I’ve recently encountered a bit of confusion about the word personality—a subject of jealous interest of mine since I myself have no personality.
One bit of confusion I found at wilderdom.com, a site about something, though I’m not sure what:
Personality comes from the Greek word “persona”, meaning “mask”
The word ‘personality’ derives from the Latin word ‘persona’ which means ‘mask’. The study of personality can be understood as the study of ‘masks’ that people wear. These are the personas that people project and display, but also includes the inner parts of psychological experience which we collectively call our ‘self’.
Greek, Latin, Babylonian—hell, just toss out any ancient language origin. How about “Etruscan,” while we’re at it?
Turns out that yes, the origin described in nonboldfaced type is correct. The word persona is Latin. But now there’s a seed of doubt. Just as it isn’t Greek, perhaps it also doesn’t mean “mask.” Could that be true? Let’s ask some language experts: Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, who say—
The English word ‘personality’ comes from two Latin words, per and sona, “through sound.” The Romans knew that the personality comes through in the tone of voice and other vocal aspects.
Well, that sounds good and all, but the word actually comes from one Latin word—persona—meaning, yes, “mask.” Think Dramatis Personae—the theatrical cast of characters. And, no, persona likely didn’t itself result from a “sounds-like” origin, as it probably came from Etruscan (gasp!)—the word phersu, also meaning “mask.”
Still, I’m very forgiving of language experts Kathlyn and Gay Hendricks, because they are actually body language experts, and they brought up the personality factor in analyzing the decipherable body language of one Sarah Palin. (At least her body language is decipherable, as her verbal language is hardly that.)
So I leave you with Kathlyn and Gay to analyze some bodyspeak from a current “personality” (read: mask-wearer) in this interesting article.
I like the goals, the coverage and the common sense over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, a blog devoted to setting folks straight regarding misconceptions and falsehoods related to history, economics, education and other topics. The name comes from the popular “fact” (promulgated by various means, but now certainly fueled by the bullshitternet) that Millard Fillmore was the first President to enjoy a bathtub in the White House, when in fact this nugget of noninformation was first mentioned in a humor piece by H.L. Mencken. Such delusions must be demystified, and if I ever get time, I’ll write a book about misconceptions about the English language and call it Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. Oh, wait.
. . . the American open road is, as always, very interesting.
For example, according to the billboards, somewhere in Wisconsin there is a restaurant named Brisco’s (after Brisco County, Texas?), which claims to feature cuisine (a French word) of a “southwestern” flavor. What does that mean?
This is a wry comment on a word often associated with the phrase “French cuisine” juxtaposed against American Southwestern fare. I’ve seen observations that took the topic of non-French cuisine to extremes, by declaring that, say, the phrase “Norwegian cuisine” was nonsensical because cuisine denoted French food and French food only.
There is no such limitation. A cuisine is “a style of cooking,” and Southwestern cooking is a particular style. (You could argue that Norwegian cooking is a certain style, too, though items like lutefisk argue to the contrary. I pick on Norwegian cooking because my heritage, my surname, and the area of Wisconsin I grew up in all have strong Norsk ties.) Granted, our borrowing cuisine from French as early as around the late 15th Century (and technically, we didn’t borrow it because we still have it), and the commonness of the phrase “French cuisine,” seem to limit the word’s use, but remember that many words over time have changed—broadening, narrowing, or even inversing themselves.
What does that Wisconsin restaurant sign mean? In this instance, as I commented on Ed Darrell’s post:
I believe it means that English is a very adaptable language. In addition to being a French word, cuisine is a centuries-old English word borrowed from French. If we were to apply words to concepts only in line with those words’ language origins, we wouldn’t be able to refer to English grammar (as the word grammar is of Old French and ultimately Latin origin) or even to the English language (again, from Latin and brought to us by the French). Nor, for that matter, would we have my favorite Muppet, the Swedish chef.
Meantime, enjoy your travels through Wisconsin, my native state. Yes, I’m a natural-born fromage-head.
And, Ed, if a culturally mixed-up restaurant sign is the oddest thing you’ve seen in Wisconsin, you haven’t run into any 30-foot plastic cows yet. They’re out there.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bork bork bork:
When discussing false origins, Everything You Know About English Is Wrong concentrates on individual words. I do take a poke at “3 sheets to the wind,” “raining cats and dogs” and a couple of other phrases that have been given false histories. For phrases, allow me to alert you to The Phrase Finder website, one of many interesting sources. There you can look up numerous phrases and their origins (and even find them grouped along such themes as “phrases from Shakespeare”), and sign up for a phrase-a-week newsletter.
Yesterday’s newsletter, for instance, pokes at “chip on your shoulder,” supposedly from placing wood chip on, yes, one’s shoulder as a dare to begin a fight. But site operator Gary Martin writes,
Anyone who might be inclined to doubt that origin can take heart from an alternative theory. This relates to working practices in the British Royal Dockyards in the 18th century. In Day and Lunn’s The History of Work and Labour Relations in the Royal Dockyards, 1999, the authors report that the standing orders of the [Royal] Navy Board for August 1739 included this ruling:
Shipwrights to be allowed to bring [chips] on their shoulders near to the dock gates, there to be inspected by officers.
The permission to remove surplus timber for firewood or building material was a substantial perk of the job for the dock workers.
In readable and interesting analysis, Martin then examines which is the actual origin of the phrase, and if you “knew” that one of the origins was right, well, everything you know about English is wrong, eh?
To read Martin’s analysis and learn the likely true origin, visit here.
By the by, the site is British, so part of the fun of the newsletter is learning about phrases that we Yanks (or at least this particular Yank) haven’t encountered before. Come a cropper? More on that anon.
File under “A spoonful of sugar helps the etymology go down . . .”
Who would have thought that candy could be so educational? Our audiovisual aid today:
Tart in its various forms has various origins:
The sweet: as in the dessert tart, coming to English in the 1200s from French.
The tart: as in the adjective tart, meaning “sharp, piquant,” originating from an Old English word teart, with intense meanings of pain and suffering
The sweet and tart: as in the pejorative tart applied to prostitutes, promiscuous women and occasionally men. This version of the word was sweet in that it was used in a positive sense when it appeared around the mid 1800s; it took pejorative connotations not long after.
So where does the candy come in? SweeTarts is a cleverly effective name in that it describes the confection’s sweet/sour flavors while recalling the positive word sweetheart. Significant to the word lovers among us is the fact that it almost certainly displays in its SweeTart/sweetheart pun the true origin of the once-nice now-pejorative noun tart. No, not the spicy nature of a type of woman. The heart of your sweetheart.
We’re not precisely sure how the word originated, but the two most likely explanations involve either a shortening of sweetheart or a shortening of jam-tart, a Cockney rhyming slang version of sweetheart.
Now class, your assignment includes reading four bags of M&Ms to prep for both spelling and math class next week.
Those of you who deliberate on why words like conversate and orientate seem to permeate sloppy speech and writing, do you abominate deliberate? If we converse and orient, why don’t we deliber instead of deliberate? In fact, we once did; the first recorded use of the verb deliber, from Chaucer, preceded the verb deliberate by about 150 years. Deliber on that for a while.
A few days back, I wrote about how dilettante word historians sometimes consciously or unconsciously dissect a word and “predict” its past based on the entrails revealed in the dissection. Hack apart greyhound (the word! the word!) with Sweeney-Todd-barber precision, and you might think you find lineage tracing back to fur color, though the DNA actually traces back to an Old Norse word, griey, with a completely different meaning. A greyhound is ultimately not a gray dog, but a female hound.
Technically, divination by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals (rarely greyhounds in the real world, I might add) is known as extispicy, a word I’d not encountered until recently. The discovery allowed me to delightedly add a definition to my English Delusionary: Extispic Etymology, or “predicting a word’s history by examining its clumsy vivisection.”
On the other hand, allow me to reveal a word history based on more-precise physical vivisection, in this an entry from my book Unfortunate English:
It’s a scene worthy of Hannibal Lechter or Jeffrey Daehmer or your favorite cannibal of choice. A human being is slashed open, revealing intestines and other entrails. It’s bloody, it’s gory, it’s . . . kind of like visiting the meat counter of the grocery store, with its tasty display of neatly packaged sausages.
At the time of this image and the verbal imagery that resulted, there weren’t any grocery stores as we know them, of course. The image may very well have occurred on a field of battle, where someone inclined to odd poetry viewed the insides of the eviscerated, and saw . . . sausages. (Perhaps the poetry wasn’t that odd, in that sausages are meats stuffed into casings—and the original casings were animal intestines.) In Latin, the word for small intestine was a diminutive of the word for sausage.
We use that diminutive word today, by the way, in a couple of forms. The Latin word was botulus, which was taken into Old French as boel, and into Middle English as bouel, what you and I now spell bowel. (The other form is botulism, the medical term adapted from German, describing not an affliction of the bowel as one might be prone to guess, but instead a type of food poisoning often associated with ill-prepared processed foods—originally and specifically, sausages.)
The new science of Extispic Etymology at its finest!
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!”)
Fulsome does not mean “full.” Nor does it mean “complete, well developed” or other pleasing synonyms of abundance. On the contrary, the adjective is used not in a compliment, but in an insult, meaning “excessive.” Its frequent use in “fulsome praise” gives that phrase the meaning of “cloying, unctuous, obsequious flattery.”
Though loosey-goosey usagists may accept the turning of the word’s meaning on its head, most of us draw the line at such surrender to error.
That might depend on who “us” is, I suppose. Woe Is I authors Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman wrote last year that “the word ‘fulsome’ has been misused so much lately that it may be beyond saving.” One might make a case that “misused so much” (a negative perspective) might be synonymous with “becoming common use” (a neutral or potentially positive perspective), a perspective shift as egregious as allowing fulsome to soften from negative to neutral, I suppose.
Now, I wonder if any language observers in the 1300s and later years were worried about fulsome being “misused so much” when the word first started changing meaning . . . from its original sense of, simply, “full, abundant, plentiful”—the very meaning that persnickitors decry today. That meaning was recorded around the middle of the 1200s (which, I acknowledge, O’Conner and Kellerman themselves note). The word later (oh, those loosey-goosey usagists, turning the word’s meaning on its head!) took meanings of “too full,” and eventually “obnoxiously full.”
So the word history I originally sought to offer my fulsome praise was the history of fulsome itself, of course. And I agree: my use of a shifting word meaning was indeed egregious, in that the first recorded use of egregious, the Oxford English Dictionary tells me, was in the sense of “remarkably good.”
Everything You Know About English Is Wrong spends a good bit of time mocking “bullshitternet facts,” those Did you know!!!!??? flushable factoids like “The word GOLF was created as an acronym of ‘Gentleman Only, Ladies Forbidden,” and the phrase “Ship High in Transit” led to SHIT (I repeat: “bullshitternet”).
I’m delighted when I find web writers who not only understand that much of the Did you know!!!!??? internet and email posts are nonsense, but also mock the very form. Here are some word-related samples from an old site, (Plastic Thoughts), some of them clever, some of them just plain surreal (which is OK by me):
No month in the English language turns teeth orange, silver, and purple.
20252 rhymes with 12,345,678,987,654,321
The order of letters in the alphabet is controlled by Mrs G Peterson of Wichita, Kansas
“Cabin fever” was responsible for the invention of the phrase “cabin fever”
“K” is the shortest antonym in the English language
More recent, and more dynamic, is the “Did you know” feature at Wikipedia parody site Uncyclopedia, “the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” Wander to the bottom of the home page for the “Do you know” items. I have to say that many of the items are strained, but others are clever—and a good deal of the fun is that you can submit your own. (Warning: “Did you know that a sentence fragment?” has been officially banned from the site due to over-submission.) The “Did you know” feature also takes some graphic twists. Did you know . . .
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.
. Oh, wait.
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authors Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman 
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