The podictionary word for today is instrument:  You won’t be surprised to learn that our word instrument appeared first in English with a meaning of an article used to produce music.  That was back in the year 1290 and in the South English Legendary, that sometimes fanciful account of the lives of the saints. 

The word came into English from the French of William the Conqueror, but originated back in Latin in the root struere which means “to pile up.”  So literally an instrument is a tool with which one is supposed to be able to build something.  In the case of a musical instrument it allows us to create music, but because of its utilitarian roots, for many years in English one could find a piece of construction equipment being referred to as an instrument. 

You wouldn’t usually think of instruction and destruction as antonyms, but if you look at them in light of that same Latin root struere, they are, in a way.  Instruction is the piling up of knowledge while when you destroy something, you are knocking things off the pile, tearing it down. 

The word instrumental can have two quite different meanings.  Your uncle could be instrumental in getting you that job, meaning he is an important instrument in achieving your ends.  Or you could listen to an instrumental on your iPod, a piece of music with no words in it, just instruments.  As with any word that means a tool of some sort, it doesn’t take long before someone uses the word to mean their sexual equipment.  For our word of the day instrument, we have an early genital reference by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue.

“I bear no malice to virginity;
Let such be bread of purest white wheat-seed,
And let us wives be called but barley bread;
And yet with barley bread (if Mark you scan)
Jesus Our Lord refreshed full many a man.
In such condition as God places us
I’ll persevere, I’m not fastidious.
In wifehood I will use my instrument
As freely as my Maker has it sent.
If I be niggardly, God give me sorrow!
My husband he shall have it, eve and morrow”

The podictionary word for today is blurb:  I see that the word blurb is to be found in the Chambers Dictionary of Eponyms.  Now I’m sure you know that an eponym is a word that is drawn from someone’s name. 

I did the word platonic not too long ago, and it is after Plato.  So according to Chambers, the word blurb comes from the name of Miss Belinda Blurb.  Yet Belinda Blurb is a fictitious character so I wonder if this qualifies as an eponym.  The guy who is credited with inventing the word blurb is Gelett Burgess, a Californian dead these fifty years.  It was he who also penned:

I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one!

Evidently he got so tired of hearing people quote that one back to him that he also wrote:

Ah yes, I wrote The Purple Cow,
I’m sorry now I wrote it;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’ll kill you if you quote it!

In looking for a nice clean definition for what the word blurb means I came across the following at Urbandictionary.com, and it seems to me that this is pretty close to how old Gelett Burgess felt about it.

A blurb is a dose of highly concentrated spin intended to deflect direct perception and critical thought while presenting a desirable or attractive image to the public.
In 1907 Burgess wrote something called Are You a Bromide? And on the cover he had some text that was intended to mock other publications of the day that had taken to writing little testimonials on their covers in an effort to sell more books. 

He called his testimonial a blurb and above it showed a picture of a young woman.  She appears to be shouting and the caption reads “Miss Belinda Blurb in the act of blurbing.”  The Oxford English Dictionary also credits Burgess with the first citation; that was in 1914 for some reason.  As can be seen from the Urbandictionary definition that I read, a blurb today can be understood to apply to many different publicity efforts, but for most of its existence blurb has applied mainly to books.

I think the understood meaning has expanded also from only marketing verbiage to any short description.  Since I have a book coming out in November I have my own blurbs.  One of them I was honoured to get was from Richard Lederer, the co-host of NPR’s A Way With Words.  Richard is a pretty clever wordsmith and A Way With Words often identifies itself as “verbivore central.”  In helping me out with my book and his blurb, he called himself a “blurbivore.” 

I’ll put a picture of Belinda Blurb up on the blog page as well as a link to A Way With Words and yet another link to my book Carnal Knowledge: A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology and Trivia.

The podictionary word for today is chaperone:  The average age of a first marriage in the western world is getting darn close to 30 years old.  This means people have pushed the date for wedding bells off almost a decade in only two or three generations.  Our whole structure of finding mates and settling down has changed radically after centuries. 

When my parents got married it was a time when all of the adults in their lives considered it their duty to watch over and guide young people.  Can you imagine a school teacher today having anything to say about the dating habits of their students.  People traveled in smaller circles in those days and a chaperone seems almost quaint now, but back then they were a necessary part of guiding the behavior of generations entering their first phases of sexual awareness. 

So what then does the word chaperone have to do with hats?  In French a chapeau is a hat.  We get our English word cap from the same Latin source cappa. And in fact the word cape is from there too. These words are old enough and pervasive enough that they appeared in Old English before the Norman invasion of 1066 brought all those French roots into Middle English. 

What all these articles of clothing have in common is the fact that they protect the wearer from the weather and it is the protection of young women from inappropriate male suitors that is the job of a chaperone. 

More than 600 years ago when chaperone first appeared as a word in English it in fact did mean a hat or hood.  It was the metaphor of the protective clothing that got the word applied to a person undertaking a protective role.

The podictionary word for today is Muslim:  Approximately three thousand years ago it is believed that a king named Solomon lived.  We now give him credit for being extremely wise and if you associate anything at all with the name Solomon it might be wisdom.  But the Hebrew version of the name is Shlomo and meaning of both names is “peace,” just as the Hebrew greeting shalom means “peace.” 

I have been reading a book called The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, and he explains that unlike in English, in languages like Hebrew and Arabic, it is the arrangement of consonants that holds meaning within a word, so that not only do the words shalom and Solomon mean peace, but other words with the S L M combination also have a historical meaning of peace to them.  Hence Islam and Muslim are both related words with their core S L M combinations. 

I look in the Oxford English Dictionary and I see that the etymology of both Islam and Muslim relate to a submission or a surrendering to God, that is to make peace with God.  It is no accident that the Hebrew word shalom sounds a little like the name of that place where they burned witches back in 1692, Salem. 

Salem, Massachusetts and all the other towns named Salem are named after Jerusalem, since it is thought it was called Salem before it was called Jerusalem.  Some, not all, scholars believe that Jerusalem breaks down to Uru-shalyme, meaning city of peace.  Unfortunately inaccurate in this day and age.  Here’s a wish for peace for all those suffering from it’s absence.

The podictionary word for today is Monty Python:  I see that based on public submissions an organization in Britain has named “the icons of England” and have included the Oxford English Dictionary on their list.  I took a look at the list and decided to look into the etymology of another icon of England, Monty Python. 

Now no dictionaries that I consulted had an entry for Monty Python itself, although the OED does have an entry for Monty Pythonesque, meaning reminiscent of Monty Python.  There doesn’t seem to be much material either on why this famous comedy series was named Monty Python’s Flying Circus, although it is revealed that in choosing the name, other candidates were rejected including:

• Owl Stretching Time
• The Toad Elevating Moment
• A Horse, A Spoon and a Basin

So lacking much in the way of etymological material for Monty Python itself, I looked instead at the constituent words.  Evidently a monty was at one time a guy at the racetrack who gave good tips on which horse would win, and also a horse that was a safe bet was a monty.  In these cases monty certainly comes from “mount.” 

The film The Full Monty springs to mind and surprise surprise the OED does actually have an entry for full monty meaning the “whole shebang.”  Evidently the expression full monty has been in slang usage in England for decades, although the earliest citation the OED can wring out is 1985.  Michael Quinion at World Wide Words feels sure he was hearing it back in the ’50s. 

Although the OED doesn’t use it as a citation they do go so far as to refer to earlier occurrences in telephone books of fish and chip shops named Full Monty Chippy.  Theories abound on why the full monty might mean “the whole nine yards”, but the one that the experts suspect to be the real deal is that a certain tailor named Montague Maurice Burton is being honoured for his complete men’s suits—which is kind of ironic since the movie that made the phrase famous, and in fact the use of the phrase in the movie, had to do with no clothing at all.  So much for monty, on to python. 

Evidently at the end of the Second World War it was also a code name among British soldiers for leave.  More familiar to us is the fact that a python is a snake.  The original python was a Greek snake of mythic proportions.  Evidently before the god Apollo owned the place called the oracle, that is, the place where the gods speak, this place was either guarded or owned by a monstrous snake. 

Apollo killed the snake and it was left to rot. The place and the snake both took their names from this decomposition since the Greek word for rot or rotten is pytho.

The podictionary word for today is omega: In the last few years there has been a general hubbub about something called omega-3 fatty acids. These are supposed to be a particular type of fat available to human diets through such sources as fish, and said to be especially good for us because they may help prevent everything from heart attack to cancer—although several medical journals aren’t so sure about this.

To make things even more confusing there is a less famous cousin called omega-6 fatty acid that can also be good for you but may compete for health benefits with the omega-3 stuff. In other words if you have a nice salmon and expect to get really healthy, eating whole grains, vegetable oils or eggs can neutralize all that fish oil. Since that is all so confusing I’ll turn to why these oils are named omega-3 and omega-6. It has to do with where a certain chemical bond takes place within each molecule, either three or six carbon-carbon bonds down the chain from the end of the molecule. And it is the end of the molecule that matters to us because that is why the word omega is used.

Omega has come to mean end. If you sit in some churches you might see embroidered into the vestments and tapestries, Greek letters. These are alpha and omega. Just like in English, alpha or A comes first. But in Greek, the last letter is omega so the symbolism in church is that the Lord is the beginning and the end. If you get a chance to look at the whole string of letters in the Greek alphabet you will notice that just there, after halfway down, there is a letter that looks mighty like an O. In fact it is an O, and there are two different Os in Greek, just as there are in spoken English though we don’t bother to write them down.

We have a long O as in Ohio and oval, and a short O as in olive or otter. In Greek the short O is called omicron and the long O is called omega. Since you know that micro means small and mega means big, you’ll believe me when I tell you that our word of the day omega literally means big O, while omicron means little O. It seems the Greeks figured out this distinction as early as 600 BC and for maybe 800 years when describing omega, they actually wrote it as two words O – mega.

The podictionary word for today is nincompoop:  Although Samuel Johnston is considered a giant among dictionary makers, he may not have been on the top of his game when it came to etymologies. Here’s what he says about nincompoop: A fool; a trifler.  He gives a citation from a guy named Addison, “An old ninnyhammer, a dotard, a nincompoop, is the best language she can afford me.”  And finally Johnston’s etymology: nincompoop A corruption of the Latin non compos meaning of unsound mind.  More modern lexicographers feel that nincompoop comes from two parts. 

The first “Nicodemus” was a proper name like Nicholas but one that had been used to mean “foolish” in France.  The second part, poop appears also to have meant foolish in Dutch and I had understood it also meant soft.  Upon trying to check this out it looks to me that it also means “poop” in Dutch.  Whatever the case, the fellow Addison cited by Dr. Johnston is also cited by the Oxford English Dictionary and it turns out that Addison was no nincompoop. 

He died when he was only 48 which makes me of similar years feel downright unproductive because during his lifetime Joseph Addison started multiple newspapers, served as a British member of parliament, acted as the government’s official poet commemorating the battle of Blenheim—a job he did so well they made him Commissioner of Appeals, whatever that was.  But what Addison appears to be best remembered for is his play Cato.  The story is about an incorruptible Roman politician who stands against Julius Caesar, but is generally seen as an exploration of personal liberty and government oppression. 

It is said that George Washington had the play performed for his men while they were camped in Valley Forge and that it inspired the fathers of the American Revolution and even informed some of the more famous quotations that still ring today.  Compare “Give me Liberty or give me death!” with the play’s line, it’s time to talk of “chains or conquest, liberty or death.”  And how about Nathan Hale’s “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” with the play’s “What a pity it is that we can die but once to serve our country.”

The podictionary word for today is scallywag:  Today the word scallywag has taken on an almost affectionate meaning.  A mother might call her misbehaving child a scallywag and a quick Google search reveals that the movie Pirates of the Caribbean has a high association with the word. 

It’s all those lovable pirates.  Scallywag was once a grave insult however.  After the American Civil war came the period known as reconstruction.  Two groups of people were hated during this time by many defeated Southerners; one group were Northerners who rolled into town trying to make a profit from the broken south, the other group were the Southerners who cooperated with them. 

That of course is a generalization; the real people ran the spectrum from fine upstanding to shyster.  Anyway the Northerners were labelled carpetbaggers and the cooperating southerners were tagged as scallywags. 

Even before the Civil War the word was in circulation, ironically it was mainly used by Northerners and the Oxford English Dictionary reports mainly by trade unionists meaning a good-for-nothing.  The etymology of this tasty word is reported as disappointingly unknown in all the best dictionaries, but a number of reputable word sleuths online offer up some credible alternatives.  One track is that scallywag was earlier applied to horses and cattle of small stature—their size being a cause for distain—the suspicion is that that animals like Shetland ponies coming from the northern Scottish isles brought along with them the name of one of the major towns there Scalloway that got transmuted into scallywag. 

An alternate theory is that it is distantly related to scholar which has a Latin root but would seem to be the polar opposite of a scallywag.  Again the source is Scottish and the thinking goes like this.  A farmer renting land belonging to a monetary sent his first born son to study for the church.  This young scholar was called a scoloc.  Later any farm worker started being called a scallag and this somehow morphed into scallywag, possibly in association with another similar sounding word meaning “vagabond.” 

The meaning keeps changing and I see on Urbandictionary that scallywag is a slang term for a loose woman, here with both the sense of distrust at her unfaithful ways, and affection for her willing favours.  The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary slang says scallywag is also a euphemism for “penis” and also the word has been shortened in northern England to scally and can mean either a bit of a trouble-maker, or alternately someone accepted as “one of the boys.”

The podictionary word for today is “shyster”:  As usual I took a look at a number of sources in trying to figure out the etymology of shyster.  Also as usual Urbandictionary.com appeared to be a mix of fact and fiction.

I’ll start with them though because more than one of their definitions gives the impression that these days a shyster means a person who will try and trick you and rip you off.  Most of the more official type dictionaries associate shyster with shady lawyers in particular.  The word does seem to have numerous connections to the law.  The American Heritage Dictionary has a fairly extensive discussion about the word starting out by saying that calling someone a shyster might be considered libelous.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for shyster is back in 1844 from a book called The Mysteries of the Tombs which was effectively a diary by a journalist who had been locked up in the Manhattan House of Detention for Men; unaffectionately known as “the tombs.”  This inmate was in the slammer for libel, although it wasn’t for using the word shyster.  A word sleuth I respect, Hugh Rawson, reports that there is an earlier citation for shyster than the one OED shows.  Rawson says that in 1843, also at New York’s Tombs prison, a different journalist was interviewing a lawyer who asked not be called a shyster. In reporting the meaning of this word to his readers, he edged away from specifics for fear of prosecution for libel and obscenity.

So certainly at its first appearance shyster was applicable to lawyers, but some of the sources I looked at, and even the OED citation, indicate that at it’s very earliest it didn’t always mean crooked lawyers, but sometimes just incompetent lawyers.  Now I hadn’t seen all of this material when I first checked Urbandictionary.com and so at first I discounted their entry that claims shyster derives from the German word for shit. But it seems that it’s true.  Or that it could be true.

Shyster is unusual in it’s etymology in that a fellow named Gerald L Cohen is credited for unearthing this word history and putting to bed such theories as it’s being related to the word shy or that it was an eponym backhandedly honoring some tricky lawyer of the past.  Gerald L Cohen was a professor at the University of Missouri, but his middle initial, L stands for Leonard, and there is a certain poet, singer songwriter named Leonard Cohen who has also had his brush with shysters.

A few years ago Cohen the singer went on retreat with a group of Buddhist monks—a very poetic thing to do—but upon his return to the world he found that his former manager had run off with all his savings, something like $5million.  That’s pretty shitty.

The podictionary word for today is hack:  For a moment forget about all the meanings that the word hack has and just listen to the sound of it.  That sure sounds like an Old English etymology to me.  For all the meanings that hack has today, most of the roots boil down to two different origins. One of them means chop, the other means a horse and neither of them actually come from Old English. 

The one that comes closest is the hacking you might do to a tree with an axe.  This root appears in some other Germanic languages and according to the American Heritage Dictionary has roots back into Indo-European, but showed up both as a noun and a verb only in Middle English, seemingly skipping both Old English and Old Norse.  It is this cutting sense that gives us our meanings of a hacking cough, a person who can’t hack the hard work—who can’t cut it. 

In the game of curling to throw the stone you brace your foot on the hack, so called because it was originally a little hole hacked out of the ice.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary as well as American Heritage, this chopping sense of hack is behind our understanding of a computer hack.  The first citation we have for computer hack is 1983 but the word hacker came first in 1976. 

So in case of computers the word hack is what lexicographers call a “back formation”, unlike say sell and seller or bake and baker where the person’s title grew out of their occupation.  Today we think of a computer hacker as someone with malicious intent.  Someone clattering away on their keyboard and prowling the innards of other people’s computers without permission.  But at first a hacker was someone who had developed a depth of programming skills simply by spending so much time cutting away at the problems that computer code represented. 

Someone who knew the software tricks to get good jobs done.  They were valued employees and developers, even if they didn’t know which way was up socially.  Now the website Etymonline appears to disagree with the OED and American Heritage in that it groups computer hackers in with writers and taxi cabs, on the other branch root of hack.  Etymonline and American Heritage do agree though on the etymology of this other hack and this time the OED is the outlier.

The OED says that a writer and a taxi are called hacks because originally there were a breed of practical, if not very showy horses called hackneys and these were the usual breed that you got if you needed to rent a horse.  The OED traces this etymology to French meaning “an ambling horse or mare, especially for ladies to ride on” and then loses track on any earlier origins.  Etymonline and American Heritage think that French got hackney from English in the first place because these horses were raised in a place, now inside London, also called Hackney, which was originally “hook’s island.”  These horses were commonly used for hired carriages also and so a hack can mean a “taxi cab” to us today.  These poor horses may have been too practical for their own good and it seems that hack took on a meaning of being worn out from overuse.  The combination of being for hire and using worn out ideas and phrases influenced the use of hack as a being descriptive of—at first—bad writers, and later, jokingly, all writers. 

Since hack meant available for hire even prostitutes were called hacks for a while.  Strikingly to fix something with a hack means just the opposite of a hack job.  I’m speculating here but I see that in 1955 in America we get the first citation for hacking something meaning to cope with it successfully.  Twenty years later the people who are able to successfully implement computer code fixes being called hackers.