I find in the Oxford English Dictionary that there are ten words pale spelled pale.  None of them are a bucket, which would be spelled pail.

One at least is short for pale ale, so that’s okay, but I want to talk about the one that’s behind the phrase “beyond the pale.”

Five of the ten are nouns so that “pale” a noun meaning a lack of pallor is obviously only subtly different from “pale” the verb to lose ones pallor, or “pale” the adjective.  But none of these are related to “beyond the pale” which means something that is improper or as the OED defines it

“outside the limits of acceptable behavior”

Here’s the story: more than 2000 years ago Roman soldiers were like modern soldiers in that they needed to train against enemies to prepare for war.  Before going into any battles at all they used to take a wooden stick and plant it in the ground, standing up, and pretend it was the enemy they had to fight.  This stick was called in Latin a p?lus and according to the American Heritage Dictionary it comes from an Indo-European root meaning to fasten.

A whole row of sticks stuck in the ground was a palisade and we still use that word for the kind of rudimentary protective walls built around early European settlements in North America.

But the word for a stick in the ground alone came to English through French and appeared not as p?lus but as “pale” about 600 years ago.  Over time, and perhaps even before, a pale was not just a stick, but a fence, and then it was the area within the fence.

By about the time of Shakespeare’s birth, just over 400 years ago a pale was an area which was under your control, and specifically the areas of Ireland that were under English control were called the pale.

There were other areas of the world as well called the pale; the OED mentions Calais in northern France.  So things that went on “beyond the pale” were things out of control so that by 1658 it was being used metaphorically to mean out of control and by implication unacceptable.

This word “pale” is also where we get our word “impale” that is, to poke a stick through. For the sake of completeness, the word “pale” meaning the color in our faces also comes from Latin through French, but it’s root is instead pallidum.

If I am doing a good job at podictionary I hope that I’ve astonished you with some of my unexpected histories of words you thought you already knew.

Well, at least I hope I have astonished you in the modern sense, not in the sense the word held when it first appeared in English.

In 1530 it meant to paralyze, deaden, stupefy, to stun or deprive of sensation, as by a blow.

The OED points back to a French root for the word, but others including Etymonline and the American Heritage point further back into Latin where we are told that the “tonare” in astonish means thunder.

The ass in astonish is supposed to mean “out” so astonish is said to mean thunderstruck.

Now I’m not sure if the literal “out thunder” is supposed to mean you were out in the thunder or that you are out of it because of the thunder, but in the sense used here they aren’t actually talking about thunder at all, but lightning.

Thunderstruck shows up in English about 100 years after astonish.

Even though “thunder” had been in the language for more than 800 years at that point, and had always meant the sound, not the electrical discharge, people still associated the power of the strike with the sound.  Think of Thor, the god of thunder, he wasn’t just a god of noise.

By the time you download this I will have surpassed 700,000 downloads of podictionary episodes.  If I haven’t astonished you yet, keep listening.  It may take another year, but I looked up the statistics and there is a one in 1.7 million chance of getting hit by lighting.

[NOTE at Feb '08 - downloads at this date approaching 4 million]

Right around the time when Shakespeare was alive there was another guy in Germany by the name of Johannes Kepler.

He was quite the guy.

Wikipedia tells me that he wrote science fiction.  He must have put his imagination to good use in the realm of science fact as well because if you recognize his name at all, it is because he came up with mathematical formulae that finally explained to all those guys who had been trying to figure out how the stars and planets moved around up there in the sky, what was going on.

Even more remarkable was the fact that he was blind as a bat and couldn’t see them himself.

He comes into my little story here because it was he, in explaining not how planetary motion worked but how light bent through lenses, it was Kepler who coined the term focus.

If you look at wikipedia at Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, you’ll see that the authors use the word focus to describe the points around which celestial bodies orbit. So today the word focus has a geometric meaning.

Figuratively we all use the word.

I have to focus on the job at hand.  If you have glasses you know that optically focus has to do with bringing the light to a focal point in the back of your eye. It was something along these lines that Kepler was thinking when he borrowed this word from Latin.

If you take a magnifying glass outside into the sunshine you can focus the sun’s rays on a tiny little point and actually start a fire.

In Latin, focus means hearth or fireplace.

Of course Johannes Kepler was writing in German, actually no, he’d have been writing in Latin.  So it was 14 years after his death that the word appeared in English.  In this case the mathematical sense was retained, but instead of appearing in a document about planets or optics, the word appeared in someone’s diary referring to acoustics and a particular place where sound seemed naturally amplified.

This is a fairly well known story due to a great book that I’ll mention later.

In the year of our lord 1247, in the City of London was founded the priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem.

As a rich person might do now for tax purposes, the land for this priory was donated by one of the sheriffs of London Simon Fitz Mary.

This priory had two reasons for being.  One was to pray for the immortal soul of Simon Fitz Mary and a few of his friends.  So today you could save taxes and feel good about it, then you could save your soul and help out a few starving friars as well.

The second job of the priory was to act as a London home for the Bishop of St. Mary of Bethlehem.  Since he actually was bishop in o-little-town-of-Bethlehem his visits to London must have been infrequent.

They stopped all together after the crusades died out and Europe lost control over the holy land.

Within 200 years instead of praying for Simon Fitz Mary the place had become a hospital for lunatics.

That’s not bad since tax deductions are only good for one year.

With time, people referred to the insane asylum less as St. Mary of Bethlehem and more as a contraction Bethlehem.

Even o-little-town had been further contracted to “bedlam” as early as the year 971 so that it was only natural that the hospital too would be called bedlam.  It’s easy to see how the name of an insane asylum might evolve into, as the definition puts it:

a scene of mad confusion and uproar

Here’s the well known part.  In his book The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester talks about James Murray, the professor in the title, and one of the prime movers and editors in the publication of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and a fellow named William Minor one of the star volunteer readers for OED.

The way it worked was that the staff at the dictionary could never hope to read all the books, much less make notes on each word, that was needed to sort out how old every word was and how many meanings it had experienced etc.  So they asked for volunteers.  Some of these volunteers did yeoman service, bringing in evidence of many thousands of words.

William Minor was one of these.

The board of the OED decided they would throw a party for these hard working volunteers and give them a little thank you memento.  The invitations went out and the party was thrown, but William Minor was unable to attend.  James Murray thought it was a shame and went to personally present the award.

He was more than a little shocked to find that the address he had been corresponding with was in fact St. Mary of Bethlehem hospital and that his star researcher was in fact locked up there for being totally off his rocker.

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.

I checked the New York Times to see how people were using the word “maelstrom.”

To be honest I needed to check the spelling first.

• There was a story on the war in Iraq and the maelstrom in Bagdad;
• another about a family crises maelstrom; and
• one on a maelstrom in public education.

These match with one of the definitions given in the New Oxford American Dictionary that says the word has a figurative sense of a scene or state of confused and violent movement or upheaval.  According to Urbandictionary maelstrom is also a Kickass band and according to Wikipedia it’s more than one role playing game as well as several pieces of music.

But the root of the word, as hinted by the spelling, isn’t English, it seems to be Dutch.

And in fact there is a place, not in Holland, where this word—if not comes from—at least is associated with.  On the coast of Norway there is an island called “Moskenisoy” and nearby the combinations of submarine rock formations and tidal currents set up a whirlpool that gurgles and sucks in a rather frightening manner if you happen to be in a boat nearby.   To sailors 500 years ago it was frightening enough that rumour got around.

Here is what seems to be the first quote in English:

There is between the said Rost Islands, and Lofoote, a whirle poole, called Malestrand, which..maketh such a terrible noise, that it shaketh the rings in the doores of the inhabitants houses of the said Islands, ten miles of

The story went that this whirlpool could suck any ship down and grind it to splinters.

The Dutch root words for maelstrom are maalen meaning to grind and whirl—which is also related to our word “meal” as in “corn meal”; and stroom  which is a stream or current.

The New Oxford American Dictionary says the word denotes a mythical whirlpool, but I’m thinking that by mythical here they mean it doesn’t really rattle the doorknobs ten miles away or grind all ships to matchsticks.

I’m sure you have attended seminars.  They seem a little interchangeable with conferences and expositions.

The usual definition these days is a get together of specialists in some field or other, or alternately students studying under a professor.

The word started appearing in English within the last 100 years and is based on its use in Germany specifically for the university, student, professor meaning which in German goes back maybe 200 years.

The reason this word was used in that context is because you are supposed to grow, and in particular grow your ideas, in university.  Seminar relates to seminary, as you might picture occupied by a group of monks.

But before a seminary was a place for religious training and thought it was a patch of land for growing things, because you see the root of both words, seminar and seminary, is from the Latin for “seed.”

Which also by the way, is the root for the word for semen.

According to Hugh Rawson’s Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk, this sexual connection, however, oblique, and particularly this MALE sexual connection so offended one professor at Washington University—as reported in 1991 in the New Yorker—that they refused to give seminars.

They gave ovulars instead.

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.”

Today we can predict the future with elaborate weather forecasting computer programs, and by getting Ivy League educated economists on the radio.

But in the bad old days people who wanted an accurate picture of the days to come would consult a soothsayer who poked through chicken entrails, or looked to the stars.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe but weather forecasters and economists are an improvement.

Because knowing the future is always helpful it is no surprise that people have been trying to make forecasts since a long long time ago.  This is why our word today, “horoscope” shows up pretty early in the history of English.  The first citation is in the year 1050, so that’s just 16 years before the Norman invasion that brought all those French words with their Latin roots into English.

So that makes it Old English.

But people who know Greek will instantly recognize the word’s suffix—scope—as coming from the Greek word for observe or watch.  That’s where we get names for things like telescope and microscope.  The prefix in the word horoscope is also from Greek.

Surprisingly, horo is still completely recognizable to modern English speakers because it means “hour” and the literal translation of “horoscope” is “hour watcher.”

In this case however, the hour watcher isn’t waiting for his shift to end, the figurative translation is “the observation of the hour of birth.”

So it’s the date and time when you’re born that is supposed to tell those astrological soothsayers what your future holds.

This makes “horoscope” a bit of an odd word.  Most words that can be traced back to Greek came into English after the Norman invasion and so depend on the fact that French was built on the common man’s Latin and Latin in turn took much inspiration from Greek.

To me this seems to reinforce the idea that knowing the future was always important, and important enough that people talked a lot about it so that a word from antiquity somehow was carried to the British isles and continued getting talked about even to this day.