When the LA Times includes the word debauchery in a story about the sex trade in Bangkok we don’t need a dictionary to tell us that the word is about pure unadulterated bodily pleasure.

The English word “debauch” came to us from French in Shakespeare’s time.  The Oxford English Dictionary first citation has less of a meaning of sweaty sin and excessive drinking, instead it more gently meant to lead astray.

But already in French and so in English too at the time the word applied to all manner sexual and indulgent behavior as were possible to look down ones nose on.

The word seemed to first arise in French about 900 years ago beyond which we lose track of its exact origins.  But what we do know is there was a word bauch which seemed to have something to do with a workshop, perhaps the work itself—an image of a timber being squared is described in more than one dictionary.  So that the imagined meaning of debauchery was that a faithful and solid worker was being drawn away from their honest task—leaving the workplace.

Despite a difference in spelling I looked to see if this word had any relation to the phrase “a botched job” and it doesn’t.  The botch from a botched job appeared in English hundreds of years before French debauchery crossed the channel, verbally anyway.  Botched job has an interesting little twist to its history too though.  At first a botch was a patch or repair, usually to clothing, while an identical English word arose at the same time but instead meaning a tumor or swelling.  The second word influenced the first so that while a new word “botcher” emerged meaning someone who sews and fixes clothes—a tailor—the original botch became a lumpy repair, one badly done.

If you are invited to any weddings this year you’ll likely have a chance to sample the punch.

Why is it that a bowl of beverage should carry the same name as the action of rapidly applying a closed fist to somebody’s nose.

Open that closed fist and you should count five fingers.  Back about 300 years ago the trail of this etymology was laid down along the following lines.

Britain did a lot of trade with India and in India the word for five is “paunch.”  The sailors who went there were enthusiastic drinkers and particularly favored a mixture that traditionally had five ingredients.  Hence the drink was named after the Hindi word for five.

The guy who wrote this did so early enough that it became the source of everyone’s etymology.  It appears in the American Heritage Dictionary and at Etymonline and in the OED.

But the OED is suspicious of this origin.

For example no one in India calls punch punch.

Also, the word seems to have been in pretty common use in England for about 100 years before this story came out and even to have migrated back into Dutch and German.  Besides, recipes for punch then, as now, have a diverse range of ingredients that more often than not don’t add up to five.

The OED ends up siding with another theory that involves English sailors.  As I said, sailors were enthusiastic drinkers.  So much so that it was part of the normal contract for a sailor to be provided each day with a slug of booze as part of their normal rations.  The container that this booze was dispensed from was called a puncheon, it was a small barrel.

So the sailors are thought to have abbreviated the name of the container and applied it to the drink.

The kind of punch that one gives to an opponent’s nose is another word altogether and arose a couple of hundred years before the name of the drink.  At first it meant to poke a hole, and that’s where the tool known as a punch got its name.

About 100 years before it started to mean drink, it stared to mean the thing the drinkers did to each others noses.  This more violent punch harkens back further to the days of Chaucer and seems to have come from French and by devious routes be also related to “pounce” so that to pounce on someone and punch them might once have meant the same thing—and so too could you not only punch a pattern in a metal sheet, but pouncing was to do the same thing.

The most popular definition of “satire” at Urbandictionary says that satire is the art of sarcasm.

While sarcasm may fit into satire, and it’s included in many of the definitions I come across in various dictionaries, satire is more than that.  Satire is today more often seen in a performance or in writing, it isn’t exactly right to say for instance “a satirical remark.”

Whereas sarcastic remarks are common and quite often contained in satire.

Satire uses humor, exaggeration, irony and sarcasm to emphasize and ridicule some folly or other.

Sarcasm on the other hand is basically a cutting remark.

These meanings are made more evident in looking at the etymology for these words.  In fact the word “satire” is related to the word “satisfied.”  Satire traces back through French and Latin to a style of poetry that also made fun of people and situations.  The style of poetry evolved out of an earlier form that seemed to range over a variety of subjects and was called “full plate” or in Latin lanx satura because it often dealt with a full range of topics.  Satura means “full” and hence we have “satisfied.”

Sarcasm on the other hand goes back to Greek and means to tear flesh, to gnash the teeth, or to speak bitterly.

I mentioned “irony” so I might as well give you its etymology too: It’s from Greek as well and the OED translates it as “ignorance purposefully affected.”  That means intentionally using the wrong word to highlight the meaning of what the right word would have been.

Jonathan Swift said “Satire is a sort of glass—by which he meant mirror—wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”

Urban dictionary has a number of remarkable entries for patriotism compared to some of the entries for other words.  Some are quite long and they all seem to be thoughtful and there is even some accurate etymology in there.

Of course patriotism comes from patriot which in turn least us back through Latin and Greek to a root pater which is to say “father.”

So patriots have an enhanced concern for the land of our forefathers –which back in ancient Greek was fairly safe in it’s assumption that they mostly all had the same forefathers.

One of the most celebrated early dictionaries in English is that by Samuel Johnston and it is he that is quoted in saying that

patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel

The Devil’s Dictionary goes further.

patriotism; noun: Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.   In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last refuge of a scoundrel.  With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

From the distance of 100 years Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is pretty funny in a black kind of way.  I guess it was then too, but Bierce wasn’t an altogether happy guy.  His father must have been a bit of a nutcase since he had 13 children and named every one with a name beginning with the letter A.

Ambrose fought in some of the Civil war’s bloodiest conflicts—the type of experience that has always tended to make a man feel apart from others.

Please use your imagination to picture him working on his Devil’s Dictionary.  On his desk at the office he kept a human skull and a box of ashes, he dressed all in black and carried a revolver.

In 1913 he told a few friends he was going to Mexico and then dropped off the face of the earth.  No one knows, but some suspect that he really did drop off the face of the earth and threw himself into the Grand Canon.

The naked truth is that I’m excited and the reason is that a project that I have been working on for a long time is finally becoming more real. I have a book on the way and I just found out that it’s listed on Amazon.

Today’s word “naked” is taken as a sample from the book which is about the words we use for our bodies.  Now don’t jump up to buy it, it won’t be out until the fall [IT IS OUT NOW].  But you can help me make it a success by asking them to order it in at your local bookstore.

To be naked is to be without a covering upon your body, as is to be nude.

Both naked and nude trace back into Indo-European and join there in the same ancestral word, but their histories are different and so are their meanings.

“Naked” is from Old English and so has a Germanic source arriving with the Anglo-Saxons.  The Oxford English Dictionary second edition dates the word at 850.

“Nude” instead came from Latin and its first citation in English is in 1492.  However, at first, in English this use didn’t refer to lack of clothing on bodies, but instead meant a statement or assertion of fact without written proof.  The reason for this is that one of the Latin meanings was “simplicity” and “lack of adornment.”

We can get this sense in a more recent quotation (1971) by JRR Tolkien. Now I’ve talked before about JRR’s non-invention of the word “hobbit” but in this quotation he is unsure.  He still thinks he invented it but his

“claim rests really on my ‘nude parole’ or unsupported assertion.”

He goes on to say someone has told him of reading it in earlier periodicals and he admits that it’s possible he could have too.

But the point here isn’t hobbits, it’s his use of “nude” which reflects the way this word first came into English.  It wasn’t until 1811 that “nude” was any kind of synonym to “naked” with respect to the human body, even though their common Indo-European ancestor likely held this meaning.  Even now though their definitions remain slightly apart; “naked” is a little bit undesirable with its sense of vulnerability while “nude” has an attractive beauty.

The reason that JRR Tolkien’s example strikes us as strange is that a nude assertion should be an attractive assertion while a naked assertion, without documentation is vulnerable.

A year ago—actually it was exactly a year ago as I write this—the Word Nerds did a piece on “geek,” associating it obviously with “nerd” in the name of their show.  So perhaps I’m behind on this one—actually I hope the statute of limitations has expired so I can talk about “geeks” without people thinking I’m copying the word nerds.

Geek is an unusual word in that so many times we see words that have shifted meaning over the years to mean something less and less complementary.  Here with geek we have a word that has moved the other way.

It is thought that a parent word for “geek” was “geck”, a word we don’t use any more.  It appeared about 500 years ago and meant a fool or simpleton.  Geek itself didn’t emerge until 1876 and I see by comparing the second and the draft third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary that both have a first citation for that year, but they cite different sources.

Interesting.

Anyway, by then geek is a solidly American word and over the years appears to be applied to not only fools, but performers who blow into town with the circus.  Particularly weird performers and maybe there is some traction here for geek because it rhymes with freak.  The meaning as a fool seems to have carried its weight over in the middle of the 20th century to a people who are overly dedicated to some particular interest, often to the exclusion of social skills.

It isn’t until the 1980s that things started to look good for geeks.

I guess geeks whose interest is in something that has remained obscure, wasn’t there some literary character who was particularly keen on neuts?  I guess for them being a geek is still an unfortunate circumstance.

But if you happened to be a geek in the ’80s who was interested in computers, hey, you’ve backed the right horse.  For you, now being a geek is a good thing.  You are not seen as a dweeb, but instead as an expert!  You’ve become so good that there exists a style called geek chic and if you out geek your fellow geeks you become an alpha geek.

These definitions have now all entered the dictionary even though back in 1989 when Hugh Rawson wrote this book wicked words, geek didn’t even merit one positive attribute.