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

Here’s a quote:

“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

That was said by Edward Morgan Forster, the author of A Passage to India.

I’ve been looking at some of his biographical material and the quote seems to match his reputation; he distrusted “the establishment” but instead trusted individuals.

He was gay and living in the early 1900s and so the prospect of betraying a friend was probably more real to him than it is to you and me.

The word betray appeared in English more than 700 years ago from French and in turn from Latin.  The Latin root was tradere the “be” prefix being added in English as an intensifier.

The Latin word in turn broke into two, trans dare literally “across give” meaning to “hand over” or to “deliver.”

Having stripped the “be” off the front of betray it is much easier to see its relationship to the word traitor.

Betraying people and countries and becoming a traitor are certainly things we frown on.  But there is a related word that we actively support.  That Latin tradere is also the root of tradition, although ironically tradition doesn’t have as long a tradition in English as betray or traitor.

One who betrays his country is accused of treason, which also comes from the same root.

Often you hear of this skullduggery referred to as high treason.  Historically there was petty treason as an alternative to high treason.

What E M Forster was hoping to have the courage for was high treason over petty treason since petty treason was betrayal of an individual, while high treason was betrayal of the state or the monarch.

These were actual laws running back to the 1300s.

Kind Edward III defined High Treason to include among other things:

• sleeping with his wife;
• sleeping with his eldest daughter;
• imagining either the king or his eldest son dead.

I guess committing these crimes against the younger kids was only petty treason.

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

“My name is Patrick Boyer and an interesting word is butterfly“

Patrick Boyer is one of the authors I met earlier this year and the reason he chose butterfly is because he actually has a small publishing house called Blue Butterfly Books.

But butterfly is a good word.

Someone I know and love told me with much confidence that the word butterfly came about because some king or other tended to get his merds wixed up and that because he mispronounced “flutter by” as “butter fly” all his subjects were too scared to point out that the emperor had no clothes and so like a bunch of sniveling sycophants started calling the insects that had been fluttering by butterflies.

At the time I was told this I had no idea why a butterfly might be called a butterfly and so I kept my mouth shut (like a sniveling sycophant).

It turns out that entire etymology research departments with vast databases at world leading universities don’t really have much idea either so I’m in good company.

They do have a few cute theories though.

The word was already being used in Old English and shows up in the written record about the year 1000.

Butterflies are usually objects of delight but the proposed etymology for the name comes in various flavors of whatever the opposite of delight is.

The mildest of these is simply that these insects were named because they tended to alight on milk or cheese left unattended. Or simply that some species have yellow wings.

But this theory is extended by superstitious minds to make those milk-stealing butterflies actually witches who have taken a more attractive form to achieve their thievery.

I’ll save the worst till last and before I tell you I’ll just touch on the word butter and its etymology.

Butter is an unusual word that appears to have come into English during the days of Old English but from Latin. Most Latinate English words appeared with the French of the Norman Conquest of 1066 or appeared even later, introduced by people thinking they were smart to drop Latin based words into their writing.

Butter, on the other hand, must have been one of those words learned by Germanic peoples in continental Europe while rubbing up against the Romans before Old English even got started.

Not everyone believes it but the Latin precursor to butter is supposed to have come from Greek where the leading “bo” sound might have come from their word for a cow, coming even earlier from Indo-European and also giving us words like bovine.

The second half of the word butter is supposed to represent turos the Greek word for “cheese” and also have Indo-European roots.

This would make butter literally mean “cow cheese.”

The last etymological theory on our word of the day butterfly is that these pretty little creatures were named because their droppings were yellow and looked like butter.

This unlikely theory was put forward by a 19th century etymologist who I haven’t talked about before on podictionary.  Hensleigh Wedgwood found a Dutch name for butterflies boterschijte and thought this pointed to nomenclature by excrement.

If the Wedgwood name sounds familiar it should.  Not only did Hensleigh write an etymological dictionary he just happened to be the grandson of Josiah Wedgwood, the guy who founded the fine china company.

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

Archibald Primrose was Prime Minister of England for a short time near the end of the reign of Queen Victoria.  He didn’t have a very easy time of it as Prime Minister and he is quoted as saying:

“There are two supreme pleasures in life. One is ideal, the other real. The ideal is when a man receives the seals of office from his Sovereign. The real pleasure comes when he hands them back.”

The seals of office of which he spoke are the things that get stamped on documents to make them all official and okey-dokey.

If you have a diploma hanging on a wall somewhere it likely has a seal on it.

These kind of seals represent a kind of convenient midpoint in the etymology of the word.  Most of us don’t apply official seals such as this very often but we are always breaking the seal on food packaging or sealing envelopes before we drop them in the mail.

The continuum isn’t that hard to figure out.  Once upon a time an official document or letter was rolled or folded and had a wax seal applied to it so that the recipient would know that the message originated from whoever applied the seal; that it wasn’t a forgery and perhaps also that no one else had read the message.

Through this kind of activity the word seal took on a meaning of “to close.”

Going back in time English got seal from French about 800 years ago and French got it from Latin before that.

The Latin root relates to our word sign so it makes etymological sense that when we sign a document it has the same impact as if we stamped it with our official seal.

The Latin root sigillum meant “small picture” or “engraved figure” so that official seal was recognized because of the image it portrayed.

Going even further back, the Indo-European word root is sekw and meant “to follow.” The idea here was that everyone should follow the image that represented their leader, be it a flag flapping on the battle field or a smudge on a document.

I see from Urbandictionary that there is a band named Placebo. There are several Urbandictionary entries praising this musical group so they must give their fans a lot of pleasure.

I am also reminded of a comedy routine by Steve Martin where he recommends this new drug he just tried, it’s called placebo.

Of course both of these uses of placebo draw on the fact that a placebo is a fake drug.

There’s a deeper joke in the etymology though.

Steve Martin was pretending that he had gotten such pleasure from this thing he thought was a drug that he wanted to recommend it to others.

The Classical Latin meaning of the word placebo is “I shall please.”

The roots of both please and placebo are the same and the American Heritage Dictionary takes them back to an Indo-European root plak that meant “to be flat.” The thinking seems to be along the lines that when the sea is flat it is calm and when things are calm they are pleasing.

When placebo first made an appearance in English it didn’t refer to either the fake drug or some pleasing nature.  That was back in the early 1200s and at that time placebo was the name of a specific prayer to be recited on behalf of the dead.  The reason the prayer was called placebo was simply that placebo was the first word uttered when reciting the prayer.

Within 100 years we see a new meaning to placebo.

Since people who excessively flatter others do so only to please and not because the really believe what they are saying, flatterers started to be called called placebos.

It wasn’t until more recently that the meaning we recognize came about.

Medical doctors have long been users of Latin and so when they prescribed medicine to a patient for their psychological good, even when they were confident that there would be no biochemical benefit, they called these drugs placebos.

This is seen first in the written record in 1785.

The meaning of placebo flipped some time during the mid 1900s.  No longer a medicine with no pharmaceutical activity, given only to please the patient, placebo became a non-drug per se, one that specifically had no effect, regardless of the patient’s pleasure or pain.

This episode brought to you by my book on the words we use for our bodies: Carnal Knowledge – A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia available at bookstores or online. For more information please visit www.navelgazersdictionary.com

All the dictionaries agree that the word echo came to English from Latin and that Latin got it from Greek.

Not all the dictionaries explore what might have gone before the Greek, nor pontificate as to whether French was part of the route between Latin and English.

Let’s take it in chronological order.

There was a Greek root word meaning “sound” ekhe and back in Classical Greece the Greeks tended to invent gods and personify everything to try and fit some kind of understanding to it.  So Echo became a nymph who lived in the woods.

As is the way with mythology there is no single clear tale about this nymph and how she came to hang out at cliff faces and shout back at you whatever it was you bellowed at the cliff.

One version is that she was a helpmate to Zeus, distracting his wife while he went off and had affairs with other nymphs.

Hera, Zeus’ wife eventually figured out why Zeus was coming home with pixy dust on his collar and vented her rage in part by casting a spell on Echo so that she could not say anything of her own volition, but only repeat what others said to her.

Another version of the tale is that Echo fell in love with Narcissus but since he was already in love with someone else—himself—he rejected her and she pined away until there was nothing left of her but her voice.

This ancient Greek myth sets the stage.  As with so many things the Romans adopted this little story from the Greeks and that’s why the dictionaries tell us the word came though Latin.

The very first citation that the Oxford English Dictionary mentions for the use of echo in English not as this nymph, but in the way we mean it when we say someone is repeating something back to us.

It’s actually an open question as to whether people applied this nymph’s name as metaphor to describe repetition, or whether the ancient Greeks themselves named the nymph because they already used this word in this way.  The OED Second Edition tends to lean toward the latter explanation.

The work echo first appears in in English is also of some interest because its title gives us a glimpse into the transition between Old English and Middle English.

The work is dated to 1340 and is called Ayenbite of Inwyt.  It was a translation from French although this title is thoroughly English even though it might not mean much to you.  These days it’s regarded as a good tool in trying to understand the dialect of Kent from around that time.

1340 was certainly a time when Middle English was taking firm hold and if the document was translated from French there was even more reason to think it might be written in Middle English.  But that title tells me that there was plenty of Old English tendencies hanging on in Kent.

The meaning of Ayenbite of Inwyt is “Remorse of Conscience.”  Ayenbite is “again bite” and is actually a literal translation of remorse; re meaning “again,” and morse meaning “bite” or “sting.”

Inwyt is the wit you have within you.  In this use it means your responsible inner knowledge but as a Middle English word it is actually a reinvention of an Old English word inwit that meant “deceit.”

So although both of these words are Middle English inventions, they follow the pattern of Old English where people loved to string together two words to create something new.

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

Elizabeth Abbott is one of the writers I met earlier this year.  She has a book out called Sugar – A Bittersweet History.

At first she asked me about the word sugar but as it turns out I’ve done an episode on sugar before and her second choice as a word was bittersweet.

This is a real bargain since this is clearly two words jammed together so I’ll have to look at each of them.

I also note that she has written a book called A History of Celibacy and to balance that out one called A History of Mistresses.

To begin I’ll take a bite into the word bitter because the word bite is related.

When you have a bitter taste in your mouth there is a sharp sensation that figuratively bites.  Both words trace back through Old English to an Indo-European root bheid meaning to split.  When you bite a piece of bread it splits off from the rest of your sandwich.

Sweet too is a word from Old English that goes back to Indo-European.

Both these words fall under the category of terms that express common and unchanging human experiences and so have held their meanings and sound pretty consistently over thousands of years.

Over the last few years it has become common to hear teenagers use the word sweet where their parents or grandparents might have said cool or groovy.

Guess what; this kind of use of sweet isn’t actually new.

Descending from the same Indo-European root there are a number of Greek words with meanings including “sweet” but also “pleasure” and “rejoicing.”  There was a Latin word suadere from the same root that meant to give good advice.

I can almost hear a conversation in a high school hallway:

• “What do you think I should do?”
• “I think you ought to…”
• “Hey, sweet advice dude!”

Speaking of advice, how highly would you value any recommendations given to you by a guy who dressed in animal skins, lived in a broken-open grave, ate only after dark, and drank only the muddy swamp water that surrounded his pitiful home.

Sounds like a medieval homeless person doesn’t it?

Well this is a description of Saint Guthlac who lived 1300 years ago.  Supposedly as he sat in his swamp all day denying himself the finer things in life he thought about God.

To the Englishmen of the day this was a noble thing to do and not only did a prince live there with him for a while—he was on the lam from his cousin and wanted to survive long enough to be king, even if it meant living in a grave swamp; it worked too—not only that, but piles of pilgrims started coming to Guthlac for advice and during a time when most people were illiterate he was thought important enough that someone wrote his biography.

This is how we know about him.

It was in the Old English translation of this Latin biography that we first get the word bitter.

It is believed that rockets were invented in China more than 1000 years ago.

I instantly thought of fireworks in this context but it appears that before rockets were used for fireworks and joyous entertainment, they were used for killing people and war.

This tradition continued as Europeans adopted the technology 600 or 700 years ago.

The things weren’t very effective in warfare but about 200 years ago a big promoter of rockets came along.  His name was William Congreve.

He thought rockets were better than cannons and mortars because you didn’t have to lug around a heavy chunk of metal to fire the things off.  He convinced the Prime Minister and he convinced the King.

He did most of his experimental work and his demonstrations at a place called Woolwich* now part of London.

This is very lucky for us because Woolwich was named because it was the place where the docks were from which wool was shipped to Europe.

Much of England’s international trade during the middle ages and before was in wool.  Sheep had nicer fleece in England’s cooler climate.

How does wool tie into rockets?  Allow me to explain.

Before the industrial revolution brought along machines and factories that could turn fibers into cloth people still needed clothes.  Noah Webster’s family name shows that his ancestors were weavers.  Unmarried old ladies are sometimes called spinsters, a name that derives from their activity spinning wool or flax into thread.

The point is that all that fabric for clothing had to come from somewhere and before the industrial revolution it came from home based manual labor.

After the raw material, came thread.  Thread was produced by almost every girl and woman when they weren’t busy doing something else.  They spun when they gossiped and they spun when they walked here and there.  It was almost like playing with a yo-yo.

The way they did it was that they took a bunch of wool or flax fiber and the twisted it around a long stick so it looked a little like cotton candy.  They tucked this stick under their arm or stuck it through their belt so they had a hand free.

From this bunch of fiber they yanked off a small amount and rolled it into a very rough thread a few inches long and still stringing out from the bunch on the stick.

The rough tread was attached to another smaller stick which was spun like a top while hanging from the tread.  This was called the spindle and a sort of small plate or wheel at the bottom end gave it the weight to keep spinning.  From time to time the girls gave the spindle a push and fed out a little more fiber, then when the thread got long enough they just wrapped it around the spindle and continued.

I still haven’t gotten to the part where this relates to rockets.

The point I’m trying to make is that the simple equipment for this kind of spinning was familiar to everyone.  It was part of daily life and you probably couldn’t go through a day without seeing someone using these two specialized sticks.

So when the technology of rockets began to appear in Europe the military men who first saw it noticed that rockets were long and skinny and chose for them a name of something else in their lives that was long and skinny.

That long stick that held the wool had an ancient Germanic name that in Old English was rock and in Italain had been rocca. The military devices appeared in the 1500s in French as roquet and in English in 1611 at last as rocket.

I wanted to tell you also that I’m going to be presenting at WordCamp Toronto on October 4th.  WordCamps are gatherings of WordPress users and WordPress is the blogging engine that powers podictionary.  The man behind the WordPress software Matt Mullenweg will be there along with other great speakers.  I’m going to be talking about podcasting with WordPress. If you attend please come and introduce yourself. I’ll be there for both days.

*I know I’m going to hear from listeners who hear me pronounce Woolwich incorrectly.  Be assured I already know I blew it.

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

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

However advanced a society we think we live in, and however well off we think we are within society there seems no getting away from menial tasks.

The grass needs cutting, unless you have a gardener; the fridge needs a cleanout, unless you employ a full time chef; the laundry needs doing, unless you have domestic servants.

This sense of what the word menial means has been around for more than 300 years.  Here are a few examples from citations from the Oxford English Dictionary.

• In 1841 Charles Dickens wrote of calling cabs and pulling out of chairs as menial tasks.
• In 1899 making bricks was said to be menial work.
• In 1988 copy-editing and correcting print proofs was cited as being menial.

Historically though these last labors would not have been seen as menial.

According to Merriam-Webster Unabridged there was a Greek word menein that meant “to remain.”  The American Heritage Dictionary points further back to Indo-European where men held the same meaning.

These roots made their way into Latin where manere meant “to dwell.”

From Latin to Old French to English this meaning of “a dwelling” followed a word which we now know as mansion; although a mansion is certainly a swelling of a dwelling.

While you and I might not have a staff of domestic servants to manage the lawn, gardens, kitchens and washing people who live in mansions often do have such a staff.

The same word root that gives us the word mansion gave us the word menial and for the longest time a menial was someone who worked in a mansion.  A menial was a household servant.

Thus menial tasks were those tasks that would get done by the servants.

Since most household servants didn’t bake bricks or copy-edit manuscripts it was the lowly nature of the household work that attached itself to the word before the word could get out of the house and be attached to lowly work elsewhere.

Although I’ll happily go on a 100 kilometer bicycle ride and in winter regularly skate-ski for 30 or 50 kilometers, I’m not much of a runner.  So for many years I’ve teased my friends who are runners by reminding them that a marathon is a race modeled after a guy who ran until he dropped dead.

How much fun could that be?

The reason I said this was that there is a commonly held belief that it was a runner named Phidippides who ran from a place called Marathon to the city of Athens to tell the people there that the Greek army had just won a battle against the Persians.  Upon delivering his news he collapsed and died.

I dare say that my friends who like running think I’m wrong in questioning their source of pleasure.

It looks also that I may have been wrong about Phidippides and his run from the battle of Marathon.

The battle of Marathon did indeed take place back about 2,500 years ago.  The Greeks were badly outnumbered by a Persian fighting force that had a pretty formidable reputation.  That’s where Phidippides came in.

According to Herodotus, a historian writing within a lifetime of the actual battle this Phidippides guy did his running before the fight, not after it.

Because the Athenians were so badly outnumbered they sent him to bring help from Sparta.  Supposedly he covered 150 miles in two days but the Spartan troops arrived too late to fight since by then the battle was over.

The Greeks won despite their numerical disadvantage and supposedly 6,400 Persians were slaughtered while only 192 Greeks died.

According to John Ayto the story about someone running the 22 or 23 miles from the fields of Marathon to Athens—and subsequently dying—didn’t appear until 700 years after the battle, so it’s actually not likely to be true.

The first marathon race was run in 1896 during the first modern Olympic Games—it didn’t exist as an event before then.  The distance was flexible at first but eventually settled on 26 miles 385 yards.  This distance was based on the historical fact that it was that far from Winsor Castle to the royal viewing box during the 1908 Olympics in England.

I guess that’s as good a reason as any.

The guy who dreamt up the idea for a marathon race was a Frenchman named Michel Bréal who just happened to be a buddy of Pierre de Coubertin the guy who started the modern Olympics.

Since the first modern Olympics were held in Greece the organizers liked the idea of a marathon race to commemorate their ancient glory.

They liked it even more when a Greek fellow won the event; he was Spyridon Louis.

Though I’m unlikely to ever run a marathon the thing I do like about marathons is that the guy who dreamed them up—that Michel Bréal—his day-job was a philologist.  He wrote things like a Dictionary of Latin Etymology.

My wife is pretty game to join me in the things I love but her athletic ability might be described as casual.

While many of our friends are quite committed to running or tennis my wife’s strengths lie elsewhere.

So years ago when we took our kids out on weekends for cross-country skiing lessons she once found herself looking at the receding backsides of several other mothers as they seemingly effortlessly disappeared up a steep slope.

She referred to these women as jocks and vowed to stay home next weekend and eat chocolate cake.

According to the dictionaries the word jock meaning “an athlete” is more American than British.

There is justification among these references to women being labeled jocks but it’s difficult to find a first citation.

My wife’s use would have been in the mid ’90s at the latest, but the Oxford English Dictionary has seemingly gender-neutral citations back into the 1960s.

This was certainly a relatively new thing since the etymology of jock meaning “athlete” is from jock-strap; that essential piece of sporting gear for males.

The first citation for jock-strap meaning a piece of sportswear is from 1897 in a US patent.  It was 1956 when athletes were called jock-straps which was quickly abbreviated to jocks by the beginning of the ’60s.

The reason that a specialized piece of clothing was called a jock-strap was that as early as 1790 jock was a slang term for “penis.”

Since this was a rude word at first it must have softened in its power to offend by the time it was used to help designate an athletic supporter. Since what is offensive at the dinner table is sometimes the lingua franca of the locker room, one might suspect this as a route toward this word’s gentrification.

It seems that one of the reasons that jock as “athlete” is considered to be more American is that in Britain Jock has long represented a pet name for John; to such an extent that Jock has often been the stand-in name for people whose names are unknown.

Perhaps this was the original reason for the slang use of jock to apply to the penis just as willie and peter are used nowadays.

I mentioned my wife’s more modern use of jock to mean an athletic woman and I see that at Urbandictionary the sentiment among the presumably younger contributors is that a jock is someone with an inflated self image based on their athletic achievements.

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