I have always associated the word holocaust with Nazi atrocities during World War II.

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Now, when you think of it, those atrocities didn’t take place all that long ago and presumably the word holocaust wasn’t invented specifically to apply to that shameful period of history.

This fact didn’t occur to me until recently.

I bought a Kindle electronic book almost a year ago. So already it’s obsolete, there are two other models out now.

But aside from buying ebooks at Amazon I’ve been downloading free out-of-copyright books as well.  One of these was a murder mystery written before the Second World War and therein I came across the word holocaust in quite a different context.

The detective admonished someone who was thinking of burning a piece of evidence.  So, I thought, the word holocaust must have something to do with burning.

Looking the word up I see that I was right.  The latter part of holocaust is related to our word caustic.

Caustic chemicals burn and caustic comments do too.

The word holocaust appears first in English way back in 1250 and comes from French who got it from Latin who got it from Greek.

In Greek it had been two words; the holo is the same as whole so that holocaust literally means “wholly burned.”

Back then the word didn’t apply to man’s inhumanity to man, but instead referred to religious rites in which offerings were burned in sacrifice.

By the 1500s holocaust had come to mean sacrifice on a large scale and by the 1700s meant wholesale slaughter.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary the word was specifically applied as The Holocaust to the Nazi mass murders by historians during the 1950s, so after the war was over.

The OED says this was probably as an equivalent to the Hebrew words hurban and shoah meaning “catastrophe.” But there are citations applying the word back to 1942, while the events were actually happening.

What got me going on the word today was listening to recent reports of the conviction for war crimes of one of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide.  Some reports referred to that as a holocaust too. Those atrocities happened 15 years ago and I dare say there are others even more recent.

It makes me wish we could make the rallying cry “never again” stick.

Listener Meredith asks about several phrases related to Dutch.

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She mentions going Dutch where people on a date pay their own share, and double Dutch a kind of skipping rope game.

I called this episode Dutch double because I’ve actually looked into the word Dutch before on podictionary, back in March 2008. There I focused on the phrase Dutch courage.

I won’t repeat that story, but I will touch again on the etymology of Dutch before jumping into the origin of going Dutch and double Dutch.

Today Dutch refers to the people of the Netherlands also known as Holland. But in 1380 when the word Dutch first appeared in English it referred to a broader area of Europe.

Germans call Germany Deutschland and there is no coincidence that this sounds like Dutch land. The group we now call Germans were in Middle English called High Dutch. The Low Dutch were the people of the Netherlands.

Originally Dutch meant “people” or “nation” and it’s a common trait through history that when a tribe or group has the option to choose their own name they usually choose one that means they are people while other groups get stuck with names meaning that they are something less.

For example, the group name Eskimo is now seen as insulting because it was first applied by a rival group and means “eaters of raw meat.”

With respect to going Dutch and double Dutch, The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that these are only some of a pile of phrases that arose as a result of

“rivalry and enmity between the English and Dutch in the 17th century.”

Going Dutch, where one pays their own way fits in well with Dutch treat, and other phrases that have fallen out of use such as Dutch party, Dutch supper and Dutch lunch.

In all of these cases the idea was that it was a bring-your-own party because the host was too cheap to pay your way and since the English hated the Dutch, labeling the event as Dutch was as good as calling it “a cheap party.”

Many of the things called Dutch were associated with drinking and a Dutch feast was one where the host got plastered before the guests did.

100 years before double Dutch was applied to a kind of skipping rope session where two ropes turn in opposition to one another—and that first shows up in 1895—double Dutch was applied to a language you didn’t understand.

It was like saying “that’s Greek to me.”

So people who couldn’t understand a language referred to it as if it was not only as impenetrable as the Dutch language, but doubly so.

I see no theory as to why this clueless reaction to a foreign language might have transferred its name to a skipping game, but I see that both uses were in play at the same time and since the skipping uses two ropes the double was a natural, and double Dutch slips off the tongue so easily, I guess it stuck.

Here’s what I’ve done to myself.

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Maybe it happens to you too.  If so, my apologies, I think it must be partly my fault.

There you are reading a book or watching a movie and part of the dialogue makes you prick up your ears.

You think “that word he just used, was it actually part of the English language during the period this story is set?”

If you take the trouble to look it up you might find it did, or you might find it didn’t.  If it didn’t, some of the authority of the writer is taken away; the story isn’t quite so believable; it isn’t quite so enjoyable.

This happened to a podictionary listener recently and he wrote to ask me if the use of the word fire to mean “discharge a weapon” was chronologically appropriate for a movie he was watching.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary people never fired projectiles from bows or catapults until after they got used to firing bullets and cannon balls.

The reason for this relates to the technology of firearms.

These days ammunition is activated by an impact to the shell casing, but back in the early days you needed to have a torch or burning ember to ignite the gunpowder.  So it didn’t become common to talk of firing weapons until after 1530 and the reason that happened was that beforehand, to fire something was to set it on fire.

Fire is one of those things we imagine some cave man discovering so it’s no surprise that the word for it is particularly old.

Old English got it from Germanic sources but it was important right back to Indo-European.

So important that there are two different words for fire in Indo-European; and so important also that both of those word families have survived right up to the present day.

As well as fire, the word ignite has Indo-European roots.

Back in those mysterious Indo-European days people often attributed animate qualities to inanimate objects and this is part of the reason they had two different words for things like fire.

One, the ancestor of fire, was used just to refer to fire. But the other, the ancestor of ignite, referred to the living and even the imagined spiritual qualities of fire.

So the word fire has effectively been around forever, while the act of firing a weapon has only been so termed for about 500 years.

Turning to the question of whether the use of the verb to fire was anachronistic or not in that movie—I’m kind of stumped.

What time period exactly should I be thinking of when watching JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?

In the morning we grab a coffee on the run and wish we had time for breakfast.  At lunch we woo new business in a bistro.  But of an evening, we dine.

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Not all of us follow this chronology in our eating habits but bear with me.

Dinner is generally accepted to be the most important or grandest meal of the day. Sometimes this is taken at mid-day, but usually when day is done and—one hopes—the labors of the day behind us.

Few would describe their first meal of the day as the time they dine, and yet it is thought that the word itself derives from that first meal.

Just as the word breakfast is easy to understand as the meal with which we break our fast, dine is thought to come from a Latin root of disjejunare, where the dis is “break” and jejunare means “fast.”

It’s easy to see that this is closely related to the French meal déjeuner meaning “beakfast.”

Dinner is clearly related to dine and both words popped into English in 1297 in the same old document, Robert of Gloucester’s Metrical Chronicle.

Because of its antiquity this document was highly thought of, until William Aldis Wright—a big wheel in English language study 100 years ago—gave it a careful editorial review, after which it is evidently considered in academic circles “worthless as history” and “verse without one spark of poetry.”

Dine out on that one.

I also wanted to say that Grant Barrett, author of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English has recently made this slang dictionary available for free download.  You can go download the book for free, but you might also think of listening to his podcast. Along with Martha Barnette, Grant hosts A Way With Words.

To the average person there doesn’t appear to be much difference between a minus sign and a hyphen and a dash. But to the trained professional not only are there differences between these three, there are several flavors of each.

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Some people use a dash in their email address.

Or are they using a hyphen?

A dash is so called because starting around 1552 it was at first the written equivalent of a violent blow. Now you can choose from en-dash and em-dash so called because an en-dash is supposed to be as wide as an “n” and an em-dash as wide as an “m.”

On our keyboards what we usually get is an en-dash and we use this quite insensitively to represent a minus sign.

A minus sign has quite a different history.

The first appearance of a minus sign in English seems to have been back 1483 and we seem  to have gotten the concept from German merchants who used the symbol along with the plus sign to keep track of their goods.

You already know when to use a minus sign but according to the best sources there are times when you should use a dash and not a hyphen and other times when you should use a hyphen and not a dash.

Evidently a dash is a more casual piece of punctuation and you can throw it in when you are feeling less buttoned down than a colon might imply.

A hyphen is a little more formal so you shouldn’t get the two confused.

But since they look the same, and they use the same key on the keyboard I admit it’s hard not to get the two confused.

As to why a hyphen is called a hyphen that goes back to Greek.

You can sort of tell it might be Greek because hyphen is spelled h-y-p-h-e-n instead of h-i-f-e-n.

The word made the leap into English in the early 1600s because Greek and Latin scholars were using it.  It didn’t come from Greek directly though because those scholars sometimes tended to smear one classical language into another so it seems to have been a late Latin word as well.

But the Greeks used hyphens, just as we do, to show when two words should be treated as if they were one; like self-sufficient.

The Greek meaning of the word hyphen is  “in one” and so it makes sense that we would treat two words as one when they are joined by a hyphen.

But that’s the figurative meaning, not the literal meaning.

The hyp part of hyphen is related to the hyp part of hypodermic which means “under the skin.” So the literal meaning of hyphen is “under one” and when the Greeks used a hyphen they didn’t draw a little dash between the two words they were joining.  Instead, they drew a little smile-shaped curve under the two words to show that they were joined.

But if you think that hyphens, minus signs and dashes are confusing, just think of how messed up Charles Daubney must have been when in 1850 he was thinking about the “joining” meaning of hyphen and so used the word hyphen to refer to what you and I would call a plus sign.

Yesterday at the Oxford University Press blog I revisited the word hurricane and mentioned a few other words for circular storms; cyclone, tornado and typhoon.

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I didn’t get much into the etymology of typhoon but it’s one of those rare words that blew in from two places with similar enough meanings that one word came to apply in both cases.

The American Heritage Dictionary declares with authority that the word started its life in Greece as Typhon the name of a hundred-headed fire breathing giant who was father of the wind.

John Ayto’s Word Origins says with equal certainty that typhoon arose in Cantonese from two words daai feng meaning “great wind.”

Both acknowledge the influence of the alternate source but The Oxford English Dictionary takes a middle road saying that both of these were influential at different times.

The word appears in Urdu and this is thought to have evolved into Arabic and Persian words for these gigantic storms. But the English Language didn’t come to absorb this word until Arabic speakers had brought it to India and an Italian by the name of Cesare Federici had set it to paper in Italian during a commercial voyage there.

His account was translated into English in 1588 by one Thomas Hickock who in his title refers to the original author as a “merchant of Venice.”

This was decade before William Shakespeare wrote his play The Merchant of Venice.

I’m not suggesting there is any more link here than the mercantile fame of Venetians at the time.

The upshot is that a word with potentially Greek roots made its way across the Mideast to the Indian subcontinent before finding its way into English.

It was 100 years later that English travelers then applied this name of the storm to similar meteorological phenomenon in the Far East.

It only becomes clear that the Cantonese word was also an influence 100 years again after that.

That middle reference just before 1700 was made in a book by William Dampier. He was a buccaneer, which is a polite way of saying pirate.

He eventually sailed three times around the world but his rise to fame came because as a relatively junior pirate he kept notes, and after his first big voyage published a book.

Who knows if his fellow buccaneers or his captains knew more than he did, but because he was the author, he was seen as the authority and the admiralty commissioned him to take command of a second expedition.

Being a pirate he perhaps wasn’t the most kind or gentle of souls and when he returned to England he was stripped of his command, docked pay and thrown out of the navy for cruelty.  This at a time when hanging crew members for insubordination was still okay for a captain.

Luckily for Dampier soon after that England was preparing for war with Spain and France and pirates were needed…oh, I mean privateers were needed to help in the stormy international relations.

The other day in my inbox appeared a word-of-the-day from the photoblog Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary.

The word was kee.

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This is not a word that I was familiar with. Nor I suppose are you.

If you ask the average person on the street what the plural of cow is, they’d likely tell you cows.

I’d even go so far as to guess that if you asked the average dairy or beef farmer in their barn, they’d reply cows as well.

But according to Samuel Johnson, in some parts of England at the time he was compiling his dictionary—which was the mid 1700s—the plural of cow was kee.

Fortunately for us Samuel Johnson goes on to point out that this was only a provincial usage and that it wasn’t the proper plural word for cow.

Oh, no, the proper word was kine.

It turns out that the plural cows had only just appeared as an English word with any frequency in the century before Johnson.  People were still using kine, and evidently kee, during his lifetime.

This variety in the plural word for cow underlines for me the ongoing importance of dialect.

The English language is not now uniformly spoken across the world and this has always been the case.

The word cow came to English with the Germanic Anglo-Saxons as cuu and may have roots tracing back to Indo-European.

Cows have long been very important to people, who, through most of history would have lived closer to, and seen more of, cows than we do today.  But in times before motorized transport and mass communications local language pockets evolved words like cuu slightly differently from place to place.

Long before Samuel Johnson, a degree of standardization had come to English through expanding literacy, but accents and local dialects persisted then and they persist now.

No one has quite figured out why this might be.

We now live in a world of conflicting pressures on the standardization of the language.  On the one hand broader and more instantaneous communications mean that we can all hear the English spoken by any other English speaker.  The internet age means that superstars that might influence how we say things are all the more widely known.

Yet at the same time the English language has permeated more locations and cultures than ever before and so, many more local usages can be expected to be integrated into English.

Part of the reason there are still local accents and dialects might be tribalism. That’s why there were differences centuries ago. It’s still true today I think.

I heard Grant Barrett just recently talk about how he learned to use the phrase “standing on line” when he moved to New York and how it is part of the bag of tricks people use to mark themselves as belonging.

I know everyone else calls those things cows, but we here in outer provincia, we call those things kee.

The word gossip today can be a verb or a noun.

The verb to gossip of course means to talk about something that is usually none of your business.

The noun can either apply to the topic of conversation that you shouldn’t be having, or to the person who engages in such idle chatter. Such a person is usually imagined to be a woman.

This gender stereotyping may seem unfair but it’s interesting because when gossip first entered English a thousand years ago, the gender associated with the word was masculine not feminine.

The word came from Old Norse as something like godsib and the feminine was more or less godsifja.

Not only was the gender different from today but so was the meaning. The god in godsib was quite litera,l and as in our word sibling the sib meant “relative” so that godsib meant “relative in god.”

So someone who was a gossip was someone who came to sponsor a child at their baptism, a godfather or godmother; as gossip quickly lost its gender.

The route from such a spiritual family friend to the exasperating cow who’s always telling tales behind your back is really quite a simple one. A godparent is obviously a dear friend and by the mid 1300s a gossip had come to mean simply a good friend.

By the time of Shakespeare gossip had more or less completed its sex change and such people were usually considered female—although still very good friends.

Around the same time a second meaning was growing, the one we know today, but it wasn’t until 200 years ago that the actual talk itself took its name from the gasbags who went on and on about it.

This is not a word that most people are happy to hear.  It tends to be used with disapproval.

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Well, it used to be used with disapproval.

These days I guess it’s being used all too often with the hope of attracting an audience.

I see a news story about a teacher sending salacious messages to a student.  That’s definitely disapproved of!

A Broadway show where actresses take off all their clothes is promoted as salacious.  That doesn’t sound like disapproval to me.

Here’s one, Tom Hanks; the disapproval here is that there are no salacious stories about him. The reporter is disappointed to report that they can’t report any juicy scandal.

The Merriam-Webster Unabridged dictionary tells me that the meaning of the word salacious is “inciting to sexual desire or imagination” or “marked by lecherousness or lewdness.”

The word was first used in English in the latter 1600s and had been drawn directly from Latin by the high-flown scholars of the day.  Back in Latin the word had been salax with a root salire which in turn went back to an Indo-European root sel.

You can be sure that back in pre-history people were interested in sex, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.  But however they expressed themselves about it, it wasn’t by using the root sel.

Sel meant “jump” and shows up in some of our other English words such as assault and somersault.

Similarly the Latin word salire meant “jump” or “leap.”

But for those people who had little self control and who liked to jump on women Latin evolved the new word salax.

So quite literally something that is salacious is something that makes people want to jump their partner.

In an effort to improve the self control of those few of my listeners and readers who might need it, I return to the first English citation for the word salacious.  This was by an author named Owen Felltham or Feltham.

His big literary hit in the century after Shakespeare was something called Resolves.

It was a book meant to improve your morals by telling 100 little stories and ending each one with a resolve that he hoped his readers would adopt.

His use of the word salacious here might be understandable.

But in fact he isn’t talking about his fellow countrymen and the birds and the bees.  Instead he’s talking about the birds themselves.

He accuses the sparrow of being salacious.

Now over the last few decades the population of sparrows in the United Kingdom has ranged from 6 to 12 million individuals.  The population of people in England is 61 million.  That’s five to ten times as many people as there are sparrows.

I ask you, which species is more jumpy?

With all the flowers out in my part of the world I’m also seeing the bees visiting those flowers.

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As I sat at my desk today, twice within half an hour big fat bumble bees banged repeatedly into my office window.  They made such a sound I thought they must really have gotten a headache, if a bee can get a headache.

The word bee is about as simple a word as we can get in English.  This is often a characteristic of Anglo-Saxon words that have survived into modernity, being simple and short. Sure enough bee comes to us from Old English and thus from Germanic parentage.

The dictionaries aren’t certain but it appears that the Germanic name for these honey-giving insects arose from an Indo-European root meaning “quiver.” By extension the stinging little gals are named for their buzz.

One of the entries for bee at Urbandictionary calls them

“black and yellow cuddly furry little flying Teddy Bears.”

That’s quite an affectionate way to think about a bug that can and often does sting. Likely the author of this loving tribute was thinking not of honey-bees but bumble-bees.

As I said, several bees recently bumbled into my windowpane but looking at the etymology of their name I see that despite this seeming lack of coordination, bumble-bees are not named for their clumsy ways.

The Latin name for a bumble-bee is Bombus and this word doesn’t refer to their dive-bombing tendencies, but is a Latin word meaning “booming” or “buzzing.”

A look in the OED shows that the original appearance of bumble was from the pen of Geoffrey Chaucer and also meant “boom” and “buzz.”

So it seems that every way we look at it, it is the sound of these insects that gives them their name.