[audio clip of Ron Foreman asking for the word redingote]

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I didn’t feel I could do an episode on the word redingote.  For one thing I already did an episode just this past Monday on the word zaftig.

How many weird words can I do when my theme is supposed to be telling you something you didn’t know about a word you thought you did know?

So here’s something you didn’t know about the word coat, starting with the word redingote.

A redingote is described in the following terms by the Oxford English Dictionary:

In France a double-breasted outer coat for men, with long plain skirts not cut away in the front; or a similar garment worn by women, sometimes cut away in front.

So starting back in the 1790s the word redingote denoted a specific style of coat fashionable in Paris.  But redingote has a little more going for it in the etymology department. This is because redingote is a word English got from French, but that French had only just gotten from English before that.

The French word redingote is a mashing together of the words riding and coat.

And it’s a good thing that Ron Foreman asked me about this word because looking at the etymology of coat itself I can’t say there’s a very interesting history to relate.

Before I cracked open my dictionaries I expected that I’d find coat was related to coast since your coat covers your sides. But no, coat arrived with the French of 1066 and William the Conqueror and etymologists suspect it may have been a Germanic word before it got into Latin.

A German word suspected to be related is kotze that refers to a kind of shaggy fabric or a garment made with it.

When coat first came into English it was a tight fitting affair that didn’t hang down below the waist. That was for men at least.  Women started wearing coats in English within 100 years, but curiously their coats started at the waist; they were essentially skirts. The legacy of these naming conventions survives in waistcoat and petticoat.

[In an audio clip Joseph Thornley asks for the phrase social media.]

People often quip “the media medium is the message.”  It’s such a wise thing to say, but I’ve never quite understood it.

I just spent a moment reading explanations of what it’s supposed to mean and although they make sense I still don’t get why “the media medium is the message” carries such weight as a phrase.

This famous phrase was written by Marshall McLuhen back in 1964 when media meant newspapers, TV, radio and magazines. All of these traditional media are now feeling the effects of the internet.

The podcast you are listening to or the blog you are reading is in the category sometimes called social media because not only can I talk at you, you can talk back at me, and to each other.

The Oxford English Dictionary released its draft revised entry for the word media in June 2008 and it didn’t include the combination social media, although they did include 25 other phrases such as media darling and media baron*.

So I turned instead to wordspy.com where the first citation that Paul Mcfedries could turn up shows its age by some of the words it uses.  It reads:

“What attracted librarians to the Internet? For some cybernauts, USENET, IRC, and the other social media of the net are the hooks.”

That’s from January 1994 by a reference librarian named Greg Notess; still an active internet observer from what I can see at his website.

But on to the roots of the words.

Both of them appeared in English just about the time Shakespeare was born.  Social came through the intermediary of French, ultimately from Latin. The Latin root socius meant “friend” or “companion.”

Perversely media—which is the plural of medium—didn’t have French as a medium between Latin and English but arrived directly.

In Classical Latin medium meant “middle” but it also had already taken on a sense of “intermediary.”

It’s this role as an intermediary between the source of the news and you the listener or reader that made media appropriate for TV and newspapers.

Similarly social media acts as an intermediary multilaterally between any number of internet users.

So in the spirit of social media I invite you to use the comment space in the blog post for this episode to tell me, and tell each other, why you think that phrase “the media medium is the message” is so memorable.

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

*The OED explained that they usually list entries like social media under social, not media.  Fair enough, but they haven’t gotten to revising social for V3 yet.

Money makes the world go round and cash is king.  The word cash appeared in English right around the time of Shakespeare, and he, being right on top of this language thing, used it.

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In Henry V two soldiers discussing gambling debts mention it.  Shakespeare wasn’t the first to use it but I mention him for a reason.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

During the same period the word cash held the meaning of a “box to keep money in.”  Both meanings had existed in French and Italian before coming into English. The “box” meaning was the original but has disappeared from English now.

So, someone referring to a cash box is being redundant if you look at it etymologically.

The Oxford English Dictionary draws on two sources for its etymology.

One of these thinks the word came into English from French.  That’s the thinking of Randle Cotgrave.  He wrote A dictionarie of the French and English tongues and I’ve mentioned him before a few times on podictionary.

The other theory is that cash came to English from Italian.  The guy who held this opinion was John or Giovanni Florio and he wrote an Italian-English dictionary that he called A World of Words.

It doesn’t much matter whether Cotgrave was right or Florio, since in either case the Latin root of cash would be caspa meaning “case” or “container.”

I mentioned Shakespeare and it just so happens that both of these bilingual dictionary makers lived during William Shakespeare’s lifetime.  Some people say Shakespeare and Florio must have been friends.

We don’t know that, but since they both enjoyed the patronage of the earls of Southampton and Pembroke it is very likely that they knew each other.

Shakespeare seems to have known Florio’s work too since in Love’s Labour’s Lost he quotes an Italian proverb verbatim from Florio’s work.

Those soldiers of Shakespeare’s from Henry V; they mentioned cash and they would have collected their weapons from a cache.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, if those two words cash and cache are related.

The dictionaries say it isn’t so.

Evidently cache the storage or hiding place is instead from the French word “to hide.”

Here I go again. [audio clip from Lynn Crymble]

I mean here I go again including a word that I might not get away with calling a common word.

I’d actually never heard of the word zaftig until I was looking for words for my book on words to do with the body.  There are a shortage of body words that start with Z.

In case you don’t know what zaftig means, as I didn’t, the most recent citation for zaftig in the Oxford English Dictionary calls Dolly Parton zaftig. Merriam-Webster defines zaftig as

“having a full rounded figure: pleasingly plump.”

Now I don’t know if Dolly Parton is exactly plump, but she certainly has a full, rounded figure.

The OED’s definition is “of a woman: plump, curvaceous, sexy.”

The word appeared first in print in a book from 1937 called The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin.  From the review in Time Magazine I can see not only that it sold for three dollars at the time and was a 964 page novel set in Chicago, but that it was reported to have contained “twice as many four-letter unprintables as [its] nearest competitor.”

The reviewer also warns readers that they may find themselves “oppressed at times by the heavy, strident Jewishness of the book’s atmosphere.”

That sort of explains why it was the first to out our word zaftig.

Zaftig is a word that came into English from Yiddish.

Yiddish is a bit of an unusual language.  It developed starting about 1000 years ago among Jews in what is now Germany.  It is based on Germanic but with generous dollops of Hebrew and other languages thrown in.  It’s written using Hebrew characters.  It developed in Jewish enclaves existing inside but largely separately from other European societies.

As reported by the OED there are only about 200 English words that have come to us from Yiddish; glitzy, schmooze, chutzpa and klutz are a few.

The parent of zaftig is ultimately Germanic therefore.

That parent was saftig meaning “juicy.” So there was certainly an attractive playfulness behind calling someone zaftig.

When Lynn asked me to do this word I’d already looked it up when researching my book and so the “juicy” meaning jumped to mind.  I playfully told her she was kind of zaftig herself.

I hope she didn’t think I was calling her plump.

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

The cantaloupe melon gets its name from its brush with the pope.

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

It is thought that cantaloupes originally were cultivated in Armenia before being brought and grown in a place near Rome, reputedly in the garden of the pope’s country villa. The place where the pope had this retreat is known as Cantalupo in Sabina and so when first the Italians, then the French and finally the English began growing and eating these melons they called them by the most famous place that they had set down roots.

I tried to find out why Cantalupo in Sabina  was called by this name and I found that there are several places in Italy called Cantalupo.

The scuttlebutt is that cantalupo is a name that means “howling of wolves” or “wolf song” but this etymology does not come from any recognized authoritative source so I’m treating it with a grain of salt.  Certainly canta does mean “song” in Latin and lupo means “wolf,” but it may just be coincidence.

The word melon has a history of its own.

Going way back, the what the Greeks thought of as a melon was what we would call an apple.  But when they added their word meaning “ripe” on the end making melopepon, it then became what we would call a melon.

The Romans grabbed this word but Latin speakers got lazy and dropped the pepon part so that by the time it got into French it was melon again, except it didn’t mean apple, now it meant melon.

This French word became an English word in 1398.

In truth some people say that melopepon didn’t mean “ripe apple,” but instead meant “apple gourd,” but it doesn’t much matter.

The first appearance of the word cantaloupe in English was in 1739 in Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary.

Miller was a highly respected horticulturist in his day and his dictionary went through many printings.  But the only place you can see a portrait of him is on a French edition of the dictionary printed in 1787 and there’s a problem with that.  The portrait is of the wrong Miller.

Somehow they got a hold of a portrait of a John Miller instead of Philip Miller, and pasted that on instead.

While I’m speaking of fruit, remember that I’ve set up poeticrecipe.com as a sort of celebration for thanksgiving.  Make up a poem, a recipe and send them in!

A guppy is a little fish.  This little fish is named after a person, although there seem to have been a few errors along the way.

The Oxford English Dictionary reports that Robert John Lechmere Guppy was a clergyman.  Here’s a pic of old Lechmere, as he was known, and you can see that it would be easy to think he’s a clergyman based on his collar.

But deeper research tells me that he was actually an inspector of schools.

The reason that Lechmere Guppy is in the OED at all is that in 1860s he thought the little fish that bear his name were interesting and unique enough that he packed some up from his base in Trinidad and shipped them off to the British Museum in London.

“Very interestink” thought Dr. Albert Carl Ludwig Gotthilf Guenther, the zoology curator. “Ve haf never zeen vun off zeeze” he said and carefully penned the Latin name Girardinus guppii on his little paper card.

But Guenther was mistaken too because this little fish had already been described in the scientific literature.  So the little fish had its name changed to Lebistes reticulates.

But it was too late, people had already decided they liked the fish and they liked the name Guppy and so it stuck at least as a common name.

It made it out of the museum and into the vernacular in 1925.

Of course the fish had existed before 1925, or even 1860 and people liked it then too.  It had been called the millions fish and they had liked it especially because it gobbled down mosquito larvae.

Old Lechmere was described as white haired although from his picture I’d say there wasn’t much hair there to judge its color. He was tall and stern “rugged in speech, combative in his opinions” and a contemporary said a whiff of cold air seemed to go wherever he went.

While that description doesn’t sound to endearing another one does.

He had been born in England but had moved to Tasmania.  Or at least he tried to move to Tasmania.  His ship was wrecked off New Zealand and he spent two years living with the Maori before moving to Trinidad when he was 22.

He got on famously with his hosts and loved in his later years to tell stories and show off the tattoos he’d gotten on his back while there.  He said he got away just in time to avoid marrying the daughter of the chief.

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

This is a re podcast of an episode that first aired July 18 2005.

I didn’t want to just recycle the same old stuff so I took a look to see if there had been any changes in the meaning or relevance of the word over the past three years.

I was a little surprised at what I found.  At Urbandictionary it looks to me like nothing much has changed.

When I posted the ghetto episode in 2005 it felt like a hip new use of an old word.  Come to think of it I haven’t heard my kids using the word so often lately. Could it be that the fashion in slang has moved on?

I took a look at Google trends where you can see the relative frequency of words used as search terms over time.

Here’s a screenshot.

The summer of 2005 looks to me like a time when the word ghetto was coolest; the big peak is right at the time I first did the episode.  Today there are only half as many searches.

So that’s a snapshot in the life of a word.

Here’s the old episode again.

Like so many superlatives the most recent meanings of the word ghetto are polar opposites.  Simultaneously meaning “of poor quality” or “shabby” and at the same time “hip” or “cool.”

Of course ghettos are neighborhoods, usually poor neighborhoods—although there are student ghettos near universities and these can’t really be called poor.

So “shabbiness” due to lack of funds, and “cool” due to the success of rap and hip-hop.

Before ghetto attained its elevated status, large, loud portable radios first called ghetto blasters were forced to change their names to boom boxes since ghetto wasn’t politically correct—or at least pointing out habits of the black ghetto anyway.

English takes the word ghetto from Italian where getto means “foundry.”

The reason is that in the 1500s Jews living in Venice were required to live on one particular island, which had previously been the site of a foundry.

By the early 1600s English had acquired the word as a generic for such enforced Jewish neighborhoods. Later by the late 1800s ghetto applied to any neighborhood that was a slum.

March 2009 Update: Anatoly Liberman has done a far more exacting job on the word over on the Oxford University Press blog where he throws questionmarks at the “foundry” idea.  Most importanly he points out “While evaluating a dozen or so mutually conflicting theories, one should not be swayed by authority.” Of course I’m swayed by authority all the time.

JD Ahmanson asked about the word scale because

• it can mean to climb up a cliff
• it can mean a device for showing how much something weighs, or
• it can refer to the outside of a fish.

The short answer is polysemy.

Erin McKean defined polysemy as “the greedy habit that some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves.”

In the case of scale polysemy isn’t really the long answer because scale wasn’t a single word that adopted many meanings, it used to be several different words that came together in sound and spelling.  According to Merriam-Webster this is a homograph, a word with identical spelling and pronunciation that actually evolved from different sources and so holds more than one meaning.

So let’s explore the three meanings JD mentioned.

Scale “to climb” appeared in English in the 1400s from Italian (a refreshing change).

Since Italian used to be Latin we aren’t surprised that the ultimate etymology was scandere “to climb.”  When it first came into English it actually meant “a ladder” or “set of stairs.”

It’s easy to see how this word also got applied to various things that went up, like scales in music or the Richter scale that measures earthquakes.

It might make sense that if the Richter scale came from this ladder or climbing meaning, scales that measure weight could also have come from the same source.

But it seems that they don’t.

Weigh scales come instead from an Old Norse word skal that meant “a drinking bowl.”  This is also the source of our word skol that you might say when drinking a toast.

So weigh scales came about because they are made with two pans or bowls, one hanging on each side.

It seems to me though that the fact that the Richter scale measures, and weigh scales measure might have well influenced the evolution of these two different words into a homograph.

The “drinking bowl” meaning shows up first in 1205 in English and by 1375 the “weigh scale” had arrived.

Finally we turn to fish scales.

Here I can actually fall back on that polysemy word because in some ways fish scales did diverge from one of the words I’ve already covered.  But that was a very long time ago.

The American Heritage Dictionary points back to an Indo-European root skel meaning “to cut.” This is the root of shell.

You can imagine ancient people using shells to cut things.

What is a fish scale but a small shell-like plate?  Actually what is a drinking bowl but a large deep shell?

The fish scale etymology got to English around 1300 through French, but the French picked it up from Germanic.

The drinking bowl etymology shows the word also coming from Germanic but from the north with Old Norse instead of the south with French.  So these two meanings—fish scale and bathroom scale—started in the same place, diverged, then came together in spelling and pronunciation, but not in meaning.

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

The other day I needed to reshevel my office.

It’s not often I want to suggest a new word, but I like this one.

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

A new word is a good word if it doesn’t need explaining.  You knew right away what resheveled meant didn’t you?  It’s recovered from being disheveled.

I’m not wholly original in this.  Depending on how you spell it Google brings up 3, 5 or 7 hits.

A new word is only really good if other people pick it up and start using it and I really don’t have any expectations of that so let’s move on from this is an aside.

The word disheveled is an even better word because, first of all people already use it, and second of all it has an unexpected etymology.

The American Heritage Dictionary says disheveled means

“being in loose disarray; unkempt…marked by disorder; untidy”

They give an example of “a disheveled pile of books.”

But the roots of the word disheveled are in Latin.  The Latin word for “head” is caput and the hair on the head is capillus in Latin.  This gave rise to the French word for hair cheveau.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

Geoffrey Chaucer used the word dishevley in The Canterbury Tales and by it he meant “bald.”  That’s because earlier in Latin and then in French decapullatus and then deschevele took the de- prefix to mean “without.”

So someone who was disheveled was without hair.

Somehow this changed over time and instead started to mean that someone who was disheveled was “without a hat” covering their hair.  Clearly someone without anything covering their hair is prone to having the wind and weather make a mess of their hair. That’s when the meaning started to mean “in disarray.”

For these reasons the word dishevel grew out of disheveled and not the other way around.

Unfortunately for my new word, there is already a word shevel and has been since 1725.

Instead of being the opposite of dishevel as I’d like it to be, shevel actually comes from a different etymology and means “distorted” so is almost a synonym.

A felon is a crook.  A felony is a serious crime.

It seems that in true legal jargon felony is still current terminology for Americans, but has been replaced by new legal jargon in other countries.

If the crime isn’t serious enough to be called a felony, then it is a misdemeanor.

It turns out that most fat dictionaries list two different words felon.  One of these is an old word meaning a “big zit” or “enflamed pustule.”

Having two different listings implies the dictionaries consider this to be a different word.  But looking at the etymology for the criminal felon I see that there is some suspicion that these villainous personalities were named because they were just as welcome as a big zit.  The etymologies say that the possible source lies in that both are full of bitterness and venom.

There are other possibilities, such as a Frankish word that meant “someone who beats or whips.”

Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary says that a felon is

“a person of greater enterprise than discretion…”

That sent me off looking for dumb criminal stories.  I found a bunch.  Like the guy who drove a stolen car to his court date for grand theft auto.  The counterfeiter who made a girl-guide’s day by ordering 10 boxes of cookies, then paid using a counterfeit $100 bill.  How about the crook that got caught trying to pass off a billion dollar bill?—caught because there is no such currency.

If you want more such tales check out clumsycrooks.com or dumbcriminals.com

When the word felon as “crook” first emerged in English it came from French with a first citation of about 700 years ago.  At first it didn’t mean strictly criminal, but just with a really bad attitude.  It is thought to be related to the word fell as in “cruel” and “ruthless.”  The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary gives an example sentence “a fell and barbarous enemy.”

I guess before I go I should also tell you the origin of misdemeanor.

Your demeanor is how you act, how you behave.  It comes from a Latin root minare that meant “to drive or conduct cattle.”  If you can manage cattle you can manage yourself.

Misdemeanor then is when you can’t conduct yourself as you should.

But it looks like the roots of these two severities of crime (felony and misdemeanor) are etymologically pretty close if felon meant a “violent person,” because the way the Latin word minare drove cattle early-on was by threat and intimidation.

Minare’s original Latin meaning was “to threaten.”

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