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If I tell you that the water in a lake is “crystal clear” you’re likely to equate the clarity to that of a wine glass made of expensive crystal. But it is more from the lake than from the glass that crystal grew.

The first citations in English for the word crystal were circa the year 1000. Even though this predates the Norman invasion it is thought that English got the word from Old French, which in turn got it from Latin, where in turn it came from Greek. There are also likely Indo-European roots that relate crystal to our word crust.

Here’s how that would work. The Indo-European parent, or great-great-grand-parent of both words meant something that was “freezing over.” It’s easy enough to see how that might relate to crust; as wet snow re-freezes it forms a crust. The Greeks used a similar word to mean frost and snow; krustallos. By the time crystal turns up in English 1000 years ago it holds both the meanings of “ice” and also of “crystalline rocks” particularly those that are transparent like ice. It’s thought that it was the Greeks who used the ice metaphor of krustallos for minerals, and we continue to do it when we call a diamond ring ice.

The first time glassware was called crystal was during Shakespeare’s time about 400 years ago, but what we think of as fine crystal hadn’t yet been invented. In the mid 1600s English glass-makers were fed up with foreign competition and they hired George Ravenscroft to see if he could figure out how to make good glass with materials found inside the British Isles. He experimented with adding flint to the glass with good results but it seemed over time the glass would lose its clarity, so then he hit on the idea of adding lead.

Who’d have thought that a glass made up of something like one third lead by weight would appear more clear than glass without lead. The key is that the lead changes the refractive index of glass making it sparkle more. As well, all that lead makes glass easier to cut, which is why you see all those cut glass patterns on expensive glassware, which in turn makes the glass sparkle even more.

George made a lot of money and his patents conveniently ran out just about the time he died. The problem, we now know, is that lead isn’t very good for you when you eat it and experts these days recommend that you don’t store liquids in lead crystal containers, or even drink from them if you are pregnant or a kid.

The Ravenscroft glass company is still a going concern but I notice that their website splash page claims them to be:

“The Leader in Handmade Lead-free Crystal…”

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The thing that comes to mind when I hear the word egg is an ovoid object about the size of a golf ball that has been excreted by a chicken and tastes good with bacon, or mayonnaise, or scrambled with cheese, or fluffed into waffles, or…mmm…now I’m getting hungry.

But the fact is that any product of a female with a biological intention of reproduction is an egg. We just see more of the chicken variety than most others.

With this background I note that the ancestor words for egg do indeed seem to relate to birds, at least according to the American Heritage Dictionary. They point to an Indo-European root word awi that meant “bird” and one of its derivatives that was supposed to mean “egg.” They spell that ajja so I’m not quite sure how it’d be pronounced. The Oxford English Dictionary traces our English egg back to Old English and its Germanic ancestor languages but acknowledges it is likely related to the Latin and Greek words for “egg”, but that they just can’t prove it.

Words like this, for things that have been with humanity for time out of mind have a credibility in their etymology. The words are unlikely to have changed much over time because they are simple basic words that apply to simple basic parts of life that are also pretty unchanging. One can imagine people many thousands of years ago harvesting eggs for their breakfast.

But that doesn’t mean the word hasn’t changed at all. The first printer in England William Caxton tells a story in the mid 1400s about eggs. In his story a merchant trying to sail to the European mainland from London is becalmed and while waiting for some wind goes ashore in south western England to find some food. He asks a farm wife for some eggs and her response is that she doesn’t speak French. It turns out that her word for an egg is eyren. Caxton’s point was that there were more dialects in England earlier in his life, but my point is that the word eyren, just like the word egg, came from Old English; egg from the north, eyren from the south. Both had in turn come from Germanic roots but the people who used each word had been living in isolation from each other for long enough, maybe in England, more likely in Germanic areas of Europe, that their words morphed just enough to be mutually unrecognizable.

Turning to the egg itself, have you ever marveled at how an egg cooks? Is there a way to uncook an egg?

What happens is that when you crack a fresh egg into the frying pan it is made up of (among other things) lots of invisibly small protein molecules. Each of these proteins is curled up in a little ball and floating around gelatinously with its colleagues. As the heat from the frying pan begins to reach this tight little ball it begins to loosen up and eventually straighten out into a long chainlike molecule. Since all of its buddies are doing the same thing the molecules tend to get more and more tangled with one another and where some chemical bonds got broken in the unwinding, others form with neighboring proteins; what was once a transparent liquid becomes an opaque solid.

Like Humpty Dumpty, it isn’t easy uncook an egg, but it isn’t impossible. At a chemical level the newly formed bonds have to be broken, and I’m told this can be done with sodium borohydride. But this raises two more questions, can the original coiling bonds be reformed and who’d want to eat it after that anyway.

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In the episode on promiscuous I mentioned a fellow named Mottley. His behavior wasn’t the most respectable and although I didn’t think there would be a connection, I wondered if our use of the word motley had any connection to his family name, even though it was spelled with two Ts; stranger things have happened.

As it turns out the answer is no. But I have in my mind a sense for the word motley that might be defined as “disreputable” although I can’t find such a definition in any dictionary. The band Motley Crew Mötley Crüe were sort of disreputable so maybe it’s that; they took their name from the phrase motley crew which meant a group of people with a mix of backgrounds, appearances and qualities.

To the degree, admittedly unsubstantiated, that motley does mean “lowbrow”, it is another case of meaning turning 180 degrees. The earliest citation we have for motley is back in 1371 which would make it solidly Middle English. At the time the meaning was of a high quality cloth that had been made with two or more different colored fibers. So cloth of multiple color took on the name motley and by the time of Shakespeare the multicolored costume of a jester was called motley. Over the next century motley was applied to groups of people who you might otherwise not think would hang out together.

So that’s why I was a little surprised when I saw a line from the New York Times describing a group of bicycle riding Puerto Ricans as a

“uniform but motley middle-aged gang.”

How could they be uniform if motley meant that they weren’t uniform; unless motley meant something else, perhaps my idea of “disreputable”? Then I found this, also from the New York Times talking about motorcyclists this time

“They are an intimidating bunch. Sheathed in leather from the neck down, they look like physical extensions of their bikes. But these riders are no motley crew. They are members of Rolling Thunder, a nationwide network of veterans and their supporters.”

So I feel at least I’m not alone in my unsubstantiated sense of the meaning of motley.

As to the etymology, the dictionaries I checked seemed fairly unanimous in their suspicions that motley might come from the same source as mote, which would make its source Old English. A mote is a tiny speck of something, and you might image some Middle English motley fabric to have a look of specks of different color. The word mote traces back to similar words in other Germanic languages most of them meaning small pieces of dirt or dust. But although Mr. J. C. Mottley’s lifestyle may have been dirty—he was the guy I mentioned in the promiscuous episode—he doesn’t appear to be etymologically related.

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I notice that the Oxford English Dictionary has issued its quarterly update of new and updated words. There are almost 2,700 hundred of them although I’m not sure the split between new words and revised entries for words already existing in the dictionary.

Of course promiscuous was a word already there. This was one of those words that literary showoffs in the days before Shakespeare plucked from classical Latin. The showoff in this case was a guy named Thomas Norton who was a poet, man of letters, lawyer and member of Parliament during the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

Now, you know that over at Urbandictionary they define promiscuous as

“Having casual sexual relations frequently with different partners”

–which for Urbandictionary is surprisingly accurate and polite. But back when Thomas Norton so cleverly thought of this word he had no notion of people sleeping around. In Latin the root word meant “common” “shared” and “general” and was based on Latin components that more or less mean “mixed up” so that the sense that promiscuous first had as it entered English almost 450 years ago was something that was not organized or ordered.

It wasn’t until just over 200 years ago that we first see people being referred to as promiscuous concerning their choice of bedmates. The scene is Portsmouth England and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is staying at the home of a prominent resident, the bookseller J. C. Mottley. While there Coleridge fired off some mail to his friends including his buddy William Wordsworth and in it he both praises and damns his host. Evidently Mottley was making every effort to make Coleridge’s stay a happy and successful one, but Mottley’s personal habits weren’t in line with Coleridge’s. In more than one letter Coleridge uses the word promiscuous in describing Mottley’s addiction (he does say addiction) to sleeping with as he puts it “women of all classes”; this despite the fact that Mottley has a lovely wife and six or seven beautiful children.

And then there’s the smoking and drinking and swearing like a sailor. You get the feeling that Coleridge is kind of anxious to move along as soon as the weather will let his ship get going. Yet he doesn’t want to get his host in trouble and goes so far as to give him a code name in case the others write back about the scandalous behavior, and here he is unconsciously showing off his classical education when instead of using Mottley’s name he suggests the code name Poecilus that he plucks from ancient Greek. A mottled pattern will have various hues, and that’s what Poecilus means.

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There are two basic meanings to the word execute. One is “to kill,” the other is “to do something.” The dictionaries I consulted listed many more meanings than just two but really most of them were just slightly different flavors of “to do something.”

Sitting here at my desk it seemed to me that the more common use of execute was the “to kill” meaning, but maybe that’s just the influence of recent years of hearing about terrorists kidnapping and killing people. When I went and did a search on execute in the New York Times I found that actually, the first seven hits that came up were for “to do something.” It was only when I came to the eighth that “to kill” appeared.

This is where having access to a corpus would come in handy. If you haven’t heard me talk about a corpus before, in the context of dictionaries, a corpus is a database of many many words that lexicographers use to explore things like, for instance, what percentage of the time when execute is used, does it mean “to kill” and what percentage does it mean “to do something.” The word corpus is from Latin and means “body”, so a language corpus is a great body of words. I had the good fortune the other day to talk to the guy who runs the Oxford English Corpus that he says now contains 1.8 billion words. I’ll post that conversation as a podcast sometime this summer.

But getting back to execute: We meet a few old friends looking at the first citations for each of the two meanings I mentioned. The first of these was the meaning of “to do something” and the oldest English record we have of the use of this meaning of execute comes from the pen of Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales. Specifically execute appeared in 1386 in The Knight’s Tale. Chaucer lived at a time when English was just beginning to reemerge as a language of literacy after being dominated for more than 300 years by French. So no surprise that execute comes from French, and in turn, no surprise that the French form comes from Latin. The breakdown of the word in Latin was ex sequi. The sequi part is the same as we use in our English word sequence and has a root meaning of “to follow.” The ex part is like exit in meaning “out” so that execute literally means “to follow out.” So when I said one of the meanings was “to do something” it’d be more accurate to say “to do something you’d intended to do” or “to do something you’d been told to do.” Certainly that’s the meaning when a computer program has the file extension EXE, it’s an executable file, one that will follow out the instructions it’s given.

Which brings us to following out legal sentences of putting someone to death. I see that Hugh Rawson in his Dictionary of Euphemisms says that terrorists prefer the term execute when they murder their victims because it lends an air of legality and justice to the slaughter. The first time execute appears in English with the meaning “to kill” someone is from 1483 off the presses of William Caxton, the first English printer.

One might logically conclude that the killing of a condemned man is called an execution because the executioner is just carrying out his orders. That’s what most of the dictionaries think, including the Oxford English Dictionary, but there they also pose another possibility. The OED points out that the ancestor of execute already had the two basic meanings I mention in medieval French and Latin so it’s hard to tell if this is really where the root of the “killing” execute comes from, since there is also another Latin sense exsequi “to pursue to the end” and for the guy who dies, it’s certainly the end.

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In 1928 Alec Fleming (now remembered as Sir Alexander Fleming) named the juice he extracted from some mold penicillin. The story goes that he had been studying Staphylococcus bacteria and went away on holiday (I think his honeymoon) for two weeks. When he came back his dirty dishes were still in the sink as it were, there on the lab bench; but he noticed something weird about them. There was one place where a kind of mold had started growing, and the Staphylococcus had completely died around this place. In one account I read the reason he called the juice he eventually extracted from this mold penicillin was that it looked like the mold had painted a circle around itself, where the Staphylococcus couldn’t grow, and the word penicillin comes from a Latin word that means “paintbrush.”

Some confusion here because it turns out that although penicillin does come from a Latin word that means “paintbrush”, the reason Fleming called penicillin penicillin was that the kind of mold he had on hand was a kind already called Penicillium notatum. It’s the fact that the little furry bits of this mold that hold the spores are shaped like brushes that connects both names back to the Latin word for paintbrush.

In fact this is a similar root for our word pencil and also penis. It isn’t that anyone thought that a penis looked like a paintbrush, but instead that those old Romans used the word to refer both to a paintbrush and also to an animal’s tail, which in some cases does look like a brush. A simpler association between tail and penis I think.

Anyway, back to Alec Fleming. He himself referred to this tale as the Fleming myth. The idea that one guy alone could come up with such an important discovery. There are several other researchers now credited with the discovery or parallel discovery of penicillin. And it took other people as well to turn the discovery into production level quantities of the stuff. But Fleming got the early credit, and the knighthood. And he deserved it too. He was especially interested in antibiotic properties and so he was a ready victim of the drifting mold spore that alighted during his vacation. Before that he had been researching the antibiotic properties of his own snot. That was unlikely to get him a knighthood I suppose.

Before I go, I thought I’d mention that that bacteria he was studying Staphylococcus has an interesting etymology too. If you look at Staphylococcus under a powerful microscope it looks like a bunch of little grains in bunches. Staphylococcus from Greek means “bunch of grapes – berry”

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It is remarkably appropriate that the first appearance of the word dream in English manuscripts was supposed to have been written by a guy named Caedmon. There are two remarkably appropriate reasons for this.

Caedmon is supposed to have lived around the year 650. He was an illiterate herdsman who was a herdsman’s party one night when all the other herdsmen were yucking it up and singing songs. Actually the account says it was monks who were partying. Evidently he was worried someone was going to ask him to sing a song and he just wasn’t up to it so he snuck off to go to bed. I imagine him stretched out in the straw and dreaming. The historical accounts have him dreaming that’s for sure, because if he hadn’t had the dream that he did, we’d never have heard of him.

So in his dream, just like at the party, someone demands that he sing a song and since this is a dream, after a little herdsmanly obfuscation, he bursts forth with a song of the greatness of God and God’s creation.

Now why is this important? Why would it get him remembered in the history books from a time when almost nothing else is remembered? The reasons are that when he told the monks of his dream, and was able to remember the song he sang in his dream, they took him to the abbess and she got him started on singing other religious songs as well. Now it’s not that he was inspired by divine guidance to sing these songs, in fact the monks told him the basic facts about each of the subjects he sang about. The thing that was special back then was that the abbess and the monks would have learned all these sacred tales in Latin and Caedmon was singing them in English. He was special to them because he was translating sacred hymns. I guess the monks and the abbess thought it was a good thing to let other illiterate herdsmen and common folk hear the word of God in a language they could understand.

But the reason he is special to history, for those of us who have plenty of other English sacred material to chew on, is that he was one of the first to do so in English so his stuff represents some of the older Old English.

So it’s a very fine thing that the first time our word of the day dream got written down it was because of a guy made famous by his dreams. But what makes it doubly fine is that when his word dream was written down, it didn’t actually mean the dream he had at night, but instead, at the time, the word dream meant what he dreamt about; the Old English meaning of dream is “joy,” “rejoicing” and “music.”

Our word dream meaning the “visions you see during sleep” didn’t show up until Middle English and there seems to be some debate as to whether it is the same word or not. The American Heritage Dictionary seems to indicate that it was, but the Oxford English Dictionary leans decidedly the other way. According to the OED our word dream must have come from Old English but it just doesn’t appear there and they speculate that the existence of another word dream at the time had some influence on people’s willingness to actually write down the one we use now.

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Both Etymonline and the American Heritage Dictionary tell me that the word lunch is an abbreviation of the word luncheon. But the Oxford English Dictionary isn’t so sure. This seems to be one of those words that poured into the language during Shakespeare’s lifetime, except it isn’t one that was built on Latin or Greek roots. No one is completely sure where it came from. The word luncheon certainly appears first in the written record, but the OED points out other words like punch and puncheon and trunch and truncheon that were also kicking around at the time. They speculate that while lunch might be short for luncheon, it’s also possible that luncheon was an extension to lunch.

At their first appearance both words, lunch and luncheon hold a meaning a little different than what we understand them to mean today. The OED connects lunch to the word lump because at first a lunch was a chunk of food. A lunch of bacon was a “thick slice of bacon”, not a “meal of bacon.” It was not until about 300 years ago that luncheon started to mean what we think it means today, and then by the early 1800s began to appear again as lunch with that meaning. When it did, lunch was seen as a really trendy word and as such looked down on by some.

One of my jobs was with a group of wonderful people who sometimes referred to themselves as “the out to lunch bunch.” The phrase out to lunch, meaning to be “not with it” appeared in 1955 and although I see no etymological evidence to back me up on this, this seems to me to have been a time when frequent business lunches liberally lubricated with martinis were seen as advantageous to one’s career.

Anyway, I see now at Urbandictionary that in some sense out to lunch has itself been abbreviated since word lunch is defined there as

When someone is acting stupid or having fun… usually as a result of being high.

This seems an appropriate place for a W C Fields quote, he is supposed to have said

Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.

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Murray Suid was kind enough to point out to me his book Words of a Feather: A Humorous Puzzlement of Etymological Pairs. In it he brings together pairs of words that might seem to have nothing to do with one another, but are joined somewhere back in etymological history. Today’s podictionary word is inspired by his pairing of the words infant and infantry.

Margaret Drabble is a British novelist, from her book The Millstone comes the quote:

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember…

And in this, Margaret Drabble has hit on what Murray Suid tells me also in his piece. Incommunicable; infants can’t talk yet. In fact, the reason they are called infants is because they can’t talk yet. The fant part of infant comes from Latin where its word root meant “to talk” so in-fant means “not talk.” The infantry on the other hand are not a bunch of babies, they are fighting men. And although they are not supposed to talk back to their superior officers, this isn’t the reason that they are called the infantry. English got both infant and infantry from French around 600 and 400 years ago respectively. Of course French was once upon a time Latin so it makes sense that the word roots go back to Latin.

It seems though that although we think of an infant as “a baby”, the word seems to have had a sort of stretchy existence. It must have meant “a baby” at first, when it meant that a child was too young to talk, but by the time it came into English it seems to have stretched to include older youths; people clearly old enough to talk. At the time when infantry came to mean “foot soldiers”, the word infant must have been stretched far enough that it still meant a very young person, but one who was old enough to be a very junior soldier. The foot soldier is the most junior of all the soldiers. While others ride on horseback, he walks.

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The Devil’s Dictionary has an entry for logic that reads in part:

The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

He then goes on to give an example:

Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.
Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds; therefore -
Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second

Now it seems to me that my sister once explained to me about how to cook a turkey in half an hour with logic something along these lines.

When most people use the word logic in everyday conversation what they are talking about is usually the string of ideas that lead them to a particular conclusion. Historically this idea has been formalized in philosophy to an extent that seems to defy logic, and in mathematics to an extent that gives us both headaches and computers, which in turn give us headaches. The English word logic comes from French and of course, in turn, Latin. But the Romans got it from the Greeks (those old philosophers) and I see from the American Heritage Dictionary that the word root goes back to Indo-European and relates to a word root meaning “to speak.” Logic is also etymologically related to the word root logos and Etymonline translates that old Greek root as “reason” “idea” or “word.”

So think of the relation between logic and words like this. When you think you have a good idea try to write it down. Try to write it down in a way that someone else reading it will come away agreeing with your idea. Crystallizing an idea into words on the page has a way of filtering out the false starts and making your logical blunders too embarrassing to sustain. I think the reason our word logic is related to logos meaning “word” is something along these lines. Even in pre-literate times a convincing argument had to be thought out clearly in order to convince anyone.

Pope John XXI is recorded as being one of the more intellectual popes and some time before he was elected pontiff he wrote a textbook on logic that was very influential in the Middle Ages. Illogically the Pope John before him was not John XX but John XIX since they seemed to have lost count what with all the pretend popes that popped up through history back then. I don’t suppose we can blame that minor numerical problem on Pope John XXI himself, but for all his logical talent things seemed to fall apart for him on a practical level. He’d only been pope for a year when the ceiling fell in at the papal palace he’d had built for himself and he was killed.

One problem I have with Ambrose Bierce and his logic is about that one man digging a post hole in sixty seconds. Have you ever tried to dig a post hole? So in this I have to agree with Lewis Carol, who wrote:

If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.