In looking for quotes on history I found that there is no shortage.

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Here are a few: Karl Marx is supposed to have said that when history repeats itself the first time is a tragedy, the second a farce.

Julian Barnes, a British novelist reacted saying, no“that’s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.”

It was George Santayana who said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

But to get a little closer to the etymology of the word history we have to quote Henry Ford and Ambrose Bierce.

Ford is quoted as saying: “History is more or less bunk . . . the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.” And Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary says in part that history is “an account mostly false.”

How exactly does this relate to the etymology of the word history?

The first use of the word history in English that we know of is from a document dated 1390 and at that time the word history had a meaning much closer to that we assign the word story today.

The two words are closely related and six or seven hundred years ago a history could be a true story or it could be a fairy tale.

It was only later that the fictitious sense of history became obsolete; The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation as late as 1834 with this meaning.

History as a serious field of study emerged fairly early on with William Caxton the first English printer credited with the first citation in the mid 1400s.

The deeper etymology of history runs back through Latin and Greek to Indo-European.  In Latin historia meant a “narrative of past events,” or a “tale,” or “story.”

If you were looking for a story back in the days when most people were still illiterate, where would you go?  You’d go to someone who knew the stories; thus in Greek the word histor at first meant a “wise” or “learned man” and the Greek and Latin word historia grew out of this as being the tales of a learned person, or more narrowly the learning or lessons themselves.

Even further back it is believed that the Greek word had evolved out of the Indo-European root weid meaning “to see” or more figuratively “to know.”

I’m about to go on a little excursion called “follow the links.”

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There’s something holistic about the internet; everything is connected to everything else and if you keep following the links you’re bound to end up back where you started.

I looked up the word exaggerate in one of the reference tools I like to use called Credo Reference—it used to be called xrefer. One of the books they have there online is John Ayto’s Word Origins.

I like John Ayto; his etymological descriptions are clear and easy to read.

With respect to the word exaggerate he illustrates its old meaning with a citation that he’s pulled from The Oxford English Dictionary.

When exaggerate first appeared in English it brought its Latin meaning along with it, which was “to pile up.”  I’ll get back to this in a moment.

The citation runs “With their flipping and flapping up and down in the dirt they exaggerate a mountain of mire.”  Philip Stubbes wrote that 1583.

Without knowing who Philip Stubbes was we might think that he was writing some kind of zoological text in which some marine animal was flapping mud and piling it up.

Now I turn to Oxford Reference Online where I look for a quotation containing the word exaggerate.  There I see that the playwright George Bernard Shaw claimed that young men exaggerate the difference between one woman and another.

But there’s a footnote: see also H. L. Mencken.

Now I happen to know that H. L. Mencken was a first rate curmudgeon.

Following the link I see that Mencken is quoted as saying “Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

But there, next on the list of Mencken’s quotations reads “Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

And my circle is complete, because Philip Stubbes wasn’t writing about any marine animal.  Philip Stubbes was one of those guys for whom the fun never stops . . . in spite of all his efforts.

His reputation—and I quote from The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—was that of “a puritan spoilsport and killjoy.” One of his great works preached of the dangers and evils of dancing.

Going to plays numbered among those activities that his God frowned upon, this just as William Shakespeare was beginning to sharpen his quills.

So the things flipping and flapping in the dirt were those dancing and play-going sinners.

I said I’d get back to the word exaggerate so here it is.  The root of exaggerate is the same as aggregate. You know that if you aggregate something you collect it all together.

The ex in exaggerate acts as an intensifier so that the Latin meaning of exaggerate was to “over aggregate.” If you overdo it when aggregating things they pile up.  That was the meaning at first in English too, back in the early 1500s.  But by the beginning of the 1600s it had become metaphorical as we use it today.

When you exaggerate about something you are piling it on.

For us playing tennis or going on a bike ride or even playing a video game might be called recreation.

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This word goes all the way back to Latin through French and has been in English for 600 years or so. The word is easily understood as “re” “create,” “to create again.”

Today we wouldn’t say, except in a joking way, that we were going out “to recreate,” but that is actually the way it had been used in Latin, as recreare.

Recreation holds within it the sense that by engaging in some diverting activity we refresh our minds and can approach the daily drudgery anew.

When recreation first appeared in English one of its main applications was to eating.  Here the idea was that people are renewed by stoking up on food.

Both recreare and recreationem had been around in Latin since classical times so that they had had a chance to take on meanings ranging from eating to recovering from illness before they moved through French and into English about 600 years ago.

And there the meaning sat until the industrial revolution made down-time a more recognized period as compared to the working day.

If we take the appearance of combinations like recreation room as a measure of the changing importance of recreation and its association with leisure it was the 1850s when recreation began to take on its current meaning of active leisure.  Recreation center and recreation hall both appear in 1943 and recreation vehicle in 1974 with RV following close on its heels in 1977.

A long time ago there was a story of a knight named Sir Guy of Warwick.

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A long long time ago the tale of Sir Guy of Warwick had been one of the first to use the word ago and certainly the oldest in which the word has survived down to us in written form.

The reason I say that the story itself was from long ago is that not too many people remember Guy of Warwick these days.  But for more than 500 years he was a hero on the scale of Robin Hood and some say on the scale of Julius Caesar.

He was at first a commoner but fell in love with the daughter of a nobleman.  To win her hand he was sent on a quest and that’s really what the story is about.

I mentioned old Guy back in the podictionary episode on the word neat and there I mentioned that one of Guy’s adventures had been to slay the dreaded Dun Cow.

The Dun Cow was a mythical monster of English folklore said to have belonged to a giant and to have provided an unending supply of milk.  But like all good things, someone tried to take advantage of the cow and that got her mad.

A woman filled her milk pail and then tried to fill a sieve (what was she thinking?)

The cow got mad and went on a rampage and it took our hero Guy of Warwick to stop the carnage.

But enough about mythical tales; it’s the word ago we care about here.  We use the word to designate a time past, and during Guy of Warwick’s early days as a legend it was used a little differently than we use it today.

Instead of saying that he was there “five years ago” Guy said he had been there “ago five years.”

So we’ve changed the order of our usage.

But this Germanic rooted word was once two words and had been abbreviated before it appeared in English documents.  When you hear what it used to be it will make more sense placed before “five years” as Guy used it.

Before lazy speakers started saying ago, they had said agone, hence “we had last been there agone five years.”

The two words it was made up of were a meaning “away” and go or its past tense gone, so that ago literally means “gone away.”

Guy of Warwick’s story is from a long time gone away.

Dictionaries define a motto as a short sentence or phrase chosen to express a belief or ideal.

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Originally these were attached emblems or crests to explain or reinforce the meaning and significance.

The motto gripped in the eagle’s beak on the Great Seal of the United States says E pluribus unum which is Latin for “Out of Many, One.”

The Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom has two mottos on it.  The royal motto is there, but I like the other one better.  It’s the motto of the Order of the Garter and it goes Honi soit qui mal y pense which means “Evil to him who evil thinks.”

The word motto came to English from Italian and showed up first in 1589 which is about the time when William Shakespeare moved to London and started up his career in theatre.

It came from Italian but the dictionaries I looked at don’t exactly agree on what it had been in Italian before that.  The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that motto or mutto had in Italian at first meant a short phrase or clever saying, but that by 250 years ago had meant simply “word.”

This ties in with the English phrase (so clearly still French) bon mot. A witty speaker might toss of a few bon mot, which literally mean “good words.”

The American Heritage Dictionary more or less agrees with this and points to a Vulgar Latin root mottum meaning “word.”  But while the OED says muttum meant “uttered sound” Merriam-Webster defines the Latin muttum to mean “grunt” or “mumble”; hardly the thing you’d want to paste on your proud national emblem.

I jumped to the conclusion that motto therefore has the same root as mutter.

That doesn’t inspire too much pride in a motto does it?

Luckily on closer inspection the link to mutter seems fairly remote.  The OED says mutter is likely a word that is imitative in origin, which makes sense to me.  They only suggest comparison—not direct links—to words that link back to motto.

Even better, to keep things inspirational they even suggest comparisons to words including muster and mystery.

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations says that the following proverb dates from the early 18th century.

“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”

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To me today that sounds a little bit cynical.  It’s common to hear cold comfort like this.  But back 300 years ago there was probably no hint of cynicsm.

What do you expect me to tell you about the word expect?  I guess it depends what you are looking for.

More exactly what you are “looking out” for because expect is from the Latin word exspectare where ex means “out” and spectare means “to look.”

This is such a basic word and with such a logical meaning I was surprised to see that it did not arrive in English from the French that washed ashore in 1066 with William the Conqueror.

In fact this was a word dredged up by those Latin-educated renaissance writers in the latter 1500s.  The first meanings were “to wait for” although the sense of “anticipation” arrived almost simultaneously.

It wasn’t until 1890 that a woman expecting a baby was said to be expecting, and even that was considered slang in its first citation.

That great lexicographer Samuel Johnson died in 1784 and so would have been alive around the time that “don’t expect much and you won’t be disappointed” proverb arose.  His statement of expectation has not taken on any cynical taint over the centuries I don’t think.

He said late in life

“As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.”

We think of sophisticated electronics as advanced and technically superior.

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We think of sophisticated people as benefiting from a wealth of experience.

So why is it that when sophisticated first appeared in English around the time of Shakespeare it meant “not pure” or “not genuine.” Worse, 200 years before that the word sophistication had meant “actively misleading.”

Obviously the meaning has changed a bit.

The root of the word is sophist from Greek which meant “wise” and “learned” or “pursuing knowledge,” which is pretty close to what we think of as sophisticated today.

Sophist is also at the heart of the word philosophy, which translates literally as “lover of knowledge.”

More than 2000 years ago two groups of Greek thinkers had a falling out.  One group was called the sophists, the other group was called the philosophers.

The philosophers did deep thinking and tried to explain the world.  The sophists started taking money to teach people how to explain the world in a way that would benefit their client.

Sounds like some lawyers today.

This philosophy-for-money model made people think poorly of them.  So poorly that to be a sophist came to be seen as to contaminate good arguments with hair-splitting ideas.  As a result something that was sophisticated was something that was no longer pure.

It wasn’t until 1895 that the “wise” and “learned” meanings at the heart of sophisticated reasserted themselves so that a person who was sophisticated wasn’t a conniving weasel-word spewing spin-doctor, but instead, as is described in the Oxford English Dictionary “a person free of naivety.”

It wasn’t until 1945 that a thing could be technologically superior and be called sophisticated.

Is this such a bad thing?  I mean, most people think of the apocalypse as a bad thing.

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Well, it is supposed to be the end of the world and I guess that can’t be a good thing.  But the word only took on a meaning of “disaster” in the last 100 years or so.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a first citation for this “disaster” meaning in 1894.

In fact since the OED hasn’t gotten around to updating this entry, that meaning is just stuck-in as a 2008 addition on top of the earlier meanings from when the dictionary was first produced 100 years ago.  The earlier definitions didn’t directly talk about anything bad at all.

Definition 1 with citations dating from circa 1175 tells us that apocalypse was an alternate name for the revelations contained in the appropriately named Book of Revelations in the Bible.

Definition 2 said, and I quote ” By extension: Any revelation or disclosure.”

So what’s so bad about that?

I guess we have to look to the Book of Revelations to find out.

I have to tell you that whenever I dip into some aspect of religious interpretation I get more email than I care to respond to so I am not trying to tell anyone what all this means.

Evidently a guy named John was on a Greek island called Patmos when he got a message from God about how the world would end and among other things how all men would be judged.

The reason this is called apocalypse is not because it is something bad, but because God revealed this information to John.  Apocalypse is Greek for “uncover” or “disclose.”

So literally apocalypse doesn’t mean anything bad.

It’s the prospect of the end of the world.  People are conservative by nature.  They don’t like change.  So who wants the end of the world?

But don’t you think you have to feel pretty unsure of yourself to expect the final judgment is going to be all that bad.  If your spouse and kids and parents and coworkers and neighbors and friends all think you’re okay, can there really be that much to worry about?

Rosie writes to say that she understands that being doubtless is being “without doubt,” and that to do something effortlessly is to do it “without effort,” but she wonders if anyone can be “full of ruth” instead of being ruthless.

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I hope Rosie won’t rue the day she asked me when she hears my answer.

Oh, I guess that is the answer.

To rue something is to “regret” it and comes from some of the oldest Old English, and thus Germanic roots. We have Beowulf and King Alfred both using rue to mean “sorrow” and “regret.”

The word ruth grew out of this Old English rue and is labeled as an early Middle English word. Ruth didn’t exactly mean “sorrow” and “regret”; instead it had more of a sense of “compassion.”

You can see how the two relate, someone who was compassionate would regret causing pain to others; would be sorry about it.

So that’s the answer, a compassionate person has ruth; a ruthless person has no compassion.

Anyhow, ruth is an interesting case showing how the divisions between Old English, Middle English and Modern English are not clean and neat partitions.

I’ve said before that if you were to travel back in time and find someone speaking what you could call Middle English—that is English that had absorbed plenty of French words—if you hunted around in England a little, before long you’d find someone else who was still speaking solid Old English.

So here we have the word ruth that is Middle English principally because it doesn’t show up before 1175 and yet had Old English parentage.

What’s more the first citations for ruth are spelled with a character that is solidly Old English, one we don’t use anymore in Modern English, the letter eth.

An eth looks like a “d” with a bar through the stem and was pronounced like “th.”

The reason Old English—or in this case Middle English—used an eth at all was that when Christianity was reintroduced to England after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons it brought literacy with it but in Latin. The speakers of Old English borrowed the Latin system of writing but found it lacking in the “th” sound that English speakers liked to use.

So they stuck in a new letter.

In fact they liked the “th” sound so much they stuck in two new “th” letters, eth and thorn.

When children play with dolls or toy trucks they are pretending that these items are actors in some imaginary world, a pretend world.  This is our normal sense of the word pretend.

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The word has been around since Classical Roman times but it was only about 300 years ago that this imaginary sense came to the word pretend.

Actually the timescales are kind of hard to pin down because the slide from an earlier meaning to our current understanding has gone through some pretty subtle phases.  Depending on how you read it it might have been 500 years or 200 years ago.

In either case though it’s a much shorter time than the 2000 years plus at the root of the Latin word.

This was a Latin root that came to English in the usual way.  It first shows up counted as an English word in 1395 for the simple reason that the rest of the document it appears in is written in English.  Prior to that it had appeared in documents where the words it kept company with were French and so was considered a French word.

So that all means that English speakers—or I should say English writers—had absorbed enough of the French that William the Conqueror forced on them to begin weaving it into their English discourse, which made it an English word.

Back in Latin and even in French pretend hadn’t meant “imaginary.”  Instead it had meant a representation or a justification.

In essence “to pretend” was to put forth the information that your communications manager and the marketing consultant had agreed was the right message.

The Latin root breaks in to prae and tendere two words that mean literally “before, to stretch.” So to pretend was to hold out your reasons before you.

The meaning of the word appears to have come full circle.  The Latin meaning had a sense that the reasons being offered had a falseness to them.  By the time the Normans brought the word to England the word could be used in either sense; the arguments being considered as credible or imaginary.

Now of course no one would refer to anything as pretend if they wanted you to believe it.