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[audio clip of Mark Jaquith asking for gesticulate]

Mark also has a word oriented blog.  It’s called wordsplosion.com and he invites people to submit pictures of spelling mistakes or grammatical errors in public signs and the like.  It’s a lot of fun.

Today is Halloween.  Tonight the streets will be filled with little ghosts and goblins, Hanna Montannas and Dark Knights.  Many will be gesticulating in their excitement—that means waving their arms around—and all, I hope, will be lugging sacks of goodies.

For the purposes of today’s word it’s appropriate that they’ll be carrying bags of candy because the root of gesticulate has to do with carrying.

In fact when a woman is pregnant and is carrying a baby the reason we talk about nine months of gestation is that this word too—gestation—comes from the same Latin root and nine months of gestation literally means nine months of carrying.

The kids on the street with their bags of loot will be gesturing to each other and gesture too is a related word.

But to us gesticulate and gesture have a greater sense of movement than of load bearing.  This is because the meaning has changed over time.  The original Latin meaning of carrying something also extended to how you carried yourself and how you behaved.  The original meaning of gesture in English referred to posture and deportment.

It was only with time that the word describing the general movement of your body got transferred to the specific movements of your body.

A court jester was more likely to gesticulate than a knight and appropriately enough the title jester comes from the same Latin root.

But knights do come into it too.  The first citation for the word gesture, when it meant posture and deportment, appeared in an old document from the early 1400s that I’ve not talked about before.  It’s known as Sir Cleges. This is the tale of a knight with an appropriately trick-or-treat theme about it.

Not only was Sir Cleges said to be of good gesture, meaning he carried himself nobly, he was generous to a fault.  Just like householders giving out candy tonight, 600 years ago Sir Cleges gave and gave and gave.  Until he had nothing left to give and was reduced to poverty.

Lucky for him a miracle happened and in the midst of winter a cherry tree in his yard was found to be full of fresh ripe fruit.

He wanted to tell the king of this wonderful event but all the guards and keepers of the castle wouldn’t let him in unless he split with them the reward he expected to get from the king.

When he did tell the king the king was so amazed and pleased with the winter cherries that he asked what Sir Cleges wanted as a reward.  Sir Cleges asked to be whipped with 12 lashes and gladly shared this reward with the guards who’d extorted him.

The king and his courtiers thought it a great trick and now figuring out how Sir Cleges had been so generous in days gone by, gave him a more satisfying reward.

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In the latter half of the 1700s this guy Antoine Lavoisier had this theory.  He figured that heat was a physical property, a material substance, like water.

His thinking was something along the lines that if you take a bowl of water and an empty bowl beside it, and connect the two with a tube, the water will flow from one bowl into the other until they have the same levels of water in each.

Similarly, if you take a cold egg and put it in hot water, the water cools down a little, and the egg warms up.  Or alternately if you take a red hot rock and drop it in a pot of cold water, it heats the water up while the stone cools down.

Today we know this is wrongheaded as a theory, but Lavoisier was a leading scientific thinker and it took a little while to figure out the holes in his theory.

But in the meantime the theory had to have a name and the name it got was caloric because Lavoisier named this invisible substance that flowed heat back and forth between bodies caloric after the Latin word for “heat” calorem.

The Romans got calorem from some predecessor language themselves because it’s Indo-European root is kela meaning warm.

Yesterday I re-posted the very first podictionary episode on the word chauffeur which is also a word that ultimately traces back to this Indo-European root kela.

As you might guess Lavoisier was French and so it took Charles Darwin’s grampa Erasmus Darwin to bring the word caloric into English in 1791.

This becomes a truly international story since to break the back of the caloric theory it took an American who was a British loyalist and had run away to Germany after the American Revolution.

Benjamin Thompson was working at a cannon factory in Germany and he noticed that although the huge chunk of brass that made up a cannon was cold before its barrel was bored out—and so was the bit used to bore it—things seemed to get damn hot during the proceedings.

According to the theory of caloric, where heat must be flowing from one place to another, this was impossible. And yet things sure did get hot when all that grinding was going on.

Clearly the theory was wrong.

In 1798, only seven years after the word caloric found its way into English Thompson published his study and killed the caloric theory.

But a word that has been associated with heat for so very long, doesn’t burn out easily.

Scientists needed names for the things they were discovering.  Now that they figured heat was another form of energy, instead of some fluid, they also found that a consistent quantity of heat was needed to raise a certain mass of water one degree centigrade.  So they pasted this unit with the name calorie.

And yet the calorie is still oh so misunderstood.

People concerned about their waistlines count calories but because a real calorie is a pretty tiny little amount of heat, the calories people do calculations on with respect to food are usually kilocalories; that is one thousand calories.

People just can’t get up the energy to say the whole word and so have adopted a convention of inaccurately calling food energy calories even though that’s only one tenth of one percent of what they mean.

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

I’ve found that I am a pretty busy guy these days and so for the next few weeks or months I’m going to be occasionally recycling some of my favorite episodes.  I think most people won’t have heard or read them before because I’ll be reaching deep into the archives, often back to a time when I had hundreds or even tens of listeners instead of thousands—and when I had no readers at all.

So today’s episode is a re-recording of my very first episode.  For those who listen I’ll give you a little sample of how I sounded back in June of 2005, before I got comfortable with microphones.

The podictionary word for today is chauffeur, a hired driver—or these days more likely a parent shuttling kids around.

The word chauffeur is older than the internal combustion engine.  It first appeared in a French dictionary in 1680, which means it must have been used in speech before that.

1680 was coincidentally the same year a Dutch physicist named Christian Huygens designed the first internal combustion engine, but Huygens’s engine was supposed to be fueled by gunpowder and never actually got built.

Some of the first cars that did get build didn’t use gunpowder or gasoline. It was the age of the steam engine and so the first cars ran on steam.

A steam engine has a firebox and a boiler, the boiler produces steam to drive the pistons.  This is an external combustion engine.

To keep the thing going you have to keep stoking the firebox.

In French chaud means “hot” and chauffeur literally meant the person who keeps things hot by stoking the fire.

Cars only really got rolling around 1900 after gasoline engines came into play and it was right around then that the word moved from French to English, but at first it didn’t refer to hired drivers, it meant instead an automobile enthusiast, since cars were still sort of a hobby for the rich.  This meaning didn’t hold on for more than a few short years and so for most of its time in English a chauffeur has been the hired driver.

[portions of this episode originally aired June 2, 2005]

[audio clip of Jane Wells asking for the word insinuate]

The Oxford Dictionary of English says that insinuate means to “suggest or hint (something bad) in an indirect and unpleasant way.”

If someone insinuated something about you it might get up your nose, and that’d be appropriate since insinuate is etymologically related to sinus.

The Oxford English Dictionary—which I’ve explained before is a different dictionary than The Oxford Dictionary of English—explains that this word insinuate came to English directly from renaissance Latin and that in Latin its parent insinuare had already developed all the meanings we adopted into English.

But having adopted all those meanings, we then promptly forgot most of them leaving us with our “indirect hint” meaning.

Sir Thomas More gave us the first citation in English in 1529 and his meaning was pretty close to what we understand insinuate to mean today.  But The Oxford English Dictionary likes to order its definitions in the order it believes the meanings evolved so Thomas More’s meaning falls as definition number five.

Back in Latin it is thought that definition number one came first, even though we don’t have an English citation for it until 1647, almost 120 years after Thomas More’s.

Incredibly this later citation is from another theologian named Henry More.

If they were related I can’t find the link.

The use that Henry More makes of the word is “to introduce tortuously or sinuously.”

Something that is sinuous is curvy like a sinuous river.  One definition I came across talked about worming your way in.

Henry More was fascinated with his belief in the human soul.  He believed the soul was immortal and so wrestled with the question of how a soul that exists before a person does, actually gets into the person.

I get the sense of tendrils or fibers of soul interweaving with those of a developing baby.

This brings us up against another word that might or might not be a homonym.  We have sinews in our bodies that connect our muscles and bones.  Do these have an etymological connection?

No.  Sinew had an Old English and Germanic background.

So if insinuate literally means curving into, what does that have to do with our noses and our sinuses?

The answer is that sinuses are named because they represent bays leading off the main nasal passages just like bays leading of some body of water.  Sinus is the Latin word for “bay.”  The bays are defined by the curvature of the shoreline.

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

[audio clip] Jacques Surveyer asks about the word maneuver.

A maneuver is a movement, but not just any old movement.  It’s a calculated movement.

The Heimlich maneuver for instance.  You are doing it for a reason.

Military maneuvers also come to mind, as well they should since it is from the military that we get our current meaning of maneuver.

Originally the word was two Latin words and didn’t have anything to do with the military except in that the Romans were a pretty militaristic society.

In Latin the words were manus opera.

Manus meant “hand” and opera meant “labor” so that originally to maneuver was to do work by hand.

This meaning was retained into French and there are citations from the mid 1200s.  But by the 1600s one of the tasks undertaken by hand emerged as a precursor to the current meaning.

Of course back in those days ships were powered by sail and to change your course you had to make adjustments to the canvas aloft.  This was done by hand and so maneuver came to specifically mean to work with the sails.

Sometime after this—in the 1700s—the word made its transition to English. But by that time already this word meaning adjustment to the sails had expanded to apply to adjustment to the positioning of the ships and so to the positioning of military resources.

I see also that the spelling of this word is one of those that still hasn’t completely settled down.  The Oxford English Dictionary mentions Noah Webster as being influential in establishing the American spelling.  But you might be surprised that Webster did so not with his dictionary.

More than 40 years before Noah Webster came out with his dictionary he produced a children’s spelling book. That little number went through hundreds of editions and sold in the millions.

Now here’s a word you don’t find in many dictionaries.  And yet Google returns 73 million hits on this word.  It’s been in newspapers and magazines thousands of times.

The New Oxford American Dictionary is the only conventional dictionary I came across that has captcha as an entry, yourdictionary.com the only online one.

That’s understandable given the rate at which dictionaries are updated.

I see at wordspy.com the first citation for captcha is October 2002.

If you can’t quite remember what it means, a captcha is that place on a website where you need to type in the letters or numbers that a spamming computer couldn’t read.

Sometimes I can’t read them either.

The reason this is called a captcha is that the people who invented these things also invented the acronym based on the title Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.

That’s not actually true.

They engineered an acronym that would fit the situation, in this case trying to capture spam robots.  They made up the title so the acronym would come out cleverly.

So now lets decode the title.  Most of it is easy except perhaps the Turing test.  As Wordspy explains it:

“In 1950, the mathematician Alan Turing suggested that a computer could earn the label intelligent if it could fool a person into thinking he or she was communicating with another person instead of a machine.”

So website designers want spambots to fail their Turing tests.

Alan Turing was a genius-level mathematician and pioneering computer scientist.  His research was a key factor in decoding German communications during the Second World War.

Unfortunately he died at age 42.

It’s possible that his death was caused by the fact that like many genius-level scientists he was just too eccentric for his own good.

You know the stereotype, an absent minded professor, awkward socially.  That’s him.

He liked to ride his bicycle to work.

But he also liked wearing a gas mask while doing so.

Obviously he didn’t care too much what others thought.

In those days being gay was seen as a security threat and when it came out that he was having homosexual affairs he was tried and convicted and watched like a hawk by the authorities.  Until one day he was found dead.

At first it looked like he had forgotten to wash his hands after a chemistry experiment and some cyanide had accidently gotten on an apple he was eating.  But investigators decided instead that he’d staged that so his mother wouldn’t think he’d killed himself.

In the audio version of this episode Penny Kome asks me to do incongruous juxtaposition.

Yikes!

Here’s a helpful definition: incongruous, not congruous.

It really says that in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Let’s dispense with this one as quickly and mercifully as we can.  Congruous came from Latin and meant “agreeable.”  So incongruous meant “disagreeable” though these days we might more figuratively attach a meaning of “not consistent.”

Juxtaposition is a French import that was built in France out of Latin parts.  Juxta was from a Latin root that meant “come together” and also gave us our English word joust.

People who joust come together in battle.

Juxtaposition just means putting things beside each other.

Both of these words appeared in English in the 1600s but the story I’m going to tell you took place in 1885.

In that year a French linguist named Arsène Darmesteter gave a series of four lectures—in French—at a private house in London.

The topic: The Life of Words.

We can read an English translation of his lectures at Google Books and the notable thing about them are that they were translated and published in English before they were published in French.

The reason for this is that the reception of his lectures in London had been so enthusiastic.

This was six years after the Philological Society of London got Oxford University started working on what eventually became the OED.  So it’s pretty likely that a number of those Victorian gents who gave us the OED were in the room when these lectures were given.

In its etymology for juxtaposition the OED refers to a French dictionary co-written by Darmesteter, and Darmesteter actually used the word in his lecture.

A small irony is that in his lecture he used juxtaposition to describe words built by putting other older words beside each other.

Examples he gave were French but some of the English equivalents are

• policeman, a juxtaposition of police with man; and
• pedestal which back in Old French had arisen from a juxtaposition of the French words for “foot of the support”

The irony: juxtaposition is a juxtaposition of juxta and position.

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

Yesterday’s episode touched on an accomplished man of letters whose father had once told him to mid his P’s and Q’s. That made me want to look into where the expression came from.

I also mentioned that Sidney Lanier had been a poet and that gives me an excuse to let you know about something silly I’ve set up.

Inspired by the bounty of the fall harvest season I’ve set up a website where people can submit poems about fruit and vegetables along with recipes.  If I get enough I’ll publish them in a book.

Check it out at poeticrecipe.com

But mind your P’s and Q’s.

As to the origin of minding P’s and Q’s I found out that no one knows for sure how this expression started, but that it is fairly old and has inspired quite a list of theories. The Oxford English Dictionary has a list of seven possibilities in its June 2008 update to the entry; none of which it can give its stamp of authenticity.

By the time our poet of 150 years ago was being told to mind his P’s and Q’s the meaning had forked into two and Sidney Lanier was being told to be careful with his spelling and writing.

But the first citation goes back to before William Shakespeare gave up the ghost 400 years ago and was in the form

“to be on one’s P’s and Q’s.”

At first it meant to be “at one’s best” generally, not specifically having to do with writing.

The first to go as a theory of the origin of P’s and Q’s is that it’s an abbreviation of minding your pleases and thank-yous.  The theory being that P stands for please and Q stands for than-Q.

Evidently the written record does not contain the full phrase pleases and thank-yous before the 1900s so it’s unlikely to have been abbreviated 400 years ago.

If you take a peek at Google Books or some other source where you can see images of what printed pages looked like hundreds of years ago you might give some credence to the theory that it was sometimes hard for typesetters to tell the difference between the letter P and the letter Q.  But since the “care-in-writing” meaning only came after the “at-your-best” meaning this again seems an unlikely origin.

One popular origin is that bartenders kept track of how many pints or quarts of beer a customer had ordered by noting down P or Q.  An honest bartender minded their P’s and Q’s.

This has a ring of folk etymology to me.  I mean it just sounds like a story that would naturally be retold in bars even though it has no grounding in truth.

The OED graciously says this theory “can be neither substantiated nor dismissed.”

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

John Richardson asked me to do the word prep.

My immediate thought was that this was just an abbreviation of prepare.

And of course it is.

But lots of words are abbreviations of other words or strings of words that, since the abbreviation has become an accepted word, the older parent has been forgotten.

The example I like to give is goodbye.  No one thinks of goodbye as an abbreviation—though it is—and no one remembers that it used to be God be with you.

And it turns out that the word prep has been around a little longer than I’d have first expected.

The first citation for prep as an abbreviation of prepare was over 100 years ago and originally meant to train a horse.

So that’s long enough that it’s made its way into dictionaries and since lots of people use it it’s become a legitimate word in its own right.

That’s prep the verb but prep the noun, meaning a person who’s gone to prep school, is even older.

Prep as in prep school is first cited back in 1839.  Urbandictionary attests to the ongoing popularity of the word applied as some sort of insult to people whose parents paid for a private education.

Like many words that have become derogatory prep started out as a good thing. One early citation was from a parent of a prep boy who made good.

I’ll talk about him in a moment, but first I’ll tell you about the parent of prep since it has a lineage longer than 200 years.

As an English word prepare is about 500 or 600 years old but came via French from Latin so praeparare is a few thousand years old.

Back then it meant “to make ready beforehand” which is pretty much what prepare means today.  But since the pre prefix usually means “before” doesn’t that imply parare meant “to make ready”?

Indeed it does and that’s why the little knife in the knife block in the kitchen is called a paring knife; it’s used to make the food ready.

Back to that preppy boy of 150 years ago.

His name was Sidney Lanier and when he’d just turned 21, his dad still felt he could give him some advice on writing.

“A prep must mind his P’s and Q’s,” he said.

I guess Sidney did, since he grew up to be one of America’s respected men of letters teaching courses about Chaucer and Shakespeare at Johns Hopkins University.  He wrote poetry and the US Postal Service issued a stamp with his face on it.

The word figure figures into so many meanings.

• Those Wall Street bankers, they were taking home eight or nine figures.
• I stopped eating pastries to improve my figure.
• How long do you figure it will take to find a job.
• If you turn to page 200 in your text book you can see figure 44.

Although the earliest citation that we have in English for the word is as we might use it in marveling over a high salary, this meaning is actually a relative latecomer.

Relative is the operational word here.

Figure to denote a numeral—a numerical symbol—appeared first in 1225 in our old friend the Ancrene Rule, that old etiquette guide for nuns I’ve talked about before. So if figure as numerical symbol is a relative newcomer and still the oldest example we have of the word in English, how does that work?

It works because many meanings of figure were meanings that evolved before Latin ever became French and before French ever became English.

But what’s remarkable about these meanings is that they not only survived those transitions between Latin, French and English, the related concepts were strongly enough related that they survived a transition into Latin from a completely different word.

The Romans were impressed enough by the Greeks that they adopted a whole pile of words from them.  Figure is not one of them.

Instead they adopted the idea of figure.

Just like the pantheon of Greek gods that were renamed as they were adopted by the Romans, but maintained their relative hierarchy in the org-chart of the gods, the Romans took on a bunch of related meanings of the Greek word skhema but renamed them all figure.

Skhema meant “shape” just like figure.

Thus it’s thought that one of the oldest meanings of figure is the one I referred to when saying I was trying to eat less pastry.  That’s not necessarily a body-shape specifically, but a shape in general.

This actually relates to the pastry because pastry is made from dough and the very word dough evolves from the same Indo-European root as figure because dough is easily shaped.

The figure on page 200 of your text book is obviously a shape.  So the meaning of some sort of drawing is an old one.

A numeral is a shape we draw to represent a number and this meaning of figure, although a latecomer, was still early enough that it shows up as the first English citation.

It is only when we apply the word figure to mean “a thought process” do we see a meaning that evolved after the word arrived in English. Meanings such as “to figure on making some money” or “we figured out the reason” didn’t appear until about 200 years ago.  The reason this meaning eventually came about was that working with numbers requires thinking, so a word associated with numbers was adapted to the activity of working with them.