To impair something is to make it worse.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

A common use of the word is in the reports you sometimes hear about people who lost their licenses for impaired driving.

The word comes to us from Latin but not quite directly.  In 1374 Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, first used the word in English when he produced a translation of a Latin work that was already 800 years old in his day.

The work is known as the Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius and is said to be one of the all time great pieces of prison literature.

It was important enough that it had been translated into Old English 450 years before Chaucer by King Alfred the Great.

The fact that Alfred wasn’t the first to use the word impair is due more to the evolution of language than to differences in translation.

In effect, Chaucer and Alfred were each translating from Latin into a different English language.

The original author Boethius is said to have influenced many of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as well as such modern writers as JRR Tolkien.

The Latin root of impair is peior which also means “to make worse,” and in fact is a link that makes the word impair related to the word pejorative.

Before impair was used by Chaucer it was already in use in English but as appair, a form that became obsolete some time after Shakespeare.

The Latin root peior itself had evolved from an earlier meaning.  According to the American Heritage Dictionary the Indo-European root ped meaning “foot” gets tangled up in the Latin etymology.

Before the Latin peior meant “to make worse” it had a root that had meant “to stumble”; there’s the foot connection.

This makes a fitting mental image of an impaired driver being asked to walk a straight line by the arresting officer.

When you hear that someone has style what do you think?

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

Perhaps that they dress well or that they behave in an admirable way.

Before I learned the etymology of this word I never would have thought that a person’s style was specifically related to how they expressed themselves in writing.  But it’s true, that’s where style comes from.

Listen to these definitions: from Merriam-Webster

“a mode of expressing thought in oral or written language”;

from the American Heritage Dictionary

” The way in which something is said, done, expressed, or performed: a style of speech and writing.”

Of course the dictionaries go further than that, but we can agree that someone’s style is how they express themselves and at first it was particularly how they expressed themselves in writing.

Here’s how style got from a stick in the ground to being a fancy hat or pair of shoes.

In Latin stilus was a stick in the ground.  It had a pointed end so that you could poke it more easily into the ground.

The word for this pole was transferred to a writing instrument because at first people didn’t write with pen and ink, but like the chalkboards of the old one room school house, people instead practiced their writing on a tablet covered with soft wax.  They used a little pointed instrument to make grooves in the wax.  That way they could just smooth out the wax again to write another message, or practice their letters again.

They gave the little pointed instrument the same name they gave to the similarly-shaped poles that they stuck in the ground. And so a little pencil-like device was called a stylus.

This was a little confusing to medieval scholars trying to understand the etymology of the word stylus because they saw this Latin word meaning both a pencil and a pole for sticking in the ground and they jumped to the conclusion that the word must have come from the Greek word for “pillar” or “column” which was stylos.

Hence they incorrectly corrected everyone into spelling the word stylus with a “y.”

Now that we can see how a pencil got called a stylus it isn’t that much of a stretch of the imagination to see that style was first applied to how one expressed oneself in writing.

It only later came to apply to expressions of self in other ways such as wardrobe.

The New York Times uses the word egregious to describe the use of taxpayers’ money to pay off AIG debts.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

Another use relates to Bernard Madoff.

The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary defines egregious as “conspicuous for bad quality or taste,” “extraordinary” and “extreme.”

So we get the idea that something that is egregious is bad.

But it wasn’t always so.

The word was one of those adopted into English by renaissance writers directly from Latin and it held a meaning of “outstanding.”  That could be outstandingly bad or outstandingly good.

We have examples of egregious meaning outstandingly good as recently as 150 years ago.

But people don’t tend to like words that hold two directly opposite meanings and so the good usage of egregious died away.

The Latin root of egregious was a compound word that was very similar to our word outstanding.  In Latin it had been e gregis, the e having the same meaning as ex, that is “out.”

Greg meant “flock,” as in a flock of sheep.

So that something egregious was something that stood out from the heard herd, like a black sheep.

The roots of greg go back to Indo-European and meant “gather.”

We see these roots emerge also in our word congregate.

The first English citation we have for the bad sense of egregious was from a writer in 1573 named Gabriel Harvey.  It’s kind of fitting really because Gabriel Harvey got into what might be considered an egregious 16th century flame war with several other writers.

Some of Gabriel Harvey’s work was republished in 1884 and here’s what the preface says:

“Gabriel Harvey…is better known to us than almost any other man among the literary characters who crowd the Elizabethan stage. His celebrated controversy with Nash (who raked up against him every circumstance in his life and writings in order to pour unlimited abuse and contempt upon his head) has furnished us with a vivid picture.”

The preface goes on to say that “fortunately, there is no need for us to enter into the merits of that wordy war,” and I agree except to offer a couple of the titles of the pamphlets that were flung back and forth low these 400 years ago and more.

How would you like to be written about in something called Pap with a Hatchet or Quip for an Upstart Courtier?

I wonder what they’d have written about black sheep such as AIG or Bernard Madoff?

This word is 800 or 900 years old in English but of course comes from older words in French and Latin. Its use in a term like tennis court shows its meaning of a space.

The American Heritage Dictionary points back to an Indo-European root gher meaning to “grasp” or “enclose” so even though a tennis court may not have walls, the deeper meaning of court was of an enclosed space.

Think of a courtyard.  Usually this is a space enclosed by the wings of a building.  Back in Latin this association between enclosed yards and the buildings that enclosed them lead to the word court applying to prestigious houses, and especially royal residences.

Because royals had plenty of hangers-on there were lots of people around, and the term court began to extended to the people too. People who were part of the court became courtiers and had to behave in a certain way.  That’s why we say that people who behave in what we think of as the approved way are courteous.

This gang who hung out at the court of the king and queen were all of a certain type—a cohort—and that’s where the term now used in demographic studies comes from.

The sovereign and his or her inner circle sometimes had to get together and hash out disputes and dispense justice.  Their gatherings naturally also became called courts.  Later judicial appointees of the sovereign took up the job and their sessions took up the name as well.  Eventually so did the buildings in which they worked.

By the time court got to English through the French of the Norman Conquest it had already developed most of these meanings.

It was almost the time of Shakespeare before the politeness of being courteous transferred itself to the attentions a young man might pay a young woman when he goes a-courting.

Ben Jonson was a contemporary of Shakespeare and from the following you can see that by their time, courting had definitely take on the meaning of romantic wooing, although there appears still to be room for development on the woman’s equality front:

Follow a shadow, it still flies you;
Seem to fly it, it will pursue:
So court a mistress, she denies you;
Let her alone, she will court you.
Say, are not women truly then
Styled but the shadows of us men?

Here’s what Ogden Nash had to say about the dromedary:

The camel has a single hump;
The dromedary, two;
Or else the other way around,
I’m never sure. Are you?

As you might imagine, the dictionaries and encyclopedias are sure, and according to them Ogden Nash has it backwards.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

A dromedary has one hump.

But a dromedary is just as much of a camel as is the two humped variety.

There are two distinct species of camels: Arabian and Bactrian.  Arabian camels have one hump and Bactrian camels have two humps.

Bactria was once a country in central Asia and these two humpers seem to be more northerly animals.

Pretty well all camels these days are domesticated, and just as we have domesticated horses that are specialized for racing and other domesticated horses that are specialized for hauling beer wagons, so too are there divisions among Arabian camels.

A dromedary is a camel specialized for racing and this specialization is reflected in its name.  Before I get to the etymology of dromedary I’ll touch on the etymology of camel.

It’s a bit of a no-brainer that the name of these beasts might come from a Semitic language source instead of Indo-European.

The Semitic languages were those stretching over the sandy districts where camels would have been domesticated.

All of the dictionaries point to Arabic and Hebrew words from which Greek would have gotten the word which then came to Latin and finally Old English. The Oxford English Dictionary is the only source that speculates on the deeper meaning of these Semitic roots, saying they might be related to a meaning of “to carry.”

But the dromedary wasn’t meant as a beast of burden.  It was a more sporty model and its name came to us not from Semitic languages but instead from Greek.

If you watch the horses run you do so at the racetrack.  But another name for the racetrack is the hippodrome.  Hippo being Greek for “horse” and drome meaning “race” or “course.”

Similarly you might watch bicycle races at the velodrome.  It’s that drome part that fits into dromedary and means “running.”

In 1943 Time Magazine was the first to identify grass as a pseudonym for “marijuana,” quickly followed in 1945 by the wonderfully titled Jive Talk Dictionary.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

But the word grass had been around for some 1200 years before that.

Perhaps people were less concerned about their lawns back then because grass was widely used to apply to the green stuff that domestic animals survived on.

Old English most certainly got this word from the Angles and Saxons who arrived around the year 449 and there were similar words most Germanic languages.

In English it turns up in glosses as early as the year 725 which is almost as early as we can find an English word and still call it English.

It is thought that further back the word grass is related to the word green, and that even more intriguingly the color is called green because it is related to things that grow.

These relationships still come through to us in the area of grass around the hole at a golf course, it’s called the green.

According to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations the proverb “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” didn’t appear until the mid 20th century.

The poet Walt Whitman seems to have been particularly fond of grass.  Since he passed away in 1892 we can be certain he was referring to grass as grows in lawns.

He wrote a poem 1343 lines long called Leaves of Grass and although it is about much more than grass, he does praise the wonder of the stuff.  Here are a few samples:

I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat;

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars

Here’s a little rhyme from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

A little child, a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself,
A fairy thing with red round cheeks,
That always finds, and never seeks,
Makes such a vision to the sight
As fills a father’s eyes with light.

That certainly gives us an innocent, joyful sense of what an elf might be.

Of course elves are mythical, magical beings.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

Elves seem to be more akin to fairies while a dwarf might be closer to a troll. Elves have a sense of beauty while dwarves, as depicted in Disney’s Snow White or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, are more stumpy and gruff.

In ages past people’s perceptions of the world was not influenced by science and technology the way ours is. Without a way of explaining natural phenomenon our predecessors turned to superstition.

While we may feel mostly affection for the idea of an elf these days, back 500 or 1000 years ago an elf represented the unknown and was as likely to have a dark side as be beautiful and graceful.

The word elf came to us from Old English and its Germanic roots reflect this conflicted feeling about the elves.

Other related Germanic words meant “oaf” and “nightmare.”

Shakespeare’s references to elves are mischievous.

Not only were people’s perceptions of science and superstition different, their perception of time was different.

During the Middle Ages people didn’t have our sense of history.  History evolved much more slowly then, so to them the world as their grandparents knew it wasn’t so different than their own world, and so they might assume it had been ever thus; and would be forever after.

When they picked up old Stone Age arrow heads they didn’t imagine that these might have been made by people.

People made metal arrow heads.

Instead they assumed the stone points were made by elves.

To underline the malicious association with elves, sometimes a person with a mysterious ailment was said to be elf shot.  One of those stone arrowheads had been used to inflict a magical illness.

Our perception of elves as harmless is said to have begun to evolve around the time that Shakespeare was still slagging the critters.  But a more ambivalent understanding of elves goes even further back.

One theory is that the word elf may be related to the Indo-European root albho meaning “white.” That’s the same root that gave the Harry Potter headmaster Albus Dumbledore his first name.

Since the connection between albho and elf is not a certainty it is impossible to say whether this whiteness was a reflection of elves occasional goodness, or some other association—completely speculatively I’ll suggest that ghosts are thought of as white.

But what got me thinking about elves were the names of a few of the writers we know from Old English. King Alfred the Great was one of them and Ælfric the Grammarian was another.

Both of these names contain the word elf. Alfred means “elf counsel” and Ælfric means “elf lord.”

These meanings emphasize a desire among our medieval predecessors to get these powerful magical beings to work on our side.  Elves were free agents and had the potential to do much harm if you didn’t strike an alliance with them.

The word sand describes something that most people have experienced and probably repeatedly.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

What’s more, the way that we experience sand today hasn’t changed much from the way that people experienced sand thousands of years ago.

Those are the ingredients needed to make a word with some staying power as far as meaning and pronunciation goes.  So it’s no surprise that the word sand has been flowing through the hourglass almost unchanged since the time of  Indo-European language.

John Ayto’s Word Origins indicates the word back then was samdam and he says that it likely arose from a root meaning “to grind.”

The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary offers the Greek word psammos meaning “sand” and  psen meaning “to rub.”

Accordingly the word was floating around in lots of Indo-European descendant languages and so arrived in Old English from its Germanic roots.

The first person we know of to put pen to paper and write sand down as an English word was a fellow known to us as Ælfric.

Although Ælfric is not exactly a common name now, it turns out there were quite a few famous Ælfrics in history so we need to designate this particular Ælfric as Ælfric the Grammarian or Ælfric of Eynsham.

He was a monk but he was a monk with a mission. He was a prolific writer when few other people in England were writing at all, and most of those who were, were writing in Latin.

The reason that Ælfric wrote in English was that most of what was considered important learning at the time was recorded in Latin and the common people were not only unable to read it, they were unable to understand it being read to them.

Ælfric was worried about their eternal souls and felt that the religious understandings circulating in folklore were inaccurate. He wanted to correct these misunderstandings and he felt that he was up against a deadline. Ælfric was writing in the latter 900s and he, among many others, believed that with the year 1000 would come the Day of Judgment.

Before I go I want to tell you something you probably didn’t know about the word sand.

You may know that much of the VC money or venture capital that fueled the technology boom came out of offices on a street in the San Francisco area called Sand Hill Road.

I see from the book California Place Names that there are at least 50 places in California alone with the names Sand Hill or Sand Creek or whatever.

I live in the Ottawa Valley and we have a few Sand Hill Roads around here too.  Many of them were named not because the soil was sandy but because the Ottawa Valley, starting about 200 years ago was one of the world centers for lumber, particularly white pine.

Only Michigan was reputed to have as fine a product.

At the peak of lumbering there was enough wood shipping out of here every year to build a boardwalk five feet wide around the whole planet.

How does this relate to sand?

Well a sand hill back in those lumber days was a hill that was too dangerous to haul a skid of logs out on.  Unless you slowed down the load by adding a bunch of grit to the snow and ice on the path, the entire pile of tons of logs would chase your horse and driver down the hill and most probably kill them.

We think of the word lift as a verb.

SPONSOR: Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit  www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts

We lift our gaze from our handheld devices to the faces of the people we should be interacting with.

We lift the suitcases that our spouses packed too much into for such a short trip and for which we will be dinged for being overweight at the airport.

The word lift has always had a sense of upness to it.

It is related to the word loft, that place where you might keep hay in the barn, or the spacious condo apartment in a building that used to be an industrial building.

Loft is a noun and so too were the roots of lift because back in Old Norse where both words evolved from, the word’s ancestor meant “air” or “sky.”

So the sense of lift etymologically is to move something up into the air.

While the noun loft goes back to Old English, the verb lift hung around in the unwritten language until Middle English before emerging in 1300.

The work that first documents lift is called the Cursor Mundi and is a long long religious poem that’s supposed to relate the unraveling of history; hence the title means “Runner of the World.”

The citation for lift in The Oxford English Dictionary caught my eye because it reads

“lift hir skirt wit-vten scurn And barfote wode sco that burn.”

Anything to do with lifting skirts has to be investigated so here’s the story.

You know that King Solomon was the guy who was supposed to have been so wise, well his fame even during his lifetime brought him a visit from the Queen of Sheba.

She wasn’t too dim herself because she was able to predict (according to the Cursor Mundi) not only the coming of Christ but also to identify the piece of wood upon which he was to be crucified.

When it was laid across a stream—that’s the burn in Cursor Mundi, burn is still a Scottish word for “stream”—when this piece of wood was laid across a stream as a bridge for her to cross she knew enough to steer clear of it and lifted up her skirt to wade barefoot.

Although dictionaries and language reference works point to the sixties as the time when the expression gross came to mean “disgusting,” this word has been around for far more than 40 or 50 years.

William Shakespeare even used it comparing the world to a garden untended and gone to seed and producing only “things rank and gross in nature.”

Gross first appeared in written form in 1380, like so many other words from French, a few hundred years after the arrival of the Normans.

In Latin grossus had meant “thick.”

In French it means “big” and so too does it in a number of English uses such as gross revenue as opposed to net revenue.

But even by 400 or 500 years ago gross food was food of lower quality and to eat grossly was to do so uncleanly and repulsively.

The word was applied to dull and stupid people as well as to things that were of poor workmanship.

Gross in its sense of “bulk” is closely related to our word groceries since we buy our groceries from a grocer who in turn buys them in bulk, or in French en gross.

We could anglicize this French expression into a real English word with a different meaning, engross, but it would still have the same etymology.

The sense of gross meaning “the whole” as we see in gross revenue is extended metaphorically in so that when you are engrossed in something your whole attention is absorbed.

If you go out and buy a gross of something you’ll be coming home with 144 items.  This is because a gross is a dozen dozen and is in fact an abbreviation of the French phrase gross douzaine meaning “big dozen.”