The podictionary word for today is “candle”:  The word candle is an unusual word in that it is from Old English but it didn’t come from a Germanic source.  For the longest time candles were associated with church and so was the word. 

This gives us a clue as to why a Latin word shows up long before any French arrives with the Norman conquest.  It was the Christian conquest.  In Latin cand?-re meant “to shine” so it’s easy to see how the word could have turned into candle.  In fact there is an Indo-European root kand or kend that also means to shine. 

Except for birthday cakes, romantic dinners and power failures we don’t seem to have much use for candles anymore.  But they were once pretty important and we have some expressions that we still use to show for it.  If something is considered inferior to something else it is sometimes said not to hold a candle to it. 

In a similar way to saying someone isn’t worthy of polishing my boots, this idiom arose from the practice of having a servant light the way for you by holding a candle.  So someone who couldn’t hold a candle was beneath the status of that servant.  Another saying we still have is burning the candle at both ends. 

If I am working night and day, or partying night and day I might be said to be burning the candle at both ends.  This was first an expression in French but according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, in Shakespeare’s day it was translated into English.  It had a more monetary meaning then.  The Oxford English Dictionary has a later citation:

“The Candle burns at both Ends. Said when Husband and Wife are both Spendthrifts”

Tradition maintains candles as a unit of measure in some industries.  Photography and the lighting industry often make measurements in foot candles.  This is a measure of how much light falls on a subject compared to the amount of light one foot from a candle.   That’s a measure of the brightness of the light at the model’s face, but the source of the light was once also measured in candlepower. 

So the light bulb would be as bright as however many candles.  This unit of measure was thought to be outdated so the new one is now called a, wait for it, candela.  Since the value of one candela is the same as the old value of one candlepower one wonders if this is really progress.

The podictionary word for today is “usher”:  At weddings there are usually people assigned as ushers to show guests to their seats.  Also at plays and classical concerts there are sometimes ushers, those people who guide latecomers with little flashlights.  In these senses the word “usher” gives us a feeling of a helper.

Someone whose who’s duty it is be your guide.  But the word originated with a meaning closer to a gatekeeper.  Since the ticket takers at the theatre are also sometimes called ushers, the meaning has stuck to some extent.  “Usher” first came into English from the pen of Geoffrey Chaucer in the part of the Canterbury Tales called the Squire’s Tale.

Before that, or coincident with it there was in fact an English word “husher” with the same meaning, but it wasn’t that this usher or husher was a person who told guests to keep quiet that gave the title husher, although it does have something to do with the mouth.  The Indo-European root word os meant mouth.  The words oral—as in oral hygiene—and orifice are both thought to have evolved ultimately from this root.

In Latin it lead to a word ostium or ustium meaning door; the mouth of a building as it were.  The common man’s Latin that morphed into French turned at least one of the branches of this word into the root of door keeper we now know as “usher.”

The podictionary word for today is “paradox”:  The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that this word has been around in English for just under 500 years and that it was adopted out of French from Latin but has roots that go back into Greek. 

The American Heritage Dictionary goes further tracing parts of the word back into Indo-European.  If you know how to break the word apart it’s meaning explains itself.  Of course you might have to be an authority on ancient languages to be able to do that without peeking in the dictionary.  I peeked so here’s the explanation.  Para is the same as in parallel, it means “by the side of.” Dox is translated as opinion. 

So that a paradox is a concept that seems to be beside the opinion one would naturally draw from it.  A statement that leads listeners on to a conclusion that seems counter intuitive or self contradictory. American Heritage takes dox back to indo-European dec meaning to take or to accept, in this case accepting knowledge or opinion. 

This root relates paradox to the word doctrine and doctor. Urbandictionary gives an example of a paradox thus, the statement below is false, followed by, the statement above is true.  In looking up information about the word paradox I made use of something called Oxford Reference Online that searches through dozens of books and documents. 

For a search like this where there may be a fair number of hits they have a helpful column breakdown of subject areas into which the hits fell; Bilingual Dictionaries, Biological Sciences, Classics, Computing etc.  I thought it was a crude measure of life, the world and everything to see that the category of Religion and Philosophy had about twice as many hits for paradox as did any other category. 

I was also entertained to see that the funny looking duck billed platypus, that paradox of nature was indeed named as a species by the scientific classification paradox by one Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.  His choice didn’t stick but another suggestion he made did.  This was the guy who dreamed up the idea that humans could be broken into 5 different racial groups: the Caucasian or white race, the Mongolian or yellow, the Malayan or brown race, the Negro, Ethiopian, or black race, and the American or red race. 

Remember that this was 200 years ago. He got most of his data from measuring skulls, although wikipedia says only 60 of them, which by today’s standards is a pretty unreliable sample size.

The podictionary word for today is “deja vu”:  I was surprised to read that not everyone experiences déjà vu—that eerie impression that you’ve done this before.  It’s referred to in a number of places as paramnesia or a form of paramnesia. 

But this doesn’t seem right to me.  Paramnesia is a distorted or improper memory and it seems to me that déjà vu isn’t memory at all, but a feeling that you have an experience as a memory.  Anyway, déjà vu only came into English from French about 100 years ago and although people in France must have been using the words for years—they mean “already seen”—it was only a few years before we got it in English that it was established in French as a term to define the feeling.  Yogi Berra is famously said to have quipped “this is like déjà vu all over again.” 

He is famous for his mangling of phrases and of course the joke here is that the déjà vu makes the “all over again” redundant.  It seemed to me that the humor in this quote is wearing off in common usage and that people are adopting the whole phrase just to mean déjà vu. 

I went to a couple of search engines that specialize in doing scans on audio and rendering them into text and without actually doing a statistical analysis on it, it looks to me like about a quarter or maybe a fifth of the hits I got were just that, people saying déjà vu all over again as if that was the phrase. 

Now I’m pretty proud of myself for this, because as Yogi Berra said, “you can observe a lot just by watching” or maybe he didn’t say that, because as he also said “I didn’t really say everything I said.”  But he certainly did say “it ain’t over till it’s over.”

The podictionary word for today is “froth”: 
Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote:

Life is mostly froth and bubble
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.

Perhaps an unfortunate little poem from Australia’s national poet, since he ended up shooting himself because he was in debt.  Froth appears in English just over 600 years ago so that was solidly after French words began to invade Old English, but the Oxford English Dictionary speculates “froth” may have been in the language before the Norman invasion via Old Norse. 

Froth is of course an accumulation of tiny bubbles just like you’d get when you brush your teeth.  Although Shakespeare used the word to refer to a foolish gentleman in Measure for Measure, and I’ve seen it also explained as an insult along the lines of “scum.”

Actually tooth brushing and foolish gentlemen are what brought me to this word.  In a book called “The Last Lion” about Winston Churchill the author makes a point of explaining how pampered the aristocratic British were in Churchill’s day.  He explains that Churchill never filled his own bath or rode a bus and he only took the subway once but had to be rescued because he got lost.

The example for today’s word though is of Churchill’s cousin. Evidently this guy was visiting friends and complained to them that his tootbrush was not “frothing properly.” It turned out he didn’t know enough to put toothpaste on it because his valet always did that for him.

The podictionary word for today is “bumblebee”:  At last etymology and entomology come together.  I’ve noticed several popular books on word origins that make the joke about confusing etymology—the history behind words—and entomology—the study of insects. 

Today we will study a little of each.  A bumble bee is of course one of those big fat fuzzy buzzing yellow and black insects that slowly and clumsily hovers from one flower to another.  They are kind of cute and it is these bees that are often depicted in ads for honey, even though true honeybees look more like flying ants or something.  Maybe not, but they don’t look the same as bumble bees anyway. 

I was surprised to find upon applying my busy-as-a-bee self to the Oxford English Dictionary that bumble bees are not called bumble bees because they bumble from one flower bloom to another in such a clumsy way, but because the word “bumble” is related to the word “boom.” 

Historically, people used the word boom not only to describe the sound of cannons or thunder, but also the buzz of insects.  In fact our usual term “bumble bee” is only the winner of a contest between several different words used across England over time to describe this charming stinging insect.  Another contender was “humble-bee” not because the insect lacked pride, we don’t really know, but again because of the sound it makes. 

With the huge popularity of the Harry Potter series it is now fairly common knowledge that Professor Dumbledore’s name is also one of those words for bumblebee that has fallen out of use.  Bumblebees are scientifically classified into genus bombus, bombus being the Latin word meaning “boom” or “buzz.” 

The podictionary word for today is “cliche”:  A cliché is a phrase that has been used again and again and again and again to the extent that his feels tired and meaningless.  The origin of this word is in the jargon of French printers.

In order to create a plate from which to print, one technique was to take the original relief image, perhaps carved in wood, and dab it into a bath of molten lead just about its melting temperature.  The result was a skin of metal shaped to the image to be printed.  It was easy enough to make a number of copies like this and from them, to print off even more prints on paper.

In English print shops this technique was called dabbing, in France the sweating men dropped the image into the molten metal and listened to the distinctive clink noise it made.  They named the process clichage after this clinking sound.  The resulting plate was therefore a cliché and that’s why something said or done over and over again is called a cliché.

It was Sam Goldwyn who said “let’s have some new clichés.”  Goldwyn, as I’m sure you know, was one of the giants of movie making as movie making was coming into its own.  His name lives on in MGM studios, now owned by Sony, although he had left the company even before it became MGM.  In fact the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation which had earlier been gobbled up into MGM didn’t take its name from Sam Goldwyn.

It was the other way round.  He took his name from the company.  He had been born in Poland with the name Gelbfisz and had changed it to Goldfish while living in Britain.  His first film endeavor was partnering with the Selwyn brothers, so Goldfish and Selwyn yielded Goldwyn.  He must have liked the name better than Goldfish because he went to court and had it changed.

If you look at the end of the article about Sam Goldwyn on wikipedia there is a long list of spoonerisms attributed to him, such as: “A bachelor’s life is no life for a single man.” And “Never make forecasts, especially about the future.” But knowing that English was not his first language makes them a little more forgivable, if no less funny.

The podictionary word for today is “boycott”:  In 1880 the word boycott popped into English and several other languages without any previous etymology at all.  Boycott is an eponym, that is a word taken from someone’s name.  And that someone was Charles Cunningham Boycott. 

In those days much of Ireland was essentially owned by the English aristocracy and rented back to Irish farmers.  The rents were considered by some farmers to be unreasonably high and a political movement began to pressure the landlords to back off a bit.  Some did, but many did not and old Charlie Boycott was one of those who didn’t back down.  His farmers decided to up the pressure a bit and walked off the job, letting the potatoes lie in the field to rot. 

The British press got involved and more sympathetic farm workers—read protestant—were brought in to take in the harvest.  The local farmers had considerable local sympathy and Charles found that he couldn’t hire household servants, couldn’t buy groceries, no one would talk to him or sit near him in church.  The British government sent in troops to protect the replacement farm workers. 

The crop was saved but Boycott had had about enough, he was after all not the land owner, just the guy representing the lord back in England—so he sailed for England before Christmas time.  In the mean time English had gained a new word, and so had French, Dutch, German and Russian.  Such is the nature of mass communications.

The podictionary word for today is “be”:  To be or not to be, that doesn’t really seem to be the question.  I just checked the US Cencus website and the estimate for the human population of planet earth is now more than six and a half billion people. 

Very roughly that’s twelve times the population estimated for the time when Shakespeare wrote my opening line.  So, I’d say we’ve decided to be.  As it turns out we’ve decided to use the word “be” as well.  It is the second most commonly used word in the English language, at least according to the Oxford English Corpus, so that means written language.  The word “the” is the most common. 

The word “be” is a verb and I’m informed by AskOxford that of the 25 most commonly used verbs, twenty of them are Old English words and another three are Old Norse.  What’s more, all 25 are words of only one syllable.  The point seems to be that simple word is a good word.  As to the etymology of “be” –let me tell you, for such a simple word, it is pretty complicated. 

The Oxford English Dictionary goes on ad nauseam.  Evidently there were three roots that came together and show up back in Sanskrit and Greek, anyway the entire definition for this two letter word goes on for more that 13,000 words; the entire play Hamlet barely has twice that many words.  The first time “be” shows up as an English word is back in the translation that King Alfred the Great did of something called the Consolation of Philosophy originally written in Latin by a guy named Boethius.  I’ve mentioned this document before. 

Boethius was born to a Roman family which had also produced several Emperors on both his mother and his father’s side, as well as a pope or two.  He himself didn’t do all that badly because he worked his way up the corporate ladder to become head of the government and court under a king called Theodoric the Great. 

Well, easy come, easy go.  One day Theodoric decided Boethius was a bad guy after all and threw him in prison for a year before having him killed.  During that year he wrote the work in question.  At a time when most of us might be expected to just sulk around our cell all day, he put pen to paper and developed an exploration of how good things can go bad, and why friends turn on you. 

And he didn’t do it in a self-pittying way either.  The title the consolation of philosophy is played out in a dialog between himself and a woman named Lady Philosophy.  At one point she asks him:

Why, then, O mortal men, do you seek that happiness outside, which lies within yourselves?

Her other title in the book was the Queen of Science and it’s interesting to note that recent scientific research is showing what this fictitious queen seemed to know.  Happiness seems to be a quality that different people have in different amounts, just like athletic ability.  And also like athletic ability, if you practice being happy, you can get better at it.  So don’t worry BE happy.

The podictionary word for today is “kid”:  I don’t know if your grandmother told you what my grandmother told me, she said that a kid was a young goat, she didn’t like people being called kids.  She must have been pretty conservative in that way because according to the Oxford English Dictionary the reference to a child as a kid made the transition from low slang to a common and familiar use about 150 years ago. 

The OED also confirms that for hundreds of years kid referred to a goat of tender years, and that it may have come from Old Norse which seems to have been more like “kith”, or it may have been from Old High German kizzen; although neither one is certain.  Anyway, the first time the slang use meaning what we would normally think of as a kid made it into print was in Shakespeare’s day. 

These days there aren’t too many goats roaming the streets so most of the kids we see are children.  The author of the work which brought that low slang into print was one Philip Massanger.  Or maybe not.  That’s who The OED cites, but then in their bibliography points to another guy, Thomas Middleton.  Wikipedia attributes the work to Middleton but it doesn’t really matter. 

The point is that not only did these guys live and write in the time of Shakespeare, they are likely to have worked with him.  The world was a smaller place in those days it seems.  Massanger is credited by some with having collaborated with old Will on the scene with the witches bubble bubble toil and troubleing in Macbeth – the play that cannot be named. 

Middleton was also a writer for the King’s men, Shakespeare’s company, although both Massanger and Middleton would have been the new kids on the block when Will was in his prime.  I also found that “kid” has several other meanings besides goats and children:

A bunch of sticks
A pea pod
A basket or tub

And of course a joke as in “no kidding.”  It seems that no kidding derives from a sense of “you aren’t going to make me feel as foolish as a child, are you?”