The podictionary word for today is gall:  It takes a lot of gall to submit an invoice to your lawyer for the time you sat in his waiting room.  The meaning of this sense of the word gall is boldness or effrontery.  The sense comes from the bitterness involved in such bold moves since the gall bladder contains a bitter yellow fluid.

The fluid is named gall because it is yellow and the root of its name goes back to Indo-European and was also the source of the name for that yellow metal we all covet so much, gold.  But funnily enough there are two other types of gall.  If something galls you, it means it gives you pain.  In this case the word gall evolves from an Old English word for the places on a horse where a saddle or harness has rubbed the skin raw.  A swollen knob on a tree is also called a gall and this is from Old French. 

There is some suspicion that the swollen knob gall and the open sore gall might have the same roots, but maybe not.  Gall the bitter yellow fluid is also known as bile and it is important in our digestive system.  It would have been important to treat the galls on your horses if you expected to get much work out of them.  But what kind of importance could the galls of trees have?  In fact, for the purposes of English etymology tree galls had a fair amount of importance, particularly the galls of oak trees.  What would happen you see is that a little wasp would come along and drill a hole into the bark of an oak tree and plant her eggs in there for safekeeping. 

The tree did not like this, not one little bit.  And so the tree grew a knob around the wasp eggs to protect itself.  But when the monks and scholars of 1000 years ago saw one of these oak galls, they knew that inside was a little store of acid produced by the tree.  They happily crushed the oak gall and used water or vinegar to draw out the acid, then added gums to make the mixture a little less runny, and then added their favorite mixture of rust and soot and other things to give the liquid whatever color they wanted.  The result was something they called encaustum in Latin, we’d call it ink, but the word ink didn’t come into use until Middle English. 

It was the acid from the oak gall that gave the ink the power to etch its way into the surface of the velum on which they wanted to write.  The velum was made from animal skins, mostly sheep and it’s because these ancient scribes took the time to use such high quality methods and materials that we can still read today what they wrote way back then.  If they had used paper it would have crumbled to dust or blacked with oxidization long before now.  Encasutum is related to caustic and both words go back to a Greek for burn.  So even though these different types of gall seem to come from different etymological sources, they all have a sting to them.

The podictionary word for today is renovate:  I have been through more than one renovation project but the one I just wrapped up was the most frustrating.  It dragged on and on.  But to keep our houses from falling down we have to keep fixing them up.  Actually more effort seems to go into making them better than they were before, rather than just keeping them in good repair. 

I see from the National Association of Home Builders that we are spending more than 200 billion dollars a year on renovations in North America—although they call it remodeling, not renovation.  I can believe 200 billion because I feel like I made a significant contribution to that total.  The New Oxford American Dictionary tells me that remodeling is improving on the design of your house, while renovation is restoring it to a good state of repair, so I guess that’s why the NAHB likes the word remodel, it means more work for them.  The etymology of renovation isn’t that interesting, it comes from Latin and means literally “to make new again.”  But the fellow who gave us the first citation is interesting. 

His name was John Leland and he was talking about an old abbey.  John Leland had a job working for another guy who’s name you might have heard, King Henry VIII.  John was the official librarian and King Henry assigned him the task of poking into all the libraries in England to see what ancient books and documents lay there.  Many of these documentary storehouses were contained in churches and we have John Leland to thank for our knowledge of some of the material because even as he toured around England making his notes, Henry VIII had his run in with the pope and all the churches in England suddenly went from being Catholic to being protestant, with an accompanying mix of property swaps and documentary guffufles. 

But John Leland was more than a librarian and as he toodled around England he wanted to check out all the places he was reading about in all those old documents and he kept pretty extensive notes.  So much so that six years into his perambulations he wrote a letter to the King saying he wanted to write a whole pile of books about his findings.  Included were

• a four volume encyclopedia of English writers up to that time;
• an extensive topographically oriented description of England so that accurate maps could be made;
• a six volume description of the islands and countries surrounding England;
• fifty books, one for each sire in England and Wales, describing their local history
• a three volume set of the genealogical relationships of English nobles
The amount of information boggles the mind doesn’t it.  It certainly boggled poor John’s mind because within a year of promising all this to the king John went insane.  But his notes survived and years later were published in many volumes collectively known as his Itinerary.

The podictionary word for today is riddle: In 1975 a guy named Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. He had been a controversial leader of the Teamster’s Union. I mention this only because his middle name was Riddle, which I found a little ironic given the mystery surrounding his disappearance. Another person named Riddle is the mythical character Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter series. He was the school aged Lord Voldemort, yet to become the ultimate evil force propelling the book series.

The reason I bring him up is that his name Riddle relates well to the etymology of the word and how he was introduced into the Harry Potter series. The word riddle is from Old English and we can trace it back at least 1000 years. Its meaning has remained pretty consistent throughout that whole time. It meant, and means—and here I quote the Oxford English Dictionary:
A question or statement intentionally worded in a dark or puzzling manner, and propounded in order that it may be guessed.

So the darkness implied there certainly applies to Voldemort, but by the mid 1600s a person could be referred to as a riddle if they were hard to predict or figure out. I’d guess that applies to Voldemort as well. But what really made me sit up and take notice was the fact that lexicographers associate the word riddle, somewhere in it’s deeper Germanic or Indo-European past, with the word read, as in “read a book.” In the Harry Potter story Ginny Weasely gets drawn into the dark side of magic through her reading of Tom Riddle’s diary. I talked about the word read yesterday and riddle’s roots go back to the same meaning of trying to fit something together. In the Old English riddle’s parent word also held a meaning of “counsel,” “opinion,” or “conjecture.” Those early Englishmen seemed to have loved riddles.

I say English men advisedly since a number of the ancient documents contain riddles that are certainly more along the lines of the jokes told in an all male environment. Here are a couple that are more than 1000 years old:

A curiosity hangs by the thigh of a man, under its master’s cloak. It is pierced through in the front; it is stiff and hard and it has a good standing-place. When the man pulls up his own robe above his knee, he means to poke with the head of his hanging thing that familiar hole of matching length which he has often filled before.

Now, you can get your mind out of the gutter, because what they’re talking about is a key. Here’s another:

I am a wondrous creature: to women a thing of joyful expectation, to close-lying companions serviceable. I harm no city-dweller excepting my slayer alone. My stem is erect and tall–I stand up in bed–and whiskery somewhere down below. Sometimes a countryman’s quite comely daughter will venture, bumptious girl, to get a grip on me. She assaults my red self and seizes my head and clenches me in a cramped place.

She will soon feel the effect of her encounter with me, this curl-locked woman who squeezes me. Her eye will be wet. “Again, you might be fantasizing there, but what you’re fantasizing about is in fact an onion. So the point about the word riddle is that its ancient meaning is not the confusing nature of a riddle, but the figuring out, the solution.”

The podictionary word for today is read: I love to read. I have so many books in my house I have to regularly ship them out of here by the carload. I am seriously thinking of getting one of those electronic books. The funny thing about the word read is that most of the first people to start using it, probably were illiterate.

We can trace the word read back about 1100 years in English and back then its primary meaning wasn’t to interpret writing on a page specifically. We can trace it back even further into its Teutonic parent language where the meaning was a little different still. The point is, that the reason we now say that we read a page or read a book is that people chose a word they already had and used it as a metaphor to describe what was happening when they saw marks on a page and had to transmogrify their meaning into ideas in their heads. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the original senses of the Teutonic verb are those of taking or giving counsel, taking care or charge of a thing, having or exercising control over something
When the word read first shows up in Old English texts around the year 900 its primary meanings are:

to consider, interpret or discern; to have an idea, to think or suppose; or to guess or conjecture and also to declare or expound this to another.

The American Heritage Dictionary points back to an Indo-European root that means “to fit together.” Still, throughout its existence in English, the word read has also meant what we do when we have our noses in a book. We still use the word in one of its old meanings if we say something like “Joe decided not to buy a new car; read he can’t afford it.” Or “my read on the citation is this.” In both cases you could just as easily insert the word understand. From this the word also has a meaning of study. That’s why spring break goes alternately by the name reading week and why students are sometimes said to be reading such and such a topic at university.

Just about 1000 years ago England had a king who we know today as Ethelred the Unready. He wasn’t called “the unready” because he became king at about 10 years old, nor was he called “the unready” because he couldn’t defend England against the Danes and had to flee to Normandy. He was called “the unready” because of the old meaning of read in its sense of “advice” or “council.”

He had bad advisors and when the Danes, who controlled much of the north of England kept raiding and demanding tribute, he ordered all the Danish people living in England to be slaughtered. This is what resulted in him having to flee the country later on. There is extra poignancy in his name the unready, since his name Ethelred means “nobly advised.”

The podictionary word for today is snow:  I’ve actually done an episode on snow before, back in January, but since its Christmas day I thought I’d do another, a little different.  When Bing Crosby sings “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” you know he’s talking about snow.  When the song was first written it had an extra verse. 

It started out describing a Californian who missed his memories of the snow up north.  Since Christmas trees came to us through a German tradition it is fitting also that our English word snow comes from Old English that would have been a Germanic language used by the Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes back around 1500 years ago when they crossed the English channel.  It’s no surprise that there are similar words in the Nordic languages, but in fact the dictionaries trace this word’s roots to similar words in Gaelic languages as well as Latin, Greek and back into Indo European.  In English it is certainly one of the older words you’ll come across. 

It has citations back almost 1200 years.  Bing Crosby was born in Washington State so he knew snow, but he didn’t write the song, that was Irving Berlin.  Curious that both these guys are remembered for names that weren’t the names they were born with.  Bing Crosby was Harry Crosby but was nicknamed Bing after a humour magazine he liked, the Bingville Bugle.  Irving Berlin was born Israel Baline but his first attempt at sheet music was misprinted Berlin instead of Baline.  As you can tell by the name Israel Baline didn’t have a lot of first hand knowledge about Christmas, although having been born in Russia and raised in New York he would have experienced snow. 

But since his dad died when Israel was just 8, and he had to start working, it’s unlikely he had fond memories of that snow.  None the less, he knew a good song when he wrote it and the story goes that one morning after being up all night songwriting, he told his assistant “I just wrote the best song I’ve ever written; hell, I just wrote the best song anyone’s ever written.”  If success is any measure he wasn’t far wrong based on the sales it’s made and the awards it’s won.  Here’s hoping you have a winning holiday.

The podictionary word for today is twelve:  On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree.  Of course you know that on the twelfth day of Christmas I got twelve drummers drumming.  But which day was that anyway?  The idea is that it took the wise men 12 days to find their way to the Christ child so that December 26th is the first day of Christmas while the 12th day is January 6th. 

Twelve as a word has been with us for a very long time.  It appears first with a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary circa the year 888.  So that makes it solidly Old English.  It looks to me that it hasn’t changed its pronunciation all that much over all those years either since the earliest spellings are T W E L F.  It also seems to have been attributed some special meaning, although I don’t for the life of me know why.  There are twelve months in a year, twelve hours on the clock, there were twelve apostles and twelve tribes of Israel and twelve Labors of Hercules.  Before the word twelve came into English it was definitely a Germanic word and it seems that it can be broken into two parts twa meaning “two,” and the second half of the word stemming from an Old Teutonic root lithan.  This is said to have the same parentage as our word leave, as in “get out of here.” So that the literal meaning of the word twelve is “two left over” and the reference is clearly that twelve is two more than ten. 

Have you ever wondered why the teens start with thirteen so that although an eleven or twelve year old is well into their second decade, but not yet into their teens.  It’s because in English and these other Germanic tongues those first two numbers beyond ten refer to an implied ten, not an explicit ten.  This is true evidently of Lithuanian as well, although all other Indo-European languages are said to do as we do with our teen numbers, refer to ten explicitly. 

That’s why thirteen is called thirteen.  It literally means “three plus ten.”  Eleven comes from ainlif also in Old Teutonic and as such is similar to twelve in that the first part of its word roots is ain, meaning “one” and again like twelve, the second part lif means “left over.”

The podictionary word for today is toy:  If you’ve been wondering if you’ve been naughty or nice, and whether you’ll get any toys this Christmas you might be interested to know that the first citation we have for the word toy is from a work called Handling Sin and that at first, a toy wasn’t something you might give to a child, but instead something you might do that might result in a child.  Hmm.  That might be naughty AND nice. 

The poem known as Handling Sin comes down to us from 1303 and appears to have been a fairly free translation of an earlier French poem.  When I say free translation I mean that the author felt pretty free to add in stuff wherever he thought it suitable so that the Middle English version he produced is half again as long as the original French version.  The objective of the work is to advise on he avoidance of sin, not as I might have implied, how to manage sinning properly.  In giving this helpful advice the word toy comes up with a meaning of “amorous sport” and in the context of “a woman handling, or any other lusty thing.”  Sounds fun eh? 

Well the meaning 500 years ago was to do with fun as well, and as such had a sense of light play, not serious, even unimportant.  So with that the meaning of toy began to move away from the lightly sexual and toward the meaning of joking and trivial.  It wasn’t long before the word began to be applied to articles as well as to actions so that toys became unimportant or trivial items. 

These included things that were given to children as playthings; things for amusement as opposed to practical use.  And so a toy dog would be for amusement, not to be used as a working dog.  Before about the year 1500 however, the word toy is a bit of a mystery.  As I said, it appeared first in 1303 in that poem Handling Sin.  But then for 200 years after that single first appearance we don’t have any trace of it.  Then after two centuries it pops into the written record again, this time in fairly wide usage, and does so with the same meaning it had back in 1303.  Very strange. 

The lexicographers have tried to hunt out an etymology for toy but all of the ancestor words suggested seem to have too different a meaning—such as furniture and tools in one case, or attire and dress in another—so that no one really knows for sure.

The podictionary word for today is pudding:  According to Wikipedia a Christmas pudding is a traditional dessert at Christmas dinner in Britain and Ireland.  It’s a tradition in my family also, although I can’t say I like it too much.  It’s full of plums and soaked in brandy and set on fire before coming to the table.

This is a far cry from what pudding used to mean, and what it has come to mean in its variations across the Atlantic Ocean.  Robbie Burns, the bard of Scotland wrote a poem to a haggis in which he called it the chieftain of the pudding race.  Here’s a recipe for haggis:

1 sheep’s lung
1 sheep heart
1 sheep liver
1/2 lb suet (that’s more or less fat)
3/4 cup oatmeal
3 onions, finely chopped
salt pepper nutmeg

Chop all this stuff up and mix together and jam it into the sheep’s stomach then boil it until it’s cooked.  Not quite the pudding you had in mind? Well it’s pretty close to the Oxford English Dictionary definition of what a pudding was when it appeared in the language 700 years ago.

“The stomach or one of the entrails of a pig, sheep, or other animal, stuffed with a mixture of minced meat, suet, oatmeal, seasoning, etc., boiled and kept till needed; a kind of sausage.”

Obviously this is a different kind of animal from chocolate pudding.  While in North America the word pudding has come to mean a creamy kind of desert, in the UK it means any desert at all.  In fact instead of asking “what’s for desert,” British kids are more likely to ask “what’s for pudding,” and not be too surprised if they get a banana or something.

The etymology of pudding seems hard to pin down.  Most sources give two possibilities.  The one I consider less likely is a root from a Germanic source pud- meaning to swell as that mixture of meat byproducts and oatmeal might do in the boiling pot.  The second possibility is through French boudain, or Italian boldone and ultimately Latin botulus.  That’s right, Latin botulus, the root also for botulism, that particularly unpleasant and sometimes deadly food poisoning.  In Latin botulus meant “sausage” so there is logic in the idea that pudding of the haggis sort might be called a sausage.

The reason that botulism was named after a sausage was that in the late 1800’s this kind of food poisoning was first identified with sausages.  Now enjoy your dinner.

The podictionary word for today is stockings: I expect that you know the poem “T’was the night before Christmas” where one line runs “The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there.”

The poem seems originally to have been named A Visit from Saint Nicholas and to have been written by a New Yorker named Clement Clarke Moore. That was in 1822. The idea of hanging Christmas stockings must obviously be older than that, but looking for the source I come up with only two leads. One is a fable that tells of three daughters too poor to afford a dowry, who hung their stockings up to dry, only to find that Saint Nicholas had thrown money down the chimney into each sock, so now they could get married; hurray hurray—to the delight of modern day feminists. But that doesn’t seem right to me. If the fable refers to a time when Saint Nicholas was alive we are talking around the year 350.

As I discussed in the episode on chimney, it’s unlikely that a household that couldn’t afford dowries would have had a chimney even up to 1000 or 1300 years after that. Also given that Saint Nicholas lived in what is now Turkey I’m wondering if these girls would have had socks either. The other more likely source is from Dutch. The first reference I could find was from Washington Irving’s satirical story A History of New York that he wrote in 1809. The idea suggested by some is that the Dutch in New York had brought with them tradition of setting shoes by the fire to be filled with gifts, and that somehow this had swapped over to stockings. These days the only stocking you can likely find is a Christmas stocking.

Most women that I know don’t even wear pantyhose anymore, and curse them roundly when they do wear them. But Christmas stockings are less sheer nylons, than an old way of saying socks. It turns out that the word sock goes back much further, almost 700 years, with a meaning that a salesperson would recognize, if you asked where to find the socks in a department store. Sock goes back almost 1300 years with a meaning of a light shoe; with an etymology into Latin and Greek. Stocking, however, didn’t turn up until almost Shakespeare’s day. Where it came from before that is a little hard to follow. All the etymological sources say that stocking evolved out of stock, S T O C K; but exactly how stock came to mean lower leg and feet covering, seems a little dodgy.

In these supposed parental senses stock means something fixed; hence stock still. Explanations try out the theory that the lower legs were analogous to the trunk of a tree, or that it was the legs that were locked up when someone was punished by being put into the stocks. Through this meaning of something fixed, stockings can be etymologically related both “the stock market” and whether something at the store is “in stock” or not.

The podictionary word for today is sleigh:  When Santa goes zipping across the sky he is most likely to do so in a sleigh, that’s S L E I G H.  I did a search for Santa and sleigh and got more than 1.7 million hits.  For Santa with sled that’s S L E D, I got about half as many hits, while for Santa and his sledge S L E D G E, I got half of that, about 400 thousand hits.  What’s the difference with these words, aren’t they all the same? 

Well, let’s work our way backward.  I had expected all these words to be pretty ancient.  They have a taste to them of Old English to me.  But I see that the youngest of these is sleigh, that favorite of Santa’s.  It appears that sleigh came into English on the American side of the Atlantic around 300 years ago.  The Oxford English Dictionary still says that it is a particularly American or Canadian usage, but that’s the OED second edition and I suspect this isn’t so so much any more since the more modern shorter dictionaries don’t say so. 

I’m wondering if this group of words are ripe candidates for revision in the OED third edition now in progress.  I think you’ll agree with me by the time I get to the end of this.  Anyway, a sleigh, that’s S L E I G H, came into English as a first citation in the diary of a fellow named Samuel Seawall.  I’ll get back to him in a moment.  A sleigh seems always to have been a sort of carriage that instead of having wheels, has runners for pulling it over ice and snow. 

Next youngest is a sledge S L E D G E.  This vehicle holds an identical definition in the OED and also in more modern British dictionaries, but in American dictionaries has transmogrified to be more of a freight vehicle.  It seems to have been the native British word that preceded the American sleigh around the time of Shakespeare; first citation 1601. Both the American sleigh and the British sledge have etymologies that point back to similar words in Dutch.  But I am left with the impression that it was the proximity between England and Holland that influenced the British word, while it was Dutch settlement and immigration in America that produced the American word. 

Surprisingly the word sled, S L E D,  is treated differently in the OED with citations back into Middle English and an etymology that points into Flemish and German.  Even more surprising is their treatment of another word S L E A D, that they equate in meaning with S L E D but give a marginally different etymology to. 

This dispite the fact that the earliest citations for both S L E A D and S L E D are both authored by John Wycliffe.  He was that translator of bibles back in the 1400s who’s work so angered the church they ended up burning his bibles and digging up his old bones and burning them too.  I’ve talked about John Wycliffe before back in episode 190 on the word allegorical.  Through all these words, sleigh, sledge, sled and slead, it’s only slead that gives a feeble wave of the hand to an etymological connection with the word slide—a rather fundamental connection I’d think since every one of these conveyances depends on a lack of friction to be of any use at all. 

Etymonline is the only source I see that takes the etymology for this word back beyond Old English and Germanic roots and points it to an Indo-European source.  Now, I said I’d return to that fist citation for sleigh.  The snippets of Samuel Seawall’s diary that I can get a glimpse of talk about sleighs several times.  About especially cold winters when supplies had to be brought in by sleigh over the ice around Boston; about the governor’s sleigh going through the ice with four horses, and two of them drowning.

Samuel Seawall was a fairly prominent citizen back around 1700 He was one of the judges who presided over the Salem witch trials, and evidently the only one who later regretted the outcome
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