I know it’s creepy, but sometimes I sit alone laughing to myself.

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I did so just now when I came across the following Urbandictionary definition of the word pompous: “a big word used to criticize big words.”

It works doesn’t it?

Here’s what The Oxford Dictionary of English says: “affectedly grand, solemn, or self-important.”

So a pompous ass is someone who acts in a puffed up way.

The word itself has had enough self confidence to have held its meaning in English since Geoffrey Chaucer first pulled it from French and set it down in English in 1375. As with many French words pompous comes from Latin.

It shows up in slightly different form when we talk about the pomp and ceremony surrounding a royal wedding or the swearing of an oath of office. In both cases the root pomp holds a sense of “formality”; in the case of pompous it’s just that the formality inappropriate.

In Classical Latin pompa was a “ceremonial procession” and the word was taken from Greek where this formal parade was likely first associated with saying formal goodbyes and sending someone away in style. The Greek root meant “to send.”

That first English use of pompous by Geoffrey Chaucer certainly referred to someone’s puffed up ego, but curiously that someone was sent away in style as well.

Chaucer writes “Was neuere capitayn vnder a kyng..Ne moore pompous in heigh presumpcioun Than Oloferne.”

Oloferne, or Holophernes, he paid for his pompousness too.

The sending-off-in-style that I mentioned was done by the biblical Judith.

Holophernes was an avenging general sent by his Assyrian king to smack down those pompous people who hadn’t supported him in his drive world domination. Holophernes was holding a town under siege and one evening this lovely woman comes by his tent and they proceed to have a merry old time.

What fun, drinking and cavorting, until Judith decided Holophernes had had enough to drink and it was time to decapitate him.

Thus endeth the siege.

We in North America are most familiar with cuckoo birds in the form of those little mechanical birds that jump out of German clocks coincidentally named cuckoo clocks.

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But the birds are flesh-and-blood-and-feathers in Europe; not the product of some crazed clockmaker-cum-puppeteer of centuries ago.

The wooden, or these days maybe plastic, birds that poke their heads out of dark brown clocks sometimes give voice to their chirping call by means of tiny bellows in the clock.

Perhaps electronic chips are more common these days.

It’s the chirping of the real birds that gave the cuckoo its name.

The Oxford English Dictionary has this to say: “A bird… well known by the call of the male during mating time, of which the name is an imitation… It is a migratory bird, arriving in the British Islands in April, and hence welcomed as the ‘harbinger of spring’.”

The records show that this bird has gone by this name in English for more than 800 years.

Of course to me it’s a robin that’s the “harbinger of spring.”

If a person is called cuckoo it means that they are “crazy” but this usage didn’t show up until about 100 years ago.

Earlier than that the meaning was more gentle. For about 400 years someone who was cuckoo was merely foolish.

This could have been because the foolish cuckoo bird had such a silly monotonous song.

But it could also have been something to do with the mating habits of cuckoo birds. The OED goes on: the cuckoo “does not hatch its own offspring, but deposits its eggs in the nests of small birds.”

Like, what kind of a foolish mother bird would lay its eggs in someone else’s nest?

In actual fact this is a pretty good reproductive strategy. Having someone else raise your kids gives you more time to play.

A number of other species have been successful with this strategy, including some humans.

And so it is that when humans exhibit similar behavior they take the word used to describe it from this bird.

Let’s imagine that Bob and Sue are married. But Sue sleeps with Jim and gets pregnant. Bob might end up raising Jim’s kid. So what’s the word that describes Bob?

Poor Bob is a cuckold.

Few people ever wonder why their elbows are called elbows, but there is a reason.

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The word breaks into two parts el and bow.

Inside your forearm are two bones called the radius and the ulna. The ulna is named from Latin and Latin in turn took the name ultimately from an Indo-European root el meaning “forearm.”

There are obsolete units of measure that came about due to the convenience of measuring off things against parts of the body. A foot is the obvious example that is still in use but the forearm was just as handy for measurement purposes and that’s why you sometimes hear about ancient things having dimensions in ells or cubits.

Cubitum was also used in Latin to describe the elbow or the distance from the elbow to the finger-tips.

So el means “arm” or “forearm.”

Bow is still a very recognizable word meaning “bend”; we bend a bow to shoot arrows and when we finish a performance we bend at the waist and take a bow.

Thus the literal meaning of the word elbow is “arm bend.”

In common parlance though, when someone mentions the elbow they usually mean the pointy bit; the outside of the arm bend.

Is there a name for the inside of the arm bend; the crease inside your elbow?

I haven’t come across a common name for this feature of the body but since physicians have a label for nearly every part of the body there is a technical name and that’s cubital fossa. 

Cubital is recognizable as meaning “elbow” from the Latin cubitum.

A fossa is a shallow depression from the Latin word for “ditch” so that cubital fossa literally means “elbow crease.”

Here’s a word that gives us a lot to think about and I see most of those topics laid out on the new media dictionary site wordnik.

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They’re pretty smart those wordnik people, they’ve arranged for postings of images from Flickr alongside snippets from Twitter alongside traditional dictionary definitions from such sources as the American Heritage Dictionary and the Century Dictionary. So what I see when I type the word columbine are three pretty different meanings depending on source.

What did you think of when you heard this podictionary episode was going to be about the word columbine?

I bet you thought about the high school tragedy.

Or, if you’re a gardener you might have thought about flowers.

I searched Twitter in a little more depth than shown at wordnik and found almost all of the Twitter users who used the word columbine were using it with some kind of context relating to the high school shootings. There were dozens of mentions on Twitter within the last 24 hours of when I checked and this is more than ten years after the incident.

The photos on Flickr, however, are almost all of flowers; a much nicer visual image.

The flower columbine is the state flower of Colorado and that’s why the high school was named Columbine.

So this word has essentially gained a new meaning out of the tragedy.

I see it being used in phrases like columbine kids and columbine nightmare. These users are not talking about flowers.

Curiously the phrase columbine massacre dates back to 1927 when a miners’ strike also in Colorado got out of hand and machine guns were used.

But there is an older meaning to the word; etymologically columbine means “pigeon-like” or “dove-like.”  

Columba was “dove” in Latin.

We can ponder the peaceful symbolism of doves in the context of two events called massacres but instead let’s examine how a word to do with doves got to be attached to flowers.

Something similar has happened with the word iris which had an association with rainbows and so was applied to a kind of flower that came in many different colors. If you look at the feathers on a pigeon’s neck as it’s bobbing around trying to grab things from your downtown picnic, you’ll see a pretty side to that ugly bird. The feathers shimmer in a rainbow of different colors. So perhaps it was that a kind of flower that appears in various colors deserved the name columbine based on the many colors of a pigeon’s neck.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t say this exactly, but instead gives examples of things other than these flowers being called columbine based on being “dove colored.”

The OED gives another theory why these flowers might be named after doves. One of the characteristics of columbine flowers is that they have five spikes or horns and the argument is that this resembled five pigeons clustered together.

This seems a pretty unconvincing association to me.

Just to show that you can see whatever you want in the meaning of things, it turns out that back around Shakespeare’s time 400 years ago columbine flowers got a bad reputation as having something to do with the seamier side of sex. It was those five horns on the flower.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary as well as the OED the name for the fabric we call tweed seems to have been one of those great words that came about by accident.

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I am not always a great speller so I can sympathize.

What is supposed to have happened is that in 1826 William Watson of Hawick, Scotland sent James Locke, a London merchant, an invoice requiring payment for a shipment of twill fabric.

The name twill comes from the two different yarns twisted together and used in this fabric.

With his Scottish accent he pronounced—and evidently spelled—the word tweel.

Whether it was a spelling mistake on Watson’s part or a difficulty in reading the handwriting on Locke’s part I don’t know, but Locke seemed to think he had gotten a shipment of tweed not tweel and the rest is history.

But history didn’t stop then.

Tweed is often associated with a classy but casual look, even sporty in a sort of “shooting birds on the estate” kind of way. This is because one Lady Dunmore in 1940 upped the ante by introducing Harris Tweed among her aristocratic sporty friends.

Harris Tweed is still a trade mark of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland but in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, Harris Tweed was evidently rhyming slang during the 1980s for speed— methedrine that is.

And we evidently are still living in what later will be history because urbandictionary.com informs me that these days in some circles tweed means “marijuana.”

In the legend of King Arthur the sword that he pulls from the stone is named Excalibur.

Or did he get the sword from The Lady of the Lake?

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Such is the way with legends, since there were few facts to begin with it’s hard to keep the facts straight.

This word Excalibur must weigh attractively on our tongues because everyone remembers the word even if they’ve forgotten it had to do with a mythical English king.

There are movies and cars named Excalibur and I wondered if the word had a Latin root, and if so, why would a word that might mean “out of calibration” be so memorable.

As it turns out this was idle speculation and Latin or calibration have nothing to do with the mythical sword.

There was Latin influence evidently.

The sword had been called Caliburn 900 years ago and even been Latinized to Caliburnus in some of the old stories.

And then the French got their hands on the story. They liked it because it reeked of chivalry and unlike most words that get worn down to a shorter form when used in French, this one got longer when the added the ex on the front.

There is all kinds of scholarly speculation as to what the origin of this sword’s name might have been before that, but no one really knows.

The only connection I did come up with between Excalibur and calibration was that the word calibrate also has origins in weaponry.

The size of ammunition fired by a gun is obviously directly related to the inside diameter of the barrel and both of these are called the caliber.

When the idea of measuring an instrument for accuracy was first expressed as calibration, only about 150 years ago, the instrument in question was a thermometer. If the little glass tube that held the mercury or alcohol was not consistent in its inside diameter then the temperature gradients wouldn’t be regularly spaced.

So a thermometer was measured in the same way that a gun barrel was.

When you measure something sometimes you do so with calipers and the etymological thinking is that calipers are called calipers because they were used in measuring calibers, either of gun barrels or of gun shot.

Both caliber and caliper go back  more than 400 years in English and come from French before that. Their earlier history is the subject of several different directions of speculation including a Latin source qua libra which would mean “of what weight?” But since traces of both words disappear into the fog of history we don’t know for sure if they are really related or what their earlier histories actually are.

Ostracize is not, as urbandictionary.com says “An exercise program for ostriches.”

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Ostracize is in fact a word that ultimately traces back to the animal kingdom.

Urbandictionary also contains the definition “to shun one away from the rest of a group” which does line up with Merriam Webster which says “to banish from society, to cast out, to exile.”

According to both The Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary, in ancient Greek the bivalve shells you might find at the beach were called ostrakon.

This is the root also for our name for those sexy slithery salty treats: oysters.

Even though an ostrich lays eggs and those eggs have a shell, the ostriches name is unrelated.

The ancient Greeks are rightly admired for their beautiful pottery. You gotta think though that over a couple of thousand years, if there are still a pile of vases each in one piece, there must have been many more that were dropped and got broken over the years.  Think of it, with all that fighting between Troy and Athens there must have been crockery shards all over the place.

You think I’m joking.

In actual fact there were enough chunks of pottery lying around the streets during the reign of Kleisthenes around 508 BC, that when he looked for a way to keep the powerful men in his city-state from killing each other, he used these broken pots to do it.  Rather than lynch someone, the law was that men of stature would vote, by marking their opinions on these shell-like shards as to whether to send they guy they thought was a jerk, away for ten years.

The law prevented folks ganging up for gain, since after ten years the ousted person could return to their full property.

You can see that our word ostracize comes from this “sending away for a decade” which in turn takes its name from the shell-like fragments.

I was looking for modern uses of the word stigma and I came across this one in an NPR story from a few years ago about an AIDS conference:

“One of the main barriers to treatment is the stigma that HIV carries. It keeps people from getting tested and allows the virus to continue to spread.”

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From this use it is easy to draw the meaning of the word stigma, as The New Oxford American Dictionary puts it “a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance.”

They give examples of “the stigma of mental disorder” or a “social stigma” associated with being a nonreader.

Etymologically that definition “a mark of disgrace” is right on because originally in English stigma meant “a mark made upon the skin by burning with a hot iron … as a token of infamy or subjection.”

That’s from the OED.

So people who were convicted of crimes or who were slaves were branded, sometimes on their face, to show their social status. This meaning emerged about 400 years ago and very quickly, within a few decades, was being used metaphorically as we use stigma today.

The appearance of the literal “branding” word that appeared in the late 16^th century was drawn from Latin and the Latin word was in turn drawn from Greek, so people have been setting social markings on each other—literally and figuratively—for a very long time.

The Greek word didn’t so much mean “brand” with a hot iron. It could just as easily have been applied to a tattoo because the root of the word stigma is similar to that of the word stick and this is because the marks put on peoples skin in the style of a tattoo are done with a sharp needle that is stuck into the skin. This word root goes all the way back to Indo-European where steig is thought to have meant “to stick” or “sharp.”

You likely already knew that there is a part of flowers called the sigma as well (although before I looked it up I wasn’t exactly sure which part it was). A flower’s stigma is the place where it receives the pollen it needs to go to seed. This part of the flower was named in the early 18^th century and from what I can see it was so named because it represents a pinhole.

So although the meaning of stigma in these two cases is quite different, the word roots are the same.

You’ve heard the old pun my karma ran over your dogma?

I was interested to see that in 1924 a British historian named Philip Guedalla had enough karma to give us another pun just as good.

He said that any stigma is good enough to beat a dogma with.

All I can say is too bad it’s always the dogma that gets the short end of the stigma.

Todd wrote me and suggested the word intramural.

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I instantly thought of school sports.

I’m not alone. I bet you did too.

Statistically I must be right because when I pop intramural into Google the top hits are about school sports.

But what can this mean this intramural? Like, isn’t a mural a painting?

Intra, that means “within” so by a little creative folk etymology I could pretend that school sports were so named because it was like they were from inside a painting; sort of the equivalent of saying they were picture perfect.

But of course I made that up.

The reason mural that is a painting is called a mural is because it is painted on a wall and the Latin word for “wall” was muralis.

So intramural sports at school are sports that take place within the walls of the school.

This is figurative since most football games or cross country running races don’t happen inside buildings. It’s just that all the competitors are from within the school.

Now this word isn’t exactly a common word. I looked it up on the website wordcount.org which lays almost 90,000 words out in order of their frequency.

At wordcount.org intramural came in as just a little less popular than the word studland and just a little more popular than the word thermoluminescence.

Thermoluminescence is a special technique of dating archeological items by measuring the energy they give off as they are heated. It’s not a technique most of us get to use very often which explains its rarity as a word.

The word studland; I was going to tell you that I couldn’t define studland is because it isn’t in The Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam Webster’s Unabridged, or even dictionary.com. But it turns out to be a small village in England; wordcount.org is after all more indicative of British usage.

Based on its association with school sports I think that in North America intramural is a somewhat more commonly understood word than studland or thermoluminescence.

But what is it called when one school plays another?

Intramural means “within walls.” You might think that playing between schools would yield intermural since inter means “between.”

Intermural certainly is being used out there but since it isn’t in most dictionaries it’s hard to say if that’s because people are misspelling intramural or because they are imposing a meaning of “school” on the word mural based on its use in intramural.

Some dictionaries point to extramural as the correct word since it means playing outside one’s own walls. But despite the fact that extramural is in the fatter dictionaries people seem to use it even less than intermural.

According to Google trends intercollegiate is 72% as popular as intramural as a search term at least.

But the word varsity swamps them all, and in this I see a focus more on school pride as represented by the top athletes on the varsity team as opposed to considering the competition as being within or between schools.

Varsity by the way is an abbreviation of the word university and appears to have first been used at Oxford University about 160 years ago.

In The Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Edition William Shakespeare is cited as the first of any man or woman to have set the word puke to paper; puke meaning “regurgitate.”

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That first citation is from 1600 and it’s from his play As You Like It.

I think you’ll recognize the passage it comes from, you’ve heard it before:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
At first the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

This example goes to show two things. First of all that just because we have a first citation date it doesn’t mean that’s when a word was invented.

How could Shakespeare have expected anyone in his audience to understand the word puke if it hadn’t existed before.   There had to be some context for people to understand that the infant wasn’t smiling or feeding in the nurse’s arms.

Looking at the etymology sources it appears that although the word itself may have never been written down before, another word pukishness had appeared about 20 years before. 

Pukishness meant the tendency to be sick frequently and that word appeared in a book about the value of a boy’s education—girls didn’t seem to benefit from education back then.

The specific passage advocates the health benefits of speaking loudly. The author says it’s a form of exercise and believes that communicating at the top of your lungs is a cure for everything from bad circulation and elephantiasis to diarrhea and leprosy.  Evidently talking loudly cures pukishness as well.

So the evidence is that there was already a word in circulation that William Shakespeare made use of.

But I said this example shows us two things.

The second thing is that the computer age is helping dictionary makers.

The draft entry for puke in the third Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary ousts Shakespeare as the first coiner of puke and in his place names Philemon Holland.

You see, with computers and such tools as Google Book Search it’s easier to comb through the huge backlog of historical writings looking for a specific word.

The way that the first and second editions of the OED were researched involved an army of individual volunteer readers actually reading all the old books and taking notes on which words were in them.

Obviously William Shakespeare attracted more readers than did Philemon Holland.

But that’s all to do with the significance of first citations. With respect to the etymology of the word puke I see that it is possibly related to the word spew.

Spew appeared as far back as King Alfred’s time and wonder of wonders, at first it also meant “barf.”