The podictionary word for today is answer:  Somebody asked me, why is there a W in answer?  I swear I didn’t know, but I looked it up and here’s the answer.  Answer and swear are related words.  Answer has been in English for 1200 years and the first citation held the same basic meaning that we use today when we look for answers. 

But before it was English answer was from Old Teutonic and before that it was two words and swear.  The and part meant “against” or “back-at-ya” and swear meant what we mean by swear when we swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  So that if you were accused of something you would “answer” the charge; that is, you would make a solemn oath against the charge.  In fact this kind of meaning trickled into English along with the more common meaning we think of first when we think of the word answer. 

Since the first citation for this word comes from so long ago I wasn’t surprised to find that the first document it appeared in was that ancient tale Beowulf.  It comes near the end.  Our superhero Beowulf is dead, having killed the mighty dragon, but expiring as a result.  His trusty servant Wiglaf is splashing water on him in a vain attempt to bring him back to life when a bunch of other fighters who’d run away from the dragon begin to return.  Wiglaf pours scorn on their cowardice.  The word answer appears as andswaru and the sense is that Wiglaf is answering their cowardice, that is swearing oaths against them, responding to the question of their abandonment of his master. 

At least that’s how the Oxford English Dictionary sees it.  I find it interesting though that in this first example the answer against an accusation is sort of reversed.  It is Wiglaf who is making the accusation of cowardice.  Modern translations of this little bit of Beowulf have Wiglaf giving gruff words, or a grim welcome or greeting to the returning cowards.  So it is the sense of his reaction to their return that gives the modern answering sense.  Besides, after their yellow-bellied behavior they don’t seem to have had an answer to his accusation.

The podictionary word for today is doppelganger:  An old friend named Ken appeared back in my life some years ago after decades away.  He now runs a bookstore.  We’d been thick as thieves back in highschool.  Years later I was on my post-university European tour when my breath was taken away. 

I had never expected to see him in—where was it, Germany?—but there he was.  Actually wasn’t; because the guy I saw was what you might call Ken’s doppelganger.  The dictionaries define doppelganger as

“an apparition or double of a living person”

That’s from the New Oxford American Dictionary anyway.  The sense historically seemed to have more of a tone of ghost to it, although most of the modern newspaper references I see use the word doppelganger to mean something that looks just the same.  Usually a person who is a double, but I even saw one reference to a building being the doppelganger of another.  The word sounds like it comes from German and in fact it does.  Doppelganger first shows up in German in a gloss or explanatory footnote in 1796 and is defined as a person who sees themselves.  So originally if Ken had seen that guy who looked just like him, it wouldn’t be the look-alike who’d be the doppelganger, but it would be Ken.  Dobbelganger literally means double goer so that the sense was, there is someone going around who is your double; but more than being another person, it was supposed to really be another you. 

It wasn’t until 1830 that doppelganger made it into English, and when it did it was anglicised to double-ganger before being re-Germanized within 20 years or so. The first person to use it in it’s anglicised form was Sir Walter Scott.  He did so in a work called Letters on demonology and witchcraft.  My first assumption was that it was that Scott’s popularity and the subject of this particular work what made doppelganger carry a tone of spookiness.  But as it turns out Walter Scott was having none of that superstitious BS and the Letters on demonology and witchcraft are actually supposed to offer rational explanations for these phenomenon. 

I guess it was fitting that I’d seen Ken’s doppelganger in Germany since the word was German, but there are a few other German connections in here.  Certainly Sir Walter Scott was a wide reader and read many texts in their original languages, including plenty of German.  So that’s likely where he got double-ganger.  But he also befriended a German by the name of Henry Weber and employed him in some of his writing projects.  They worked closely together for years, including Weber joining Scott family events etc.  But it seemed that Weber was a bit of a boozer and in fact Walter Scott partly kept him close at hand to keep him out of too much trouble. 

Doubtless there had been talks between the two and I guess Weber, like many alcoholics, placed the blame on others and not himself.  So it happened that one day they were working away in the same room on different manuscripts when Scott decided to call it a day and looked up to see Weber staring at him unblinkingly.  “What’s up?”  Walter Scott asks.  Weber pulls out a pair of pistols and says Scott has been insulting him for years and challenges him to a duel. 

Scott accepts the challenge but says he doesn’t want to disturb Mrs. Scott or the children, so could the duel wait until after dinner?  Weber agrees and Scott locks the pistols in his desk until the evening entertainment.  They have a lovely dinner en famille but Weber almost loses it when Scott gives him an after dinner drink. 

Not exactly wanting to get shot, or to kill Weber either for that matter, Walter Scott had taken the precaution when washing up for dinner, of sending a message to another buddy of Weber’s who luckily arrived minutes after the after dinner drink.  Thus it all ended happily except for Weber, who got trussed up in a straight-jacket and spent most of the rest of his days in an asylum, kindly paid for by Sir Walter Scott.

The podictionary word for today is lousy:  It’s been a lousy ski season.  Cold came late, not much snow, early spring; lousy.  Climatologists are too cautious to say my bad ski season is directly the result of climate change, but I’m not so cautious. 

I’m asking you a personal favor of getting out of your car and onto a bike so I can have better skiing next winter.  I guess it’s a lost cause.  All this to show you what you already know: the word lousy now means to us something that is inferior; a lousy restaurant, a lousy movie.  This meaning has been with us since the time of Chaucer, but there was a slightly older meaning, and when I tell you, you’ll appreciate all the more why lousy means not so great. Of course, lousy comes from lice. 

Originally in 1377 something that was lousy was infested with lice.  The word lice in turn comes from Old English and can be found way back to circa 725.  That’s pretty old as far as English words go, but we’ve been entertaining these little creepy crawlies much longer than that so I guess it should be no surprise that the word actually goes back to Indo-European. In fact humans are host to two different kinds of lice; head lice and pubic lice.  This makes us a little different than most animals.  A few have multiple lice species as parasites, but most only have one. 

The reason humans can boast two completely different species of lice is that we have two isolated zones of hair on our bodies.  On an animal with hair all over, the lice environment would be more competitive and one species would lose out.  We have two little nature reserves isolated from one another.  Now this is kind of gross, but I heard something recently that I found fascinating so stick with me.  Years ago I remember hearing stories about conservationist working with endangered species. 

In the early days these rescuing angels would save endangered animals and when the captured them, they would clean them up; make them healthy.  Part of the process was to de-louse them.  But then they realized that the little parasites on those endangered animals were also endangered themselves, since they were usually uniquely evolved to survive only on that host species of duck or monkey or whatever.  At the time I remember thinking, well, I agree with the theory, but come on, be practical, they’re lice for heaven’s sake. 

Dr. David Reed of the Florida Museum of Natural History has now answered my dismissal.  He has been doing DNA analysis of the two kinds of human lice and has discovered that while head lice have been with us for as long as there has been us, pubic lice only hopped on about three million years ago.  It seems we got them from gorillas.  We had been evolving separately from gorillas for four to six million years already by then.  Suddenly that conservation of endangered lice has value to me. 

Imagine, we certainly don’t know what proto-humans looked like three million years ago, but here’s a clue.  Could it be that it was just before that that we lost our body hair so that only then could we support two species of lice?  No flies on me, but it sure is lousy when species go extinct.

The podictionary word for today is galaxy:  If you have good eyes and a good view of the night sky you can often see that some parts of the sky appear whiter than others.  A wide strip of lightness runs across the sky with darker sections either side of it.  This of course is the Milky Way. 

The reason that we see the Milky Way is that as we circle around the sun, the sun is itself circling around a huge bunch of other stars that are all clumped together and spinning.  The whole agglomeration takes a sort of Frisbee shape, well, actually closer to a discus since it is fatter in the middle than out at the edges.  We are out at the edge and so we are more or less looking edge on at that discus shaped cloud of stars.  To us they appear like a wide stripe across the sky. 

In English we have been calling this the Milky Way since the time of Chaucer, that’s 600 years or so.  The reason is obviously because this part of the sky is lighter, as if someone had spilled milk across it.  The Romans had another name for it in Latin.  They called it via lactea which you might already recognize as a milk word; it means “road of milk,” just like our Milky Way. 

But going back even further the Greeks also had a name for it, galaxias, and guess what, gala meant milk in Greek.  And that is why our gigantic discus of billions of stars—as well as other gigantic clouds of stars—are called galaxies.  And it was old Geoffrey Chaucer who first wrote that one down too.  I figured that I couldn’t let an episode on galaxy go by without some mention of Douglas Adams, the creator of A Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy.  First I looked for quotes by him.  Wouldn’t’ you know it, Oxford’s Quotations only gives me ones I know already, and I’m sure you know too. 

“Don’t Panic” and “The Answer to the Great Question Of…Life, the Universe and Everything… Forty-two.”

So I looked for first citations.  He is there in the OED, but not as a first citation.  Closest he gets is 1979 for electronic book which was coined in 1970.  Not satisfied with that I cast my inter-net wider than my usual rock solid reference materials and found his gem, that I think quite suitable to today’s word.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

The podictionary word for today is dismantle:  You’d think that if I can dismantle my bicycle I’d be able to mantle it again.  I hope I’d be able to assemble it if I disassembled it but there is not and never has been a word mantle that meant to put together.  There are quite a few meanings to the word mantle however and I’ll touch on them before getting back to dismantle.  

Whereas dismantle popped into English from French at during Shakespeare’s lifetime, mantle has been around in English for as long as there has been English.  That makes mantle Old English.  In both cases the root is from Latin mantellum where the meaning was one of a long sleeveless cloak. A cloak is a covering and so mantle was applied to all kinds of coverings.  That little ash bag in a Coleman lantern is a mantle, it covers the outlet of the gas. 

A mountain can be covered in a mantle of snow.  Although the lintel over a fireplace is called a mantel the convention is to spell it differently; so a coat is L E while a mantelpiece is E L.  It seems to me someone told me that a mantelpiece was so named because people used to hang their cloaks on it to dry, but I see no evidence for this in my dictionaries, which instead suggest the fact that this piece of ornamental shelving covers the fireplace opening gives it its name. 

Having burned a few fires myself, I don’t know if hanging wet cloaks in front of the flames would achieve any of the objectives; shielding the room from warmth at the same time as singeing the overcoats.  So if a mantle is a covering, why does dismantle mean “to disassemble” something?  There were two meanings to the word in French before it came over to English, and from my vantage point it’s hard to tell if they were in circulation at the same time, but my hunch is that one evolved out of the other.  It’s easy to understand that if a mantle is a cloak, to dismantle someone is to take the cloak of his back. 

This had a figurative meaning of making him vulnerable.  The second meaning was to remove the protective wall around a town or castle.  I’d guess that tearing down the walls, which we certainly would recognize as dismantling, would be an easy step as a metaphor from the figurative removal of a man’s mantle.  Running my eye down the citations here I see one for mantle by a writer named John Cheever.  He was a Pulitzer Prize winner and in this citation he is referring to mantle as a covering; specifically the hair covering the head of Rosemary Clooney a beautiful songstress of Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye vintage.  John Cheever was for a time teaching at the University of Iowa.  It appears that he was drinking a bit during this time and other professors and even students were so concerned about it that the regularly had him over for dinner just to be sure he was actually feeding himself. 

He and his drinking buddy were mighty grateful and at the end of term the decided to throw a banquet for all those who helped them out.  They rented a hall and sent out the invitations.  But it seems that business took Cheever out of town just before the appointed date, and too drunk to catch the flight home in time, he failed to follow through on the thankyou idea.  All the guests arrived to an empty, foodless banquet.

The podictionary word for today is affinity:  I personally have an affinity for chocolate.  If you’re a regular listener then it’s likely you have an affinity for podictionary.  The New Oxford American Dictionary says affinity is:

a spontaneous or natural liking or sympathy for someone or something
So why are some credit cards called affinity cards?  Affinity cards go as far back as 1979 and at first the idea was that a percentage of the fees the cards collected as you used your card, went to some charitable organization with which you had an affinity. 

These days lots of people seem to have an affinity with collecting credits against some future purchase like a car or something, so maybe the idea is a little watered down.  Credit card companies love affinity cards because they still make most of the money and people feel proud to support their organization of choice and so theoretically use the credit card more. 

The organization doesn’t actually get much cash but hopes having its logo flashed around out there might help in some way.  Back to the word affinity.  The meaning of liking something or someone is about 400 years old, but the word existed before that, coming into English from French about 700 years ago.  The original meaning of affinity was a familial relationship that was not by blood. 

That means a brother and sister would not have affinity with one another, but a husband and wife would.  For that brother and sister the relationship was called not affinity, but consanguinity.  The roots of affinity go back further than French and into Latin and it turns out that affinity is actually related to our word finish.  It all comes from that marital meaning of affinity.  In Latin finis meant boundary and ad finis meant related by marriage because that person was right at the boundary of your blood relations, just outside it, but still as close as can be. 

That other alternative consanguinity has the word for blood sang right in there, indicating a blood relative.  In fact our English word sanguine usually means cheerful and optimistic, but it comes from the same bloody root.  It was thought back in the day when medical science consisted of a theory of the balance of four fluids or humors in the body, that having a red face meant that of those four, blood predominated.  Evidently people with a ruddy complexion were thought to be more happy go lucky.  And who can help but have an affinity for someone like that?

The podictionary word for today is boffin:  According to The New Oxford American Dictionary a boffin is:

• a person engaged in scientific or technical research; or
• a person with knowledge or a skill considered to be complex, arcane, and difficult

The Oxford English Dictionary cites a first use of this sense in 1945 and perhaps illuminates where the arcane flavor of boffin comes from when it says a boffin is engaged in ‘back-room’ scientific or technical research.  This would have been the close of World War II and the OED goes on to say that the term was specifically applied to people working on radar—so that was a big secret at the time. 

But the etymology is stated as unknown both in the OED and in other reputable etymological sources.  The OED does however have an earlier citation for boffin back in 1941.  In this case however a boffin is not a technical specialist, but an elderly naval officer.  I guess many of the fighting men were pretty youthful since the OED puts elderly in quotes and the citation makes it clear that anyone over the age of 32 is elderly.  I just had my 49th birthday so that makes me feel great.  The OED says that there are lots of theories for an etymology of boffin but none have any proof.  That sort of got my juices going.  If there are so many theories, what are they? 

I did manage to find one.  There was an aircraft called the Blackburn B-5 Baffin. It was a biplane like Snoopy imagines he is fighting the Red Barron in and it is said to have been named after William Baffin, arctic explorer of almost Shakespearian vintage.  Now that first OED citation does mention air crews so I suppose there is some overlap.  Boffin, Baffin, I suppose it could be.  One thing I though was interesting about all of those arctic explorers was this cockamamie theory that seemed to be floating around with the icebergs that surrounded their ships. 

For hundreds of years the people who financed and went on arctic expeditions—trying to find a more direct route to China and Japan, to cut out the middlemen—for hundreds of years they had a theory that if you could only push past that first barrier of ice, the entire sea around the north pole was actually warm and open water.  The idea was first floated by a fellow named Robert Thorne who rightly felt there was water, not land, across the top of the world.  He tried to convince King Henry VIII but when that failed, he printed a pamphlet about the idea. 

Some people think that Henry Hudson later got a hold of this pamphlet and used it to generate interest in his trips.  In any case, they were all wrong, the northwest passage and the arctic ocean remained locked up in solid ice in spite of their wishful thinking.  But today the climate boffins tell us things are changing and we may soon be able to sail across the top of the world.

The podictionary word for today is pee:  It is more polite to say pee than piss.  Once I was together with some family friends.  Their young teenage son had just broken both arms snowboarding and was helplessly encased in plaster.  His mother, without thinking asked him in front of numerous similarly aged girls if he needed help to have a pee before she went out.  There was of course embarrassment, but not at the word pee. 

Piss is what you might be more likely to hear from someone into their fourth beer.  But pee in the sense of urine or urination is simply the first letter from the word piss which somehow makes it less vulgar.  The Oxford English Dictionary says that this usage is only cited as if it were a word within the last couple of hundred years, but they do point to sources such as Shakespeare that use the letter P not as a full word in a punning sense that would support the idea that the word was also in circulation much earlier. 

The word piss has moved into the zone that the OED now calls “coarse slang” from a position of Standard English starting about 700 years ago.  Before that it was standard French with an earliest citation in French of 1180. It actually appears in a large number of other languages but etymologists don’t think it is a word that has been borrowed back and forth that much.  Instead, the thinking is that it is onomatopoeic, so that the sound of peeing inspired the word for it in more than one language. 

Although piss is a little rude, and maybe because of it, piss turns up in several phrases.  Pissed off” only appears around the time of the Second World War.  A recently updated OED entry cites from the academic journal American Speech that pissed off may have evolved from “peeved off,” being abbreviated to “peed off,” and then rudened to “pissed off.”  The OED doesn’t give this theory much weight though, saying it’s probably mistaken.  “Pissing contest” comes up in my search engine and I take it to mean “an unimportant competition.” 

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable tells me it’s an Americanism and offers the image of two boys seeing who can squirt further.  That same source tells me that “pissing in the wind” is “wasting time” and that makes me think of “pissing into the wind” which has more of a meaning of “futility” to it—an uphill battle, a messy and annoying way to get things done. Interestingly this phrase seems to have existed also in French way back almost as far as when piss’s first French citation; 1280.

One phrase that as often opts for pee as it does for piss is to “pee my pants.” This can mean one is laughing so hard that bladder control is lost, or that you’re very scared and a little squirt gets out.  This definition actually shows up in the OED with a citation of 1946.  More accurately to quote:

To urinate involuntarily in one’s underclothes, usually as the result of extreme fear, hilarity, or excitement.

And this puts me in mind of yet another incident with those family friends I mentioned.  I was on a canoe trip with the sister-in-law of the aforementioned mother.  She had her two kids in tow, I had my two.  A bear rolled into our campsite in broad daylight scattering frightened campers left and right. 

While I stood with a can of pepper spray in one hand and a foot in a canoe, she got the kids out on the water in the other canoe as I pelted the bear with stones until he went away.  As soon as they were out on the water 3 of the 4 kids needed to pee.  

The podictionary word for today is believe:  We live by our beliefs.  That’s a good thing.  But I think we always have to keep checking that our beliefs are based on fact and rationale and not influenced by our desires, or worse, the desires of others. Here are a few quotations that should make us think twice; in chronological order:

• Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish. Julius Caesar
• A false report, if believed during three days, may be of great service to a government. Catherine de’ Medici
• Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word. Charles de Gaulle

We live by our beliefs and that is tied up in the etymology of the word.  As far as we know believe first turned up on the page 800 years ago which makes it Middle English. But it isn’t evolved from a French or Latin word, it comes from an Old English word leefan or geleefan.  These words themselves already had a meaning of “believe” or “to hold dear” and they and other variants like ileve and leve were still in use during the life of Geoffrey Chaucer.  All of them trace back through Old Teutonic to Indo-European and actually seem to connect with the roots of the word love.  What we believe is often as much about feeling as it is about fact. 

The gulf between belief and fact is reflected in the expression “believe it or not” by which we mean “you may not take this to heart, but I’m presenting it as a fact just the same.”  It seems that this phrase might have actually been popularized by Robert Ripley.  The Oxford English Dictionary isn’t set up to show first citations of phrases, but their first citation of this phrase definitely does not predate the first time Ripley published a cartoon under the byline Believe it or Not; that was in 1919. 

Although Ripley always maintained that his stories were true and that he could back them up, the fact that they were often so bizarre made them unbelievable and gives a sense to the phrase that makes us question when someone says “believe it or not.”

The podictionary word for today is quagmire:  I’ll start with a few headlines that use the word:

• Cheney Once Warned Of ‘Quagmire’ From An Open-Ended Commitment In Iraq
• Tullytown council’s PR quagmire
• Quagmire of codes confounds business owners
• Unavoidable I-5 traffic quagmire to hit South End this summer

In all of these examples quagmire is used to mean a difficult situation, or in the case of business codes, a confusing situation.  These meanings began to be used back about 250 years ago based on an earlier meaning of the word from 400 years ago.  That earlier meaning was built on the two root words of quagmire, quag and mire.  Today we still recognize the word mire. 

A mire was a swamp and so to be mired would mean to be stuck as if in a swamp, or to be spattered and smeared with mud as if from struggling out of a swamp.  The quag part isn’t a word we use anymore but it seems to have had a life of its own with a meaning of “swamp,” so in one sense a quagmire is a “swamp-swamp.”  But quag notably also held a meaning of “shake,” so that a quagmire is a “shaking swamp;” synonyms at the time were quakemire and wagmire. 

So the idea is a swamp or bog with such saturated soil that trying to walk in it actually creates waves in the goo; a non-gritty quicksand.  I did see one quote giving George Bush credit for the seemingly impossible task of turning the sandy Iraqi desert into just such a saturated piece of turf.  So the current meaning of “an extremely difficult situation” is just a metaphor for the literal difficulty of trying to claw one’s way out of an extremely boggy sucking swamp.  The first person to write the word down is of note; his name was Sir Thomas North.  North was a lawyer and a soldier but he made his name in history as a translator. 

In fact he seems to be the meat in the sandwich because all the references I looked at say not only was he playing second fiddle a bit to the original authors by acting as translator, but at least part of his enduring fame was due to the fact that Shakespeare read him, and evidently liked his work, because he used it in his plays.  These were the days before copyright law and Shakespeare in some cases lifted quite long passages from North’s work and plunked them almost unchanged into his own work. 

Now-a-days that would get you into trouble, and speaking of trouble I note that back in the 1400s “to mire” was to be involved in sinfulness from which it is not easy to withdraw.  I wonder if the writers knew that when they named the extremely promiscuous character in the animated show The Family Guy, Glenn Quagmire.