My sister is happily married with kids. I remember her wedding as one of the best parties I’ve ever been to. But before all of that my father once joked that if she was ever planning to elope he’d pay for the ladder.

For some reason I have an image in my mind of elopement including a young woman climbing out of her bedroom window, in her parent’s house, with her wedding dress on. You’d think the dress would have been a tip-off to her family.

Our understanding these days of what it is to elope is a couple running away somewhere to get married without all the entanglements and hoopla that surrounds a more conventional wedding; parents, guest lists, caterers…

But it hasn’t always been that way. Back in Shakespeare’s day it was a crime. Back much further than that too.

The first two citations in the Oxford English Dictionary are in Latin and French so can’t be counted in English, but they actually are legal terms that were adopted from Old English; not English later adopting some Latin word. And these crimes weren’t about that gal climbing out of her parents’ window either. Back then to elope meant that you were already married and you were running away from your husband to hang with some other guy.

In this already-married situation a guy was never said to elope, just a gal. The reason this word elope was used for this messy situation was that an earlier Old English word uthleapan was the legal term for an escaping thief.

In these words we can hear the familiar movement words lope and leap and they are in fact etymologically related.

The entry for elope that I see in the Oxford English Dictionary is one of those that hasn’t been updated since its first edition, although none of the other etymology sources I checked disagree. Yet I see in an old 1930 journal that there is some speculation that the parent of elope might be an Anglo-Norman word alope. And that alpoe actually placed the blame on the man, not the woman.

The article cites three legal examples where the sense is that the aloper was a man who kidnapped a woman and had sex with her, presumably against her will, so that she would have to marry him.

This gives a different tone to leap doesn’t it—more along the lines of “to jump someone”—and the article makes that point.

Jumping back to the slightly more modern, I also found a 1938 journal article entitled A Study of 738 Elopements. The researchers found five basic reasons that couples of 80 years ago eloped. Chief among them was parental disapproval. Maybe you should pay some attention to your parents because if you eloped to marry against their will you were 10% more likely to break-up than if you eloped just to save money or to avoid all the attention.

Still, the conclusion was that although there are lots of reasons that people elope, knowing these doesn’t do much to predict how happy the marriage will be. About half the marriages studied turned out happy and the researcher attributed this to the qualities of the people who did the eloping.

Since by the time of this study elope held the meaning we understand today, it’s safe to say that the qualities of these people did not include bigamy or rape.

Thanks for listening/reading and if you haven’t already done so, please consider buying my book Carnal Knowledge – A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before.

Q: What kind of noise annoys an oyster?

A: A noisy noise annoys an oyster.

The etymology of oyster may not have anything to do with noise, but it is true that oysters have to some extent been associated with quiet. Mark Twain seems to have been the first writer to call someone who didn’t talk much an oyster. I’m not sure if this is because oysters themselves are quiet creatures, or because they like to keep their traps tightly shut.

The etymology of oyster does however have something to do with them keeping their traps shut. At least it is the hardness of their shells that comes into it, if not the difficulty in prying them apart.

Oyster first shows up in English before there was any written record so that it was firmly there when the Old English documents that still survive were penned. It came to English from Latin and shows up in a bunch of other Germanic languages as well. I guess everyone was eating them.

The Romans got the word—which actually was pronounced ostrea in Latin—from the usual source; Greek. But the word root goes back to Indo-European. That’s where the connection with the hardness of the shell began, although it is apparent in Latin too.

The os- in the oyster word root is the same os- as in osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a disorder of the bones and os- means “bone.”

In the podictionary episode on the word ostracize I talked about how the shells of oysters found their way into that word meaning “to shun” someone. (That was a while ago October 2005)

Not only have oysters been associated with silence both in antiquity and in Mark Twain’s day, they have also been looked on with alternating disgust and hope. Jonathan Swift who wrote Gulliver’s Travels said

“he was a bold man who first eat an oyster.”

Ambrose Bierce called oysters “slimy.” One of the meanings of oyster I see in the Oxford English Dictionary is too revolting to go into.

And yet there is a salty seductiveness to oysters that perpetuates their reputation as an aphrodisiac.

These days we might say that things are different as from each other as apples and oranges. But oranges came to England millennia after oysters and for centuries the phrase was as different as apples and oysters.

Shakespeare was the first to document the now familiar phrase the world is your oyster and this seems not to relate to any bone hardness of life, nor delicacy for your eating. Instead it’s a hopeful phrase along the lines that once you open things up you might find a pearl inside.

REQUEST – If you’re a regular podictionary follower (and particularly a podictionary podcast listener) I’d appreciate it if you took a moment to complete one or both of the audience surveys at the website.  There’s one from Podtrac and another from Wizzard Media (this second has a bonus episode of podictionary hidden at the end). Thanks so much!

Anyone who’s heard of Batman knows that he does his crime fighting in Gotham City.

The word gotham may possibly stem from an Old English root meaning “goat enclosure.”

There is no real major American city named Gotham, but it is generally seen as a stand in for New York City.  But there was a connection between Gotham and New York long before there was a Batman; and there was a Gotham City long before there was a New York City.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from 1807 for Gotham as applied to New York.  This is attributed to Washington Irving who used the term in something called Salmagundi.  These were a series of satirical pieces and I see from Google Book Search that Irving used the word quite a lot there.

The fact that he was writing satire is relevant here because going further back in history Gotham is a legendary town populated by fools.  So Washington Irving was poking fun at the sophistication of New York.

One example was a French Horn concert that was well played, but not quite so well played as an earlier concert given by

“a gentleman amateur in Gotham pla[ing] a solo on his proboscis.”

That is blowing his nose.

Gotham the legendary town of fools is first cited around 1460 so well before the founding of New Amsterdam—New York’s first European name—in 1626.  But the City of Gotham legend seems to go back further than that and refers, perhaps without basis, to the period of King John right around the year 1200.

It is a true fact that royalty like King John did tour around the countryside.  Some say it was to keep alliances alive.  Some say because their castles got so filthy and smelly they had to keep moving to the next one from time to time.  Another theory is that the royal retinue was so enormous that it gobbled up all the local resources and had to move on or risk starvation.

Starvation of the local people of course, not of the royal court.

Whatever the cause, this last overuse of resources seems to be at the root of the Gotham story.  King John is said to have planned to come to the City of Gotham in the course of his peregrinations and this started the people of the City of Gotham quaking in their boots.  They didn’t want to have to entertain the king in high style.  So they came up with a clever plan.  They decided to all begin acting like they were crazy so that when the advance guard checked out what the accommodations would be like this is what they found:

• A group of townsfolk earnestly trying to drown an eel; and
• another bunch surrounding a bush with arms locked so that the bird perched within couldn’t escape.

The king’s men reported that the place was full of wing-nuts and so King John stayed somewhere else.

I wonder what they’d have made of New York.

My reference to Bob Dylan in the podictionary episode on the word icon, caught the eye of not a podictionary listener, but a podictionary blog reader who’s a big Bob Dylan fan.

Tom Grasty has actually written a book called Blood on the Tracks that isn’t about Bob Dylan, but alludes to him. That’s why when I asked Tom for a favorite word, he chose allude.

I just looked this up so I know that to allude to something is to make indirect reference to it.

That means Tom’s book never actually mentions Bob Dylan, but Blood on the Tracks; a Dylan album, like duh!

So he refers to Blood on the Tracks, but alludes to Dylan.

That’s a pretty subtle difference there between refer and allude; kind of plays with your mind doesn’t it. That’s appropriate too because the etymological roots of allude are all about play.

Allude came into English about 500 years ago from Latin. Probably one of those words pulled from Latin directly by writers who wanted to show off how smart they were. English professors call these inkhorn terms.

Anyway, back in Latin allude was originally two words ad ludere, ad meaning “to” and ludere meaning “play.”

So the reason that allusion is indirect reference is that the person is only playing with the reference.

For a while there—because of this “playing” meaning—to allude was also to “make fun of.”

But what really attracted my attention was that it isn’t often that we come across a word that English got from Latin but that doesn’t have an Indo-European root. The American Heritage Dictionary does list that Latin ludere along with Indo-European roots, but it also says that it may actually be from Etruscan instead.

Etruscan is thought not to be an Indo-European language but it was a pretty important one. The Etruscans were the folks who set the framework for the Roman Empire. That’s why it’s quite possible that one of their words might have wiggled its way into Latin.

Just like many words must have existed in Old English but are a bit hard to trace because so few documents have survived, there are few samples of Etruscan writing so it’s hard to be sure exactly which Etruscan words made it into Latin. Even worse for those who study Etruscan, so few other related languages exist (and have documents to study) that although scholars can read Etruscan letters and make out the words, they can’t always figure out what the words mean.

The Etruscan text usually doesn’t even allude to a meaning.

Years ago I might look at the aftermath of a great party and see debris.  These days I look in my kids rooms.

Actually in both cases what I’d be looking at was mostly just a mess so I’m using debris in a bit of a metaphorical sense.

Debris is more literally garbage and broken refuse.  In fact completely literally debris is de meaning “from” and bris meaning “broken.”

While debris as an English word only shows up in 1708 it has an older English parent word that came from the French of the Norman Conquest 900 years ago.  The bris meaning “broken” had a more subtle tone to it than just something that was broken; the mode of breakage was by crushing.

Another English word that you are familiar with and that turns out to be related to debris is the word bruise.  If you whack your leg against a table hard enough after a few minutes or hours you’ll see a bruise.  In a sense the breaking and crushing sense of the word root applies since you’ve broken some blood vessels.

But the word bruise is far older than debris.  Bruise shows up way back in the writings of King Alfred the Great in the year 890.  So this Old English bruise certainly predates the French word root that appeared with the parents of debris.  What scholars think is that this word root might have actually been a Celtic word that wormed its way into Germanic languages as the Germanic peoples pushed up against the Celts in what is now Germany and France.  From the Germanic precursor it found its way into Old English and before that had also found its way into Latin where one of its many offspring was a word brisare meaning “to press grapes.”

On the other side of the English Channel where less grapes were grown one English dialect evolved bruise into a word meaning “to mash potatoes.”

That first citation of King Alfred’s was in fact his rendering of an even earlier English writer know to us as the Venerable Bede.  I’ve talked about him before here on podictionary.  He was the original English historian but he was also a church official—as were almost all of the educated for about half of English history.

Among his many other talents Bede made a close study of time.  Time was really important back then because different parts of the church calculated it differently so that the most important day of the year for them—Easter—took place on different dates in different places; sometimes as much as a month apart from one another.

This didn’t reflect very well on the supremacy of God, or at least on the accuracy of those other Christians who were celebrating on the wrong date.

In studying such problems it was Bede’s work that established an age for the earth and got him in some hot water as well.  At the time that he lived—back 1300 years ago—it was a well known fact among Christians that the earth had gone through six ages; the sixth beginning with the birth of Jesus Christ.  The understanding among the scholars of the day was that each of the previous ages had lasted roughly a thousand years.

Bede carefully combed through his religious texts and historical texts and computed that instead of being something like 5,700 years old, the earth was in fact only 3,952 years old.  Many of his contemporaries were appalled at this discovery.  They thought this put the birth of Christ in the wrong age and the accused Bede of heresy.

This, not surprisingly bruised his feelings.

The Oxford Dictionary of English  tells me that a delinquent is a young person prone to commit minor crimes.

The term juvenile delinquent makes this a little more specific.

I see from the mothership, the Oxford English Dictionary that the sense of “a petty criminal” has been effect since the first appearance of the word in English back in 1484; this from the presses of William Caxton, England’s first printer.

But before delinquent was an English word it had been a Latin word.  There too it had meant someone who offended.  But the deeper Latin root is a word linquere that didn’t mean anything at all like “a young tough.”  Instead it meant “to leave” and this is a meaning that traces back to Indo-European.

I can think of two possible reasons why a word meaning “gone-outa-here” might grow to mean “‘a crook.”

One could be that the person just wasn’t where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there.  For example someone who is delinquent in repaying a loan just didn’t show up to pay it, or the expected money didn’t show up.

The other reason might be that the guy who did the crime didn’t want to do the time and so he linquere-ed out of there as fast as his little legs would carry him.  When you see someone leaving the scene of a crime, you automatically think of them as the culprit.

The etymological sources I looked at don’t reach far enough back in enough detail to tell me if either of these suppositions might be true.

The OED entry for delinquent hasn’t been updated yet in the effort to issue the Oxford English Dictionary Third Edition, so the most recent citation in there is from 1891 and there isn’t much about juvenile delinquents.

But I do see a citation from Washington Irving referring to a “delinquent school-boy.”

Washington Irving was an early—if not the first—celebrity author that the United States produced.  He died in 1859 and from what I see of him he was not only a great writer but also a really nice guy.  With his success came support for other writers.

One day he had a chance meeting with another writer who was particularly interested in what Irving was working on for his next book. The reason was that an earlier Washington Irving book had been on the history of Spain and this other writer had been a little disappointed when it came out because his own book included some of the same information and hit the bookstores only a few months afterward; he didn’t want it to happen again.

Washington Irving says:

“Are you writing about something American?”

The other guy says “yes.”

“Is it about the Conquest of Mexico?” says Irving

“Yes” quavers the other guy.  To which the big hearted Irving replies:

“Well then, I am engaged upon that subject, but I abandon it to you.”

One more thing about Washington Irving; his Spanish History was considered so authoritative that four years later he served as the US ambassador to Spain.  Which of course forced him to linquere America for a while

Budgies are those colorful little birds that can be taught to say a few words. They are in fact a breed of parrot originally from Australia and so it’s reasonable that their name also be from Australia.

Budgie is a short form of budgerigar which is how the Australian Aboriginal word has been rendered into English.

The Oxford English Dictionary seems to disagree a bit on the source of this word with American Heritage Dictionary, Merriam-Webster and others. Curiously The Australian Oxford Dictionary even differs from the OED.

But only the OED gives a translation of what the Aboriginal word was supposed to have meant, and that is “good cockatoo.”

This seems a strange translation.

A cockatoo is another kind of parroty bird but if budgerigar means “good cockatoo”, wouldn’t that imply there was a bad cockatoo? Or maybe that the budgerigar was good for something?

The word budgerigar first appeared in 1847 in a book called Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia by a guy named Ludwig Leichhardt.

Originally a German—or Prussian in those days—Leichhardt had dropped out of school in Germany because he was too poor to pay the tuition but after some education in the school of hard knocks and a little sponsorship from friends through university in England he set out for Australia. His objective was scientific study of the undiscovered geology and wildlife.

When he got there he tried for an official research position but couldn’t break the glass ceiling and so got so fed up that he organized his own amateur expedition. Leaving town with a ragtag bunch he achieved what was then the longest overland journey by a European and returned in triumph. Even better; when his journal came out people saw that it wasn’t just a travel-log but instead a serious scientific observation.

He had no trouble organizing another expedition but he did have some trouble actually taking it. At first he was forced to give up due to rains, sickness and lack of food. Finally he set out for a third time, but this time he and his team seemed to walk right off the edge of the earth because nothing was ever heard of him again. The public concern was intense and search parties were sent out repeatedly over decades just like they were for Franklyn and Scott. But no one knows what happened to Leichhardt.

His journal doesn’t say why budgerigars are called budgerigars but I found one source that instead of saying the Aboriginal word means “good cockatoo” claims that it actually meant “good food.”

While I’m a little curious about the “good cockatoo” translation, I’m a little skeptical about the “good food” translation. This for two reasons. For one thing birds like this are very difficult to catch without a net. The same source that offers this translation claims that boys caught them by throwing sticks and rocks at them. If you’ve ever tried to hit a bird with a stick or a rock you’ll know that trying to catch dinner this way is a hungry way to live. The other thing is even if you did hit one, these birds are pretty tiny.

We are awash in nitrogen, but since most of us don’t have much use for it we don’t even notice.

What I mean by that is that the air all around you is made up mostly by nitrogen, but since you can’t see it or taste it you don’t much care. You can’t see or taste the second most common element in the air either, but you do care more about it.  That’s oxygen and of course if it isn’t there you notice because you tend to die of asphyxiation.  We don’t strictly need nitrogen to breathe so we don’t think of it much.

Sometimes the things made out of nitrogen we have tended to value more highly.  When we value them more highly we tend to give them names and that’s why nitrogen is called nitrogen; people valued nitre or natron and so they called this gas (that’s as common as dirt) “nitre forming”—the gen in nitrogen means that the stuff forms nitre.

Nitre was valuable 300 years ago or more because nitric acid was known as royal water for its ability to dissolve gold.

It wasn’t that people were running around dissolving gold every day, but nitre was also known to be necessary for the manufacture of gunpowder which was a little more important.

The roots of nitre or natron go much further back however.  The ancient Egyptians used the stuff in their religious ceremonies and for embalming and must have had other uses for it because they taxed it.  Our English word root comes via academic Latin which in turn drew from Greek, but the Greeks got it from the Egyptians.

The Oxford English Dictionary supposes that this Egyptian word for the stuff is closely related to another Egyptian word meaning “divine” and ’sacred.”

For some reason a Scotsman named Daniel Rutherford is credited with discovering nitrogen gas.  The fact is though that he didn’t really know the gas was associated with nitre, nor did he give it its name.

He just thought that air was made up of two parts; good air and bad air.  The bad air he called noxious air and that’s what was later called nitrogen.  According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography although he did do some experiments where he asphyxiated some mice there were others around at the time who were doing similar work.  The name Joseph Priestley jumps off the page.

The reputation of this noxious air wasn’t too good because in other languages nitrogen is often called azote; a French name given to it that from Greek means “without life.”

Poor old Daniel Rutherford seems to have been a nice guy but to have suffered in his day and since from a reputation for inadequacy.  At one point he took a job as professor at the University of Edinburg but no one would come to his classes based on an early sort of ratemyprofessors.com.  Something called A Guide for Gentlemen Studying Medicine at the University of Edinburgh slagged Rutherford saying that the stuff you’d prepare in his labs could just as easily be bought in local shops and his lectures didn’t add anything to what you could read in other literature.

This started him into a public mudslinging match with the author of the guide.

Edinburgh was probably only about 50,000 people in population at the time and the academic community would have been much smaller.  I imagine there would have been quite a bit of noxious air about whenever these two crossed paths.

When I right click on this word explicit and look at the suggested synonyms, unambiguous and precise strike me as pretty close to how I think of the word explicit.

And yet I see in iTunes that some podcasts are marked with a red explicit warning.  Based on what I know about the etymology of explicit it seems to me that this warning is a bit ambiguous.

Of course in iTunes and elsewhere an explicit warning means that the material is sexual in nature or in some other way may offend.  This meaning of explicit is first cited in 1971 and I see also in the Oxford English Dictionary that in 1986 in the Daily Telegraph one Michael O’Connor of Marine City, Michigan, complained that the real meaning of explicit was getting lost.  He demanded to know if

“this rich and expressive word [will] have its meaning narrowed and inextricably entwined with sex, violence and drugs?”

With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight Michael, in a word, yes.

With this sexual meaning it’s hard to notice that the word explicit is actually closely related to the word explain—unless you somehow think of pornographic videos as educational.

Both words explicit and explain come from Latin and appeared in English with first citations roughly 600 years ago around the time of Geoffrey Chaucer.  Knowing these words were Latin we can immediately figure out that the ex part means “out” or “out of.”  But what might the –plicit or –pain parts mean?

Here you should think of long hair in a braid.  In England a braid is often called a plait (pronounced “plate” or “plat” depending on who you ask).  The reason for this is because the various twines of hair are interleaved with each other.

They are folded over one another as would be various plies.  Here think of plywood or two-ply tissue.  It’s that ply part that is represented in the second half of explain and explicit.  Both words literally come from a root that meant “to unfold.”

So something that is explained is unfolded and open to full view.

An explicit instruction has had all its detailed nuances pointed out.

Occasionally these days the end of a story is clearly announced; The End.  It was this same context that actually brought the word roots for explicit to the British Isles.  The custom—dated to the year 420 by the OED—was to end a written work not by saying “The End” but instead explicitus or explicitus est liber.  This ending comes from the time when books were actually scrolls and since liber meant “book” in Latin, this ending literally meant “the book is unrolled.”

A soldier might use mortars to knock down a building made of bricks and mortar.  If there was anyone injured they might be treated with medicine prepared using a mortar and pestle.  The doctor would be highly educated and may well have worn a mortarboard at his graduation.

Believe it or not all of these mortars come from the same source.

I’ll start with the mortar and pestle.  I have one in my kitchen and I sometimes use it to grind up spices for cooking.  But which is the mortar and which is the pestle?

In case you don’t know what I’m talking about a mortar and pestle is a simple tool used for grinding things.  It consists of a bulky kind of bowl—that’s the mortar—and a club shaped pestle that is used to bash away at whatever is in the bowl to render it into smithereens.  It may help you remember which the mortar is and which the pestle is if I tell you that back in the 1400s people used the word pestle as a slang term for “penis”; similar shape and sound.

I mention this kind of mortar first because it is this mortar that all the other kinds grew out of.  The mortar for grinding comes to English from Latin but actually appeared back in Old English before most of those French words arrived with Middle English.  Latin was long the language of the educated classes and people who might be preparing concoctions for medical or spiritual purposes would have been familiar with Latin and so helped this word into English very early on.

By the year 1300 Middle English was in full swing but it was about that time that the powder that was produced after working with a mortar and pestle gave its name to the powder you mix with water when building a brick wall; hence bricks and mortar.

The mortar that soldiers use to lob explosives at their enemies was at first a very short stocky kind of cannon.  While a true cannon resembled it’s etymological forbearers—cane coming from the same root and meaning “a long tube”—mortars resembled a fat stocky bowl instead, sort of like the thing your 16th century doctor used to grind up medicines in.  Hence a few years before Shakespeare is born we first see in the inventory of the Tower of London armory something called a gonne morter.

So I’ve covered the grinding tool, the building material and the weapon.  All that’s left is the funny hat that people wear when they finish at university or collage.

These hats have their own fashion history that lead up to their being called mortarboards.

Back in the days when Oxford and Cambridge universities were young the most honored professors were recognizable by a kind of hat they wore called a pileus.  It was a tight thing with a point on top but it evolved over a few hundred years in two directions; pileus quadratus and pileus rotundus.

Rotundus were round on top while quadtratus were square.  Both were just shaped by the cut and bulk of the fabric but if you had a choice you’d wear a quadtratus since that meant you were wiser and more important.

These square kinds of hats can still be seen being worn by certain church officials; religion and higher learning were very closely associated back then.

The next step in the academic headgear fashion came in the 1700s when the squareness of one’s hat that somehow conveyed an affinity to the English church after the reformation necessitated exaggerated squareness emphasized by the inclusion of an actual board on the top of the hat.

Before these hats were called mortarboards they were called trencher-caps.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the name mortarboard was originally slang but I think trencher-cap must have been as well because a trencher was a board that people ate off of. When inverted the hat looks like a board with a bowl on it; even more reminiscent of tableware and perhaps enough to inspire some wit to call it trencher-cap.

The slang in mortarboard comes from the square tool bricklayers use to hold their mortar.