t match they were both said to be odd.

The plural of odd is odds.  This is the origin of odds in gambling.  Usually there isn’t a 50 50 chance of winning and so the inequality is called the odds.

The Oxford English Dictionary spends a little time scratching its head over the fact that “odds” this plural of “odd” is universally treated as a singular.

[note that I have been corrected on the name of the guy who actually did the pedaling vs who did the designing, but I don't have that data here as I'm backfilling this episode's text]

In 1979 a guy named Paul McCready climbed carefully into an ultralight aircraft that contained no engine and proceeded to pedal it like a bicycle just above the waves all the way across the English channel.  He called this bird the gossamer albatross.

I looked up gossamer in half a dozen dictionaries and they all begin by talking about the webs of small spiders, light and airy, lifted by the merest breeze.

That’s what McCready wanted.  Light.  Obviously albatross is the name of a bird, his earlier creation was the gossamer condor.  Both of these are famous for their soaring abilities.  The roots of the word gossamer are not quite so streamlined as all that though.  Today, when summer is fleeting and the leaves are beginning to loosen on the branches, a week of nice summer weather might just arrive as an extra blessing.  We call this Indian Summer but this period has had other names over the ages.

Both St Martin and St Luke have been invoked since their saint days are in October and November, but even before that, these final breaths of summer tended to arrive right around the time when the geese were all fat and ready for slaughter.  This time of the year became goose summer.  For some reason, perhaps because there were so many feathers floating around after the carnage, the light little spider webs that spiders use as parachutes  to get around, took on the name [goose summer = gossamer].

In English the association with Indian summer was lost, and a link to the light and filmy established.  Maybe Paul McCready knew this, after all, even a fat goose could make it across the English channel without too much trouble.

You are hearing me say the word “wind” and so you have less potential confusion than if I were writing a blog and you had to guess at first if I was talking about W I N D the movement of air or W I N D the turning or twisting of something around spindle.

Clearly these are homographs, that is, words that are spelled the same but not necessarily having the same pronunciation or meaning.  Homonyms have the same pronunciation and so wynd and wind are not homonyms.  But they used to be.  According to the OED the pronunciation for both words was WYND until the 18th century.  Wynd, the movement of air shows up in Beowulf circa 725 so it’s about as old and Old English word as we are gonna get.  Wynd to turn around something is a relative latecomer only arriving from Dutch about 600 years ago.  People have long given names to the winds.

According to Greek mythology Aeolus was assigned by Zeus to be the keeper of the winds.  To protect Ulysses Aeolus gave him a bag containing the dangerous winds so he wouldn’t have storms on his voyage.  Of course his crew released them.  Car companies have made the zephyr and sirocco commonly known, even if people don’t remember that these are the names of a gentle warm breeze and a hot dry sandstorm respectively.

The Mistral is a cold dry wind blowing south across France and a Chinook is a warm moist wind blowing east in from the coast across the Rockies.  The trade winds are named not because they pushed ships back and forth across the deeps with loads of trade goods, but as I explored in my episode on trade, because trade means path and the trade winds follow the same path consistently.  Just like most other words, the names of winds come and go and we have lost a perfectly good word in “aquilon”; a word that Shakespeare would have recognized as meaning a cold wind from the north.

If you go into a fancy paint store, or clothing store for that matter, you may see a kind of purple referred to as aubergine.  Of course the aubergine is the eggplant.

English speakers called them eggplants before they adopted the highfalutin French name for these purple gourd shaped relatives of deadly nightshade.

Actually eggplant and aubergine both appeared in writing according to the OED, within 30 years of each other in the late 1700s and at first eggplants were the white variety so their name made more sense.  Although it’s easy to follow why eggplant might be chosen as the name for these things, their shape, especially when white and somewhat smaller could be compared with eggs.

Aubergine, however made a lengthy transit ultimately from Sanskrit through Persian to Arabic then Spanish to French.  If you want to get your ten year son old interested in etymology, now’s the time to get them to listen in, although it won’t encourage them to be less picky eaters.

Back in Sanskrit the original meaning of the orginal parent word for aubergine was “wind go.”  This is interpreted by all as meaning “fart go.”

But not everyone agrees if it means that aubergine is the vegetable that prevents farting, as Mark Morton claims in his book Cupboard Love, and Jane Grigson says in her Vegetable Book.  John Ayto’s A-Z of Food and Drink expresses the opinion that eggplants are decidedly flatulent.

But then he spoils all the fun by suggesting that the parent word may have been borrowed into Sanskrit from some other even older word and only gained its gassy reputation as a folk etymology because it was so cute.

Certainly the OED and my other regular contributors don’t go there.

I think it was George Carlin who I heard the other day in one of his rants talking about what a useless word “nice” is.  Well, he’s not the first.

Etymonline pulls one from Jane Austin making the point that “nice” is a meaningless word.

I use it all the time.  I might tell my kids to be nice to each other or say that we had a nice weekend or that it was a nice day.  All of these are positive things and so I have a fairly positive feeling about the word “nice.”  But they aren’t strongly positive.  It’s a gorgeous day.  We had a fantastic weekend.

Urbandictonary makes the point pretty strongly where one definition says “nice is the guy who you decide you are NOT going to sleep with. ”

Etymonline traces the history of the word through an unbelievable number of meanings through time:
•    in Latin its root meant “ignorant”
•    its Old French ancestor meant “silly” or “foolish”
•    It first appeared in English in 1290 also as “foolish”, “stupid” or “senseless”
•    Then proceeded through “timid”
•     “fussy, fastidious”
•    ”dainty, delicate” (c.1405);
•     “precise, careful”
•     “agreeable, delightful
•     “kind” and “thoughtful”

But there’s more.  The OED gives us “well dressed” and “Strict”.  It says the loops and turns for this word are unparalleled in Latin or Romance languages.  And although Etymonline tries to paint a linear progression of meaning change for “nice”, the OED says it’s hard to trace this since because the word has so long had so many meanings, when we look back at a text of such and such a year, the context isn’t enough to tell us what they meant by the word.  Returning to urbandictionary I see that nice has become an interjection just to keep the conversation going, just like “uh-hun”

All this leads us nicely to that favorite phrase of everyone’s “have a nice day”.  The OED has a first citation of this expression in 1971 but in the novel it comes from it’s supposed to be printed on a highway sign, so it had to have been common already before then.  Brewers Dictionary of phrase and fable says it reached a sort of zenith in the 1950 in America and then moved to Britian, further pointing out that people who say it generally don’t give a hoot what kind of day you have.  The variant “have a good day” appears so much earlier that the OED has an entry that shows this phrase gave itself as a name for a kind of door latch 600 years ago.

So with that I won’t tell you to have a nice day.  I’ll tell you to have a good day.

On the NPR podcast “On Words With John Chiardy” I heard him talk about the word “nasty”, claiming that it descended from a bird’s nest and that people thought that a nest, all fouled by the bird’s use, transferred it’s revolting nature to the word.

That sounds pretty strange sez I.

So I went to have a look.  Sure enough there are etymologies that make this link.  But there certainly isn’t unanimity on the point and the OED doesn’t mention this as a possible source.

A competing theory is that “nasty” comes from French—and for this the time is right, it appeared in 1390—as a contraction of a French word villenastre meaning infamous or ignoble.

At first I thought this might be related to the word “disaster” that I did a little while ago.  Since disaster originally meant an evil star maybe villenastre meant villainous star.  But no, although “aster” the star did come from Greek through Latin, the Latin ending aster here means “like” so a villenastre was villain-like.

One thing the OED does say about “nasty” is that in languages such as Swedish the word is more sharp sounding and more dramatically conveys a sense of disgust and that this revolting sounding word has been toned down in English.

The OED also points to a couple of references  that show that 100 years ago or more the word “nasty” was itself considered so nasty that in America at least, polite speakers dared not utter the word.  It was even taken out of books by publishers.    Hugh Rawson’s Wicked Words gives Tom Brown’s School Days as one example.

I of course took a look at urbandictionary and found that nasty is another one of those words that have taken on a double life.  Like so many other negative words, nasty has become also a positive word in slang usage.  The lunch someone left in their locker for two weeks is certainly nasty by now, but so was the concert they saw on the weekend and, like, really awesome, yea.

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “squander” as pretty close to “waste.”  You can waste or squander money, time or opportunity.  The words can be used interchangeably.

I looked high and low for an etymology for squander but none of the usual suspects was forthcoming.  The word first appears in print in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, but also appeared a couple of years earlier as “squandering” in a poem called Albion’s England by a fellow named William Warner.  The poem is said to be a mix of fact and fiction that was sympathetic to the powers of the time, and thus widely popular among the limited number of people who were following such things at the time.

I was reminded the other day, by one of my grumpier correspondents that just because the OED says the first citation of a word is from so-and-so, doesn’t mean that he or she invented the word.  This I suspect you already know.

Because Shakespeare is the guy whose work, so far, has been the first to turn up squander, we can’t assume he himself thought it up.  In this case it seems it was in circulation generally at the time because it turns up in quite a few citations of the time with variations like squandered, squanderer, squandering.

Even though no one can tell me where the word ultimately comes from I see that it hasn’t exactly had a uniform meaning over the 400 years that we know it has been in English.  The earliest citations have more of a sense of “scatter” than “waste.”  I still get this sense when thinking of someone squandering their money, they spend a little here, a little there, until it’s all gone.

Historically though, one of the meanings of squander was almost a sort of collective “wander.”  One citation has horses squandering left and right.

Squander, wander.  Sound similar.

“Wander” is decidedly Old English, first citations almost 800 years before squander; and “wander” appears to have always held a more solitary path.  A person, or a thought or a rumor might be said to wander, but the path is imagined as a single line, however meandering.

Squander‘s sense is of a collection of things moving away in different directions, even driven away as might be enemy soldiers or those horses.

There’s no evidence of connection between the words and I couldn’t find a prefix sq that meant multiple or anything, but I did find it interesting that there were a number of other words with similar sound and similar meaning.  There’s “meander” and a Scottish word “dander” also means “wander”, as do the words “gander” and “Scamander” although none of these last three are exactly everyday words.

The word “gander” was first a male goose, and since they were seen to wander about apparently without aim, to gander became to move about randomly as well.  The word does survive in our phrase “take a gander at that” meaning take a casual glance, let your eye wander over it.

I had never heard the word “Scamander” before but evidently it is a meandering river mentioned in Greek from Homer.