If you’ve been following podictionary for a while you’ll already know that the sources we have for Old English words, and even Middle English words are old documents, also that these old documents were not generally made of paper.

This is a good thing not only for trees but for researchers too since paper that is 600 or 1200 years old is usually not paper anymore but dust.

This was not such a good thing for barnyard animals though because instead of using paper the scribes of the day used parchment and vellum. These materials protected old documents so well because they had earlier been designed to protect animals—as their skin.

So it will come as no surprise to you that the word vellum comes to us from Old French and came right alongside another word, veal. So vellum was the skin from a young calf.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary Chaucer was the first author that we know of to use the word veal back in 1386.

Although they were writing on it, the word vellum didn’t seem to get written down until about 40 years later as an English word.

Both these words of course trace back to Latin where vitulus was a “calf.”

The American Heritage Dictionary links the Latin word back to Indo-European to a word wet that seems to be what the Indo-Europeans called a year. The idea here is that a calf or veal is a young animal, a yearling.

Although turning a tree into pulp and then spreading that pulp out into a thin sheet to make paper is quite an operation, it has the advantage that you can get a machine to do it and the result is a roll of paper hundreds of feet long.

Animal skins are not quite that long and the process of production isn’t exactly easy either.

• After the animal was slaughtered and the skin removed it was soaked in a lime solution until the hair fell off.
• Then each skin was stretched out on a rack and scraped smooth with a special knife.
• If the animal had gotten caught on a fence or been bitten by a bug the skin might have flaws that needed repair.
• Dry and shaved, the skin was again soaked to get the lime out then dried a second time.
• Finally it was rubbed with a pumice stone to really make it smooth for the scribes to write on before being cut into the shape of a page.

Pumice stones are a kind of foamy stone produced by volcanoes and they crumble a bit as they are used so that both the dust sanded off the animal skin and the dust breaking off the pumice mixed and acted to absorb any leftover oils on the vellum.

The result was a laboriously produced creamy white and long lasting surface upon which scribes could doodle for the benefit of future generations.

The word vomit doesn’t stimulate any very pleasant images so I won’t dwell on it much.

It appeared in English during the lifetime of Chaucer and he used the word, although he wasn’t the first that we know of to put it in writing.

I see at Urbandictionary an impressive list of synonyms and I guess that goes to the fact that this unpleasant act is one we all have experience with. Such is the hallmark of words that last a long time without change.

So it’s no surprise that vomit comes from Old French and in turn from Latin vomitus and according to the American Heritage Dictionary from an Indo-European root wem; all the way up through these thousands of years meaning the same thing as we understand vomit to mean today.

So why did I choose this word if it has no interesting twists and turns in its etymology and is sort of disgusting besides?

Some years ago I went to see a play. As we sat reading the program before the lights dimmed I was interested to see a note apologizing to patrons for any inconvenience during the construction of the theatre’s new vomitorium.

I’ve stopped going to that theater.

But the vomitorium’s not why. It turns out that a vomitorium is the opening through the rising rows of seats that allows the audience to get in and out of the place.

Since this is such a rare word I can’t find much about its etymology but presumably there is a sense of the crowd flowing out after the show. Evidently the word, or one very like it, was used in ancient Roman theatres.

The Oxford English Dictionary also notes that the word has been used erroneously as if it were a room where these ancient Romans went to barf during feasting. Authors no less than Aldus Huxley are cited with this meaning.

But I understood straight away what Aldus Huxley was thinking when he used vomitorium in this way. That’s what I thought that day years ago when I first read the word in the theatre program.

Admit it, that’s what you thought when I first said it just now.

So if Aldus used it and we all understood what he meant is the OED correct in saying this is an erroneous use?

Aldus Huxley is most famous for his book Brave New World but he wrote all his life. His essay The Doors of Perception was about his experience with mescaline. This is what inspired Jim Morrison of “Come on baby light my fire” fame to call his band The Doors. Jim was a bit of a drug user and one would presume someone also experienced with vomitoria; in both senses of the word.

In an unrelated note I see that Aldus Huxley also penned an essay called Vulgarity in Literature.

To us today there is a very specific meaning to the word nephew. I have several nephews and they are the sons of my brother.

But this word is derived from ancient roots and you can be sure things change over the thousands of years the word has been in use.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary there was an Indo-European root nepot that didn’t mean the son of your sibling necessarily, but could also mean “grandson.” This meaning seems to have percolated up into Latin and there seems to be a sense of “once removed” about nephew since both the sons of siblings and the sons of children are related to you but not as directly as your own child.

Another meaning that made it into Latin was of a “prodigal child” so there too, there is a sense of being not as close as a cozy tight parent-child relationship.

Those meanings ruled in classical Latin but Latin is like English in that it morphed and so in more recent Latin nephew came to mean what we mean by nephew, but it also extended to nieces.

I said in the episode on nepotism that it was a word that came out of the Italian word for “nephew” because popes kept appointing their nephews to positions as cardinals. But I see from work done by a guy named William Harrison that nephew was also a euphemism for son if a child was born out of wedlock. So this puts a bit of a new possibility to the notion that popes were giving their nephews plumb plum jobs.

Here’s what William Harrison had to say in his piece The description of England:

For nephues might say in those daies; ‘Father, shall I call you uncle?’ And vncles also; ‘Son, I must call thee nephue.’

This work was actually part of a larger work known to us now as Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Raphael Holinshed worked with a team to put together what they hoped would be a shining example of the wonderful history of the British Isles.

Up to that point most educated people in England didn’t actually spend a whole lot of time studying England itself. It was all the classics and a lot of wonderful stuff about other nations.

Evidently Holinshed and his team were kind of disappointed with the result they produced but history has judged it kindly. After its publication young scholars took English history seriously and it is said to have been a major source of material for Shakespeare who was 13 when the thing was published

According to Merriam Webster caucuses are all about political party members gathering and making decisions about candidates and policies.

There’s a tone in some definitions, including those in the Oxford English Dictionary of a caucus being back room boys controlling things behind the scenes; but this is mainly a British meaning to the word.

There seems to be little question among any of the etymological sources as to the geographical starting point for this word, at least as used in English; Boston.

Before the American Revolution local Boston elections were slightly notorious for being predetermined by one group of men meeting in a smoke filled room and planning out the next slate of elected officials. The reputation of this group was one of rare defeat. They became known as the Caucus Club but exactly why that name was chosen seems to have an unusually large slate of candidate etymologies.

Also the earliest two accounts of the existence of these movers and shakers come from people who aren’t very complementary complimentary.

The first citation comes from the diary of John Adams where he writes that:

the Caucas Clubb meets at certain Times in the Garret of Tom Daws… He has a large House…and the whole Clubb meets in one Room. There they smoke tobacco till you cannot see from one End of the Garrett to the other. There they drink Phlip I suppose, and there they choose a Moderator…and select Men, Assessors, Collectors, Wardens, Fire Wards, and Representatives…Regularly chosen before they are chosen in the Town.

What he means there by “drinking Phlip” is drinking a warm concoction mixed of beer and rum or whiskey. This relates to one of the proposed etymologies.

The American Heritage Dictionary attributes the club’s name to a Latin word caucus meaning a “drinking vessel.”

It seems to me though that lots of political meetings at the time were held in taverns, not in Tom Daws attic and the group would hardly have chosen a name centered on boozing and ended up so politically effective. I think their effectiveness is reflected not only in their reputation for winning all the time back those 250 years but also in the fact that their name was revered enough that others adopted it as a word inseparable from political process.

John Adams was writing a few weeks before the town elections. The week after the elections an anonymous cranky op-ed piece appeared in the Boston Evening Post, likely from a losing candidate; it referred to the Caucus Club as the “cork-ass club.”

Merriam-Webster’s suggested etymology sounds more likely. They draw on Algonquin, Abnaki and Natick native words meaning “advisor” or “elder.”

Other citations back-cast the existence of the club at least to 1724 but don’t give many more clues as to the name.

Around the year 1300 some unidentified scribe sat down and either wrote out or copied from another document a long romantic poem about King Alfred the Great. This document did not contain the word affidavit. But it did contain a related word and it is also an example of a Middle English document with a tale to or two to tell.

Affidavit is such a formal legal term that it feels right that it comes directly from Latin. It shows up in English in the century after Shakespeare’s death, so almost 400 years ago.

As I said it came from Latin and the lawyers of the time were using it because the literal English translation of the Latin affidavit was “has stated on oath.” It’s the fid in the middle of affidavit that gives us the oath, or at least a pledge of faith. It’s the same fid from fidelity.

Just like English words morph and mutate over time Latin words did too and the Latin affidavit was really only a late Latin word used in the middle ages after the Romans had long finished their campaign of world domination. It had grown out of two earlier Latin words fidum dare.

The related English word that showed up those 700 years ago in the King Alfred poem was affy—not a word we use any more—and it meant “to trust.”

That Middle English poem was unlike some other Middle English documents.

When Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales he was laying out a story intended to be read from the get-go. It was aimed at educated readers.

The poem was called Kyng Alisaunder and it instead was aimed at people who couldn’t read. You see Kyng Alisaunder was invented in some age before it was ever written down so that it could be recited aloud.

This is the way with lots of old epics.

The people couldn’t read or write and their oral tradition was helped along because it’s easier to remember a poem than all the facts of a prose story. In trying to remember it to tell the next person not only is your memory stimulated by the string of events, but since there is a certain rhythm and rhyme to a poem, one line more securely connects to the next in your memory. The story changes less from telling to telling.

So in 1300 or so it was written down. There are only four copies of it left in existence and these tell us something too.

These were the days before printing presses so each copy was written by hand. If oral poetry was more faithful than oral prose you’d think that a written reproduction would be even more faithful. But human failings being what they are we see that in copying out a manuscript the old scribes sometimes made mistakes, or maybe even added in their own versions of how they’d heard the poem in their youth.

Then there’s the question of dust to dust ashes to ashes. Four copies exist but we don’t know if there were more earlier on that just got destroyed or lost. Even the copies that remain are actually not immune from the dust to dust thing and three of the four are what are called fragments.

The last little story this old poem has to tell us is the value of paper. Actually these old documents weren’t written on paper. They were written on specially prepared sheep skins called vellum or parchment.

Since these materials didn’t grow on trees they were kind of expensive and since they were expensive they got reused.

One of the fragments of Kyng Alisaunder wasn’t kept safe in a musty library or museum. In 1949 it was found inside another book at the University of St. Andrews; it had been used for the new book’s binding.

I have just looked at a couple of sources and can confirm that today there is only one way that we use the word stickler. I saw

• a stickler for accuracy
• a stickler for detail and
• a grammar stickler.

As the American Heritage Dictionary puts it a stickler is “one who insists on something unyieldingly.”

The author Lynne Truss calls herself a stickler and wrote a book insisting on proper use of punctuation. Her book is called Eats, Shoots & Leaves but I have to say that in actually fact she isn’t an unyielding stickler since she was kind enough to give my book an endorsement blurb even though my punctuation isn’t always up to snuff.

Then again I did have a copy-editor fixing my mistakes.

The word stickler grew out of other similar words in English tracing right back as far as we can go in English. When it first showed up it didn’t mean your grumpy teacher who thought you should get lots of marks taken off just for a spelling mistake or messy writing. It was another word for an “umpire” or “referee.”

That was only about 500 years ago but its parent word stightle dating from 700 years ago had shades of meaning from the referee to making things right to

“with hostile notion, to dispose of.”

So that would be along the same lines as “I’ll fix him.”

Taking the next leap backwards we get stight showing up as early as the year 850 and meaning a much more benign “to set in order, arrange, place.”

This string of word roots and branches doesn’t seem to have emerged in our Modern English in any other word than stickler.

The first citation we have for stickler is from another dictionary maker, Thomas Elyot.

Thomas Elyot lived during the time of Henry VIII and was on good terms with the king. It seems that Henry VIII even took an interest in Thomas Elyot’s dictionary. This was also a time when a dictionary was actually a bilingual dictionary, not a dictionary as we would think of one today.

Elyot’s was a Latin-English dictionary.

He had been working away at it for a while and gotten up to the letter M when Henry VIII took an interest. I think Thomas Elyot was of two minds about Henry’s enthusiasm. On the one hand it’s great to have the king recognize your work and want to help. But on the other hand when the king makes editorial suggestions your independence as an author goes out the window. Especially a king who is okay with beheadings etc.

Actually Henry VIII didn’t get that deeply into the dictionary writing, but he did ship a wagonload of books from the royal library for use as reference material.

For Thomas Elyot this meant that there was a whole lot of extra work to do than what he’d been expecting; both reading the books and then putting the new stuff he found into the dictionary. He says so in the dictionary’s preface in the same place he dedicates the thing to Henry.

The printer had already started working on the dictionary.

Those were the days before you’d flip a switch and copies would start spitting out the far end of a machine. Printing was still a pretty manual-intensive affair.

So the final product if you can find it in a library of rare and antique books, runs with adequate detail up to the letter M and then with copious detail for the letters N and after. Then pinned on the back is an appendix with a bunch more detail for those A to M entries.

That’s it for today. Remember my book—hopefully rendered in adequate detail—and with a blurb by that stickler Lynne Truss. My book on the words we use for our bodies titled Carnal Knowledge.

Emily Post is probably the name most associated with etiquette.

She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but not all of her life went quite as swimmingly as you’d imagine for the most recognizable name in social propriety. She split with her husband because he was chasing skirts but he had also lost the family fortune in a stock market collapse so that’s why she picked up her pen.

We’d never know how to be polite to one another if it hadn’t been for her misfortune. Actually I’m sure she gave lots of good advice. You don’t get to be that respected without a good reason, but from this distance in history some of her recommendations leave me scratching my head.

I was drawn to some of her writings on words, phrases and pronunciation. She writes that:

People of the fashionable world invariably use certain expressions and instinctively avoid others.

And then she goes on to recommend that one never utter any of the following lines:

• Never say “Pardon me” (you should say “I beg your pardon”)
• Avoid “Pleased to meet you” (that should be “How do you do”)
• Instead of saying you “attended” an event you have to say you “went to” it.
• Never say someone is “brainy” when they are “brilliant” or “clever.”
• Don’t say “phone” when you mean “telephone;” or
• “auto” when you mean “automobile.”

To me none of these are  is too offensive.

There could be two reasons for this:

1. that I’m hopeless at etiquette or
2. that she wrote these 85 years ago.

Whichever is the case Emily Post clearly felt that if you knew your etiquette you could write your own ticket in life, and etymologically she’s right.

Way back in Indo-European there was a word steig that meant “to stick.” One of the many growth routes of this word brought it up through Germanic languages where they rubbed up against the Latin that was turning into French after the Romans folded up their empire and went home.

In French this word turned up as estiquet and was applied to a piece of paper that officials nailed to church doors and the like; the “stick” root being applied because they were stuck in a public place. About 500 years ago this word for a short written notice came into English as ticket.

In the mean time followers of the French kings and queens were taking notes on how to behave among all those fancy pants courtiers. These little booklets took on the name of those written notices and so became etiquet—which arrived in English 300 years after ticket. The leading S that stuck with stick was lost in both ticket and etiquette.

Here’s a quote from Samuel Johnson himself:

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Here’s the Merriam Webster definition of task:

a specific piece or amount of work usually assigned by another and often required or expected to be finished within a certain time

I think all of us these days would include tasks that we imposed on ourselves in that definition. The first citation for this meaning is from someone I haven’t cited in a while, but you’ll remember his name; William Shakespeare. From Richard II:

Alas poore Duke, the taske he vndertakes Is numbring sands, and drinking Oceans drie.

This carries the sense also of difficulty and burden that task used to have; a somewhat more onerous meaning than we give task these days.

Something similar to our current meaning appeared about 400 years ago, but the word is older than that. 700 years ago the word applied to the work you had to do to for your lord. That might be as a soldier for your baron or tending crops on his land for him.

Although the written evidence turns up a little later, 600 years ago, the thinking is that the earliest meaning of the word task in English was in fact “tax.” So not only could your social superior demand a task of you in time and labor, but a task could be something you paid in cash.

And there’s a reason that a task meant a “tax.” Both words sprung from the same root.

The new French government that was put in place after the Norman Conquest a thousand years ago made a priority of figuring out what taxes they could extract from England. You’ve heard of the Doomsday Book. It was actually a taxable property inventory that the Normans undertook almost as soon as their feet hit English turf. The Old Norman French word tasque was actually just a mixing up of the sounds of the earlier Latin taxa.

So to recap with the information I talked about yesterday in the episode on the word tax:

• An Indo-European root meaning to touch
• Evolved into a Latin word meaning to evaluate by touch
• And further into a meaning of evaluation for taxation purposes
• Then split in two
• One word being tax and relating to monetary or commodity payments
• The other being task and relating to payments in time and effort

Will Rogers said

“Income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf.”

We have the French to thank for taxes. Before the Norman invasion in 1066 there were no taxes in England. There were tolls of course, but no taxes. The word tax was so kindly given to English by the French who got it from Latin.

Toll on the other hand was Old English and so a Germanic word. But surprise surprise, it too seems to have come from Latin.

Those Romans didn’t build their empire on voluntary contributions.

If you feel that the government is putting the touch on you when they gather their taxes this is an etymologically accurate feeling. Before reaching England’s untaxed shores the word in Old French was taxer. The French had already paid theirs to the Romans who in turn called the act taxare.

The meaning in Latin was not only “to tax” but also “to evaluate” because for quite some time over the span of history the paying of taxes wasn’t so much computed in coin but in chickens and bushels of grain. To figure out how much you owed the government required a little subjective judgment. So that Latin taxare is actually a closely related word to tangare which is Latin for “to touch” and taxare also had this sense of the tactile. The idea here is to know how much tax you need to impose you need to be able to judge the value of the thing being taxed. To judge the value of the thing to be taxed you need to get firsthand knowledge of it, if possible touch it.

These Latin words are traced back to Indo-European in the American Heritage Dictionary to a “touch” word tag.

Right away I thought of the kids game tag but the etymology of this tag only seems to run back 300 years in the dictionaries.

The word toll as I said was already in English before the arrival of William the Conqueror but it had also come from Latin. Sometimes Latin words came to Old English with the church but in this case other Germanic languages also have toll or very similar words so it really is more likely that it was an earlier interaction between Romans and Germanic tribes involving some paying of tribute that brought us this word.

Toll can be traced through Greek before finding its way back to Indo-European where it’s most basic meaning is “to support.” The thinking isn’t so much that tolls supported the government as the fact that some kind of measuring and weighing of produce was involved in calculating the toll. So it was supporting the basket of grain as you weighed it that lent the word its meaning.

Do you trust your government? The federal government takes its name from the Latin word for “trust.”

It wasn’t that they were trying to con people into trusting them though. The first time the word federal showed up according to the Oxford English Dictionary was in a religious context.

Federal theology represented the deal that God made with Adam or the deal Jesus made with his church. That was back in 1645.

The Latin root was faedus and is clearly related to our English word faith. While faith made its way up from Indo-European through Greek, Latin and French, federal as a word was picked directly out of Latin and plunked down in English.

Before federal got applied to our governments it was applied to agreements between sovereign governments such as those for Sweden and Denmark.

The United States is made up of—well, the name says it all—united states. It is the uniting of all of these independent states that makes the overarching government a federal government.

The first citations we have for the use of federal to mean such a government come fittingly enough from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington almost 150 years after the word appears in the language.

This gives me three things to mention.

The fact that the OED chooses Thomas Jefferson and George Washington as its first two citations for this usage tells me that the OED in this case didn’t really search too hard to make sure they had the earliest citation. I’m sure Jefferson and Washington used the words, and early on too; but don’t you think some other functionary or newspaper reporter is likely to have used it before Jefferson.

It just feels like these two are too much the obvious candidates to cite.

Here’s what Jefferson actually wrote—he was in Paris at the time:

The opposition to the new Constitution grows feebler. Everywhere the elections are federal. [By this he means people are voting for a federation.]…The Virginia Assembly…are furiously anti-federal. They have passed a bill rendering every person holding any federal office incapable of holding at the same time any State office. This is a declaration of war against the new Constitution.

Now in that passage he’s used the word federal three times and according to the OED he’s used it with two different meanings.

The elections going federal and the Virginia Assembly being anti-federal use federal to mean in favor of turning the individual states into one big country.

When he says “federal office” that’s when he is supposed to be establishing the first ever use of the word federal to mean the central government.

There is a difference I guess but it’s a bit of a subtle one.

The other uses he’s making of the word federal are only cited one year earlier according to the OED. For that one Jefferson was indeed scooped by a reporter; in the London Magazine.

The only other thing I have to say is that the citation from George Washington talks about the “federal city;” they hadn’t named it after him yet.

Funny though, Georgetown was already Georgetown, not after George Washington but supposedly after King George II; although I see a source that tells me that the two town founders were also named George.