Regurgitate means “barf,” “puke,” “throw-up.”

Please don’t do any of that at New Years.

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The existence of a word like regurgitate implies the existence of another word, gurgitate.

I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary and sure enough, there it is, and also ingergitate. Both at one time meant “to swallow,” and particularly “to drink,” sometimes excessively.

Yet to the extent that this unusual word gurgitate is still used (there was one reference as recently as 1963) it is now supposed to mean “swallowed up as if dropped into a whirlpool.” And it is from whirlpool that all the words come because the Latin word for whirlpool was gurges.

The first time the word regurgitate was used in English—as far as we can tell from the written record—was by Henry More in 1653.

This was one of those instances where old Latin words were being drawn into use in English by great thinkers trying to express ideas that they found hard to articulate using only English words.

More wasn’t talking about human regurgitation but about fluid flow.

It wasn’t until 1753 that regurgitate was used to describe vomiting.  According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—which means National of England—Henry More was considered “one of the leading philosophers of his time.”  He’d been brought up in a strict Calvinist faith and to some extent rebelled against it.

His philosophy was still very devout, but he felt there was room for everyone in the tent.  His approach was called latitudinarianism because it gave people lots of latitude in their beliefs.

I think that’s a nice, broad-minded attitude to go into the new year with, don’t you?

Just another reminder that there’ll be no episodes until Friday.

Happy New Year.

With New Year’s eve coming I thought it might be wise to explore a word to do with drinking.

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What’s more, I thought this word might apply to dressing up to go out to a party.

But I was wrong in that.  I was thinking of coif which means a fancy haircut.

Your hair dresser might be called a coiffeur.  But if they are a quaffer watch out because they may be drunk as they wield the scissors.

The word coiffeur –the hairdresser—came from the stylish French less than 200 years ago but the word coif had already been in English for about 500 years before that, coming originally from the French of the Norman Conquest.

But that first coif had meant a kind of hat.  The arrival of coiffeur made people throw off their hats and apply the word coif directly to their hair instead.

The root of all of these was a late Latin word cuffia that was thought to have been adopted into Latin from Germanic.

But enough about hairstyle, on to the serious drinking.

The word quaff, meaning “to drink deeply” appeared in English in the early 1500s but no one really knows where it came from.  Some speculate that it is an imitative word.

I don’t know, can you hear the sound of a beer being sucked back in the word quaff?

What we do know is that one of the first users of the word that we can still find on paper was one Thomas Dekker.

Like quaff Dekker didn’t leave too much trace of where he came from but we know that he was a playwright and a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. We also know that he worked for the big theatre promoter of the day Philip Henslowe.

Today I don’t want to talk about Dekker or Henslowe, but instead I want to dip into Henslowe’s diary.

The reason is that Philip Henslowe’s diary tells us quite a few unexpected things.  Number one, this is a document in which Henslowe made notes on how he ran his business and got the various actors and playwrights of the day to sign that they would repay the money he loaned them.  So it’s a bit of a guide to the business of running the theatre 400 years ago.

Something particularly unexpected is that this diary is in fact a re-used accounts book.  It had previously been the financial record of an ironworks.  So although Henslowe was rich enough to be lending out money, building theatres and buying properties, he still felt it prudent to flip a used book over and re-use it on the blank page backs.  So as an added bonus, not only do researchers better understand the business of the theatre 400 years ago, they better understand the business of running an ironworks too.

Because Henslowe was a wheeler dealer in the time of Shakespeare, people have also looked for tidbits of Shakespeare trivia in there.

This explains one last surprise.

If you want people to believe something you have to say, it is best to point them to an authoritative source.  This is what a guy named John Payne Collier did in the early 1800s.  The problem was, that the theories Collier was trying to promote were theories he’d dreamed up himself for which there really were no authoritative sources.  So what he did was create his own evidence and while he was borrowing the Henslowe diary for research purposes, stuck his stuff in with the originals so everyone would believe him.

Remember, no episodes until next week.  Happy holiday to all of you who celebrate Christmas.

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As early as 1390 a cook book was instructing chefs to dice mushrooms—that is, to cut them into little cubes like the dice we use in games of chance.

The word dice is plural and a single little cube with spots on it is called a die.

In games of chance we win or lose our bets, or move our pieces according to the numbers given on the dice.

That’s why they are called dice, because they give the numbers.  The word dice comes from Latin datum meaning “that which is given.”

These days we like to do things based on facts, not just gut feeling.  We need data to make decisions and data is the plural of datum, both of which were originally Latin.

So the chance of dice is closely related to the certainty of data, at least etymologically.

Unless dice have been tampered with dice really are a source of chance results.  There’s not much strategy or skill involved. Because of this the word dice took on the meaning of gambling.

I see several references to the phrase dicing with death having emerged during the early days of auto racing.

Something that is dicey is a bit of a gamble or even something dangerous.

That usage only turned up in print in 1950 and is supposedly originally US Air Force slang.  It makes me wonder if the auto-racing phrase planted the seed for the Air Force slang.  There would seem to me to have been a kind of psychographic overlap; fast cars, powerful engines, fighter aircraft…

The phrase no dice turned up just a few decades earlier and I’ve come across two explanations why no dice  might mean—as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it “…hopeless, unsuccessful…nothing-doing.”

One is that bouncers at gambling halls refused entrance with this phrase.  This seems a home-made explanation to me.

The explanation I find a little more credible is that the dice are not giving you the result you wanted.

Imagine asking for permission to borrow the car, or to take the day off.  “No dice” is not the answer you hoped for.

There is even an entry at Urbandictionary listing dice as the opposite of no dice so that dice becomes the answer you did want, from there to being an expression of something good, like the word cool.

Before we get into the word for the day I want to let you know that podictionary is having a few short weeks this week and next, what with Christmas and New Years and all.  So that means just two episodes this week and three next week.  Once we’re into the New Year I’ll get back to the normal schedule.

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Today’s episode is being released just a few days before Christmas and so I thought that the word spruce might be appropriate since not only do we spruce ourselves up for holiday parties, but many of us have spruce trees standing in our living-rooms as well.

Is there a connection between these two kinds of spruce?

The answer is yes.

This is a word that does not go back to Latin or Old English or Indo-European.  Its origins started with a Slavic people known to history as the Borussi who around 1000 years ago hung out between what is now Germany and the Black Sea.

After the time of the Crusades Polish and German knights took over the territory as its new ruling class and the name Borussi morphed into Prussia.

Although there was plenty of fighting and shifting of power bases the Prussian Empire was huge for centuries, lasting in part until the end of the Second World War when Germany’s modern borders were established.

As early as the time of Geoffrey Chaucer—which would be more than 600 years ago—people in England were calling the place not Prussia, but Pruce.  As is the way with words, somehow it became fashionable to pronounce the name of this powerful empire with an S in the front, so Pruce became Spruce.

Which is to say the first time anyone talked about Spruce in English, they were talking about a place; a foreign land; a power across the water.

England has long been a trading nation and in exchange for the wool they shipped out, one of the things they shipped in was lumber. Since Prussia was a very large landmass with plenty of forests some of that lumber came from Prussia.  Since English speakers called the place Spruce, this particular kind of wood began to be called Spruce wood.

Thus is explained the name of some species of Christmas tree—appropriately also tradition of German origin.

It remains only for me to explain why getting dressed nicely for a party is called sprucing yourself up.

This application of the name of the foreign land had to wait until about 400 years ago to appear.  The connection isn’t completely certain but the suspicion is that a certain style of leather jacket associated with Prussia had become popular in England and was thought to look especially snappy.  Hence by the time of Shakespeare to be well dressed came to be called spruce.

The most recent flurry of the use of the word junket that I could find was after the Wall Street bailout when executives of AIG were said to have gone on a $400,000 junket.

Oh this is an especially appropriate episode for today’s sponsor, don’t you think!

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In the service of podictionary listeners I wanted to do some in-depth research but since I didn’t get any bailout money myself I couldn’t experience the St. Regis resort at Monarch Beach first hand.

Instead I checked out their website.

I was shocked to see that dog lovers could invest $545 a night (minimum two night stay) for which price their dog would get food and water in silver bowls and a personalized welcome letter addressed to the dog.

However, I was pleased to see that starting at $735 per night (excluding tax and gratuity) any couple who might be expecting a baby can enjoy the Last Hurrah package—as if all enjoyment were over after children.  For that price you can indulge your pregnant cravings for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or mac and cheese.

This is much more in line with the meaning of junket don’t you think?  The etymological meaning anyway.

The modern interpretation of junket is a costly trip taken at company or government expense.  It’s a very enjoyable trip for those who take part but with limited benefit to those who pay for it.

But it wasn’t always so.

In fact the meaning has tilted enough over the last few decades that this commonly understood meaning is kind of hard to find in the Oxford English Dictionary.  It is there, but it was added during the second edition revisions and is treated as a fairly minor spinoff from a meaning of “a banquet.”

Where junket started though was in Latin and then in French where words for “rushes” were applied to woven baskets.  These baskets were carried across the English Channel and appeared as English words in the 1300s.

For the most part, over the centuries it was the food that might be contained in such baskets that was associated with the word junket.

Then by about 200 years ago the fact that people used woven picnic baskets when going for pleasure trips began to shift the meaning of the word from the basket itself, beyond the food it contained, ultimately to the trip it was taken on.

It seems to me that peanut butter and jelly are more fitting to a picnic than silver dog dishes.

As you know, a bayonet is a sort of knife or spear that soldiers clip onto the end of their rifles.

A bayonet isn’t much use to fighter pilots or even to tank commanders because a bayonet only does its gruesome work when the fighting gets up close and personal.

The demographics of who gets to fight from cockpits and who gets to fight hand to hand may or may not be related to family background, education and income level, but it is with the idea that it was the common Joe who was doing the face-to-face fighting, not the sons of professors, bankers and elected officials that lead to the saying among labor union activists that:

a bayonet was a tool with a worker at each end

The name of this ugly tool is usually attributed to a town in France.  Bayonne is in the South West corner of France right near the border with Spain.

The word turned up in French documents by 1575 and is thought to be named because this town had become famous for the kind of knives or swords they made.  At that time the bayonet would not have been too useful as an appendage to a long gun since these were early days for firearms.

In 1860 John Yonge Akerman, acting as secretary to the Society of Antiquaries presented a report on the history of bayonets.

He didn’t mention the town of Bayonne but instead brought up the idea that baion was a word applying to the arrow of a crossbow.  Some dictionaries these days acknowledge that as a dissenting opinion.

Ackerman said that bayonets would have been impractical at first on the end of muskets which were particularly long and muzzle loading.  He seems on shaky ground when he extends his theory of bayonets coming from crossbows and being used by hunters as an attachment to their weapons as a way to finish off a wounded animal by simply jamming the handle end of the bayonet into the muzzle of the hunting gun.

He’s on more solid footing though when he reports that two kinds of mountings were tried to affix a bayonet to a musket; ring mounting and a socket bayonet.

Evidently the socket bayonet was demonstrated in front of the French King in 1686 but failed to impress.

After presenting his report Akerman promptly resigned his position as secretary of the Society of Antiquaries claiming ill health.  While sad for Akerman, this—in the loosest of ways—sort of fits with a bayonet quote from Boris Yeltsin along the lines of “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”

During a coup Yeltsin spoke against the rising saying

“You can make a throne of bayonets, but you can’t sit on it for long.”

Of course people have been having headaches for a long time and the first references to migraine were in the context of various supposed cures for these debilitating headaches.

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In 1425 one of the suggestions was to have someone blow air up your nose.

This is one of those words that came to English with French and must have been used verbally for quite some time before it was written down. The first instances in French were about 800 years ago and even then the word seems to have been in use metaphorically so must have been in use before that.

The symptoms of migraines span quite a range:

• vomiting,
• pain if you move,
• pain if you see light,
• pain if you hear sounds,
• visual disturbance—I get that one sometimes—and
• sometimes pain on only one side of the head

It’s this last one that gives a migraine its name.

Before it got into French the word was Latin and came originally from Greek.

Migraine is one of those words that people got lazy with and shortened up over time.  Off the front end they shaved “he” off hemi- and at the back end they shaved “ia” off –crania.  Thus hemicrania meaning “half the head” became migraine.  So it is pain in half the head that lead to the name.

The word compression that formed migraine out of hemicrania happened before the word got into English. As such when the word first was used in English it was pronounced mee-grain.  That’s the pronunciation that dictionaries gave the word up until about 100 years ago and is still used by many people.

Nicotine is a word that goes to show it isn’t always what you know, but also who you know.

One of the dictionaries I consulted told me that nicotine is colorless, another said it is slightly yellow while a third said it darkens on exposure to air.  Despite this mild lack of agreement on color, every source I checked included the word toxic or poisonous as part of the definition.

The chemical substance known as nicotine takes its name from the family of plants of which tobacco is a part. The chemical wasn’t named until the early 1800s.  The plant family was given its name by Carl Linnaeus in the 1700s.  But tobacco plants themselves were named nicotaine as early as 1567 in French.

Here’s where things get personal because the reason the plants were named nicotaine is because a guy named Jean Nicot was singing their praises as a cure for everything from headache to cancer.

Jean Nicot hadn’t discovered tobacco or anything.  It was another Frenchman Jacques Cartier who first encountered tobacco use among North American Indians in 1535.

But Jean Nicot had connections.

He was the ambassador to Portugal and although tobacco was a foreign species to Europe, that’s where Nicot discovered it and liked it.  He brought some home and gave it to the queen and she liked it too.

She liked it so much that  she decreed that this marvoulous plant should be named Herba Regina which is Latin for “the herb of the queen.”

But as I’ve said before, words are the ultimate democratic instrument and it isn’t queens or presidents that decide ultimately what something is going to be called, it’s all the people doing the calling.  So as people cottoned on to how wonderful this tobacco stuff was they started naming after the guy who they assumed had discovered it; the credit went to the messenger.

I suppose it is a credit to the power of the tobacco industry that although I was able to find plenty of information on how Jean Nicot introduced tobacco to Europe, there was vanishingly little information about Jean Nicot the dictionary maker.

Yes, that’s right.

Not only was Jean Nicot the guy who we can blame for nicotine, but he also produced what is still regarded as an important milestone in the development of French dictionaries.

He was working in the mid to late 1500s when France didn’t exactly speak French yet.  What we would call France today was at that time a vast collection of pockets of dialect speakers.  Many of those dialects had been influenced by Latin, but had started out almost incomprehensible to each other.  Nicot’s dictionary picked up on those strands of Latin.

Centuries later it the first dictionary to be computerized for distribution on the web.

It used to be that anyone wishing to take their dog with them if they were moving from North America to England had to stick their dog in quarantine for six months when they got to England so the English authorities could be certain that the dogs weren’t infected with rabies.

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The rules have changed somewhat, but before they did a friend of mine moved to England for a few years and brought along his dog.  The dog is a kind of malamute sort of dog.  One of those Alaska-husky-type-looking-dogs.  I believe they were able to visit the dog during its incarceration and things turned out okay.

But the remarkable thing they learned was that their dog was actually white.  Since it couldn’t get grubby while in custody it went through a full shedding cycle and came out completely clean and almost unrecognizable.

The dog was held for six months, so that’s something over 180 days and according to my dictionaries that’s not a quarantine.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary the root of the word is kwetwer and comes from Indo-European and means “four.”

Between Indo-European and English it passed through Latin where quadraginta meant “forty.”

By the time the word quarantine got into English it meant “a forty day period” and such a period was traditionally applied to several different things.

• Jesus Christ was supposed to have fasted for 40 days and in the 1400s the church used the word quarantine to refer to the place where he spent that time.
• When a woman became a widow it wasn’t always the law that her husband’s property should become hers.  During the time it took to sort out what she got out of the deal a 40 day period was allowed her to continue living in their home.  This period was also called the quarantine.

I won’t even get into the heartbreak of losing your partner and then getting turfed out of your home.

It was Samuel Pepys in 1663 in his diary who first noted that 40 days wasn’t what it used to be.  In his case it wasn’t dogs being isolated but people who might be bringing human disease into England.

Pepys said they were required to be quarantined for 30 days and that although this obviously wasn’t 40 days there was a general acceptance that the word no longer actually meant 40 days, but “it signifies now the thing, not the time spent in doing it.”

Let’s assume that the girly magazine Penthouse took its name in 1965 based on the notion that people who lived in expensive penthouse apartments could afford to fritter away their time doing anything they wanted.

However, you and I both know that magazines like this often end up in bathrooms. A look at the etymology of the word penthouse makes this location kind of appropriate.

The expensive apartment at the top of a high rise building only began being called a penthouse after the first part of the twentieth century.  The very first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for penthouse meaning a dwelling at the top of an apartment was hardly the rich and fancy kind.  I quote:

“It is the name given to an ariel [sic] extension of a building, by constructing a habitation for a janitor and his family on the roof.”

The reason such a cobbled-on extension might be called a penthouse comes from the word’s root which is related to the word appendix.  The etymological meaning of both words is “something added on.”

Penthouse came into English with the French of the Norman Conquest and the word that we got from French just happened to be a version in which the leading “a” had been rubbed off.  If it had remained, you would more easily recognize the word apenthouse as related to appendix.

So that makes the pent part clear enough, what about the house part?

I’ll begin by telling you that the house part was a mistake.

At first the word wasn’t penthouse, but something that sort of sounded like it: pendiz.

Back around the year 1400 when the forerunner of penthouse appeared as an English word there were no high rise apartment buildings. So when you cobbled an extra bit of building on to an existing structure it quite often looked like a shed. These kind of add-on rooms often had sloping roofs and it just so happened that there was a French word pente abroad in the land at the time and pente meant “slope.”

This lead to some confusion and people thought that those little sheds attached to the side of buildings were called pendiz because they had sloping roofs.

It made sense therefore to call outbuildings with sloping roofs pendiz as well.

Small buildings might still house people and so the ending of pendiz that kind of sounded like house started getting called house; thus penthouse.

So, by the mid 1600s the word penthouse applied both to small structures added on to a main building and also to other freestanding little buildings particularly those with sloping roofs.

One kind of freestanding little building goes now by the name of outhouse and that’s what made me say that perhaps the name of Penthouse Magazine is appropriate for the bathroom.