The podictionary word for today is bless:  In England, around the time the first seeds were being sewn that would make England England, the folks who were called the Angles, having come from what is now Germany, were not Christians. 

They and their neighboring tribes from back on the continent, the Saxons, Frisians and Jutes held some religious beliefs that I am hard pressed to describe.  But they did bless each other in religious ceremonies.  The Angles and the Saxons are best remembered in that people with a British family background are sometimes called Anglo-Saxon, but the name of the Angles lives on far more prominently as the name of our language and the island from which it spread.  English used to be Anglish and England, Angland. 

The blessings they gave each other way back 1500 years ago were perhaps less benign than those we now give each other after a sneeze.  The word bless appears to have evolved from a word meaning “to consecrate by sprinkling with blood.”  There is a strong connection not only in the similar sounds of the words bless and blood, but also in the roots of bless.  There is even a similar Old English word blot that meant “blood sacrifice.”  So the origins of a blessing were quite grizzly.  But by the time the word shows up in English in old documents more than a thousand years ago, the inhabitants of the British isles have gone Christian and a blessing has taken on a much more gentle tone.  Lexicographers can specifically track the civilizing of blessing to its Christianization. 

In Latin bibles a word benedicere was used and benedicere itself is a word that started out in Latin “meaning speak well of,” or “praise” but had changed its own meaning in having been used in translating Hebrew scriptures into the Latin bible, taking on a meaning of going down on bended knee as if to praise God.  When it came time to translate the Latin into English the word bless was chosen to represent benedicere.  And so the gory, blood-soaked history of bless was transmogrified to a consecration not by blood, but by supplication and praise to God. 

There is also a tone of happiness to bless that is absent from the terror inspiring God of the old testament, which is who those old Hebrew texts would have been talking about.  And the thinking is here that the word bless is so similar to the word bliss that some of the joy of bliss must have rubbed off on bless.

The podictionary word for today is “pattern”: 
Wordsworth is such a great name for a poet or writer.  Good thing he got famous. But those who knew him in his day felt that although he started strong, he sold out as he got older and more successful.  Robert Browning even wrote a poem about it called The Lost Leader.  It starts out “Just for a handful of silver he left us” and goes on later

We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,
Made him our pattern to live and to die!

And there by Browning’s use of our word of the day pattern we get a clue to where pattern comes from.  You’ll recognize the definition of pattern as something that serves as a model.  A pattern might be needed for dress making.  So Browning was claiming that Wordsworth had once been a model for other poets.  He could have just as easily said Wordsworth was a patron for other poets. 

A patron is a father figure, someone to emulate.  And as it turns out the word pattern is a twist on the pronunciation of the word patron.  Patron comes to us from Latin and it’s a good thing a patron is a father figure, because in Latin patronus meant father.  Harry Potter and his fellow wizards summon a patronus to save the day and in J K Rowling’s stories the patronus is a sort of ghostly protective figure, who for Harry turns out to be—surprise surprise—the same one his father produced. 

I stumbled across these word connections while I was looking into why certain Victorian street people would be called patterers.  They kept up a patter of talk in trying to sell their wares and as it turns out there is a connection between pattern, patron and patter as well.  At first I thought there might be a connection in the repetition of the street vendor’s matra that was seen as a pattern, but the reason it was called patter had more to do with father figures than repetitive patterns. 

In Latin the Lord’s Prayer is called the paternoster.  The father figure of the Lord showing up here in the pater part of paternoster.  It was the similarity in the pattern of rhythmic speech of the street vendors to chanting churchgoers that lead to the street vendors gaining the name patterers.

The podictionary word for today is whet:  Of course you know the story of Pavlov and his dogs, how he found that he could condition them to think that food was coming by ringing a bell so that eventually he could just ring the bell and the dogs would start to salivate.  I guess something like that is what makes people think that to whet one’s appetite has something to do with your mouth watering.  But the word isn’t wet, it’s whet with an H. 

Whet is solidly Old English and its earliest appearances are all associated with the sharpening of weapons. One of those spinning stones that you sharpen an axe on is a whetstone and although such stones are sometimes bathed in water to keep the sparks from flying, it’s called a whetstone because it sharpens, not because it is wet.  As is the case with so many words people started to use the metaphor of the word’s meaning to apply to other things.  By six hundred years ago you could not only whet your knife, but also your wits—sharpen your wits, not dampen them. 

Then four hundred years ago people’s hunger was in for some sharpening as well when the first citation of whetting the appetite is recorded.  John J Audubon is a famed naturalist and he described the name of a particular kind of owl

“known in Massachusetts by the name of the ‘Saw-whet’, the sound of its love-notes bearing a great resemblance to the noise produced by filing the teeth of a large saw.”

The podictionary word for today is moniker:  The Merriam Webster Unabridged online dictionary tells me that the etymology of moniker is unknown.  But when I turn to the American Heritage Dictionary I’m told that moniker is probably from Shelta, which they go on to tell me is a sort of secret slang that street people in England used to use where words were developed by taking a Gaelic word and reversing its pronunciation. 

In this moniker would be related by various translations and reversals to our word name, which makes some sense.  But the website Etymonline, although it agrees with the street people part, links moniker to monk as might live in a monastery which has a somewhat different etymology than name.  It becomes clear that things are unclear when I look at the OED draft 2002 entry for moniker that says
Origin uncertain.

Various possible origins have been suggested, such as that the word arises from back-slang for EKE-NAME [that's where nickname came from]
or that it represents spec. use of MONARCH or MONOGRAM perhaps blended with SIGNATURE [both of these are more in line with the monk idea]

I’d think that the OED 2002 entry would be pretty up to date.  Although the OED doesn’t say so the idea that it came from the slang of London or English street people is supported with it’s first citation.  One of the guys who founded the humor magazine punch was a guy named Henry Mayhew and during the 1840s he took on a project to interview and write about the underclass in London.  Mayhew was born the same year as Charles Dickens, 1812, so Dickens would have been reading Mayhew’s non fiction accounts of these people as he was writing his fictional accounts. 

So you might think of these two guys as twin forces for social justice in Victorian England.  It was in one of Mayhew’s pieces that the word moniker first appears, and he is very specific in letting readers know that this is part of the slang of the people he is studying.  In this particular case he has subdivided the groups down to a class of people he calls patterers and I guess they were itinerant street vendors called patterers because they kept up a constant patter in trying to sell their wares. 

Mayhew’s articles from the newspaper the Morning Chronicle were later collected into a book called London Labor and the London Poor.  It still makes interesting reading and the full text is available on line.  But if you go looking for it remember to spell labor with a U, the British way.

The podictionary word for today is extol: These days the word extol has pretty well only one meaning. I might extol the virtues of exercise. The dictionaries pretty much agree that the meaning is “to give high praise” or to “praise enthusiastically.” But the word runs back to Latin extollere where tollere itself meant to lift up or to raise. The only quotation I could find that uses the word extol is from John Milton’s poem Paradise Lost.

On earth join all ye creatures to extol
Him first, him last, him midst, and without end.

So in his usage he is also raising up praise for God. And the first appearances in English of the word extol were also with its praising sense. But almost in parallel was a more literal meaning that seems to have died out, that of physically or metaphorically lifting up. In looking for related words I come up with the word toll as in “toll booth.” According to the American Heritage Dictionary both words ultimately go back to an Indo-European root tela.

Toll came to English via Greek where telos meant tax but the connection is not that taxes amount to a lifting or a taking away of your money from your pocket, but instead from the connection between lifting and weight, between weight, weighing and trade, and between trade and monetary exchange. As I said, our meaning today for extol is “to praise,” and plenty of people have praised John Milton, particularly for his Paradise Lost. But even people who extol Paradise Lost admit that it is a little heavy going.

The fact is that John Milton was a bit of a sour puss. I guess he had good reason to be. At 33 he married a girl half his age and there couldn’t have been a whole lot of domestic bliss because she went home to mother a month later and stayed three years. Milton proceeded to write about the merits of divorce. They got back together and stuck it out for seven years, but she then died in the service of childbearing. Their only son then died. Milton went blind. Milton married again.

Two years later his second wife died again in the service of reproduction. The daughter produced also died. He married a third time and this may have been a happier experience since this third wife outlived him, but it must have been a bummer of a time because at the time, the same time that he completed Paradise Lost—dictating it because he was blind—he had moved out of London to avoid the Great Plague that was killing as many as two out of every ten people.

The podictionary word for today is hunky dory:  If everything is hunky dory then everything is just fine thank you.  This is a phrase that certainly originated in America and appears to have become popular because it was part of a hit song. 

But farther back we find Dutch immigrants coming to New York in the early and middle half of the 1800s and bringing with them their children and the children bringing with them their children’s games.  Just as the Frisians were one of the peoples who appeared back in England about 1500 years ago along with the Angles to make the place first Anglish, then English, the Frisians were also ancestral dwellers in what is now Holland. 

One of their words was honck and it meant house or dwelling or safe refuge.  Trickling down over the centuries, just as kids now-a-days are glad to be home free, the little Dutch kids in New York were glad to get hunk.  To get home safe in their games.  So hunk came to mean “something good.” 

There are slightly disused sayings such as being in hunk with someone, meaning getting in good with them.  No one seems to know how things got from hunk to hunky dory but the story goes that there were a troop of entertainers known as Christie’s Minstrels who had a big hit with a song called Josiphus Orange Blossom.  This would have been in the day of big hits being sales of sheet music. 

There are plenty of websites that say these entertainers were the ones who popularized the term because it was in one of their songs, but I’m unable to find a copy of the full lyrics.  I did however find an academic paper that referred to both the Minstrels and the song and the particular line in the song.  Now what’s not hunky dory about this is that evidently at the time the reason the song was popular was that it was a funny song.  And the reason it was a funny song was that it was part of a funny song genre that drew its humour from the fact that blacks, now that they were no longer slaves, thought that they could move up in the world.  Ha ha.

So this particular black Josiphus Orange Blossom had such high expectations that he thought he was red-hot hunky-dory.  Ha ha ha.  No longer funny.

The podictionary word for today is squaw:  The American Heritage Dictionary has two definitions for the word squaw.  For both of these definitions the first word to appear is the word offensive.  The New American Oxford Dictionary has a usage note that runs as follows:

Until relatively recently, the word squaw, derived from an Algonquian language, was used neutrally in anthropological and other contexts to mean ‘an American Indian woman or wife.’ With changes in the political climate in the second half of the 20th century, however, the derogatory attitudes of the past toward American Indian women have meant that, in modern American English, the word cannot be used in any sense without being offensive.

So my objective today is to explore how we got here, from there.  The first citation for squaw in the Oxford English Dictionary is back in 1634.  The etymology shows that this was a word widely used by native Americans who’s language was part of the Algonquin family of languages to mean a “woman” or “wife.”  I’m thinking the meaning was closer to “woman” than it was to “wife” because there is a 1716 citation for a squaw sachem which translates as a tribal chief who is female. 

By the early 1800s the word was being used as an insult, but it appears to have been more sexually based than racially based, along the lines that California governor Arnold Schwartzenegger uses when he says people are “girly-men.”  The most recent citation for squaw in the OED is dated 1975 so this isn’t one of the entries that has lain dormant for more than 100 years, and yet dispite what the American Heritage Dictionary and the New American Oxford Dictionary have to say about squaw being offensive, there is no hit of that in the OED; so I can only conclude that when the New American Oxford says “until relatively recently” they mean less than 30 years.  Urbandictionary.com confirms my impression that squaw is these days an insulting term for males or females and not sexually insulting but racially insulting. And that’s about where the trail ends. 

I can’t see any more clear traces of how we got here from there.  But the point of an offensive term is that it offends.  So if people perceive squaw to be offensive, then it is offensive, even if we don’t know why it should be.  A quick note to end on; I found it interesting that there is a 1901 citation for “squaw winter” which is described as a cold spell after summer and preceding a period of Indian summer.

The podictionary word for today is rhyme:  I always have a tough time spelling rhyme.  It’s R-H-Y-M-E.  Why are the H and the Y in there?  It must be some ancient Greek thing.  Actually not.  R-H-Y-M-E turned up just a few years before that old poet William Shakespeare pushed on to the next world.  For more than 400 years before that it was spelled R-I-M-E. 

The reason people changed it is because they thought that rhyme was so naturally associated with rhythm that it should have the same kind of spelling.  And rhythm does take it’s spelling based on its Latin and Greek lineage.  Now, it’s likely they were right, that rhyme does trace its lineage too back to these roots, but we can’t see that in English historical documents.  I only regret that old Noah Webster didn’t toss R-H-Y-M-E in with all those other words that he standardized into what he thought to be more logical American spellings. 

He even saw his spellings as something somehow more republican in rejecting the old aristocratic rules of the British oppressor.  But everyone continues to spell rhyme R-H-Y-M-E so I’d better too. 

The American Heritage Dictionary points to an Indo-European root of ar for rhyme, with a meaning of fitting together.  So a rhyme fits together words and the same word root is traced to arm since our arm fits together or comes together with our shoulder.  In another musical allusion this seems to be a root also for harmony.

The podictionary word for today is round:  Another common word that has been round for a long time.  Round came into English from French, but when it came into French from Latin it had been rotund, not the current French rond or our English round.  The change from rotund to rond is due to something that Katherine Barber, the Editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, calls the French squishing syndrome by which she means that many words that came from Latin were compressed and made more convenient to pronounce during their time in France, before they came across the channel and became English words. 

This squishing syndrome is certainly not restricted to the French.  For example the podictionary episode on goodbye explained how it used to be god-be-with-you.  Anyway we still recognize the word rotund and usually apply it to someone who is excessively fat.  One would suppose because they are more round-shaped than most of us.  I said the word has been round a long time and I see pointers here back to Indo-European to a root ret which meant “to run” or “to roll.” 

Here’s a funny thing; if you do some calculation you might round up or round down the answer so you aren’t stuck with a fraction to work with.  But the dictionary definition of a round number isn’t a “whole number,” it is a number rounded to the nearest convenient order of magnitude. That could be tens or hundreds, or for government budgets hundreds of billions. 

In sports sometimes a completion is called a “round robin” when all the participants get a fair shot at playing everyone else.  The origin of “round robin” isn’t from sport however; it’s from a kind of protest movement tradition.  The Oxford English Dictionary says that “round robin” is thought to have been used aboard ship.  The idea is that the crew thinks the captain is doing a bad job, but no one wants to tell him so.  Remember these were the days when perceived insubordination allowed the captain to have a crewman killed. 

So everyone who felt the captain should change his ways would sign a paper in a circular manner so that on the one hand there was no way to tell who started the petition, and hopefully there would be enough signatories that the captain couldn’t retaliate without losing so many men, he couldn’t sail the ship. 

Other sources than the OED indicate that before the phrase was “round robin” it was from French and was rond ruban meaning round ribbon or tape. I imagine a sort of mobius loop so that there is no beginning or end. 

The podictionary word for today is urine:  In the episode on hysterical I said that I’d have to find a word that showed that old Greek physician Hippocrates in a better light.  Well this is it.  The etymology of the word urine traces back to 1325 or so in English which shows perfect timing for it to be one of those Middle English words that we got as a result of the Norman Conquest of 1066. 

Before it was a French word it was of course a Latin word and through all these linguistic flip flops it has always meant the same thing.  The Oxford English Dictionary makes vague hand motions in the direction of Greek before the Latin word as well as connecting the word urine with the word water. 

So when I went to look at the American Heritage Dictionary it pointed me back to an Indo-European root wer which appears to be a great-great-great grandparent of both our words urine and water.  It also lists milk as one of the descendants and as I found out when I did the episode on vodka, that beverage too dribbles back to the same root.  Now you might want to take a drink before going to the doctor if you expect to have to give a urine sample. 

The practice of inspecting urine as a means of gauging people’s health goes back six thousand years if Sumerian and Babylonian clay tablets are to be believed.  In fact that first 1325 English instance of the word urine was made in the context of its inspection for medical purposes.  But by that time the hucksters were out and people called urine-mongers, urine-casters and urine-prophets were making a living doing shoddy diagnoses based on urine samples without ever having met the patient.  The 1325 citation pokes fun at this bad doctoring. 

Later, one Thomas Linacre—the founder of the College of Physicians of London, said that it would be just as effective to bring a patient’s shoe instead.  Laws were passed with stiff penalties for charlatans who tried to pass these techniques off as medicine.  The reason for passing laws was probably less for purposes of public safety than because physicians have always formed part of the upper crust of society and their reputations were being hurt. 

By Shakespeare’s time pisspot was a derogatory term for a doctor, like we would use quack now.  Of course there is a lot that can be told about a patient’s health from the urine, but in those days with their unsophisticated knowledge of chemistry and body function—for instance it hadn’t yet been figured out that blood re-circulated in the body—it would be pretty hit-and-miss to try to diagnose anything beyond the health of the bladder and kidneys.  And that’s what old Hippocrates advised.