Perhaps it’s etymologically appropriate that one of the first movies produced by National Lampoon, Animal House involved a lot of drinking.

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I can’t be completely sure but it may have been about the time of that movie Animal House in 1978 that I first became aware of the word lampoon.

Perhaps I’d heard of the magazine National Lampoon before that, it started in 1970 and my impression was that while Mad Magazine was junior high humor, National Lampoon was university humor.

Of course the word lampoon had been around for centuries before I noticed it or the magazine adopted the name.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates lampoon to 1645 and defines it as “a virulent or scurrilous satire upon an individual.”

All etymologies point to French as the source of lampoon but an equivalent word there seems to have blinked out of existence before lexicographers could nail it to the dictionnaire.

But most English dictionaries have a theory about that French word.

They say lampoon could possibly have been from a French word meaning “let us drink” which seems to have evolved from the same source as our word lap as a cat does when lapping up a saucer of milk.

So it seems that this word lampoon had evolved into some kind of a tavern cry which found its way into various drinking songs. In turn the drinking songs sometimes made fun of the politicians of the day and so the word lampoon moved from meaning “let us drink” to referring to the cutting humor of the drinking songs.

Bargain is  a word that demonstrates how etymologies can get lost in the fog of history; and how I can happily bumble around in the same fog and find some fun things.

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The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that ever since it appeared in English in 1330 bargain has meant just about what it means now, “discussion,” “agreement,” “negotiation.”

The OED has as its etymology for bargain that English got it from Old French and ultimately Latin.

But now comes the foggy part.

The OED etymology calls up the opinions of  the German philologist Friedrich Diez who died in 1876. Diez seemed to feel that something called Capit. Charles the Bald implied that the Latin root of bargain is related to barca which meant “a small boat.”

From this he thinks that the back and forth nature of bargaining is related to the fact that a boat carries goods to and fro.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t leave one with the impression that they are too convinced of this etymology and it seems that none of the more recently updated dictionaries are convinced either.

The American Heritage Dictionary suggests an Indo-European via Germanic route for the development of bargain.  This would connect the word with roots with meanings of “hiding” and “protecting things.”

This ties the word remotely to the word borrowing as well as berg which shows up in so many city names based on their histories as fortresses.

The meaning development is hypothesized by John Ayto as moving from “keep” and “protect” to “take on loan” or “borrow” then becoming “give” or “take” and finally “trade” or “haggle.”

Jumping back to the Diez theory concerning Charles the Bald.  It turns out that what was being referred to there were the Capitula of Charles the Bald.

Charles the Bald was king of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor back just before Alfred the Great arose as King of Wessex.

The Capitula of Charles the Bald were his laws.

One of the things I found in the fog was that this is where we get our word chapter.

The Latin capitula means “small head.” The title of the book would be its “big heading” but the title of each chapter would each be a “small heading.”

For Charles the Bald this was a set of headings on a legal document and similarly that is why when someone “capitulates” they are cooperating with a former adversary; they have done so according to a written legal agreement containing a set of headings.

Why would people use a word meaning “cake” for this bloody thing?

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Every one of us has had a very intimate connection with a placenta at one point in our lives and yet, unless you work in a delivery room at a hospital, most of us would be hard pressed to identify a placenta if we saw one.

I think most of the reason for this is that our closest association with a placenta happens when we are still inside our mother; a time that few of us can remember much about.

Of course the placenta is also known as the afterbirth and is the thing that connects mothers’ and babies’ circulatory systems during that time when a baby can’t eat or breathe on account of the fact that they are trapped in a bag of fluid.

Then later, as adults, the only time we might see a placenta is shortly after the birth of a child.

For some reason during these times the child provides a significant distraction for both mother and father and so memory of what a placenta looks like just doesn’t stick with us.

Babies get their food and oxygen through their belly buttons to which is attached their umbilical chord. The other end of this trio of tubes connects to the placenta whose job it is to gently gently snuggle up against mom’s circulatory system and pass that food, oxygen and resulting waste products back and forth between the two.

Just as the inside of our lungs requires a considerable surface area to facilitate gas exchange—the usual analogy is that if you flattened out your lungs they’d add up to about one side of a tennis court—in a similar way the mom/baby exchange needs an expanded area to do its job.

We’re not talking sports venues this time but the placenta does spread out across the wall of the mother’s uterus and because of this has an appearance that is flat and round.

So back in the 16^th century when physicians chatted among themselves in classical languages they pulled out an Ancient Greek word for a flat, round cake, Latinized it and called the afterbirth placenta uterina meaning “uterine cake.”

It’s the flatness of the thing that gives it the name and some etymologists think that there is a link between the flatness represented in the word plank and the flatness of placenta.

Though swinging around in the top of circus tents might not be your idea of stability, stability is why a trapeze is called a trapeze.

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In an earlier episode I reviewed how the garment leotard was named after a trapeze artist Jules Leotard. Today I’ll look into why a trapeze is called a trapeze.

When circus performers swing back and forth it is important that they don’t start to swing side to side. If they did then when they shot off into space expecting to grab their partner’s hands they’d find they were inches or feet off target and land in the net.

To keep them swinging straight, the lines from which the trapeze hangs are mounted a little further apart from each other than the length of the trapeze bar. This allows the acrobat a little more control since leaning to one side or the other will steer the swinging motion.

So when a trapeze is hanging unused its shape is a little wider at the top of the ropes than at the trapeze bar.

A shape like this, where two sides are parallel and two sides are not, is called a trapezoid.

Or maybe it’s called a trapezium.

Actually which word you use depends on which century you are living in and which language you speak, because for some reason in English the meanings of trapezoid and trapezium flipped like an acrobatic performer. In other places and in other times trapezium had parallel sides and trapezoid had no parallel sides.

It hardly matters in the circus though.

The parent of all of these words is Greek and means “table like.”

I imagined that a table has its top parallel to the floor and maybe that’s why this geometrical shape was called a trapezoid, but I was wrong.

Trapeza meaning “table” was once tetra peza meaning “four feet.”

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Special

This is a special edition of podictionary in which I’m going to give you a little glimpse behind the scenes and explain a few changes that are coming up.

After that I’ll include a bonus etymology.

History

Podictionary has been around for about 4½ years now but it hasn’t always been a blog and email subscription.

The name “podictionary” was chosen because I was “podcasting the dictionary” and for more than half of its existence podictionary was available in audio format only.

It is still the case that there are more listeners to podictionary than readers of podictionary.

Most listeners picked up the show with the iPod software iTunes that automatically downloads each episode to their iPod or iPhone.

I was lucky enough to have started podcasting before Apple included podcasts in their iTunes store and so as an early entrant I got quite good exposure.

Because the majority of podictionary subscribers are listeners I’ve got an iPhone app in the works as well (I’ll let you know when that’s released).

When I began posting transcripts of the show it meant that podictionary started to get delivered to people in three different ways:

• as email;
• as audio via podcast; and
• by stumbling across podictionary in a Google search

(actually there’s RSS too but most people don’t know about RSS)

These new ways mean I’ve gained a whole new readership audience. That audience continues to grow. Thank you.

Sponsorship Sustains Podictionary

Originally the podcast was intended to promote my first book but podictionary has become much more than that.

It is fun and I plan to keep doing it, but it is a good thing that it has grown to be more than a promotion vehicle because I can assure you that as a vehicle to drive book sales it couldn’t stand on its own.

I’ve experimented with sponsors and Google advertising and what I’ve found is that the listening audience pays the freight.

I have recently removed all advertising from the email because it doesn’t add up to anything anyway.

If it were not for the sponsors who pay per download of the audio file I don’t think I could justify the time it takes to put podictionary together every day.

So for all of you who’ve sent me messages saying you wanted to support podictionary with PayPal donations or something, the message is clear; if you like what you’re reading I would hope you’d like to listen to it even more.

As the creator of podictionary I get paid for having listeners but I don’t get paid for having readers (funny old world isn’t it?).

The fact that podictionary started out as a spoken product and not a written product explains why you’ll all too often find spelling mistakes, typos and grammatical errors here.

I’ve given a lot of attention to producing clean sound but an editor has never been in the picture for podictionary.

And yet I’d never dream of producing a book without several layers of editorial support.

I suppose if podictionary generated ten times the revenue that it does I would hire an editor. I’m sure it could do nothing but good.

Since you’ve been so patient as to stand all that rambling, here is  the etymology: This one is for the word yacht.

Etymology of the Word Yacht

I think to most people the word yacht evokes some sense of luxury.

Unknown luxury for most of us because although we can pretty easily walk through the lobby of a swanky hotel, it is pretty rare that we get aboard someone’s yacht.

The only yacht I’ve ever been on is The Royal Yacht Britannia. I wasn’t a guest of Queen Elizabeth or Prince Charles. The Royal Yacht Britannia is retired as a royal yacht and is now a tourist attraction tied up in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of the word yacht in English to 1557 and says it meant “a light fast-sailing ship, in early use especially for the conveyance of royal or other important persons.”

So it may be this long-term association with royalty that gives the word yacht its patina of luxury.

Then again it may be the price of the things.

Yacht is alternately defined as a hole in the sea into which one pours money.

Money is at the root of the etymology of yacht too because originally it wasn’t royalty that were cruising around in the ancestors of yachts but pirates.

Yacht is spelled so strangely because it comes from a Germanic word that English speakers had a hard time rendering. Jaghtschip is traced by some dictionaries to Dutch and by other dictionaries to Norwegian.

The literal meaning of jaghtschip is “hunting ship” or “chasing ship” and these were the kinds of ships most useful to pirates.

Like so many words jaghtschip was abbreviated to jaght back in either Dutch or Norwegian before being picked up by English.

Although some royal figures have indeed acted like pirates the reason a yacht became associated with royalty was likely not because it could be used to rob other ships. Instead, I think it was the speed of the things was what was attractive. Not only did royal or other important persons wish to be able to get away from chasing ships, there is prestige in a fast vessel.

One last thing about the Royal Yacht Britannia: having seen the bed the Queen slept in I can tell you that what is sold as a queen sized bed isn’t. At least on board Britannia the real Queen slept in a single.

Survey

Finally, with respect to advertising within podcasts, a couple of groups are running a survey. You can get to that at either

www.takethesurvey.com/rawvoice

or

www.takethesurvey.com/wizzard

Rawvoice is kind of like my agent that finds advertisers for podcasters and Wizzard is where I host my files (in fact both companies do both things). The other group involved is the Association for Downloadable Media.

The survey is supposed to take about 10 minutes and explores listener preferences in ad style, delivery and placement.

Thanks for putting up with this unusual post.

People sometimes exercise or do yoga in leotards.

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The garment is variously described as having long or short sleeves or legs or none at all, but in all cases being skin tight and as such being an inappropriate piece of attire for me.

Luckily the guy who popularized the leotard had a good body and is remembered as having a good body because he died when he was still young and attractively shaped. Maybe not lucky for him.

Jules Leotard was a French circus performer in the mid 1800s. He amazed crowds then the way that Cirque du Soleil amazes crowds today.

His specialty was the trapeze and he was the first to dare to let go of one trapeze, do a mid-air somersault and grab onto a second trapeze.

His innovative costume was skin tight from ankle to wrist with a more roomy pair of shorts in the middle. All this  supposedly to allow unrestricted freedom of movement, but with the added bonus—as anyone frequenting fitness clubs these days knows—of giving the audience a little more to look at.

What seems strange to me is that even though he was so famous in his day, and seems incontrovertibly to have been the reason that leotards are named leotards, it took quite a while after his death before this word shows up in the written record. He died in 1870—he was only 30—but the OED gives a first citation 50 years later in 1920.

The Merriam Webster etymology must have been compiled more recently because they offer a first citation of 1886 but that’s still a bit of a gap.

Jules Leotard himself didn’t refer to this garment as a leotard but instead as a maillot (pronounced “my oh”), a word that had only recently come into use in French.

Now it’s usually the name of a style of woman’s bathing suit.

Folk etymology had the source of this word also from someone’s name, supposedly a Monsieur Maillot who supplied the Paris Opera with such garments. But lexicographers find no evidence that Monsieur Maillot actually existed and instead point to a meaning of “swaddling clothing.”

Since most of us would not go into a clothing store and expect to be understood if we asked for something that would “swaddle us” I looked that up too.

It’s related to swathe. Babies are swaddled; which means they are wound up firmly in their blankets.

When parents impose a curfew on their teenagers it means they want them home by a certain time.

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If the government imposes a curfew it means that authorities don’t want people out roaming the streets after a certain hour.

According to Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable the word curfew came to England as a French word with William the Conqueror in 1066.  This arrival isn’t specifically claimed in The Oxford English Dictionary although the OED does give as its first citation a French usage just over 200 years afterwards.

By this time the word curfew meant to the people of England “the ringing of the evening bell.”

This bell would have in earlier times been the signal for lockdown by the French conquering aristocracy over their newly subordinate English subjects.

The word does not go any further back into Latin or Greek since it is an alteration of two French words still in use today.  Couvre is easily recognizable as “cover” and feu is the French word for “fire.”

But the earlier French concept of curfew was not like England during the Second World War when blackout conditions were instituted to keep bombers from spotting their targets.

Instead the idea seems to have been that fires were to be put out so that none would be left unattended and burn down the town.

There were two equivalent words in Latin ignitegium and pyritegium, ignite and pyro being recognizably fire related and the ending meaning “to cover.”

Thus curfew may have been a sensible approach to public safety.

There have been other municipal control measures instituted after fires that had interesting results.

In the city of Copenhagen a notable feature of the old downtown buildings is their diagonally faced corners. The reason for this is that during one fire in that town it was found that fire brigades with long ladders were unable to get around the corners of narrow streets because the buildings were in the way, so a bylaw was enacted to chop off all the building corners to allow ladders to get through.

In the same city at one time it was decreed that wooden houses were forbidden so that today one can admire the beautiful stone frontages of some old structures and then wander into their back courtyards to see the old half-timbered rest of the building that their owners raised at reduced costs out of sight of the city fathers.

Finally, Quebec City is known to be one of the most European-looking cities in North America.  Part of its charm comes from the old stone buildings that were built so that, by law, their adjoining walls extended above their roof lines.  That way if one caught fire, the flames could not spread directly.

If you are American you’ll say aluminum.

If you’re British you’ll say aluminium.

But the guy who came up with the stuff called it alumium at first.

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That guy was Sir Humphrey Davy back in 1808.

People had been using alum for thousands of years, especially to fix dye. It was economically important in England first to increase the value of wool being exported and later to increase the value of woven cloth by dying it.

Sir Humphrey changed his mind though, after he first called his discovery alumium he revised the name to aluminum.

Others thought this wonderful new stuff should have a more classical name and so suggested aluminium because they thought it went better with the names of other chemicals.

Again, it’s all about style.

I have a few problems with the OED definition of aluminium which hasn’t yet undergone the third edition revisions. It says “a metal, white, sonorous, ductile, and malleable, very light, not oxidized in the air…”

Sonorous?

When I look up sonorous it says “capable of giving out a sound, especially of a deep or ringing character.”

I do see one of their citations says that a bell was made of aluminum but this is not the usual choice for sonorous things because as a metal aluminum is pretty good at damping vibration. That’s why in the kitchen aluminum pots have a more thumpy sound than stainless steel pots.

Also, what’s this about “not oxidized in air?”

True, aluminum doesn’t raise blisters of rust the way iron and steel do, but the reason is that aluminum very quickly skins-over with a thin layer of oxide that blocks deeper oxidization.

But Humphrey Davy was an interesting character. By sheer strength of inquisitiveness he rose up the scientific ladder to be President of the Royal Society.

He also discovered laughing gas and did so because someone else theorized that it should be poison.

To find out what the qualities of nitrous oxide might be Humphrey Davy applied his inquisitive nature and started breathing the stuff himself. Instead of dying of a poison gas he found the stuff made him delirious.

He thought it might be good stuff to use as an anesthetic and so it is these days in dentist’s offices.

But he didn’t stop there. Along with his many other scientific inquiries he tried gulping back a lungful of carbon monoxide; that one almost killed him.

It didn’t though. Later after a stroke, he died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 50 in 1829.

Perhaps it is the rise in the popularity of body piercing that has made the word tragus a more recognizable word.

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When I first came across the word I was surprised that this particular body part even had a name.

I suppose that in specialist circles every part of the body has a name. Physicians concerned with the square inch of our physique in which they specialize have to build up a vocabulary to describe its every nuance.

Body piercing is old hat when it comes to ears but traditionally ear rings are poked through the ear lobe. Perhaps poking a hole through the tragus was the next logical step because the tragus is the little bump that partially covers the ear hole through which sound enters your head on its way to the ear drum.

Every little bump and notch in the human ear has a name but I have to say that tragus is the funniest.

The word appeared in English in a medical dictionary in 1693.

Then as now medical words often had Latin roots but in this case the Latin root reaches further back to Greek. Rufus of Ephesus was a Greek physician of about 2000 years ago and is the first person known to have named this bump on the ear a tragus.

I think that the reason it was called a tragus shows a sense of humor in the ancient Greeks.

Before the bump on the ear was called a tragus a common domestic animal was known as tragus in Greek.

If you know any men with little tufts of hair growing out of their ears you’ll appreciate the connection.

Tragus in Greek meant “billy-goat” and the tuft of hair protruding from someone’s ear was being likened to the billy-goat’s beard.

Here’s a message from a subscriber named Pierce.

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He asks “is it true that carpenter is the only common English word from a Celtic root?”

I peeked into my Oxford English Dictionary and shot back that carpenter is from Latin via French but that lots of words rubbed off from Germanic or Gaulish roots as the Romans were doing business with European peoples who spoke dialects of these languages.

Celtic and Gaulish are related.

I hadn’t heard the last of Pierce though and he replied saying that his dictionary said that Latin may have gotten carpenter from the Gauls.

Sure enough, when I actually took the time to read what the OED said it proved Pierce right “Latin carpentum was apparently after Old Celtic carpentom.”

The other parts of Pierce’s question were whether carpenter is the only common English word from a Celtic root, and from there, how come if Celtic languages were all over the British Isles they don’t leave many traces in English.

I guess that the OED information shows that Celtic is in the mix for carpenter but it isn’t the only element. I see from The American Heritage Dictionary that the root can be traced further back into Indo-European.

So does that make this a word with a Celtic root specifically?

It’s true that Celtic hasn’t made much impact on English but I see that the word mine—as in: a hole in the ground from which one extracts minerals—is also felt to have Celtic traces to its etymology.

Perhaps less common is another example, the word for the sediment left over after fermentation, the lees.

So carpenter certainly isn’t the only example.

As to why Celtic is so thin on the ground in English, I think it has to do with being conquered a few times over.

About 2000 years ago the Romans marched into Britain and took over. They liked speaking Latin and so the various versions of tribal Celtic languages that were being spoken before their arrival suddenly became second class.

The Romans then shipped out a few hundred years before the Anglo-Saxons shipped in 1500 years ago.  At that point Latin ceased to be an important language in Britain and the Germanic roots set in. Again the Anglo-Saxon culture made the indigenous culture take a back seat.

That’s what Welsh evolved from.

Maybe the earlier Roman domination had something to do with making this possible, maybe not.

So by the time of William the Conqueror 1000 years ago Celtic roots already made up a diminishing fraction of the language stock. The Norman imposition of French watered that minimal influence down even more.

But there are a few interesting points to bring out about the word carpenter.

The OED defines a carpenter as one who does the heavier and stronger work in wood such as the framework of houses or ships and as distinct from a cabinet-maker.

The Latin root of carpenter points to craftsmen who made wagons and chariots since that’s what a carpentum was, a two wheeled vehicle.

You’d like your chariot to be strong and hold together as it bounced over those cobbled Roman roads.

The Indo-European root I mentioned is thought to have been kers meaning “to run” and so fitting into “moving” meaning of chariot.