A filibuster is something that happens in government. When one party wants to pass some law or something and their opposition doesn’t have the legal means to stop it, but tries to stop it anyway, by hook or by crook.

The Oxford Dictionary of English says that a filibuster is:

An action such as prolonged speaking which obstructs progress in a legislative assembly in a way that does not technically contravene the required procedures.

Where might such a word as filibuster come from?

There is that buster part in there that seems to match up with the busting action the opposition is taking. But if that has anything to do with the etymology it’s because English speakers thought it made sense, not because it had any historical validity.

More accurate might be the idea that the opposition party was acting in a sort of outlaw manner by hijacking the business of government. They could be seen as some sort of pirates, at least in the eyes of the group who were trying to move their legislation forward.

Back in the century before Shakespeare the Dutch had more ships afloat than any other European country and so it’s understandable that some of their nautical jargon might find its way into English.

The Dutch term for a pirate was vrijbuiter and this appears to have quite quickly have been mutated in English mouths into filibuster.

There’s a first citation in the late 1500s and then the word must have simply been circulating verbally because it next turns up more than 200 years later, still meaning pirate.

By the middle of the 1800s the word was shifting in meaning and being applied to Americans who worked for regime change in South and Central America in contravention of international law. This specific reference to pirates in a specific application broadened quickly to be applied to people fighting unconventional wars against foreign governments generally.

Finally just before the start of the 1900s the word turned in on itself and applied to actions against one’s own government, this time not with guns but with political tactics.

I should say also that it isn’t always the party in power that suffers filibuster from the opposition party. There are plenty of cases where an opposition group has found some dirt on the governing party and is working the government channels to bring it to light so the governing party themselves turn pirate on their own government processes to try and keep the embarrassing details hidden.

I usually drink my coffee black.

Strong and black.

I do enjoy cappuccino from time to time, but it is more of a fancy kind of coffee than I usually have time for. The fact that cappuccino is a fancy kind of coffee is sort of at odds with its etymological history.

For a few decades either side of the year 1200 there walked this earth a guy now known to us as St. Francis of Assisi. He built up quite a following with his ideas of simplicity and poverty and the movement he founded became known as the Franciscans.

One of the things he is famous for is his love of nature. Reportedly he preached to the birds and advocated the feeding of even wild wolves rather than hunting them when shepherd’s flocks were being picked off.

But by 300 years after his death some of his Franciscan followers were of the opinion that others of his followers weren’t living simply enough or in enough poverty. So they started their own sub-group of monks within the Franciscan order. This new group wore very simple garments. You might imagine the classic long plain robe with a big hood hanging down the back.

At the time this must have been a bit distinctive because the Italian word for a “hood” was cappuccio and so this new sub-order of monks became known as the cappuccino monks, at least in Italian.

So the fancy cappuccino coffee you order in an upscale coffee bar with its foamy head of steamed milk and a little dash of cinnamon is a long way from the avowed simplicity of these monks.

But how then did a group of monks give their name to a fancy coffee drink?

Some of the sources I checked claim that it is the white foamy head on the drink that is being recalled in the name, even going so far as to say these monks wore some kind of white headgear as part of their habit or uniform. This appears to be false. I think it comes from the etymology of the word pointing to something one wears on one’s head.

The Oxford English Dictionary says instead that it was the color of their robes that was likened to the color of the coffee with milk in it. But there’s something wrong with this description too because this color is described as gray and any cappuccino I’ve ever seen is brown; as appear to be all the modern photographs of the robes of Capuchin monks.

The problem appears to be that we Anglophones have only been drinking cappuccino for about 60 years, while the Italians have been drinking it much longer. The transference of the word cappuccino from monk to beverage happened in Italian before coming to English and so the citations we have came later and the etymology is second hand.

I suppose that would be okay with true Capuchin monks; hand-me-downs would fit well with their vow of poverty.

Molière wrote:

It is public scandal that constitutes offense, and to sin in secret is not to sin at all.

Molière was a French playwright who lived just after Shakespeare.

I don’t think I can agree with his assessment here.

To you and me a scandal is a public outcry at some event judged to be wrong.

That’s what the word meant to Molière too. It was shortly before the time of Molière that scandal came into English, and it like Molière came from French.

In fact this was the second coming for the word into English because we see citations for it hundreds of years before, but that first time it mutated into another English word slander and so scandal had to be rediscovered.

There is a strange twist in meaning as this earlier form of scandal moved through history.

Back in ancient Greek the word meant a trap and so then came to mean a trap that you might set for your enemies and particularly a trap that might cause moral stumbles.

In those earlier senses there is an element of victimization to the person at the center of the scandal. At the time it first appeared in English the sense was of public outcry but particularly to events in which a church official had crossed moral lines. Our current sense of the word slander also carries the implication that there is a victim against whom false accusations have been made.

Did the meaning of this word move away from victimhood and back again in its evolution?

While I can’t find dictionary evidence to support me on this I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that the belief system back 800 years ago would have supported the perception of a church official as victim because the view was that the whole game was a battle between God and the devil for people’s souls. The church official could have been seen as having been tricked into Satan’s trap.

As I said, when scandal reappeared in English just before Shakespeare’s time it held just about the meaning we think of today.

I’ve dug up an example of a scandal with two interesting attributes.

In 1963 John Profumo was the Secretary of State for War in England. He had to give up that nice job because he had an affair and it became a scandal. According to Molière if the details had stayed in the bedroom it wouldn’t have mattered.

Except that the gal that John Profumo was getting cozy with was Christine Keeler and she just happened to also be mighty friendly with another guy who surprise surprise was a Russian spy. These were the days of the cold war.

I think that most people would agree with the idea that even if this little affair didn’t blow up into a public embarrassment, there was something wrong about it.

The other interesting thing about this scandal is its echoes in the ancient Greek meaning of the word. Clearly John Profumo was a bit of a dunce to put his foot in the trap, but when pretty girls with Russian spy boyfriends start getting friendly with high government officials somebody’s going to end up a victim.

I hold in my hot little hands a brand new copy of Anatoly Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology.

Today I’m going to use the word dwarf as a kind of vehicle to describe what I see between this book’s covers.

To begin with let me read to you the full etymology for dwarf as reported in the American Heritage Dictionary:

[from] Middle English dwerf, from Old English dweorh

That’s it, the whole entry.

Compare this with Anatoly Liberman’s information which I estimate to run in excess of 12,000 words of text. I think it’s safe to say that Professor Liberman’s treatment of this word dwarfs the etymologies in other dictionaries.

I’ll get to what he has to say in a moment, but first I want to tell you about the philosophy behind this dictionary of English etymology.

Not all dictionaries are particularly strong on etymology and part of the reason is that etymology takes up valuable space on the page where not all dictionary buyers are as keen on the subject as you and I might be.

Also, even though the word etymology means “the true sense of words,” in practice there is often a lot of opinion involved in what the true history of a word might be. For this reason, as Professor Liberman explains, the compilers of even strong English etymology dictionaries have tended to include etymologies where they themselves were convinced by the research and arguments of experts. But all too often felt justified in claiming an etymology was unknown when there was no clear winner among a host of theories on a word’s background. The result is, that for you and me who don’t know multiple languages alive and dead, we have no idea what the competing theories might have been.

Even when the dictionary editor does believe one line of thinking, we have no way of knowing why he or she believes that.

Anatoly Liberman has taken a different approach. He feels that what we have in English, as far as etymology dictionaries go, lags far behind those of many other languages because past efforts have not brought together and openly sifted-through the various theories and pieces of evidence.

Because he’s been willing to do so, each entry in his dictionary is comparatively huge. Consequently, when finished his dictionary will also be a rather ponderous size.

But it isn’t finished yet.

The book that I cradle in my arms is subtitled An Introduction because in it Professor Liberman treats a total of fewer than 60 words.

That’s not very many by most dictionary standards.

You might even say that it’s a bit of a dwarf of a dictionary that way.

In this, and in my earlier mention, I’ve used the word dwarf to mean something small. That’s certainly its current meaning, and in fact the Oxford English Dictionary first cites the word back in the year 700 as meaning a person of less than normal dimensions.

But Professor Liberman has taken a long view and applied his best judgment to the scraps of evidence that trail back into pre-history and come up with the idea that dwarf didn’t always mean small.

In fact, in some ways in an ancient world view, dwarves were seen on a par with the gods.

What etymology my usual dictionaries do have on dwarf agrees with him that it is an ancient Germanic word. He feels that the evidence points further back to a time when the mythical beings that came to be dwarves were conceived to be helpers to the gods and of normal stature.

Our current mythology associates dwarves with caves and Professor Liberman suggests that this may be because one of the earlier forms of the word dwarf sounded a lot like the then contemporary Germanic word for “mountain.” Imagining a race of beings that lived in caves in the mountains would support their being of a smaller scale.

As I said, his entry for the word dwarf goes on for many pages and I can’t cover it all here.

What’s more, it isn’t always easy going. There’s some deeply academic content that sometimes takes a will to get through.

But Professor Liberman has tried to make it easy. He opens the book with a section called The Etymologies at a Glance where he boils the analysis down to a single paragraph for each word. But once you get interested in a word it’s definitely worth plowing on into the main bulk of the entry because there is obviously more meat there than he could fit into one paragraph.

He also breaks the main entry into somewhat logical parts. In relation to dwarf he spends some time discussing the word’s association to insanity; the ancient thinking being that people who were “a little off” had been affected by the gods—or in this case the sub-gods, dwarves.

When you think that this first portion of Professor Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology holds entries for fewer than 60 words, the hope of ever seeing a full and complete dictionary itself seems a little insane.

But think back to the Oxford English Dictionary. Its first publication took more than 20 years to produce and only went up to the word ant.

To get close to a complete etymology dictionary Anatoly Liberman will need some help, so here’s the help that you can give him.

Convince his publisher that they weren’t insane to produce the thing by buying a copy.

Or, get your local library to buy three.

The etymology gods—or at least their dwarves—will smile on you. Plus it’ll give me more to talk about

I took a look at Urbandictionary as well as the more reliable official type sources.

Whereas I think Urbandictionary is an excellent source for figuring out slang usage, a word like glossary allows the weaknesses of a site like Urbandictionary to show.

To start with Urbandictionary doesn’t even have an entry for glossary.

But they do have an entry for gloss.

This is due to the fact that since anybody can submit an entry it just so happens that no one has done so for glossary. But because another word gloss means “shine or luster on a smooth surface” (as The New Oxford American Dictionary puts it) someone has submitted an Urbandictionary entry for that word.

In turn a second user has added the meaning of gloss that relates to glossary.

So here’s what Urbandictionary says about that gloss.

background information on something or someone; basic facts in order to get a take (probably from “glossary”, the part of a book which lists sources of information)

Oops, a few little mistakes in there.

The basic definition is okay: “background information on something or someone.”

Most of the real dictionaries I looked at would agree that a gloss is “a brief explanation.”

But then Urbandictionary says that gloss is probably from glossary and that the glossary is the part of a book listing sources of information.

Hmm. I always thought the part of the book that listed sources of information was called the bibliography.

But since I know the real answer, the statement that gloss is probably from glossary is what stood out for me.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary a glossary is a collection of glosses, so Urbandictionary got that backwards.

I guess the mistake is understandable since most people encounter glossaries at the back of books as lists of words used in the book with quick explanations of their meanings. Glossaries are also sometimes published not as the back of a book, but as a book themselves.

In this case I suppose the conventional understanding of what the difference is between an glossary and a dictionary might be that a dictionary goes into some depth in describing a word—or can do—while a glossary is strictly that quick description.

A dictionary may have several different meanings to a word; it may have sample sentences or citations in which the word was used; it may have an etymology. But a glossary keeps it simple.

That may be how we understand the difference today, but when the words first began emerging in English the distinction wasn’t quite so clear. Glossary is hundreds of years older than dictionary as a word, and the reason is, that as the OED says, a glossary is “a collection of glosses.”

Before a gloss was a quick description of something it was a quick translation of something. The first English glosses were English words written in Latin religious texts to explain what the Latin meant to the English monks who were supposed to be studying the texts. So at that point, a gloss stood alone, not in a glossary at the back of the book.

The Latin manuscript might have been penned hundreds of years earlier and then these explanatory notes added right there on the old pages either crowded between the lines or off in the margin.

Whereas the word dictionary doesn’t show up until the 1500s, gloss shows up in the 1200s.

Although we got the word from French, gloss comes from Latin and at first glossa meant “a word needing explanation.” With time that meaning changed to mean the explanation itself.

Before being a Latin word gloss was a Greek word and here’s where things get interesting.

Originally in Greek glossa was the word you used to refer to your tongue; the thing the doctor asks you to stick out when you say “ah.” The Greeks thought that foreign languages that other people spoke—their mother tongues—needed explanation, hence the transfer of meaning.

And I see that Merriam-Webster relates this old Greek word to another old Greek word glochin- or glochis meaning “a projecting point” which I guess fits with sticking out your tongue.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Long John Baldry but he was a musician who palled around with Elton John and Rod Stewart.

One of Long John’s songs is Everything Stops for Tea. Therein he claims

Every nation in creation has its favourite drink
France is famous for its wine, it’s beer in Germany
Turkey has its coffee and they serve it blacker than ink
Russians go for vodka and England loves its tea

Oh, the factory may be roaring
With a boom-a-lacka, zoom-a-lacka, wee
But there isn’t any roar when the clock strikes four
Everything stops for tea

This little ditty feeds off of and reinforces the image of a cup of tea being a very British thing to enjoy.

Long John says it’s coffee in Turkey but you might be surprised to learn that people were drinking coffee in England for quite a while before anyone there had ever heard of tea.

Actually both coffee and tea show up in the written record in the same year—1598—and in the same document, but tea came out as chaa and didn’t turn up again as tea until 1655, forty years after that other English icon—Shakespeare—was six feet under.

That document was something called John Huighen Van Linschoten, his Discours of Voyages into the East and West Indies.

John Huighen Van Linschoten was Dutch and the Dutch were big into sailing around discovering things and then becoming middlemen selling those things here and there around the world.

And so it was that Dutch traders to Malay or Formosa brought back the Amoy dialect word tea to Europe—or something like tea—while Mandarin Chinese chai found its way to Europe courtesy of Portuguese traders; Arabs via the silk route; and overland to Russia.

Tea drinking in England took a while to get going. It was 1660 when Samuel Pepys reported tasting the stuff for the first time.

So tea changed its pronunciation back in the Far East before Europeans discovered it and it’s also a good example of how pronunciation change continues. While Long John Baldry rhymed tea with wee and Germany, The American Heritage Dictionary offers up a passage by Alexander Pope that shows the pronunciation of tea back in 1714 as “tay,” rhyming with obey.

What kind of pine has the sharpest needles?

We’ll of course a porcupine.

I’m not sure if I remember that joke from when my kids were eight years old, or from when I was eight years old.

As a guy who likes to spend time in the woods I’ve always thought of porcupines as North American beasties.

To be honest, without thinking about it much I sort of wondered as I was looking the word up, whether porcupine might have an etymology in a native North American language. But the earliest citation in English for porcupine was back in 1425 and Columbus wasn’t supposed to have sailed the ocean blue until 1492, so there goes my theory.

Porcupines of a slightly different sort did and do yet exist in Europe, Africa and Asia. In Europe they seemed to like it around the Mediterranean and particularly in Italy so it makes sense that the French, who brought the word to English, got it from the Italians.

That’s the theory according to the latest update in the Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition just released online in March, 2008 as a draft entry.

The Italian word goes back to Latin and breaks into porcus spina which means “pig with thorns.”

There are older Greek words with the same meaning thought to have inspired the Latin ones.

Except when my dog gets too interested in a porcupine I always think of these little creatures as pretty harmless. But they haven’t always been viewed that way.

So many heraldic symbols are meant to inspire a feeling of power. You’ve seen roaring lions and bold eagles on crests and coats of arms.

Shortly after the word porcupine waddled its way into English the French king Louis XII came to the throne. He brought with him the fearsome symbol of his family crest, the terror-inspiring porcupine.

This little picture from the Wikipedia article on Louis XII shows a statue of the king on horseback.There below him in the lower right corner is the royal porcupine with a crown on its back.

Although I think of a porcupine as pretty docile, the belief once was that porcupines could throw their quills (they can’t). With that in mind one can see the symbolism as being more aggressive and powerful.

King Louis didn’t want to say “I’m a pig but keep your dog away from me if he doesn’t want a mouthful.” He wanted to be seen as the aggressor, and he was, taking over parts of what is now Italy.

But from what I read, part of the reason we no longer think of porcupines in this heraldic sense, as we might rearing horses or lions rampant, is because King Louis was more than a warrior king. As his reign went on he undertook projects that were just plain good policy. He became a very popular king and wanted to portray an image of care for his kingdom, not only a fearsome ruler. And so the porcupine was downplayed.

So this little spiky creature has a long and honorable European history as well as a North American one.

To close the loop I should tell you that kakwa is the Cree word for “porcupine” and the Mi’kmaq word is matues.

You know of course that something in turmoil is mixed up, in a state of agitation.

Not every word in the dictionary has a clear etymology.

I checked Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Encarta dictionary, Wiktionary, Cambridge and more. They all said the same thing “etymology unknown.”

The Oxford English Dictionary could have said the same thing, but it didn’t. They said “origin unascertained.”

So they don’t know for sure either, but they do give us a theory. According to the OED a fellow named Cotgrave thought up the theory.

Randle Cotgrave came out with his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues in 1611. So, five years before Shakespeare died.

Cotgrave appears to have been a careful lexicographer who shipped pieces of his manuscript off to Paris for double checking and shared it with people he respected in London as well.

We feel the turmoil of our times and that there are never enough hours in the day and Cotgrave’s letters show that he felt some of the same pressures, asking his reviewers for quick turnaround so he could get the various letters of the alphabet to the printer on time.

The earliest citations for turmoil in the OED are about mental turmoil but Cotgrave’s theory is for a mechanical mixer-uper.

Although the word seems to spontaneously pop up in English without any history Cotgrave theorizes that an Old French word might be behind it. The Old French word was tremouille and it was built, as are so many words, by jamming together other words; in this case trémie de moulin.

You’ve likely heard of Moulin Rouge which is a “red windmill,” moulin being “mill.” The trémie was the hopper into which the grain was fed that was going to be ground in the mill.

To keep the grain continuously flowing into the grinding stones of the mill the hopper jiggles around all the time. Actually that’s why a hopper is called a hopper, because it hops around so much.

So the reason turmoil means “agitation” to us today may be as a metaphor to this agitating container.

The reason an Old French hopper was called a trémie is that as we already know French was once upon a time Latin and the Latin name for the same trémie meant that it could hold three of the standard Roman units of measure. The tre in trémie meant “three” the mie stood for modius.

So if Cotgrave was right then we can deconstruct the word turmoil to mean

“the hopper that contains three units of dry measure and jumps around above the millstone.”

Of course you know the story about Groucho Marx.

He was accepted as a member of a very exclusive club called the Friar’s Club and then sent them a telegram saying

Please accept my resignation. I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.

The word club began its life in English in 1205 according to the earliest documents that the Oxford English Dictionary could turn up.

It doesn’t seem to appear in Old English but instead in Old Norse. What this tells me is that it was likely a word in use in the northern part of England during the time before the tenth century, when the Danes were in charge up there after their Viking raids.

Few people were writing anything down at that point at that latitude and so the word had to wait until the Grandson of King Alfred the Great more or less unified the country, and then until literacy spread north, before the word club could join the party.

The club Groucho Marks wished to dissociate himself with* isn’t the Old Norse club though.

For centuries before and after that first 1205 citation a club was a club was club was a big honking stick that you could crack over someone else’s head.

That sounds more like a Viking word now doesn’t it.

So how exactly did the word that once meant “a big stick” come to mean “a group of people” that Groucho Marx wouldn’t want to associate with?

The Oxford English Dictionary is the only dictionary that I found that even makes an attempt to answer this. The others just say “from Old Norse.”

The OED tries but it doesn’t feel that it succeeds. Here’s the thinking.

The word club is related way back on the mists of Germanic language history to the word clump. A clump can just be a lump, but it can also have a sense of something “brought together” or “hanging together.” This may have influenced the use of the word club in the 1600s when the word started to mean “to gather things together.”

At one point a knot of hair on the back of your head could be called a club of hair because it was gathered together.

People pooled their resources to pay for an outing and that was called a club. And so more generally a social gathering, or the place it happened, or the organization it happened under, all became known as clubs within a very small number of decades.

So a golf club can thus be the thing you whack the white ball with, or the place you do it.

The problem with this logical progression as the OED points out, is that the transition between club meaning a big stick, and the emergence club meaning a group of people appears to be too short.

There appear to be no written records of social clubs or gathering hair into clubs at all before the 1600s, and then suddenly, within a few decades there are a whole gang of related meanings to club with various subtle shades of meaning too complex to have evolved that fast.

I guess Groucho Marx didn’t understand clubs either. He applied to become a member of a California beach club that he knew wouldn’t accept a Jew—which he was. He claimed that because his wife was a Gentile he hoped they’d let his son go into the ocean at least up to his knees.

*see comments

Yesterday I explained that the name Webster once was a woman’s professional title if she wove cloth.

I also introduced a guy who’s spent almost 9 years now producing handmade books containing antique dictionary images from Webster’s dictionaries of the 1800s.

He calls his book the Pictorial Webster’s.

Seeing as how there is a major dictionary company named Merriam-Webster you might wonder how he gets away with it.

For instance if I wanted to call my book The Oxford Dictionary of Body Parts I might just hear from an attorney.

I took a look on Amazon and found the Webster’s New World Hacker Dictionary. This is a dictionary of computing words and one Amazon reviewer had concluded his review by saying

“it’s trusted by Webster’s.”

In fact that particular book is published by Wylie.

I suppose it’s perfectly trustworthy but the reason that Wylie and Merriam-Webster and a number of other publishers appear to be sharing the name Webster is that

• on the one hand people put a lot of trust in the name as far as dictionaries go, and
• on the other hand, court battles have been fought over the rights to the name

and…well I’m not sure whether to say everybody lost or everybody won.

Here’s the story.

Shortly after the American Declaration of Independence a guy by the name of Noah Webster came up with a spelling book.

Since all the other spelling books available to American kids were being published by what was at that time thought of as the enemy, England, Webster pretty much had the field to himself and sold a pile of the things.

He got it into his head that he was the arbiter of American English and so within a few decades came out with a dictionary, and then another bigger dictionary.

When he finally died the rights to his dictionaries were bought up by G & C Merriam. They happily went on to produce new editions of the dictionary but there is a long history of the contents of one publisher’s dictionary finding its way into a new and improved dictionary from another publisher.

Since Noah Webster had built up so much brand equity in his name it seemed tempting for other dictionary compilers to slap it on theirs, since Noah’s dictionary had been such an inspiration to them.

The G & C Merriam company didn’t think that was fair and so took another dictionary maker to court. Problem was, according to the court, the original dictionary was out of copyright. So that meant the name was fair game.

Merriam didn’t just lay down and die, but kept paying lawyers for a while all to no avail.

According to the law anyone who wants to call their dictionary Webster’s can. It means just about the same as “dictionary” these days.