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Urbandictionary says that flagrant is “breaking the law.” Now I have to remind you that Urbandictionary is a website that has a database of words defined by website users, not necessarily by any experts or people with lexicographical credentials. I think that Urbandictionary is really a useful resource because I can see there word meanings and interpretations of younger people, that haven’t had time to percolate into the more official type dictionaries. In this case, for the word flagrant I think that whoever posted the definition is showing a sense of the word as it is used today, without perhaps the full context.

To me the phrase “a flagrant disregard for the law” jumps to mind. So it isn’t that flagrant itself is law-breaking, it’s that the law-breaking is done in a particularly audacious manner; something hard to ignore. It is the insistent, imperative nature of the word that makes it appropriate for this use. The reason such a criminal act is flagrant is that it is flamingly outrageous.

Flagrant means “burning”, “in flames”; it’s related to the word conflagration. It only came into English in the last 500 years, but before that it was from Latin and in turn its roots go back to Indo-European meanings of “shining”, “flashing” and “burning.” The first meaning it had in English was of burning, but that’s considered an obsolete use now.

The first person to use the word in the sense of an outrageous criminal act was one Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe. That was 100 years after Shakespeare. Not only did Daniel Defoe write stories, he also owned a ceramics factory. A century and a half after his death during the age of steam in England workmen were digging to lay railway tracks across the former site of Defoe’s factory. There they turned up old bricks, clay pipes that people used to use as disposable smoking accoutrements, and roofing tiles. A literary type stopped by the worksite one day and pointed out to the workmen that all that stuff had been made by the author of Robinson Crusoe 150 years before. What had at first appeared as junk to the men with spades, suddenly became collector’s items.

And with that I’ve been able to connect the fires of steam locomotives, the fires of Defoe’s ceramics kilns, and the fires of flagrant all into one.

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According to the New York Times a riot involving about 500 inmates was a fracas. The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the word comes from Italian and meant “to make an uproar.” The latter half of the word, cas has a Latin root that means to break things.

A scene comes to mind of a couple in a ferocious argument with plates flying.

Urbandictionary points out that what is termed a fracas when movie stars do it, is called assault if it’s you and me.

The woman who brought the word into English had a little fight in her I’d say. Her name was Mary Wortley Montagu. In 1712 when her dad told her she had to marry a guy she didn’t love, she upped and out of there, eloping with her longtime sweetheart of whom her father disapproved. She formed a long-lasting, spiteful and very public fracas-full relationship with Alexander Pope. Evidently this started when he told her he loved her and she laughed in his face, subsequently devolving into satirical plays and correspondence back and forth and passed around among friends and amused acquaintances in English society.

At one time Mary went on a trip to the Mediterranean. To save money she hitched a ride with a commodore on one of the navy’s ships. When they got to their destination she told the commodore that although she knew she was not supposed to pay him for this little favor, she hoped he would accept this emerald ring to remember her by. For years the commodore cherished the ring until one day a friend suggested he have a jeweler take a look at it. It turned out to be a cheesy imitation.

I can’t think of a more appropriate person to introduce fracas to the English language.

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The word voila is transparently French and I see both from Urbandictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary that it isn’t just me who thinks people use the word to add flourish to something they are revealing. In fact, the first two citations in the Oxford English Dictionary have this same sense of something suddenly revealed. The French that makes up voila is voi and la, two words that exactly correlate to our “look” and “there. ” So voila is an exact translation of “look there.” Somehow “look there” doesn’t’ have the same flourish to it.

Those two citations I mentioned in the OED are from the poet Thomas Gray and the politician and writer Horace Walpole, both writing a decade or two either side of 1750. By coincidence these two citation authors were great friends and had hung out at school together before doing the grand European tour together after school. No doubt these two already knew how to speak French, which is why they were able to pull voila out of their hats, but they likely improved their French during their stay in France.

Horace Walpole also just happened to be the son of the Prime Minister and while he was touring through France he stopped one day to admire a grand cathedral. Think of how such a young man would have traveled in the day and you’ll not be surprised to hear that he had a little pet dog along with him. As he was gazing up at the glazing his dog trotted over to the font of holy water, and it being a hot day, had a drink. Walpole figured he’d better get out of there fast, that catching the son of the English Prime Minster watering his dog at one of France’s holy places might be seen as somewhat controversial.

Voila, he was gone.

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Over eleven hundred years ago there were not very many literate people in the place we now call England. One of the guys back then who was literate, one of the very few, was someone we remember today as King Alfred the Great. One day he sat down, pen in hand and began to write down in English a story that he had know for a long time, and studied repeatedly in Latin.

At the time the English he used would have been what we now call Old English, and it was so different from our current English that when I look the citation for the precursor word for silly that is shown to me in a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary not only do I have a hard time picking out which word is the one that’s supposed to be the forerunner of our word silly, of the 15 words in the citation, I only recognize one of them.

The story Alfred was translating was Boethius. Actually, Boethius was the original author and the work is also known as the Consolation of Philosophy. It would have been quite a while, certainly not that first day, before Alfred got to the word silly—it’s quite far on in the work. But when he wrote it down, talking about some Greek islanders who were ancient even when Boethius wrote about them, the word silly didn’t mean to Alfred what it might mean to you. It meant that the people on that Greek isle were “fortunate”, “prosperous” and “happy”. There is an Indo-European root that takes silly back to a meaning of “happy.”

Etymonline gives a succinct list of the transformation of meanings that silly has gone through over the centuries. Whereas silly people were at first “fortunate” they then became “blessed.” If they were “blessed” then it only made sense that they were “pious,” so a silly person was one who was devout. Then as now, one of the qualities of being devout might be “innocence” and so silly took on this meaning too. It isn’t a huge logical step for someone who is an “innocent” to be seen as “harmless”, and if “harmless”, perhaps “weak”. If “weak”, then “weak of mind”, and so “foolish” which is where we find silly in meaning by the time of Shakespeare’s birth.

So from a start of “happiness” and the good fortune to be born on a warm Mediterranean island, the meaning corkscrewed to today’s meaning of “clueless.”

This however is not the origin of the expression “ignorance is bliss.”

That has a shorter history, being written as the closing line to a poem by Thomas Gray. A slightly more expanded quotation of which is:

Where ignorance is bliss
‘Tis folly to be wise

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There is a lot of talk these days about profiling. Whether it is racial profiling where the police are accused of assuming someone is more likely to commit a crime based on the color of their skin; or profiling internet users so they can be sold more products. In either case, the idea is that an image is being developed of someone. Since a more literal meaning of a profile is an outline tracing someone’s features from the side, it’s clear that the image is only a partial one.

If you see a person’s profile it usually means you see them from the side. That’s the meaning the word had when it first entered English from Italian in 1715. What was Italian in 1715 in all likely hood had been Latin when the Romans roamed Europe and beyond, and such is the case with profile.

The reason a person’s side view is called a profile is that the etymology of the word breaks down into pro and filare. The pro part means “to bring forth”, filare is related to our word filament and means “to spin out a line.” So what was likely once a meaning of making thread was applied metaphorically to the drawing of a line on paper, making the outline of a face.

There is a citation in the OED for the American humorist and author James Thurber using the word profile in its sense of an artistic rendering of someone. Thurber was once courted by Sam Goldwyn to write for the movies. Thurber packed up his bags in New York and moved to Hollywood. He was provided with a secretary but when he tried to work with her, giving her dictation on the screenplay, she responded that she couldn’t take dictation on dialogue, but only did letters. Thurber had to start all his dictation by saying “dear Sam.” Later, the movie producer asked for revisions but Thurber was fed up and said no, moved back to New York and sent back his $28,000 fee.

That’s about $400,000 now.

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When verdict appears in the English literary record in 1297 or so, the government had been operating in French in England for coming on 250 years. Plenty of time for a word like verdict to move from French into English. Of course, the word is self-evidently related to legal proceedings and since these too would have been going on in French it makes all the more sense.

Verdict comes from the mashing together of two French words that meant “truth” and “speak.” So at the end of a trial one would hope that the outcome, the closing statement as it were, was the word of truth about the matter. The first appearance however, was in a document that scholars feel holds not too much truth at all. The document is know as the Metrical Chronicle and its author is recorded as Robert of Gloucester. It’s called metrical because it’s written in rhymed couplets. I’ve actually mentioned it before. Scholars of old took it all very seriously, but no one now believes such fantasies as the idea that the Roman Brutus trooped over to Britain to found a country and that the reason it’s called Britain is after Brutus.

The verdict doesn’t run entirely against poor Robert of Gloucester however. Because more recent scholars, in looking closely at the 16 copies of the manuscript from centuries ago, seem to feel that Robert didn’t write all that nonsense himself. A pile of anonymous scribes seem to have put together those lines of the poem—the suspicious details of which appear in other old documents as well—and Robert just came along at the end, added some more recent history that he’d actually lived through, and then been given credit for the whole thing.

What Robert did chronicle more accurately were the wars against King Henry III by his Barons which ended in a battle known as Evesham. This put an end to the uprising against Henry as practically all of the anti-royalist forces were slaughtered in one go. The ringleader’s body was divided into various pieces and dispatched to various parts of England to let any other rebels know that they’d better start supporting the king.

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The word pearl comes to English from Latin through Norman French, that’s for sure. But there is some debate how exactly it got into Latin in the first place.

There was in fact another Latin word that meant “pearl” and that word was margarite. Margarite was old enough that it or some related word had found its way into Old English and its Germanic ancestors as meregrot also meaning “pearl.” The name Margaret comes from this same source.

But the word pearl is most likely to have come from a word that had more to do with farm animals than the watery deeps. You already know that pearls are formed by oysters when a little grit or something gets into their shell. Cultured pearls don’t have at their core a grain of sand, but instead are little plastic or glass beads or something that pearl farmers stick into the oyster for a year or so. The oyster dutifully coats the little marble with an outer layer of pearl and much time is saved not having to grow each pearl up from the size of a sand grain. Although since this exercise is often fatal to the oyster, one might think they would prefer taking the time to do it right. Anyway, the reason we call pearls pearls seems to be that way back in Roman times someone thought that the shell of the oyster or maybe some other part of it looked the same shape as a ham, or maybe a leg of mutton because that’s what the Latin word pernula seems to have meant.

Ham, lamb, oyster all edible. Pearls not so much. But you can see some connection.

Alternative theories exist too. One of these is that pearls and pears are similar enough in shape that the word for pears was applied to pearls too. So you can see that no one really knows. The first time the word appeared in English meaning what you’d think of as a pearl was in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales back in 1375.

When someone is knitting a scarf or a sweater the phrase knit one purl two might fit the context, but in this case the purl is a different word spelled P U R L and comes from a source meaning “twist.”

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Tomorrow is the 300th birthday of Carolus Linnaeus and I chose boa constrictor as the word for today because it is one of the few common words that old Carolus contributed to the English Language. He did that in 1788. Most of the rest he contributed are pretty technical.

As I said before old Carolus was the guy who invented our scientific classification scheme for plants and animals. He was supposed to be a clergyman like his dad, but liked gardening instead so got sent off to university and became a doctor. 100 years before Charles Darwin stirred up controversy by suggesting that humans and apes had evolved from common ancestors, Linnaeus had reached more or less the same conclusion in sorting out which animals should be classified as related.

He thought that the boa constrictor, a South American snake, was the biggest snake in the world. But it seems that the Anaconda and the Asiatic Reticulated Python compete for that honor. The reason he named what he thought was the biggest snake the boa constrictor was first of all that it constricts, that means it kills it’s food by winding itself around it, then squeezing. It’s the boa part that’s etymologically interesting though. The Oxford English Dictionary says:

Adoption of Latin boa (Pliny Natural History VIII. xiv), of unknown origin: Pliny and St. Jerome derived it from bos an ox, for different reasons.

So that sent me scurrying to see if I could figure out what those different reasons were. Pliny the Elder is who they’re talking about and he was a Roman of the first century. Looking at his Natural History here’s what he thought:

in India, serpents grow to such an immense size, as to swallow stags and bulls…about the river Rhyndacus [modern Turkey] they seize and swallow the birds that are flying above them, however high and however rapid their flight

Presumably it’s a different species of snake that can jump up and devour birds, but the one that eats stags and bulls appears to take its name from the eating of cattle.

I couldn’t find what St. Jerome had to say about the boa, but I did come across a reference in a wonderful old etymology by St. Isidore of Seville who lived in the sixth century. He said:

The boa is a snake in Italy [so the geography has changed] of immense size, attacks herds of cattle and buffalos, and attaches itself to the udders of the ones flowing with plenty of milk, and kills them by sucking on them, and from this takes the name boa from the destruction of cows (bos).

I doubt that Linnaeus believed that snakes could grow to quite the size that these more ancient authorities believed, but he did take this word boa on their say-so.

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Spring is well and truly here and people are thinking about their gardens. Someone asked me the other day if there was any connection between the plant impatiens and the sense of not being willing to wait. I’m going to make you wait for the answer because I’m going to start with the background on the word patient. Here is a word that came into English with the French of the Norman Conquest. It turns up in 1350 with the meaning I used in asking you to be patient in waiting for me to answer that question about the plant name.

The Oxford English Dictionary more precisely puts it:

Enduring pain, affliction, inconvenience, etc., calmly, without discontent or complaint

The word root of course goes back to Latin from a root pati “to suffer” but connects further back to Greek, Sanskrit and Indo-European to meanings of “suffering” and “want.” So somewhere before it came into English this root had shifted its meaning from one of suffering to that of enduring suffering.

In English it only took a couple of decades from that first citation before someone who was being looked after by a physician was called a patient. So the idea of being a medical patient goes back to the suffering you are undergoing due to the illness. I guess that means if you are just making a doctor’s appointment for an annual check-up, you’re not a patient in the strict etymological sense.

This first citation of a patient as a “’medical patient” comes from the pen of Geoffrey Chaucer in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, appropriately enough, describing the physician who went along on the pilgrimage to Canterbury.

From patient we turn to impatient (since you’re in such a hurry). And here too the word stems from before it emerged in English. In both French and Latin the root of patient had already been added-to when referring to those people who insisted on complaining, instead of bearing their burdens in silence.

One fall afternoon I was strolling the street and although it wasn’t silent, I did hear an unusual snapping and popping sound. Looking around for the source I found a hedge covered with seed pods, sort of like green beans or wax beans, but smaller. In the sunshine these little pods were splitting open; bursting. And in so doing each half of the pod twisted and curled away from the other half like a little spring and flung some of the seeds out onto the ground.

The plant impatiens has seed pods like this and the reason the plant is called impatiens is that it has this trick of not waiting for the gardener to gather its seeds; or of bursting and spraying the seeds when the gardener tries to gather them.

Lots of plants have common names and scientific names besides. This impatiens name turns out to be both, and it just happens that this year, 2007, happens to be the 300th birthday of the guy who invented the system by which plants and animals are scientifically classified. He was a Swedish guy named Carolus Linnaeus and it turns out his birthday was May 23 so I’m actually going to be posting this episode very close to that day.

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Olympic bicycle races are held in a velodrome. Why should this be?

The reason is a collision of two forms of non-motorized transport. I’ll start by breaking the word in half, velo and drome. The word velo is French for “bicycle” and in fact we got velodrome from French as well, but only back in 1902. In English we’ve been calling a bicycle a bicycle only since its first citation as recently as 1868. Before a bicycle was called a bicycle it was called a velocipede. The French velo is a shortening of velocipede.

A velocipede was in turn named because in Latin it means “swift foot”, and this has to do with the historical development of the bicycle. In the early 1800s bicycles stared out without pedals. Imagine a bike frame of today where the top bar was one long extended seat and the way you made it go was by kicking along with your legs. It worked but wasn’t very popular in part because all your weight was on your crotch and the roads weren’t very smooth in those days.

An advance came soon after by adding pedals to the front wheel. This could go faster than the push-along model and that’s when it started to be called the swift foot or velocipede.

The mechanics of the situation are that the bigger the wheel the faster a rider could go without any gears on the bike. Since no one had thought of gears yet, this encouraged bicycles to larger and larger front wheels which is why those antique bicycles you still see images of looked like that. The bigger wheel also made the bumpy streets feel not quite so hard on the crotch. One major problem with this sort of bike was that the rider was sitting up just behind top-dead-center on the big front wheel. That lead to big problems stopping. If one was making any speed at all – and that was the whole point of the big wheel – then running into a dog or farm animal or even trying to slow down too quickly meant that the rider went ass over teakettle forward. The situation was made worse since his legs were trapped under the handle bars.

This dangerous device was called a bicycle starting in 1868, 50 years after velocipede. I’m sure the only reason it was able to change its name in the popular vocabulary was that it had never been too popular to begin with.

Sometimes you hear a bicycle being called a safety bicycle. This is because these big-wheeled versions were so unsafe.

Before I leave the velo part of velodrome I should say the obvious. A bicycle is called a bicycle because it has two wheels; bi- cycle.

The drome part of velodrome goes back much further. A hippodrome is a fancy word for a “racecourse.” It comes from Latin and ultimately Greek where hippos meant “horse” and dromos meant “race” or “racecourse.” There were horse races back in ancient Rome and Greece so the word goes that far back. It may seem strange that hippos means “horse” in Greek since it reminds us of hippopotamus. But in fact the hippopotamus was named by the ancient Greeks who saw it as a “horse of the river,” which is what hippopotamus means. Since the word hippodrome was already in existence, particularly in French, when a word for a “bicycle racecourse” was needed the natural thing seemed to be to glom that dromus ending onto velo; hence velodrome.