Hi there, what’s your sign? I’m a Pisces.

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I remember a little poem from Mad Magazine: The ardent Pisces loves to feel, he’s one great mass of sex appeal. You’d think by now that he would see the girls who date him don’t agree.

Now Pisces is a fish so I guess that’s understandable.

As a sign of the zodiac Pisces is etymologically appropriate insofar as a fish is an animal.

Taurus the bull, Leo the lion and Capricorn the goat, they all make sense; but what’s with Virgo the virgin and Gemini the twins and Aquarius the water carrier? I mean the etymology of zodiac goes back to the same root as the word zoo. Shouldn’t the zodiac be full of animals like the zoo?

The word zodiac literally means a “circle of animals” and was once two words in Greek.

The ancients looked up into the heavens and noticed that things like the sun and moon appeared to move across the sky within a certain band of width. They divided this band up according to the constellations they thought looked a little like connect-the-dots figures in the sky. Some of these appeared to look like animals and so the whole darned lot got labeled from the Greek word zoion meaning “animal.”

So even back then the humanoid connect-the-dots figures got lumped in with the animals.

Now I don’t take the signs of the zodiac or my horoscope too seriously and that’s why I so enjoyed a skit that Father Guido Sarducci once did. He had branched out from writing his gossip column in the Vatican newspaper and was also doing the horoscope.

He said it was easy because once you’d written a few you could just move them around and no one would ever know.

Another famous zodiac is that kind of inflatable boat. These are made by an international company based in France. It makes sense that these guys would invent an inflatable boat because the company’s original product was a balloon; that is, a lighter-than-air airship.

Their original logo depicts a zeppelin-like airship floating through that circle of animals.

The corporate website says that the company name as well as its English spelling are a bit of an enigma. I don’t know about the spelling part but it seems to me that a company that built airships would be well advised to choose a name associated with things floating across the heavens.

I came across an op-ed piece by Garrison Keillor in which he is lamenting the replacement of homemade potato salad by store bought potato salad that comes in pails. He wishes people took the time to do things right.

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This relates to the word hobnob because Keillor uses the word twice in his article.  First with respect to the potato salad:

“When the family meets this weekend to hobnob and burn burgers, the family member assigned to bring the potato salad is likely going to walk in with a couple of gallon plastic buckets of yellowish muck…”

Later in the article he bemoans this taking of shortcuts by saying

“What if Thomas Jefferson had been too busy hobnobbing to write the Declaration of Independence…”

I’m here to tell you that it’s true that many of those burger burning families hobnob; and that despite the fact that the Declaration of Independence came out okay, Thomas Jefferson was one all-star hobnobber.

First to the definition of hobnob as found in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary under definition number two: “to associate familiarly, go about in an easy informal companionship.”

Clearly this is the meaning Garrison Keillor meant. But it’s the earlier meaning I’m thinking of.

The reason that hobnob means to “go about in an easy informal companionship” is that originally hobnob meant “to have and to have not.” The hob is “have” and the nob is “have not.”

In Shakespeare’s day the phrase had a sense of “give or take.”

The question thus becomes, how did a phrase meaning “give or take” come to mean “easy informal companionship” and moreover, what does that have to do with barbeques and Thomas Jefferson?

The first connection has to do with being companionable. When you are hanging out with your friends in a drinking establishment it’s pretty common that you’ll take turns buying the drinks. It’s this give and take approach that lent the word hobnob to this practice by the mid 1700s and from there to simply hanging out in the bar together.

Thus to hobnob for a time meant not just to “go about” together, but specifically to “drink together.”

That’s why I said I’m certain lots of summer barbeques involved hobnobbing.

As to Thomas Jefferson, he is seen as an early and influential wine lover who is known to have helped many of his contemporaries with their own wine cellars. It’s safe to assume therefore that he was not only an all-star hobnober when it came to winning friends and influencing people, but he must too have enjoyed drinking together with many of them.

Yet another connection between etymology and wine.

I don’t recommend that you look up the word school at Urbandictionary.

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The evidence of the age of the user group shines through for that particular entry. There is plenty of profanity but here are a couple of clean quotes that give you the general idea.

“School: a place where young, innocent, defenseless children are kept prisoner…”

and

“Welcome, I am the Government. We have a plan for your future, kid…”

With that kind of approach to school you’d think people had no idea of the etymology of the word.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, once a very long time ago there was a word segh that meant “to hold.” This little word morphed over time into a Greek word skhole that meant “to hold back.”

The meaning here included holding back from working too hard and so skhole as an ancestor word to school actually meant “leisure.”

Next time you hear some kid complaining about school you can remember—I wouldn’t suggest actually telling them—that school, etymologically at least, means “taking it easy.”

The problem for today’s student is that those Greeks liked to learn things in their leisure time. It was this thirst for knowledge that changed the meaning of the word from “leisure” to “learning.”

The Romans picked up the Greek word and adopted it into Latin and since they then proceeded to send out armies of conquest far and wide this Latin root morphed into words that students hated from Spain and Ireland to Poland and Russia.

Some time ago in an episode on the word park I talked about why we park on the driveway and drive on the parkway.

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Today I’m going to talk about the word drive.

It is a deceptively simple word; deceptive because it shows up in quite a few contexts. The context I suggested just now is that of driving a car. But why would the act of moving across the landscape in a sculpture of metal, glass, rubber and plastic be etymologically related to a snowdrift or a computer hard drive?

Back in Indo-European there was a word dhreibh that had the sense of “push” to it.

The ancestor of drive first turns up in English back in Old English as drifan and back then the meaning was akin to the drive in cattle drive.

To drive for most of English history was to force animals to move out ahead of you.

When we drive a car though we are actually in the thing.

The reason we drive cars instead of ride cars or conduct cars is that back before cars people drove wagons and horse drawn carriages.  Unless you put the cart before the horse you were forcing animals to move out ahead of you.

This was made much more relaxing by tying a wheeled vehicle to the animals that you were driving.

Seeing some of those early renditions of the word drive and knowing that the root meaning was “to force before” it gets easier to understand why the word is related to snowdrift. In fact that Indo-European root word had already taken on a meaning of “snow,” presumably because so often a blizzard rolls in with driven snow.

This now shows us why that pile of snow called a snowdrift is related to the drifting you might do in a canoe; both have to do with being pushed along by the wind.

It turns out that English is unique in its use of a word like drive to describe how we use cars. John Ayto points out in his book Word Origins that other Indo-European descended languages don’t “push” their cars but instead “lead” or “guide” them.

It is this pushing meaning within English that lends the word not only to the drive shaft of the car but also to the naming convention in computer hardware. It isn’t uncommon for people to talk about storing data on this or that hard drive, but if I look at the organization of my computer as defined by Microsoft Windows I see that “C” is labeled Local Disk while “D” is labeled DVD-RAM Drive.

The subtlety is that the drive is the thing that forces the disk to spin.

Victor Borge had a great comedy routine that he built up around punctuation.

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He complained that it was hard to understand English because people didn’t include punctuation in their spoken communications the way they did in their written communication.  He then demonstrated how periods, commas and dashes might sound if we actually spoke them.

But I’m here to tell you that Victor Borge was wrong.

We do include punctuation with the spoken word and the word comma is here to prove it.

Here’s what The Oxford English Dictionary has to say

“the function of the comma is to make clear the grammatical structure, and hence the sense, of the passage; one of the means by which this is effected in actual speech is a short pause.”

“But”—I  hear you scratching your head—“isn’t a comma just a symbol that shows the reader where they are supposed to imagine that pause?”

I guess you’re right there, that’s what a comma is now to most people, but it wasn’t always so. The OED goes on:

“the comma is often inaccurately said to be merely the mark of such a pause.”

You see, the word comma came to English around the time of Shakespeare 400 years ago from Latin and originally Greek. In Greek the root word meant “a piece cut off” and so became the name of a part of a sentence that had been cut off from the rest of the sentence by that little pause.

It was only later in English that this word that referred to part of the sentence came to mean the thing that signified where the break in the sentence came.

Some people get right snooty about where commas should and shouldn’t be.

Lynne Truss made a bundle on this with her book Eats, Shoots and Leaves; it sold millions—a book on punctuation, go figure.

She was kind enough to give a blurb to my book on the words we use for our bodies. Then my publisher was unkind enough to mis-spell her name right there on my book cover.

Sorry Lynne.

I am going somewhere with this.

The error made in forgetting the final “e” in Lynne’s name was clearly an oversight due to insufficient scrutiny of the text. I’m sure you’ve come across instances of just the opposite, where a whole committee reviews text ad- nauseam.

An author of a century ago called this comma hunting.

Francis Cornford wrote Microcosmographia Academica, which is Greek for “a study of a tiny academic world.” He was making fun of the politics at Cambridge University and as part of his satire he likened comma hunting to a sport.

He warned however that if one spends too much energy comma hunting then a paper might get through because it wasn’t “properly obstructed on its [other] demerits.”

What caught my eye about Francis Cornford was—as Wikipedia puts it—“ Francis Cornford should not be confused with his wife, Frances Cornford.” He spelled Francis, she Frances. She of course not originally being a Cornford but a Darwin.

Yes that Darwin; Charles was her grampa.

In 1849 a scholarly journal was first published, still running, called Notes & Queries.

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Six years later a correspondent submitted the question “clap-trap: what is the derivation?”

I’ll get to the answer in a moment.

First though I’ll define claptrap.  According to The Oxford Dictionary of English, second edition claptrap is “absurd or nonsensical talk or ideas.”

The word has a ring to it doesn’t it. You can imagine someone up on stage with their trap clapping away as they blab on about nothing at all. But the derivation isn’t based on someone’s trap clapping.

In fact, the original claptrap wasn’t considered nonsense by those who heard it either.

Here’s what the editors of Notes & Queries had to say in response.

“The term clap-trap seems to have derived its name from the clap-net, a device for catching larks; for according to Bailey, ‘A clap-trap is a name given to the rant and rhymes that dramatic poets, to please the actors, let them go off with; as much as to say, a trap to catch a clap by way of applause from the spectators at a play.’”

Let me dissect that for you. It was written 150 years ago and there are a few ideas all combined together there.

The main point is that the word claptrap refers literally to a device, a trap, that is designed to capture applause; clapping.

A clap-trap was a cheap line that the writers threw in there with the sole intention of getting a good reaction from the audience to thereby stroke the egos of the actors.

So that’s why I said that originally claptrap was a good thing; the audience liked it, the actors liked it. It’s just that it served no other purpose than as a “feel-good” and so grew to mean “nonsense.”

But what about that clap-net thing used to catch larks?

Nowhere else in the etymological sources do I see this connection, but a clap-net was a kind of net that had a drawstring around the edge so that once your bird flew into it you could “clap” it closed. The connection to claptrap seems accidental to me, but then I’m not an editor of Notes & Queries.

Notes & Queries was then touted as being for “literary men” and so when the editors tossed off the line “according to Bailey” they expected their readers to know that they were referring to Nathan Bailey, a guy who produced a series of very popular dictionaries in the 1700s.

But then if the readers of Notes & Queries were “literary men” I guess they wouldn’t have been reading Nathan Bailey’s dictionaries because they were supposed to be for “the Ignorant, and for the Benefit of young Students, Artificers, Tradesmen, and Foreigners, who are desirous thorowly to understand what they Speak, Read, or Write.”

Sunday and Monday are obvious in being named in honor of ancient gods of the sun and the moon and we can recognize the god of thunder, Thor in Thursday.

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It was Thor’s dad, Woden who is remembered (though not so clearly) in Wednesday, and Thor’s brother Tui in Tuesday.

Woden was the king of the gods and hung out in Valhalla.  Among other things he was the god of war.

Woden was his Anglo-Saxon name while in Norse he was Oden.

The English modeled our names for the days of the week along the lines of the Romans who had ditched their system of more or less having a name for every day of the month, in favor of the seven day system.  They adopted it from a system that was originally from Mesopotamia where each day was linked to a celestial body.

English kept three—Sunday, Monday and Saturday (from Saturn) but changed the other four to gods they already knew and loved—the only one I’m missing is Friday.

Friday replaced Venus’ day and since Venus is the god of love the Anglo-Saxons put in her place their god of love, who’s name, believe it or not, is Frigg.

It gives a whole new meaning to “thank god it’s Friday”—two new meanings actually.  Frigg was the wife of Woden.

This podictionary episode is a re-run from 2005. I see though that Anatoly Liberman did a piece more recently on Wednesday’s Father and revisited the theme at the beginning of July 2009.

In this time of economic difficulty it’s unusual for people to have a bulging budget, however, etymologically it seems your budget should be bulging.

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Long long ago, in the days when people were speaking a language that is now often called Proto-Indo-European they had a word bhelgh that meant “to swell.”

The dictionaries tell us that this word root swelled into several different English words including belly, bellows and bolster.

A bolster is one of those feather filled blankets and it swells up nicely to keep you warm on a cold night.

A bellows is one of those devices used to blow air on the coals in a fireplace so it swells and puffs as you work it.

I find it sort of comforting that the very word belly is based on a word root meaning “to swell”; it makes me feel better as I reach for a cookie.

Anyway, one of the words that evolved from that Indo-European root was a Gaulish word that got picked up by Latin. In Latin it came out as bulga which meant “a leather bag or knapsack.”

We can imagine that the meaning transference here was due to the fact that when you stuff your suitcase full of all the junk you feel it’s essential to have with you, the thing begins to swell.

As is the way with French, this Latin word took on yet another life as bougette.  Here the ending “t” sound means “little one” so that a bougette was a “little leather bag.” As you already know, lots of French words transmogrified into English words after the Normans took over and that’s why small leather bags were called budgets in English by the 1400s.

There is one particular type of small leather bag that seems to add a little confusion to this etymology. Many of the dictionaries include “wallet” among the early meanings of budget. A wallet certainly has financial associations and so could easily be thought of as the reason why a budget came to be related to finances. But this isn’t quite the route that the meaning took.

Instead, for a few hundred years, starting around Shakespeare’s time, a budget took on the meaning of a collection of documents as might be carried in a leather case.  It was this sense that applied when in 1733 Sir Robert Walpole was criticized for his financial planning on behalf of the British government in a pamphlet called The Budget Opened.

The pamphlet used this title because the plans on how the government was planning to spend money took the form of a bundle of documents carried into Parliament in a leather bag.

So the first time a budget specifically meant a financial plan was in the case of the financial plans of the British government. From there a budget began to mean the financial plan of other governments and eventually to the finances of individuals.

It’s Friday so most people will be feeling fairly jovial.

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According to the American Heritage Dictionary to be jovial means to be “marked by hearty conviviality and good cheer.”

But when I look at the etymology of jovial I see that what jovial literally means is that you are “of Jove” as in “by Jove I think she’s got it.”

Back in the 1500s when people didn’t have the choice between believing in astrology or believing in science it was quite popular to attribute your personality traits to some imagined association with the alignment of the planets.  Someone who was “of Jove” was someone said to be born under the influence of the planet Jupiter.

People seen to be born under the influence of Jupiter were supposed to be happier than other people. And why not? There is a reason why the planet Jupiter is called Jupiter.

The opening line of the Wikipedia entry for Jupiter reads “Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is … two and a half times more massive than all of the other planets in our Solar System combined.”

On the theory that biggest is best this big ball of gas was named after the boss of the gods in the Roman pantheon. Jupiter was—according to Merriam-Webster—the chief god, the god of light and of the sky and weather among other things.

Clearly being born under the influence of the boss was a good thing.

The name of this chief god came to me as a worthy subject of a podictionary episode while I was browsing The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.

There in the introduction is a passage that I particularly like, emphasizing how interesting and meaningful etymology is. The editor, Calvert Watkins, compares the etymology of the word Jupiter to the artifacts you might see in a museum.

The word Jupiter is actually a contraction of Jovis pater.

The roots of both Jovis and pater reach back from Latin, through Greek and into Indo-European.*

Of Jovis he points out that its Indo-European parent word for god was deiwos, itself a derivative of the Indo-European word meaning “to shine” and also appearing in their word for “day.” From this we can understand that their view of religion had to do with light and the sky; consistent with the Merriam-Webster definition for Jupiter I noted above.

The second part of the word, pater means “father.”Not in the sense of “male parent,” but in a sense of “head of the household” and thus shows us that Indo-European society was patriarchal.

As Watkins puts it, this word Jupiter “alone tells us more about the conceptual world of the Indo-Europeans than a roomful of graven images.”

*Evidently not. See comments.

Here’s a quote from 1889:

“Hughes’ Microphone… The microphone is nothing but a telephonic transmitter, but it owes its name..to its power to convert vibrations of feeble intensity into undulatory currents, which, passing through a receiving telephone, produce sonorous vibrations of much greater intensity than those of the original source.”

So now you know what a microphone is.

Or do I have to amplify that a little? The quote above underlines the importance of a microphone as part of the telephone.

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Back in 1889 the telephone had been around for decades already. Few houses had them but the first concept is said to have arisen in the 1840s and then to have been made to work in the lab and have achieved patent status by the 1860s. Among electronics geeks of the 1880s then the idea of the telephone was old hat.

What was new was this Hughes’ Microphone.

David Hughes had been born in England and moved to Kentucky. He used the word microphone to describe the working part of the mouthpiece in a telephone because at the time it had been particularly hard to take the sounds coming out of someone’s mouth and convert that energy into electricity that could then be sent over wires to a speaker that would chatter the message into someone else’s ear. The amount of energy contained in the tiny pressure waves in the air that constituted what someone was saying, just weren’t enough to power much of an electrical current in the wires.

Hughes figured out a better way to do this and so he was able to take small sounds and from them produce bigger corresponding currents.

If you wanted to say “small sound” in Greek you’d say microsphon; hence microphone.

But small sounds had been around before the invention of the telephone and so had Greek.

People don’t usually talk about things that don’t concern them and only people who had a hard time hearing were particularly concerned with small sounds.

So it was that as early as 1684 any device that assisted the deaf might be called a microphone.

What people were referring to then was usually an ear trumpet.

The only thing an ear trumpet does is to take the vibrations that occupy, let’s say one square foot, and concentrate them down to the square centimeter or so that is the human eardrum.

It seems to me that all those satellite dishes we see screwed to people’s houses are doing approximately the same thing with electromagnetic waves.  By that logic shouldn’t they be called microwaves?