The word karaoke is a kind of ping-pong-ball word in that its elements have bounced back and forth across western and eastern cultures.

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A few weeks ago at the podictionary website one of the words of the day was karate and I touched on the fact that this Japanese word literally meant “empty hand.”

The initial element of karate also appears in the word karaoke.

In the case of karaoke though what is empty isn’t the hand but the vocal track.

This is because karaoke is a kind of sing-along where the instrumental track plays while any tone-deaf romantic with a drink inside them can bellow out the lyrics.

This is an activity that could never have happened before the age of electronics and a word that could never have happened before the age of globalization.

The main money in karaoke is in supplying the latest popular songs with the voices of the pop-stars removed. For those who can’t quite remember the words these are provided, scrolling along the screen.

The word karaoke breaks down as kara meaning “empty” and oke short for okesutora.

If you don’t speak Japanese and think that you don’t know what the word okesutora means that’s okay because before Japanese borrowed the word from English they didn’t know either; in Japanese okesutora means “orchestra.”

Thus karaoke means “empty orchestra.” An empty orchestra just waiting for you to fill it up with your golden voice.

In 1705 a British poet named Matthew Prior—reputed to be the high point in poetry between John Dryden Alexander Pope—wrote a poem called An English Padlock.

Be to her virtues very kind;
Be to her faults a little blind;
Let all her ways be unconfined;
And clap your padlock—on her mind.

I’ve been unable to ascertain whether this comes from a longer poem or whether it represents a loving little ditty or a piece of male chauvinism.

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I guess it doesn’t matter because what I’m trying to get at here is that Matthew Prior 300 years ago had the same feeling about the word virtue that we do today. It was something good and something you’d like to see in your mother or your girlfriend or your wife or your daughters.

But this certainly could not have been the case when the word was forming out of an Indo-European root into Latin. Etymologically being a virtuous woman wasn’t such a great thing.

English got the word virtue from French and it shows up around 1250 as an English word, consistent with other words injected into the language under the influence of the French rulers of England after the Norman Conquest.

Back in Latin before evolving into a French word, the meaning was remarkably stable and reflected this sense of “goodness.”

Today we can taste a little sense of moral strength in the word virtue and this was an even stronger sense of the word back through time.

The root of the word though was vir from Indo-European wiro meaning “man.”

So virtue actually means “manliness” and gets it sense of strength from that manly sense.

That’s why people thousands of years ago might not have liked to think of females as virtuous. It is that same word root that causes my email spam filter to work so hard on messages talking about virility.

Before I go I should also tell you that historically patience was not a virtue; at least not one of the seven virtues that seemed to counter the seven deadly sins.

Of course there were Faith, Hope, and Charity; that’s three.

Then there were Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude; that’s seven—and patience isn’t listed.

But then again, how many of these seven seem especially manly?

In high school I had a wonderful teacher, Mr. Martin.

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He brought the arcane mathematics of physics to life, in part by putting a human face on them; and he told a tale of etymology.

In the 1500s this guy named Nicolaus Copernicus wrote a book that proved the sun was at the centre of our solar system. But he didn’t publish it for decades—in fact until the year of his death—because it was so controversial.

Back then the church believed that man, in the image of God, must occupy the centre of the universe. Because of this Copernicus was scared that the authorities would reject his theories and worse.

Later, another guy named Galileo Galilei agreed with what Copernicus had written and the way he was treated certainly justifies Copernicus’ hesitation. Galileo was threatened with torture until he swore that he didn’t agree with Copernicus after all.

The name of that book Copernicus wrote was De Revolutionibus and my teacher Mr. Martin told us that it came as such a shock to people that this is where we get our word revolution, meaning social upheaval.

I really liked Mr. Martin and he was usually right.  But to my disappointment he was wrong about that etymology.

Revolution appeared first in English in 1390 so well before either Copernicus or Galileo were on the scene. At that point it actually referred to the movements of heavenly bodies, though humans were still at the centre.

In 1450 it appears for the first time with a meaning of “great change” as would apply later to the French revolution or other political upheavals.

1450 was still 23 years before Copernicus was born.

The thing is that the word revolution is from Latin and Copernicus was writing in Latin.

Latin dug up the roots of revolution as volvere from an Indo-European origin wel meaning “to turn.”

I grabbed a few uses of the word entail from Twitter. Someone was tweeting about what new health care laws might entail; another person asked a friend about what a change to their plans might entail.

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The sense here is that entail means “require.”

That is consistent with the meaning of entail since its emergence in English more than 600 years ago but the rest of the word’s history isn’t exactly what you might expect.

The word entail does literally mean “to attach a tail to” and we could guess that this might be a metaphorical sense of imposing a restriction, but there’s more to it than that. In this case the word tail does not refer to a long appendage that one drags behind. This tail comes from the French word taillie that meant “to cut.”

Before anyone was talking about what a change in their plans for the weekend might entail the word entail had a strict and narrow legal meaning. It had to do with imposing limitations on the vast tracts of real estate owned by the rich and influential in England.

The source of most wealth of aristocratic families was the land they owned. They made their money by having the common people work the land and pay rent on it, either in cash or goods or labor.

Since there was no such thing as birth control a rich family, like a poor one, would likely have lots of kids. If you start forking out sections of the back 40 to half a dozen kids every generation, before long your cash flow no longer qualifies you as noble and aristocratic.

Hence the family land had legal encumbrances placed upon it so that only the oldest male descendant could take possession.

That’s what entailment meant at first.

The “cut” meaning of tail has been explained in some places as being a cut to the rights or abilities of the owner in how the pass the property along, but most dictionaries point instead to a sense of “cut” meaning that the legal obligation is cut or shaped into a precise and unchangeable form as if it were set in stone.

For most of its existence the word shave did not refer to hair removal.

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Men have been scraping the hair off their faces (or not) time out of mind and our word shave is old too.

It first appears in Old English in 725 and the experts trace its little cutting trail back through Germanic languages to a Teutonic word scab.  Our word scab goes back to Latin and Greek roots which in Latin relates to meanings of “scratch” and “itch,” while in Greek it may relate to words meaning “dig” and “spade.”

Merriam-Webster thinks shave relates to these scabby Latin and Greek roots but The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s doubtful.

Right from the beginning of its use in English the word shave meant to scrape away, but it wasn’t until 600 years after it came into English that it was used in reference to hair removal.

A shaver can be the thing you use to shave with but the word has also been used to refer to a youngster, presumably someone who has just gotten old enough to shave.

Around the time of Henry VIII the term shaveling appeared as a derogatory term. In this case though it wasn’t the young and inexperienced that were being insulted, the low social standing of shavelings had much more to do with King Henry’s desire for new wives and his break with the Catholic Church.

When Henry got turned off of the Catholic Church so did his subjects.

But all the while there were these monks milling around in their monasteries and old cathedrals. Since their brand of religion was out of favor so were they. These were the guys who were being called shavelings and the reason for that was that their church required them to shave the tops of their heads; a style called a tonsure.

Before the word shave meant to remove one’s beard or underarm hair it was being applied to things such as the removal of a thin layer of wood. We still shave off wood with a wood-plane and some authorities think that the word shaft might have evolved because this is how people would have produced wooden shafts, by shaving away the material they didn’t need.

Today people are victims of injustice or fraud as well as car accidents and homicide.

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This is an improvement over victims of ages past that were restricted to having to have died to qualify as victims.

The word victim comes to English from Latin in the 15^th or almost the 16^th century. The earliest meaning in English was that victim was a sacrificial animal used in some pagan religious ceremony.

Back then any religious ceremony that wasn’t Christian was automatically considered suspect by English speakers. This would have been true of French speakers too who get involved in the word’s history as we’ll see in a moment.

As a Latin word victima naturally made its way into French as well but the Latin roots of the word mean that it evolved in a pre-Christian time and likely among people who thought these animal sacrifices were just the thing that God wanted; or gods, or something.

Most dictionaries don’t go this far back but the Century Dictionary suggests that the Latin victima was probably appled to sacrificial animals because when they were offered to the gods they would have been all prettied up, effectively wrapped in a bow.

The Latin word vincire meant “bind,” or “wind” as you would do with a ribbon and the Century Dictionary at any rate suspects this has the same etymological root as victim.

Though English adopted the word from Latin in a small way at first another influence on getting the word adopted into the language came about from French.

I’d never known it but in the latter 1500s in Reims, France there was an English college and it produced an English translation of the New Testament. I myself think of Reims as more of a source of champagne than of vocabulary but English bibles had an influence on English vocabulary and perhaps it was the French vocabulary of the New Testament translators that influenced their generous use of the word victim in the holy book.

In any case it wasn’t until 100 years later that the word became common and sometime after that when it started to soften in meaning so that death wasn’t always a prerequisite.

If you were looking for talent would you look at the gym, the bank or in church?

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One of the more popular definitions of the word talent at Urbandictionary relates to a young woman’s looks.

Checking out the local talent is an expression dating from the days of the grandparents of most Urbandictionary users and was adopted in the 1940s.

But etymologically, appreciating the talents of members of the opposite sex might actually relate to whether they are overweight or not; or perhaps how rich they are.

The word comes from Greek where it referred to a scale or balance as well as the weight that might be placed on that balance. Then it was applied to a specific weight, although that varied from place to place and time to time sometimes being 30 kilograms, sometimes 40, other times, other weights.

Since scales or balances were mainly used in financial transactions a talent later became a unit of currency and it’s with these two meanings that the word it first entered Old English.

The Old English talent had come via Latin and being Latin the word arrived again through French after the Norman Conquest this time with a new meaning that had developed as French was emerging out of its Latin roots.

This new talent meant a person’s “will” or “state of mind” but this meaning too was swept away in the currents of time when the word began appearing in English translations of the Bible. In those translations a talent was again a piece of money since the Bible story harkened back to times when that was in fact the case.

But Bible stories are told for their allegorical value and the Parable of the Talents was one of these.

In that story a master gives his three servants some talents—being pieces of money—which two of them invest and earn interest but the third effectively hides under his mattress. The moral of the story being that you’ve got to use the talents you’ve been given in this life—which is what gave the word talent the meaning we understand today.

Being disoriented didn’t used to mean being confused.

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To orient oneself is to figure out how or where you are in relation to other things. Orienteering involves using a compass to navigate across the landscape. To become disoriented is to become confused; you’ve lost your bearings.

These words orient, orienteering and disoriented don’t appear on the surface to be related to the orient in oriental rug, but in fact they are.

The ancestor word of our word orient is from Latin and meant “to arise” or “to be born”.  According to the OED, in 1375, orient arose into the English language born out of the pen of one Geoffrey Chaucer who used the word more than once with both the meanings of the lands to the east and the east itself.

In his Knight’s Tale he writes

And fiery Phoebus rises up so bright
That all the orient is laughing with the light,
And with his streamers dries, among the greves,
The silver droplets hanging on the leaves.

So the connection is that the sun arises or is born every morning in the east.  Hence the Far East was called the Orient and the compass point east called orient ever since Chaucer’s time in English but even longer in French and Latin.

By the early 1700s church architects would say that their sanctuaries were oriented because they faced east.

By the mid 1800s other things as well as people could be oriented which by this point didn’t always have to mean that they faced toward the east.

In a time when orient meant “east” disoriented meant to “leave the east” or to “turn from the east” but as orient morphed to mean other directions to be disoriented followed along meaning not only that one had lost their direction but extending to mean confused generally.

The shoe company Nike takes its name from a Greek goddess.

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When I first became aware of the shoe company it wasn’t entirely clear that its name should be pronounced with that ending “e” but knowing that the ancient Greeks had a particularly high regard for a goddess named Nike who was the goddess of victory helps sort out this little pronunciation question.

In ancient depictions she is shown as a particularly fast moving goddess despite all the drapery and has wings on her back though no sports shoes on her feet.

One of the more famous images of her is a headless, armless winged statue at the Louvre in Paris.

This was unearthed on a Greek island in 1863 and underlines the association between Nike and victory because the statue is known as The Winged Victory of Samothrace (Samothrace being the place it was discovered).

The shoe company was first called Blue Ribbon Sports and took on the Nike name when Jeff Johnson dreamed about the Greek goddess and suggested her name first for a model of soccer cleat.

That was 1971, the same year the swoosh design was dreamed up.

Ten years later Nike introduced a basketball shoe called Air Force 1 which also introduced their air cushioned soles.

But it seems to me that being a company that is namesake to a winged goddess they already had air somehow mixed into their identity.

After all what are wings for?

And then there’s the swoosh. The swoosh is that little checkmarky symbol Nike uses. You knew that’s what I meant when I said “swoosh.” But swoosh itself has to do with air. The first citation for the word swoosh is from 1867 when it referred to the sound of a fishing rod moving through the air as the fisherman cast his line.

Although vigorous exercise involves a lot of gulping of air I don’t know that Nike has ever tried to weave that into its marketing.

It was 1988 when they first came out with the slogan “just do it.”

EB White, the author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, wrote of commuters:

One who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife
A man who shaves and takes a train,
And then rides back to shave again.

A commuter is of course someone who commutes.

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Commute as a word took the trip into English first in 1633 from Latin commutare but at the time it didn’t have anything to do with traveling. Instead it meant “change,” or perhaps more accurately “exchange.”

The first citation in English according to the OED was for people commuting money at a currency exchange.

We still sometimes hear an “exchange” or “change” meaning used for the word commute when a prisoner has their sentence commuted by a judge. This usually means it’s changed to be a shorter sentence.

The Latin sense of “change” in the word root also shows up also in a word related to commute; mutate.

The word commute first took on a meaning of “traveling back and forth” about 100 years ago. But it wasn’t the exchange of locations that gave commute this new meaning, as might be implied by EB White’s little poem.

In 1848 the American Railroad Journal reported that regular passengers travelling between Trenton and New Brunswick could buy a ticket good for eight train trips along that route.

The special ticket was priced lower than eight individual tickets and was called a commutation ticket. This model was extended to mean “season ticket” for railway passages and the use of commutation was consistent with other senses at the time of fees or taxes that where paid in lieu of some other means of payment.

All this to say, that the original commuters were exchanging their single ticket prices for a better deal, not simply exchanging their place at home for their place at the office twice a day.