There was a recent story about a government agency trying to balance protection of a heard of wild horses with protection of lots of other things these horses eat and step on as they roam around between Montana and California.

One of the management measures being considered is to cull the herd; there are tens of thousands of them out there.

In the article I saw the following sentence appeared:

[for some] euthanasia as a solution remains anathema

As a word anathema is one that I’ve never fully taken onboard.  I hear people use it, and I know it means “something bad” but somehow I don’t feel like I know the word well enough to actually use it myself.

I mean is it really anathema or is it an athema?

Should I be saying “kicking the dog is an anathema” or “kicking the dog is anathema”?

No one tells you these things, it’s like you have to figure them out for yourself.

So in preparing for this episode I thought I’d do a public service in finding answers to these burning questions.

I peeked into a couple of English usage texts and got no help. So I resorted to looking at examples.

In an English corpus database I use I found that 10% of usage was an anathema.  The remaining 90% said kicking the dog was anathema—well, not exactly but you know what I mean.

As far as breaking anathema into two words an athema well, nobody does that; I must be the only one dumb enough to think it might have been that way.

So now that I’ve educated myself, here’s the etymology.

A long long time ago the roots of this word were Indo-European and meant “to put,” or “to put up” or even “to hang up.”

As time went on important things were put up, and in trying to please the gods it was critical to offer up things of value.  This is where the word roots emerged in ancient Greek.

So back there at first anathema was a good thing. It was something worshiped or venerated and offered to the gods.

The Oxford English Dictionary has the original Greek translated as “a thing devoted.”

But all too often the things being given in offering to the gods were sheep and goats and the like.

Maybe just like people now don’t want those horses killed, somewhere back in pre-Roman Greek times people started thinking dead animals, and death in particular wasn’t such a good thing.

So anathema, that had been good, started to be bad.

And so it passed into Latin and then much later into English in the 1500s.

Because the 1500s was a time when intellectuals thought Greek and Latin were “the greatest” both the good and the bad meanings were adopted by different English intellectuals (the OED has citations for both).

The “bad” more specifically relate to excommunication and being cursed and that’s the one that stuck.

A 2007 OED draft addition to the entry on anathema gives as the current definition “loathsome” and “repugnant.”

I would guess that the first time I saw a carabiner was in the 1980s.

I had become a whitewater canoe enthusiast and another guy I knew was selling off some rock climbing equipment, including carabiners.  I thought they’d be useful in clipping stuff into the canoe or in rope work sometimes needed to drag canoes off rocks; or even in saving paddlers who had gone for an unintentional swim in a rapid.

I see now that according to Merriam-Webster climbers had already established a slang version of the word carabiner more than a decade before my introduction to the things.  They have a 1973 first citation for biner in their Colligate Dictionary although the Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t yet list the word.

Today people use carabiners or biners to clip water bottles to backpacks, keys to keyrings and tools to carpenter belts.

But since my first exposure was in the context of the great outdoors I saw a nice parallel here with an episode I did the other day where I explored the relationship between mosquito and musket.

The fact is that a carabiner is closely etymologically related to a carbine.

A carbine is a short rifle.

It takes its name from the soldiers who carried it.  They were cavalry and it makes sense that you’d want something a little shorter if you had to maneuver it around on a horse.

Why these soldiers were called carabines is a little up-for-debate.  The German etymology expert Fredreich Diez  linked this back to an ancient name for a weapon of war with Greek roots, but another authority Littré said no, he thought it was because those kind of soldiers had originally come from Calabria.

Both the American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster relate the word to a nickname for a grave digger or someone who prepares corpses for burial.  In this they relate it to scarab and dung beetles.

I have to use my imagination as to why a group of soldiers might be nicknamed after gravediggers since none of the dictionaries go that far, but if your job is to shoot people, I guess it’s a label you’d wear with pride.

I find it a little unsettling though that in French a carabin is slang for a medical student.

Whatever the source of carbine “a short rifle,” the fact that horsemen had to carry them meant that they had to be clipped onto the horsemen’s gear; hence the name of a clip carabiner.

The first English work to include the word carbine was by an author named Richard Rowlans Verstegan.

Verstegan was one who believed the pen was mightier than the carbine.

He got into big trouble with the government of England when he published an account of the death of a contemporary who some now regard as a saint; Edward Campion.

Campion was a Catholic who refused to recant his faith and was extensively tortured in the Tower of London for it.  Verstegan at least was able to run away to continental Europe from where he made a career of criticizing the English government and supporting English Catholics.

Today’s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl’s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

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In November of 2007 the International Herald Tribune, which identifies itself as the global edition of the New York Times, reported that the high speed train lines in France had been sabotaged.

A minor point in the article explained that sabotage was a French word dating from another railway controversy, a strike back in 1910 when workers dug up the wooden railway ties upon which the rails were laid.

According to that article the railway ties were called sabots because that was the French word for “wooden shoes.”

I see from comments on that article that readers recognized right away that this etymology was inaccurate.

Instead they mentioned something that was sitting hazily in the back of my memory.  Sabot did indeed mean “wooden shoes” but it wasn’t a transference of this meaning to the wooden footings of railway tracks, but the fact that striking workers threw their wooden shoes into the gears of machinery to gum up the works that lead to our word sabotage.

When I cracked open my dictionaries however, I see that not only is the International Herald Tribune wrong, but so are the blog commenters and so is my memory. The idea that workers threw their wooden shoes into the machinery seems to be a bit of a folk etymology.

The word sabotage certainly did enter the English language with the 1910 French railway strike, but it had already been a French word that had evolved over many years.

The first English citation we have for sabot is way back in 1607.

The dictionary explanation of the evolution of the word is that because people walking in wooden shoes tend to be noisy walkers, this word for “shoe” came to be associated with sloppy or clumsy walking, and sloppy or clumsy workmanship.  Sometimes clumsy workmanship can damage equipment and sometimes intentional damage can be passed off as the result of clumsy workmanship.

That first citation for sabot back 400 years ago in English was—as so often happens—in a translation.  The translator, Richard Carew also wrote a short work called An Epistle concerning the Excellencies of the English Tongue in which he makes this largely accurate observation.

“In our native English-Saxon language we find many [words] expressed by one sillable.  Those consisting of more are borrowed from other nations.”

Carew was an early etymology enthusiast and participated in debates with his contemporaries—including Shakespeare—about whether English should be kept “pure” and not accept foreign words.

I’m happy to say that Carew was accepting of these polysyllabic imports “borrowed from other nations,” as you might expect a translator to be.

Today’s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording – The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com

David Beasley is an author and runs Davus Publishing. He starts of the audio portion of this episode by saying he’s very curious about the word curious.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that curious is:

“a word which has been used from time to time with many shades of meaning.”

They then go on to list 31 shades of meaning, most of which are obsolete or obscure.

You are no doubt familiar with the expression curiosity killed the cat.  This expression has been around for at least 400 years but the wording has changed over time and in part, the changing meaning of curiosity is reflected in the change of the proverb.

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations claims curiosity killed the cat to be a pretty modern expression not showing up until the 20th century.

In fact, when the word curious first appeared in English this expression would have been nonsensical since curiosity would have more likely saved the cat.

That first appearance was due to French and the Norman Conquest and shows up first in the 1300s.

The Latin root curiosus could mean “inquisitive,” but more often meant “careful.”  So it is unlikely that being careful would kill the cat.

And yet our first citations for the expression also give a glimpse into the subtleties and evolution in meaning of the word care, since both Ben Johnson and William Shakespeare use the expression

as care will kill a cat

One of those 31 shades of meaning for curious jumped out at me.  Starting in the second half of the 1800s publishers and booksellers used the word curious as a kind of code-word for “erotic books.”

Both H. G. Wells and Aldus Huxley are cited as using the word in this way.  And curiouser and curiouser, Huxley’s citation refers to something called “the Purity League” producing curious books—meaning dirty books.

What, I wondered, was a group called the Purity League doing producing erotic literature?

Well, evidently the Purity League was just as much a euphemism in this regard as was the word curious.   The following is from biographies of John O’Hara, a member of the Purity League:

“[he had] an acute vernacular gift and a narrative frankness shocking in his day… he cut a wide swath through a Manhattan demimonde whose fierce friendships and bitter feuds—fueled by oceans of booze—were played out at such institutions as the Stork Club, “21,” and the Algonquin Round Table.”

“The Purity League [was an] ironic reference to their shared interest in girls and alcohol.”

Of the little I could learn about the Purity League I did come across one curious snippet:

“The Purity League would hang out at Hodgson’s…”

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I sometimes say that a common human experience breeds a word that is common across cultures and changes little over time.

There isn’t much in the world that’s more common to human experience than having a mother, nor anything that means quite as much to most people.  So it should come as no surprise that this word has come down to us almost unchanged for as far back as we can see into the history of words.

And also that it is one of the words that spans the entire width and breadth of Indo-European languages.

Evidently we only started writing the TH in mother back in the early 1500s but may have been pronouncing it that way for some time beforehand.

The Indo-European root was mater.

Not too different for five to seven thousand years.

Also, languages from Latin to Gaelic, and Greek to Russian share this maternal legacy.

This is a word we not only all have in common, it is also a word we all use with great regularity.  Words like that just can’t change because there are too many people around who know the word and will correct you if you start to pronounce it wrong or use it with a meaning that is just too far from their understanding of what it should mean.

So again it is no surprise that we didn’t get mother from Latin or French, but from the oldest Old English.

I mentioned Sir Robert Cotton yesterday in my episode on the word mildew at the Oxford University Press blog.  While the meaning of mildew has changed a lot, the word mother has its first citation in the same document set I mentioned yesterday from Sir Robert’s library.

The Cotton Library is an important resource for people studying Old English.

Unfortunately back in 1731almost a quarter of the ancient collection went up in smoke.  The documents had been brought together around the time of Shakespeare by Sir Robert Cotton and then had been moved in the early 1700s to the ironically named Ashburnham House.

The librarian was understandably an enthusiast when it came to ancient documents and he had quite a pile of them in his own house nearby when tragedy struck.  In the dead of night his house burned down and destroyed numerous irreplaceable old manuscripts.

An eyewitness—the headmaster of the school where this all took place—reported the panic stricken librarian stumbling out through the smoke in his nightshirt with bundles of old documents tucked under his arms.

When I think of mildew I think of camping gear that came home after a rainy canoe trip, was dragged into the basement so I could warm up in the bath, and then forgotten about for a month or so.

As I’m sure is the case with most people, I have no particular fondness for mildew.  I place it in a mental compartment very close to where I keep my images of mold.  If I am diligent in my household sanitation mildew and I can keep a respectful distance between us.

That’s why the other day when I was researching the word honey I was astonished to find that the Latin word for “honey” had given rise to the English word mildew.

Evidently when mildew first was used in English it meant “honeydew,” the sticky droppings left behind by aphids.

It seems that to a farmer a sick plant was a sick plant and if it was sick because aphids were sucking it dry and leaving it covered with a sticky coating, it was just as bad as if it was sick because of a fungal growth that was leaving it with a sticky coating; so why not call both coatings the same thing.

Less appetizing though, don’t you think.

The honeydew meaning appears first in Old English documents—so well over 1000 years ago—while the fungal meaning creeps in a little over 600 years ago.

One of the reasons we know that mildew relates to honey is because of a fellow named Robert Bruce Cotton.

He lived around the same time as William Shakespeare, so that’s 400 years ago.

He was particularly interested in antiquities and he was fortunate enough to be pretty rich.

We really should thank him because he came along at a very opportune time.  King Henry VIII had found it necessary to kick the Catholic Church out of England so that he could get on with some new marriages.  In doing so he had disbanded the monasteries.

But the monasteries were the main places of refuge if you were an old manuscript trying to hide from the ravages of time.  In kicking out Catholicism Henry unwittingly made homeless whole libraries of precious manuscripts.  Sir Robert Cotton went around collecting up these homeless waifs and giving them a roof over their heads in his own personal library.

The other day I talked about the Lindesfarne Gospels during the episode on the word amen; these fantastic documents were among those rescued by Cotton.

Similarly the first document to contain the word mildew was housed in the Cotton Library.

While most of the citations I report to you from the Oxford English Dictionary come from some book or other with a name, in the case of the word mildew the name of the old manuscript that gives us a first citation is a little curious.

It is called the Cleopatra Glossary A.III.

There is nothing in the document that relates to Cleopatra the old queen of Egypt.

Instead it was an idiosyncrasy of Sir Robert that earned the title.

Sir Robert Cotton arranged his library with busts of famous people from history along the top shelves, with each of the shelves below marked by letter and number.  So it just so happened that this particular word, in this particular document lay for some years beneath the marble likeness of Cleopatra.

People have suffered the whining buzzing and itching biting of mosquitoes for time out of mind.  For this reason Old English had a name for these little blood sucking creatures.

But it wasn’t mosquito.

It was gnat.

Somehow the word gnat survived the arrival of mosquito although was displaced in meaning and now refers not specifically to mosquitoes, but to little hovering bugs in general.

In 1572 a geography enthusiast named Richard Hakluyt got a letter from one Henry Hawks.

Richard Hakluyt was in the midst of writing a whole bunch of books that told the tales of English exploration over the high seas and to foreign lands.

Richard himself didn’t do much traveling abroad but he read everything he could get his hands on in as many languages as he could manage, then reproduced the stories in English.

Henry Hawks was writing to Richard because Henry Hawks had firsthand experience living in Mexico.  In one passage Henry describes high mortality rates due to illness in the cities in Mexico based in part on the heat, and in part on these insects that bite both men and women in their sleep.

These he called muskitos.

Now you might at first think this was a Native American word to describe these annoying and evidently fatal flies, but in fact the word had arrived with the Spanish and had an Indo-European root.

In Latin musca meant fly so mosquito literally means “little fly.”

But this Latin word root appeared in the Americas in another unexpected guise as well, this time in the hands of early settlers.

One of the things Europeans brought with them that Native North Americans didn’t have was firearms.  These killed more rapidly than mosquitoes but their name had a familiar ring to it, they were called muskets.

A musket got its name from the same root as a mosquito.  Here’s how that worked.

Back in France before the Norman Conquest bird fanciers had a special name for the male sparrow hawk.  These bird fanciers weren’t bird watchers as you might think of today, instead they were hunters who used birds of prey to help them hunt.  It just so happens that the male sparrow hawk is quite small compared to the female.

For this reason he was called a fly, or musche.

Meanwhile other hunters used bow and arrow.

One day someone invented a crossbow.

The crossbow shoots a powerful arrow, the arrow itself is usually stocky but shorter than that used with a regular bow.

Some smart-aleck nicknamed these diminutive arrows after the diminutive birds since they both flew to their target.

Over time the name transferred to the crossbow itself. Then when technology replaced crossbows with guns, the name was applied there as musket.

Today’s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl’s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

Honey is a very old word but it is a bit of an unusual word in that most words that represent something very common to our human experience have a pretty wide usage across many languages.

This is only partly true of honey.

In most Indo-European languages the word for honey is not related to our word honey, but instead to an actual Indo-European root meaning “honey.”

This root does make its way into English in words like mellifluous and molasses.  But only Germanic based languages use the word honey or its relatives.

As logic would have it that means that honey shows up as an English word back in Old English.

As a basic word that so many people would have experience with it turned up early too; the Oxford English Dictionary first citation is from the year 875.

But Germanic languages are Indo-European languages too, so why did we end up with a different word for honey?

It seems that like many words the parent of honey spread in meaning and got applied to numerous things.

Etymologists think that perhaps the word root behind honey might originally not have meant this sweet sticky substance, but a yellow honey-like color instead.

So honey was an important enough article that in Germanic it overtook other meanings of the word, which in Sanskrit and Greek were retained as color words.

Honey from bees is certainly the oldest meaning of the word honey, but the word gets applied to lots of other things we like, especially our loved-ones.

The first citation someone calling their sweetheart honey is found in 1350 in a translation of a French story known as William of Palerne or Guillaume de Palerme.

This story has an unexpected etymological circularity.

I’m sure the honey as “sweetheart” reference was merely incidental in the translation but the main love interest in the story is daughter to the Roman Emperor, a girl named Melior.

Clearly Melior is a name chosen for its sweetness and etymological connection to mel the Latin word for “honey.”

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[audio clip] I’m Christopher Moore and the word I’m interested in is itinerary because I’m sometimes not sure if it should be itinery or itinerary.

Well, Christopher you’ve come up with a quandary for me.

I always maintain that if people use a word and recognize it, it’s a real word.

I plugged itinery into Google and more than 100,000 hits came up.  So people certainly use it.  I recognized it when you said it, and I’d have recognized it even if you hadn’t said it in the context of itinerary.

But none of the dictionaries recognize itinery and at first I’d have said it was a mistake people were making, spelling it in the abbreviated way that some people pronounce it.

But since I’ve given the benefit of the doubt to so many other words I guess I’ll concede that perhaps this is a word in transition.

Except that Google reports more than 24 million hits for itinerary so if less than half a percent of users use the new pronunciation and spelling, the word certainly hasn’t come very far in its transition and maybe never will catch on in wider usage.

That makes it a mistake again.

I think of an itinerary as a sort of plan.  I’ve even heard people referring to those little calendars sometimes kept in a pocket as an itinerary.  One web citation refers to a reading itinerary.

But the roots of itinerary relate more specifically to travel.  So when you hear about the itinerary of the pope’s visit or something, it’s called an itinerary not because it’s a plan, but because it’s a plan of his travels.

The American Heritage Dictionary tells me that there is an Indo-European root ei that means “to go.”  This made its way into Latin iter which is what the Romans called the routes they took, particularly when extending the reach of their empire into new and hostile territories.

Thus an itinerarium was a list of the places that the route passed through, and often included information such as how long it took to march the army there.

Roman itineraries were more than just travel plans though.

In some cases they were commemorative pillars and public monuments that actually reinforced the political control the Romans exerted over foreign lands by making visible and enduring proclamations of that control.

Since maps were pretty crude in those days itineraries were also a really important means of understanding geography.

The first time itinerary showed up in English was back in the middle 1400s and it was drawn directly from Latin.

The sense of travel embodied in itinerary shows up also in itinerant.  An itinerant salesman is a traveling salesman.

While the devout might pray to St. Christopher as the patron saint of travelers, the actual prayer has itself also been called an itinerary.

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Allow me to read you a little of the Wikipedia entry for trampoline:

According to circus folklore, the trampoline was supposedly first developed by an artiste called Du Trampolin who saw the possibility of using the trapeze safety net as a form of propulsion and landing device and experimented with different systems of suspension, eventually reducing the net to a practical size for separate performance.

It goes on

…the story of Du Trampolin is probably a myth and no documentary evidence has been found to support it.

I’m here to tell you that not only has no documentary evidence been found to support it, there is good evidence to refute it.  Every dictionary I checked gives an etymology for trampoline that does not derive from a personal name.

The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s from an Italian word trampoli but the American Heritage Dictionary says the Italian word came from Spanish.

On the other hand Merriam-Webster says Spanish got it from Italian, but at least they both agree that before either Spanish or Italian the word root was likely Germanic.

In Italian trampoli meant “stilts” and although none of the dictionaries go this far, it seems to me logical that the up-in-the-air function of a trampoline might well have adopted the “high walking” name from stilts.

The Germanic connection brings us back to a more familiar English word with a connection to walking; tramp.

Much is made in various internet articles of the invention of the modern trampoline in 1934 but the OED has as its first citation 1798 from the Times of London in what appears to have been an advertisement for a circus.  It reads

Equestrian Performances with Oranges, Forks, Skipping Rope, Hat, Handkerchief, and a curious Equilibrium with a Hoop and Glass. Wonderful Trampolin Tricks, by Messrs. Smith [etc.].

Though this is the first citation, people obviously must have known what a trampoline was, since there is no explanation contained in the advertising copy.

Forks, skipping ropes and hats as inducements to come to the circus may seem quaint but I note that oranges would have been an expensive and relatively rare food item in England in 1789, though perhaps not worth the price of admission if you only got to see it and not eat it.