Another episode from 2006

I’m sure you have attended seminars.  They seem a little interchangeable with conferences and expositions.

The usual definition these days is a get together of specialists in some field or other, or alternately students studying under a professor.

The word started appearing in English within the last 100 years and is based on its use in Germany specifically for the university, student, professor meaning which in German goes back maybe 200 years.

The reason this word was used in that context is because you are supposed to grow, and in particular grow your ideas, in university.  Seminar relates to seminary, as you might picture occupied by a group of monks.

But before a seminary was a place for religious training and thought it was a patch of land for growing things, because you see the root of both words, seminar and seminary, is from the Latin for “seed.”

Which also by the way, is the root for the word for semen.

According to Hugh Rawson’s Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk, this sexual connection, however, oblique, and particularly this MALE sexual connection so offended one professor at Washington University—as reported in 1991 in the New Yorker—that they refused to give seminars.

They gave ovulars instead.