When JohnnyB stuck his bloggish tongue in his cheek the other day and recommended that one of his readers check out “Brohaugh’s pedantic language stuff blog,” I commented, “Doesn’t pedantic mean ‘foot antics’?”
The source of that joke is what I call “microparsing”: dissecting a word and making assumptions about the entrails so discovered, in this case with humorous intent. This form of etymological analysis is often as reliable as extispicy (divination by examining entrails). Extispic etymology leads to assumptions and claims that the “man-” in manufacture is a male human (when it derives from a Latin root meaning “hand”) or that triage connotes “three” (when “tri-” comes from a root meaning “to cull”).
In contrast, some words post their origins right on their foreheads—no surgery needed—and those origins go unnoticed. I was surprised recently when a friend paused, then proclaimed “I didn’t know that” in something approaching wonderment after I mentioned that fabulous means “in the nature of a fable.” We see the miracle in miraculous, but apparently have lost the fable in fabulous.
Another example, in the spirit of foot-antical language stuff: It’s obvious, their youth, when you see pictures of soldiers who have died in action. It’s not so obvious, their youth, when you see the word infantry.
But it should be obvious. It’s staring you right in the face.
The word infantry arrived in English in its present meaning after a long journey (on foot, perhaps), through French, Spanish and Italian, and ultimately from Latin infant-—”youth.” The infant in the word infantry is not a literal baby, but a figurative babe. The infantry were the less trained, usually the younger. They were the ground forces, smaller than the cavalry. (They were the lads, marching off to war. And there, too, we see youth as cannon fodder: Lads, in the first use of the word before they were servant males of “low birth” and before they were young men, were footsoldiers. These lads could aspire to becoming cadets, one supposes, where they could go from being grunts to grunt-workers, toting the generals’ golf clubs on foot . . . and becoming the word we know today as caddies.)
And thus concludes today’s peripatetic pedantry.
(But before I go: Doesn’t extispicy sound like a way to order food at a road kill restaurant? “I’ll have my racoon brains spicy and my possum guts extispicy!”)
In response to my post here yesterday, in which I mocked a misspelling of “lessen” and then employed said misspelling as a lessen—um, lesson—about lackadaisical writing, my friend and colleague JohnnyB(good?) talked of ominous implications, and then wondered parenthetically, “why not omenous?”
Why not omenous, indeed? Let me illuminate: Ominous derives directly from omen, so omenous seems perfectly logical, though the variation in English is, as we’ll see in a moment, “perfectly” illogical.
The derivation of ominous from omen occurred in the source Latin, where cases and modes and tenses and declensions and conjugations and other formal hokey-pokey dance steps changed spelling depending on function (such as illuminate arising from lumen). We brought both words into English at about the same time (by the late 1500s), certainly retaining the Latin spellings in each case.
All such matters are explained in this instructional video, which I believe was the pilot episode of Schoolhouse Rock many years ago:
In that clip, doesn’t instructor John Cleese remind you of that persnickitor-guy two cubicles down from yours who goes apoplectic should someone deign to intentially split an infinitive? (He’s exploding because of my previous sentence, I assure you.) I make this point frequently: Latin has enriched and empowered the language we speak today, but Latin has also in some ways shackled English. Or, rather, Latin’s maniacal adherents have shackled English. Ranging from banning split infinitives to artificially inserting the letter B into otherwise straightforward words like det to disdaining “omenous” spelling consistency, dictates from the “perfect” classical language have forced imperfections on our current living language.
The next time someone bitches about the difficulty of learning English spelling, you can now illumenate them about the price of misplaced perfection.
Today’s Unfortunate English moment, not captured in the original book: If employers are so concerned about people sleeping on the job, why do they put them in cubicles?
The first meaning of cubicle, from around the late 15th century, was . . . (yawwwn—excuse me) . . . (maybe I should get some coffee—just a second) . . . anyway, the first meaning of cubicle, from Latin, is “bedchamber,” and if I hadn’t seen that etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary, I’d wonder if the “bedchamber” origin weren’t perhaps concocted by the guy responsible for those Penthouse letters (you know there has to be only one).
So if you want your employees to stay focused, give them offices. But don’t expect them to be happy about it. I return to the the OED, and its definition of an early but now obsolete use of the word office: “The function or action of defecating or urinating; excretion; an instance of this.” At least such meanings might save you the bother of issuing keys to the executive washrooms.
A few days back, I was talking with a colleague about some subject weighty enough to allow one of us to use the word ruminate. Toward the end of the conversation, my colleague circled back to the word: “Ruminate. That comes from the name of a lyrical poet or a philosopher, doesn’t it?”
This author of Everything You Know About English Is Wrong and of Unfortunate English lives for these very moments. I cleared my throat (I didn’t, actually, but I should have, not only for timing effect, but also as something of a physical demonstration of the word’s origins), and then I told her the story. Here it is, in excerpt from Unfortunate English:
Let’s ruminate on cows chewing their cuds.
In other words, ruminate on rumination.
The first stomach of a ruminant animal (that is, an animal that chews its cud) is a rumen. Rumen is a Latin word that led to Latin ruminari which in turn led to the English word ruminate by the early 1500s. A cud, by the way, is partially digested food that is returned from the first stomach to the animal’s mouth for further chewing.
So chew that image over in your mind and chew it again . . . ruminate it.
Maybe it’s shocking for The Name Inspector to say this, but the etymologies of words or word parts that you use in your name don’t matter. What do matter are the associations people make. Sometimes there’s an overlap between the two, though. For example, many people recognize that -lumin- relates to light, and it in fact comes from the Latin word for light. However, most people don’t make the association to light because of their knowledge of Latin or etymology. They make it because they know words like luminous and illuminate and recognize the word part. In general, etymological meaning connections only come through when they’re also part of the living language.
Hmm, says this word maven. My Unfortunate English is devoted to etymology. My Write Tight advises writers to immerse themselves in dictionaries to learn not only vocabulary but also the nuances of word and even syllable origins. “Forget etymology”? “Forget etymology”? Especially in the light (no pun intended) of my undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin, whose motto is “Numen Lumen”? “Forget etymology”?
Yup. In this context, the Name Inspector is dead on. Words mean what they mean today, not what they meant once. New names and other neologisms depend on association and resonance with related, living words, as well as with similarity of sonic resonance and even typographical look.
Is it important to understand a word’s history? Yes!, so buy Unfortunate English or you may contract dandruff of the hand! Or to be more a touch more realistic . . . etymology is fascinating, and edifying, and so often surprising. (I’m wondering how many wedding shops would reconsider using the word bridal in their business names if they were to allow original meanings of words to scare them away. Bridal the adjective is a modification of the noun bride-ale, a wedding celebration that involved lots and lots of the final syllable.)
Etymology is also at times confounding and in some situations outright distracting. Which brings us back to the karma that illuminated my path to this post: No one seems to know exactly what the hell “Numen Lumen” means, a mystery so deep that a 1912 issue of Wisconsin Alumni magazine published the winner of a contest asking who could explain it best (the explanation is so esoteric that the first place entry also won second place). I always thought “Numen Lumen” meant something on the order of “knowledge illuminates,” but, obviously, sometimes knowledge just obfuscates. That revelation is an undergraduate education in itself.
Therefore, when bringing new words to the language—for business and product names, to describe new processes or trends, or just for the fun of it—rely on the now as your guiding lumin.
“You put your right foot in, you take your right foot out . . .” Now everybody! It’s etymological “Hokey Pokey” time, so shake it all about. You put your right etymology in, you take the wrong etymology out. You define hocus pocus as a corruption of “hoc est corpus” and I’ll shake you all about.
The wrong etymology of “hocus pocus”—the magician’s incantation—is that it comes from either a misinterpretation or a parody of words in the Latin Mass. I bring this up because a friend recently, with all earnestness, filled me in on this “interesting history.” Wikipedia (sometimes known as “wackypedia” or, in homage to friend Fozzy Bear, “wokkawokkapedia”) helps spread the nonsense:
a distortion of hoc enim est corpus meum—”this is my body”—the words of consecration accompanying the elevation of the host at Eucharist . . . mocked by Puritans and others as a form of “magic words”. The Anglican Canon Matthew Damon, Provost of Wakefield Cathedral, West Yorkshire, says that the dance as well comes from the Catholic Latin mass. The priest would perform his movements with his back to the congregation, who could not hear well the Latin words nor see clearly his movements.
This notymology, says the OED, seems to result from a conjecture by one John Tillotson in a seemingly grumpy sermon from the 1690s: “In all probability those common juggling words of hocus pocus are nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of Rome in their trick of Transubstantiation.”
Well, in all improbability, actually. Hocus pocus likely originated as nothing more than part of a series of nonsense syllables used by a stage conjurer (who apparently actually called himself Hocus Pocus) around the 1620s to embellish his act. Later, hocus pocus may have been used in punning reference to words in the Eucharist, but those words are not the source.
So, with all respect to my earnest friend, if you continue to spread the false etymology of hocus pocus . . . You put your wrong foot in, you take your wrong foot out, you put your wrong foot in and you keep it in your mouth.
and of 
lives for these very moments. I cleared my throat (I didn’t, actually, but I should have, not only for timing effect, but also as something of a physical demonstration of the word’s origins), and then I told her the story. Here it is, in excerpt from Unfortunate English:
. Feel free to 
