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They would have been speaking a form of French and by the time paint popped out into the written record in 1275 that French had mixed with Old English to form Middle English.

That timeline gives 200 years or so for people to have mixed the two languages but the case of the word paint shows not only that this mix could have happened faster, it also shows us a little bit about how ancient documents are interpreted.

The Oxford English Dictionary indicates the year 1275 as the latest that this word paint might have first appeared, but they also list 1216 as a possible date.

The reason for this is that the word is first cited in something called The Argument Between the Owl and the Nightingale which is a poem supposedly relating exactly what the title describes.

It now exists in only two old manuscripts and scholars have to guess at how old the poem itself might be.

The strongest evidence is a reference to King Henry. But which King Henry?

And was the reference a literal one or metaphorical one because in the context of a story about two birds sitting in the trees arguing with one another one can’t be too sure anything is literal.

Thus is woven the tenuous dating of first citations.

The birds certainly were arguing. The citation for the word paint relates to the nightingale telling the owl how hateful and ugly she is:

“your body is squat, your neck is scrawny, your head is bigger than the rest of you put together; your eyes are black as coal, and as big as if they were painted with woad.”

Woad is a kind of dye.

With this cutting remark it is appropriate that when we look back beyond the French etymology of paint we find Latin and ultimately an Indo-European root and that Indo-European root meant “to cut.”

The development seems to have been that people used the word “to cut” to refer to making decorations with cut marks, that this later came simply to mean “to decorate” and later still “to decorate with colors.”

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What I mean is that although we pronounce hors d’oeuvre with an “r” before the “v” it is actually spelled with the “v” before the “r”.

This now English word hors d’oeuvre is really three French words baked into one.

These days hors d’oeuvre likely mean to you finger foods scarfed down at a party.

When the term was first used in French back in 1596, hors d’oeuvre was an architectural term and indicated a piece of masonry that jutted out from the rest building; a ledge or a piece of cornice or something.

The literal meaning of these thee words is

• hors meaning “outside”
• de meaning “of”, and
• oeuvre meaning “work”

Thus hors d’oeuvre literally means “out of [the] work.”

So the main work of the building’s edifice has hors d’oeuvres sticking out of it.

From that start, when hors d’oeuvre first came into English in the early 1700s it meant “something out of the ordinary”  But both in French and in English it very quickly came to mean a little something extra to eat before the main meal; just to get the juices flowing.

In this use it actually retains its original meaning since “the work” in this sense is the creative work of the cook. For a chef the main work is the main meal, so that the hors d’oeuvres are something outside of that main creation.

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Today I’m going to talk about four words pawn. In some ways they all have to do with the lowly.

When people are desperate for cash they sometimes pawn their valuables.

Thankfully I’ve never been forced into this position but the basic arrangement is that you hand over your diamond tiara and the pawnbroker hands you a stack of bills. You agree to pay him back with interest in a certain time period or else he gets to keep and sell your tiara.

The reason the gentleman now in possession of your jewelry is called a pawnbroker, and the act is called pawning is that this agreement between the two of you is a kind of pledge and about 600 years ago a French word for “pledge” pan made its way into English.

The second word pawn I want to talk about today refers to people who are used as tools in other people’s schemes. This usage is almost as old as the “pledge” pawn although it comes from a different source.

Before I explain why someone who is being manipulated in this way is called a pawn I’ll jump to the third word pwn.*(note below)

Pwn is a fairly recent development. It means “to dominate.”

This new pwn is a word that could only come about in the internet age because it is a typo-word among internet gamers who intended to type own but since the key for the letter “p” is right beside the “o” key, own all too often came out pwn.  One gamer might claim to “own” another when he or she dominates them in games.

It seems to me that the coincidental similarity in meaning and form between pwn and pawn could be one reason why the new word caught on.

Now to why that abused individual might be called a pawn.

Someone who is merely a pawn is so called because they are being used like the lowliest piece in a game of chess. The name of the chess piece in turn came about because in real life the lowliest soldiers were those who fought on foot and when the Norman Conquerors arrived in England with their French a paun meant “a walker” based on the Latin root word for foot.

Note: My gentle subscribers (now I know why those old authors addressed their “gentle readers”) have pointed out to me that pwn is pronounced to rhyme with own.

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Urbandictionary.com, tells me that a magazine is “a controlling device used by corporate America to brainwash teenaged girls.”

The word magazine appeared on this earth long before people were reading periodicals.  Its ultimate ancestor was an Arabic word kazana meaning to “store up” whose sister word makazan, meaning “storehouse” was adopted into a number of languages including Latin and then French, where English got it from.

According to the OED, in Spanish the word also existed but they then stuck the Arabic al on the front meaning “the warehouse.”

This is similar to our use of the words alcohol and algebra, both of which have prefixes that could have been left off since all the al means is “the.”

Thus when magazine entered English in 1583 it arrived with the meaning of a “storehouse.”

This meaning we can still recognize, particularly relating to military storage areas, but otherwise this usage has pretty well been eclipsed by the magazines we read.

The storage of small items in a case, such as bullets in a clip or music CDs in a cartridge, take their name from the old meaning; but we developed these applications of the word right here in English around 1677, and the French had to adopt it back from us.

Similarly it was in English that a bundle of pages sold at a news stand first became known as a magazine in 1731 when the Gentleman’s Magazine, explained its own title thus: “This Consideration has induced several Gentlemen to promote a Monthly Collection to treasure up, as in a Magazine.”

This meaning too was later adopted back into French and other languages.

Somehow magazines fall into a lower tier of sorts in that a periodical is thought of as aimed at an academic audience while a magazine is aimed at the general public.

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A century after that Scottish politician Tom Johnston, when lamenting that poor people had been displaced from lands by rich landowners, said “the peasant has been ruthlessly swept aside to make room for the pheasant.”

Both of these quotations are consistent with the current entry in Wikipedia for pheasant which says in part “Uses of pheasants: Pheasants are shot for sport and for the table…”

The Wikipedia article also says they are valued for their attractive appearance and I guess that is exemplified in the peacock which is a type of pheasant.

Pheasants are the birds being shot in those quaint rural images that remind you of Norman Rockwell and LL Bean.

People must have been admiring their plumage as well as their taste for a long time because the word pheasant spans millennia as well as language; as is often characteristic of a word that is widely used and understood.

The first use of pheasant in English so far as we know dates from 1299. Which is appropriate for a word that we think comes from French after the Norman Conquest.

Since a pheasant is a type of fowl I found it fitting that the first Oxford English Dictionary citation for pheasant is credited to a man named Fowler who did the digging back through the Middle English Records of the Abbey of Durham to turn up this first documented use.

French got pheasant from Latin who in turn got it from Greek and the reason the Greeks called this bird phasianos was that they had heard that these types of birds came from near the River Phasis which flows into the black sea.

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I can’t be completely sure but it may have been about the time of that movie Animal House in 1978 that I first became aware of the word lampoon.

Perhaps I’d heard of the magazine National Lampoon before that, it started in 1970 and my impression was that while Mad Magazine was junior high humor, National Lampoon was university humor.

Of course the word lampoon had been around for centuries before I noticed it or the magazine adopted the name.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates lampoon to 1645 and defines it as “a virulent or scurrilous satire upon an individual.”

All etymologies point to French as the source of lampoon but an equivalent word there seems to have blinked out of existence before lexicographers could nail it to the dictionnaire.

But most English dictionaries have a theory about that French word.

They say lampoon could possibly have been from a French word meaning “let us drink” which seems to have evolved from the same source as our word lap as a cat does when lapping up a saucer of milk.

So it seems that this word lampoon had evolved into some kind of a tavern cry which found its way into various drinking songs. In turn the drinking songs sometimes made fun of the politicians of the day and so the word lampoon moved from meaning “let us drink” to referring to the cutting humor of the drinking songs.

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The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that ever since it appeared in English in 1330 bargain has meant just about what it means now, “discussion,” “agreement,” “negotiation.”

The OED has as its etymology for bargain that English got it from Old French and ultimately Latin.

But now comes the foggy part.

The OED etymology calls up the opinions of  the German philologist Friedrich Diez who died in 1876. Diez seemed to feel that something called Capit. Charles the Bald implied that the Latin root of bargain is related to barca which meant “a small boat.”

From this he thinks that the back and forth nature of bargaining is related to the fact that a boat carries goods to and fro.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t leave one with the impression that they are too convinced of this etymology and it seems that none of the more recently updated dictionaries are convinced either.

The American Heritage Dictionary suggests an Indo-European via Germanic route for the development of bargain.  This would connect the word with roots with meanings of “hiding” and “protecting things.”

This ties the word remotely to the word borrowing as well as berg which shows up in so many city names based on their histories as fortresses.

The meaning development is hypothesized by John Ayto as moving from “keep” and “protect” to “take on loan” or “borrow” then becoming “give” or “take” and finally “trade” or “haggle.”

Jumping back to the Diez theory concerning Charles the Bald.  It turns out that what was being referred to there were the Capitula of Charles the Bald.

Charles the Bald was king of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor back just before Alfred the Great arose as King of Wessex.

The Capitula of Charles the Bald were his laws.

One of the things I found in the fog was that this is where we get our word chapter.

The Latin capitula means “small head.” The title of the book would be its “big heading” but the title of each chapter would each be a “small heading.”

For Charles the Bald this was a set of headings on a legal document and similarly that is why when someone “capitulates” they are cooperating with a former adversary; they have done so according to a written legal agreement containing a set of headings.

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Every one of us has had a very intimate connection with a placenta at one point in our lives and yet, unless you work in a delivery room at a hospital, most of us would be hard pressed to identify a placenta if we saw one.

I think most of the reason for this is that our closest association with a placenta happens when we are still inside our mother; a time that few of us can remember much about.

Of course the placenta is also known as the afterbirth and is the thing that connects mothers’ and babies’ circulatory systems during that time when a baby can’t eat or breathe on account of the fact that they are trapped in a bag of fluid.

Then later, as adults, the only time we might see a placenta is shortly after the birth of a child.

For some reason during these times the child provides a significant distraction for both mother and father and so memory of what a placenta looks like just doesn’t stick with us.

Babies get their food and oxygen through their belly buttons to which is attached their umbilical chord. The other end of this trio of tubes connects to the placenta whose job it is to gently gently snuggle up against mom’s circulatory system and pass that food, oxygen and resulting waste products back and forth between the two.

Just as the inside of our lungs requires a considerable surface area to facilitate gas exchange—the usual analogy is that if you flattened out your lungs they’d add up to about one side of a tennis court—in a similar way the mom/baby exchange needs an expanded area to do its job.

We’re not talking sports venues this time but the placenta does spread out across the wall of the mother’s uterus and because of this has an appearance that is flat and round.

So back in the 16^th century when physicians chatted among themselves in classical languages they pulled out an Ancient Greek word for a flat, round cake, Latinized it and called the afterbirth placenta uterina meaning “uterine cake.”

It’s the flatness of the thing that gives it the name and some etymologists think that there is a link between the flatness represented in the word plank and the flatness of placenta.

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In an earlier episode I reviewed how the garment leotard was named after a trapeze artist Jules Leotard. Today I’ll look into why a trapeze is called a trapeze.

When circus performers swing back and forth it is important that they don’t start to swing side to side. If they did then when they shot off into space expecting to grab their partner’s hands they’d find they were inches or feet off target and land in the net.

To keep them swinging straight, the lines from which the trapeze hangs are mounted a little further apart from each other than the length of the trapeze bar. This allows the acrobat a little more control since leaning to one side or the other will steer the swinging motion.

So when a trapeze is hanging unused its shape is a little wider at the top of the ropes than at the trapeze bar.

A shape like this, where two sides are parallel and two sides are not, is called a trapezoid.

Or maybe it’s called a trapezium.

Actually which word you use depends on which century you are living in and which language you speak, because for some reason in English the meanings of trapezoid and trapezium flipped like an acrobatic performer. In other places and in other times trapezium had parallel sides and trapezoid had no parallel sides.

It hardly matters in the circus though.

The parent of all of these words is Greek and means “table like.”

I imagined that a table has its top parallel to the floor and maybe that’s why this geometrical shape was called a trapezoid, but I was wrong.

Trapeza meaning “table” was once tetra peza meaning “four feet.”

Special

This is a special edition of podictionary in which I’m going to give you a little glimpse behind the scenes and explain a few changes that are coming up.

After that I’ll include a bonus etymology.

History

Podictionary has been around for about 4½ years now but it hasn’t always been a blog and email subscription.

The name “podictionary” was chosen because I was “podcasting the dictionary” and for more than half of its existence podictionary was available in audio format only.

It is still the case that there are more listeners to podictionary than readers of podictionary.

Most listeners picked up the show with the iPod software iTunes that automatically downloads each episode to their iPod or iPhone.

I was lucky enough to have started podcasting before Apple included podcasts in their iTunes store and so as an early entrant I got quite good exposure.

Because the majority of podictionary subscribers are listeners I’ve got an iPhone app in the works as well (I’ll let you know when that’s released).

When I began posting transcripts of the show it meant that podictionary started to get delivered to people in three different ways:

• as email;
• as audio via podcast; and
• by stumbling across podictionary in a Google search

(actually there’s RSS too but most people don’t know about RSS)

These new ways mean I’ve gained a whole new readership audience. That audience continues to grow. Thank you.

Sponsorship Sustains Podictionary

Originally the podcast was intended to promote my first book but podictionary has become much more than that.

It is fun and I plan to keep doing it, but it is a good thing that it has grown to be more than a promotion vehicle because I can assure you that as a vehicle to drive book sales it couldn’t stand on its own.

I’ve experimented with sponsors and Google advertising and what I’ve found is that the listening audience pays the freight.

I have recently removed all advertising from the email because it doesn’t add up to anything anyway.

If it were not for the sponsors who pay per download of the audio file I don’t think I could justify the time it takes to put podictionary together every day.

So for all of you who’ve sent me messages saying you wanted to support podictionary with PayPal donations or something, the message is clear; if you like what you’re reading I would hope you’d like to listen to it even more.

As the creator of podictionary I get paid for having listeners but I don’t get paid for having readers (funny old world isn’t it?).

The fact that podictionary started out as a spoken product and not a written product explains why you’ll all too often find spelling mistakes, typos and grammatical errors here.

I’ve given a lot of attention to producing clean sound but an editor has never been in the picture for podictionary.

And yet I’d never dream of producing a book without several layers of editorial support.

I suppose if podictionary generated ten times the revenue that it does I would hire an editor. I’m sure it could do nothing but good.

Since you’ve been so patient as to stand all that rambling, here is  the etymology: This one is for the word yacht.

Etymology of the Word Yacht

I think to most people the word yacht evokes some sense of luxury.

Unknown luxury for most of us because although we can pretty easily walk through the lobby of a swanky hotel, it is pretty rare that we get aboard someone’s yacht.

The only yacht I’ve ever been on is The Royal Yacht Britannia. I wasn’t a guest of Queen Elizabeth or Prince Charles. The Royal Yacht Britannia is retired as a royal yacht and is now a tourist attraction tied up in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of the word yacht in English to 1557 and says it meant “a light fast-sailing ship, in early use especially for the conveyance of royal or other important persons.”

So it may be this long-term association with royalty that gives the word yacht its patina of luxury.

Then again it may be the price of the things.

Yacht is alternately defined as a hole in the sea into which one pours money.

Money is at the root of the etymology of yacht too because originally it wasn’t royalty that were cruising around in the ancestors of yachts but pirates.

Yacht is spelled so strangely because it comes from a Germanic word that English speakers had a hard time rendering. Jaghtschip is traced by some dictionaries to Dutch and by other dictionaries to Norwegian.

The literal meaning of jaghtschip is “hunting ship” or “chasing ship” and these were the kinds of ships most useful to pirates.

Like so many words jaghtschip was abbreviated to jaght back in either Dutch or Norwegian before being picked up by English.

Although some royal figures have indeed acted like pirates the reason a yacht became associated with royalty was likely not because it could be used to rob other ships. Instead, I think it was the speed of the things was what was attractive. Not only did royal or other important persons wish to be able to get away from chasing ships, there is prestige in a fast vessel.

One last thing about the Royal Yacht Britannia: having seen the bed the Queen slept in I can tell you that what is sold as a queen sized bed isn’t. At least on board Britannia the real Queen slept in a single.

Survey

Finally, with respect to advertising within podcasts, a couple of groups are running a survey. You can get to that at either

www.takethesurvey.com/rawvoice

or

www.takethesurvey.com/wizzard

Rawvoice is kind of like my agent that finds advertisers for podcasters and Wizzard is where I host my files (in fact both companies do both things). The other group involved is the Association for Downloadable Media.

The survey is supposed to take about 10 minutes and explores listener preferences in ad style, delivery and placement.

Thanks for putting up with this unusual post.

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The garment is variously described as having long or short sleeves or legs or none at all, but in all cases being skin tight and as such being an inappropriate piece of attire for me.

Luckily the guy who popularized the leotard had a good body and is remembered as having a good body because he died when he was still young and attractively shaped. Maybe not lucky for him.

Jules Leotard was a French circus performer in the mid 1800s. He amazed crowds then the way that Cirque du Soleil amazes crowds today.

His specialty was the trapeze and he was the first to dare to let go of one trapeze, do a mid-air somersault and grab onto a second trapeze.

His innovative costume was skin tight from ankle to wrist with a more roomy pair of shorts in the middle. All this  supposedly to allow unrestricted freedom of movement, but with the added bonus—as anyone frequenting fitness clubs these days knows—of giving the audience a little more to look at.

What seems strange to me is that even though he was so famous in his day, and seems incontrovertibly to have been the reason that leotards are named leotards, it took quite a while after his death before this word shows up in the written record. He died in 1870—he was only 30—but the OED gives a first citation 50 years later in 1920.

The Merriam Webster etymology must have been compiled more recently because they offer a first citation of 1886 but that’s still a bit of a gap.

Jules Leotard himself didn’t refer to this garment as a leotard but instead as a maillot (pronounced “my oh”), a word that had only recently come into use in French.

Now it’s usually the name of a style of woman’s bathing suit.

Folk etymology had the source of this word also from someone’s name, supposedly a Monsieur Maillot who supplied the Paris Opera with such garments. But lexicographers find no evidence that Monsieur Maillot actually existed and instead point to a meaning of “swaddling clothing.”

Since most of us would not go into a clothing store and expect to be understood if we asked for something that would “swaddle us” I looked that up too.

It’s related to swathe. Babies are swaddled; which means they are wound up firmly in their blankets.

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If the government imposes a curfew it means that authorities don’t want people out roaming the streets after a certain hour.

According to Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable the word curfew came to England as a French word with William the Conqueror in 1066.  This arrival isn’t specifically claimed in The Oxford English Dictionary although the OED does give as its first citation a French usage just over 200 years afterwards.

By this time the word curfew meant to the people of England “the ringing of the evening bell.”

This bell would have in earlier times been the signal for lockdown by the French conquering aristocracy over their newly subordinate English subjects.

The word does not go any further back into Latin or Greek since it is an alteration of two French words still in use today.  Couvre is easily recognizable as “cover” and feu is the French word for “fire.”

But the earlier French concept of curfew was not like England during the Second World War when blackout conditions were instituted to keep bombers from spotting their targets.

Instead the idea seems to have been that fires were to be put out so that none would be left unattended and burn down the town.

There were two equivalent words in Latin ignitegium and pyritegium, ignite and pyro being recognizably fire related and the ending meaning “to cover.”

Thus curfew may have been a sensible approach to public safety.

There have been other municipal control measures instituted after fires that had interesting results.

In the city of Copenhagen a notable feature of the old downtown buildings is their diagonally faced corners. The reason for this is that during one fire in that town it was found that fire brigades with long ladders were unable to get around the corners of narrow streets because the buildings were in the way, so a bylaw was enacted to chop off all the building corners to allow ladders to get through.

In the same city at one time it was decreed that wooden houses were forbidden so that today one can admire the beautiful stone frontages of some old structures and then wander into their back courtyards to see the old half-timbered rest of the building that their owners raised at reduced costs out of sight of the city fathers.

Finally, Quebec City is known to be one of the most European-looking cities in North America.  Part of its charm comes from the old stone buildings that were built so that, by law, their adjoining walls extended above their roof lines.  That way if one caught fire, the flames could not spread directly.

If you’re British you’ll say aluminium.

But the guy who came up with the stuff called it alumium at first.

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That guy was Sir Humphrey Davy back in 1808.

People had been using alum for thousands of years, especially to fix dye. It was economically important in England first to increase the value of wool being exported and later to increase the value of woven cloth by dying it.

Sir Humphrey changed his mind though, after he first called his discovery alumium he revised the name to aluminum.

Others thought this wonderful new stuff should have a more classical name and so suggested aluminium because they thought it went better with the names of other chemicals.

Again, it’s all about style.

I have a few problems with the OED definition of aluminium which hasn’t yet undergone the third edition revisions. It says “a metal, white, sonorous, ductile, and malleable, very light, not oxidized in the air…”

Sonorous?

When I look up sonorous it says “capable of giving out a sound, especially of a deep or ringing character.”

I do see one of their citations says that a bell was made of aluminum but this is not the usual choice for sonorous things because as a metal aluminum is pretty good at damping vibration. That’s why in the kitchen aluminum pots have a more thumpy sound than stainless steel pots.

Also, what’s this about “not oxidized in air?”

True, aluminum doesn’t raise blisters of rust the way iron and steel do, but the reason is that aluminum very quickly skins-over with a thin layer of oxide that blocks deeper oxidization.

But Humphrey Davy was an interesting character. By sheer strength of inquisitiveness he rose up the scientific ladder to be President of the Royal Society.

He also discovered laughing gas and did so because someone else theorized that it should be poison.

To find out what the qualities of nitrous oxide might be Humphrey Davy applied his inquisitive nature and started breathing the stuff himself. Instead of dying of a poison gas he found the stuff made him delirious.

He thought it might be good stuff to use as an anesthetic and so it is these days in dentist’s offices.

But he didn’t stop there. Along with his many other scientific inquiries he tried gulping back a lungful of carbon monoxide; that one almost killed him.

It didn’t though. Later after a stroke, he died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 50 in 1829.

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When I first came across the word I was surprised that this particular body part even had a name.

I suppose that in specialist circles every part of the body has a name. Physicians concerned with the square inch of our physique in which they specialize have to build up a vocabulary to describe its every nuance.

Body piercing is old hat when it comes to ears but traditionally ear rings are poked through the ear lobe. Perhaps poking a hole through the tragus was the next logical step because the tragus is the little bump that partially covers the ear hole through which sound enters your head on its way to the ear drum.

Every little bump and notch in the human ear has a name but I have to say that tragus is the funniest.

The word appeared in English in a medical dictionary in 1693.

Then as now medical words often had Latin roots but in this case the Latin root reaches further back to Greek. Rufus of Ephesus was a Greek physician of about 2000 years ago and is the first person known to have named this bump on the ear a tragus.

I think that the reason it was called a tragus shows a sense of humor in the ancient Greeks.

Before the bump on the ear was called a tragus a common domestic animal was known as tragus in Greek.

If you know any men with little tufts of hair growing out of their ears you’ll appreciate the connection.

Tragus in Greek meant “billy-goat” and the tuft of hair protruding from someone’s ear was being likened to the billy-goat’s beard.

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He asks “is it true that carpenter is the only common English word from a Celtic root?”

I peeked into my Oxford English Dictionary and shot back that carpenter is from Latin via French but that lots of words rubbed off from Germanic or Gaulish roots as the Romans were doing business with European peoples who spoke dialects of these languages.

Celtic and Gaulish are related.

I hadn’t heard the last of Pierce though and he replied saying that his dictionary said that Latin may have gotten carpenter from the Gauls.

Sure enough, when I actually took the time to read what the OED said it proved Pierce right “Latin carpentum was apparently after Old Celtic carpentom.”

The other parts of Pierce’s question were whether carpenter is the only common English word from a Celtic root, and from there, how come if Celtic languages were all over the British Isles they don’t leave many traces in English.

I guess that the OED information shows that Celtic is in the mix for carpenter but it isn’t the only element. I see from The American Heritage Dictionary that the root can be traced further back into Indo-European.

So does that make this a word with a Celtic root specifically?

It’s true that Celtic hasn’t made much impact on English but I see that the word mine—as in: a hole in the ground from which one extracts minerals—is also felt to have Celtic traces to its etymology.

Perhaps less common is another example, the word for the sediment left over after fermentation, the lees.

So carpenter certainly isn’t the only example.

As to why Celtic is so thin on the ground in English, I think it has to do with being conquered a few times over.

About 2000 years ago the Romans marched into Britain and took over. They liked speaking Latin and so the various versions of tribal Celtic languages that were being spoken before their arrival suddenly became second class.

The Romans then shipped out a few hundred years before the Anglo-Saxons shipped in 1500 years ago.  At that point Latin ceased to be an important language in Britain and the Germanic roots set in. Again the Anglo-Saxon culture made the indigenous culture take a back seat.

That’s what Welsh evolved from.

Maybe the earlier Roman domination had something to do with making this possible, maybe not.

So by the time of William the Conqueror 1000 years ago Celtic roots already made up a diminishing fraction of the language stock. The Norman imposition of French watered that minimal influence down even more.

But there are a few interesting points to bring out about the word carpenter.

The OED defines a carpenter as one who does the heavier and stronger work in wood such as the framework of houses or ships and as distinct from a cabinet-maker.

The Latin root of carpenter points to craftsmen who made wagons and chariots since that’s what a carpentum was, a two wheeled vehicle.

You’d like your chariot to be strong and hold together as it bounced over those cobbled Roman roads.

The Indo-European root I mentioned is thought to have been kers meaning “to run” and so fitting into “moving” meaning of chariot.

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My wife was born in a culture that didn’t give middle names and so she only has two names.

It’s all about style.

It’s the style in western culture to identify ourselves by two names and so you probably know my first name and my last name but not my middle name.

In fact sometimes people who identify themselves with more than two names come across as pretentious.

That’s part of the style too.

The reason a last name is called a surname is because it wasn’t always the style to have two names.

Surname literally means “on top of name” and figuratively means “another name on top of the one you already have.”

This meaning makes sense when you understand why people began to think that having two names was more stylish—and practical.

When the Normans invaded in 1066 almost no one in England went by more than one name. There were a large variety of names and people hung out in smaller groups in towns and villages.

As French culture of the Normans influenced people French names began to be more popular, especially those with New Testament origins.

In 1379 tax records show that in the town of Sheffield one third of the male taxpayers were named John and another 19 percent were named William.

That’s more than half the guys with only two names.

At the same time, as cottage industry began to give way to factories populations became more centralized.

It’s one thing to keep 5 people named John straight, it’s quite another to keep 50 straight.

Clearly another name on top of the name their parents gave them was necessary to tell which was who.

What to call them?

Margaret Atwood’s ancestors must have lived near the edge of town. Samuel Johnson must have had an ancestor who was the son of one of those Johns.

I’ve always known that this happened somewhere back there in history but it’s nice to figure out why and when.

In the early 1200s surnames hadn’t caught on widely, by the end of the 1400s almost everybody had ‘em.

In case you’re wondering, my middle name is Brodie, from my mother’s maiden name.

I contacted Dr. Durkin because his book The Oxford Guide to Etymology was recently released in North America and he was kind enough to spend a comfortable 20 minutes talking with me.

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Here’s the transcript:

Charles Hodgson: So, I’ve got with me today, Philip Durkin, who’s the principal etymologist at The Oxford English Dictionary. The reason I contacted him was because he recently authored a book, “The Oxford Guide to Etymology.” Thanks very much for being with me today.

Philip Durkin: It’s a pleasure.

Charles: I did seed a few questions to you before the call, so why don’t we get into those. When I do my podictionary podcast, I usually focus on the changes that have happened in the meaning of a word, because that’s really what I find the most fun. But etymology is obviously much larger than that, and I was wondering if you wanted to expand a bit, talk about the other elements.

Philip: Yes, certainly. For an etymologist, the two big things are normally changes that words show in their meaning, and changes that they show in their form. Bringing those two together is often one of the most difficult parts of etymology.

If I take the example of the word “friar” — meaning in modern English, a member of the mendicant order, so the Franciscans, Dominicans, and so on — this is a borrowing from French in the Middle Ages. It comes from the French word “frere,” the normally French word for a brother, as in the relation in a family.

That French words comes ultimately from Latin — “frater” — brother. That word was borrowed into Middle English. In Middle French, it had the meanings of brother in the family, and also a metaphorical meaning, member of a religious order of brothers, metaphorical brothers, people living together in a community.

Charles: Same sort of things as a fraternity.

Philip: Precisely, yes, yes, precisely the same meaning development. At that’s the meaning that got adopted in English. So in there, we’ve got a case of a metaphorical meaning change and a narrowing then in English where the meaning became restricted to just that meaning, and in fact, to a specific type of brotherhood, someone in the mendicant order as opposed to Benedictines, and so on.

That’s the meaning history of that word. Then running parallel to that, you’ve got the form history – how its sounds have developed over time. The development from Latin, frater, to French, frere, is actually a very straightforward and predictable one, even though it might sound quite surprising.

Likewise, the development from the French word to the Middle English word is absolutely straightforward. It was borrowed into Middle English in exactly the same form. But then there is a bit of a hiccup there, because you’d expect the modern English word to be “frere.” You’d expect it to develop like the word “here.” So from “her” to here.

That hasn’t happened in the case of this particular word, so we’ve got a bit of an etymological problem to solve there. That’s where comparison with other word histories comes into its own. In this case, there are some parallels. There are words like “briar” or in spite of the spelling, “choir,” which have probably shared in the same sort of development. It’s the sort of raising of the vowel that’s caused by the following “r” sound.

We have a few parallels for that, so we can identify what we can call a minor sound change in English, something that affected a little group of words. It didn’t affect all words of that shape, but we can group together in a cluster this little group of words that seem to be affected. That, on a small scale, is what a lot of etymology is about.

Charles: So, that would be more important, I guess, for words that the transition from Latin to French to English isn’t so great in terms of the sounds of the words that someone who isn’t a specialist can still believe that those changes might have happened.

Whereas, there are other examples, I guess, where the current word doesn’t sound anything like what we think that the root word might have sounded like. So it’s more important, I guess, in those cases, to be able to see patterns across larger groups of words.

Philip: Absolutely. Absolutely. The whole business of sound change and form history is something that I think can seem very arcane to someone who isn’t a specialist in language history. Whereas, the meaning changes are something that is quite easy intuitively to get a grasp of what’s going on there.

The idea that words shift in their meaning is, I think, more familiar to most of us than the idea that over time they’ll shift quite radically in the way that they’re pronounced. But, actually, slightly paradoxically, for technical etymologists, it’s normally the changes in form which are easier to deal with than the changes in meaning because the changes in form tend to affect a whole group of words together.

So we can identify these things called “sound changes” or, sometimes, “sound laws” that affect a whole group of words. We can see it’s quite an absolute thing that this word follows the pattern, or it doesn’t follow the pattern. If it follows the pattern, we don’t have a problem. If it doesn’t follow the pattern, we’ve got a problem to explain.

It’s often difficult to know whether you’ve really got a problem or not. A favorite example of mine is the English expression, “as thin as a rake.” You’re familiar with that one?

Charles: Oh, yes.

Philip: One who’s very thin. It first appears in Chauncer in the late Middle English period. It’s normally been assumed that it shows a metaphorical use of the name of the tool, a rake that you pull over the soil.

But that was challenged by quite an eminent English etymologist a couple of decades ago, who said, “Well, what is intrinsically thin about a rake?” He proposed a quite another, difficult etymology to explain what other word this could be that’s become identified as a rake over the years.

That’s a case where it’s very difficult to pin down whether there is anything intrinsically thin about a rake or whether there isn’t. You can look at medieval illustrations of what rakes looked like in the 14th and 15th centuries, just to see if that give any clues. You can look at early used of the word, just to see if there are any metaphorical association there in other uses that would help support the idea.

But there’s nothing really intrinsic in the language that helps prove whether this is plausible or implausible. The meaning changes are very, very slippery things.

Charles: I’ve heard also, “as thin as a rail.”

Philip: Yes. That, I think, a lot more recent, and I suppose, also, a rail is something that is more obviously thin for all of its length. But certainly, collecting together parallels is one of the strongest ways of trying to strengthen an argument about changing word meanings, to look for other words that might have shown a similar pathway.

The tricky thing is always that they’re in slightly different contexts and in slightly times, so it’s always very hard to know whether you’ve got an exact parallel, or whether you’re looking at something that seems superficially the same, but there might be some difficulty there.

Charles: So, that actually leads easily into the next question, because you’re talking about looking for patterns in large groups of words. So, one of the questions I also asked was about what sort of tools you have to be able to manage such a humongous…

Philip: Yes, yes. The two main things are historical dictionaries. When we say “historical dictionaries” we mean a really big dictionary. Something like the Oxford English Dictionary that’s got lots of historical illustrations of usage and has a lot of documentation of all of the historical forms of the word, so you can trace the historical meaning development of each word.

You can see how its forms have varied and changed over the centuries. Then side-by-side with that, something that we call an “historical grammar.” A historical grammar tends to have a lot of information about syntactic change and so on, like you’d expect a contemporary grammar to have, but also a lot of information about developments in pronunciation in the history of a language, and trying to identify the common sound changes that occur in a language’s history.

Those are the two big tools to fall back on. What we don’t have is a sort of grammar of meaning changes. That’s often a sort of weak point. If you imagine a triangle, you’ve got the dictionary with all the data in it, and you’ve got the grammar that draws out all the parallels in the form development, but the meaning histories are a little bit more tricky. You can make comparisons, but you can’t necessarily say the exactly same thing has happened to this series of words.

Charles: So both of those examples seem to me to be sort of – maybe it’s not fair to say secondary research — but certainly building on the academic exercises of people in the past. Whereas, I know that for some purposes over the last few decades, people have been using corpus to try to analyze word meanings, and that kind of thing. Is there any use of those kind of computerized tools of…

Philip: Oh, yes, absolutely. An historical dictionary can give you a certain number of examples of usage across a certain period, and it can document as many historical forms as the research has found. But if you’re lucky enough to have a large corpus available to you, then you can find many, many more contexts and usage quite quickly.

Sometimes there can be difficulties in distinguishing between two words that have similar spellings, but aren’t actually related to one another at all. There are plenty of those in English. But a corpus can be a huge advantage.

Although, of course, it depends on two things. It depends on an awful lot of work in digitizing the text, and making them available and searchable for scholars. Also, you need to have your texts in the first place. There are quite big tracts in the history of English when we have very, very few texts. When you start pushing things further back in trying to reconstruct things that happened before our earliest surviving English texts and look at relationships between English and other Germanic languages, and trying to push things back from Proto-Germanic to Proto-Indo-European, then you’re working at a level where there are no texts.

Charles: I liken that to the Monty Python skit about a dinosaur being thick in the middle but very, very thin at the far end.

Philip: Yes. That’s usually the bit that you’re most interested in as well with etymology. It tends to be the bit where you’ve got lots and lots of data. You more or less know what’s going on there, but the interesting things probably happened at the extreme end where you don’t have very much data at all.

But corpora are hugely important to be able to back up ideas, hunches about how a word might have developed in a particular period. Particularly with the meaning changes, you can look at lots and lots of context and try to look at particular nuances of meaning that might help back up a particular hypothesis or suggest a different one.

Charles: I felt that etymology reveals human nature, so I wanted to see how you react to that.

Philip: Yes, a lot of the way that language works reveals all sorts of exciting things about human nature and the way that people make associations between words that they use.

You get a thing called analogy, the way that one word or group of words becomes associated in people’s minds with another, and, therefore, the one becomes more like the other.

So you can get little parallels, like you have the adjective “warm” and you have the noun “warmth” and you have the adjective “cool.” Well, normally we get “coolness” but occasionally you get “coolth” on the basis of “warmth.”

“Warm” and “cool” are antonyms of one another, so why shouldn’t “coolth” be the antonym of “warmth”?

“Strive” is a borrowing from French, and originally it had the past tense “strived.” Now these things actually differ a lot between varieties. For you, is “strive” the past tense “strove” and the past participle “striven”?

Charles: I wouldn’t use “striven” very often, I don’t think.

Philip: Certainly in a lot of varieties, that is what you get. It’s not what you’d expect historically, except that it is what you expect historically for the much commoner verb “drive.” There you get “drive,” “drove,” “driven.” So on the basis of that, by analogy with that, you quite often get “strive,” “strove,” “striven.” You get quite a lot of these little patterns, where one less common word typically becomes associated with a more common word and becomes more like it.

Charles: Certainly when my children were small, they were quite often coming up with new words that made sense in the pattern of other words they knew but weren’t ones that people commonly used, and it was quite entertaining sometimes.

But that I think also goes back to human nature of how then they were “corrected” to use the standard version.

Philip: Yes, precisely. A lot of the things that children do are very similar to the things that you can see historically have happened in the language at large.

It’s the same processes underlying it, especially in periods where you don’t have so much codification of language. You don’t have so much in the way of authoritative dictionaries, grammar books, prescriptive traditions in teaching, and so on.

There’s much more scope for this sort of variation that arises from the way we use language day to day. You can call it a mistake. You can call it an innovation. You can call it a variation, whatever you like. There’s much more scope for that sort of thing to become more widespread in the community and to become the normal form over time.

Quite similar to folk etymology as well, really, the way that people sometimes modify an unfamiliar word to make it more like other more familiar words, like the famous case of “asparagus,” a borrowing of an unfamiliar Greek word that is unanalyzable. There’s nothing you can break down in “asparagus” that explains why it should be the name of this plant.

Quite early in its history in English, you find the various “sparrow grass” types of forms. “Asparagus” was probably shortened anyway to “sparagus” just by loss of its initial vowel, and then you find alteration of that to “sparrow grass.”

Well, it makes a sort of semantic sense.

Charles: Yes, it’s green. It sticks up.

Philip: Exactly. A bird could perch on it or could eat it. I don’t think sparrows would really get much of a meal out of a piece of asparagus.

It makes a sort of sense, and there are plenty of words that are compounds of two words that, because of their meaning development over time, only make a sort of sense anyway. So modifying “asparagus” to produce “sparrow grass” produces something that’s more familiar and easier to remember.

Charles: That makes me think there are these big patterns that you follow, Grimm’s law and the Great Vowel Shift, and…

Philip: Grimm’s law take its name from Jacob Grimm, one of the Brothers Grimm who compiled the great collection of tales, the fairy tales, and in the middle of the 19th century, they also started the great historical dictionary of the German language.

Jacob Grimm was a very great historical linguist, and he put into their most definitive formulation some observations that a lot of scholars had been making for a few decades before him, actually. He didn’t discover Grimm’s law, but he put it into its clearest form, and it became associated with his name subsequently.

That was the discovery that there are lots of regular correspondences between Germanic and other Indo-European languages as a result of a sound shift that happened early in the development of Germanic – that’s to say, English before it split off from German, and Old Icelandic, and the other Germanic languages.

This would explain the regular correspondence you get between words like English “father” and Latin “pater” where you find that you have the “p” sound in Latin, but you have a “f” sound in English. That’s a result of this change called Grimm’s law, which affected all of the words in this class.

That was identified by lots of scholars spending a lot of time comparing the forms they found in each language and trying to work out what on earth could be the regular correspondence behind all of them.

So that’s the way that the process works – scholars building on one another’s work. On the basis of that, over the course of well over a century now, a body of scholarship has been established that explains many words’ histories.

It doesn’t explain all of them, by any means. There are still a great many mysteries out there.

Charles: Would you say that’s because there’s a lack of data to solidify their fitting into the theory or the law, or was it because they have their own quirks, that an event in history formed the way they were pronounced or something like that?

Philip: Yes, that touches on some really big controversies, whether things really are regular or whether their regularity is a rule that linguists have to observe to make sure that they identify at least a common core of very safe examples and they don’t admit some other examples which may show particular quirks.

Charles: In closing, maybe I can ask you – one of my feelings also is, certainly for me, looking at the history of various words has opened windows for me into what history itself was.

I wanted to know if you had come across any facts from history that you hadn’t known until you looked into the history of a word you were investigating.

Philip: Oh yes, definitely. Definitely.

One of my colleagues was working quite extensively recently on the word “penguin,” which certainly I was familiar with beforehand, as we all are.

It’s the name of a type of flightless bird from the Southern Hemisphere. Very interestingly, in its early history in English, it first turns up in the late 16th century. It means that big group of birds from the South.

It also means some things rather closer to Britain and to North America, a type of bird called the Great Auk, now extinct. That was a bird of the Northern Hemisphere, superficially quite similar to the penguin. Probably that was the bird that was originally called the penguin.

Well, that was news to me. But how then do you explain how it got this name and back up the hypothesis that this was the thing originally called “penguin,” not the unrelated but similar-looking bird from the South?

One etymology that’s been suggested for “penguin” is that is has something to do with Welsh “pen gwyn,” which is a phrase in Welsh that means “white head.” But a problem there is that the Great Auk didn’t have a white head. It may be extinct, but we know enough about it to know that that’s not the case.

But in documents contemporary with the first references to the bird as a penguin, we find also references to somewhere called Penguin Island, a particular place in North America.

That may seem like it’s not going to help us at all because it’s just called that because there were lots of these birds there. But, in fact, it’s quite likely that the Penguin Island is so called because it was a white promontory, because that’s another of the meanings of the Welsh word.

So if it had this Welsh phrase as its name, then that would make very good sense as the name for the place, and then maybe the birds get their name because they were found there, rather than the other way around, which leads to a further lovely little historical tidbit that there were quite a lot of Welsh sailors, and also Briton sailors, involved in the early sea voyages to North America from Europe.

We have what seems a very workable historical hypothesis to explain how this place could have got its name, and then how the bird could have got its name from the place, and then how the other birds that have that name today got their name by transfer from the northern birds that they looked a bit similar to.

Charles: I really appreciate the time you’ve taken. Thank you.

Philip: It’s a pleasure.

Charles: Well, thank you so much.

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I learned recently that in 1381 in London an unruly crowd cornered a bunch of Flemish people in a church then set up a block outside and proceeded to behead 35 of them one after the other.

The reason for the animosity was that native English felt that their livelihoods were under threat from these immigrant workers.

The author of the book I got this from said that the reason the Flemish workers were there in the first place was that earlier it had been official government policy to invite these workers because of their skill in textile manufacturing. A prime example was the Flemish factory owner Thomas Blanket who’s name gave us the name of the warm cloth.

“Aha,” I thought, “here’s the stuff of a podictionary episode.”

But what I found wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

I could only find a single authoritative dictionary that mentions Thomas Blanket. That was The Oxford English Dictionary and it referred to poor Thomas with derision.

I actually think that this OED entry is an example of some quaint Victorian wording that likely won’t survive the revisions now taking place for the 3^rd edition.

What it actually says is “the Thomas Blanket to whom gossip attributes the origin of the name, if he really existed, doubtless took his name from the article.”

He certainly seems to have existed. His name survives because he was fined by the City of Bristol and appealed to King Edward III who sided with Thomas.

But the OED is right that blankets didn’t get called blankets because Thomas flooded the market with a new kind of beadspread.

The first citation in English for the word blanket was more than 30 years before Thomas set up his looms in Bristol and the first meaning the word took reveals its true etymology.

Before blanket meant a warm piece of fabric it referred to the undyed woolen fluff that went into making the blanket. Undyed is the operative word here.

Most sheep are white—or mostly white—and the French word for “white” is blanc and a blanket is called a blanket because it was made from this white fluff that was also called blanket.

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The word class in this sense means “classroom” or “lecture.”

The reason I say that it is appropriate students are being called is that the word class has an etymology that appears to lead back to being called.

The first time class was applied to the room in which education is delivered was in 1870 but as might be guessed from Greek and Latin being called classical languages the roots of class go quite a bit further back than 1870.

Thomas Blount included the word in his 1656 dictionary Glossographia saying both that it was a social division of people and that it referred to the division of students within a school; the latter being the more frequent use according to him.

It was the meaning of “social divisions of people into a hierarchy” that the Latin parent word classis referred to.

This meaning ran back to Servius Tullius who was king of Rome about 2,600 years ago. For tax purposes he divided his society into six groups based on land holdings.

Part of what a person owed the state was military service and the word used to describe these six groups evolved out of the same word used to mean a soldier was being “called up.”

That’s why students being called back to their classrooms is etymologically appropriate.

The reason that ancient Greek and Roman are termed classical is the same reason that a rich or stylish person might be called classy. Although there were six classes in Rome during Tullius’ time, it is the top tier that gets all the attention and so class became associated with being first.

When English adopted the word class from French around 400 years ago Greek and Roman were seen as “the original” languages and so were tagged with this “first” meaning.

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To us an ordeal might involve fighting the Christmas shopping crowds, or having our hard disk go up in a puff of smoke.

But originally an ordeal was a judgment.

The word has relatives in other languages where the meaning also includes “the dealing out of judgment” —as in apportioning blame—and it is thought that this sense of “dealing” influenced the re-adoption of the word as or-deal.

In English though, the older meaning was related to a specific kind of justice.  “Trial by ordeal” is mocked in Monty Python, but people who were thought to be witches really were tried by dunking them in water: if you float you’re a witch, if you sink, you’re innocent (the joke is that it’s too late ‘cause you’ve drowned).

Other gruesome practices included making the accused grab onto a piece of red hot iron, then binding up the burns and see if after a week or two they were infected or not. The logic behind this form of justice was that if one were guilty God would let you rot; if you were innocent he would perform a miracle and get you off.

Around the year 1300 Englishmen figured out that this was a stupid idea, and made it illegal—mostly.

They still dunked witches and allowed an accused person prove their innocence by challenging their accuser to a battle since whoever won was obviously telling God’s truth.  So with the ending of most forms of “trial by ordeal” so ended the use of the word—in fact it seems to have died out before that.

It wasn’t scientific progress and a desire to reduce unnecessary cruelty that made the English abolish trial by ordeal.  It was theology.

Think of God the almighty.

Clearly, thought the lawmakers of the day, we puny humans cannot invoke the miracles of God according to our will.  Hence trial by ordeal contradicts the supremacy of God.  We can’t have that now can we.  T

hus endeth the grabbing of red hot iron bars.

Yet somehow witch dunking got around this clause in the law, as did what was called “wager by battle” which lasted until 1818.

That was the year when a guy who had been accused of murder defended himself by calling for this “wager by battle.” The judge figured out that maybe it wouldn’t be a fair trial if the guy who was accused of murder got off by doing another murder.

Another quirk is that “wager by battle” was different than a “duel of honor.”  Duels continued to be legal since they were not over criminal accusations, only over social faux pas—it was okay to kill or maim someone over that.  By 1900 dueling itself was a social faux pas.