The podictionary word for today is “pagan”:  It’s hard to define what pagan means today.  The dictionaries I looked at include definitions such as “heathen,” someone not part of a recognized religion, someone who seeks after pleasure. 

I see ancient belief systems from places all over the world described as pagan, from Iraq, Druids, aborigines. The word came into English in the great work by Sir Thomas Malory, le Mort d’ Arthur.  That’d be not quite 600 years ago.  I’ve talked about this work before.  It was in the episode on “pickle,” and it was a pretty good one, so if you haven’t heard it you might go look it up.  Anyway, “pagan” came from Latin where in ancient times it simply meant a person who wasn’t a soldier.  A local person. 

From the perspective of Christians in England for most of the last few millennia, and in other places in Europe too, a pagan had the meaning of a non-believer; a non-Christian.  So how did a word that just meant a civilian come to mean a religious outsider, or even a person with less sophisticated religious views.  In fact “pagan” did have an implication of less sophistication even when the Romans were using the word to describe the locals.  But Christians also took on with their religion a metaphorical attitude of God’s soldiers—think of that hymn, Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War… So with that kind of attitude, the suspicion is that the believers began to regard the non-believers as civilians and so calling by the Latin word for civilians. 

Which I suppose is better than calling them enemy combatants.  Poor old Thomas Malory though, he was treated like an enemy combatant.  He wrote his great story while locked up.  But one site I visited asked the question how come this author who wrote so timelessly about honor and duty and love got tossed into prison charged with being a rapist, a cattle thief and an attempted murderer? 

Digging a little deeper it looks like the guy was a political player in his day, a knight, elected multiple times to parliament, a sheriff and a justice of the piece.  People in England were really taking sides at the time and it may be that he was just on the wrong side. 

He was never tried for the charges he was jailed for and one account possibly puts the rape charge into perspective in relating that the charge was not brought by the woman, but by her husband under a statute that made elopement chargeable as rape even if the woman consented.  Then again, from this distance in history, we’ll never know.  He could have been a cad—but not a pagan.

The podictionary word for today is “Frankenstein”:  Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster.  You knew that.  But since this book was written almost 200 years ago the word has ignored its parent—sort of a role reversal on the plot—and if someone is said to have created a Frankenstein it is understood to mean they have created a monster. 

Frankenstein has even morphed into other words; for instance genetically modified crops are sometimes called frankenfood with the idea that we don’t really know what the knock on effects of creating these organisms are.  In 1816 a 19 year old Mary Shelly had eloped with her husband the poet Percy Shelly and was hanging around with another notable of the time, Lord Byron.  It was Lord Byron who suggested as a sort of game that each of them should write a ghost story. 

The others got on with theirs and Mary had writer’s block.  Every morning they’d ask, so have you written one yet?  And the days went by in company and conversation.  One day Byron and Percy were musing about a piece of urban legend according to which Erasmus Darwin, this was Charles Darwin’s grampa, had done experiments with vermicelli noodles and brought them to life. 

Nothing twigged with Mary at the time, but as she lay in bed that night the pieces started to fall into place.  Her husband’s publisher declined the book as did Lord Byron’s despite a forward by Byron, and when it did come out the critics were not kind.  But as you know the book became a monster, still in print and influencing film, literature and language to this day. 

Mary said that the name just came to her, but the etymology is German and means “stone of the franks” and there has been endless speculation at why she chose the name, including suggestions that she stayed at a castle by that name during an earlier visit to Germany.

The podictionary word for today is “gamut”:  Something that “runs the gamut” has a wide range.  Gamut is one of those words that doesn’t live alone.  You never hear gamut except if something is running it.  What is a gamut anyway? 

Well it is the range of musical notes and was invented about 1000 years ago by an Italian monk named Guido d’Arezzo.  This is the same guy who gave us do-re-me.  Originally gamut was two words, “gamma” like the Greek letter, and “ut” which was what was there before doe in do-ra-me.  So Gamma ut became gamut.  The gamma represented the note G.  Just as the alphabet is named after the first two letters alpha and beta from the Greek alphabet, the scale was named from its first note which went by these two names.  

If you count out on your fingers do-ra-mi-fa-so-la-te-which-will-bring-us-back-to-do, you’ll see that there are seven notes before you have to begin repeating.  Before Guido came along there were only five.  He invented a sixth, or at least the system for categorizing a sixth which was a new first note.  About 500 years later, that’s also 500 years ago, a guy named Hubert Waelrant figured out if six was good, seven would be even better, so at the top end he added a new note that he called “ni.” 

Actually, he tried to rename all the notes but the old system was too firmly embedded.  It came from leading syllables of a Latin hymn that I’ll play for you now. 
I’ve found a few translations for this but the one I like best is
So that these your servants may
with all their voice
resound your marvelous exploits
clean the guilt from our stained lips ,
O Saint John
Because in those days everyone knew the tune they, easily remembered the scale.  It was about 400 years ago that the first note, ut was renamed to doe, and within the last 200 years that the seventh note was renamed tea.  It was  Rodgers and Hammerstein who turned them into a female deer and a drink with jam and bread.  There, I’ve run the gamut.

The podictionary word for today is “kangaroo”:  Today let me begin with a quote from Urbandictionary:

“People went to Australia and saw these things that liked to bounce. They went to the aborigines and where like “what the fuck are those things? *points and fuzzy hopping thing with pouch”* and the aborigines said “kangaroo” so they thought they were called kangaroos but really, kangaroo means “I don’t understand your question.” in aborigine. ”
Now the reason I relate this seemingly juvenile little tale is that it’s true.  Well it isn’t true, but it’s not just something this Urbandictionary contributor made up.  Around 225 years ago Captain Cook and his botanist Joseph Banks were the ones who said “like what the fuck are those things.”  The answer they got was something like “kangaroo” and they wrote it down.  Fifty years later, another captain asked the same question but the answer he got was “mee-nah.” 

This put the lexicographers into a tizzy and somehow the rumor got started that the Captain Cook answer had been a mistake.  The rumor had enough legs that not only has it shown up at Urbandictionary, but the Oxford English Dictionary takes pains to throw cold water on it as does the American Heritage Dictionary and others. 

A kangaroo court is one that doles out justice without due regard for the law.  Brewer’s dictionary of phrase and fable seems to imply that it takes its name from a British parliamentary procedure where the speaker of the house chooses various amendments to be debated, instead of working through all of them, thereby hopping from one area to another.  But the dates don’t work on this one. 

The parliamentary procedure only shows up 100 years ago while Kangaroo courts were showing up in America 50 years earlier.  Michael Quinion at World Wide Words, wouldn’t swear by it, but the best explanation he’s heard of is that in California during the gold rush—in which a lot of Australians participated—non-official courts were set up to try claim-jumpers.  With all those ozzies around it wouldn’t have taken long to connect claim jumpers and kangaroos. 

So kangaroo or something like it really was what the aboriginals called a kangaroo.  Then what was a mee-nah?  One authority claims mee-nah translates as “edible animal.”

The podictionary word for today is “asset”:  One asset that I have is my winning smile.  Used in this sense the word “asset” differs in several ways from its original entrance into English. 

For one thing my smile isn’t something I can sell—I suppose I could if I was a model, but it isn’t a hard piece of property that can be tallied up and counted against a loan.  When “assets” first became an English word about 500 years ago, it was as a legal word and very much applied to money and goods that could be turned into cash. 

Reaching back through French to Latin, where the word comes from, it was originally two words ad satis—the satis part being the same as we have in satisfied. So the legal meaning of ad satis was “to sufficiency,” that is, does this guy have enough “to sufficiently” cover the debt.  And herein lies the second difference.

The word “asset” appears to us to be the singular, with “assets” being plural.  But actually assets was singular to begin with, since it comes from satis ending with an S.  In fact, since the Oxford English Dictionary hasn’t yet gotten around to revisiting this word for the third edition online, even though most dictionaries cover it, what’s available now in the OED second edition doesn’t even have an entry for asset, only for assets.

The first person who used “assets” in a figurative sense, as I did talking about my smile, was William Wycherley, a playwright living a couple of generations after Shakespeare.  I’ve mentioned him before when we did the word “faux pas.”  When last we looked in on him he was beginning an affair with the Duchess of Cleveland, who was also having an affair with King Charles the second. 

The play that today’s word “assets” appeared in was called The Plain Dealer.  One day Wycherley was in a bookstore when a good looking female customer came in and asked for a copy.  A buddy of Wycherley’s elbows him forward and says “there’s the plain dealer if you want him.”  She replied that she loved plain dealing best and thus began their courtship leading to marriage, but ending the affair with the Duchess of Cleveland.  I wish this story had a happy ending, but it doesn’t.  But it does serve to show the variable morals people have observed over the years. 

Now the King seemed to admire Wycherley rather than resent sharing a mistress with him, and so Wycherley had been in line to become the tutor to the Duke of Richmond who was the son of King Charles by yet another mistress.  But once he got married he could not be relied on to party with and so he fell out of favor, didn’t get the well paid tutoring job.  It gets worse.  His poor wife died young and from the royal perspective he had snubbed society, so he ended up spending seven years in debtors’ prison.

The podictionary word for today is “amber”:  When a tree, particularly a conifer, loses a branch in a windstorm, one of the ways it tries to protect itself from attacking insects is to ooze out a resinous sap.  Trees have been using this strategy for millions of years and bugs have been getting stuck in the sap for millions of years also. 

Death comes to us all and many of those trees of millions of years ago fell down and rotted away leaving globs of resin, sometimes containing bugs or feathers.  One way or another these blobs have come down to us after having been fossilized so that for thousands of years people have valued them for jewelry and decoration.  Today we call these fossilized blobs amber. But the word amber at first referred to something from quite another part of nature. 

Deep in the sea swim the sperm whales, gobbling up squid and other creatures of the deep.  And deep in the belly of the sperm whale collected another kind of blob.  One explanation is that kind of like an oyster that reacts to a scratchy grain of sand in its shell by wrapping it in a pearl, the sperm whales produced these blobs of resinous material in order to allow them to digest and pass the hard beaks of the squid that they were eating. 

Now one might imagine that some goop from the belly of a whale might be a little—shall we say—aromatic, and indeed it is.  Except to our human taste it seems that this particular aroma has an appeal.  Long before Captain Ahab’s peers were harvesting these blobs as a valuable byproduct of the whale oil they were after, people were finding the things floating on the sea and washed up on beaches.  These blobs were the original amber.  The word comes to English from Arabic via Latin and French about 600 years ago. 

People used to use the stuff—which is more wax-like and less stone-like—they used it for making perfume and even for cooking.  Then about 500 years ago it took on a new name, ambergris, from French meaning grey amber, while the fossilized tree sap took over first as yellow amber, and then just amber. 

The podictionary word for today is “cupboard”:  My mother raised me to use the word cupboard and closet more or less interchangeably.  In more recent years I have come to use closet for things like coats and shirts and cupboard for cans of soup and plates.  But now that I look up cupboard in the dictionary I see that mom was right.  Isn’t your mom always right? 

There are quite a few references that use closet to define cupboard, so there you go.  Cupboard first appeared almost 700 years ago in English and is obviously built on the words cup and board.  This is why I figured it had to refer to kitchen cabinetry.  But when cupboards first appeared in English homes, they weren’t in the kitchen.  They were usually prominently displayed shelving units upon the selves of which sat the fine silver of which the owner was most proud. 

So in this sense a cupboard was originally quite the opposite of a closet, which was a personal private space.  In fact, the stuff that was displayed on the shelves for a while also took on the name cupboard so that if the house was burning down and the owner shouted “grab the cupboard” he didn’t mean the piece of furniture, but the dishes. 

One of my favorite books is called cupboard love and it’s named for a phrase meaning insincere affection with an aim for ones advantage, the idea being that someone comes into the kitchen and pretends to be so sweet and nice, just so they can get out of there with a mitt full of cookies.

The podictionary word for today is “closet”:  In my house the closet is a place where we hang clothes.  I renovated a few years ago and I went with the theory that you can never have too many closets.  I have since found this to be false. 

We have so much stuff jammed into those closets its going to be a major job to clear them out someday.  The sense we have now for the word closet is a place of storage.  How does this compare to such sayings as “you have a skeleton in your closet” or “the gay politician came out of the closet”?  Or even the British use of WC to mean Water Closet or a bathroom?  Certainly the idea wasn’t to store the facilities.  In fact the origin of “closet” is in the word “close” and relates to privacy. 

Back 600 or 700 years when we got this word from French, your closet was what we might call our den these days.  A private room.  When people first started coming out of the closet—that is making things public instead of keeping them to themselves—and this was only in the 1950s—the shame they were hiding was alcoholism.  It wasn’t until the 1970s that homosexuality was coming out of the closet.  It seems hard to pin down when people were first accused of having skeletons in their closets. 

I found several supposed reasons that we use this phrase.  I didn’t find any of them strictly credible.  Perhaps the closest was a claim that the phrase arose during the time when physicians found it hard to study anatomy due to the unavailability of dead bodies—principally because it was illegal to desecrate the bodies of the dead—except of course the ones who had been publicly hanged.  This would have been during the 1600 and 1700s when medicine had advanced enough that doctors wanted to explore the interior of the body, but society and the law hadn’t caught up. 

In this environment it might be expected that a doctor could possibly keep human remains in his private chambers for study.  As I said, it seems to make some sense but there are no citations for it and the usual references that I’ve learned to trust don’t say anything about it, so I have my doubts. 

One thing that is more certain is that the first time the phrase appeared in print was in the work of William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair.  The Oxford English Dictionary says that the phrase had been in use earlier, although how they know this is a mystery to me.

The podictionary word for today is “stuff”:  Here’s a nice little word with a pretty wide range of subtlety.  Most of the meanings come back to the main meaning which itself is sort of hard to pin down to a one word definition. 

It’s just stuff: equipment, stores, stock, provisions, property, furnishings, material, substance, matter.  Stuff.  At one end of the spectrum we have Shakespeare saying in The Tempest “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” and at the other end of the spectrum the rather crude expression “get stuffed.”  The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that we don’t know whether the noun, “the stuff dreams are made of” came first or the verb, as in to “get stuffed.” 

Because it is hard to exactly date some of the old documents concerned, we aren’t even sure if we got the noun first or the verb into English almost 700 years ago.  In either case it would have come from French and both relate to military uses.  These days if you go to the camping store and ask what clothes to buy for a trip into the mountains, they’ll tell you to dress in layers. 

The same advice was given back in medieval times if you were planning to go out and whack at someone with a sword or poke at them with a lance.  In place of Gore-Tex they had armour. In place of fleece they had chain mail, and in place of thermal underwear they had stuff. This was a sort of quilted fabric and I suppose it served the dual purpose of keeping all of your body heat from being sucked away by all of the metal against your skin, and in case your opponent managed to poke you with a lance first, would tend to distribute and cushion the blow transferred through the outer layers. 

The reason it was called “stuff” was that it had some form of insulation stuffed in between the quilted outer layers.  As a verb the first citation is to stuff a town with soldiers, that is to furnish it with men.  Unlike most words that came from French, the word “stuff” may not have come from Latin.  It’s hard to tell since it seems Latin adopted the word stuff back from Old French.  Most references think “stuff” is from a Germanic root.

The podictionary word for today is “vodka”:  My father in law was born in a place called Bessarabia which almost 200 years ago chipped off the Ottoman Empire and became part of Russia.  Within his lifetime it seemed to switch back and forth between the Soviet Union and Romania. 

His mother told tales of buying meat at the butcher where in a freezing room a Russian man alternately served customers and banged back glasses of vodka. The word vodka comes to English from Russian and appeared first in 1802, just before Bessarabia was handed over from Ottoman to Russian rule. 

According to the American Heritage Dictionary in Russian the word for water is voda and vodka is a diminutive so that it literally meant “little water.”  One can imagine the alcoholics of days gone by referring to their little water with affection or maybe as a joking euphemism.  The American Heritage Dictionary goes on to connect this word root back to Indo-European and thus to our words water and wet. 

Unfortunately for modern day Russians vodka is just about as cheap as water these days and just as available too.  I heard a Russian woman quoted not too long ago saying that the only reason Russian women needed Russian men around was when something heavy needed to be lifted. 

When my grand-mother-in-law lived in Bessarabia that butcher’s life expectancy was probably not terribly old, but by the 1960s Russian life expectancies were supposed to have been on a par with western countries.  The United Nations Development Program recently reports that these days, after the collapse of communism men’s life expectancy in Russia has fallen back to 58 years old, women’s is still up at 72.  The United Nations attributes this to male self-destructive behavior, including alcoholism.