I was wondering why North America was called a continent but to be incontinent means you need to wear diapers.

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I bet you’ve guessed the answer already.

Both the word continent and incontinent have a similar etymology and share their root with the words contain and continuous.

Someone who is incontinent can’t contain the byproducts our bodies produce.

The reason that Europe and North America and the other continents are called continents is that this word continent is actually an abbreviation of an earlier Latin expression terra continens that meant “continuous landmass.”

This sense appeared in English in the latter 16^th century and according to The Oxford English Dictionary at first there were thought to be only two continents.

This since North and South America are actually attached to each other, as are Europe, Asia and Africa.

Australia didn’t seem to count and as the OED put it “geographers have speculated on the existence of an Antarctic Continent.”

You can tell that this particular entry in the OED has not been updated too recently.

But happily for us the very first time the word continent was documented in English with a conscious meaning of huge landmasses and distinguishing such segments as Europe and Africa was in a book about etymology.

Here I use the word etymology in the loosest of ways because the work in question was called Enquiries touching the diversity of languages and religions, through the chief parts of the world written by Edward Brerewood and published in 1614, after his death.

Edward Brerewood was a very smart guy but he lived in a time when inquiries into language and other subjects were based on “deep thought” instead of research into facts and data. As a consequence not much of what he said about language development holds water.

In poking around in my dictionaries I also noticed that the word content meaning “happy” is also related to continent and incontinent.

In a nutshell the reason we are feeling satisfied when we are feeling content is that contentment means we are lacking for nothing. As the OED puts it “having one’s desires bounded by what one has; not disturbed by the desire of anything more.”

In my part of the world the snow is melting. Melting too early and too fast for my taste since I haven’t had enough skiing this year.

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But the warm breezes and sunshine seem to make most people happy and they see these signs as harbingers of spring.

I see in one dictionary that there is actually a plant called the harbinger of spring.

The American Heritage Dictionary says that a harbinger is something “that indicates or foreshadows what is to come” it’s “a forerunner.”

The etymology of the word harbinger is tied up in that “forerunner” meaning.

Long before English was English the roots of this word were likely Germanic.

It was a military word.

Think not in terms not of attacking, but of moving troops from place to place and stationing them here or there.

When an army rolls into town it’s unlikely they can fit in comfortably when they arrive unannounced. Before you know it all the spare beds are full and all the food for miles around is being gobbled up.

Things tend to work out better if they have a place to stay arranged in advance.

To this extent the word harbinger is related to the word harbour which is a safe place to stay for a ship.

The harbinger was the person sent out ahead of the army, or some visiting royal personage, to let the townsfolk know that they were about to have a visit and to make sure the place was ready when the troops arrived.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the parent word was heriberga in Old High German and that this word breaks down as heri meaning “army” and berga meaning “shelter.”

When the word harbinger arose in English more than 800 years ago it had already passed through French and was applied to the people who gave shelter.

From being someone who goes ahead to arrange for shelter, the harbinger evolved to be slightly more generally someone who went ahead just to announce that the king or some military group was on its way.

From there its easy to see how the melting of snow can be seen as advance notice of the coming of spring and so be called a harbinger.

There’s an etymological connection between the platform upon which speeches are made and squirrels, rats and beavers.

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The platform I’m talking about is a rostrum.

A rostrum is so called because it was so called in ancient Rome.

People would stand on a platform that faced the senate and make speeches.

The reason we call such a speaking platform a rostrum is that more than 2300 years ago the Romans won a battle and brought their war trophies back to show off.

This battle was pretty close to home since the city they conquered was less than 50 kilometers from Rome itself.

The war trophies were the prows of six ships that they had captured. They hung these up on the platform where speeches were made and presumably made speeches about winning the battle.

Afterward people began referring to the platform as “the prows” because of this.

Except that in Latin a ship’s prow was called a rostrum and the plural of rostrum was rostra so they called the speaking platform rostra.

The reason a ship’s prow was called rostrum was because it was the beak or the snout of the ship and rostrum was also the word used to describe an animal’s beak or muzzle.

In turn the beak or muzzle was so named because to peck or gnaw at something was in Latin rodere.

Animals like squirrels, rats and beavers have teeth that keep on growing their whole lives so that they have no worries about wearing them down by gnawing on nut shells, household foundations or trees.

Since rodere means “gnaw” rodent literally means “gnawer.”

In 1601 Philemon Holland came out with an English translation from Latin, of the now 2000 year old  Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder.

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Here’s what Pliny had to say about the word prevarication:

“The ploughman, unlesse he bend and stoupe forward..must..leave much undone as it ought to be; a fault which in Latine we call Prevarication  and this tearme appropriate unto Husbandrie, is borrowed from thence by Lawyers.”

These days when someone is asked a question and they skate around the answer they are said to prevaricate.

They are avoiding the question.

The word prevaricate was built on an earlier word varicare that meant “to straddle” which in turn came from varus meaning “crooked.”

It may seem obvious how a word that meant “crooked” grew into a word that means “avoiding the question” but how did the farmer get involved?

The “crooked” meaning of varus was also applied in classical Latin to the crooked legs of people who were knock-kneed.

The pre part of prevaricate might be thought of as “before” or “going forward” so that prevaricate comes to mean “going forward crookedly” or “walking crookedly.”

Thus the reason a negligent plowman was said to prevaricate was that the furrow he cut wasn’t straight. Hence a lawyer or politician who isn’t giving you a straight line is prevaricating.

Sadly, there are still people in the world today who are living as slaves.  If you want to know more about this, please visit iabolish.com or antislavery.org.

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The history of the word slave jumped out at me from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable because there it claimed that the word slave is a misnomer and that it really means “noble” and “illustrious.”

So, as I always do, I cracked open The Oxford English Dictionary.

Let me see; all the definitions that I can see tell me that ever since it came into English more than 700 years ago, the meaning of slave has remained pretty consistent.

It does say here that we get this word because so many people of Slavic origin became slaves even earlier than that.

As an aside, in northern Canada there is Great Slave Lake named after the Slavey Indians, who in turn were named because their Cree neighbors so often took them into slavery.

As I poke around in my various sources I get more of the same. The word comes to us because 1100 years ago the Holy Roman Empire was fighting with Slavic people and taking many of them prisoner.

But nothing about the word actually meaning “noble.”

Nothing at least until I get to the American Heritage Dictionary.  There it indicates that Slavic was what the Slavic peoples called themselves.

Now we’re getting somewhere; one wouldn’t expect them to call themselves anything that was degrading.

I’m told that that the root comes from an Indo-European word meaning “to hear.” Thus we might consider Slavic as the name of a people who considered themselves noteworthy, people you’d have heard about.

And yet the Century Dictionary directly counters this claim saying “the ordinary derivation from Old Bulgarian slovo, a word, or slava, glory, fame, is untenable.”

When I hear the word chauvinist I think of a person—male—who takes a superior view of the capabilities of his gender. I guess I’m influenced by the 1970s phrase male chauvinist pig that evolved out of the woman’s lib movement.

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Dictionaries take a wider perspective and offer examples of chauvinists who think it is their country that is innately superior.

Chauvinist and chauvinism are words that demonstrate the power of the entertainment industry.

Chauvinist is a word that arose because of the over-the-top antics of Nicholas Chauvin.

The story goes that Nicholas Chauvin was a soldier in Napoleon’s army and was mad-crazy enthusiastic about fighting for his country and his leader. He sustained war wounds on 17 different occasions, lost fingers, had his face disfigured and still kept up his rah-rah attitude. Napoleon was so happy to have such a keen supporter that Nicholas Chauvin was given a ceremonial sword and a cash prize.

But eventually Napoleon himself fell out of favor and Nicholas Chauvin’s excessive enthusiasm began to earn him only ridicule.

At least two plays were written in the early 1800s that featured him as an over-zealous wing-nut. Through these plays people in France and then elsewhere began using his name to describe people who had an unreasonable superiority complex about their own social group—with particular emphasis on nationalism and militarism.

His name became so famous through theses plays and the adoption of the term chauvinism that people actually began to believe that he had been a real person.

I say this because in 1993 Gerard de Puymège went looking for authentic military records about Nicholas Chauvin and wrote a book about the fact that the guy had never really existed; he was just a creation of the theatre.

A number of years ago I worked at a company where the chemistry among the people was so wonderful.  I was really fond of the people I worked with.

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Nowadays that means I really liked them.  I have a warm affection for them still.

However 600 or 700 years ago using “fond” when talking bout someone else had quite a different meaning.

Back then it would have meant that they were silly, or even more strongly, that they were blithering idiots.

I look back at the roots of this word and things seem a little misty to me.  On the one hand sources such as Anatoly Liberman’s Word Origins, and etymonline tell me that the earlier foolish meanings of “fond” may be related to the word “fun.”  The Oxford English Dictionary confirms this but and adds that an even earlier meaning of “fond” seemed to be something that was bland and had lost flavor.

I was having trouble making sense of these roots, but maybe an early citation dated 1388 can help out.

“he is said fonned salt, not profitable to any thing”

Which means that somebody is being called a bland spice.  I’m sure you’ve known somebody who was part of your group but was pretty silly and really didn’t add much, or worse was an annoying idiot.  I can see how “fonned salt” meaning “flavorless spice” might have morphed into a meaning of foolish.

The rest of the trajectory of this word is pretty simple.  Already when that quote was made, people were using “fond” to mean “foolish” and as time went on the meaning edged toward the softer meaning, away from an absolute cretin.

Toward Shakespeare’s time “fond” was taking on the tone of “foolishly naive.”  It’s easy to see how one can be sympathetic with naiveté, and so “fond” began to apply to the feelings of that sympathy and affection.

The word “fondle” grew out of “fond” within the last 400 years.  At first it was to treat something fondly and about 200 years ago started to be more specific, in meaning “to caress.”

A midwife is called a midwife not because the midwife is in the middle of anything, nor because during the birth of children the midwife is helping the wife as opposed to the husband.

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It is pretty uncommon to find men who are midwives but I guess they do exist. The etymology of the word midwife reflects the fact that assisting in bringing a new little person into this world has long been a gender role and almost completely dominated by women.

The wife part of midwife has nothing to do with the marital state of the parents of the baby being delivered, nor that of the midwife herself.

The word wife predates an association with being married or unmarried and in our earliest records just meant “woman.”

If we paste that meaning on midwife we get midwoman.

Unfortunately this doesn’t get us much further along the way toward understanding why these deliverers of babies might be called midwives.

We have to take another step and examine the mid part of midwife.

In this case mid does not mean middle.

There don’t seem to be too many examples of words other than midwife that retain an old meaning of mid but what it is believed to have mean was “with.”

Thus midwife literally means “with woman” and refers to the fact that this woman called a midwife has the job of being with the mother during her labor and delivery.

I like to go on canoe trips in the summer and one of the hazards of canoe tripping is that sometimes lakes have leeches.

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They adhere themselves to your skin and start sucking on your blood.

They don’t actually do much damage but the concept is pretty unappealing.

Kids love animals but is it possible for little girls to love leeches?

Historically and even today leeches are used in medicine. They have the ability to keep blood flowing which can be useful in tissues that doctors are trying to help heal. So perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that once upon a time doctors weren’t called doctors, but instead they were called leeches.

Back around the year 900 the Venerable Bede first recorded the word leech in English and at that time he was talking about medical practitioners, not slimy sucking water worms.

Coincidentally The Oxford English Dictionary also dates the first reference to leeches as blood suckers to about the same year 900 but this time in a gloss; that is, in a short note explaining in English what a word in Latin document means.

Doctors were called leeches based on a Germanic root that meant “to heal.”

This root in turn is thought to go back to and Indo-European root leg that meant “to speak.”

Here I’m imagining a connection based on the doctor speaking to you about what you have to do to heal yourself.

The “to speak” meaning went even further back to a meaning of “gather.”

Here I suppose the knowledge has been gathered by the physician.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable confidently declares that it is because doctors used leeches extensively to heal people that leeches started to be called by what people called the doctors.

The Oxford English Dictionary says this is a plausible theory but that the early spelling forms of the animal leech were different enough from the physician leech to make them think it might have been an independent word.

The American Heritage Dictionary points to a different Indo-European root for the sucking kind of leech. In this case leig which meant to bind.

The waters get murky back that far in history.

Murky waters are where leeches like to live and one day when on a canoe trip we noticed some of the little suckers happily ensconced between my daughter’s toes.

Luckily there were no tears from my daughter.

It isn’t recommended to just rip the things off, they leave their mouth parts behind. Better, so it is said, to sprinkle salt on them or touch them with a hot ember until the disengage and fall off.

We went for the salt option.

No tears I should say until I was ready to pitch the little leech body into the campfire. Then she let loose.

We simply had to return the dear little creature to the lake where it liked to live.

The word storm is a very old word that predates English itself according to The Oxford English Dictionary.

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It shows up in almost identical form in many Germanic languages and appears to have the same ancient roots as does the word stir.

The image of a divine wooden spoon stirring up black clouds springs to mind.

The power of weather has always left an impression on people’s minds, particularly when they are dependent on its good behavior for their survival.

In the century after Shakespeare we are informed by Opie and Tatem’s Dictionary of Superstitions that sailors whose lives were often threatened by stormy weather believed that having a prostitute onboard the ship would bring storms upon them.

Imagine a seaman of those days, having been confined to his vessel for weeks or months and finally getting shore leave.  His temptation to strike up an acquaintance with one of the ladies of the port must have been considerable.

And when the time came to sail, it’s only natural that the intimate couple conspire to smuggle her onboard to continue the fun.

Now imagine the scene some time later when she is discovered.

The sad outcome seems to have been that she was often hurled into the waves as some sort of sacrifice to Neptune in a misguided attempt to avert stormy weather.

A common sailor might be forgiven for his superstitious prejudice but compare the contrasting beliefs of the educated classes of the time.

While getting rid of a lady-of-the-night might avoid a storm (even at the cost of killing her) a great storm was seen by the upper crust as nature’s unease at the death of a leading citizen.

Simpson & Roud’s Dictionary of English Folklore reports that the death of Cromwell was accompanied by a storm and that the best of English society connected the two events.

We find in the diaries of Samuel Pepys the account of a storm which made him worry that it might mean the death of the queen.

The significance of a great storm seemed to be ambiguous and might announce the death of a good person, or the passing of an evil person into hell.

This makes me think that killing a prostitute would have had no effect at all on the weather since some people felt it prevented storms while others thought it brought them on—it’s a kind of a balance of superstition.