When I was a boy we would spend summers by the lake. There was an old boathouse and sometimes behind the squeaking doors I’d catch a glimpse of a big hairy dock spider.

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My mother was scared of these spiders and described them as “the size of dinner plates.”

Thus I tend to shudder when I think of tarantulas. Yet the resources I have been checking tell me that these ugly brutes are actually fairly harmless.

Perhaps I should take my own advice.  When my kids were little and we went on canoe trips and someone expressed their worry about bears I asked them what was the most dangerous animal in the world.

Answer: you are—people are the most dangerous animals.

The forgoing supports the thesis that I and my friends and family are strange and illogical.

But that’s okay because the etymology of tarantula shows that we are not the only ones.

There is a word tarantella that describes

“A very quick Neapolitan dance (or its music) in 6/8 time for one couple”

That’s from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which goes on to say that the name of this dance is

“said to have been based on the gyrations carried out by those whom the tarantula had bitten.”

The folklore evidently doesn’t tell us if the people (a couple I guess) gyrated because of the spider’s poison, or as some sources would have it, because physicians of the day claimed that dancing was a kind of antivenin to the spider bite.

Out of this four legged dancing for eight legged reasons came in 1938, according to The Oxford English Dictionary the word tarantism defined as

“a hysterical malady, characterized by an extreme impulse to dance.”

And I thought that was called disco.

All of these words point back to a town in Italy. The city of Taranto is located under the heel of the boot of Italy and it was the hairy spiders of this place that spread their strange and illogical webs of terror all over the world and all over our language.

This despite the fact that they don’t even spin webs.  They are a type of spider called a wolf spider that runs after and jumps on its prey.

Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better about them.

The city of Taranto in turn takes its name from a Greek related language, Illyrian, where darandos meant “oak tree.” A second theory on the town’s name is that it might come from an Indo-European root ter meaning a “flowing current.”

The first citation we have for the word scrumptious is said by Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary to be from 1830.

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The Oxford English Dictionary points to 1836 and says it’s an American invention.

One of the more succinct definitions of scrumptious is

“delicious”

and most dictionaries say scrumptious usually refers to food.

While both Merriam Webster and The American Heritage Dictionary feel that scrumptious may have evolved from sumptuous, the OED has another theory.

Evidently there was an earlier word scrumptious called by the OED “dialectal” and it meant almost the opposite of “delicious.”

Our problem here is that since the OED considered this word non-standard English and part of a dialect, they didn’t actually include the earlier scrumptious as an entry. Instead they just offhandedly referred to it in the etymology of our word scrumptious.

That earlier scrumptious was a word applied to people not food, and it didn’t mean “attractive,” but “unattractive”—in fact “stingy” and “hard to please.”

Scrumptious is thought to be related to the word scrimp.

So what happened?

The speculation is that the word scrumptious first referred to people who kept good things for themselves, and then scrumptious was transferred to the good things those people were hording.

Whatever they were hording must have been attractive so something that was scrumptious became something particularly attractive.

I looked at several trending tools to see if the use of the word scrumptious was on the rise or in decline. The data is mixed with Google trends on a gentle climb and Facebook lexicon showing a mild falling off.

The thing that did strike me was that although everyone seems to agree that this word originated in the United States, it is now more frequently used in England, Ireland, and Australia than it is in the US.

Plus, of all places there seem to be twice as many scrumptious users in Singapore that the US.

I mentioned the word hyperbole the other day when I was talking about hype.

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Hyperbole is one of those words that conforms to an out of date spelling convention so that it takes some getting used to in order to spell it right.

The word appeared in English in 1529 from Greek and the first citation in The Oxford English Dictionary underlines the importance that renaissance scholars gave to the classical languages. That citation reads

“a maner of speking which is among lerned men called yperbole, for the more vehement expressyng of a mater.”

It was learned men who knew their Greek.

The Greek and Latin spelling conventions were absolutely crazy.  Imagine having every letter that you wrote down actually represent a sound you were actually supposed to pronounce in the word.

So although our much more modern and logical spelling convention would imply that the final ending “e” in hyperbole would be silent—so you’d say “hyperbowl”—because this word is a learned import from the classics we don’t silence that “e”.

The Oxford Dictionary of English defines hyperbole as “exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.”

That reflects the meaning the word had in Greek as well. The OED offers “excess” and “exaggeration” as what the classical Greeks themselves meant by the word.

I guess it’s a characteristic of words drawn from ancient languages by relatively modern scholars, that they have the ancient meanings. They haven’t lived through the centuries of mutation that have battered other words into different shapes.  Instead they were sucked through some kind of language time-machine.

The Greeks built this word out of something else though. It was a metaphor.

The literal roots of hyperbole mean “cast beyond” or “over throw” as you might do when you fire a baseball to teammate and it sails above their reach.

The “throw” word root in the Greek ballein goes back to Indo-European.

I have also been introduced to a new internet word resource that is still a big secret so I’ll have to tell you another time.  But one of the features it offers is a prediction of how often you might expect to encounter a word.  Hyperbole is predicted to occur a few times in your year.

Compare this with the word egg which is predicted to cross your vocabulary daily.

This top secret website also shows, based on data crunching of huge piles of historical documents and modern electronic correspondence, the relative frequency of use of each word across the last 200 years or so. Evidently the use of hyperbole (as a word at least) is gaining in popularity.

I wonder if that has anything to do with how much of it we have to endure in our advertising soaked lives.

[irony warning for listeners to the podcast, an ad follows immediately]

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Daniel writes

“How did it become a card? Why is it used to mean first…or best? It replaces 1 in a deck of cards and is also the highest (as well as the lowest) card in a deck. How did it become synonymous with pilots?”

Lots of questions.

Fortunately I’ve got lots of answers.

The word seems to have come to English from Latin via the intermediary of French.  In Latin it is said to have first referred to a kind of coin.

The various dictionaries point in various directions before Latin. An Etruscan source is suggested by John Ayto’s Word Origins.

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests instead a Tarentine word as that might have come from a Greek word eis.

In fact these origins aren’t all that far apart since a Tarentine word would have come from the city of Taranto which is located in the arch of the foot under the heel of the boot of Italy; the Etruscan stomping ground was more the front of the shin of the boot of Italy; and the Greeks were trading and setting up colonies all over this part of the Mediterranean before the rise of the Roman Empire.

I suppose the association between the coin and the numeric value “one” must have been something similar to the idea that if I tell you I have a buck, you know I have “one dollar.”

The “one” meaning is very ancient and is the meaning that came with the word into English circa the year 1300.  That first usage was in reference to games of dice where the side with only one dot was called the ace.

Daniel asks how the word ace came to be associated with pilots.

Not all pilots are aces, only the good ones.

It was World War I flyers who were first called aces, and only when they had brought down 10 enemy aircraft.

The reason these people were called aces is sort of the flip-side of an ace in dice, and is implied in the other part of Daniel’s question.

It may seem strange to us, but because an ace in dice was a low score, before the word ace was used to refer to someone who was particularly good, it was used to refer to things that were worthless or unlucky.

The usage of ace to refer to a card with a value of one entered English in 1553 and it was because this card was sometimes the lowest and sometimes the highest value card that the word ace itself began to gain status.

By 1889 we have an ace in tennis being a very good thing, a serve so fast and accurate that the opponent can’t get their racket on it.

Coincidentally I was listening recently to the BBC History Magazine podcast where they were talking about those First World War flying aces.

One point was that contrary to the image given by Snoopy fighting the Red Barron, these guys didn’t go up specifically to fight.  Their job was to protect the bomber aircraft.

What point just shooting down some other pilot? Much more important that your bombers get through and the reason the enemy pilot is up there in the first place is to stop those bombers.

Two things happened to me that made me want to look into the word hype.

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I was listening to a podcast talking about hyperbole in advertising, and I saw an item from Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary this time on an older form of hyp.

As I walked my dog and listened to the podcast I thought “ah, the word hype must come from hyperbole” since to me the meaning of the word hype fits perfectly with advertising.

The New Oxford American Dictionary says that hype is “extravagant or intensive publicity or promotion.”

Compare that to Merriam-Webster’s definition for hyperbole “extravagant exaggeration that represents something as much greater or less, better or worse, or more intense than it really is.”

So imagine my surprise when I cracked open my Oxford English Dictionary only to find that

(a) this use of hype is so recent the OED doesn’t yet have an entry for this meaning, and

(b) the etymology doesn’t come from hyperbole.

The first entry for hype comes as a noun in 1924 as a slang term for a “drug addict” shortened from hypodermic.

Almost simultaneously hype appeared in 1926 meaning “to cheat” or “a cheater,” someone who gives you back the wrong change.

Although drug addicts may also be cheats the OED says this “cheating” meaning has an unknown etymology.

Then by 1936 to hype something is to “stimulate” it or “work it up” as if it had been injected with some drug.

Now at least we see the roots of advertising hype in this “work it up” meaning.

I see that The American Heritage Dictionary suspects the etymology to be “partly from hype, a swindle … and partly from [hyperbole]” which makes sense to me.

When we look at the background of the word hyper, as a kid might become when he’s eaten three bowls of sugared cereal, we see that it instead of coming from this “worked up” drug etymology, is thought to stem from an abbreviation of hyperactive.

That hyper first showed up in 1942 but there was an earlier word hyper with citations from 1914 which shows us why the etymologists didn’t connect the cheating hype with the drug addict hype. Hyper had at that earlier date been “Criminal Slang…current amongst money-changers. A flim-flammer.”

All of these citations are within the last hundred years but as I said at the beginning, what got me going, was in part a nugget from more like 250 years ago.

As the organizers put it, the photoblog Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary is

“posted each day for readers’ lexiconic delight…words [are] taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition, extra-illustrated with Johnson’s and his helpers’ manuscript corrections.”

All of which means you can see how The Doctor corrected mistakes and made notes to himself.

His entry for hyp is of quite a different sort than our more modern versions.  In his day to hyp was not to “work up” but instead “to depress” and as he put it was “barbarously contracted from hypochondriack.”

What this all means is that although we think of hype and hyper as both meaning something amplified or revved up, etymologically only hyper comes from this meaning.  Hype, whether from hypochondriac or hypodermic etymologically comes from the opposite direction; from “down,” or “lower.”

Hypo means “under” and in hypodermic means “under the skin.”

I first examined the word discombobulate in 2005.

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At the time I had been delighted to discover a real authentic word gurgitate hidden inside regurgitate.

I wondered what wonderful meaning the word combobulate might have, or taking it even further, bobulate.

But it turned out that discombobulate was not an assembly of other legitimate word components. Instead it was a product of our human fancy.

People just liked the sound of it and so once they heard it, they kept using it; no matter that it never had been a real word before.

The dictionaries suggest that whoever coined the word did so by blending and modifying the words “discompose” and/or “discomfit.”

The American Heritage Dictionary defines discombobulate as “to throw into a state of confusion.”

The word first appeared in the 1830s and took a little while to get itself together so as not be in a state of confusion as to whether it was discombobracate, discombobberate, or discombobulate.

Within a decade it appears to have standardized and become popular enough that during the Second World War the strain on American resources was described in conversations with no less than Franklin Roosevelt as having the potential of

“discombobulating the domestic economy.”

Because it has style discombobulate is simply a better word than discomfit or discompose. Both these words now sound dated because few people use them anymore.

The reason discombobulate still sounds fresh is simply that people like the sound of it.

As Urbandictionary puts it

“one of those rare and wonderful words that means exactly what it sounds like. There is no word more onomatopoeic to confusion than discombobulate.”

The other day my daughter came home with an etymology she’d learned at school.

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Sincere, she said, came from a way that people knew if a statue was a valuable antique or not.

Evidently people used wax to stick broken statues back together and since the Latin word for wax is cera, sans cera meant “without wax” and you knew your antique statue was the real McCoy.

I was a little dubious of this etymology at first, so I proceeded to my Oxford English Dictionary and low and behold, there it was.

One problem though.

There it was in the sentence “There is no probability in the old explanation from sine cera ‘without wax’.”

I’ll tell you the real etymology in a moment but to attempt to discover where this phony etymology came from I did a little searching.  There are other equally unlikely stories.

Workmen who’d been hired to build roman pillars were too lazy to polish the marble and so buffed it up with some wax, took their pay and vamoosed before the hot sun melted the wax.

Another alternative, that people making cheap pottery that seemed to crack before it was even sold, used wax to hide these defects and so quality potters took to stamping “no wax” or its equivalent on their workmanship, bringing a sense of “true quality” to the word sincere.

Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code used this folk etymology in his book Digital Fortress in which he has one of the characters sign his letters “without wax, David.”

Despite the popularity of Dan Brown’s books, he must have been perpetuating an already popular folk etymology as opposed to being its principal evangelist.  This is because Digital Fortress wasn’t published until 10 years after The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition in which this dissing of the “no wax” theory appears.

So what was the correct etymology you ask?

I said before that once I started looking into wine words I was amazed how often words seemed to be related to wine.

This word sincere is not in my Wine Words book, but listen to how it relates.

The true etymology of sincere is from the Latin sincerus meaning “clean,” or “pure” but thought to originate in Indo-European roots sem meaning “one” and ker meaning “growth.”

So something that is sincere is etymologically pure and uncontaminated by cross breeding.

In doing my book research I’ve become convinced that wine is the most highly engineered product that humanity has ever produced.  We have been tinkering with wine at the genetic level for at least 8000 years.

So I ask you, what agricultural product could it have been, for which ancient peoples cared enough about its quality to have come up with a phrase describing it in terms of its genetic purity?

I suggest wine.

Hey, the cru in Grand Cru and Premier Cru comes from the same source.

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Here are two sentences I snipped off the New York Times website:

British sprinter Dwain Chambers could face sanctions from the sport’s world governing body…

And

Treasury Secretaries [should not] not willingly sanction bonuses to AIG executives…

You’d think to read those two sentences that the word sanction had two completely opposite meanings.

And if fact it does.

For the sprinter sanction is a bad thing.  He’s going to be punished.

But for AIG executives sanction is a good thing, they are going to get their loot.

How can this be?

Well, it’s like this you see; sanction is “law.”  At least in Classical Latin sanction was the decreeing what was essentially law.

So for the sprinter the decree is that he’s broken the law of the governing body.  For the AIG executives the decree is that their bonuses are legal.

The word sanction appeared in English as a noun in the latter 1500s and it was Thomas Jefferson who first used sanction as a verb in 1778.

The word sanction is etymologically related to the words sacred and saint.

So how, might you ask, can a word that means “law” be related to things holy?

In Latin the root had been sancire and had meant to “ordain” or “decree.” It was the things that had been decreed as holy that were then called sacred.

This is a kind of “perception is reality” thing.

It wasn’t that something was innately sacred, it became sacred because it was decreed to be so.

It’s also true that hundreds of years ago there was less of a perceived difference between church and state so that the laws of humans were more based on what was thought to be the laws of God.

Think of the “divine right of kings.”

Aside from getting hit in the eye by an arrow at the Battle of Hastings, King Harold was on his way to losing the kingdom of England to William the Conqueror in any case. This is because the pope had decreed that it was God’s will that William be king of England instead of Harold.  It was the pope’s sanction of William that made his conquest sacred.

But in retrospect, do we really think that the pope’s approval originated in law or in politics?

Hard economic times are showing up at podictionary.

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I chose today’s word frugal because when times are hard it’s wise to be frugal since frugal means “careful with your money.”

But it was podictionary itself that prompted the choice of the word.

Back in 2007 I did an episode on the word thrifty and wouldn’t you know it, people have been finding the episode on Google, undoubtedly because they are thinking thrifty thoughts in these hard economic times.

So maybe a few more will Google frugal.

Google frugal, say that ten times.

The word frugal appeared in English in 1598 in The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare.

This is a great excuse for me to explain to frugal Googlers who may not already know what regular podictionary subscribers know; that is the fact that just because William Shakespeare appears to have been the first person to write the word down, it doesn’t mean that he invented it.

Some words can be traced to their inventors but most words have been floating around in verbal conversation for years before someone writes them down for the first time.

Another thing that might be news to non-regular readers and listeners is that although Shakespeare is credited with more first citations than any other single author, the reason may have more to do with modern readers than with Shakespeare’s genius.

In my audio-book Global Wording I came across a perfect example in the word puke that had been attributed to Shakespeare for the first citation, but that during the research for the third edition update for The Oxford English Dictionary had been discovered to have been written down twenty years earlier by someone else.

So this might also be the case with the word frugal.

It hasn’t yet been reviewed for the third edition of the OED and that means Shakespeare’s grasp on this first citation is based on his huge popularity both with readers of hundreds of years ago, which prompted many copies of his works to survive; and with the readers of a century ago who compiled the original OED and who thought of Shakespeare as a superstar. Because he was a superstar they read his works more closely than writers like that hack writer who’d actually used puke before Shakespeare.

It’s only with modern computerized methods that we can comb more easily through hundreds of thousands of old books to find who really first wrote a word down.

Of course, the books that turned to dust never will be digitized so I guess we’ve missed them.

I’m not being very frugal with my words here so I’d better get back to frugal’s etymology.

Before coming to Shakespeare’s English, frugal had been a Latin word.  Back in Latin frugalis meant not only “economical,” but “useful” and came from a root frux meaning “profit.”

Since profit is something that grows it’s easy to see how this word root can also be related to our word fruit.

They say that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail and I’ve been finding since I wrote my Wine Words book that an amazing number of words relate to wine words in one way or another.

Obviously the word fruit can be applied to the growing of grapes and so I have an entry in the book about fruit.  If you manage to get a copy of the book you’ll see why I think this word root in particular shines a happy light on the lifestyles of the ancient Romans.

Although the world has been on a heightened alert against terrorists since 2001, the word terrorist is more than 200 years old.

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In its first use it did not refer, as it does today, to a band of extremists who try to influence a more powerful government or society by the use of violent acts.  Instead, the first terrorists were insiders in that powerful government.

This was the heat of the French revolution and the terrorists were those with their hands on the leavers of power who orchestrated the Reign of Terror that suppressed moderate politics in France at that time.

Somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 people were sent to the guillotine in what were publicized as acts of virtue aimed at morally uniting France.

The first terrorists to be called by this name as we would recognize it, that is, as being some sort of violent underground movement, were Irish patriots back in 1866.

According to a 2005 update to The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style the word terrorist is one of the most hotly debated words in newsrooms.

Some people evidently say that the word itself portrays a partiality against the terrorists who might be considered freedom fighters from another perspective.

Other people argue that, damn straight it portrays a partiality against people who use horrific acts of violence to promote their cause, and, like, shouldn’t we have a partiality against that?

The word insurgent is offered by those seeking a less judgmental word than terrorist.

Terrorist is of course built on the word terror and this word we get from French and from Latin before that.

In both cases it has held just about the same meaning that it does now in English; “fright.”

The Indo-European root that gave Latin the word terror was ter and meant to “tremble” or “shake.”