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I was lucky enough to catch Cory Doctorow at a book reading recently.

In addition to being a science fiction author whose excuse for being there was his book Little Brother (an excellent and even important book by the way) Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of boingboing.net. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is involved in a stack of boards and describes himself as an activist.

In my view he’s an activist for good.

When I asked him to give me a word for podictionary he said he liked the word annihilate, in part because it has nihilism in there.

Activist for good? That didn’t sound so good.

Let’s first see what nihilism is all about.

The Oxford English Dictionary says

“Total rejection of prevailing religious beliefs, moral principles, laws, etc., often from a sense of despair and the belief that life is devoid of meaning.”

The OED goes on to say this was later extended to apply to destructive attitudes and behavior generally, based on a group of Russian revolutionaries who called themselves Nihilists starting about 140 years ago.

The word annihilate seems to me to hold a destructive sense to it too so I was beginning to think that Cory had given me a word that I didn’t like very much.

So I turned to the etymology of annihilate to see if there were any interesting twists and turns in meaning over the years.

Annihilate was pulled from Latin more than 600 years ago, probably with some French influence since it was followed 100 years later by a French word annihil.

This French word couldn’t have been of much use to English speakers since they quickly stopped using it (assigning it’s meaning to annihilate which had previously simply been the past tense of annihil).

The word annihil wouldn’t be of much use to us either except that it leads me to some interesting facts.

First I need to walk you back through history a little more.

The word annihil had earlier in Latin been ad nihil meaning “to nothing” from which we can see why annihiliate means “bring something to nothing.” Also from this we can see that nihil meant “nothing” in Latin.

When we contract nihil we get nil, which was actually what the Romans did too.

But nihil didn’t come from nothing.

Back in Indo-European ne meant “not” and before nihil meant “nothing” in Latin it was built on ne hilum where hilum was a word that meant “a minimal quantity” according to the OED.

Thus our word nil literally means “not even a wee little bit.”

Evidently hilum itself has a history.

It was said to have meant “that which adheres to a bean.”

Sure enough I see in several of the fatter dictionaries that hilum has a meaning in Modern English too: the scar on a seed or bean showing how it was connected to the mother plant; sort of like a bellybutton.

I guess this shows that the destructive tone of Cory Doctorow’s word choice doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

Finally, the person who tells us this bean-related history of hilum is new to me and also of interest.

Sextus Pompeius Festus lived about 1800 years ago. His name sounds pretty Roman but he lived in what is now the south of France.

Old Festus was an early lexicographer who produced something called de verborum significatu which might translate as “the meaning of words.”

He didn’t write it all himself but collected it from centuries of earlier work and so compiled a rich source of information about what early Roman life was like.

As with many very old books this one was nearly annihilated over the centuries. But half of one copy did survive, containing entries starting from the letter M.

Scholars at University College London and at Duke University are working to put this wonderful humpty-dumpty back together again from the sole surviving manuscript plus numerous other references to the work sprinkled throughout history.