This episode sponsored by GotoMeeting. Try it free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

I was interested to see the following citation from more than 400 years ago.

” Hath hell no power to hold thy sprite..Or else hath Pluto baalde thee out?”

So, to be “bailed out of jail,” as a phrase, goes back some time.

To “bail out” of a situation has a different root. The Oxford English Dictionary ties bail as relates to jail, to a Latin root that we got through French. It originally meant “to bear a burden” then mutated meaning through “taking charge of” to “taking away” before arriving in English as “being liberated, with certain conditions”—like leaving your wallet at the door.

To bail out of a situation is purported to have two possible etymologies according to the OED.

One idea relates to a bale of hay and the idea is that the bale or package is dropped through a trap door.

This bale is spelled differently and also traces back through Latin to be related to our word ball.

The second idea relates to saving yourself by bailing the water out of a boat.

In this case yet another bail we got from French and Latin comes into play. This time it means “pail.”

Although “bailing someone out of jail” can be traced back 400 years and more, “bailing out” of a situation only goes back to 1925 and appears to be an Americanism originating in a time when it was both more frequently required, and more possible to bail out of a plane.

I came across a citation for our word of the day that made me think of a story I once heard about the early days of film. Evidently when a movie was playing in some western town whose audience included real life cowboys, a scene came on showing cattle stampeding toward the audience. This terrified the unsophisticated audience including the cowboys. At least they had experience with stampeding cattle, so they began shooting their guns at the screen.

I can’t find a reference for that story but in a similar vein is the story of Harriet Mellon; a pretty actress back around the year 1800.

She was playing the part of a damsel in distress in a theatre in Liverpool England. Across from her was the dastardly villain of the piece demanding that she pay her debts or go to prison.

Would no one stand bail for her?

Out of one of the upper balconies of the theatre leaps a sailor who swings down to the stage as he might descending rigging from his ship and offers to protect the actress while threatening the other poor actor.

The day was only saved when the quick thinking manager emerged with a wad of fake stage money to pay the debt.

In real life a more substantial citizen stood bail for pretty Harriet Mellon.

In another audience sat a rich banker Thomas Coots. After the show Harriet favored him with her company, and for many evenings besides.

Unfortunately he was married which puts a little tarnish on her damsel in distress reputation. But when his wife died 10 years later he married Harriet even though she was half his age. And so Harriet went from a childhood of near poverty to a substantial fortune.

But her success on the stage was genuine and if she was acting in her affection for her sugar-daddy she got her own back when, after he died she in turn married someone half her age. This time a Duke. So you can look her up under Duchess of St. Albans.

I’m sure you know that a hypochondriac is someone who imagines they have a multitude of medical problems when in fact they are perfectly healthy. They suffer from hypochondria.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary this meaning developed in English from a word that we got from Latin and that Latin in turn borrowed from Greek.

Hypochondria sounds like a fancy medical word and so it is fitting that it didn’t come to English from French 1000 years ago, but instead directly from Latin more like 400 years ago when renaissance scholars were dragging ancient wisdom back into the light of day, at least to European knowledge.

When English academics first adopted the word hypochondria the meaning was not of imagined medical conditions. The Greek roots of the word can be broken in two hypo and chondria. Hypo is the opposite of hyper so that while something that is hyper is above, something that is hypo is underneath.

That’s why you get a shot with a hypodermic needle, it goes under your skin.

The chondira part of hypochondria means “cartilage.”

So hypochondria really meant the soft tissues and organs that lay beneath your ribs and sternum.

Back hundreds of years ago and sometimes even now, when people went to their doctors with unspecified stomach ailments, pains and complaints, the doctor often couldn’t pin down the problem. So it was that these soft tissues and organs were blamed for unspecified health problems and the problems took on the name of the region of the body.

You can be sure that in many cases the pain and threat to health was real and that it was the primitive physician’s ignorance that made the problems unknown and generalized under the hypochondria heading.

But with time the meaning of the word shifted so that it came to mean not an illness the physician had no other name for, but an illness that the physician didn’t actually believe was there.

In the late 1700s there was a doctor named John Moore who was a keen observer of human nature. We know he was a keen observer because he was also an author.

He was convinced that two thirds of a physician’s fee were generated out of imaginary complaints. He tells the story of a businessman who had gone to the town of Bath for the health-giving properties of its hot-springs and then was off to Bristol to see if theirs could make him any more healthy.

He asked his doctor in Bath to write a note to whatever doctor the businessman managed to scare up in Bristol to bring that new doctor up to speed on the case. Off he went toward Bristol. After a while he got curious as to what his physician might have said to the prospective doctor.

I’d guess the businessman was enough of a hypochondriac that he wanted to have a more exact understanding of all his ailments.

Anyway, he opens the envelope addressed to the new doctor and reads

“Dear Sir. The bearer is a fat Wiltshire clothier. Make the most of him.”

Although the word taxi only emerged about 100 years ago, the word cab is a little older.

The first citation the Oxford English Dictionary has for cab is from 1827. That was a contraction of the word cabriolet.

Cabriolet appeared in 1766 and didn’t refer to a vehicle for hire, but instead to a specific kind of horse drawn carriage. This explains why the part of a pickup truck where the people sit is also called a cab. Curiously this is not related to the part of an aircraft where the people sit which is called the cabin.

A cabriolet was a two wheeled, two person carriage pulled by one horse. It usually had a hood over it to keep out the rain and the passengers legs and feet were sheltered inside the frame. (I couldn’t find a copyright free image of the thing.)

Because the things were quite lightweight compared to bigger carriages and wagons, they tended to start with a jerk as the horse got going. Other accounts say their suspension was very springy so that as they moved over the bumpy roads they tended to jump around a lot.

In any case it is this tendency to sudden movement that gave them their name. Cabriolet came from Italian before it came to English from French.

Through French it relates to our word caper as in “to caper about”—a kind of movement that might involve jumping.

Back in Italian and into Latin the root meant “a goat jumping.” In fact the American Heritage Dictionary tells me that caper meant “he-goat” back in Latin.

I went looking for quotes about cabs and the only one that I turned up related to the film actor from last century Clark Gable.

This is a story that should give some comfort to people finding it hard while just starting out in their careers.

You may remember Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind from the 1939. Evidently he did not find it easy getting into the movies.

Jack Warner of Warner Brothers was heard to yell at his casting director:

“Why do you throw away $500 of our money on a [screen] test for that big ape? Didn’t you see those big ears when you talked to him?”

Another reviewer inside MGM said:

“You can’t put this man in a picture. Look at him! Look at his big, bat-like ears.”

And here’s the cab quote. Howard Hughes said:

“That man’s ears make him look like a taxi-cab with both doors open.”

It hasn’t shown up yet on iTunes & Audible.com for sale as a download but it is there at online bookstores for those who’d prefer a CD.

Here are the links:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• Powell’s
• Borders
• Booksamillion
• Chapters/Indigo (Canada)
• Amazon.ca (Canada)

If you want to support your local bookstore you can ask for it by name, author or ISBN # 978-1427203304

I’ll keep you posted on when it turns up at the iTunes store.

In the audio I’ve included a little clip of Groucho Marx making taxi puns in the 1933 movie Duck Soup.

The first citation we have for the word taxi is from a British newspaper in 1907; the Daily Chronicle. Back then people hadn’t quite decided what to call taxis—as the article says (as sited in the OED):

“Every journalist..has his idea of what the vehicle should be called. It has been described as the (1) taxi, (2) motor-cab, (3) taxi-cab, (4) taximo,..(7) taximeter-cab.”

But the very next year the same paper says:

“Within the past few months the ‘taxi’ has been the name given to the motor-cab.”

But I see in Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable* that a taxi traces its name back beyond English and beyond taxis that were motor-cabs.

According to Brewers the name comes from horse drawn cabs in France. Except it wasn’t that these horse drawn taxis were themselves called taxis, it was that they had a little machine onboard that calculated how much you needed to pay them.

That little machine was called a taximeter; which is a word we’d still recognize.

Brewers goes on to say that taxe is French for “tarrif” or “fare.”

But I see in the Oxford English Dictionary that these little machines were first manufactured in Germany and that taxameter appeared first in a German patent for the things in 1890.

The Latin word taxa meant “tax.” I’ve touched on the word tax in a previous episode.

Those earliest German taxameters didn’t actually compute the price of your ride, they simply connected to the wheels of the carriage so that they could show you how far you’d gone. So today we’d call them odometers.

Strange that, because the word odometer had been floating around for more than a hundred years before people adopted this German trade name instead.

The OED quotes Thomas Jefferson as the first person to use odometer in English in 1791but clearly other people must have been using the word before that, or who’d have known what he was talking about.

Odometer shows up in French back in 1678 according to the Robert dictionary. Back then—and in the days of Jefferson—no one was connecting devices to the wheels of carts or carriages. The first odometers were what we’d call pedometers and measured how far you walked.

The word odometer comes from the Greek root hodos meaning “journey.”

* The link I gave above for Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable goes to a publicly available version that doesn’t actually contain the entry for taxi. The version I used is available instead through Credo Reference (a site available through libraries, but that also gives free trials).

I drive a car with a stick shift and a clutch.

I’ve been teaching my daughter to drive and I think what she hates most is stalling in traffic.

Since most people drive cars with automatic transmissions I’ll explain that to stall a standard what you need to do is engage the engine—which is running at or near idle speed—with the wheels—which are stopped, without giving the car time to get rolling. The engine stops too.

Instead of moving away from an intersection after the light turns green, as the driver behind you expects, you stand still. Your face reddens, you fumble with the ignition and try again; even more likely now to stall since the pressure is on.

It’s that standing still that gives this event the name stall.

The etymological sources give a bewildering spider-web of related words but seem to connect this kind of stalling of a car to the stall a horse might stand in. It’s the standing still that counts.

Among the many twists and turns this word seems to have taken over the ages two points stood out as unusual to me. The “standing still” stall came from Old English and thus Germanic roots but to stall for time is said to have arrived from French.

This latter French arrival was first used to refer to a tethered bird used as a decoy and later a stall was a pickpocket’s accomplice, someone who’d slow you up—stall you—while your wallet was lightened.

These two origins only became the same word as their meanings drifted close enough to be confused.

The reason I picked this word for today was that I didn’t want to blatantly steal from Ben Zimmer who looked at a word with a similar meaning for his first post at Word Routes his new column at the Visual Thesaurus.

His word was procrastination and he explains there that this is from Latin meaning “to put off until tomorrow.”

But I got two bonuses out of his first column and I’ll share them with you.

One was that he was kind enough to let me know the new column had begun and I craftily looked at who else he’d told. And from that list of email addresses harvested a little list of word and language related blogs.

Some I was already subscribed to, some were new to me.

Here’s the full list

• Ben’s new column
• Language Log another blog Ben participates in with several other bloggers
• Erin McKean’s Dictionary Evangelist
• Errata a blog associated with wordie, a site that bills itself “like flickr but without the photos.”
• Languagehat also a good copy editor if you need one
• Literalminded
• Mr. Verb
• Polyglotconspiracy
• Separated by a common language
• Tenser said the tensor
• The Lexicographer’s Rules Grant also runs Double Tongued Dictionary and co-hosts A Way With Words by radio and podcast.
• Wishdig
• Wordlustitude

The other bonus was that when I wanted to pick a word that matched up with procrastinate and couldn’t think of one, I poked around in the Visual Thesaurus for a while until it led me to stall.

Before I go I should reveal my own story of learning to drive (having embarrassed my daughter).

When my dad taught me to drive we lived in Montreal a place full of steep hills.

Early on, when stopped at a light, it turned green and I expertly released the brake, pushed gently on the gas pedal and eased off the clutch.

This should have begun my graceful forward acceleration. Except due to the fact that I had neglected to put the stick shift into first my acceleration began in the other direction, much to the surprise of the car waiting behind me.

There was a loud, panic inducing bump and my father said

“just go, just go.”

I went. But you know, I didn’t even stall.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Audible.com Download a free audiobook of your choice today at www.audiblepodcast.com/dictionary

The podictionary word for today is curl:

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead;
And when she was good
She was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

These immortal lines were written by that towering literary figure Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. That was in the 1800s.

A little more recently, but still a long time ago, this poem surfaced in my childhood home when my sister was misbehaving. We must have been quite young because the family tradition evolved so that when my sister was bad she was porridge.

The word curl showed up in English long before, back in the 1300s and then too it was in connection to curly hair.

The word’s roots are Germanic, based on similar words in other Germanic languages and it is pretty certain that curl or its parent word was in use long before, back in Old English. It just never got written down; or if it did the document curled up and disintegrated before modern scholars got to see it.

The traces that are left show us that the word curl came after the word curled, at least in the documentary record, and that both are likely related to crull meaning “curly,” as is my hair.

This connection sent me off looking for cruller which The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America tells me is a twisted piece of deep-fried sweet dough.

The things I thought of are doughnuts that look like little tractor tires but according to this Encyclopedia of Food and Drink they can be quite a variety of shapes. They appear to have been introduced into North American cuisine by Dutch immigrants to New York and must have in that case had a curling shape since a cruller takes its name from that Dutch-Germanic word meaning “curl.”

I’ve got a picture of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the podcast shownotes and you can see that he himself had curly hair and a curly beard.

There lies a story, sad but also relating to curly hair.

In the picture Longfellow’s hair and beard are snowy white so it’s obvious that this was taken in his later years. This time of his life was a sad time.

For decades he had been an internationally recognized poet and Harvard professor. Later he married and lived happily in what is now the Longfellow National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He had a reputation for being happy and happily settled.

One summer day he was napping while his wife was saving locks of their children’s hair in envelopes and sealing them with wax. Her dress caught fire and her screams woke Longfellow who put out the blaze.

But it was too late, she was burned so badly that she died the next day.

In trying to save her, Longfellow burned himself so badly that he was unable to attend her funeral and the reason he’s seen in pictures with his full curling beard is because of his facial burns; perhaps the beard hid the scars, perhaps the scars made shaving impossible, probably both.

This episode sponsored by GotoMeeting. Try it free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

It is my practice in researching the history of a word to see if I can glean any intelligence about the future of the word as well.

To do this I usually check out Urbandictionary. There’s a lot of trash there but occasionally I see a word being used as slang with a meaning I’d never have known otherwise.

Here’s what one entry says for size.

A superior adjective for such words as cool, rad and awesome. Slip this word into any conversation and your friends will be amazed, hot women and wealth will soon follow!

As it happens, there are considerably more votes against this entry than for it so one must suppose as a slang word it doesn’t have much traction.

A slightly more popular entry at Urbandictionary uses size as a synonym for evaluate.

This entry has about even votes for and against. I’m thinking it’s along the lines of “size up a situation.”

As it turns out this evaluate usage is right-on in terms of the etymology of size.

When size first appears in English back before the year 1300 it did not mean “dimension” or “magnitude.”

These were the centuries after the Norman Conquest when the government was French. That government might have been a little more uncaring than the English residents would have liked, but in collecting taxes from the people it was doing just about the same thing our governments do to us today.

To calculate how much tax needed to be paid, a sort of judicial council sat in judgment. They considered the resources you had and then decided what a fair rate of tax was.

Because the government was French these councils went by a French name. Back in France this had been l’assise. You might recognize an English word meaning “court of judgment,” assize.

That French name l’assise is a bit of an abbreviation for la assise meaning in English “the assize.” But English speakers got confused and assumed it was short for la sise, “the size.” Thus for a while there in Middle English both the word size and the word assize meant a judicial body making decisions on justice and taxation.

To make a long story short, the idea that this gang of judges could determine the magnitude of your tax bill lead to the word size taking on a meaning of “magnitude.”

This was about 1400 and shows up first in an old document that represents a popular but unusual form of entertainment from that period.

Most of the earlier manuscripts are religious in nature and this continued to be true. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were written at this time and although generally entertaining, they had a religious thread. Even documents purporting to tell the history of England and the world were pretty religious.

This particular document was instead about the history of Alexander the Great. Only a few fragments have survived of these Alexander Romances as they are called. But they were so widely known at the time that Geoffrey Chaucer has one of his characters talking about them and making it plain that everyone already knows their stories.

There’s actually more to the story of the word size and I’m going to get to the bottom of it—literally—in tomorrow’s episode; distributed, as are all the Thursday episodes, on the Oxford University Press blog.

For iTunes users I’ve begun adding a podcast subscribe link with my posts at OUPblog.

It is my practice in researching the history of a word to see if I can glean any intelligence about the future of the word as well.  To do this I usually check out Urbandictionary.  There’s a lot of trash there but occasionally I see a word being used as slang with a meaning I’d never have known otherwise.  Here’s what one entry says for size.
A superior adjective for such words as cool, rad and awesome.  Slip this word into any conversation and your friends will be amazed, hot women and wealth will soon follow!
As it happens, there are considerably more votes against this entry than for it so one must suppose as a slang word it doesn’t have much traction.  A slightly more popular entry at Urbandictionary uses size as a synonym for evaluate. This entry has about even votes for and against. I’m thinking it’s along the lines of “size up a situation.”  As it turns out this evaluate usage is right-on in terms of the etymology of size. When size first appears in English back before the year 1300 it did not mean “dimension” or “magnitude.”  These were the centuries after the Norman Conquest when the government was French.  That government might have been a little more uncaring than the English residents would have liked, but in collecting taxes from the people it was doing just about the same thing our governments do to us today.  To calculate how much tax needed to be paid, a sort of judicial council sat in judgment.  They considered the resources you had and then decided what a fair rate of tax was.  Because the government was French these councils went by a French name.  Back in France this had been l’assise.  You might recognize an English word meaning “court of judgment,” assize.  That French name l’assise is a bit of an abbreviation for la assise meaning in English “the assize.” But English speakers got confused and assumed it was short for la sise, “the size.”  Thus for a while there in Middle English both the word size and the word assize meant a judicial body making decisions on justice and taxation.  To make a long story short, the idea that this gang of judges could determine the magnitude of your tax bill lead to the word size taking on a meaning of “magnitude.”  This was about 1400 and shows up first in an old document that represents a popular but unusual form of entertainment from that period.  Most of the earlier manuscripts are religious in nature and this continued to be true.  Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were written at this time and although generally entertaining, they had a religious thread.  Even documents purporting to tell the history of England and the world were pretty religious.  This particular document was instead about the history of Alexander the Great.  Only a few fragments have survived of these Alexander Romances as they are called.  But they were so widely known at the time that Geoffrey Chaucer has one of his characters talking about them and making it plain that everyone already knows their stories.  There’s actually more to the story of the word size and I’m going to get to the bottom of it—literally—in tomorrow’s episode; distributed, as are all the Thursday episodes, on the Oxford University Press blog.  For iTunes users I’ve begun adding a podcast subscribe link with my posts at OUPblog.

Yesterday on the main podictionary blog and podcast I talked about the word size and how, when it first came into English, it didn’t mean “bigness” but instead was related to assize, a word meaning “judicial panel.”

It was because the judges determined the “enormity” of the tax bill people had to pay back 600 or 700 years ago in England that the word size began to take on a meaning of “magnitude.”

With this little snippet of information it isn’t much of a leap in logic to understand how the word assess might be related to assize and size.

While assize and size once were related to evaluating the amount of tax you pay, assess still is to this day. It’s as familiar as the phrase tax assessment.

The word assess first turned up in English about 550 years ago. Originally it was only used in relation to assessing taxes. In fact for almost 500 of the years since then it has “exclusively” been used in relation to assessing taxes.

It was only in 1935 that we get the first citation for assess being used for the assessment of anything but taxes.

Only within the last hundred years have we begun to assess men and assess opportunity and assess situations.

The word assess came to English from Old French and along the usual path, before that, from Latin. The English association between tax and the word assess reflects the meaning that the late Latin parent word held. But this Latin word was built on earlier roots.

When a judge sat in judgment he often had an assistant to help him out. Believe it or not the words size, assize, and assess all run back to a word root meaning “sit.”

In earlier Latin assess didn’t mean taxes, it meant “to sit beside” as would an assistant to the judge.

The American Heritage Dictionary goes further in tying the words to an Indo-European root sed also meaning to “sit.”

The 1935 citation in the Oxford English Dictionary that liberates assessment for uses beyond taxation is credited to Webster. Since by 1935 Noah Webster had been dead lo those 90 years we will turn our gaze instead to the New International Dictionary, Second Edition that was printed in his name in that year.

No doubt the dictionary was accurate in its assessment of assess, but there is one famous error contained elsewhere in its pages.

Have you ever come across the word dord?

It appeared in the 1935 New International Dictionary but not because it was a word.

It appeared because one of the contributors suggested that the word density could be abbreviated by either a capital D or a small d. Whoever read the submission didn’t read “D or d” they read dord and thus a new word was born.

It took a few years but the mistake was caught and dord removed. That’s why none of the mainline dictionaries I consulted include dord as a word. But it appears at Urbandictionary and with—I think—an appropriate definition.

They say it’s the word meaning a word that doesn’t exist.

I came to today’s word from the episode I did on the word matrix.

As I said there matrix traces back to a much older word mater meaning “mother.”

But I see in the Oxford English Dictionary the ending of matrix is a standard Latin suffix strapped onto a number of words to indicate that the person involved is a female.

Not that I’ve ever met any but dominatrix is a female role that springs to mind.

The OED says there in its matrix entry that the trix suffix may have been added to matrix in Latin after nutrix.

That pricked up my ears, what’s nutrix?

I mentioned that the American Heritage Dictionary has a reputation for being a little more daring in the reach of it’s etymologies than some other dictionaries but in the case of nutrition the recently updated OED is right onside.

Back in Indo-European and then in Sanskrit there was a word snu that meant to flow. If you’ve ever been or been close to a new mother when she hears babies crying you’ll believe it when I make the connection between flow and nutrition. Just the sound of babies crying is usually enough to get a nursing mother’s milk flowing.

So by the time the word snu made it up to Latin it had morphed and lost its leading S.

Within Latin the word began to split and eventually gave us both nourish and nurse. So a nutrix is a woman who provides care and nurturing to growing children, back in Latin she was a “wet nurse.”

Nutrition first showed up in English almost 600 years ago through French. Nutrix appeared just slightly later.

Although nutrix isn’t a word that I at first recognized and so I think I’m safe in saying isn’t a word too commonly used, the OED shows a citation for it as recently as 1995 so I guess it’s still in circulation.

The document that first brought us nutrix is of some interest. A guy named Ranulf Higdon used it back in the 1300s in his book Polychronicon which was a history of England as seen from the middle ages.

But Higdon wrote it in Latin so that doesn’t count as an English word.

Others came after Higdon and liked what he’d done and so translated it into English; that’s where nutrix was legitimized as an English word.

Then in 1857 the government of England undertook a fairly gargantuan project. This became known as the Rolls Series.

The head judge of the land had as part of his responsibility the keeping of all of the public records of England. Because early on these had been scrolls his title was Master of the Rolls.

150 years ago the Master of the Rolls realized that all the medieval records of the history of England were in a pretty sorry state. He convinced the government to cough up money so that hundreds of these old documents could be carefully studied, translated and reprinted. Thus what had previously been in hand written manuscript format was reproduced in typeset format.

If the Master of the Rolls hadn’t come through for us back then Google Book Search could never have digitized the hand written versions. But he did, and they did, so now you can see them from the comfort of your desk.