Frogs have long played a part in popular culture.

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Kermit had star power among the muppets.

Young women are forced to kiss lots of frogs to find a prince

When the Jews were trying to escape slavery in Egypt one of the tricks used to convince the Pharaoh to let them go was to send in a plague of frogs.

The Greeks had their tale of a war between the frogs and the mice.

I think the frogs must have won that one in the end because if you look in research labs these days it’s mice that are being experimented on. For a while there though the frog dissection you may have done in high school was so representative of their use in scientific research that they have been called martyrs to science.

One scientist commenting on how scientific theories are improved upon over time said “The biologist passes, the frog remains.”

According to Wikipedia frogs are the best jumpers of all vertebrates and it may be this ability to hop that gave them their name.

According to Merriam Webster our word frog, though decidedly Germainc, is related to a Sanskrit word for “frog” plava which in turn is related to Sanskrit pravate meaning “he jumps up.”

There is no mention of this jumping or hopping etymology in either The Oxford English Dictionary nor in John Ayto’s Word Origins.

In languages that arose out of Latin the word for “frog” isn’t based on the power of the animal’s legs for jumping, but instead from the power of its voice. The Latin word meaning “frog” was rana and is thought to have come from the sound of imitating a frog’s croak.

Although frogs are amphibians, not reptiles, in The Devil’s Dictionary Ambrose Bierce defines a frog as” a reptile with edible legs.”

The taste for frog’s legs is said to be behind the offensive use of the word frog to mean “French.” However, according to the OED frog has been a personal insult quite apart from nationality since 1330 and in 1652 was specifically associated with the Dutch, not the French.

The word uncle is one of those words that breaks the world into three groups.

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There’s your immediate family, your extended family, and everyone else.

Etymologically uncle means “little grandfather.” So uncle places the person in that second circle, close to you but not actually your direct parent.

Way back in Indo-European there was a word for “grandfather” that was awo.

By the time this got into Latin it was avus.

The diminutive of avus was avunculus thus “little grandfather.”

By the time this Latin word avunculus got into French, before it arrived in English, it had the leading and trailing parts worn off to give us uncle.

In Latin though, avunculus was specifically your mother’s brother. Your father’s brother had a completely different title patruus; a title clearly related to his status in terms of father or pater as opposed to a little grandfather.

Uncles are friendly characters. Why shouldn’t they be, they have a big stake in your success if only because you share a big chunk of their genes.

This feeling of friendliness turns up in all kinds of cultural references and fictional characters.

Uncle Sam is an embodiment of the United States conveniently sharing its initials; evidently first appearing as a counter-embodiment of John Bull the British personification, during the conflicts between those two countries a couple of centuries ago.

There was a TV show in the 60s called the Man from UNCLE where the friendliness of uncle reinforced the notion that this secret spy agency represented the good guys.

UNCLE stood for United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

Only the bad guys might argue with that.

The bad guys, by the way, had their own organization THRUSH that stood for Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity.

There doesn’t seem to have been any deeper meaning to THRUSH as there might have been for UNCLE in terms of the names of the organizations since a thrush is a bird and a fairly cute and harmless one at that.

Originally though, during the TV show’s pilot episode, the criminal organization had been WASP and we all know what that means.

I don’t know why they changed the name except perhaps the connotation of WASP standing for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant and the fact that so much of the TV audience of the 1960s fell into this demographic.

When someone asks about my appetite it’s usually because they are going to feed me.

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The connection between the word appetite and eating is reflected in this 1911definition from The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. There he says that appetite is “An instinct thoughtfully implanted by Providence as a solution to the labor question.”

As you likely remember Ambrose Bierce was a curmudgeonly newspaperman from a century ago and what he mean here was that people have to go to work so they can buy groceries.

In his mind “the labor question” wasn’t that there was too much unemployment, but that people would be lazy and unproductive if they didn’t need to eat.

Although our association of the word appetite to eating is so strong that one might imagine a phrase like “appetite for adventure” to be a metaphorical use of the word, in fact the Latin roots of appetite mean “strong desire” and have nothing in particular to do with food.

The root in Latin was petere “to seek.”

The fact that after needing to breathe our need to eat is our most frequent and strongest desire meant that a relationship between food and the word appetite had already evolved before the word arrived in English from French 700 years ago.

When it comes to strong desire love and sex are right up there on the hierarchy of needs. John Vanbrugh about 300 years ago said “In matters of love men … have violent appetites, ’tis true; but they have soon dined.”

In the neighborhood where I live a convent recently went on the market.

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This made the news because for years a significant piece of real-estate fairly close to downtown had been hidden behind high walls as the nuns who lived there kept their quiet ways.

Now, evidently there aren’t enough nuns left to make it worthwhile holding onto and the real-estate prices would likely make a welcome addition to church coffers.

The city is trying to designate the convent building itself as a heritage structure but the surrounding acreage will likely become stores, houses and condos.

So that all made me think of the word nun.

So many of the oldest Old English words show up in church documents that it isn’t much surprise that the word nun is among them.

The reason that so many words seem to trace back to church origins is that it was in the churches that literacy was taught and valued. Another reason might be the fact that documents likely to have survived the thousand-years-plus since Old English, needed a place to stay for all those years and churches were sometimes safer than other places.

Thus we find that nun was an Old English word.

But nun is also a word that has a Latin etymology. This is a bit confusing since most English words with Latin backgrounds have them because they arrived with French and the Norman Conquest and as such should rightfully be Middle English words, not Old English.

But since the church was filled with Latin nun was one of a smaller number of Latin based words that sneaked into English while it was still Old English, before the French had such a big influence on Middle English.

As far back as 1600 years ago in Latin the word nonna had been the female equivalent of nonnus which had meant “monk.”

Before that these two words are found to have had referred to a “wet-nurse” and a “foster father” respectively.  In some languages related words mean “grandmother” and “grandfather.”

The thinking is that the root word was one like momma that a young child might use. But in this case the word was used to refer to a respected person not related to you as mother or father.

Thus the deepest meaning of nun is directly analogous to the title of the chief nun at a convent, the mother superior; or similarly evolved in the same way that a priest is called father.

This is a revision of an episode first aired in 2005.

The word orchard has been growing for a long time.  It is one of those words that first appear in English in the writings of Alfred the Great who died back in the year 899.

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As an aside, this word brings to our attention a change in The Oxford English Dictionary. In the Second Edition—which was updated to 1997—old citations are dated.

For example King Alfred’s use of orchard is dated circa 897.

In the third edition—which is now in draft but available by online subscription—there is no specific date.  Instead the entry is marked simply as “early Old English.”

I hunted around to find out why this might be so.

The answer is that many of the old documents from which scholars study Old English are actually copies.  They are still really old, but they aren’t originals from the time the works were first written. Instead they are old documents that have been re-written by hand.

So it is possible that words from these documents were changed or added during the copying.

This is a policy decision on the part of the OED that I can understand but I’m not sure I agree with.  They don’t want to mislead with dates they can’t prove, but in avoiding misinformation they are making the information they do have a little less available.

But who am I to say?

Back to orchard.

Most dictionaries break orchard into two parts—hortus and yard.  The first half is from Latin and means “garden” and is an obvious relative of “horticulture.”

Yard is still a word we use today and the compound “garden yard” would seem to make sense, particularly when we learn that the earliest orchards were used for gardening in general, including fruit trees as we would imagine these days.

The word yard is closely related to the word garden—it’s that middle ard sound—so that orchard might literally be translated as “garden garden.”

This is a common trick.

We have a number of words and expressions that are actually repetitions of their own meanings.  La Brea Tar Pits was one; brea being “tar” in Spanish. Another is rice paddy since in Malay padi means “rice.”

Last week I revised an old episode I’d done on the word moll. I said there that such a woman was sometimes called a gun moll but that in her case the gun wasn’t the kind that fired bullets.

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When I posted that episode I noticed an unanswered comment that had been left by Lou back in March.

Lou asks the obvious question “where did we get the word gun?”

Since guns are often used for fighting it may be appropriate that the etymological sources do a little bit of battle on this one.

The losing candidates in this gun battle include that

1. there was once a kind of catapult called a mangonel used to throw stones at one’s enemies and that this word was shortened down to gun;
2. there is a French word gonne meaning “barrel” that somehow was applied to weapons; and
3. that the word gun is somehow supposed to represent the sound of a gun going off.

The fact that these theories are out there shows that there is not concrete proof of what the root of gun really is. But the most likely etymology is also the most fun.

Just like there is a history of men naming their boats after women, there appears to be a history of men naming their weapons after women.

In the records of Windsor Castle of the year 1330 to 1331 there is included in the accounts mention of one Lady Gunilda. This wasn’t a person but perhaps an important kind of crossbow or catapult.

The name Gunilda was a legitimate female name from Old Norse and breaks down to two other names, Gunnr and Hildr, which are particularly appropriate. Modern equivalent names might be Günter and Hilda, both of which mean war or battle.

So it appears that the guns that people tote around these days are called guns because more than 700 years ago someone dubbed a particularly impressive weapon with a woman’s name; and that whether that name was consciously chosen because of its warlike etymology or not, it was a particularly fitting name to be applied to a weapon.

I am not fond of the job of vacuuming the house. Nor am I fond of being around when anyone else is vacuuming. It’s noisy and I’m not a fan of loud machines.

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Funny that a device with a name that means “nothing” should fill the air with so much racket.

For the word vacuum comes to English directly from Latin in the 16^th century. The Latin root is vacuus meaning “empty.”

Hence the word vacuous which to means to me someone who is rather empty headed; though literally it means anything that’s empty.

My memory of the word vacuous is anything but highfalutin since I recall it as being used in the Monty Python skit about buying a an argument.

The word vacuum on the other hand came into English in a very high-flown manner from the pen of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

As well as being Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer helped out King Henry VIII with his domestic troubles.

It was Thomas Cranmer who said “naturall reason abhorreth vacuum” and in fact it was this quote that represents the first use of vacuum in the English written record.

I went and had a look at the document where this quotation comes from to see if I could get some context and from what I can see Cranmer was a bit of an expert at evaluating how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.

That is to say he was experienced at making convoluted theological arguments and in this case his argument had to do with bread and wine that would not go moldy or turn to vinegar if they weren’t there and how this related to the symbolic representation of the body of Christ by the bread in a church ceremony.

You can see that Thomas Cranmer was the perfect guy to have on your side if you were King Henry VIII and you wanted to have your marriage annulled based on the biblical ban on a man marrying his deceased brother’s wife.

I guess this was a good thing for Catherine of Aragon since it meant she wasn’t executed.

When we say “nature abhors a vacuum” we usually mean it in either a physical way, like the way air rushes in when you crack open a jar of pickles, or an analogous way, like when investors rush in to an untapped market opportunity.  This use of the phrase appeared before Thomas Cranmer and in a less elevated setting.

François Rabelais was a French writer living in the half century before Cranmer—their lives overlapped.

Rabelais was the kind of writer who gets a broad following because they don’t shy away from the grittier side of life.

Rabelais introduced the phrase (in Latin) natura abhorret vacuum in a drinking scene in one of his books. The idea was “don’t leave me with an empty glass!”

Before I go I should explain why a vacuum that makes so much noise as it’s cleaning the carpet is called a vacuum.

The roaring motor inside has the job of sucking air out of the immediate vicinity of the rotating brushes. Because nature abhors a vacuum the air in the carpet and along its surface jumps in to fill the void, bringing dust and dog hair along with it.

A device that uses this trick is called a vacuum cleaner because it is a cleaner that makes use of the properties of a vacuum.

Although Cranmer and Rabelais were discussing vacuums in the early 1500s it was 1902 when the first vacuum cleaner was mentioned in print.

In old gangster movies there was always a dame swinging off the arm of the tough guy.

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She is known as his moll or sometimes as a gun moll.

Now I don’t use the word moll in conversation too often. Maybe it’s because I don’t know many.  But I did see it in the paper the other day and it caught my eye.

Looking it up I see that most dictionaries give prominence to a meaning of “prostitute.”

The etymology is that moll like Molly was once an alternative for the name Mary.

Where one has gangsters one has conflict and such is the case between the dictionaries on this one.  In The Oxford English Dictionary the term gun moll is said to be American slang for a female thief or an armed woman.  But the American Heritage Dictionary says gun moll is based on obsolete British slang.

It’s almost as if each country were trying to blame the other for its crooks.

The explanation comes when we look closer at the word gun as Hugh Rawson did in his book Wicked Words.

This particular gun didn’t have a barrel or fire bullets, instead the word is an alteration of the word ganef or gonif, a Yiddish word meaning “thief.”

So the babe at Bugsie’s elbow is a thieving hooker—no wonder I don’t know many.

On a brighter note in this seamy investigation I came across clues to a most unusual dictionary. Dated 1891and written in dialect the Blegburn Dickshonary reflects not only the accent and vocabulary of the city of Blackburn in Lancashire, England, but also the sense of humor of the lexicographer who compiled it.

He called himself Tum-O’-Dick-O’-Bobs but his parents called him Joseph Baron.

I guess because the Blegburn Dickshonary is cited in several places by the OED it reflects a sense of humor there too.

(in the audio version) I’ll read you the citation for moll:

“Aw’m gooin’ to meet mi Moll to-neet” is a varra common sayin’ wi’ factory lads: some o’ th’ better soort say ‘woman’ i’ th’ place o’ Moll, but nooan so mony.”

Elise wrote to me the other day.

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Elise works in a library and part of her job is to catalog books. She says that she and her colleagues sometimes come across some strange subject headings from the Library of Congress.

Her pick for the most curious is bildungsroman.

I try to steer away from uncommon words and this is certainly an uncommon one. But I do like to think about why words become popular or why they might not.

Bildungsroman is a German word and the English dictionaries that do contain it define it as a genre of novel that deals with coming of age themes or growing spiritually.

The dictionaries that have etymologies for bildungsroman say it breaks simply in two bildung and roman; bidung meaning “education” and roman meaning “novel.” But from what I can see bildung in German means more than “education” it means education in life, in society, in self.

So what we are talking about here are coming of age novels and self discovery novels.

Because the word bildungsroman is unfamiliar it might seem a little unwieldy, but familiarity aside it is certainly a more efficient word than the phrase coming of age novel.

So being a word that made it into English, why didn’t it catch on and become a more popular word?

Of course I don’t really know the answer, but here are a few clues.

The German word bildung doesn’t seem to show up in the etymology of any other English word so the element of unfamiliarity that Elise and I experience with bildungsroman seems to extend to the word bildung and applies to most English speakers now and in centuries past.

So one reason that this word never caught on even though it might be better for its application could be that didn’t have enough content that corresponded with meanings people already knew in English.

The roman part of the word is a little unfamiliar too. Does it mean it’s from Rome or does it mean it’s romantic? I actually touched on this root way back in 2006 in an episode on romance. I explained there that love and romance were associated because novels written about love had earlier been written mostly in French. Further that French had evolved from Latin and that Latin was the language of the Romans. So for a time in some circles the language that we now call French was actually called Romance.

Two other reasons why bildungsroman never caught on in English might have to do with timing.

I told you that bildungsroman is a German word, but even if I hadn’t you might have guessed; it has a German sound to it I think.

The Oxford English Dictionary first citation for the use of the word bildungsroman in English is 1910; World War I broke out in 1914.

The OED second citation is from 1938; World War II started in 1939.

Could it be that the unpopularity of Germany among English speakers during the two world wars also contributed to this useful word being stranded in the back shelves of the Library of Congress?

This episode first aired in September of 2005 and was prompted by the unfortunate coincidence of podictionary having done an episode on hurricane just a few days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans combined with the fact that this also coincided with podictionary’s 13^th week of existence.

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No cause-and-effect there, but it did suggest today’s word superstition none-the-less.

Superstition appeared in English in 1402 apparently from Old French although Italian, Spanish and Portuguese also have this word.  Like most words that appear in all those languages this word goes back into Latin.

It’s easy to figure out that the prefix super means “above.”

The –stition part of the word comes from a Latin word meaning “to stand.”

Actually our word stand comes from the same root.

Thus the word superstition has a literal meaning of “stand upon” or “stand over.”

This is a bit of a mysterious translation in light of what we understand superstition to mean. 

The Oxford Dictionary of English defines superstition as “excessively credulous belief in and reverence for the supernatural.”

The first citation of the word back in 1402 appears to name superstition as a political sin; alongside sedition, gluttony and pride.  The Oxford English Dictionary gives a definition applicable to that first citation as “an irrational religious belief or practice founded on fear or ignorance.”

This goes to show not only that their understanding of the word was the same as ours is today, but also that in a time when religion was a life & death matter people still had doubts about some aspects of religious practice.

I scoured the various etymological sources and it’s clear that no one really knows why a word meaning “stand over” might have come to mean “an irrational belief.”

Several theories are offered: One is that it refers to standing over something in amazement, perhaps some religious object.

Another conjecture is that it refers to a state of religious exaltation.

Finally a third guess proposes that this older meaning relates to old beliefs surviving new knowledge. The OED doesn’t buy this last one though; they don’t think it makes sense because the concept of the march of progress and improvements in scientific understanding wouldn’t have existed back in Roman society when the meaning of the word changed.