The podictionary word for today is mascara:  Urbandictionary tells me that mascara is
an item of makeup that people (usually women) wear to make their eyelashes look longer, thicker, darker or curlier. And that it can’t be put on with your mouth closed.
I see from the website of Maybelline UK that in 1913 Maybelline’s founder, a guy named T. L. Williams invented a mascara for his sister who had set her cap for a man named Chet who was inconveniently in love with another woman.  I can’t find out much about the mysterious T. L. Williams except that he is called a chemist. 

His original recipe for mascara consisted of mixing petroleum jelly with coal dust.  Since petroleum jelly was called Vaseline and his sister was called Mabel, the resulting goo was called mabelline. Based only on this minimal information I would have categorized T. L. Williams as a marketeer instead of a chemist. 

The website does not reveal if Mabel actually caught Chet, it does claim that this product was the first mascara.  I beg to differ.  This is supposed to have taken place in 1913, but the Oxford English Dictionary tells me that our English word mascara appeared first in 1886 and was apparently used not only for lady’s eyelashes and eyebrows, but for men’s mustaches as well.  All of the sources I checked out agree that the word mascara comes from Spanish or Italian meaning “mask.”  Well, almost all. 

The Oxford English Dictionary, that king of dictionaries, has in fact been updated for the word mascara as recently as December 2000 and it says mascara probably came from this meaning of the Spanish or Italian word, or from a Catalan or Portuguese word meaning “soot.”  I like this etymology better for two reasons.  One is that masks are usually used to hide or disguise someone but mascara has always been used to make people more attention catching.  More importantly, I look back at the history of mascara and before old T. L Williams and his coal dust, mascara appears to have very often involved a lot of burnt offerings from various leavings after the flames. 

Most specifically, in the decades leading up to the appearance of the word in English the most popular means of coloring one’s eyelashes appears to have been to hold something noncombustible over a lamp flame and collect the soot that it gave off, then smear that carefully onto your fluttering lashes.  Imagine the mess that made when a few tears shed.

This is Charles Hodgson with podictionary, the podcast for word lovers.
The podictionary word for today is jet:  It was in the 1930s that the idea of a jet engine that could be used on aircraft was finally put into practice.  It was 1944 when the word jet was first used to describe an aircraft powered by these things.  The idea of how such an engine might work had been around for millennia.

A NASA website credits an ancient Egyptian of 150 BC with coming up with the idea of a turbine engine.  How it works is that air gets sucked in at the front end and compressed down into a central chamber where fuel is sprayed into the passing breeze and set alight.  The resulting explosion is a controlled one but it has the effect of considerably increasing the pressure of the gasses inside the engine at this point.  Aside from extracting a little energy to use for sucking in more new air, the rest of the jet engine is dedicated to skillfully directing the flow of exhaust and expanding it so that when it emerges at the back end it is very close to the atmospheric pressure of the air around it.

Here the energy that once manifested itself as pressure now manifests itself as speed so that exhaust shoots out of the back of a jet engine like a bat out of hell.  A jet engine is literally throwing its exhaust out the back end as fast as it can.  As Isaac Newton said “for every action there is an equal and opposite re-action” so that if a jet engine throws enough exhaust out its back end, and throws it fast enough, it tends to move forward.  And it is due to this throwing action that the jet takes its name.  The French word for “throw” is jeter. 

The podictionary word for today is metal:  In the days of the ancient Greeks there was a need for materials from which to make swords and helmets and things.  To obtain this material it was necessary to dig a hole in the ground.  In the ancient Greek language of the day, this hole in the ground was called metallon, and by extension, so was the stuff they dug out of it and heat treated into useful tools and weapons. 

This Greek word was adopted by the Romans as metallum and later came to English through French.  By the time it got into English the word metal had pretty much dropped it’s meaning of the place where the stuff came from and was applied only to the stuff itself.  That was first back in 1230 in our old friend the Ancrene Rule.  In the passage where it appears, this old instruction manual for medieval nuns is recommending steering clear of other people who can lead you into sin.  The passage draws an analogy by saying that

“Neither gold nor silver nor iron nor steel is ever so bright that it won’t draw a rusty stain from a thing that is rusty if it lies long beside it.”

I’m reading this from a modern transcription of the Ancrene Rule and it’s clear that the guy who re-wrote it from Middle English wasn’t exactly sure what the original writers meant by the word metal.  What I just read doesn’t even use the word metal, but there in the original metal is tossed in the cutlery drawer along with the gold, silver, iron and steel, as if it were a fifth kind of substance that would get rusty. 

Over the following centuries the word extended beyond minerals to mean generally what something was made of, and particularly what a person was made of in terms of their character.  Hence the word mettle spelled M E T T L E appeared as a variant spelling about 500 years ago, intended to notify readers that we were talking about personal attributes, not cutlery.

I had always wondered, particularly around times when the Olympics were on, whether the word medal M E D A L was related to the word metal M E T A L.  Evidently I wasn’t alone.  Older etymology sources do link the two.  After all, aren’t medals made of metal?  But more recent and more authoritative etymology sources turn instead to an old meaning of medal as a coin of specific value.  This value was half a denarius.  A denarius was a Roman silver coin but the operative part of this relationship is that the medal was half the value of the denarius.  Since when you divide something in half you have a dividing line down the middle, in was the “middle” meaning the Latin word medius that gave medal its name.  So medal is unrelated to metal.

Since I brought up that Roman coin the denarius I think it’s worth telling you that its name harkens back to the days before trade was conducted entirely in cash.  The value of a denarius was such that with it you should have been able to purchase ten donkeys; hence denarius means literally “ten asses.”

The podictionary word for today is genial: I did a search on the Washington Post’s website on the word genial to see what would come up. Evidently Richard Causey, who was an Enron accountant and just got sent to prison for five and a half years, is a genial guy. By this I take it that he was a pretty nice guy, even if he turns out to have been a bit crooked.

This meaning concurs with the meaning I see in the New American Oxford Dictionary which defines genial as “friendly and cheerful.” But the first citation we have for the word genial in the Oxford English Dictionary relates to something that was anything but “friendly and cheerful.” In that first citation the meaning of genial isn’t “friendly and cheerful,” but instead, something having to do with marriage. So that a genial bed was the marriage bed. The Latin root of genial actually goes back to the same root as that for genius, but I’ll deal with geniuses another day.

At the base of both words is an Indo-European root gen meaning to give birth. Hence the connection with marriage. That first citation was back in 1566, a year when Shakespeare was about three years old or so. Within a few generations we have a new meaning appearing, meaning festive. Now I’m only guessing, but I’m thinking that a word used in association with a happy event like a wedding might easily take on a festive meaning. Shortly after that we have citations with a new meaning, likely more closely related to the original Latin or Indo-European, genial meaning good for growing, as vegetables might find it genial in a sunny garden with good dark soil.

This good-for-growing meaning morphed to mean nice weather. And by about 250 years ago, the meaning we recognize today emerged. Who wouldn’t feel genial while attending a wedding feast on a lovely spring day? But as I said up front, the very first citation wasn’t so friendly and cheerful. The book is an English retelling of a tale first told by the Roman Seneca who was born just about coincident with Jesus Christ. The story was of the Empress Octavia and her marriage to the Roman Emperor Nero. It was reference to that marriage that prompted genial to appear in the English document, and specifically it was Octavia’s face in that marriage that was covered in tears.

Y’see Nero was the type of leader who didn’t shy away from a little murder or poisoning if it meant he stayed in control. He had agreed to marry Octavia because she was the boss’s daughter—that boss being the previous Roman Emperor Claudius. But as the years went by, he just didn’t seem to love her and so they had domestic spats including attempted uxoricide through strangling (that’s killing your wife through strangling). Nero did fall in love with a few other gals and so divorced Octavia—which I suppose is better than being poisoned—but when she was exiled she had the bad judgment to complain about her treatment so her servants were tortured to give her the hit to shut up.

The damage was done however and people took to the streets complaining that she was a great old gal and shouldn’t be treated so shabbily. Nero couldn’t put up with it so Octavia was tied up and had her wrists slit. As I said. Not very genial at all.

The podictionary word for today is pioneer:  I took a look at Urbandictionary.com and as well as noting that pioneer is a brand of electronics, there is a definition there that carries what I think is an accurate sense of the meaning of pioneer missing from a number of mainstream dictionaries.  I quote:

“Anything that is from an earlier era and looked upon with high regard or respect. Can be used to refer to music, clothing, language, or anything really.”

And just to back that up, The New Oxford American Dictionary gives as an example “a famous pioneer of birth control.”  So we have a sense of healthy respect for those pioneers who have gone before us and who’ve done the hard work that makes it easier for us today. 

Americans are proud of their pioneering spirit and think not only of modern breakthroughs in medicine or technology, but of covered wagons toughing it out in the days before pizza delivery.  But the origins of the word pioneer are not so proud; not so lofty.  The word pioneer came into English from French at the beginning of the 1500s with a meaning of “a lowly laborer who digs ditches.”  Mixed in with this meaning and paralleling it was a meaning of a foot soldier who goes ahead to prepare the way for the coming army, presumably work that involved digging ditches. 

It turns out that the word pioneer is related to the word pawn, that most lowly chess piece, or as defined in the OED “A person or thing of little value, status, power, etc.”  The reason pioneers and pawns were people of lowly status is because they were unhorsed and destined to walk.  At the root of these words is the Indo-European word for foot, ped.  Thus the progress of the word was that the underclass walked into battle and got the crappy assignments, which included going out first into potentially enemy territory. 

This meaning of going out first hung on when the meaning of pioneer changed right at the time of Shakespeare to include those breaking new ground in honorable professions that could be looked back on with pride.

The podictionary word for today is bombast:  To be bombastic is to speak or write in a high flown, overdone and especially pompous tone.  But the origin of the word comes down to us from the most modest of sources; a worm.  Specifically a silk worm.  The ancient Greek word for a silk worm was bombux which was absorbed into Latin as bombyx and survives today as the scientific name of silkworms and silkworm moths Bombyx mori. 

But like certain words in English that are shared between related things—for example a letter is a thing you write, and the symbol you use to do the writing—bombux and bombyx came to mean not only silk worms but silk itself.  They didn’t appear in English as words meaning silk, but instead, when some newfangled substance started to be imported into England some time in the decades before Shakespeare, it came with the appellation, from French, of bombace—with the explanation that this was silk of the trees.  In fact it was cotton, a word that had been in English already for a few hundred years. 

But thus the meaning of the word shifted upon entering English from silk to cotton, and in particular a type of raw cotton especially useful for padding.  So when it came time to invent a metaphor for someone who was puffing up their rhetoric unnecessarily, padding it, bombast nicely filled the gap.  The other day I mentioned a founding figure in modern medicine, Paracelsus.  His actual name was Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. 

Because he was such an antisocial arrogant guy there are etymological theories floating around out there that it was one of his names that gave bombast its English meaning.  But in fact the Oxford English Dictionary goes to the trouble of pointing out that this is false.  I’m left guessing that perhaps some of his forebears were in the silk trade or something.  As an aside I was tickled to learn that another word with a similar meaning to bombast, fustian also has a previous life as a kind of cotton fabric.  I only came across it because the word bombast is the word so frequently used to define what fustian now means.

The podictionary word for today is poker: In 1911 Ambrose Bierce said in his Devil’s Dictionary Poker: A game said to be played with cards for some purpose to this lexicographer unknown. I’m sure he was joshing, but I guess it expresses his distain for such game playing. Although a number of sources give a number of etymologies for the name of the game poker—including the non-answer “origin unknown”—I’m pleased to see that the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry that has been updated to 2005 for the word poker, so I think we can trust this one.

The OED says that poker probably developed from a French name of a card game poque that in turn was named after the French verb poquer that meant to place a bet. That French poquer would have been spelled P O Q U E R so this may have resulted in the English pronunciation of poker. The French word in turn may have had a German ancestor but before I go there I’ll also tell you that the definition for poker that the OED gives starts out “a card game related to brag..” Now if I follow the thread back to the entry for brag, I see there among the definitions you might expect to see, like someone who boasts, definition number six that reads:
A game at cards, essentially identical with the modern game of ‘poker’. The name is taken from the ‘brag’ or challenge given by one of the players to the rest to turn up cards equal in value to his.

This is dated 1734 for a first citation, while the French poquer comes almost 20 years later. The likely German forebear of the French word had a meaning of boast or brag—what a coincidence—and the bragging must have come with some physical bravado as well because the literal translation of the German word means “to knock” or “to rap” as you’d do to the table in challenging your opponents.

I look to a number of histories of poker and they all appear to point to the French ownership of Louisiana as the reason poker took root in New Orleans and from there spread up the Mississippi. The first citation for poker is in 1836 but apparently the game was first described as being played in New Orleans two years before that but was instead called “the cheating game”; clearly a reference to the bluffing that is involved and that would have tended to be associated with bragging as well.

The podictionary word for today is salamander:  In his play Henry IV, Shakespeare has Falstaff call Bardolph’s face a salamander.  Why would he do that?  A salamander is a kind of slimy lizard and I checked to see that my memory serves me correctly—it does—one notable fact about salamanders is that they can disconnect their tails from their bodies in order to run away, and grow a new tail. 

There has been a mythology about salamanders that goes back to the ancient Greeks and it is from the ancient Greeks that we get the word salamander too.  That myth is that salamanders can walk through fire or even like to live in fire.  Because of this myth there is a heraldic device that involves a salamander surrounded by flames, King Francis I of France made it his own. 

His motto was nutrisco et extinguo which was Latin and supposed to evoke “I nourish the good and extinguish the bad.”  Francis died less than two decades before Shakespeare was born and the reason he chose a salamander in flames along with this motto was that salamanders were thought not only to be able to live among the flames, but to be able to cool them with their bodies as well. 

All of this mythology is supposed to have arisen because in fact salamanders usually would prefer a damp and soggy place to hang out than in glowing coals, and as I said before, they are themselves kind of slimy creatures.  The theory is that in ages past people would heap a little wood on the fire to chase away the cold winter chill. As they sat warming their toes and staring into the flames, there would appear a little salamander running out of the hearth.  The reason the salamander was running was that he was running for his life.  He’d been asleep in his nice damp log when suddenly someone had set fire to it. 

To protect himself he had exuded mucous through his skin and legged it out of there.  But the ancients, not equipped with flashlights to find the sorry little guy in the dark, assumed the salamander liked the flames, since that was the place he was seen most often.  So salamanders became associated also with fires and things glowing bright red, which is what was the condition Bardolph’s face was after a bout of drinking when Falstaff called his face a salamander.

The podictionary word for today is arcade:  There’s a band that’s quite popular these days called Arcade Fire.  Supposedly there isn’t much meaning to the name of the band except that one of the founders had heard a story about a fire in an arcade and it stuck with him. 

By this you’ll understand me to mean arcade to mean a place where people go, or went, to play on arcade games.  Most recently these would have been video games, but as Nintendo and Xbox filled that need I’d guess even these are closing up their doors.  Before electronics invaded the arcade these places were sometimes known as pinball arcades; the first citation for this name being in 1951 in the Newport Daily News—although the word pinball itself, referring to a game using a marble and a sloping board, appeared in 1911 in a toy catalogue. 

But before arcades were associated with pinball or video games the machines that people played on operated by the insertion of a penny and so these halls of dubious entertainment were known as penny arcades; first mentioned in 1903 in the Indiana County Gazette.  But none of that tells you why an arcade is called an arcade.  The word itself came from French but appeared back in 1644 in the diary of a guy named John Evelyn.  In French the word had literally meant “an arch” or “half a circle” but both in French and Italian the parent word from Latin had come to be applied to a kind of shopping street or an avenue under a series of arches. 

I’m only guessing but I’ll assume it was the long narrow nature of the older arcades, with their various openings for shops, or arched entrances that suggested the word arcade for the kind of long narrow storefront so often the home of video arcades.  This first arcade that appeared in English almost four centuries ago was not a shopping mall but an avenue of valuable sculptures and it was observed by John Evelyn and jotted down in his diary during a tour of Italy when he was 24 years old.  Although it was common for young men of means to do a European tour in those days, in this case there was more to John’s trip than personal enlightenment.  At first blush it might seem that he was an early draft dodger. 

He had joined the Royalist Army at the beginning of the British Civil War and soon thereafter began his extended trip on the Continent, not returning until after the war was over.  It might seem that running away from a war instead of getting killed in that war is choosing the lesser of two evils, but in John’s case his choice was between running away and a different greater evil, at least as he saw it.  He owned estates in England that were in the territory of the Parliamentarians, those fighting against the king. 

So he figured if he was openly seen as supporting the king, not only would he lose his estates, but the funds that they generated would go into the enemy’s war chest.  So, better to flee the country and wait out the war admiring expensive statuary.

The podictionary word for today is gnome:  In 2004 a travel ad campaign was launched using a garden gnome who appeared on skis, in a hot tub.  A similar plot device was used in the movie Amelie where Amelie steals her dad’s garden gnome and sends it off to exotic locations, from where a friend mails back pictures of the gnome enjoying itself. 

This little trick seems to have been around for decades and the earliest evidence I came across is from the 1980s when an Australian gnome went missing for two weeks, sent home a postcard and reappeared on his lawn with a shoe polish suntan.  Most of these stunts involve air travel, but the etymology of the word gnome is far more terrestrial.  Gnome appeared in English from the pen of Alexander Pope about 100 years after Shakespeare, but the word had appeared almost 200 years before that in German out of the mind of a guy known to us as Paracelsus.  

He reached back into Latin and Greek and it seems that the root word for gnome means “earth-dwelling.”  Old Paracelsus goes further in postulating that gnomes are beings that inhabit the ground

“through which they move unobstructed as fish do through water, or birds and land animals through air.”

Now you might guess that with this kind of thinking Paracelsus must have been some kind of mystic or folktale spinner.  But in fact he is one of the fathers of modern medicine.  He seems to have been a real jerk that couldn’t get along with anyone so that if he achieved some advancement or fame, he just as quickly lost it. 

For example he got a lecturing gig at the University of Basel but then enraged the establishment by expressing his disgust with current medical theory by tossing their great medical texts on a public bonfire.  And so he died young and if not in obscurity, certainly not respected.  But in the decades after his death doctors began reading his stuff and then actively seeking out manuscripts that he’s left scattered across Europe —he was one of the first to reject the idea that people’s health depended on a balance of humors in their bodies. 

It’s now felt that it was because of Paracelsus that people began applying chemistry to medicine.  So we have to forgive him for believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden and remember that in those days, everybody believed that stuff.