The word damage appeared in English about 700 years ago and it was the French of the Norman invasion that brought damage to England, certainly as a word and perhaps as a condition of the invasion. In French it meant “loss” or “hurt” and through Latin is etymologically closely related to the word damn. To damn someone was to “condemn” them to punishment, to “inflict damage” on them.

The word damn isn’t seen as a very rude word today but it was incredibly rude just a few decades ago. In the film Gone With the Wind Clark Gable exclaims

“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn”

and audiences in theatres across North America sat with their mouths hanging open in shock. We’ll I don’t know if they sat with their mouths hanging open in shock but MGM studios was certainly breaking the rules and had to negotiate for months and pay a huge fine in order to get the film into theatres with such an outrageous word in it.

So think of what kind of hell raising rebel came up with the phrase in 1909,

“life is just one damn thing after another.”

That was a journalist Elbert Hubbard in a magazine called the Philistine. He was an east coast contemporary of Ambrose Bierce who wrote the Devil’s Dictionary and I see that even Ambrose tiptoed around his definition of the word damn. Even more radical was this remake of that quote. A gal named Edna St. Vincent Millay responded

“It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another—it’s one damn thing over and over.”

Now if you don’t believe that using damn was a very radical thing to do back then, here’s a little poem that Edna is famous for:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–
It gives a lovely light!

And she should know. She took lovers like you get emails. She complained when two of her boyfriends remained friends with each other, they’d come over for dinner and then recline with her on the couch, one getting her top half, the other her bottom half, and discuss which one got the better deal.

Her candle didn’t last the night, for her the damage was done when she fell down the stairs alone at home one night.

I remember when I was part of the dating scene, all those decades ago, some guy once saying that the word pretty was outdated, that no one called girls pretty anymore. I don’t know if he was right or not, but at least one contributor to Urbandictionary puts a fairly high value on the word pretty explaining that when a guy says a girl is pretty it means he really likes her, while if he says she’s hot, he’s actually less likely to really want to date her. I don’t know if that’s true either but lots of other Urbandictionary users seem to agree.

The word itself appeared first back in Old English and way back then (some years before I was part of the dating scene) it meant something quite different than our current understanding. The word is an evolution of the word prat and the Old English meaning of prat is “trick.” You can still find that word as part of our more modern word pratfall, which is a “trick fall” done by an actor. So someone that was pretty was someone who was “tricky” and the actual Oxford English Dictionary definition for the oldest meaning of the word pretty is “cunning” and “crafty.”

By the middle of the 1400s it had changed its meaning to closer to that we recognize now. Between the two, the “tricky” softened to “clever” and “skillful” and undoubtedly these are more attractive and so lead to pretty meaning “attractive.”

So the scene was set for that famous diary writer of the late 1600s Samuel Pepys to call a certain actress turned royal mistress “pretty, witty Nell.”

Nell Gwyn must have had some of the tricky elements of pretty in her as well as the clever and accomplished, besides the physically attractive, because hers is the classic rags to riches story. Her mom ran a house of ill repute and as a little girl Nell plied the customers with brandy. As a young woman her older sister got her a job selling oranges in a theatre from where she graduated to being an actress. She climbed the social ranks on the arms of various, ever increasing aristocratically elevated men until she could climb no higher because her final boyfriend was Charles II, King of England.

I guess one could say rags to riches or slept her way to the top but most people still say rags to riches because she remained very popular with the public despite her lowly beginnings and her dodgy pedigree at court. This even though she never learned to read or write. They say pretty is as pretty does.

I was doing a radio interview for my book launch and probably because the book title Carnal Knowledge normally has a pretty sexual connotation, the interviewer started out by telling me that he wanted to stay away from anything too risqué. I admitted that yes, the book, since it’s a book about the words we use for our bodies, did include words for our private parts, and yes, they sometimes were considered rude, he really didn’t have to worry about me being rude.

I gave him the example of the word ass. Ass has always been part of English but mostly it meant “donkey.” It was arse that meant what we think of as “ass” now. It isn’t hard to see how people might have gotten confused between the two words. They sound very similar and given different dialects and pronunciations, in some places they might have sounded identical. But the implication was that as the meaning shifted people who wanted to refer to the animal got embarrassed and so had to come up with a new word. Although ass goes back thousands of years, donkey only shows up in 1785, as ass the rear end was gaining strength in common usage.

“So where did donkey come from?” the interviewer asked me. “I’ll have to look it up” I said. And so here I am with the answer.

There are two theories and in fact, both of them may be true. My grandmother was known to everyone as Brownie because as a kid she had brown hair. A donkey is a kind of dusty brown color that could be described as dun colored. This is a pretty boring reason to call a donkey a donkey.

But it seems that when people first started calling a donkey a donkey, they didn’t, actually. What I mean is, they called it a dunkey—as in donkey pronounced to rhyme with monkey.

The other theory is that just like people call cows Daisy or Bossy, and dogs Fido; donkeys when they were still asses were often named Duncan. As it turns out both the word dun for the dusty brown color and the name Duncan are words from Gaelic roots. The name Duncan is most common among Scottish families and the meaning of the name is, surprise-surprise “brown chief.” So either way, a donkey appears to be named for its color.

But wonder of wonders, I see by looking at Urbandictionary that people wanting to refer to that brown quadruped without any of the embarrassment that might be associated with the word ass might soon also have to abandon the word donkey. A very popular meaning of donkey at Urbandictionary is a male slang usage for a female rather large rear end.

Pretty subtle guys.

I’ve always smiled at the French expression of endearment mon petit chou. You might say this to your kids or your partner but the literal meaning is “my little cabbage.” I’ve managed to find two explanations as to why being a little cabbage might be a nice thing to be for a French person.

One relates to the old story of how kids come into the world by being found under a cabbage leaf. Now I don’t find this very satisfactory. And in fact neither this or the other explanation I’ll tell you in a minute come with the regular authority I’m able to offer having the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage and other dictionaries behind me. I use the French sources less often and so this is mostly anecdotal.

The explanation I find more credible is that there is a kind of French dessert desert like an éclair called chou à la crème and it is after this sweet treat that loved ones are called little cabbages. The French were calling their loved ones petit chou from before the mid 1700s. I find this explanation credible not only because there are so many great French desserts deserts, but I also find in the great French dictionary Robert that just like you might call a kid “a chip off the old block,” there is a French expression bout de chou that literally means “an end of cabbage,” but figuratively means “sweet little crumb.”

But why all this focus on French cabbages you ask? Of course because English took the word cabbage from French. In French the original full name of a cabbage wasn’t chou but choux cabus. The choux part being a whole family of plants including broccoli and cauliflower but most closely etymologically related to the green kale. Actually if you listen for it you can hear kale in cauliflower, the word I mean.

So that original French choux cabus meant “kale head.” It’s easy to see how the cabus part relates to the Latin caput meaning “head;” and we do buy our cabbages by the head.

So by sometime after Chaucer in the 1400s, when English was gaining strength over the imposed French after the Norman invasion, a cookbook appeared with our first citation of cabbage that the is believed to have grown from that cabus part of the French name.

I see that Mark Morton in his book Cupboard Love feels that the latter part of the word comes from an Old French word boce that meant “swollen” so that cabbage would literally mean “swollen head.”

So if someone calls you mon petit chou maybe you can let it give you a swelled head.

The Devil’s Dictionary, as I’ve mentioned before, was written more than 100 years ago by Ambrose Bierce, a rather cynical guy. And so I think one I can only love from this safe distance. His definition for ocean is:

“A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills.”

The ancient Greeks were perhaps a little more modest than those of us who have come to feel that this world was created just for our use. Those Greeks saw themselves as mortal men and women but living in a world full of gods who were not mortal. These gods had greater powers than we humans but seemed curiously driven by human motivations and subject to human failings. One of these gods was the god Okeanos son of Uranus and Gaia. Many of these gods had areas of responsibility. For instance Poseidon was the god of the sea, and of earthquakes and horses; Aphrodite was the god of love.

Greece is of course located on the Mediterranean so the Greeks were well aware of that body of water. They were pretty comfortable sailing all around the Mediterranean as well so they had a good idea of the land masses that surround it, Europe, Africa and to the east, Asia. But what lay beyond these land masses was a little more theoretical. The Greek myth that comes down to us is that this world that the Greeks knew was entirely surrounded by a circular flowing river. That flowing river was called the okeanos and was under the dominion of the god of the same name.

Some of the dictionaries I consulted seemed almost apologetic that they couldn’t trace the roots of this word further back. Evidently though, even back in ancient Greek times the word also held a meaning of “a vast expanse” or “a huge quantity” of something.

The Romans adopted this name for the great body of water beyond the Mediterranean and since their other word for a big body of water was mare they in fact called the outer one the mare oceanus. Latin became French and French became English and ocean popped up in English by about 1300. In keeping with the Latin usage it was common at first to talk about the “ocean sea” and this went on until well after Shakespeare was in his grave.

But of course we know better than those ancient Greek. The world isn’t surrounded by a great unending river. As Ambrose Bierce pointed out, the land is surrounded by twice as much water. And now, with better ocean research we also know that there are ocean currents down there that…that…that continuously circulate like a gigantic river.

Do you find the lobster humorous? I don’t mean humorous as in “damp” I mean humorous as in funny.” Well the snapping crustacean seems to have inspired others to poetry, although it’s hard to know what they were thinking. Here are three examples:

Ah! who has seen the mailed lobster rise,
Clap her broad wings, and soaring claim the skies?

By mailed he doesn’t mean put in the post box, he means covered with armour. That’s from a poem by a 19th century poet, John Hookham Frere. Here’s one from Lewis Caroll, always one for serious work:

Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.

So this quote from Lewis Caroll’s contemporary in France, Gerard de Nerval seems appropriate:

Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog…or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don’t bark, and they don’t gnaw.

And for some reason these are the three and only three quotations concerning lobsters I find in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Here’s what you need to know about lobsters. They have an exoskeleton. While we have bones to hold us up, lobsters effectively have their bones on the outside. This is an advantage when a codfish tries to eat them, but a disadvantage when they want to grow. To move up a size they have to shuck their entire skeleton. This may be something a lobster has gotten used to but when you go and try to eat one this exoskeletal shucking has implications. A lobster stays as long as it can in its old shell, then after wriggling out of it, puffs itself up as much as it can before forming a new shell, so that the new one is a larger size and it can live in there for as long as possible before having to repeat the molting procedure. What this means to you as a diner is that you want your lobster as near to molting as possible, and not right after molting. This way the meat is as dense and full as possible.

All this has nothing to do with the etymology of lobster. For that I turn to my OED and I can tell you two things. One is that lobster is an Old English word with evidence from more than 1000 years ago. And also that it comes from a Latin word; sort of.

Depending on what part of the world you live in there may or may not be much difference between a grasshopper and a locust. But to the average Roman, evidently a lobster so reminded them of a grasshopper, or whatever bug a locust was at that time, that they used the same word for locust the bug, and locust the lobster. Once in Britain Old English speakers chewed away on their lobster word and diverged its pronunciation to something with a P; lopster. Evidently they too were reminded of bugs when they looked at a lobster because an old English name for a spider was loppe. And evidently the Latin locusta moved to lopster because of this Old English Spider, before around Shakespeare’s time turning the P into a B.

Henry Kissinger once said:

“For other nations, Utopia is a blessed past never to be recovered; for Americans it is just beyond the horizon.”

This sounds like a nice sentiment but perhaps Kissinger should have chosen another word than horizon. As Mark Pattison, a 19th century British author and teacher said:

“…the horizon recedes as we advance, and is no nearer at sixty than it was at twenty.”

If both these statements are true I guess we’ll never reach Utopia, but I think it’s still worth trying.

Our word horizon showed up in English back in the late 1300s and Geoffrey Chaucer is the scribe credited with being the first to scribble it down. Chaucer was working at in Middle English and would have been well versed in communicating in both French and English. And horizon is one of those words that had made the transition from French into English, so when Chaucer wrote it down, it was in an English context. But horizon then was a little different then than the way we write it now; it had no H at the beginning.

If you know any French speakers at all they often have a hard time pronouncing the H in words and so although the original Latin word did indeed have an H on the front of it, after being spoken in France for centuries before making its way to England, the word had lost its H. But then during the centuries either side of Shakespeare people in England started becoming increasingly literate and some kind of standard spelling began to come into fashion. This took a long time and it was sort of an informal consensus thing, not the result of a single person or spelling book that set the rules.

As an aside, the differences in British and American spelling are largely due to one guy, Noah Webster who produced spelling books by the zillion in the decades after the American revolution when those rotten British spellings represented if not the work of the devil, at least the work of the enemy.

But back to earlier British English spelling crystallization. As people began to think purposefully about how words should be spelled, instead of the earlier mode of everyone just spelling them however they saw fit, scholars in Latin and Greek were also thinking about where the words came from; their etymologies. In the case of horizon they deduced that the original parent word had had an H on it and so they insisted that the Modern English word should have one too. So the H was reintroduced.

But in many cases these guys uncovered false etymologies and imposed supposedly historically correct spellings on words that actually had never really had that history, and so we now spell them historically incorrectly. One example of this is advantage that really shouldn’t have a D in there at all.

As I implied the Latin root of horizon depended on an earlier Greek root. Perhaps even more than that English writer and teacher Mark Pattison, those Greeks knew their geometry and our word horizon evolves out of their understanding. As with a number of other words we use today, horizon is an abbreviation. The Greeks would have said horizon kyklos which means “the boundary circle.” If you stand in a boat on the open ocean the geometry of the situation is such that where you see the water end and the sky begin all around you would look like a perfect circle from above. So the boundary circle is the limit of how far you can see and the root meaning of horizon is “boundary.”

I went looking for quotes to quote at you using the word pregnant but there appear to be precious few. Of course there is one from Florynce Kennedy:

“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

She was a civil rights activist and feminist who died in 2000.

But my search did turn up an unexpected source; Charles Darwin’s Grampa Erasmus Darwin. At first I thought there was a misdirected weblink because the poetry of Erasmus Darwin that was shown didn’t seem to have much to do with pregnancy or the word pregnant. Erasmus Darwin was a physician as well as a poet and had a very broad range of interests and insights. I scanned down the page and sure enough there were a few instances of the word pregnant. But perhaps not quite in the context you might expect from a physician. He talks about pregnant oysters, oak trees and poppy seeds.

One of the reasons for this is that at the time that Erasmus was alive the word pregnant meaning “with child” was considered a little bit rude. Some say that this is the reason that we have so many different ways of referring to a woman who is “expecting.” But this in itself hardly explains pregnant oysters and oak trees.

What seems to have happened was that although using the word pregnant to refer to a woman “in the family way” was a little taboo, the word pregnant was still a good word and so people were using it for other meanings such as “full of promise.” This might more accurately explain old Erasmus’ non-human uses. Even kids who seemed smart and likely to succeed in life were referred to as pregnant without any sexual implications at all.

But the etymological roots of pregnant certainly have to do with sex and regeneration. The ancient Romans already used the word to mean “having one on the way” but somewhere before that the word traces back to a literal meaning of “before birth.” We can still pretty easily tease this out of the word pregnant. The pre part of pregnant is easily recognizable as meaning “before.” And if you’ve ever had a baby you likely attended pre-natal classes. So the N A N T ending of pregnant meaning “birth” also reveals itself as related to “natal.” But even with the G in there makes sense since natal is also closely related to the Indo-European root gen that gives us words like generations, genitals and genetic.

Jumping back to Erasmus Darwin for just a second: the poem that did first pop up while I was searching doesn’t have the actual word pregnant in it, but now I see that one of the alternate senses of pregnant is indeed there. He wrote:

“Soon shall thy arm, UNCONQUER’D STEAM! afar
Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;
Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear
The flying-chariot through the fields of air.”

There was Erasmus living at the very opening stages of the industrial revolution. The steam engine had barely been invented and already he saw its pregnant promise. Replace his vision of steam power with fossil fuels and here he is predicting cars and planes, more than 100 years before the Wright Brothers and Kitty Hawk.

In old movies you sometimes see the reporter elbowing his way through the crowd with a fedora on his head and stuck into the band of the hat is a little sign “press.” These days we talk about the media more than the press and this is appropriate because the news business includes the internet, TV and radio, as well as newspapers and magazines; these latter two being the only ones that are produced on a press.

The etymology of the word press is seemingly in dispute. Both Merriam Webster and American Heritage dictionaries point to the word coming into English from Old French with the Norman invasion and having developed there from an earlier Latin word, all the while having a huge range of senses. American Heritage points back to an Indo-European root word per meaning to “strike.” Yet the Oxford English Dictionary has citations for the noun press dating back well before the Norman invasion and so gives the etymology as being Old English. People have been pressing things together for a very long time and so this is one of those words that has such utility and has been applicable across so many ages that it’s a bit hard to pin down where it started from.

As I implied the reason those newspaper men wore little signs in their hats proclaiming “press” was that the product they produced depended on a printing press. As you well know Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Actually he didn’t. He invented movable type. People had been printing with presses long before Gutenberg. The difference was mostly that the reverse images that they used to press the ink onto the paper were often solid bocks of wood or other material that took a long time to carve out. With movable type the reverse image could be assembled from pieces much more quickly. But before even solid block printing was going on a similar device was in use and also called a press. These devices were most certainly the contraptions that inspired printing presses, but long before, they had been used for extracting grape juice for wine and oil from olives. This would have been going on around the Mediterranean for centuries before the Romans even began their program of world domination.

It strikes me that when a newspaper is churning out 80, 100, maybe 200 pages a day, their focus is on quantity not quality. That isn’t to say that the news is wrong, I know reporters do their best. It’s just that my experience bringing my book to market shows me that some press related professional groups are more picky about where, say, a comma might go than others.

For a book there are multiple stages of editing and finally the book comes to press.

In the newspaper business if there is a mistake the worst thing that will happen is the paper will issue a correction, perhaps an apology, and by the end of the week most people will have forgotten it, having received a few more hundred pages in the mean time.

For a book though, once it’s printed, it’s out there, often forever. So when it comes time to bring the final text to the press, book publishers are often very careful. The result of course can be introduction of new errors by overzealous guard against old ones. A tale is told of an author who concluded his book with a description of a rocky area of flat land between a volcano and the ocean. His intended verbiage was

“the whole plain was strewn with erratic blocks.”

Now whoever was setting the type didn’t understand what this meant and thought it was an error and so they, quote, corrected it to say “strewn with erotic blacks.”

I have yet to see what kind of corrections turn up in my book.

The Oxford American Dictionary of Current English defines destination as:

“a place to which a person or thing is going”

This is in fact one of those examples of human laziness because this sense of destination is actually short for the phrase place of destination.

The word destination showed up in English during the life of Shakespeare when English speakers were expanding their language and weaving new words out of old, and at first it meant more or less “an act of predicting,” except with more force to the accuracy of the prediction. Someone who proclaimed that you were destined to become a star, or maybe a bum, was engaging in the act of destination. So the phrase place of destination was that place where it was predicted you’d be at the end of your trip. People got lazy saying three words and so abbreviated it down to one about 200 years ago.

Much further back—back to the 1300s in English—destiny appears. The Devil’s Dictionary defines destiny as:

“A tyrant’s authority for crime and fool’s excuse for failure.”

Urbandictionary offers a marginally more upbeat pair of definitions, the more popular one placing oodles of faith in the meaning of life, but second in popularity

“A really stupid way for people to blame their failures on something other than their own shortcomings”

While the first is a little flaky, the second is a little cruel in my mind. Luck does come into it I think.

But where does all this leave us in the etymology of destination and destiny? The sense of that more hopeful Urbandictionary definition is that there is some fixed, preordained outcome that each one of us is headed for (and here neither I nor Urbandictionary mean death). It’s the sense of something fixed that underlies both destination and destiny. It isn’t a coincidence that in one of the definitions I saw for destination it said “where one is bound.” To be bound is to be “tied up,” “made secure” and according the Oxford English Dictionary the Latin destinare meant to “make fast or firm.” Both destination and destiny, I see from the American Heritage Dictionary evolve from an Indo-European root sta that meant “stand” and is there also in the etymology of such unmoving words as statue and stationary.