The podictionary word for today is yesterday:  You’ve heard of the Spanish Inquisition?  Once upon a time, many yesterdays ago there was a fellow named Fray Luis Ponce de León.  He was a monk and a university professor back in the 1500s.  Somehow he fell afoul of the authorities and was thrown in prison for almost 5 years. 

Upon his release he returned to the University at Salamanca and began his lecture as if he’d never been away, with the words

dicebamus hesterno die

Which is supposed to translate as “we were saying yesterday.”  This loose sense of what time period exactly constitutes yesterday actually is embodied in the etymology of the word.  Ambrose Bierce agrees in his Devil’s Dictionary where he points out that to a youth, yesterday is one’s infancy, to a man, one’s youth and to an elder, one’s whole life.  The roots of the word yesterday trace back to Indo-European. 

But as is easy to see in the modern word, the day part of yesterday, can be easily separated out.  It is the yester part that comes from so long ago, and itself held a sense of “yesterday.”  In the Germanic languages that gave birth to Old English this yester root also existed on its own and didn’t need the day added on to be understood.  By the time the word got into English people seem to have felt it necessary to add day to the end, although the Oxford English Dictionary says there is one example in Old English manuscripts where it is left out.  I guess this means that yesterday is redundant, I mean literally it means “yesterday day.” 

More than that, it seems that even though English speakers had settled down to a comfort level with the unnecessary day in there, they hadn’t actually identified the time period being referred to.  In some cases yesterday is supposed to have referred to “the day before yesterday”—actually the dictionaries seem to be saying that this is why the seemingly unnecessary day got tacked on there.  But even worse, historically yesterday sometimes means “tomorrow” or even the “day after tomorrow.”  These senses are reflected in the pre-English word roots. 

The most popular entry for yesterday at Urbandictionary is one that defines yesterday as a song by the Beatles.  Given the confusion about when exactly yesterday is referring to it is fitting that the working title of this Beatles song, before it was released, was Scrambled Eggs.

The podictionary word for today is guy: Leo Durocher was a baseball player and manager who is the originator of the phrase, “nice guys finish last.”  By this he clearly meant, as we do now, “nice male persons finish last.”  Sometimes unidentified persons are linked to specific names, like the customers of prostitutes are named Johns. 

Come to think of it John doesn’t come off very well in this department since an unknown body is a John Doe and when someone is being broken up with they get a Dear John letter.  But guy is a little different that John or Tom, Dick and Harry.  There is a specific guy named Guy that is being referenced behind that anonymity.  In 1605 England was a protestant country, but there were Catholics who still weren’t happy about it.  Some of them decided to blow up a joint session of the House of Lords and the House of Commons while the King was making a speech. 

They rented a building next door that conveniently had a basement that ran along under the building where the King was to make his speech. This fellow named Guy Fawkes brought in barrels and barrels of gun powder but he got caught before any sparks flew and was executed.  This was not done in any sort of humane manner and so it became as sort of national holiday complete with bonfires and effigies of the late lamented Guy Fawkes. 

For centuries since, little children would take old clothes and stuff them with straw or newspaper and cart them around the neighborhood in preparation for bonfires and fireworks on Guy Fawkes day.  These manikins were of coarse known to represent the person Guy Fawkes, but the formality with which they were referred diminished, perhaps understandably, until the word guy, just meant “some person.” 

It wasn’t until 200 years later, in 1806 that we have the first citation of this guy meaning just “any guy.”  Of coarse the formal name Guy had been in use for hundreds of years before that.  I mentioned in the episode on the word neat that there was an old legend from the 1300s or before of a Guy of Warwick. 

The name goes much further back through French and into Germanic roots where it might have been pronounced wit, or witu.  The musical Guys and Dolls was based on a book by a guy named Damon Runyan.  Now that’s a pretty unusual name and I was surprised one day when I went into a government office to have my passport processed to see a name plate on the clerk’s desk that said Damon Runyan.  I wondered if in that job he and his colleges needed to remain anonymous.  Just to be some guy to the customers.

The podictionary word for today is heroin:  Believe it or not, 100 years ago, if you had a serious cough your doctor might prescribe heroin.  At the time, you wouldn’t go down to your nearest dingy alley to get your fix, but you’d go to the drug store and buy your heroin from the pharmacist. 

It came in a little glass bottle, carefully packaged by the Baer drug company of Germany.  Same guys who brought you aspirin.  The medical establishment of the time was confident that this drug would help you feel better, although it wasn’t really their plan that you would keep having to come back to buy more and more and more.  It actually came as a surprise to them that heroin turned out to be addictive.  Baer was at first under the mistaken impression that heroin was a non addictive replacement drug for morphine.  Oops. 

The reason that heroin is called heroin is said to be because when Baer was doing clinical trials, all of the people they gave it too said it made them feel heroic.  Heroin really was the brand name.  The word hero came to English—and German too—a lot longer ago than heroin.  Back about 650 years ago a guy named Ranulf Higdon wrote an important history up to that time and called it the polychronicon, meaning “a chronicle of many events.”  Now he was writing in Latin so his use of hero can’t be called the earliest English citation.  But a few years later about 1387 the polychronicon was translated into English by John de Travista. 

And with that this ancient Greek word came into English.  The original meaning back then, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, had hero referring to men of superhuman strength, courage, or ability, favoured by the gods.  Later, but before entering English or German, these heroic men were seen as somewhere between mortal men and the gods.   Ironic that heroin makes one feel godlike yet actually enhances mortality.

The podictionary word for today is neat: I like to drink my whiskey neat. The net result is a shiny nose. You wouldn’t suspect it but these are three related concepts. Way back in Indo-European there was a word root that meant “to shine.”

By the time this got into Latin it had become nitidus. But it seemed to take on more meanings than just a meaning of shining like my nose. Things that are well cleaned are often shiny and even back in Latin the meaning had extended to include not only “shiny”, and “clean,” but “elegant” and “trim.” During the time since those Romans were tromping around what is now France and speaking Vulgar Latin, the language slowly morphed into French and in so doing many words got considerably shorter. Katherine Barber of Oxford Dictionaries calls this the French Squishing Syndrome. The Latin word nitidus had become a French net by the time of 1066 and the Norman Invasion. The meaning still had a sense of “clean” and “elegant” and “trim” about it, but it also took on a sense of “purity.” So when I say the net result is that my nose gets shiny, the word net is from the same source.

The net income is contrasted with the gross income because the gross income includes all the money that comes in, but doesn’t take into account what you had to pay for office space or computer equipment. The net income is more pure because all those costs have been taken into account. So of course net became neat and when I drink my whiskey neat I have it without ice or water, I just have it pure. And when you make your room nice and neat you are making it elegant and trim. The first appearance of neat in English is in 1453 and it is naturally preceded by a citation for net back in 1330. That was in the tale of a guy named Guy of Warwick. His story has not come down to us with the popularity of Robin Hood or King Arthur, but he was of the same ilk.

That is, he was a very popular legend that was passed from person to person for generations before it was written down. The gist of the story of Guy of Warwick is that he falls in love with a girl, her dad says he has to prove himself worthy, so Guy tromps off all over England and northern France fighting the bad guys as well as dragons and in one account a dangerous cow. He then comes home and weds his bride only to be overcome with guilt due to is bloodthirsty youth. So he bogs of to the Holy Land and comes back in secret to live in a cave on his wife’s property, only revealing his identity to her on his deathbed.

One account has Guy as the hero who chased the Vikings out of Southern England, but in fact this was achieved by paying them shiny money. So next time someone asks you to get the place neat and tidy, just hope they don’t know the etymology and want the place absolutely shining.

The podictionary word for today is yes: For hundreds of years up until the time of Shakespeare if you went down to the store and your friend later asked you:

“You didn’t go down to the store, did you?”

You would answer that question differently than if they asked you

“Did you go down to the store?”

In the first case the question was framed negatively “You didn’t go down to the store, did you?” and the answer would have been “yes, I did.” The second question was framed positively “did you go down to the store?” and because of the difference in how the question is framed the correct answer at the time would not have been “yes” it would have been “yea, I did.”

That’s Y E A like you might remember from bible readings or something. Both yea and yes come from the same roots but yes became the more emphatic of the two, and as the stronger sibling, after Shakespeare pushed the weaker yea out of the nest. This is an old word from Old English appearing first in written Old English in the year 888 but with older roots back into West Saxon. Although yes is a very short word with only three letters, it appears to be so old that it’s two basic sounds ye and es can be traced in Indo-European to make language scholars believe that yes must have originally been a phrase meaning “so be it” or “may it be so.” The es part is what means “to be” and I’m only stretching the point a little here when I say that this makes the difference between yea and yes.

Yea meant “yes,” but yes meant a stronger “yes” because it was saying “yes be” or “yes it is so.” In the 1970s a band named Yes came out of England and made a name for themselves with an album named Fragile. This was their fourth album but it was the first one that really made it big and they banged it together in only about two months. The reason was that a new band member had joined the group. His name was Rick Wakeman and he played a whole pile of instruments and in order to pay for them all they had to get a move on with the record.

From what I can see the only reason the band chose the name Yes was that it was memorable and short and positive. Ironically the band members kept saying no and quitting the band. Just like yes and yea, no as an answer historically had its place. Example: “You’re not going to stay with the band are you?” Answer: “No.” “Are you going to stay with the band?” Answer: “Nay.”

The podictionary word for today is terrific: 
Way back in Latin there was this word terrere.  In fact we still have it in English; terror.  It meant then, as it does now, “fright.”  So her terrible day was literally a “frightful” day, and the terrorist alert must have been “terrifying.” 

By now it should be obvious that her mother’s terrific day stems from the same source; terrifying and terrific are pretty close in spelling and sound. The literal meaning of terrific as used by John Milton in Paradise Lost is “something that can scare the bejesus out of you.”  That Paradise Lost citation is in fact the first one in English and is from 1667.  John Milton is describing a serpent—not the serpent—but one of the creatures of God’s creation.  His serpent sports a hairy mane; which I have to admit does sound a little out of the ordinary.  According to his own words, Milton’s purpose in writing this 80,000 word poem was to “justify the ways of God to men.” 

Now that in itself is a little terrifying isn’t it?  The way that our word of the day terrific came to mean “wonderful” from a root of meaning “terrifying” is as follows.  When John Milton used terrific he did mean “terrifying.”  But by 1800 people were using terrific as an intensifier, along the same lines as my kids might today tell me that a party they were at was so much fun that it was scary.  Here are the first two citations for this intensifier usage:

• I am up to my eyes in business, the extent of which is quite terrific.
• The crowd was immense, and the applause terrific.

You can see from these citations that the meaning could go either way.  The applause or the amount of work could terrify, or it could be wonderful.  But it wasn’t until 1930 that we see the first citation for terrific plainly meaning a very good thing. 

And in that citation there is another example of a similar trend among words that intensify.  The citation goes:

‘Thanks awfully,’ said Rex. ‘That’ll be ripping.’ ‘Fine!’ said Derek Yardley. ‘Great! Terrific!’

That word great had earlier meant “large,” here it means “very good.”  In fact that opening dialogue I started with:
“Terrific!  We just finished a tremendous project, on time, on budget.”
That uses the word tremendous which originally meant something that induced trembling with fear, then followed a similar route to a similar current meaning.

The podictionary word for today is proper:  Jonathan Swift said
Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.
Now I certainly recognize what he means by proper in that quote.  He means “appropriate” or “correct.”  But what made me think of exploring the word proper was that I got an email from a friend in England. 

Now this guy had grown up in North America but I recognized the tone of his use of proper in his email as being British.  I had been complaining about a lack of snow to ski on and he reported that it had snowed in London and wrote

“It made me think how I missed those proper Canadian winters.”

Obviously he doesn’t mean “appropriate” Canadian winters, or “correct” Canadian winters.  He means “real” Canadian winters.  So both Jonathan Swift and my friend used proper in a way that wouldn’t have been my first definition.  When I think of something proper I think in more formal terms.  You’ve got your suit on, or maybe even a tuxedo.  The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word proper had already gone through many twists and turns of meaning before it ever came into English from French.  The first citation is from 1225 but they put the meaning it drew from Latin as the first definition, even though its citation isn’t until 1300. 

That Latin root meaning was “belonging to oneself.” Now another word comes into focus; property.  And so does the term proper noun.  Now I had a hard time at first, figuring out how proper, meaning real or correct could relate in meaning to property. But certainly we can see proper there inside the word appropriate, and the word appropriate is easier to understand in its connection to property.  The meaning of appropriate has a sense of an attribute belonging to something. 

Well, it made sense to me anyway.  The American Heritage Dictionary takes the root back to Indo-European and connects it even in Latin with the roots of private.  As to my initial feeling that there was a difference between UK and American usage I stand corrected by the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang where I am informed that during the 1990s it was “a general cry of appreciation, approval” in California then spreading to London youth.  But then again, maybe the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang might stand corrected as I see at Urbandictionary a disproportionate number of references to this particular use as being British. 

Hardly a statistical sampling, but, there you have it.  That quote from Jonathan Swift; he was they guy who wrote Gulliver’s Travels.  I was struggling with what to tell you about Jonathan Swift when I came across this from Encyclopaedia Britannica:

Gulliver’s Travels’s matter-of-fact style and its air of sober reality confer on it an ironic depth that defeats oversimple explanations.

Ah, so why even try.  Instead here are a few other thoughts from him.  This is from his Directions to Servants. 

• WHEN your Master or Lady call a Servant by Name, if that Servant be not in the Way [he means out of earshot] none of you are to answer, for then there will be no End of your Drudgery.
• When you have done a Fault, be always pert and insolent, and behave your self as if you were the injured Person; this will immediately put your Master or Lady off their Mettle.
• The Cook, the Butler, the Groom, the Market-man, and every other Servant who is concerned in the Expences of the Family, should act as if his Master’s whole Estate ought to be applied to that Servant’s particular Business. For Instance, if the Cook computes his Master’s Estate to be a thousand Pounds a Year, he reasonably concludes that a thousand Pounds a Year will afford Meat enough, and therefore, he need not be sparing.

I guess that’s why the called him a satirist.

The podictionary word for today is horse:  Until the last century horses were a pretty important part of people’s lives.  In English the word has a first citation in Old English in the year 825.  At that time the singular and the plural were both horse. 

Just like we now use the word moose for both a single moose, and the rarely seen herd of moose.  Sheep are more often seen in groups and they too have the same word for the singular as the plural.  As a little aside here, I see that the word herd has been around for 1000 years and always meant a group of animals.   While that more sheep-fitting word flock shows up in English 1000 years ago meaning a group of people. 

To some extent it still does mean people when you are talking about followers of the church, but I’d always assumed the word was an allusion to the idea of lost sheep and the Lord is our Shepherd.  Anyway, flock might be thought to be related to birds and flying but the Oxford English Dictionary tells me it is actually related to the word folk, as in folk songs.  Around 500 years ago people used the two words herd and flock in contrast to one another where flocks would be wild animals and herds were domestic.  Even long before that first English citation for horse, there were horses in what is now England and they were of course important residents. 

Before people started to call a horse a horse there appears to have been an older Old English word something along the lines of eoh.  Etymonline spells it E O H.  Both Etymonline and the OED say that although there isn’t hard evidence, there is speculation that the new Old English word that gives us horse, comes from an Indo-European root that meant “to run.”  It appears that horses were not only important to proto-Englishmen of a thousand or two thousand years ago, but they were very important also to those much, much more ancient proto-Indo-Europeans. 

I see references here to an Indo-European cult of the horse and it’s easy to imagine why there might have been one.  Just think of the amount of mindshare and market-share we give over to cars.  Strange, however, that no Indo-European word meaning “horse” appears to have descended in any language to a modern word meaning “horse.”  Etymonline says this may be due to a habit among people to develop a taboo about saying the name of something they worship. 

Horses were of course important between the times of the Indo-Europeans and the first Germanic English immigrants.  The Greeks said that horses were created by Poseidon, god of the sea.  Since horses are less useful at sea than on land I find this a little puzzling.  Someone with horse sense is thought to be shrewd, but that’s not because horses themselves are thought to be particularly insightful.  It’s because people who trade in horses were traditionally thought to be clever bargainers.  I think this also reflects the important place in past economies that horses held.

The podictionary word for today is Smithsonian:  Even if you have never been to any of the Smithsonian museums in Washington, you’ve heard of them.  Today I’ll talk about the guy they are named after.  Once upon a time there was a men’s store in Cheapside London.  Its owners were named Smithson and being owners of a men’s store made them haberdashers.  They sold hats, shirts, ties and things.  These things were very important to London society and so the Smithsons made lots of money.  One Smithson was named Hugh.  The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that Hugh had phenomenal genealogical luck but to me his luck looks like the basis of an Agatha Christie novel or perhaps even a police investigation.  The Smithsons had made enough money that Hugh’s grandfather was a Baronet.  Hugh’s father died young and so Hugh inherited the baronetcy at 17 years of age. Now listen to this timeline. 
1729 Hugh becomes a baronet and inherits the Smithson estate
1734 his sister dies and he gets 10k pounds, big money in those days
1740 his counsin dies and he inherits more estates
1740 he also marries into a much richer family – his bride’s grampa objects and cuts her out of his will
1744 Hugh has a little chat with the king about gramps and also says nice things about his father in law – the king reverses grampa’s will
1748 grampa dies and Hugh’s father in law becomes an earl
1750 the father in law dies and Hugh becomes an earl, much better than being a baronet  He also convinces the king to make him the first duke of Northumberland

Since it would now be embarrassing to be an duke or an earl with the name Smithson, the name of some lowly hat sellers, he gets parliament to change his name to the far more impressive family name of his wife, Percy.  So you think, what can this possibly have to do with the Smithsonian in Washington?  Since he changed his name he can’t have given it the name Smithson.  Too true.  But while all of this was going on, Hugh Smithson Percy was also running around and sleeping with other women besides his wife.  One of these gals got pregnant and ran off to Paris to have her baby and named him James Macie, since her name was Elizabeth Macie. 

Since Elizabeth Macie was a descendant of King Henry VII she had a little money too and although the illegitimate James never saw a cent of his father’s money, his mother left him a smaller pile.  It seems to have been his mother’s will that required him to change his name to James Smithson. James now Smithson felt that since his mom was of royal blood and his dad was such a big shot, he should get a little respect.  He seems to have sometimes signed his letters as an English Lord, although he wasn’t one. 

He was a scientist though, a chemist mostly.  He hoped that if his bloodlines didn’t get him remembered, his science would.  He is remembered in the name of a kind of stone, smithsonite, but the main reason I’m even talking about him, is that he left money that started the Smithsonian.  He cared about his illegitimacy and in his will he didn’t give money to the Smithsonian Institution directly.  He had a nephew who was also illegitimate and it was to him that he left his small fortune. 

The will stipulated that if this nephew died without heirs then the money should go

“to the United States of America, to found at Washington, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men”

The fact is that he had never set foot in America nor seems to have had correspondence with anyone in America.  His personal library, now housed at the Smithsonian held 213 books and only two of them had anything to do with America.  So why did he leave his money to a nation he seemed to have no connection to?  Well here’s a clue.  One of those two books has a prediction

“If the affairs of the United States go on as rapidly as they have done, it will become the grand emporium of the West, and rival in magnitude and splendor the cities of the whole world.”

Where would you send your legacy? If you had said, as he had
“My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles of [and here you can insert the titles of his father] are extinct and forgotten”

The podictionary word for today is content:  John Quincy Adams is supposed to have been hard at work at Congress when he suffered a brain hemorrhage and collapsed, saying “this is the end of the earth, I am content” and died two days later.  I guess when you have achieved the presidency of the United States of America and then gone on to a long second career as a Congressman, you can be content.  But then, at that stage, he didn’t have much choice did he?  You may think I am being a bit of a smart ass to say that, but the reason I said that is that the roots of the word content have a lot to do with not having much choice. 

The first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1440 and says

“Having one’s desires bounded by what one has”

The etymology of the word links it back through Latin to the word contained.  Although content and content are spelled the same, they are different words with different meanings and pronunciations, but strikingly similar etymologies.  Content is being satisfied with what one’s life contains, while content is what is contained in something, be it the information in this podcast, or tomatoes in a can. 

To contain something is to hold it together, the word is made up of two Latin roots con meaning “together” and tenre meaning “to hold.”  That last part tenre goes back to an Indo-European root meaning to stretch and is related to the word tension and to the tendons in your body. I’m imagining it’s presence there in the word contain like some kind of linguistic elastic holding things together.  Since I started with John Quincy Adams I’ll end with him too.  I mentioned back in the episode on the word redneck that Anne Royall had caught then president John Quincy Adams in the buff swimming in the Potomac.  I see from Wikipedia that Adams made a habit of this and Anne Royal wasn’t the only one to catch him during an early morning skinny dip. 

She is alternately reported as being a journalist seeking an interview, or being a military widow lobbying government, but in either case, she evidently sussed out the fact that Adams liked a dawn dip and so waited until he was in the water, then came and sat on his clothes until he talked to her about whatever it was she needed to discuss. 

The other story is that a vagrant grabbed the president’s clothes as he was splashing away so that he had to wait around in the river until a kid walked by, whom he dispatched back to the White House for a fresh pair of duds.  I don’t know if this is true, but you’ll have to be content with it.