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.