Sometimes academics are accused of living in ivory towers; of propounding nice clean theories that can’t work in the real world.

This criticism might come to mind when you learn that the word university comes out of the same roots as the word universe and that Latin speakers thought of universum as a word meaning “the whole world.”

Do university professors live in their own world, their own universe?

Actually the etymology doesn’t point that way at all and without these thinkers who sometimes get it wrong we wouldn’t have much chance of getting so many things right.

The very first citation we have in English for the word university is from around the year 1300. This particular quote refers to a certain university whose name comes up pretty frequently here on podictionary. The place is Oxenford—clearly a spot where domestic beasts were sent across the Thames River.

Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world but when it began, almost instantly after the Norman Invasion, it wasn’t called a university. The earlier word applied to places of learning was studium. At first the school at Oxford was fairly modest, but it became an important centre of learning when in 1167 King Henry II made it illegal to ship off to Paris for university.

Of course both studium and universitas were Latin and so Oxford’s transition to university status, which happened in 1231 didn’t show up as an English word right away. Even when it gained the Latin label universitas the word didn’t mean specifically that Oxford was a place of higher learning, instead universitas meant that it was incorporated.

Literally it meant “turned into one.” Both parts of this word are particularly ancient, running back to Indo-European. The uni part represents “one” and versus comes from vertere meaning “to turn.”

Here’s a quote from William Congreve:

‘Tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University. But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman.

Congreve was a gentleman writer living 100 years after Shakespeare. He seems to have been a pretty good comedy writer and he was joking about a university education too.

He well knew that we are all servants in this universe.

The dictionaries I consulted give a definition for the word fiasco that puts it closer to its supposed roots than we actually seem to use it today. They say a fiasco is an “embarrassing failure.”

But when I look at examples of the word used in context I see fiascos referred to not only in situations that would be personally embarrassing or embarrassing to some group, but also situations that cost people money.

There are indeed fiascos where short lived couples try it out for a night and decide in the morning that it was an embarrassing mistake. Also when political parties take strong stands or make bold moves that result in complete failure the fiasco is a political embarrassment; Iraq shows up frequently in this context.

But I see the junk-bond market collapse referred to as a fiasco, the savings and loan fiasco, the Enron fiasco, the subprime mortgage fiasco; the list goes on.

All these disasters out of a bottle.; because at root the word fiasco means “bottle.”

Exactly how the word bottle in Italian came to mean an embarrassing and costly screw-up is a bit of a mystery, but we do have some clues. Going as far back as we can we find that the ancestors to the word flask appeared first in early Latin and referred to a small wooden barrel for wine; small enough that you would carry it with you when you went on a journey by foot. This ancestor word also seems to show up in all the Germanic languages too so no one is really sure at this stage if the early Germans got it from the early Romans or if the Romans got it from the Germans.

In any case, one of the grandchild words that evolved from it was the Italian word fiasco meaning “bottle.” 150 years ago the word came into English as an Italian expression for an embarrassing performance at the theatre. There are accounts that tell us that not only in Italy but also in France to have a disastrous performance was called a bottle, or to make a bottle. But it isn’t completely clear why.

The Oxford English Dictionary entry is one of those that are a little dated and I don’t find any illumination either recently or from decades past in the academic journals.

Douglas Harper over at Etymonline is perhaps the most helpful since he offers up a few of the theories, including that bad work among glassblowers was discarded for reuse in making common bottles. And Douglas’ preferred explanation: that there was once an Italian expression fare il fiasco—again “make a bottle”—that meant a game people played where the loser had to buy the next bottle of wine.

He thus brings the idea of cost back to fiasco.

No where do I see any evidence that anyone has thought that bad theatrical performances—or bad performances of any kind that were fiascos—might be so-called because the actors had been into the bottle beforehand.

I checked with Merriam-Webster and it is indeed correct to pronounce this word either “huunta” or “jaunta.”

This word has been in the news this fall due mainly to the stiff necked government of Burma also known as Myanmar. We in the west heard most about how the Buddhist monks were defying the crackdown of the military junta and so there is some irony in the fact that the first time junta turned up in English it was referring to a group of religious leaders. In that case a committee of Catholic bishops was gathered together to help negotiate a marriage arrangement between a Spanish princess and an English prince. The committee was called the Junta of Divines and as seems to be the case with juntas these days, their plan didn’t work out very well. Even though a marriage contract was signed, the wedding never happened.

But the clue to the roots of junta is there in the committee. As might be suspected of a Spanish word, junta is originally from Latin. It comes from a root meaning “to join” and I see that the American Heritage Dictionary back-casts this meaning to roots of this word back into Indo-European.

So a junta is a joining together of the members of the committee.

The other citations for junta in the Oxford English Dictionary maintain this general “committee” meaning up until 1808 when junta takes on a decidedly military meaning.

At that time Napoleon was invading Spain and the Spanish military was completely hopeless at trying to keep the French out. So along with this new meaning to junta sprang up our word guerrilla because the fight against the French was taken on by independent fighting groups. Each of these was organized by a committee, a junta.

These regional juntas got even more organized and formed a central junta. But as seems to be the pattern, their plans failed too and the French took over.

But those 200 year old juntas sound almost representative of their people. Modern dictionary definitions spell out something more applicable to the “government” of Burma. Here’s one definition:

a military or political group that rules a country after taking power by force

But there’s something missing there. I see no evidence as to why junta might have shifted meaning from a military kind of government fighting an invading army to a military government that seems to be fighting its own people.

One of the reasons I can’t see any evidence is hinted at by an explanitary  explanatory note in the OED. It says that in modern history junta is best known as the name of these Spanish committees.

If modern history relates to events 200 years ago this tells us two things:

1. that history is loooong
2. that this particular entry in the OED is a little out of date

It’s hard to trace the more recent twists of meaning of this word when the most recent citation is from 1887.

I hope Oxford University Press will put a committee on that.

But not a junta—that would be sure to fail.

In the episode on the word luxury I cast aspersions on the author Anthony Trollope saying that a trollop was a woman of loose morals.  Today I wish to right that wrong.

A trollop is a woman of loose morals but that shouldn’t reflect badly on Anthony Trollope or anyone else named Trollope for that matter, including the still living author Joanna Trollope. 

I took a look at several dictionaries of family names, including one by Oxford University Press and came up short on an authoritative source for the Trollope last name.

Certainly if some ancient ancestor had been named because of their sexual availability the descendants would have opted for another moniker.

Without any authoritative sources I fall back to Wikipedia that tells me Trollope as a name comes from a place in England that had originally meant “troll valley.”

Maybe, maybe not.

I see that Hugh Rawson in examining the word trollop (as opposed to the name) is one of the only sources that gives some weight to its etymology relating to trolls as might hide under bridges.

My recollection of these creatures makes me suspicious of this relationship since all the trolls I’ve ever seen depicted in books or plastic are pretty ugly.  It’s hard to imagine them inspiring any kind of sexual excitement as would be required to move them into the “woman of loose morals” category.

The Oxford English Dictionary and The American Heritage Dictionary aren’t much better.  They instead suggest trollop developed out of a word troll meaning “to roll and wallow.”  This I guess puts a meaning to the word that relates to being dressed in ragged clothes as might be worn by some down and out hooker.

But the evidence must be indirect because there is also some hand-waving toward troll as one might do when fishing.

Yet if you do go trolling for trollops the dictionaries say you might be using the word troll as a slang abbreviation for the word patrol.

There is also an Old French troller meaning to go “hunting without a specific direction or destination.”

So this seems to be an etymology with rather loose morals, or at least loose word roots.

So I’ll turn back to Anthony Trollop.  He seems to have been a bit of a character, if not of loose morals.  At one banquet one of his fellow diners noticed that he was helping himself generously to every single platter that came  his way.

“You seem to have a very good appetite”

she said to him.  To which he replied

“not at all, but thank God, I am very greedy.”

Another time he was asked to make a presentation along with a whole pile of dignitaries.  Each was asked to keep it down to five minutes and all of them did; until Anthony Trollope.  He kept going on and on and on.  The chairman rang a little bell to signal time.  He rang it again; and again more loudly.  Finally he reached over and tugged at Trollope’s coattail to which our longwinded author responded

“please leave my coat alone”

and continued his arguments to their overtimely end.

When punk rock was young one of its leading exponents was Sid Vicious.  Sid Vicious was actually born Simon John Ritchie and I think I’m safe in saying that in choosing his stage name he never considered how etymologically appropriate this name was in combination with the name of his favorite band The Sex Pistols.

It was also appropriate to his overall lifestyle, but perhaps not in the way you might think.

I said The Sex Pistols were his favorite band and I’m sure you’re thinking—if you’ve heard of Sid Vicious and The Sex Pistols—that he was in the band.  He was in the band after a while, but at first he was just a friend of the band.  He couldn’t play any instruments and his main value was being a jerk and attracting attention.

In the music business this is called publicity.

He took the name Sid from Johnny Rotten’s pet hamster and The Sex Pistols took their name from a clothing store where they hung out.  The store owner suggested the Vicious part of Sid’s name.

This is all according to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The American Heritage Dictionary includes these definitions for vicious and I think they fit pretty well with what most people understand vicious to be:

• Disposed to or characterized by violent or destructive behavior.
• Marked by an aggressive disposition; savage.

Well, Sid Vicious was both those things.  He was forever getting in fights.  His attention-getting persona was not an act.

But the etymology of vicious is from French back to Latin. In the early 1300s when the word first entered English on the coattails of that punk William the Bastard—leader of the band The Norman Invasion—at first it meant “addicted to vice,” “depraved” or “immoral.”

Now don’t you think a band called The Sex Pistols would appreciate an etymology like that?

Of course vice isn’t only to do with sex; as Ian Dury affirmed it’s sex and drugs and rock and roll.  Vicious was certainly addicted too to the vicious vice of drugs.  He died at 21 of a heroin overdose in 1979.  He obtained his fatal fix from his mother’s purse.

Evidently she too was somewhat vicious

When I was a young boy I had some stuffed animals that must have been produced as an early sort of marketing tie-in to the 1933 Disney film The Three Little Pigs. I’m not quite that old, but maybe the stuffed animals were. I actually don’t remember the pigs, but I certainly do remember the wolf. He had white teeth that I could see in the dark from my bed at night and I remember asking my parents to take him off the shelf because I couldn’t sleep with him there. It must have really bothered me for me to remember it so clearly all these decades later.

I guess wolves have always bothered people. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a tale traditionally ascribed to Aesop who was Greek and lived more than 2500 years ago.

Our word for these animals goes back as far as we can trace words. Wolf itself appeared in English as wulf beside the Latin lupus in a gloss back before the year 725. So of course that makes it solidly Old English and points unequivocally to Germanic sources for the word. Sure enough Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Middle Low German, Middle Dutch, Old High German, Middle High German, Old Norse, Gothic and Old Teutonic all have a similar word.

But even more than that my dictionaries tell me that Latin lupus is related as well as are a whole other bag of words in other languages that descended from Indo-European.

Just as my memory is firmly imprinted with what my young mind though was important, the tracks of this word through the millennia show that men and women for most of our history have had an edgy sort of feeling about these beautiful creatures.

Things are different now of course. We mostly live in cities far from wolves and so they have become romantic symbols of nature. I have a picture of one on my credit card for heaven’s sake; I get complements on it from store clerks all the time.

In Algonquin Park, a huge area of wilderness in Ontario, the wolf howl has become a real tourist draw. Park rangers guide hundreds of people by night out into a part of the park where wolves are expected to be and for hours the people make wolf-like howls into the darkness and thrill at the replies sent back by the real live wolves.

I’m sure the hair on many people’s necks stands up, but there’s really no danger. They can always just go hop back in the car.

It’s nice to know they’re out there; until you can’t hop back in the car.

One summer about 10 years ago I went canoe camping with another family in Quebec. They brought along their son who was only about a year old. One year old babies are often unable to sleep through the night and just as often complain loudly at their insomnia. As I lay there in my thin nylon tent surrounded my young family I listened to baby Warren fill the night with his howls. And as he paused to draw breath there came answering howls. I was glad that they sounded fairly distant but I didn’t sleep all that well after that.

I’m sure lots of sleepless nights reinforced this word’s antiquity.

I’ll leave it to your imagination instead of relating what Urbandictionary’s very popular definitions say about the word orgy.

Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that “an orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.”  Muggeridge is supposed to have had a pretty healthy appetite for women and booze so I’m not sure if he meant by that quote that an orgy wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  In fact around the time that he wrote that he himself was becoming a strong Catholic and so maybe he was feeling some of that righteous indignation himself.

Surprisingly the word orgy actually has everything to do with righteousness if you look at its etymology.

A long long time ago religions developed special rites to honor their gods.  Back in Indo-European times the word used describe these rites was one that was related to their word werg for “work” or “to do.”  By the time these words worked their way up to ancient Greece and Rome they resembled our word orgy.  Both Latin and Greek used the word orgia to describe these religious rites.  While we use the word in the singular, it was always in the plural back in ancint times since these were rites—a series of actions to honor the god—not a single religious rite.

Even in English it was pretty rare to have a single orgy until the 19th century.  This is because even in English the word at first referred to these religious rites, although not Christian rites.  The word seems to have begun to be used in the singular as opposed to the plural alongside the increased tone of sexuality associated with orgy.

So the question is, how did a word that meant religious ceremonies come to mean a kind of group sex act?

The answer to this lies in which religion you’re talking about.

In antiquity orgies referred to a whole range of sects, but since the word appeared first in English in 1561 it mostly meant the ceremonies related to the god Dionysus or Bacchus.  Now Bacchus is the god of wine and we all know what that can lead to.

The art department at my publisher chose Bacchus’ shoulder to feature on my book right above the title Carnal Knowledge, so there’s another hint.

In fact, in ancient Rome the cult of Bacchus evolved into festivals including loud parades where some people carried oversized penis replicas. These eventually got so out of hand that the authorities outlawed them.

A superficial look might make you think this was all about sex, and I guess to some extent it was.  But there was a deeper religious meaning there too.  Bacchus was the god of wine not only because people liked to drink, but also because of the miracle of how the grapes grew and turned into wine and by extension the miracle of fertility.

I guess, no sex, no fertility—thank God!

In the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations we find the following from the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope:

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Now seeing it there in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations out of the context of the novel in which it first appeared, my mind began to whirl; what exactly did he mean by that?

My whirling mind was put in motion by two tempting hints.  One was the historical meaning of the word luxury and the other was Mr. Trollope’s name itself.

You know that a trollop is a “woman of loose morals,” but perhaps what you don’t know is that our word luxury has a bit of a seamy background as well.

The roots of luxury are from Latin.  Luxus meant “abundance” and “sumptuous enjoyment.”  This is certainly the sense reflected in a particularly long entry at Urbandictionary that talks of private jets, personal chiefs chefs, yachts and your own grass tennis court.  It is also the sense of deluxe which we get from French de luxe that means literally “of luxe.”

But there’s a hint here in that this word isn’t deluxury.

The fact is that although in Latin luxus meant “sumptuous enjoyment” the Latin precursor to luxury actually meant “sinful enjoyment.” So as Latin devolved into French and Italian and Spanish their words evolving from Latin’s luxuria mean “lust” and “debauchery.”

And so it was that when luxury first appeared in English from Old French in 1340 it didn’t mean sipping Champagne and swanning around in fur coats, it meant slipping between the sheets with someone you weren’t supposed to.

With that kind of background you might think that Anthony Trollope was talking about paying for prostitutes when he said ” Love is like any other luxury…”

But come on, he was a Victorian writer, a popular Victorian writer; he must have been writing in the most family-values-oriented way imaginable.

And so he was.  In the novel it is someone called Lady Carbury who tosses off the quote and the context is one where a young woman is said to be well advised to know her man has a bunch of cash in the bank before she falls in love with him.

I suppose that isn’t actually bad advice, but if you want my opinion it is this:

Love of almost any kind is a luxury and one we can’t afford to be without.

The Devil’s Dictionary says that an omen is:

A sign that something will happen if nothing happens.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that that omen came into English only in 1582 but that it comes from classical Latin where it also had a meaning of something that foreshadows an event.

The OED frustratingly says that there are lots of theories about the etymology of the Latin word, and then doesn’t tell us any of them.

It does pointedly dismiss the idea that the “o” in omen relates to os meaning “mouth” as if an omen speaks to us. None of the other sources give us much to go on etymologically so that’s not a good omen.

The second citation for omen in the OED is from Ben Jonson, that contemporary of Shakespeare’s and so it gives me an opportunity to talk about old Ben and the times he lived in.

If you get a chance to look at any of the portraits of Ben Jonson that are available say at Wikipedia or Britannica, you might get the impression that the guy was possibly quite physically powerful. I think this was likely the case since the records seem to indicate that started out as a bricklayer and during his life seems to have killed two people in hand to hand combat.

The first of these is pretty telling. Before his career in theatre he went over to Holland as a soldier. He’d have had a good education by that point but wasn’t from an aristocratic background so was likely a common soldier. But there is one account of him standing as the champion in a one-on-one fight that was an ancient contest intended to avoid whole groups of soldiers battling it out. By Jonson’s time it was rarely used but he seems to have been the chosen fighter and to have won, afterward having the honor to claim his opponent’s arms in victory.

The fact that he got selected for the task must have put him in the big-tough-guy category.

Further evidence is that later in life he was jailed for killing another actor in a duel. He later told a friend that the other guy had challenged him to the duel, had used a sword ten inches longer than his own, and had managed to slash Jonson’s arm before Jonson got the better of him.

So at the time of Johnson’s life 400 years ago, single-combat warfare seems still to have been occasionally used and the fighting of duels was pretty common.

But killing someone in a duel wasn’t exactly approved of in law back then. Jonson almost hanged because of it, but was saved by some sympathetic churchman who got him off the hook by converting him to Catholicism and having him recite some apologetic prayers. He also had to go around after this with a brand on his thumb that told everyone that he was a convicted felon.

In between these two deadly events Jonson came to prominence in English theatre. He is said to have been a middling actor but a very good playwright and also an excellent director. He’s described as getting into an arm waving sweaty state of animation in his role as director and I can see actors doing their best to please him if he was the bear of a man I imagine.

As for Jonson’s use of omen we should look to his education. He was lucky enough not only to have been noticed when on death row, but also years before when only about seven he was recommended to Westminster School where he had a strong classical education.

So just as the word omen was emerging from Latin to become an English word we have Jonson likely familiar with it as a Latin word. He’d have been ten years old at the time of that first citation.

There is a legend about Jonson that the more stodgy sources don’t mention so perhaps it’s not true. But it is said that for his first play Jonson approached Shakespeare’s company of players and offered up his manuscript. Whoever read it first was on the point of returning it with a polite thanks-but-no-thanks, when Shakespeare himself just happened to see it lying open, picked it up and thought it pretty good, thereby launching Jonson’s career.

We don’t know if that’s true, but what is true is that Jonson’s tribute to Shakespeare is what heads up the oldest collections we have of Shakespeare’s plays.

According to The Concise Oxford English Dictionary a mentor is “an experienced and trusted adviser.”

The first citation for mentor in English is 1750 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But it is very likely that you could have heard the word in England long before that. First as a Greek word—more specifically a person’s name—and later in French.

You see about 2600 to 2800 years ago a guy named Homer sat down with pen in hand and started scribbling out something we now call The Iliad. Then, as now, a sequel to a successful work was likely and what appeared we now know as The Odyssey. So it was these old Greek works that English and French scholars might have been reading when they mouthed the word mentor for the first time on English soil.

But they wouldn’t at first have given this proper name the meaning we give it today, nor would they at first have taken much notice of the character whose name it was.

The storyline as it involves this guy Mentor is that Odysseus has taken off, leaving his wife and young son at home. He’s asked his old friend and advisor Mentor to keep an eye out for them. But since we are talking about Greek myth here, with all kinds of gods involved and many loose ends to the story, the main role Mentor plays is that the god Athena pretends to be Mentor at certain critical times.

So until well after the time of Shakespeare if you stopped an Englishman on the street and asked him if he recognized the word or name mentor, he’d look at you pretty curelessly cluelessly. I suspect you’d get the same look if you stopped students of Greek as they streamed out of their classrooms at Oxford or Cambridge. The guy just didn’t count for much.

Then along came this guy named François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. You might have guessed that he was not an Englishman, but instead a Frenchman. He had been made tutor of the grandson of King Louis XIV and took the opportunity to weave his political theories of French government into a retelling of The Odyssey. But in François’ story called The Adventures of Telemachus our friend Mentor was one of the central figures.

This tale wasn’t quite the Harry Potter of its day, but it was pretty popular and was instantly translated into English around 1699 or 1700. So 50 years later the name of the guy who in this popular story plays the role of “an experienced and trusted adviser” becomes an eponym meaning the same thing.

Looking at The American Heritage Dictionary and Etymonline I see them pointing back beyond Greek to Indo-European and Sanskrit. These ancient Greek tales don’t choose the names of their characters at random. That French book The Adventures of Telemachus alerts us to the name of Odysseus’ son.

Telemachus holds the meaning of “far away fighter” since his father was off at war.

Similarly Mentor could have been named from a root men- meaning “to think” since we’d like our trusted advisers to be people with a good head on their shoulders.

Before I go I really should address Betty’s point about that French word mentir; it was her voicemail that I played in my recent feedback episode that prompted this episode.

She wanted me to find out why the French word mentir meant “liar” which is such a different meaning than the English mentor. It turns out that although similar, these are actually different words. There is a French mentor that means the same as our English mentor for obvious reasons. But that French mentir instead comes from a Latin root that meant “liar” and is a word that didn’t make it into modern English.

There were a few words with this parentage that did make it into English, but all of them have fallen out of use and I suspect, looking at them, that the reason is they are so similar to other English words that people stopped using them. For example about 300 years ago mentition meant “the action of telling lies” but it’s so close to our word mention that who’d want to risk getting the two confused.