07.07.08
Posted in Latin sources, myths and misconceptions, unfortunate English at 6:11 am by Bill Brohaugh
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.
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06.26.08
Posted in English origins, Latin sources, neology, unfortunate English, word history, write tight at 4:37 pm by Bill Brohaugh
I recently found myself at an older blog post about creating names. I first thought I had simply surfed there, but now I’m thinking that some kind of karma illuminated my path to said post, The Name Inspector blog’s “10 tips for naming your company, product, or service”:
9. Forget etymology
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.
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06.21.08
Posted in unfortunate English, word history at 8:28 am by Bill Brohaugh
Today’s Unfortunate English moment, reflecting back on “unfortunate” word histories:
It’s every lecher’s dream that buxom wenches are buxom.
That statement seems ridiculously redundant until we return to the original meaning of buxom. The modern meaning, showing up by 1600, is “attractive, healthy” . . . and the usual sense today is “healthy” in a particular area of the body that sounds a lot like buxom: the bosom. The buxom wenches that our lechers are likely leering at are, in modern euphemism, well-endowed.
But the word buxom is based on the word bow—not the long-O bow that one might wear on one’s buxom bosom, by the “rhymes-with-wow” bow that one does in deference to another. In the original meaning, someone compliant, obedient, and inclined to bow was bow-some, or, in eventual spelling, buxom.
Now the lechers are catching on. If only that buxom wench was bowsome!
The simplified flow of the word’s meaning changes over the years was something like this, with admittedly some of my musing thrown in*: If one was compliant and obedient (the first sense, now obsolete, in use by 1200), one could in turn be gracious, affable and obliging (an obsolete sense in use by the late 1300s); being gracious, one could be in turn be cheerful, good-natured and jolly (in use by the late 1500s); being the cheery, jolly sort, one in turn could be interpreted to be healthy and possibly observed to be plump (also by the late 1500s).
On the other hand, maybe the lecher isn’t so eager that the wench declare herself to be “buxom at bed and at board,” in that this, until the phrase was removed in the 1500s, was part of the ancient ’til-death-do-us-part wedding vows we speak yet today.
Now, for the wench side of things, ladies might very well dream that handsome men are handsome.
Among the surviving modern meanings of handsome is “physically attractive, good looking” (a perception that is often enhanced if the handsome person takes home a handsome—or considerable and respectable—salary), in a sense in use by the late 1500s. But handsome, by the mid 1400s, was originally “easily handled or manipulated” (though the term was used in reference to things, like axes). This sense of physical grace was applied to figurative grace, and then back again to the physical grace of the handsome lechers dreaming of buxom wenches.
(* This brief historification is performed by a nonprofessional on an open course; do try this at home. And nowhere else.)
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06.14.08
Posted in Old English, unfortunate English, word history at 11:23 am by Bill Brohaugh
We get a lot of rain ’round these parts this time of year. Don’t you hate those dreary rainy days? Gray skies, drab sunlight, the clouds spilling blood . . .
Hold on, Mr. Masochistic Meteorologist. Clouds spilling blood? What’s that all about?
It’s about a paraphrase of Edgar Allen Poe:
Once upon a midnight gory,
While I pondered ’bout this story . . .
In Old English, dreor was flowing blood. (As an aside, dreor arises from a root meaning “flow” or “fall”—dreor was a specific type of flow—that of blood.) If something was dreary, it was bloody.
Bloody stuff is usually pretty horrid, and bloody people are in dire straits, and dreary came to take figurative but still pretty intense meanings of “horrid” or “dire.” People in bloodied states are usually not happy about it, and early on dreary also meant “frightened” or “sad.” By the mid 1600s—more likely a softening of “dire or horrid” rather than a twist on “frightened or sad,” the word was applied to situations that make you sad—gloomy, dreary conditions.
So in the figurative sense, the clouds were spilling not blood, but were spilling instead, um . . . blood. And here I’m referring to another original word meaning. The hell with the cliches. Better start crying over spilled milk. Mourn the spilling of milk. Sing dirges because of it. Weep openly.
To spill back in Old English was “to kill, slay, rob of life.” (“Stop me before I spill again!”) And for several centuries of English it had associated meanings related to suicide, destruction, devastation and spoilage. By the early 1100s, to spill was “to ooze blood,” a sense that led by the early 1300s to the meaning of spill as we know it.
That in mind, don’t those dreary days seem a little easier to take now?
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06.08.08
Posted in unfortunate English, word history at 10:56 am by Bill Brohaugh
Today’s Unfortunate English moment:
One of the first commercially viable products sold on the internet was porn. Saucy dot-com sites were selling their wares (and un-wears) long before e-commerce in the rest of the retail and service world took hold.
How oddly appropriate, then, is the history of the name of the symbol in the middle of all porn-site web addresses (as well as all others, of course)—the dot.
The sense of this very old word as “speck” didn’t surface until the 1600s, and OED.com notes that the word didn’t become common until the 1700s. In the 1500s, dot meant “lump, clot,” and before that, stretching back to Old English, dott was used (though in only one recorded instance before reappearing centuries later) to mean “head of a boil.” OK, that meaning is a little disgusting, but not porn-saucy. You see, the odd appropriateness I mentioned results from dott’s German evil twin. Says the OED, “The Old English word [dott] was cognate with Old High German tutto, tutta, modern German dialect dütte, nipple of the breast.” Dott, by association, connoting nipp. Tutto-dott-com indeed—perhaps the perfect porn website name.
And, yes, the spelling is correct. Dott. Two T’s, no A.
(Shameless Plug Alert: This is the sort of nonsense I cover in my book Unfortunate English: The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use, which is of course purchaseable [this would be a failed "Shameless Plug" if I didn't point that out, now wouldn't it?] End Shameless Plug Alert and associated parentheticals.)
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