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“My name is Sandra Gulland and the word I would like to know more about is persnickety because it’s so much fun to say and it’s a little bit spitty and I wonder if the history of the word persnickety has something to do with the pleasure of the sound of it.” [audio file]

I’d better start out by saying what persnickety means.

But first I’ll tell you that Sandra Gulland is another one of the authors I met earlier this summer at a writers’ event.  She’s a historical novelist and her latest work Mistress of the Sun imagines what life must have been like for the mistress of Louis XIV, the Sun King.

The American Heritage Dictionary says that persnickety means:

“Overparticular about trivial details; fastidious”

Merriam-Webster Unabridged says:

“excessively meticulous…fussy”

Even Urbandictionary agrees.

The British dictionaries agree too, but they go about it in a way that tells a tale.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines persnickety as – (wait for it) – “pernickety.”

There in the OED is an entry for persnickety updated to June 2008—so Sandra your timing is excellent—and with a first citation for persnickety back in 1892.

They call the word an American colloquialism and point for its etymology to this same word persnickety except without the spitty S; pernickety.

The first citation for pernickety is 1808 and it’s described as a colloquialism originally Scottish.

The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style lets us in on the distinction saying that although pernickety is older, persnickety is about five times more frequently used in North America.

They don’t say so but evidently this isn’t true back in England and Scotland.

So one would have to conclude that while the spitty persnickety is more fun for North Americans to say, the spit free pernickety must be more fun for British English speakers.

That first citation for pernickety is from something called an Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language by John Jamieson.

Although something called an etymological dictionary sure sounds interesting, it turns out that John Jamieson was highly regarded for his industry in being able to produce such  a work almost singlehandedly, he fell a little short on the etymology.

He speculates that pernickety might be from French where par means “through” and niquet means “trifle.”

Although that sounds pretty logical, it can’t have much basis in documentary evidence because none of the modern etymology dictionaries give this theory the time of day.

Some instead suggesting pernickety is a twisted form of particular.  The OED takes almost 100 words to say “we don’t know the etymology of this word.”

Oh, hey, did I mention that this is episode 800 of podictionary?

I was fortunate to have attended a garden party recently that seems to me to fit with the word extravagant.

The owners of the garden were in the construction business and had been for a long time.  The great grandfather had helped build the parliament buildings here in Ottawa.

The house was right in the city, but in the country too.

The day was hot and muggy but there was a pleasant breeze blowing off the lake as we stood chatting and sipping champagne under the awnings, a band played and waiters shuttled nibblies around the beautiful flowerbeds that ran right across the lawn to the yacht club right next door.

Girls in beautiful gowns and discrete photographers, plenty of food and sparkling conversation; what better way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

If this mental picture seems to you to fit with the word extravagant then you’ll agree with me that extravagant in this case is a good thing.

But it has not always been so.

The first time extravagant turned up in English was back in 1387 and it was a legal term.  It wasn’t necessarily a bad legal term.

An extravagant law was an outlier; a law that didn’t fit under a category with other laws.

The bad part of the meaning of the word came into English later but it came for the same reason that extravagant was applied to a law that was hard to categorize.

Let’s break the word in two: extra, vagant.  There is a pretty clear connection there between vagant and vagrant or vague.

That first English citation was drawn directly from Latin—as the old legal eagles were in the habit of doing—and in Latin vagus meant “wandering” and “uncertain.”  And of course extra in Latin meant “outside of” so that an extravagant law had wandered outside of the normal categories the lawyers used.

The word extravagant sat in legal obscurity there for about 200 years before reappearing, this time through French around the time of William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare used the word extravagant in Love’s Labour’s Lost applying to emotions that went beyond reasonable; and in Hamlet applying to the ghost that was roving out of bounds by coming back from the dead.

By 100 years after Shakespeare you could be living extravagantly; that meant that you were living beyond your means.

That certainly wasn’t good.

So when you are giving an extravagant gift, the literal meaning is that the gift giver has gone beyond the limit that they should have.

But since we all like to swan around beautiful gardens with a glass of bubbly in our paw, extravagant has also come to mean “good.”

I’ll tell you an extravagant story about William Shakespeare.

I heard this one from Samuel Johnson.  He said that when Shakespeare was young he ran away to London and his first job was to hang out outside the theatre and wait for theatre goers to arrive on horseback.  He made his living at first by taking care of the horses while the play went on and was such a good caretaker that theatre goers would ask for him specifically.  He then built up a group of employees who would help him deal with the bigger crowds.

What is extravagant about this story is only that it goes beyond the bounds of truth, so says Sam Schoenbaum the American Shakespeare biographer.

A teenager I know was recently at a weekend party up at a lake.  Evidently two of the girls there had an altercation and one pushed the other off the wharf and into the water.  This was reported to me in the following terms:

“Suzie and Nancy really had beef.”

This was a new one on me.

For a second I wondered if they had shared a nice steak.

Good word beef; interesting history.

Cows have been around people for some time.  Long enough that there was an Indo-European word for cow gwou.

This reached us as cow via Old English.  But while it was getting here it was also getting to Latin by a parallel route to arrive there as bov.  By the time William the Conqueror arrived in England in 1066 the French had turned the Latin into beuf.

So there was William looking out the window of his castle and in the adjacent field he saw an animal he’d call a beuf.  While out in the field the guy with the pitchfork looked at the same beast and thought it was a cow.

Since William and his court spent more time with beuf after it had been sliced up into steak, the word for the meat of this animal took on the name beef.  But the guy with the pitchfork still had to manage these ponderous creatures and so the Old English name stuck to the live versions.

It took a little while for the French word to creep into writings that we can now accepted as English.  French arrived as the official language of England in 1066 but it was almost the year 1300 before beef has its first citation as an English word.

So that explains why I thought these two girls were having steak.  But how did my teenage friend get to understand the word beef to mean “fight”?

Well, in 1869 Harper’s Magazine reported on the exploitation of some buffalo for their meat and used the word beef in its article with a meaning of “slaughter.”

The buffalo were to be beefed.

The OED reports that this sense fed a slang expression where to beef someone was to knock them down; showing first in writing in 1926.

I don’t believe that this directly fed into my teenage friend’s use of the word beef to mean “fight” but in 1888 and 1889 we have the first two citations for beef meaning “to complain,” as in “what’s your beef.”

This is as far as my understanding of the word beef goes; which is to say I’m right up to date with the jargon of 120 years ago.

But Urbandictionary does have entries that support my teenage friend’s use of beef meaning to argue or fight.  The implication is that this is from gangster rap and likely evolved from the “complaint” meaning to also encompass a meaning of “grudge” as well as “fight.”

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I’ve talked before about how the parts of human experience that are most common to us all are the ones for which the history of a word describing that little bit of our common heritage goes back furthest. 

Word is one of those words.

Ever since people have been able to communicate verbally with one another we’ve had to have had words, and what we call these little pieces of audible communication has had a common name for a very long time.

Both the Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary point to an Indo-European root wer.

People had been speaking to each other long before that but we’ve no way to tell if the word root for word went even further back.

Still, this is a pretty far reaching conclusion since Indo-European was perhaps seven thousand years ago and that’s about half way back to the invention of agriculture.  Classical Roman and Greek are only about a third of the way back to Indo-European on that timescale.

From that Indo-European word root wer sprouted related word words in all the precursor languages I regularly mention on podictionary.  But because the idea of what a word is was so natural to all the users along the way, instead of the Romans borrowing from the Greeks or the pre-Germanic people borrowing from the Romans, each language developed in parallel.

So our English word word traces back to Old English and Germanic roots.

But we also have the word verb that we got from French and Latin before it.  Verb has the same ultimate parentage as word, but evolved in parallel.

Similarly our word rhetoric came to us through Greek, but in Greek this word grew from the same Indo-European root and again along a parallel path.

The difference in meaning between word and rhetoric also points out the breadth of meaning of such a commonly understood concept.

Looking back at the Oxford English Dictionary I can tell you that for a word with only four letters the definitions in the OED do go on.

Just as an experiment I copied the text for the OED entry into a Word™ document and found that it runs to 32 pages with more than 20,000 words of text.  The subtle variations in meaning are mind boggling.

Of course a group of letters on a page is a word, and so is something I say to you.  But even in that there are shades of gray.

“Can I have a word with you?”

“Say the word.” and

“We had words with each other.”

all demonstrate how slippery this meaning can be.

The point is that for these oldest and most commonly understood words not only do they have the longest histories, but they also have the most number of minute distinctions and variations in meaning.

The very first citation the OED has for word is dated 873.

There are a few things that are unusual about this.  For one thing 873 is a bit more exact than most of the older citations.  Another unusual thing about this citation is that it is for the seventh definition, not the first; often a word’s oldest appearance comes first in the list of definitions.

The reason that the OED has pinned 873 as the first time this word was written down is that the document it is written down in is pretty unique.  It was the will of King Alfred the Great.

The reason this citation comes in at number seven is really due to the slipperiness of the meaning of the word word.

Usually the OED tries to list meanings in the historical order that they arose in English.  Because word had been kicking around for so long with so many subtleties in meaning, I guess the OED editors felt that although they couldn’t find written evidence of English use of some of these meanings earlier than King Alfred’s, they really were more basic, fundamental meanings and so got listed first.

Most of the first six definitions are to do with speaking, Alfred’s—number seven—is to do with a command or instruction.

I chose today’s word word in part because it comes into the title of my audio book, and my audio book is now available not only on CD from Amazon and other bookstores, but as a download at iTunes (click here) and Audible.com (click here).

The title is Global Wording – the Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English.

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Although I’m going to mention the internet company Yahoo! This episode really isn’t about the name of that company.

It’s more of a story about a miracle.

In 1994 two guys started to track their favorite websites.  This endeavor caught on, was named Yahoo! and eventually grew to be a big internet success story, only to be bulldozed by other bigger internet success stories.

According to Brewers Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable:

“The name is supposed to be an acronym for ‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle’, but [the founders] claimed that they regarded themselves as yahoos (rude, noisy or violent people). More appropriately, the word is an exclamation of joy or excitement.”

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that as an exclamation of joy or excitement, yahoo only dates from 1976; whereas as a rude, noisy or violent person the word goes back to 1726.

The first yahoos back almost 300 years were the invention of Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver’s Travels.

You may remember the Lilliputians who were so small.

The Yahoo were another type of folk populating imaginary lands, this time having the “form of men, but being of a degraded or bestial type,” as the OED puts it.

Not only was Jonathan Swift an author, he was a preacher who became dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.

All that preaching and writing of satirical prose, wears a guy down and so Swift once took a little holiday to visit his pal godson Thomas Sheridan.  They heard that the local beggars were celebrating a wedding and so they dressed down and Sheridan—who was actually a teacher—brought along his violin and pretended to be blind, with Swift as his guide.

The wedding celebrations were a great time with everyone dancing and having fun and at the end of it all these poor beggars pooled their meager funds and paid the blind fiddler for his wonderful tunes.

The next day Sheridan and Swift were out and about in their normal attire when who should they meet but a bunch of the beggars from last night.

But the light of day had changed them.

While the night before they had danced and partied, today they hobbled about on crutches and were blind themselves.

Sheridan seems to me to have been the better sport because he reached into his pockets and gave the unsuspecting beggars back the same money he had been paid at their celebration.  It had been Jonathan Swift’s idea that Sheridan pretend to be blind the night before but now he got all righteous and started giving the beggars a stern talking to.

And here’s the miracle part.

Suddenly by the word of this man of God, the lame could walk and the blind could see.

Yahoo!

“My name is Nino Ricci and a word I like is runcible.” [audio clip]

Nino Ricci has written a number of novels including Lives of the Saints and more recently Testament.  I met him at a writers’ conference.

His word runcible wasn’t one I was looking forward to doing because it’s a made-up word and so likely wouldn’t have much of an etymology.  But I’m up for a challenge; and as it turns out it’s a great word.

The poet Edward Lear introduced the word runcible to the world and I think most people would recognize it in his poem The Owl and the Pussy-Cat:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon.

But it turns out that Edward Lear was so enthusiastic about the word that, even though it didn’t mean anything, he used it in other poems too.  He called a cat runcible in a poem called The Pobble Who Has No Toes and he refers to a hat as runcible in the preface of a collection of nonsense songs.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates his first introduction of runcible at 1871 but claims that by 1926 a runcible spoon had actually acquired a meaning.

Here’s an example of a word that started out with no meaning but that was so widespread or so delicious that people started giving it a meaning.

The meaning it acquired was what some people call a spork; one of those implements with the curvature of a spoon, tines like a fork and sometimes a bit of an edge suitable for crude knife-like cutting.

I see this definition at almost all my usual dictionary sources.

The OED says there is nothing at all in the senses that Lear gave to the word—as mysterious as those senses were—that might suggest such a meaning.

As to etymology both the OED and the American Heritage Dictionary suggest that runcible might have come from a place-name Roncesvalles.

This place is located in the Pyrenees between France and Spain and for some reason that I haven’t been able to sort out, this place-name gave English a word rouncival—now largely obsolete, but once attached as a kind of qualifier to give something a meaning of “largeness.”

For a hundred years each side of Shakespeare a woman who was rouncival was a big gal with a big friendly personality (maybe too friendly).

Other meanings appear too and seem to stem from a kind of pea that grew larger than other peas and was said to have first come from that place on the French Spanish border.

There was a tantalizing note in the American Heritage Dictionary that says giant bones were found at this place. American Heritage says nothing about peas.

I’m left with a feeling—but can’t find any evidence—that some medieval or later find of fossils was attributed to giants, which might have given the sense of size rather than the peas.

I don’t know what Edward Lear meant by runcible but if he meant “big” then he might have applied it to his family.

He was twentieth of twenty-one children.

He is most famous now for his nonsense rhymes but during his life he was also a landscape painter and ornithological illustrator—that means he drew birds.

In part because he was one of the last of a long line of kids in his family, and in part because he was kind of sickly, he didn’t get to go to school much as a child.

For much of his life he felt a little embarrassed about his lack of education and some say it influenced his willingness to explore the unknown and his nonsense.  He later felt that it helped him because he saw many of his peers constrained by their “cut and dried” educations while he felt free to explore.

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When you climb aboard an airplane the intercom often squawks a welcome on behalf of the captain and crew.

The crew is of course the team of people who try to keep you happy during your time in the aerial-sardine-can while at the same time keeping it aerial.

The term crew for this group of people comes because an airplane is considered in some ways an airship and before there were air crews there were ship’s crews.

In the podictionary episode on the word recruit I explained how this was a military-related word having to do with re-growing the headcount need for battle.

You may note a similarity in sound between the words recruit and crew.

It’s true, the crew of a ship is so named because it was necessary to grow their number.

The word appeared in English more than 500 years ago and came from Old French and is suspected to be closely related to the word accrue, as in:

“if you save your money it will accrue into a large amount.”

That first English citation was for the augmentation of a military force, although not necessarily naval.  The nautical meaning evolved about 300 years ago and the aeronautical less than 100—for obvious reasons.

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The nautical association might seem to explain the term crew-cut describing a short haircut as is usually required of military men, including navy men.  But the route to this style of hair-do name took a civilian detour.

After the Second World War groups of young men rowing for Harvard and Yale were also being called crews (and I guess rowers still are).  These upwardly mobile young men were understandably the objects of some admiration and imitation.  They like to wear their hair short and brushed up, hence the birth of the term crew-cut.

Ernest Hemingway is credited with the first citation for crew-cut in his play The Fifth Column about the Spanish Civil War.  This is also an appropriately military setting for both crew-cuts and crews.

Hemingway himself was a particularly manly man; maybe too manly.

I went looking for a story to tell about him and I found many.  But almost all of them seemed to revolve around him trying to prove to some other poor guy what a man he was, usually by making him go a few rounds in a boxing ring.  All too often the boxing ring was improvised in a restaurant, a living-room, a publisher’s office…

His manliness seemed to include a need to intimidate people.

The publisher’s office story was particularly telling.  He accidently met another author there who had two years earlier made a comment in a magazine article about Hemingway’s chest hair.  Hemingway proceeds to rip open his shirt to show how hairy his chest is, then unbuttons the other guy’s shirt, showing little hair.

For some reason this lead led to a disagreement.

The disagreement lead to a punch-up which in turn lead led to the partial trashing of the office.

According to John Ayto’s A to Z of Food and Drink:

” These new-moon-shaped puff-pastry rolls seem first to have been introduced to British and American breakfast tables towards the end of the nineteenth century.”

He goes on to cast aspersions on the stories told about the invention of these yummy baked goods.  Wikipedia disses the stories too.

I’ll tell that tale in a moment, but I want first to point out that Ayto accurately called croissants new-moon-shaped.

John Ayto has written several books about words and their origins and so I’m sure that he chose his words there very carefully.

Of course we call that shape of moon a crescent moon and of course the words crescent and croissant are really two flavors of the same word; crescent arriving in English from French in the 1300s and croissant along with the pastry in at the end of the 1800s, also from French.

But when I refer to a crescent moon I’m usually just intending to communicate its fingernail-clipping shape.  It could just as easily be a waning moon as a waxing moon.

But new-moon-shaped refers only to waxing, or growing moons, and this is as is should be because the very word crescent has an etymology related to the growing moon.

A new moon begins with a very thin sliver of a crescent that grows and grows until it’s a full moon.  It’s that growing we’re looking for.

I mentioned in the podictionary episode on recruit that an Indo-European root ker meant to grow.  This same root turns up as crescere in Latin and was then applied to the growing moon.  The shape thus took its name from this horned appearance of the moon.

This same shape is an Islamic symbol and the much discredited story of the invention of the edible croissant is tied to this Islamic crescent.

Supposedly the bakers in either Vienna or Budapest were up early one morning going at it with their bread dough and stoking up their ovens when they heard a digging noise.

They alerted the army who then prevented the Turks from entering the city by tunneling under the city walls.  As a reward the bakers were allowed to, or asked to create celebratory goodies in the shape of the Islamic crescent.

Trouble is that these Turkish attacks happened back around the end of the 1600s and the first reference we have to the pastries doesn’t come until something like 170 years later.  The first time the word was used in English was in 1899 according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The user was a small time author from Alabama named William Chambers Morrow.  He used it pretty enthusiastically too since it appears three times in his book about how students lived in Paris 100 and some-odd years ago.

But this use of croissant for the delicacy didn’t mean that was the first time English speakers were experiencing them.  Crescent rolls are cited as an Americanism 13 years before.

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Although people are recruited to join corporations or sports teams, the main meaning of recruit seems to have a military connotation to it.

This actually lines up well with the first emergence of the word into English about 50 years after Shakespeare.

At first recruits were only military and the main reason the military needed recruits is actually tied up in the word’s etymology.

One unfortunate aspect of being a soldier during a time of war is that a certain number of soldiers are killed.  In order to keep on having a military force the government needs to recruit new forces—and here I use the word recruit in its original French sense: “re-grow.”  To recruit is to re-grow the army.

The American Heritage Dictionary points back to an Indo-European root ker meaning “to grow.”  This is the same root at the heart of the word create.  This ker root found its way into the Latin crescere and from what I can see, somewhere back as Latin was morphing into French this “grow” word was used to build “re-grow.”

In language as in anything else there is fashion and the first time this recruit word showed up in French it seems to have been in what is now Belgium, but then to have fallen out of fashion and been declared obsolete as a noun.

But other people seemed to like it and it was picked up in some Germanic languages. Then the word remerged in French writings in what is now Holland.

Where there is fashion we often find fashion police and this is certainly the case with the French language.

Around the time of Shakespeare France was just beginning to gear up to put together it’s language police force, the Académie Française.

By the end of the century these intellectuals were busying themselves with such important matters as disapproving of the re-emergence of the word, now as a verb—recruiter—into the French language.

This was too late to save us English speakers who had greedily recruited both the noun and the verb from French while the going was good.

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My main use of the word immaculate has to do with cleanliness. I ask my kids to pick up their rooms until they are immaculate.

This rarely happens.

The other occurrence is immaculate as part of a name of a school or something and relating to the immaculate conception of Christ.

I can see how the two meanings relate; a physically clean room and the concept of moral cleanliness.

It seems to me that the meaning of the word immaculate has sort of moved back and forth between these two senses like a slow pendulum.  The Latin root of immaculate means “not maculate.”

But what does maculate mean I hear you asking.

Actually this is a Latin word I came across while I was writing my book about the words we use for our bodies.

Inside your eye are all those rods and cones specialized to pick up colored light during the day and greyer shades when it’s dark.  Obviously we can see better during the day and so it makes sense to crowd the cone cells that can pick up color in the part of the eye where things actually come into focus.  Out around the rest of the sphere of your eyeball rod cells are more common which is why peripheral vision is often good at night.

The crowding of the cone cells at the back of the eye where the image forms has a consequence that when the eye doctor looks into your eye, the part where the cone cells are most dense looks a little more yellow.

About 150 years ago, or maybe a little longer, physicians gave this yellow spot a name.

They called it yellow spot;

But in the Latin they liked to use that came out as macula lutea.

All of this being a very longwinded way of telling you that immaculate literally means “spotless” because macula meant “spot.”

But spots and eyes have gone together for more than 150 years.  Scars in people’s eyes and other spots have been called macula in England as far back as William the Conqueror, which is more like 1000 years.  So this root clearly arrived with the French of the Normans.

Immaculate doesn’t show up in English until 1430 but of course it was in use even back in classical Latin.

The pendulum swing I mentioned was that initially the meaning was a literal one so that something without spot was just clean.  By the time the word arrived in English it was a metaphor and meant without stain of character.

In most of our modern uses I think we’ve moved back to immaculate having to do with soap and elbow grease.  I checked with an English language corpus and this seems mostly true, but not entirely; there are still citations for such things as “immaculate performances.”

One side track that runs off this word root like some kind of spur line is the word mail.

By that I mean chainmail as dwarves might wear to complement their battle axes.

As I said, back in Latin macula meant “spot,” but it also meant “net,” as in “fishing net.”  Expert etymologists aren’t sure exactly why but I can imagine the knot in the string where the netting ties to its next strand looking like a spot and so gaining this name.

Whatever the reason, this name for a netting later evolved into the name of a netting of metal rings worn to protect against enemy battle axes.

Hence macula became mail.

Although dwarves and chainmail have an Old English feel to them chainmail couldn’t have been called chainmail in Old English since it’s a Middle English word. In Old English the garment was called here-burne.