I remember an ad I saw on TV once.  I can’t remember if it was for a diarrhea cure or medication for hemorrhoids, but it was a shot of a group of people standing, waiting for the bus in the rain.  One particularly miserable looking guy looks at the camera and says

I want to talk to you about hemorrhoids

or whatever it was.  The people beside him look a little startled and begin to edge away from him.

This is sort of what happened to the word “undertaker.”

The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1382 as the first appearance of the word.  Essentially an undertaker is a person who makes an undertaking; who undertakes to do something. Through the ages it has applied to a wide range of specific undertakings.

•    A helper
•    One who takes up a challenge
•    Someone who went to Ireland to occupy lands on behalf of the English government.
•    One who undertakes a task
•    One who rebukes
•    People who intervened in the British parliament on behalf of the King to get them to give him more money
•    A scholar
•    A contractor
•    An editor or book publisher
•    A musical or theatrical impresario
•    Someone who sponsors a baptism
•    A kind of co-signer on a loan or business deal.

About 300 years ago people who arranged funerals also got tagged with the name.

Now pretty well everyone gets diarrhea from time to time, but that doesn’t mean you want to be associated with it. It seems that once undertaking the task of preparing the dead for burial acquired the label “undertaker” less and less other people wanted it, until today when I look in the New Oxford American Dictionary and others, there is only one meaning.

Of course Urbandictionary has to be different.  Most of the space there is taken up in lavish praise of a wrestlemania character with the stage name undertaker who in his performance evidently uses such inspired lines as “rest in peace.”

Five years before Shakespeare died Randle Cotgrave produced A dictionarie of the French and English tongues.  This is the document that the Oxford English Dictionary cites as the first use of the word omelet in English.

There is a kind of circular logic about this particular entry in that old dictionary.  What we are looking at here is a list of French words with English definitions, along with, as he puts it

Briefe Directions for such as desire to learne the French Tongue

So the entry for omelette spelled O M E L E T T E is an entry for a French word.  The definition uses the same word, as an English word, spelled O M E L E T to tell us what it is.

This is sort of confusing if indeed the word has never turned up in English before. I don’t suppose he was being subtle about the spelling.  Remember that around this time Shakespeare was spelling his own name in several different ways.

Anyway, it is this appearance in the definition, not in as the word being defined that qualifies it as the first citation.

Randle goes on to explain that an omelet is a “pancake of egges.”  Everyone knows that a pancake is flat.  It is the flat nature of this pancake of eggs that gave it its name “omelet.”  Our English word laminate means a thin layer and comes from a Latin root.  Through various twists and turns a Latin word meaning “a thin plate of metal” moved through French and into English, emerging as “omelet.”

At first I thought it was the plate of metal upon which the eggs were cooked that gave it its name, or perhaps the cooking implement, since one of these words also meant knife or blade.  But in fact it was the thinness of the omelet that invited the name.

The roots of the word toast go back far enough that according to the American Heritage Dictionary there are connections through Indo-European between toast and thirst, since both relate to “dry.”

Coming up through Latin then French into English in the early 15th century when toast first appeared in English it seemed to mean something closer to what we would call croutons today.  Dried little morsels of bread that were often mixed with spices and—as ungodly as it sounds to my ear—added to wine or beer to “improve the taste.”  For almost 400 years these little chunks of browned bread floated around in peoples glasses before people decided to use the word to apply to the little speeches they made while drinking.

Why exactly would the word for bread chunks transfer to speeches?  The etymological sources point uniformly in one direction, although no one seems to be able to do more than agree it’s a fine story that might even be true.

Once upon a time a group were taking the waters at Bath.  An admirer of one of the ladies dipped his glass in the water in which she bathed in order to drink her health.  Another present disdained the drink, but—in reference to what had been floating in it (the girl)—said he’d rather have the toast.

In fact Shakespeare talks of drinking “a health,” which is what a toast had been called before “toast” caught on.

So at first, drinking a toast wasn’t the speech, but the girl of whom the speech was in honor.  The Oxford English Dictionary explains that in this, the reference to the lady was supposed to indicate that it was her charms that lent flavor to the drink, as did the pieces of browned bread in earlier times.

Today we use the word toast in other senses as well.  Since the 1980s something that was broken was toast.  One source connects this with a browned circuit board—something one of my old colleagues would have said has “let the smoke out.”

From here one imagines a logical progression of metaphor so that getting in trouble with the boss might make you say “I’m toast.”

I checked Urbandictionary and evidently where carrying a gun was once called “packing heat” a gun might now be called “toast.”  Although Urbandictionary isn’t exactly an etymological authority, one author says that this is because bullet wounds burn.  I would think a more logical progression would be that in one sense, someone who is toast is dead, so that something that might make them toast could acquire the name.

Every now and again all of us make a faux pas, that is a social error, a mistake.

This expression is clearly from French and it’s literal translation is “false step.”

I look in Merriam Webster and it says it’s a blunder, particularly a social blunder.

But looking at the Oxford English Dictionary it shows that historically it had particular resonance with the social blunder of a young woman’s lapse of virtue.  No mention of the men there.

While that is all very nice, what is interesting about this phrase is the guy who’s credited with its first citation.  William Wycherley was a playwright and around the middle of the 1600s his first play was being staged.  It included some fairly racy scenes as well as a song glorifying both loose women and their resulting offspring.

So there he was riding in his carriage one day when a passing noblewoman recognizes him and shouts out

Wycherley you’re a son of a whore

At first he was dazed, but quickly realized that it was a line from his play.  He had the carriage turned around and gave chase.  Who was it but the mistress of King Charles, said to be one of the most beautiful women in England.

Quothe he:

I’d like you to come to the show tonight, even though I’ll have to stand up my other date.

Quothe she:

do you always stand up your dates?

Quothe he:

Only if the new one is more beautiful, and since I make that a rule, I’ll die before I stand you up.

The upshot of this exchange was the beginning of an affair.  This was no doubt a loss of virtue, but seemingly not a faux pas, since the lady in question, the Duchess of Cleveland, continued also to be the mistress of the king, supposedly bearing him four children, all the while also married to another guy who the king kindly named Baron Limerick and Earl of Castlemaine.

I mentioned “mule” the other day when I was talking about hybrid.  I wanted to get back to mule for a couple of reasons.

Wikipedia says, or it did when I looked last, someone may go correct it after this, anyway wikipedia says that formerly a mule referred not just to the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse, but any cross breeding, including other species.  The implication there seemed to me to show that while the word hybrid went from a specific species to a general crossbreeding, mule went the other way, from the general to the specific.

Now I looked into it and that isn’t so.

Admittedly the word mule has been used in a general sense like hybrid, but that was only in the last 300 or 400 years and we are talking about a word that has been in English since before it was English.  So like hybrid, mule has gone from the specific to the general.  There are specific beneficial attributes based on this particular cross breeding – that is the strength of the horse and the hardiness of a donkey. The reverse, a male horse and female donkey is apparently harder to breed and results in a smaller animal offspring called a hinny.

I suppose that since mules have more practical attributes than the crossbreeding of wild and domestic pigs, their specific name has remained more specific to them.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that mule was a Latin word that was adopted into Germanic languages early on and readopted into Middle English as well.  They indicate that it doesn’t seem to have been an Indo-European word before that.

A mule is supposed to be stubborn, but it has given its name just as often to things that pull and carry.  A mule is slang for someone who smuggles drugs, or at least the person who carries them across the border and tractors and certain sails on boats have also been called mules.

I have sometimes wondered why some kind of women’s shoes are called mules.  Here’s the answer.  They have nothing to do with the animal, although they do carry you along.  In ancient Rome the upper classes distinguished themselves by their means of dress, and one of the things they wore was a kind of red shoe.  The root of mule the shoe comes from this color which must have been a dark red because the word is supposed also to be related to the Greek word for dark or black. It’s thus related to the word melatonin, the hormone that helps us regulate our sleep cycles and is produced according to the light and dark that we experience.

These days people are likely to call even the best cared for children urchins.  The word has taken on a sense of cute mischief to it.  But it also still refers to dirty children running wild, street kids.

The origin of the word is from the wild.  Wildlife.  It comes from a Latin word that meant hedgehog.  Etymonline at least traces the root further back into Greek where the word also meant hedgehog but was built on an Indo-European root that meant “to bristle.”

So a hedgehog with all it’s spines seems to fit the description.  Certainly a sea urchin is very spiny.

Once into English the word began to be applied to the imaginary creatures that lived in the wild, the goblins and little people, on the theory that they changed into hedgehogs when they weren’t being goblins or elves.

Two quotes from Shakespeare assign magical mischievous qualities to urchins. The unkempt look of street people is said by some to have lent the name to them, I’m thinking sticking up hair or something here.  I also see claims that prickly personalities brought on the name.  Although Urbandictionary gives urchin a decidedly homeless tone, as much as 400 years ago the sympathy an unwashed child evoked was already mingling with the disapproval.

Last night I was awoken by a bang and a flash.  I noticed that the power had been out, the digital clock flashing at me.  I would have called that an explosion.  I look in various dictionaries and I find a definition along the lines of

burst or shatter violently and noisily as a result of rapid combustion, decomposition, excessive internal pressure, or other process, typically scattering fragments widely: a large bomb exploded in a park.

That’s from the New Oxford American Dictionary.

The word explode first appeared in English in 1538 according to the OED.  That would be about the time that Shakespeare’s grandparents were coming into this world.  It is from an even older root in Latin.

The thing is, when it first came into English it didn’t mean the type of thing that woke me up. In fact, when Samuel Johnston wrote his dictionary it didn’t recognize the meaning I just read out.  His second definition shows how explode has come to mean what we understand.  He says that gunpowder exploded the massive ball out of the brass tube.

Here the sense of explode is to drive the cannon ball out of the cannon and is in some sense a metaphor for his main entry “to drive out disgracefully with noise of contempt.”  So it is from Latin that the word explode is actually related to applaud where an actor would be driven from the stage – that’s the ex part – by the disapproving sounds from the audience – that’s the plaud part.

It seems that not only is the metaphor made on the driving out, but also on the sudden expulsion of air that comes when a crowd starts to boo, analogous to the expanding gas from the igniting gunpowder.

I later heard on the news that the explosion that woke me up was some yahoo driver, lucky to still be alive, who wiped out his car and three electrical poles.  The site of the accident, which must have blown up a transformer or something, was more than a mile from my sleeping form.

Coincidentally, the drivers name was Johnston, although I’d expect he would recognize now more than most the modern meaning of explode.

Let’s start with how we use the word “hybrid” today, before I explore where it came from.

I looked once again at the New York Times and found the expected hybrid vehicles and from the forestry industry hybrid poplar as well as a kind of hybrid law and finally a comment that mayor Giuliani had been a hybrid as far as his political support went.

So the sense is of a mix.

The word appeared just after Shakespeare breathed his last, but the OED tells us that it was almost never used until the 1800s.

The etymology for hybrid has been revised over the years.  An outdated etymology pointed to a Greek root along the same lines as “hubris” that I talked about in yesterday’s episode.  In that sense a hybrid was seen as an insult, specifically a sexual insult against nature.  This would be along the lines of half-breed or mongrel.

About 100 years ago people figured out this was a dud as far as etymologies go and the new theory that every etymological dictionary now contains ties hybrid instead to another Greek root, this time related to another word I’ve covered here recently on podictionary, hyena.

Evidently to the Romans, a hybrid was just as identifiable as a cross between a wild and a domestic pig, as we would recognize a mule to be the specific word designating a cross between a horse and a donkey.

Just as specifically, whereas a mule is the crossing of a male donkey and a female horse, a hybrid was the offspring of a male wild boar and a female domestic sow.  Most biological hybrids that we know of are the result of man’s design, trying to benefit from positive attributes from two sources.  I can’t see this with the wild and domestic pigs though and imagine a rogue boar busting into the pigpen at night, having his way with the lady pigs.

Another hybrid was recently in the news.  A hunter from Idaho shot what he thought was a polar bear, but turned out to be a hybrid between a polar and a grizzly bear.  One radio show that I favor on CBC headlined the story “an urse of a different color.”

I mentioned to my wife that I was going to do the word “hubris” and she said,

I’ve heard you use that word and I don’t like it.  Crazy isn’t it?  I’m not sure what it means, but I don’t like it.

I said, “for good reason.”

Here’s what the OED has to say about the word:

Presumption, originally towards the gods; pride, excessive self-confidence.

Before I looked it up I might have used the word to describe the inventors of DDT who thought they’d come up with a way to manage pests, or Freon, that designer chemical ideal for refrigeration and aerosol propellant.

If you don’t know, both of these substances have been banned, because the problems they cause are bigger than the solutions they provide.

Although “hubris” has only been a word in English for about 120 years, it appears the concept goes back thousands of years.  Aristotle is said to have defined it something along the lines of making someone else look bad, simply for your own gratification.

The meaning seemed to change over time.

In ancient Greece hubris was defined as a crime, and one example is given in which someone is assaulted and the perpetrator stands over the victim crowing about it.  The hubris wasn’t the assault, but the showing off on top of the assault.

At least one source mentions a Greek god called Hubris or Hybris who embodied the tendency to be overbearing and insulting to others—contrasting against the god nemesis who will wreak revenge for the affront.

But none of that ancient Greek stuff was quite carried with the word into English.  The first citation, from 1884 runs:

Boys of good family, who have always been toadied, and never been checked, who are full of health and high spirits, develop what Academic slang knows as hubris, a kind of high-flown insolence.

So it was teachers, who knew their Greek, who were put down by the sons of the rich and powerful that brought the word into English; likely hoping that these smartass kids would get what the Greeks said was coming to them.

Sometimes we refer to the great achievement of someone’s life as their “magnum opus.”  The source of this expression is classical Latin.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that there are frequent references to magnum opus by the Roman orator Cicero who was born just about 100 years before Christ.  But that was then and this is now.

This Latin phrase waited around almost two thousand years before popping up in English.  It literally means “great work” and you can sometimes hear people use just “opus” when describing a work, particularly of music or literature.  In fact opus and opera are closely related words, opera also being a work of music.

It was a fellow named Boswell who first brought “magnum opus” into English.  Born in Scotland, James Boswell in due course went to Glasgow University and while there decided to become a catholic and a monk.  His dad was right upset about this and sent for him to come home.

Instead he ran away to London.

Wikipedia describes his initial visit there to have seen him live the life of a libertine.  This is a polite way of saying he chased skirts day and night when he was sober enough to stand.

So much for being a monk.

Even though, as wikipedia indicates, he seems to have died of drink and venereal disease, history seems to have forgiven him his excess because it was he who penned the Life of Johnston; Johnston being Samuel Johnston, the famous dictionary maker of much interest to word lovers.  From the brief reading about Boswell that I have done he doesn’t appear to me to have been a guy who most people would have enjoyed having to dinner, unless of course you were one of the great and famous, in which case he could be most entertaining.  Of course Samuel Johnston was great and famous and so Boswell hooked onto him like a leach.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it seems to me telling that it wasn’t Johnston’s dictionary that merited Boswell’s use of “magnum opus” but Boswell’s own biography of Johnston.