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The general tone of the word cushy these days seems to be moving from comfort to luxury.

Where a cushy job means a “comfortable job” the examples I see in my newspaper web-searching talk of cushy hotels and such. This seems to me to have a tone of something more than “comfort.”

The word cushy hasn’t been with us for all that long.  The Oxford English Dictionary first citation is from 1915.

Most of the etymological resources I looked at said that the word came via Anglo-Indian from Hindi and perhaps even from Persian.  The source word being khush meaning “pleasant” or “beautiful.”

I said most of the etymological sources.

One holdout is the American Heritage Dictionary that acknowledges this Ango-Indian theory but then pours cold water on it.

According to American Heritage that first citation for cushy appears in the writings of a young soldier fighting in France during the First World War.  They point out that no direct Indian connection has been found with cushy and so they speculate that instead of coming from a Hindi word for “pleasant,” cushy may simply be a modification of cushion, or possibly a French word coucheé which they translate as “lying down, a bed.”

I’d have translated it as “sleeping.”

The point here is that even thought the most authoritative dictionaries in the world—and here I’d say the OED and Merriam-Webster represent the pan-oceanic superpowers—even though they claim an etymology, the fact is that oftentimes it’s just a theory.

But in the case of the American Heritage Dictionary their theory is just a theory too.

It is true that the word first shows up from the pen of an Englishman in Europe.  But that Englishman was fighting in the British army which had just spent 50 years policing colonial India.

Other early citations for the word cushy also seem to have emerged during the First World War.

One of these was the phrase a cushy wound.  A cushy wound was one that didn’t actually endanger your life but was enough to get you out of the trenches.

Though the American Heritage Dictionary can’t find an Anglo-Indian connection, there seems to me to be a military connection and the British military were steeped in Indian sourced words.

That first citation has a bit of a poignant story behind it.  It comes from a book that was privately printed in only 150 copies.  These were the letters of Denis Oliver Barnett; Dobbin to his friends.

He wrote of some of the cushy billets he had during training and as an officer but unfortunately for him when he eventually got wounded it wasn’t a cushy wound.  He died in just a few hours.

He was 20 at the time.

I find it quite delightful that the Oxford English Dictionary has as its first two citations for the word loot entries that relate not only to the word itself, but to men who appear to have been pretty sophisticated looters.

The first citation is from 1788 and a book called Indian Vocabulary.

This gives you a pretty hot clue as to the etymology of the word loot—it’s from Hindi and Sanskrit.

The reason English book buyers were interested in the vocabulary of India was that India represented a growing source of national wealth for England and news from India was hard to follow if you didn’t understand the jargon.

The publisher of the book went further though.

Since improving your vocabulary hasn’t always proven to be motivation enough for buying a book, the full title of the thing was Indian vocabulary: to which is prefixed the Forms of Impeachment.

If this seems to you no better as far as marketing a book by its title is concerned that’s because you don’t know about the scandal out of India at the time.

This book was trading not only on self improvement through vocabulary, but on the titillation of scandal through the recent impeachment of Warren Hastings the Governor General of Bengal.

Hastings wasn’t a looter in the sense that he smashed windows and grabbed valuables, but he appears to have amassed a considerable estate in Calcutta while disregarding the trifling details of governing. I should say though that he was later acquitted.

The second OED citation is from 1839 and reads

“He always found the talismanic gathering-word Loot…a sufficient bond of union in any part of India.”

I found that an intriguing sentence.

Who found the word loot a bond of union?

This sounds like the stuff of Indiana Jones movies.

Well it turns out that it was a guy named Amir Khan.  For much of his life Amir Khan was the head of a sort of tribal army in India except it was made up of quite a mix of tribes.

He was constantly brokering deals where he’d get paid to attack one area or get paid more not to; or he’d establish alliances with one faction or another depending on the profit margin involved.

It was when asked how he kept his mix of followers onside that he called loot a talismanic gathering-word.

He figured sharing the spoils kept everyone faithful.  And it worked for him with the British too.

Eventually the British got tired of his disruptive plundering activities and managed to turn some of his allies into enemies.  Once it seemed more profitable to fight for the British than against them Amir Khan himself became an ally.

As England continued to extract loot from India Amir Khan was able to keep his cut and was thereafter regarded by the English administration as a model of local leadership.

My personal understanding of the word thug is that a thug is someone I want to avoid because they are likely to clobber me, either to rob me or just because they think it’s some kind of fun.

But I see from a few very popular entries at Urbandictionary that rap music and hip-hop have gone some way to changing the meaning of thug. It seems to have become something of a legitimate badge of honor in some circles.

I suppose it was a badge of honor anyway for toughs who need to prove themselves through deeds of violence.

But the new meaning appears to be that someone from underprivileged origins toughs it through to be a legitimate success; so that in this case to be a thug means you’re toughing it through.

The origins of the word thug aren’t too honorable or legitimate though.

The word comes from Hindi and originally held a meaning not all that different from my original English understanding of the word.  It meant a robber or a cheat.

The word root reaches back into Indo-European where teg or steg meant “to cover”; a robber wants to cover up their crime.

But it was the antics of a weird Hindu religious cult a couple of hundred years ago that brought the word into English.

Hinduism has numerous gods but one of the main ones is Shiva. Shiva is, among other things, the god of destruction.

This particular cult though, they worshipped his wife Kali.

She seems to have been a pretty nasty piece of business and her worshippers followed suit.  By some delusion they regarded killing and robbing people as some kind of act of worship.

Their usual method was to strangle their victim but there are claims of poison, stabbing and dumping down wells.

These guys were called the Thugs in Hindi and the word was adopted by the British government in India.

A book published in 1837 called Illustrations of the History and Practices of the Thugs claims that

“for many years after the British power had gained the ascendant in India the Thugs continued to practice their execrable trade…the evil seems to have been regarded in much the same light as the fixed inconveniences of the climate or the accidental inclemency of unfavorable seasons—as a thing greatly to be lamented but beyond hope of remedy and which it was the part of wisdom to endure with patience.”

Finally a lowly civil servant named William Sleeman started to point out to his government that it was really irresponsible of any governing body to let this go on.

For some time he was ignored as is the familiar lot of so many responsible civil servants even today, but finally a new Governor General arrived from England and took the issue seriously.

They say it took 50 years to stamp out the cult.

Today’s episode brought to you by Ammon Shea’s book Reading the OED.

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

When Pervez Musharraf resigned as Pakistan’s president he gave his speech in Urdu with a sprinkling of English.

I mention this not because there are hordes of people in Pakistan—although there seem to be—but because there is an etymological connection between the name of the language Pervez Musharraf used and today’s podictionary word.

The roots of Urdu as a name for a language represent a rare mashup of languages.

Notably Urdu doesn’t come from Urdu.

This is one of those cases of one group of people applying a word to another group of people.

In this case the “namers” encountered on the fringes of their empire groups of nomadic peoples wandering around with their animals.  These nomads lived in camps and so when the namers figured out how to communicate with the nomads, they named their language “the language of the camps.”

In Persian that comes out something like zaban i urdu.

The word zaban is actually the word that meant “languge.” Urdu was a word that seems to have meant “camp.”

Like so many other phrases through history zaban i urdu got worn down with use and abbreviated to urdu.

So etymologically the name we use for the language of Pakistan actually means “camp.”

There is some discrepancy between dictionaries as to the ultimate source of the word urdu so I guess it’s safe to say it moved around from language to language like the nomads.  A look at several dictionaries yields the following list of languages implicated in the travels of the word to English:

• Persian
• Hindustani
• Turkish
• Russian
• Polish
• German
• Danish
• Swedish
• Italian
• Spanish
• French
• Mongolian
• and Kalmuck (which I’d never heard of)

The word horde—as in “there was a horde of shoppers at the mall”—is reported to have come to English from similar roots.

No dictionaries actually say so but I’m interpreting that while Urdu means “language of the camps” horde must have evolved from “people of the camps” or “those who live in camps.”

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines horde as

“chiefly derogatory, a large group of people.”

I think “derogatory” is a bit too strong.  “Impersonal” is more like it.

Notably the homonym hoard—as in “I have a hoard of candy to give out at Halloween”—is not a related word.

The nomads had to travel light and so left hoarding to Germanic speakers who gave the word to Old English meaning “treasure” and “hiding place.”

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

Nora Gold asks about the word passionate.  Nora is another one of the authors I met at a conference before the summer.  She wrote a book of short stories called Marrow and Other Stories and at her website she has free PDF downloads of a couple of those stories.

Byron wrote

His love was passion’s essence:—as a tree
On fire by lightning, with ethereal flame
Kindled he was, and blasted.

That really does seem to be passion’s essence, to be consumed.  But although Byron was talking about being consumed by passionate love, the image of being struck by lightning and bursting into flames sounds pretty painful and actually, pain is really at the root of passion.

The American Heritage Dictionary tells me that there was an Indo-European word root pei to hurt.

This word root made its way up into Latin where pati meant “suffer.”

Classical Latin is what the Romans spoke but after the end of the Roman Empire Latin was the language of literacy all over Europe and morphed into Medieval Latin.  One of the main vehicles for Latin’s ongoing popularity was the church and this particular word root was applied in a particularly churchy way.

About 1000 years ago passion emerged specifically applying to the suffering of Christ.

It was the strength of feeling associated with what was considered to be the ultimate in suffering that infused the word passion with a meaning of “strength of feeling” about 700 years ago.

From “strength of feeling,” a meaning relating to love and sexual passion evolved about 400 years ago.

I was interested to see that the first citation for passion as applied to sexual desire was from a book with the unlikely title of Mathematical Magick, or, The Wonders that may be Performed by Mechanical Geometry.

Unlikely where sexual passion is concerned anyway.

This book was written by an enlightened theologian named John Wilkins.  In it he was actually saying that the divine frees people from their lusts and passions, not writing anything remotely erotic.

John Wilkins was passionate about science though as the book title suggests.  This was a kind of popular mechanics type of approach and it’s notable that the book was written in English not Latin.

At the time there was hot debate about whether man as created by God was centre of the universe and in particular if the earth represented a planet just like those other things up in the sky.

John Wilkins wrote another book called Discourse concerning a new planet; tending to prove, that (’tis probable) our earth is one of the planets.  He was trying to show people not only that the evidence seemed to support this more humble position in the universe but also give religious arguments as to why this might be so.

He was also passionate about communication which is why he didn’t write his books in Latin.

In fact he was one of those guys who springs up from time to time through history advocating a new universal language so that everyone from everywhere can understand each other.

I guess he didn’t realize that to some measure that’s what Latin had been, or what English was going to become.

In 1823 Lord Byron was in Genoa in Italy writing poetry including something called The Island.

In it, at one point, one character is telling another he’s seen a ship.

What! could you make her out? It cannot be;
I’ve seen no rag of canvass on the sea.”
“Belike,” said Ben, “you might not from the bay,
But from the bluff-head, where I watched to-day,
I saw her in the doldrums; for the wind
Was light and baffling.”

And this is the first citation we have for the doldrums meaning a ship that is unable to make headway.

As The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea explains it

“[the doldrums are a] belt of low pressure that extends 5° to 10° either side of the equator…[they] were notorious in the days of sail, because vessels could become becalmed there for many days and even weeks…Being in the doldrums has now become synonymous with being listless, depressed, and generally stuck in a rut.”

It is information like this that must have been stuck in my brain somewhere and made me think that this name of a region of ocean gave us our word doldrums for being down, for feeling melancholy.

And I guess it did, but I see that in fact it also has an older history, although it is a short one.

That citation of Lord Byron is from 1823 but in 1812 in the newspaper The Examiner there is a citation reading

“A doldrum is, we believe, the cant word for a long sleeper.”

So the Oxford English Dictionary has as its first and obsolete definition

“slang…a dull, drowsy, or sluggish fellow.”

It’s easy to believe that sailors stuck for days or weeks in the hot, humid seas around the equator might use this word to describe the place.

The OED etymology for doldrum is not too helpful, it says perhaps from dold, an early variation on dolt meaning “dull.”

Lord Byron is reported to have said

“who would write who had anything better to do?”

and I guess he found life in Genoa a little dull around the time he set doldrums to paper, because he promptly set out to join the Greek war of independence and brought along a pile of money to pay to support soldiers under his command.

But the Greek military organization was in a bit of a doldrum itself, or maybe a shambles or a mess.

The lousy weather didn’t help and not only did Byron get discouraged he got sick and died.

Maybe dull isn’t so bad after all.

If you remember that slapstick comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, you may remember Ollie’s standard line

“another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”

Stan Laurel was the thin one and Oliver Hardy was the fat one.

This might bespeak a larger appetite on the part of Oliver Hardy and if so there might be an etymological explanation for Ollie’s quote.

Around the year 1300 the word mess made its first appearance in writing in English.  This date points to a possible source of the word from French since it’s within a few hundred years of the Norman Conquest and it would have taken a few centuries for a French word to have been first picked up and adopted into English, and then eventually to find its way onto paper.

Sure enough the Oxford English Dictionary traces mess back to Anglo-Norman and Old French before that.

But what a hungry Oliver Hardy might have found interesting about a mess of 700 years ago is that it didn’t mean “a spot of trouble” as he might have meant in reprimanding Stanley, at first a mess was a serving of food, a meal.

This connection between the word mess and food is preserved for us in the military where soldiers, sailors and pilots eat in the mess.

As with most French words mess actually goes back to Latin and the OED even takes it back further to Indo-European.

Back those five thousand years or more the Indo-European root mittere meant “to send” and the idea here is that the food was sent to the table.  So from Indo-European to Latin the meaning was “to send” but while in Latin a meaning of “food” evolved that was carried into languages including French and Italian.

English adopted the “food” meaning but English was the only language to mutate the meaning again into our current meaning of “disorderly,” “untidy,” “cluttered” or “dirty.”

Here’s how that worked:

After that first appearance in 1300 the word mess changed its meanings in English a little bit.  In one case it went from meaning “a meal” to meaning “a single portion.”

In another case it went from meaning “a meal” to meaning a specific kind of meal, something soft, liquid or goopy; porridge or soup would have been called mess by some people as early as 1330.

This is the meaning that matters to us because it is this mixed-up-stew kind of meal that gave rise to a meaning of mess by 1738 as feed for an animal and by 1828 as an unappetizing mixture of foods.  Somewhere about this time the undesirable state of “things mixed together” lent the word mess to applications outside of the world of food.

The OED’s first citation for mess meaning “a predicament” or “troubling state of affairs” is from 1812.  So by the time Stan and Ollie were getting into messes in the 1930s the principal meaning of “food” had been somewhat obsolete for a century or so.

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

I’ve recently become a member of the board of directors for an association of cottage owners.  I’ve been working on a strategy to help protect the natural environment around the lake.  So the word strategy is on my mind.

I’ll paraphrase here from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary:

strategy – the science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces…to afford the maximum support to adopted policies [to protect the bunnies and ducks].

Okay, I put that last part in myself.

I don’t think I’ll be using military force in my strategy but the military does have a deep stake in the etymology of the word strategy.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary there was an Indo-European word root ster that meant “to spread things out.”

I came across this root once before in the podictionary episode on the word street which came about because the Romans built their roads in layers and they called the layers strata.  The strata were called strata because each material was “spread out” before the next one was piled on top.

Strategy didn’t come through Latin though, instead it came through Greek.

That same word root meaning “spread out” was applied to a big group of people who were spread out over an open space.

Sometimes an army was a big group of people spread out over an open space and so the Greek word for army was stratos.

An army needs a commander and the Greek word for a general was strategos.

Of course it’s the general who practices the “science and art of deploying political, economic, psychological, and military force” to achieve his purpose and so that art and science was named after him.  Since he was a strategos the art and science became a strategy.

One of the rules of language is that if you don’t have a word for it, you likely don’t think about it much.

From this little etymology you can plainly see that the ancients were pretty smart in planning out their military operations.  Yet English didn’t pick up the word strategy until 1688.

What does that say about England’s planning capacity?

I went looking for synonyms with a deeper history and believe it or not the word plan didn’t arrive until 1635.

But obviously the English did strategize before that and I did find an Old English word rede that seems to fit the bill.  It relates to a root meaning of “understand” and could also mean “advice,” “plan” or “scheme.”

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

I plugged the word shambles into The New York Times to check whether or not my use of the word to mean “a disorganized mess” was consistent with what other people might mean when they use the word.

It was, but I almost wish I hadn’t looked.

According to the search results we are all in deep trouble

• the economy is in a shambles
• the transportation network is a shambles
• Iraq is in a shambles
• the Democratic Party is a shambles
• John McCain’s campaign appears to be in shambles

The list goes on.

So let’s leave those depressing search results and look instead at why we think being in a shambles is such a bad thing.

Although the word is a very old one it was only 1926 when it came to mean what all those doom and gloom citations meant.

Back in Latin scamnum meant a stool or bench.  As the Romans rubbed up against the Germanic peoples before the Anglo Saxons took over England this word for stool was adopted into Germanic.

So when Old English eventually did become a recognizable language in its own right scomul was one of the words they used for a stool.  We have citations for this word back to the year 825.

But what is a stool but a miniature table and as logic would have it by the year 971 sceomolas took on the meaning of table or counter.

In particular these tables and counters were ones set out on market days and they were the work surface that people used to do their trade.

The word seems to have broken in two from here; in one direction the whole marketplace started to be called the shambles and some old towns still have place names of streets or commons based on this use.

But the direction we are more interested in here is the narrowing of use of shambles from meaning “a market stall” generally to meaning a market stall specializing in meats.

If the table at the market where you bought your meat was called a shambles—and by 1305 it was—then didn’t it make sense to call the abattoir a shambles too?  It was by 1548.

Now an abattoir or slaughterhouse is a pretty messy place with all that blood and guts splattered all over the place.  It is common coin among language users to try and hype their message by overdoing a comparison.  If your office is a big mess someone will really be getting the message across that they think it’s a mess if they call it an abattoir.

So that’s what brought us the current meaning less than 100 years ago.

Wayne Grady is the current president of the Writers Union of Canada and in the audio version of podictionary gives as his favorite words as Bloody Caesar.

He then proceeds to give a recipe for the mostly Canadian drink Bloody Caesar and encourages us to drink them for breakfast.

Oh, a writer’s life!

• Vodka
• Beef boullion
• Clamato juice
• Lime
• Worcestershire sauce
• Horseradish optional

Wayne’s latest book is Deserts – A Literary Companion, which might explain why he’s so thirsty.

He says he met the inventor and by all accounts that inventor was Walter Chell a bartender in Calgary, Alberta in 1969. The combination of clam juice and tomato juice is a bit unusual and evidently it was the popularity of the drink that spawned a concoction called Mott’s Clamato.

I have to take issue with Wayne’s inclusion of beef boullion in a Bloody Caesar because I’d always thought there was a different classification of drink called a bull shot that used beef boullion instead of tomato or clamato juice.

But enough on drinks.

Caesar is our word and we must render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

Although Wayne’s drink has only been around a few decades, the word Caesar is reported to be the earliest Latin word adopted into Teutonic languages.

One can imagine why.

Julius Caesar was an influential enough character that his name is still very familiar to us and he lived about 2,100 years ago.

He was the first Roman leader to be called Caesar but those that followed adopted the name as if it were a title—and so it became a title.

In fact it became so much of a title that it migrated into other languages as a title so that the German Kaiser and the Russian Czar both take their titles from the word Caesar and ultimately old Julius.

Taking a word back 2100 years isn’t a bad trick, but it’s kind of boring etymologically if it all flows back to one guy.

Wikipedia tells me that the name Caesar goes back at least six generations before the Julius we know.

Almost none of the dictionaries even speculate at a meaning for the name.

When a woman has a baby delivered by caesarian section the operation is said to be so named because Julius Caesar was brought into the world in this way. However, this is thought to be a myth since until the era of modern medicine such a procedure was uniformly fatal to the mother and Julius Caesar’s mother was 20 when she had him but lived to be 65 years old.

In fact John Ayto believes that the name evolved from the procedure instead of the other way around; it’s all about cutting. Your incisors in your mouth are the teeth that cut and scissors cut.

People have been speculating on the origin of the name for a very long time and Pliny the Elder suggested that the name Caesar came from a Latin word for “hair” due to a full head of hair adorning the first to bear the name.

Although Wayne’s Canadian drink is named after the ancient Roman, Caesar Salad is not; at least not directly.

In 1924 a restaurateur named Caesar Cardini—this time from Tijuana, Mexico—invented the recipe.

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