A few years ago I worked with a guy who regularly said “that’s my jam” in reference to his favourite music, and even his non-musical interests and activities. The jam he spoke of was likely an expansion of the musical jam, a noun that also became a verb.  First recorded in 1929 as jazz lingo, it referred to a short improvised piece of music by a band.

One theory explains that 1920s musicians would often gather to play a different style of jazz, after their paid gigs with larger ensemble bands. When Bing Crosby attended these sessions he clapped on the first and third beat; described by the other musicians as jammin’ the beat.
A muso might be able to explain in what sense this jamming was intended. Perhaps “tightly packed” or “blocking”, but anyway, by 1933, the improvised jazz collaborations were known as jam sessions.

I favour a more bookish explanation (of course) from Etymonline.com:
The meaning of the kitchen jam (fruit preserve) dating back to the 1730s may have spread to the music scene with the suggestion of something sweet or excellent, giving us the jazz jam.
And the first recorded usage of jam to mean a treat or reward is from Lewis Carroll‘s Through the Looking-glass (1871):

‘I’m sure I’ll take you with pleasure!’ the Queen said. ‘Twopence a week, and jam every other day.’
Alice couldn’t help laughing, as she said, ‘I don’t want you to hire ME – and I don’t care for jam.’
‘It’s very good jam,’ said the Queen.
‘Well, I don’t want any TO-DAY, at any rate.’
‘You couldn’t have it if you DID want it,’ the Queen said. ‘The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day.’
‘It MUST come sometimes to “jam to-day,”‘ Alice objected.
‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every OTHER day: to-day isn’t any OTHER day, you know.’

It didn’t take long before jam tomorrow became a popular phrase meaning the promise of something good, and by 1975 Hotten’s Slang Dictionary (5th ed.) had included:

 real jam, a sporting phrase, meaning anything exceptionally good.

Fraser and Gibbons’ Soldier and sailor words and phrases (1925) gives us the first indication that our seafarers of the time were also floating it in their colloquial vocabulary.

PS The fruit preserve jam probably originated from a culinary use of the verb (to press or squeeze objects tightly) crushing fruit into a preserve.
The verb (1719) is thought to have been onomatopoeic from the sound objects can make when jammed together with force, akin to cham (bite, chew) or champ (to crush or chew noisily).

PPS If anyone knows anything at all about the Jemmy Squaretoes entry in this photo capture, I’d love to hear about it.

Foolery! This is where I ended up when the word history of fond took me back to foolish and then to fools (the good and the true). And then to the realisation that there is a whole swathe of foolery to consider.

Does it come from Latin’s follis (windbag, empty headed person) in the idiot sense?
Or folles (“puffed cheeks” of the buffoon) for shades of jester?
Or is the question moot because folles, here, is a secondary meaning of the plural of follis?

And don’t get me started on moot. Yet.

Æ is one of my favourite graphemes. We all have our favourites right?
My partiality for æ is partly for its aesthetic form (especially in lowercase) but mostly for its modern name, ash.
Why ash? When æ was incorporated into the Old English Latin alphabet, the letter was called æsc (ash tree) after the Anglo-Saxon futhorc rune it transliterated: ᚫ

Originally a short vowel between ‘a’ and ‘e’ = the ‘a’ in fan, æ was replaced by ‘e’ or ‘ee’ in the 13th century. Three centuries later it was reintroduced into English, for words taken from Latin with the diphthong ae, and Greek’s ai.
It has the full status of a letter in some alphabets including Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese. Lucky languages that they are, ae?

Welcome-home-husband-no matter-how-drunk-you-be is the kind of (apparently) common plant name that not only invites further research but insists on it.

Just as ignorant of the houseleek noted here, I flipped pages to the h’s and was only slightly more enlightened by the description of “1. a crassulaceous herb, sempervivum tectorum, with pink flowers and thick, succulent leaves, found growing on the roofs and walls of houses.” (“2. any plant of the genus sempervivum.”)

The Latin sempervivum tectorum means “everliving on house roofs” from semper (always)+ vivum (alive) and tectorum (of house roofs).

Next stop: Google images…

Welcome home hubby is not an unfamiliar looking succulent and I’m sure we have these in Tasmania.
It is native to Europe (France, Italy, Greece) but in England the name has also been used to refer to the UK’s biting stonecrop. The yellow flowered stonecrop actually has its own version of this name — welcome home husband though never so drunk. I found cases of each used interchangeably for the other, and there are name variations of both.

Traditionally thought to protect against lightning in thunderstorms, evil, and your everyday bad luck, the common houseleek has a whole swathe of other common names in English, not shared with stonecrop, including:

devil’s beard earwort
fuet
homewort
imbroke
Jove’s beard
Jupiter’s eye
St. George’s Beard
St. Patrick’s cabbage
sengreen
Thor’s beard
thunderplant

My favourite is thunderplant.

But why the welcome-home-hubby name?

One explanation from Dorset, England: Historically the presence of houseleeks, and their consumption as a spice added to meat, was thought to heighten male virility.
The roots of this belief may have grown from the Romans’ fondness for the plant, as one of their love medicines.

A second thought is that houseleeks require little maintenance and, similarly, some very drunk husbands require little attention, if any, on arriving home. Perhaps both meant that wives benefited from some extra time for themselves.

I wish you all succulents on your roof & time for yourself and loved ones in 2018!

Usually I like dogear-free pages but today I’m adjusting that rule. This secondhand “Concise Macquarie Dictionary” from 1982 has just a single folded down page in its entire body. And it is no dainty fold.

On closer examination it doesn’t mark just the page, it also directs readers’ attention to a particular word:

Mephistophelian, comes to us from one of the seven chief devils’ names in medieval mythology. Mephistopheles became famous for buying Faust’s soul in the German legend (1587). Two theories on the name origin:

1.  A compound from Hebrew mephitz (scatterer, disperser) + tophel (liar) from tophel sheqer (falsehood plasterer).
This explanation is the likeliest contender as the names of devils in the middle ages often came from Hebrew, according to Dr Ernest Klein (1971).

2.  A combo of three Greek words: mé (negation) + phós (light) + philis (loving) = “not-light-loving”.
And, yes, I’m on the Greek train because I like the possible parody of the Latin Lucifer (light-bringer, light-bearer).

If anyone knows the other six chief devils’ names, I’d love to hear of them.

Words and food combined in the most delicious way; this is the wonderful gift that made my week. A gift that also got me curious about the etymology behind it.

Not to be confused with second breakfast — though it often is — elevenses first appears in 1887 recorded in a not-so-succinctly titled A dictionary of the Kentish dialect and provincialisms in use in the county of Kent. Most commonly used as another form of elevens (n. an eleven o’clock meal) and often noted as a plural, elevenses was originally just a shortened take on “elevens (n. the refreshment) at eleven (adj. o’clock)”.

In use for over 130 years, I could only find it in a few of my print dictionaries. A highlight of my hard copy search was an introduction to the (once) more common elevener. Here’s an Australian definition from the Mac’:

But. My biggest discovery in researching elevenses was…wait for it… the existence of fourses! (say fourzees, of course.) Yep, fourses was totally a thing. Not a thing I can recall ever hearing about but, clearly, a very logical thing:

The name ‘fourzes’ and ‘elevens’, given to these short periods of rest and refreshment, show when taken.

In another aside, my elevenses-loving friend was unfamiliar with Tolkien’s description of Hobbit habits in The Fellowship of the Rings. So it was a delight to revisit that time Peter Jackson served up elevenses for the masses when finding the link for her.

Other famous (and not so famous) elevenses partakers:
– Winnie the Pooh was a honey on bread with condensed milk elevenser.
– Paddington Bear and Mr Gruber were all about the buns and hot chocolate.
– I’m quite sold on the cookies and tea.

Do you have a favourite elevenses?

Before smudged there was smouched (blotted, smutched). And before smooch there was smouch (kiss, or buss – kiss in a boisterous manner).

The word origins of the smouches are unrelated but the current association between smudged (think lipstick) and smooching is what caught my eye here.

Between the two sits another smouch (to scam, swindle). Cynics of today will probably pick up what the cynics of yesterday were putting down there.

Ps does anyone have a recipe handy for the culinary delights of smotheration?

The fourth Found Words collection presents forty-four selected word columns from my preferred broken old dictionary of choice; the Concise English Dictionary. These columns are protected in slightly larger sleeves (22.5cm x 6.5cm) than our previous bookmarks, and paired with their identifying swing tag.
The larger sleeves allow the header words that uniquely name each bookmark, to remain attached to its word column rather than trimmed off and tucked inside its sleeve.

Dictionary: Concise English Dictionary
Publication Year: 1990
Publisher: Peter Harrap
Printed in: Israel

Available via Small Shelves, the CE17 series:

*9 of the P words in this collection are a no-frills, streamlined version of their former selves (now minus their hangholes and twined flutterances). In a climate of stalactites at the Market@Franklin last weekend, after they hit the deck in bulk, some cracking of corners occurred. Trimmed up, I like their simplicity and I hope their new word loving owners will too.

Better known as a billion these days, it came to us from the French; milli– (in million) + –ard (to form the noun). But its story is a flip-floppy one…

In 1516 while writing in Latin as one did back in the day, French mathematician Guillaume Budé first recorded the term milliart to mean “ten myriad myriad” or one thousand million. Thirty odd years later while attributing the term to Budé’s earlier usage, another French mathematician, Jacques Pelletier du Mans used milliard to mean one million million. But in a numbers game milliard lost to the competition and its definition was once again reduced to one thousand million.

The competition in milliard’s story is, of course, billion.

So let’s go there.
The French billon of the 1680’s (originally byllion; bi + million) meant the second power of a million (a million millions) and it was adopted by the British and the Germans.
However, as use of large numbers increased in France they evolved into punctuated three digit groups as opposed to six – and billion was used to refer to the resulting “thousand million”. Remember the short scale – from the tale of nonillion?

Larger number names began to apply to their smaller number counterparts with some French and Italian mathematicians using billion and others using thousand million or milliard – with the reduced definition – all referring to the same number; 1 000 000 000.
This short billion was picked up by the USA and in their school curriculums by 1729.

Now although little billion had been born and widely accepted in France, once Billi was out in the world, the French Government turned their back. They officially adopted the bigger billion and all the long scale relatives in 1961.

In the same year, the UK attempted to introduce their own term for a thousand million in the form of gillion (gi- from giga). It didn’t catch on and in 1974, the British Government chose to follow the USA, officially switching to the short scale to help avoid confusion.
But it’s still confusing, so here’s a map to keep your billions straight if you travel.

In 1975, French mathematician, Geneviève Guitel gave us the scale names we still use today: long scale (échelle longue) and short scale (échelle courte). It was the least they could do, really!

Afterword

And what of everybody’s undisputed million; the building block for numerical terms of astronomical as well as indefinite and fictional  proportions?

It was counted into English from French in the late 13c. as “one thousand thousands”. Thankfully this hasn’t changed for us but in its country of origin, Italy, the term was far less specific. Italian millione from the early 13c. was created by adding -one (large or great) to the Latin mille (thousand), and simply means “a great thousand”.

This Shorter English Oxford Dictionary is showing her age.

Nonillion exemplifies the post-million divergence of numerical terms on the scales once referred to as British (long scale) and American (short scale) systems.
Giving in to the growing local use of the American system, the UK officially adopted the short scale terms in 1974.
I don’t recall learning this in school but must admit that is a long while ago now and my memory is also on a short scale when it comes to numbers and math.

So, how to remember the difference for future reference?

On the long scale each new term greater than million is one million times larger than the previous term ie. a billion is a million millions (10 to the 12th power).
Think of the terms rising in lots of 6 zeroes or “loooooong” scale.

On the short scale each new term greater than million is one thousand times larger than the previous term ie. a billion is a thousand millions (10 to the 9th power). Think of the terms rising in lots of 3 zeroes hence “short”er in scale.

PS If anyone knows how to use superscript in WordPress, I’d love to hear about it.