The podictionary word for today is “ignoramus”:  One definition on Urbandictionary caught my eye:

“for all of us who want to spell well, its ignoramus not ignoranus”

Now, the word ignoramus does have a tone of the rear end to it.  Another Urbandictionary definition of this word mentions ass more than once.  But contrary to any thoughts that this word is a compound of ignorant ass or something, the word comes directly from Latin and according to the Oxford English Dictionary it means “we don’t know.” 

These days we use the word to mean someone who is ignorant, and certainly for most of its history in English that’s what it has always meant.  There was a play of this name staged back around the time when Shakespeare kicked the bucket.  The play was in Latin and made fun of a bumbling university official.  But when ignoramus first came into English it was a legal term. And the translation “we don’t know” might more aptly be rendered “we don’t want to know” for this legal application. 

When a Grand Jury was presented with a case—then termed a bill—back in the mid 1500s they would scribble ignoramus on it if they felt there was insufficient evidence surrounding the case to proceed with hearing it.  While I said this means “we don’t want to know” the OED translates the meaning as “we take no notice of it” which amounts to the same thing. 

I also took note of a similarity in definitions for ignoramus appearing in the Devil’s Dictionary and Urbandictionary.  The Devil’s Dictionary says:

“A person unacquainted with certain kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having certain other kinds that you know nothing about.”

Urbandictionary says:

“Someone who doesn’t know something that you found out yesterday.
EXAMPLE I can’t believe that you didn’t know the capital of Papua New Guinea you ignoramus!”

The podictionary word for today is “slash”:  I heard someone the other day talking about how internet use is changing the way we talk.  The example they gave was L O L, meaning of course “laugh out loud.”  People haven’t stopped laughing out loud, but they have started saying lol to other people in conversation instead of saying what we used to say as kids “that was so funny I forgot to laugh.” 

What got me thinking about this was that my daughter has started injecting the word slash into her conversation quite regularly, instead of saying or.  This definition of slash has shown up on Urbandictionary but I learned two other things about slash.  One is that slash is the name of a guitarist, and also that it is slang for taking a pee in Britain and Australia. 

The etymology of slash the typographical character that my daughter is using instead of or, is apparently from French, although it isn’t certain.  The thinking is it comes from a word meaning to break, and the earliest use was in one copy of the Wycliffe bible back around 600 years ago, where the meaning was a violent blow as with a sharp cutting weapon. 

Then, seemingly the violence went out of English—or at least the word slash did—for 200 years.  Slash first made it as the name of the typographical character in 1961.  Slash meaning to pee goes back to 1950, but is thought to have come from a Scandinavian root which entered English almost back in the time of Shakespeare as a large splash of liquid, in first citation a beverage, so input, not output. 

A final little piece of education I came across is that slash is a sub-genre of science fiction where two characters that appear together in popular media, are said to have a sexual relationship, often a homosexual one.  Where I might have guessed that a genre called slash might have more to do with violence than sex, it turns out that the slash here is also the typographical character since the origin of the genre seems to have been a supposed sexual relationship between captain Kirk and Spock from Star Trek. 

There is even an Oxford English Dictionary entry for capital K slash capital S that describes this origin and links back to the entry for slash.  The first citation here is 1977; Star Trek started in 1966. 

The podictionary word for today is “authorized”:  The other day I was looking up the etymology for the word girl and I came across a note saying that girl was only used twice in the authorized version of the bible. 

I have since learned that the authorized version of the bible is the same as the King James version of the bible.  King James originally being the American terminology and Authorized being what it used to be called in England.  But at first I wondered “authorized by who?” By God?  No.  By King James. 

But then again James the first, who authorized the authorized version was also a big advocate of the divine right of kings, that is, the theory that it wasn’t the will of the people or the authority of parliament that made a king a king, it was the direct will of God.  So in James’ mind anyway, I suppose authorized by King was much the same as authorized by God.  But on to etymology.  The root of authorization one can logically see connected also to the root of authority. 

The sense we have today of an authorized work is of some authority giving it approval.  With this in mind it is maybe a little out of line to see authority tied to the word author, since anyone can write anything these days.  But it is the sense that author has of the hand that brings something into being that is the connection here.  All these words come from a Latin root augere that means “to grow” and in turn links back to an Indo-European root. 

So in the case of the King James Bible, it was by his authority that the thing was undertaken.  The Latin augere meaning “to grow” is referenced in other places as meaning “to increase” and with this meaning it turns out that augere is also the root of our word auction.  When you sell something at auction you hope that the bidding will increase the value.

The podictionary word for today is “girl”:  The word girl seems pretty basic.  It describes a kind of person who must have been around since language was invented.  It’s a short word and has the sort of sound you might expect to have evolved from Old English.  These are the kind of clues that one might think should point to a word with a root deep in antiquity. 

So how come we know so little about its etymology.  It doesn’t seem to be rooted in antiquity, but instead shows up only about 700 years ago.  None of the usual sources claim to have the goods on the origin of girl but it seems that when it was first being used back then, it didn’t refer only to females, but to boys or girls.  It certainly referred to young people and usually in plural. 

Brewers dictionary of phrase and fable points out that the plays of Shakespeare mention girls 70 times while the King James Bible only mentions girls twice.  Both Shakespeare and the King James Bible were roughly contemporary but there are big differences between them of course.  Shakespeare was writing to entertain and so would have been using pretty accessible language for his audience. 

The King James bible was being assembled by a committee of scholars from as ancient texts as they could get their hands on in Greek and Latin and Hebrew.  So although girls were children of either sex about 700 years ago, by about 100 years before Shakespeare, so 500 years ago or so, they had acquired their female meaning. 

The first occurance of the word girl is in a work now called the Southern English Legendary.  This was a collection of stories about the lives of the saints and it appears to have been a very popular item in its day because about sixty manuscripts still survive.  From what I can see it appears to have been written in a fairly readable style and is supposed not only to reveal the lives of the saints, but according to one academic who wrote a book on the Legendary, also tells us a lot about how people lived and perceived their world in the south west of England at the time. 

The Oxford English Dictionary admits also that we don’t know where the word girl came from but reports that suspicions lean toward Old English, and Germanic roots.  It closes its etymology of girl thus:

It may be noted that boy, lad, lass, and the numerous synonyms in the modern Scandinavian languages, are all of difficult etymology; probably most of them arose as jocular transferred uses of words that had originally a different meaning.

The podictionary word for today is “planet”:  I grew up understanding that we had nine planets in our solar system.  That we were on the third and that the one farthest away was called Pluto.  But when I look in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition they give mentions seven planets, not nine.  Then it goes on to list them

The moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

This is certainly a little different than what I learned.  First of all I didn’t think the moon was a planet, and certainly not the sun.  And what about Pluto, Uranus, Neptune and Earth?  Well it turns out that this classical definition of what the planets are underlies also the etymology of the word planet itself.  Even today astronomers don’t always agree on how many planets we have in our solar system. 

Some argue that it isn’t nine, it’s really eight because Pluto is too small and it’s orbit too elliptical to qualify.  Others argue that Pluto has been called a planet for long enough that we better not change it now, and what’s more, there are lots of other things shooting around out there that might be invited to join the party, like that one that’s sometimes called Xena. 

That erratic orbit of Pluto’s relates to the old classical idea of a planet.  Imagine the ancients lying on their backs at night, watching the skies.  They must have been watching very carefully because they noticed that while thousands of the tiny lights up there tended to follow each other in a consistent direction from east to west every night, a few of them tended to wander around all over the sky.  They called these objects “wanderers” and that’s what planet means in Greek. 

In fact the vast soup of space has galaxies and solar systems milling about all over the place, but from our perspective the distances are so vast and the timescales so long that looking up at the sky all we might be expected to notice is the apparent motion of these lights due to the rotation of the earth upon which we sit.  So most of those lights look pretty consistent in their speed and direction.  The few that the ancients called planets were in orbit around the sun, and of course the moon is in orbit around us.  So the apparent motion of these things—that we can see by the light from the sun that they reflect—look to be moving pretty erratically compared to the stars.  Pluto, Uranus and Neptune weren’t bright enough to be noticed. 

The paradigm that these guys were operating under was that we were the centre of the universe and these seven planets moved around out there at fixed distances, as if each were embedded in the surface of some spherical glass bubble and all these bubbles fit inside each other, with us at the centre.  The math ALMOST worked for this.  We live in a world with seven days in a week and the reason is that the ancients believed that each of the seven planets they saw ruled the earliest moments of one of these seven days.  The sun would look most important and after that the moon so it’s no accident that Sunday and Monday are the first days of the week, even though, by our modern definitions, neither of them are even planets.

The podictionary word for today is “war”: Eleanor Roosevelt is quoted as saying “I cannot believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.” She was talking about World War Two.

You might think that the word “war” is as old as human history, and I guess in a way it is. But the Oxford English Dictionary says “It is a curious fact that no Germanic nation in early historic times had in living use any word properly meaning ‘war’, though several words with that meaning survived in poetry, in proverbial phrases, and in compound personal names.”

English gained the word “war” in the closing stages of Old English, just before the arrival of the Normans with William the Conqueror. “War” has Germanic roots, but they had invaded French as well since the French word for war guerre grew out of the same root. It was one of those French offshoots that brought war across the English Channel and into Old English. The American Heritage Dictionary points out that our word guerrilla comes from the French side of that word family.

The OED says that the reason that French and other Romance languages didn’t take the Latin root for war—which we still see in words like bellicose—is that it was too similar to the word for “beautiful”—bella. Anyone who thinks war is beautiful needs their head examined. They are very confused. And it is confused that actually was at the root of our word “war.” As the OED said, the Germanic languages didn’t have a word for war, so they chose one that seemed close enough.

In Old High German werra meant “confusion,” “discord,” or “strife.” The American Heritage Dictionary points this root back to Indo-European and thereby links the etymology of “war” also to the word “worse.”

The podictionary word for today is “candid”:  Three of four decades ago there was a TV show called Candid Camera.  If you don’t know it you’ll recognize the theme because it’s had plenty of imitators since.  A hidden camera filmed people’s reactions to unusual or outrageous citations.  One that I remember used a car that had had it’s engine taken out and every available space under the hood and in the trunk replaced with a huge gas tank. 

This was in the days of full service gas stations.  They chose a gas station on a hill and had a pretty driver roll the car down the hill and in beside the pumps.  The poor gas jockey was scratching his head and looking under the car as the gas kept filling and filling and filling.  Another episode had a guy arrive at the post office, open his post box—one of those in a bank of other boxes along the wall—and pull out a tubular package, except the tube was 20 feet long or something. 

Anyway, wikipedia tells me that Woody Allen wrote and acted on the show early in his career and Buster Keaton and Muhammad Ali appeared too.  But the point of this little talk isn’t an old TV show, it’s part of the title of the TV show.  The word “candid” means “open” and “sincere.”  In the context of the TV show it meant that people were acting in the normal way they would act, because they didn’t know they were on camera.  But the roots of the word have nothing at all to do with the idea of honesty or deception or putting on a front. 

“Candid” appeared in English shortly after Shakespeare’s death, although the closely related word “candor” was with us much earlier, more than 600 years ago.  Both came to English from Latin and at first meant “white.” It was the sense of purity associated with pure white that led to a meaning of innocence, and to honesty.  Back in Latin the reason the word brought with it the sense of “white” is that the parent word meant “shining forth” and that’s why it’s also the parent word of “candle.”

When cool first appeared in English 1000 years ago it seems not to have been treated all that different from “cold.”

Come to think of it, sometimes I don’t distinguish the word that much.  I come in from walking the dog when it’s 20 below.  “What’s it like out there?” someone asks.  “Pretty cool” I might say.

But that’s not the meaning I want to deal with here today.

A cool temperature has been with English speakers for 1000 years.  Except for a short stint 150 years ago when cool also meant a 28 pound tub of butter, cool has always referred to a condition of temperature.

So when did this climatic condition become a state of… how to express it… a state of hip?

This very question has vexed lexicographers for years.

The origin of cool.

Who was it who was the original Joe cool?

This is where the dictionary and reality TV come together.  The British Broadcasting Corporation and the Oxford English Dictionary got together and had a televised series for which the prize was that John Q Public got to “change the dictionary.”

People were supposed to root through their memories (and bookshelves) to see if they could improve on about 50 words in terms of what their first citation might be, or more clues to etymology.

As might be expected, most of the non-professional material submitted was…well…non-professional.

I’m not being critical.  I don’t think I’d be looking too professional either in trying to find earliest citations.

One of the big problems that people had was to get around their 2006 mindset, with their pre-existing understanding of word meanings, so that the earlier meanings shone through.

It takes years of study to think with the vocabulary of someone from 300 years ago.

So it was no surprise that much of what was received was junk.

But victory was had as well.

Toss out a big enough net and you are likely to catch a few good fish.  And one of those fish was cool.

I look at my Oxford English Dictionary second edition and there doesn’t even appear to be an entry for cool meaning “trend setting” and” hip”, “approved of” and “accepted.”

The March 2006 entry (the draft 3rd edition) remedied that—well it would have remedied it anyway—but because of that TV effort (something they called Balderdash and Piffle)—they found two earlier citations not only pushing back the date of cool’s first citation from 1933 almost 50 years to 1884, but also confirming the belief that it was black slang that brought this cool into the world.  The new definition:

A colloquialism
originally U.S., in African-American usage
As a general term of approval: admirable, excellent; especially–sophisticated, stylish, ‘classy’
Compare with  HOT

The podictionary word for today is “anecdote”:  I have been finding it quite useful to podictionary to go through a number of books about literary anecdotes and anecdotes about other historical figures.  In high school I had a teacher who tried to impress upon us the need to use the right words.  He didn’t want us shooting allegories on the Nile or giving anecdotes to people who had been poisoned. 

The word “anecdote” came into English just over 300 years ago and at first it was regarded with distain.  The Greek roots of the word mean “things unpublished” and for the first century or more if you heard an anecdote it was gossip of the least creditable kind.  Now we think of it as just an interesting story from behind the scenes. 

The Oxford book of Literary Anecdotes that I have just gotten my hands on tells me that the first use of the word was by a Byzantine writer 1500 years ago. His name was Procopius and our word of the day appears in one of his more famous pieces now known as The Secret History supposedly dealing with the behind the scenes indiscretions of the Emperor Justinian.  It is famous because it is pretty racy in some parts.  Here’s what he says of the Queen:

she often went to a supper at which each one paid his share, with ten or more young men, in the full vigour of their age and practised in debauchery, and would pass the whole night with all of them. When they were all exhausted, she would go to their servants, thirty in number …and it goes on,
or
in the theatre, she removed her costume and stood nude in their midst, she would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves would then scatter grains of barley from above into the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat.

No wonder people thought it was pretty low gossip.

The podictionary word for today is “iron”: The American Heritage Dictionary talks about iron being from Old English but points back also to an Indo-European root. The Oxford English Dictionary ties it into Germanic roots. Certainly iron is a very old word. Its parent words pre-dated the Norman invasion by many centuries and the first citations imply use back 1300 or 1400 years ago.

As I was perusing over the lengthy and complicated etymology that the Oxford English Dictionary always has for these old old words, I suddenly felt like I recognized some of the word roots from my days, years ago reading JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. As I’ve said before on podictionary, Tolkien did actually work on the Oxford English Dictionary. I pulled out my old leather bound copy of Lord of the Rings—someone recently told me I was a complete nerd for owning it—anyway, I was right. There is the fortress of Isengard. Not in any reputable etymological dictionary can one find this word, but in general searches on the net people sure seem to feel that Isengard means “iron fortress.”

The iron we don’t use much any more to iron our clothes gained it’s name during the last years of Shakespeare’s life, simply because the way people used to iron their shirts was to have a chunk of iron designed to have a flat bottom, and rest it very near the fire, and let it get good and hot, then grab it up with some kind of handle or oven mitt, and get on with the linen. I grew up with one of these things hanging around the house as a door-stop, so for many years I was mildly confused by the phrase “strike while the iron is hot.” I assumed it must have something to do with starched collars. Of course it is a blacksmithing expression. If you want to bang a piece of iron into some new and better shape, the best time to do that is to strike it when it is glowing red hot.

Etymonline talks about the etymological roots of iron in proto-Germanic words meaning holy metal or strong metal. Whether iron is holy or not, one of the early citations for it was in Caedmon’s Genesis. Although Caedmon lived more than 1300 years ago he is still regarded as an important figure. At the time he was thought of as a guy who had been blessed by God, but English etymology scholars think he was important for another reason. He started out as a common cow herd, hanging out with his fellow heardsmen, and maybe feeling a little the outcast, because as they sat around partying and singing of an evening, Caedmon said he was no good at singing and went to bed. Well, his anti-social behavior must have bothered him because deep down he really did want to make up songs and sing them with his buddies. He dreamed that someone came to him in the night and asked him to sing, as before, he made excuses, but the dream figure would have none of it. “Sing to me of the creation” says he. So in his dream Caedmon sings. After he wakes up he thinks, hey, that wasn’t bad, and he goes to his local monk to tell him the song.

The Monk takes him to the Abbess and she tests him, they all think that he, a poor illiterate herder must have been touched by God to be able to produce such songs. Oh it was so glorious. But what’s glorious to scholars today is the fact that when everyone else was scribbling their stuff away in Latin, here was Caedmon, one of the very first to produce stuff in English, or at least the one who everyone thought was blessed enough that they saved his stuff.