An episode from 2006

Today we can predict the future with elaborate weather forecasting computer programs, and by getting Ivy League educated economists on the radio.

But in the bad old days people who wanted an accurate picture of the days to come would consult a soothsayer who poked through chicken entrails, or looked to the stars.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe but weather forecasters and economists are an improvement.

Because knowing the future is always helpful it is no surprise that people have been trying to make forecasts since a long long time ago.  This is why our word today, “horoscope” shows up pretty early in the history of English.  The first citation is in the year 1050, so that’s just 16 years before the Norman invasion that brought all those French words with their Latin roots into English.

So that makes it Old English.

But people who know Greek will instantly recognize the word’s suffix—scope—as coming from the Greek word for observe or watch.  That’s where we get names for things like telescope and microscope.  The prefix in the word horoscope is also from Greek.

Surprisingly, horo is still completely recognizable to modern English speakers because it means “hour” and the literal translation of “horoscope” is “hour watcher.”

In this case however, the hour watcher isn’t waiting for his shift to end, the figurative translation is “the observation of the hour of birth.”

So it’s the date and time when you’re born that is supposed to tell those astrological soothsayers what your future holds.

This makes “horoscope” a bit of an odd word.  Most words that can be traced back to Greek came into English after the Norman invasion and so depend on the fact that French was built on the common man’s Latin and Latin in turn took much inspiration from Greek.

To me this seems to reinforce the idea that knowing the future was always important, and important enough that people talked a lot about it so that a word from antiquity somehow was carried to the British isles and continued getting talked about even to this day.

This episode circa April 2006

I checked the New York Times to see how people were using the word “maelstrom.”

To be honest I needed to check the spelling first.

• There was a story on the war in Iraq and the maelstrom in Bagdad;
• another about a family crises maelstrom; and
• one on a maelstrom in public education.

These match with one of the definitions given in the New Oxford American Dictionary that says the word has a figurative sense of a scene or state of confused and violent movement or upheaval.  According to Urbandictionary maelstrom is also a Kickass band and according to Wikipedia it’s more than one role playing game as well as several pieces of music.

But the root of the word, as hinted by the spelling, isn’t English, it seems to be Dutch.

And in fact there is a place, not in Holland, where this word—if not comes from—at least is associated with.  On the coast of Norway there is an island called “Moskenisoy” and nearby the combinations of submarine rock formations and tidal currents set up a whirlpool that gurgles and sucks in a rather frightening manner if you happen to be in a boat nearby.   To sailors 500 years ago it was frightening enough that rumour got around.

Here is what seems to be the first quote in English:

There is between the said Rost Islands, and Lofoote, a whirle poole, called Malestrand, which..maketh such a terrible noise, that it shaketh the rings in the doores of the inhabitants houses of the said Islands, ten miles of

The story went that this whirlpool could suck any ship down and grind it to splinters.

The Dutch root words for maelstrom are maalen meaning to grind and whirl—which is also related to our word “meal” as in “corn meal”; and stroom  which is a stream or current.

The New Oxford American Dictionary says the word denotes a mythical whirlpool, but I’m thinking that by mythical here they mean it doesn’t really rattle the doorknobs ten miles away or grind all ships to matchsticks.

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.

From April 2006

I hate luggage.

My theory of travel includes a thin suitcase and a fat wallet.

Consequently I never travel.

The word “luggage” appears first in 1597 and one of the first citations is Shakespeare’ Henry IV where the King’s son Hal asks his friend to

bring your luggage nobly on your back

The word “luggage” is supposed to be modeled after the word baggage.  But a bag is the container.  The luggage refers to the thing we have to lug around.

“Lug” is an older word and it has always meant something to do with pulling.  So these roller bags that make it easier to lug your junk around airports are in keeping with etymology stretching back more than 600 years.

Originally “lug” is thought to have come from Old Norse and is reflected in Swedish where lugga refers to pulling a person by the hair.  But it also at various times meant to pull out your sword and to take a pull at a bottle.

I took a look at the word slug, thinking that if lug meant to take a little drink, maybe taking a slug was related.  The OED says this form of slug is a slang usage, not tracing the origin.  But etymonline offers two other possibilities, a slang expression “fire a slug” that used to mean take a drink, or from Irish slog that meant swallow.

Since our word “luggage” didn’t come from Latin I am interested to see that in the Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary the Latin translations they give for luggage include impedimenta—which is how I feel about luggage—and onus.

Onus is Latin for “burden.”

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English seems to feel that dragging luggage around is classier than carrying baggage.  I think the fat wallet idea is the classiest.

First posted April 2006

In English the word “pupa” is the stage of life of an insect.  For example between being a caterpillar and being a butterfly the stage where this kind of insect morphs is called its pupal stage.

This is the idea of Carl Linneas who in the 1750s came up with the classification system we still use today for plants and animals.  He borrowed the Latin word for “girl” pupa which also meant “doll” in Latin.  He did it in a documented format so we know who to blame, but the traces on a number of other related words are not quite so well established, but the traces are there just the same and the connections are pretty believable.

In Latin it’s easy to see how the word for girl might be applied also to a doll.  I mean its more often girls who play with dolls and today we certainly call our own little girls dolls, living dolls.

In fact our big girls too sometimes.

Since French grew out of vulgar Latin the links to their word for doll poupée are also clear.

“Puppet” didn’t appear until the mid 1500s and before that it had been “poppet.”  The movie Pirates of the Caribbean has Keira Knightley’s character Elizabeth Swann being called a poppet by the kidnapping pirates.

Then as today we think of a puppet not only as a plaything, but as a representation of a person that is actually controlled by a real person behind the scenes.  Political puppets are actual people controlled by someone behind the scenes.

Keira Knightley was being called a poppet though, because another old meaning of the word is a dainty, pretty girl.

Now Keira Knightley is no dog but it turns out that puppet is a word related to what we call young dogs.  In the middle ages lap dogs were also called poupée because they were thought of as playthings—not working dogs.  Poupée morphed to puppy and so with time any little dog began to be called a puppy.

From 2006

I did a random search of the New York Times to see how people were using the word “nemesis”

• The Los Angeles Lakers Kobe Bryant is quoted as saying the third quarter of their games this season has been their nemesis.
• Kristanna Loken, is said to be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nemesis in Terminator 3.
• The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin is said to have a nemesis in his own Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

All these usages line up well with the dictionary definitions I turned up.  To use The New Oxford American Dictionary as an example, a nemesis is

“the inescapable…agent of someone’s…downfall.”

The OED tells me that this word comes from ancient Greek where Nemesis was a goddess.  Her job was to keep an eye out for people who were being overly successful, particularly when the success is undeserved and even more so when it is ill gotten.

She is the goddess of righteous anger; divine retribution and vengeance, but only where vengeance is actually fair in balance.

In the pantheon of ancient gods she appears to me to be unusually reasonable.

Her name is said to translate as “to give what is due.”  She’s the daughter of night, or at least the goddess Nyx and is still said by some to have evaded the advances of Zeus.

I’m liking her more all the time.

I see that the entrys in the OED second and draft third edition are a little different.  They have pushed the date of the first citation back by 25 years or so to 1542 and there are several more subtle varieties of definition in there.  But the new entry I like the most relates to astronomy.

In 1984 in the journal Nature, a paper by Davis, Hut & Muller proposed a twin star to our sun as a possible explanation for an apparent cycle of mass extinctions on earth that seemed to show up every 26 million years.  Their theory was that the orbit of this star every 26 million years moved into an area called the Oort cloud and dislodged comets that then pounded the earth.

However unjust this may be, they suggested that if and when this companion star is found, it be named NEMESIS.

Isaac Asimov wrote a book on the idea.

In the 20 odd years since, nobody has found this theoretical star and the idea that extinctions come and go every 26 million years is also up in the air.  But the OED citation shows a certain sense of humor about it that originates with the authors of the theory Davis, Hut & Muller; they go on to say

“We worry that if the companion is not found, this paper will be our nemesis.”

From 2006

The other day on the blog The Oxford Etymologist Anatoly Liberman just happened to mention in passing that the word “window” evolved from an earlier pair of words “wind” and “eye.”

So a window is the space in the wall where the wind looks in; or at least did until people started sticking sheets of glass in the way.

According to the OED the word “window” shows up first in English in the Ancrene Riwle, an old text I’ve talked about before here at podictionary.  This puts window around the year 1225, but its roots are quite a bit older.

There had been another word that English men and women used to describe the things we now call windows.  In Old English these were called eyethurls and since thurl is an old word for hole, this means eye holes.  This word had been part of English since the Germanic peoples came across the English channel in around 450.

I spent a few moments on a sort of sidetrack with thurl because I’ve come across it before in writing my book and looking at the word nostril, obviously nostril is nose thurl. Thurl is related to the word through which is obviously related to holes.

Anyway, eyethurl lost out in its battle as an English word to window.

There was another contestant that came into English around the same time as window.  The word “fenester” came from French and was used in English concurrently with the word “window” for more than 300 years up until about Shakespeare’s time.

The winner as we know wasn’t eyethurl, nor fenester, but window which didn’t come from French or Germanic Old English, but was brought down from the north by the invading Vikings, who, once they stopped burning and raping and pillaging, settled down and started living relatively peacefully with their English neighbors and thus injected words such as window into the language.

The American Heritage Dictionary says that window is an example of a type of word called a “kenning” that the Norse loved to invent.

Wikipedia tells me that a kenning is called a kenning from a norse phrase translating as “to express a thing in terms of another.” The example that is often trotted out is from Beowulf where the kenning “whale road” is used to mean the sea.  So the wind’s eye became window.

Government is always working on ways to get taxes, and if they are a good government they look for ways to make taxation fair.  About 100 years after the word window left eyethirl and fenester in the dust appeared one of these efforts.

Today I pay my municipal taxes based on an assessment of what my house is worth.  Centuries ago tax assessors didn’t have the real estate records to compare house values, much less the computers to crunch the numbers, so a few simpler tricks were tried.  If you were rich enough to have a hearth in your home you were rich enough to pay taxes.  Two hearths, ah, more tax please, etc.

Then in the late 1600s, if you have more than six windows in your house, tax.  More windows, more tax.

This lasted in England until 1851, over a century and a half with the result that a bunch of homeonwners bricked up a few windows so they wouldn’t have to pay.  My sources say that some of these windows are still bricked up.

Once the window in a building had gained its name for good and all, people started using the word window as a metaphor.  For example “the eyes are windows on a person’s soul” and in fact I see from one Oxford quotation that a nice pair of shoes are a window on someone’s soul too.

More recently we have windows of opportunity and of course we have windows on our computers.  Microsoft Windows of course isn’t the only operating system but all operating systems that open and close little panes on the screen are using a concept of windowing that was supposedly dreamed up and named at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre in the early 1970s.

From 2006

In fact I want to talk about both cement and concrete and explore what is different about them.

The word cement seems to have come into Middle English from Old French and ultimately from Latin.  The earliest ancestor word in Latin has a meaning of small stones that have been chipped off a larger piece.  This name fits with the technology of cement which required the mixing of ground stone of specific kinds, and later more refined processes included heating it until it almost fuses, then re-grinding it into powder.  The resulting material was then, and is now used to mix with water and forms a sort of stone glue to stick blocks of stone or bricks together.

This meaning of mortar was the one that stuck to cement when it entered English in 1300.  Since then it has come to mean other types of glue like rubber cement.

I never made much distinction between cement and concrete, but etymologically the have a different background and evidently they are technically different too.

Concrete is also from Latin but instead of meaning stone chips or dust, the parent word for concrete holds a meaning of growing together.  So in the construction industry concrete is the stuff that results when you mix cement with filler material like sand or gravel.

The cement, cements the gravel together, concretes it together.

When I hear the word concrete used in conversation for example in the phrase “concrete proposal” I always assumed that the proposal was solid, like concrete.  But historically the word concrete was used to apply to things that were blended together tightly, before it was ever poured onto a construction site.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that in 1651 the voice sliding up the scale was referred to as an example of concrete sound—as opposed to discrete sounds—while the mixing with gravel and cement had to wait until 1834.

Concrete is given as a sort of antonym of discrete, and although both concrete and discrete are from Latin and one means grow together while the other means separate and distinct, they don’t seem to have been thought of as antonyms until they got into English.

In thinking of cement’s origins with chips from larger blocks of stone I kept thinking of the phrase “a chip off the old block” but I see that according to Michael Quinion of world-wide-words.org the allusion is to carpentry and a block of wood.  He puts the first instance as “chip of the same block” in 1637.

Yesterday I talked about the cold soup vichyssoise and quoted its inventor Louis Diat as saying “there are five elements: earth, air, fire, water and garlic.”

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Garlic features in the the cold soup gazpacho that I like too but not in its etymology.

While vichyssoise can be dated to about 100 years ago, gazpacho has a much longer history and one that’s a little harder to date.

The OED online gives a first citation of gazpacho from 1845 and even gives a recipe. I see though that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives a first English citation of 1775.

Via the OED, according to the 1845 Handbook of Travels in Spain,  gazpacho “is a cold vegetable soup, and is composed of onions, garlic, cucumbers, pepinos, pimientas, all chopped up very small and mixed with crumbs of bread, and then put into a bowl of oil, vinegar, and fresh water.”

Both Mark Morton’s Cupboard Love and Larousse Gastronomique tell us that the name for this soup comes from Arabic and means “soaked bread.”

Certainly my first exposure to the stuff came from my uncle who insisted that one of the key ingredients was stale bread.

At the time he had a Spanish visitor who scoffed at us eating our gazpacho, dipping bread into it to soak up the delicious juices. He quoted what I supposed to be an old Spanish proverb: “bread with bread is a fool’s meal.”

Well too bad for him, this fool still loves the stuff.

Though the “soaked bread” etymology appears in a few sources the OED simply says it’s from Spanish. The American Heritage Dictionary however expands on this saying it is probably of Mozarabic origin; akin to the Spanish word caspicias meaning “remainders” or “worthless things.”

I needed to lookup Mozarabic which turns out to be a language group that occupied Spain based on the Latin that had been there from Roman times, morphing due to the Arabic of the Muslim conquerors of the area who hung out there until about 500 years ago.

It was a hot and humid day recently and I decided that some of my favorite cold soup would be just the ticket. But when I announced to my kids the kind of soup that I wanted to make they began pining for another cold soup that their grandmother makes; vichyssoise.

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So the etymology of vichyssoise will come first.

Vichyssoise is made with potatoes and leeks and cream. The dictionaries only show a date of 1939 for a first citation but the origins of vichyssoise go back to before 1900.

It was in 1900 that Louis Diat turned 15 years old and let’s assume that the story he told New Yorker Magazine in 1950 goes back to an earlier stage of his childhood.

Louis Diat was a French chef and he worked for the Ritz restaurants in Paris and London before the Ritz Carleton opened in New York and he was sent there to run the place.

In the summer of 1917, he was inspired by the memory of the potato-and-leek soup of his childhood, which his mother and grandmother used to make. He said “I recalled how, during the summer, my older brother and I used to cool it off by pouring in cold milk, and how delicious it was.”

In creating the soup Diat got to name it and he named it after the city of Vichy near where he grew up.

Vichy might have gotten its name, according to Adrian Room, either from the personal name of some otherwise forgotten Roman Vippius, or else as a shortening of vicus calidus meaning warm village, because of some hot springs there.

That’d be a little ironic, that cold soup would be named after hot springs.

Anyway it was Louis Diat who once said that “there are five elements: earth, air, fire, water and garlic.”