This word highlights the dangers of electronic media.

I looked up bamboozled in the Oxford English Dictionary online, that’s where the draft third edition can be found.

There is a verb to bamboozle and a noun bamboozle so I clicked on the etymology for the first one listed online, the noun, and it said to check the etymology of the preceding word; which is “bamboos” and is defined as a wooden drinking vessel for milk or water etc.

The implication is that it may derive from drinking vessels made from a piece of bamboo.

Aha, I think, maybe the word comes from drinking, I mean to be bamboozled is sort of being confused, and this work sort of contains the word booze.  Let’s look at the definitions here, to deceive by trickery, well that’s got nothgin to do with drinking or drinking vessels.  Let’s check Etymonline, no, American Heritage dictionary, no.

Well, to be truthful, none of my sources go down that path, so what’s the OED telling me.

Well it turns out that the lexicographers at Oxford haven’t yet gotten around to this particular word so its entry is still the same as the one in the second edition.  Except that in their electronic database, the order that they list the noun and the verb has been reversed so that while in the second edition the verb comes first, and the noun references its etymology to the preceding word, in the online version, the noun comes first so it is referencing a word that isn’t even related.

Bamboozle has nothing at all to do with wooden drinking cups.

So the real etymology is that it appeared, evidently as slang, in around 1700.

Evidently people have always complained that the English language was going to hell in a hand basket because “bamboozle” appeared as one of the words in a publication called the Tatler 300 years ago in an article about

the continual corruption of our English tongue

Etymonline agrees with the slang origin but also offers a couple of words from Scottish dialect and French that could have lead to bamboozle.

Some listeners have been asking for words that arose from languages other than Latin.  I chose hyena out of the blue, thinking, that’s likely to be African isn’t it?

Which just goes to show how hard it is to get away from Latin and Greek roots since hyena too arrived in English after the Norman invasion.  Ultimately the word is from a Greek word meaning “swine” or “pig.” And more than one source tells me that this is due to the ruff of hair on its back and shoulders that supposedly reminded people of similar hair on pigs—presumably wild boars, since the rest of a hyena doesn’t look like any kind of other animal.

There appears to have been a longstanding revulsion of hyenas although two references I came across said they were also held in high esteem but for different reasons.  The Devil’s Dictionary says hyenas were once revered because they visited graves at night, then old Ambrose Bierce goes on to say that that’s nothing to look up to since physicians do that—presumably he’s referring to grave robbing for anatomical study, I don’t know.

But there seems to be a low opinion of hyenas among Africans, at least in the literature I looked over, due to this very habit, not just visiting graves, but eating dead people.

Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable steers us back to Latin in explaining that Pliny thought hyenas had a kind of stone in their eye, that if you put under your tongue gave the gift of prophecy. So that to the ancient Romans at least hyenas were looked up to, but only if they were dead.

Medieval Europeans would not likely have seen too many hyenas but they still had opinions about them.  For some reason they considered hyenas to be far too interested in sex, and in some cases accused them of homosexuality or even of gender changing through their lives, like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

While these assertions are pure myth, the truth is strange enough that we can forgive our ancestors their misconceptions.  I have never had the pleasure of examining the private parts of a hyena, but from what I’m told, the females have something that so resembles a penis it makes mating downright tricky.  In fact the females are the dominant sex among hyenas.  They are larger and more aggressive and researchers are finding that this is due to what we would normally associate with male hormones, that in hyenas females seem to apply to themselves as well.  It’s this exposure to male hormones that makes the female’s genitals look like a penis.  In addition to the likelihood of ancient people seeing females and thinking they were male; when male hyenas are young pups, they exhibit a behavior called play mounting which is the only practice they will get before later having to approach a slavering, dominant, aggressive penis wielding female and trying to figure out how to get it on.

No wonder people were confused.

The Zulu name for a hyena is impisi, that means “the one who cleans up.” The Sestwana name is sephiri that means the ‘animal of the secret’.

I got the idea for this word of the day from reading more about the Oxford English Corpus, that dictionary maker’s tool said to have a billion words in its database.

One of the things that lexicographers have been able to do, that they weren’t able to do before, is give words more flavor along with their meaning.  I don’t have access to the Oxford English Corpus so I don’t know exactly what it would make of “proclivity” but here’s what I did.

Traditional dictionaries include a definition for a word. In the case of “proclivity” it might run something along the lines of “an inclination or predisposition toward something.”  That’s actually from Merriam Webster.  But there is a tone to proclivity too.  I was listening to the radio where they were talking about a natural history exhibit on the mating habits of wild animals.  The word proclivity came up in the conversation more than once.  The tone was one of titillation.  I thought…is there a kind of cheeky aspect to the word proclivity?  Something not exactly disapproved of, but not exactly respectable either?

The Oxford English Corpus would have let me look at numerous contexts of the word to tease out whether this was the case.  Since I don’t have the Corpus I had to settle for Google.  I actually used the search engines within newspapers like the LA Times and The New York Times.  Sure enough proclivities came associated with not buying new underwear, mincing around in bathing suits—sun tanning while visible from the street, cross dressing, overspending and more.  So even if the dictionary tells you that proclivity means a predisposition, it doesn’t tell you that most people use proclivity when talking with light disapproval…or is that winking approval?  The etymology of the word proclivity is ironically appropriate for this flavor of usage.  The word comes from Latin and is related to “incline,” where cl?vus means slope.  So that proclivity holds a figurative etymology of “going forward down a slope.”  And in practice our proclivities are things we allow ourselves, like a ball rolling down its natural course.

The podictionary word for today is “mall”:  I’m not a mall person, but of course every now and then I need to go to the mall to buy something.  Would you have suspected that the word we use to describe this collection of stores originates in a word for “hammer?”  The word I’m thinking of is the Latin ancestor of “mallet” and it shows up in other words too.  Something that can be banged into different shapes is “malleable.”

Some theories on why the chain armor that knights used to wear was called mail include the idea that it was hammered together.  In the game of croquet uses a wooden hammer to whack wooden balls through little hoops.  When I was in my twenties we somehow turned this into a drinking game fully equipped with rules that legitimized smacking someone else’s ball into the woods, or on a good day, into the river.  This game, or a game like it has been around for a long time.

The oldest name for it is closh and the name it had prior to being croquet was pall-mall.  You may recognize the name of a landmark of London England in the name of this game which translates simply as ball-mallet.  Of course in order to play croquet you need a stretch of green space and the name of the game of pall-mall is what gave the alley where it was played its name.  The place in London is only one of many where this games space gave its name to a later street called “the mall.”  And of course many of these became shopping streets and in turn, first in America, Australia and New Zealand the name started to be applied to enclosed shopping areas.

The first citation for this was in 1959 in what I’ll assume was a trade magazine, unbelievably titled Chain Store Age.  I was surprised to see in looking this stuff over that the game of closh had for many years been outlawed in England along with such other questionable pursuits as tennis, horseshoes and bowling.  Why would these innocent activities—my own version of croquet aside—be made illegal I wondered.  The explanation I found upon looking into it seems to be based on three things.  Henry VIII was the first to pass legislation against such unlawful gaming.

At the time it was felt that gambling between participants on such games was immoral in that the more talented player was depriving the loser of his hard earned cash through little better than trickery.  The legislation itself compares it to stealing.  A second reason was that anyone who had time to get really good at such games wasn’t out there working and contributing to the national economy.

Finally, in those days national defense was a much more grass roots operation.  Almost everyone in the country—anyone who owned property anyway—was legally required to keep weapons in their house so that in times of war, the king could call on them to fight.  It wasn’t the right to bear arms, it was the obligation.  It was also considered that if someone had hours to wile away, they should be practicing their archery, not whacking at wooden balls with mallets.

The other day I mentioned that Richard Lederer had brought up a word with an interesting background and “umpire” is the word.

An umpire is of course the official who enforces the rules in baseball and a number of other sports.  In some sports the official isn’t called an umpire but a referee instead.  Obviously a referee is someone to whom we refer such decisions.  Referees have been around for about 400 years but only about 160 as sports officials.

Umpires have been around for 600 years and about 300 years in sport.

But before they were umpires the title came to English from French and it was noumpere.

Even in today’s English we can understand the meaning of this word if we break it into “non” “peer” so the umpire was someone who didn’t have any equals—no peers—he was above the people he was judging.

It didn’t take English speakers long to confuse the phrase “a noumpere” and move the N across to the first word “an umpire.”

This happened with a number of words.  An adder, a snake, was in Old English “a nadder”; and an auger, the thing you dig holes for fence posts with, was “a nauger”.

The opposite happened as well.  Some words started in English without a leading N but had one attached because people thought it sounded better.  One example of this is “nickname.”

Do you have a nickname?  700 years ago I would have asked you if you had “an eke name” and before that “eke name” was two words.  “Eke” in Old English meant “something added” and that is why we eke out our existence.

In order to keep existing we constantly have to keep adding something, particularly to our mouths in the form of food.

I can think of three meanings for the word train right off the top of my head.

• There is the train that people might ride on either to go to work every day or when traveling around Europe.
• There’s the training that takes place in classrooms and
• there is the train that drags along the ground behind a woman’s wedding dress.

All of these trains, and more, do in fact relate to the same word root.  In Latin the root word came from the same root for the word “tractor” and meant to pull something.  From there in English over 700 years or so the word has been pulled in all sorts of directions from meaning the track of an animal to the gait of a horse.

It’s easy to see how the train of a woman’s dress could evolve from this pulling sense, and about 500 years ago how it began to apply to the direction of pupils, pulling them along in their course of study.  By the early 1800s it began to be applied to physical activity as well, as you might train for a race.

It was still well before Shakespeare’s time that “train” began to apply to a connected series of events or a line of some kind. And it was around the same time that people began to do athletic training that locomotive or railroad trains were first called trains.

I see a reference here to “train oil” that clearly predates railroads and the reason is that this was not oil to be used on trains, but oil that was drawn from whales, often boiled from their blubber.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary trainspotting is the hobby of hanging around beside railway lines and taking careful note of the details of the trains that go by.  There is a particularly successful movie called trainspotting that isn’t about trains at all but about junkies.  Taking a look at Urbandictionary I see that there are three definitions there for trainspotting.  One is the OED version, another is heroin injection, which would make sense in connection with the book and the movie.

Before I looked this up I had always assumed that the tracks in an addict’s arm were the source for the title. But the third Urbandictionary definition is people who hang around the DJ at a dance and take careful note of all the music he plays.  This is clearly more along the obsessive line of people who make notes on locomotives than a connection to junkies.

There is an implication in one of the entries at least that the course of the word trainspotting from hanging around railways to heroin addiction is because people obsessive about the music were also people who were shooting up.  However, I find that according to the British Council of the Arts on contemporary writers, the title of the book is supposed to be an inside joke on the fact that the junkies were hanging around an old train station in a part of town that was run down and hadn’t seen a train go through in years.

While we are taking cues from Urbandictionary I find that their entries for “train” are a little off-putting, think of a lineup of people and sex in the same context.  At first I just assumed this was one of the weaknesses of Urbandictionary, allowing almost any jerk to input whatever crude insider slang they wanted, no matter how small the circle might be of people who actually used the word in that sense.  But then I found in the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang a very similar entry supposedly dating from the 1980s in Britain.

Being the happily married guy that I am, I never knew—and maybe I didn’t want to.

I find in the Oxford English Dictionary that there are ten words pale spelled pale.  None of them are a bucket, which would be spelled pail.

One at least is short for pale ale, so that’s okay, but I want to talk about the one that’s behind the phrase “beyond the pale.”

Five of the ten are nouns so that “pale” a noun meaning a lack of pallor is obviously only subtly different from “pale” the verb to lose ones pallor, or “pale” the adjective.  But none of these are related to “beyond the pale” which means something that is improper or as the OED defines it

“outside the limits of acceptable behavior”

Here’s the story: more than 2000 years ago Roman soldiers were like modern soldiers in that they needed to train against enemies to prepare for war.  Before going into any battles at all they used to take a wooden stick and plant it in the ground, standing up, and pretend it was the enemy they had to fight.  This stick was called in Latin a p?lus and according to the American Heritage Dictionary it comes from an Indo-European root meaning to fasten.

A whole row of sticks stuck in the ground was a palisade and we still use that word for the kind of rudimentary protective walls built around early European settlements in North America.

But the word for a stick in the ground alone came to English through French and appeared not as p?lus but as “pale” about 600 years ago.  Over time, and perhaps even before, a pale was not just a stick, but a fence, and then it was the area within the fence.

By about the time of Shakespeare’s birth, just over 400 years ago a pale was an area which was under your control, and specifically the areas of Ireland that were under English control were called the pale.

There were other areas of the world as well called the pale; the OED mentions Calais in northern France.  So things that went on “beyond the pale” were things out of control so that by 1658 it was being used metaphorically to mean out of control and by implication unacceptable.

This word “pale” is also where we get our word “impale” that is, to poke a stick through. For the sake of completeness, the word “pale” meaning the color in our faces also comes from Latin through French, but it’s root is instead pallidum.

If I am doing a good job at podictionary I hope that I’ve astonished you with some of my unexpected histories of words you thought you already knew.

Well, at least I hope I have astonished you in the modern sense, not in the sense the word held when it first appeared in English.

In 1530 it meant to paralyze, deaden, stupefy, to stun or deprive of sensation, as by a blow.

The OED points back to a French root for the word, but others including Etymonline and the American Heritage point further back into Latin where we are told that the “tonare” in astonish means thunder.

The ass in astonish is supposed to mean “out” so astonish is said to mean thunderstruck.

Now I’m not sure if the literal “out thunder” is supposed to mean you were out in the thunder or that you are out of it because of the thunder, but in the sense used here they aren’t actually talking about thunder at all, but lightning.

Thunderstruck shows up in English about 100 years after astonish.

Even though “thunder” had been in the language for more than 800 years at that point, and had always meant the sound, not the electrical discharge, people still associated the power of the strike with the sound.  Think of Thor, the god of thunder, he wasn’t just a god of noise.

By the time you download this I will have surpassed 700,000 downloads of podictionary episodes.  If I haven’t astonished you yet, keep listening.  It may take another year, but I looked up the statistics and there is a one in 1.7 million chance of getting hit by lighting.

[NOTE at Feb '08 - downloads at this date approaching 4 million]

Right around the time when Shakespeare was alive there was another guy in Germany by the name of Johannes Kepler.

He was quite the guy.

Wikipedia tells me that he wrote science fiction.  He must have put his imagination to good use in the realm of science fact as well because if you recognize his name at all, it is because he came up with mathematical formulae that finally explained to all those guys who had been trying to figure out how the stars and planets moved around up there in the sky, what was going on.

Even more remarkable was the fact that he was blind as a bat and couldn’t see them himself.

He comes into my little story here because it was he, in explaining not how planetary motion worked but how light bent through lenses, it was Kepler who coined the term focus.

If you look at wikipedia at Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, you’ll see that the authors use the word focus to describe the points around which celestial bodies orbit. So today the word focus has a geometric meaning.

Figuratively we all use the word.

I have to focus on the job at hand.  If you have glasses you know that optically focus has to do with bringing the light to a focal point in the back of your eye. It was something along these lines that Kepler was thinking when he borrowed this word from Latin.

If you take a magnifying glass outside into the sunshine you can focus the sun’s rays on a tiny little point and actually start a fire.

In Latin, focus means hearth or fireplace.

Of course Johannes Kepler was writing in German, actually no, he’d have been writing in Latin.  So it was 14 years after his death that the word appeared in English.  In this case the mathematical sense was retained, but instead of appearing in a document about planets or optics, the word appeared in someone’s diary referring to acoustics and a particular place where sound seemed naturally amplified.

In the year of our lord 1247, in the City of London was founded the priory of St. Mary of Bethlehem.

As a rich person might do now for tax purposes, the land for this priory was donated by one of the sheriffs of London Simon Fitz Mary.

This priory had two reasons for being.  One was to pray for the immortal soul of Simon Fitz Mary and a few of his friends.  So today you could save taxes and feel good about it, then you could save your soul and help out a few starving friars as well.

The second job of the priory was to act as a London home for the Bishop of St. Mary of Bethlehem.  Since he actually was bishop in o-little-town-of-Bethlehem his visits to London must have been infrequent.

They stopped all together after the crusades died out and Europe lost control over the holy land.

Within 200 years instead of praying for Simon Fitz Mary the place had become a hospital for lunatics.

That’s not bad since tax deductions are only good for one year.

With time, people referred to the insane asylum less as St. Mary of Bethlehem and more as a contraction Bethlehem.

Even o-little-town had been further contracted to “bedlam” as early as the year 971 so that it was only natural that the hospital too would be called bedlam.  It’s easy to see how the name of an insane asylum might evolve into, as the definition puts it:

a scene of mad confusion and uproar

Here’s the well known part.  In his book The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester talks about James Murray, the professor in the title, and one of the prime movers and editors in the publication of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and a fellow named William Minor one of the star volunteer readers for OED.

The way it worked was that the staff at the dictionary could never hope to read all the books, much less make notes on each word, that was needed to sort out how old every word was and how many meanings it had experienced etc.  So they asked for volunteers.  Some of these volunteers did yeoman service, bringing in evidence of many thousands of words.

William Minor was one of these.

The board of the OED decided they would throw a party for these hard working volunteers and give them a little thank you memento.  The invitations went out and the party was thrown, but William Minor was unable to attend.  James Murray thought it was a shame and went to personally present the award.

He was more than a little shocked to find that the address he had been corresponding with was in fact St. Mary of Bethlehem hospital and that his star researcher was in fact locked up there for being totally off his rocker.

Today we can predict the future with elaborate weather forecasting computer programs, and by getting Ivy League educated economists on the radio.

But in the bad old days people who wanted an accurate picture of the days to come would consult a soothsayer who poked through chicken entrails, or looked to the stars.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe but weather forecasters and economists are an improvement.

Because knowing the future is always helpful it is no surprise that people have been trying to make forecasts since a long long time ago.  This is why our word today, “horoscope” shows up pretty early in the history of English.  The first citation is in the year 1050, so that’s just 16 years before the Norman invasion that brought all those French words with their Latin roots into English.

So that makes it Old English.

But people who know Greek will instantly recognize the word’s suffix—scope—as coming from the Greek word for observe or watch.  That’s where we get names for things like telescope and microscope.  The prefix in the word horoscope is also from Greek.

Surprisingly, horo is still completely recognizable to modern English speakers because it means “hour” and the literal translation of “horoscope” is “hour watcher.”

In this case however, the hour watcher isn’t waiting for his shift to end, the figurative translation is “the observation of the hour of birth.”

So it’s the date and time when you’re born that is supposed to tell those astrological soothsayers what your future holds.

This makes “horoscope” a bit of an odd word.  Most words that can be traced back to Greek came into English after the Norman invasion and so depend on the fact that French was built on the common man’s Latin and Latin in turn took much inspiration from Greek.

To me this seems to reinforce the idea that knowing the future was always important, and important enough that people talked a lot about it so that a word from antiquity somehow was carried to the British isles and continued getting talked about even to this day.

I checked the New York Times to see how people were using the word “maelstrom.”

To be honest I needed to check the spelling first.

• There was a story on the war in Iraq and the maelstrom in Bagdad;
• another about a family crises maelstrom; and
• one on a maelstrom in public education.

These match with one of the definitions given in the New Oxford American Dictionary that says the word has a figurative sense of a scene or state of confused and violent movement or upheaval.  According to Urbandictionary maelstrom is also a Kickass band and according to Wikipedia it’s more than one role playing game as well as several pieces of music.

But the root of the word, as hinted by the spelling, isn’t English, it seems to be Dutch.

And in fact there is a place, not in Holland, where this word—if not comes from—at least is associated with.  On the coast of Norway there is an island called “Moskenisoy” and nearby the combinations of submarine rock formations and tidal currents set up a whirlpool that gurgles and sucks in a rather frightening manner if you happen to be in a boat nearby.   To sailors 500 years ago it was frightening enough that rumour got around.

Here is what seems to be the first quote in English:

There is between the said Rost Islands, and Lofoote, a whirle poole, called Malestrand, which..maketh such a terrible noise, that it shaketh the rings in the doores of the inhabitants houses of the said Islands, ten miles of

The story went that this whirlpool could suck any ship down and grind it to splinters.

The Dutch root words for maelstrom are maalen meaning to grind and whirl—which is also related to our word “meal” as in “corn meal”; and stroom  which is a stream or current.

The New Oxford American Dictionary says the word denotes a mythical whirlpool, but I’m thinking that by mythical here they mean it doesn’t really rattle the doorknobs ten miles away or grind all ships to matchsticks.

I’m sure you have attended seminars.  They seem a little interchangeable with conferences and expositions.

The usual definition these days is a get together of specialists in some field or other, or alternately students studying under a professor.

The word started appearing in English within the last 100 years and is based on its use in Germany specifically for the university, student, professor meaning which in German goes back maybe 200 years.

The reason this word was used in that context is because you are supposed to grow, and in particular grow your ideas, in university.  Seminar relates to seminary, as you might picture occupied by a group of monks.

But before a seminary was a place for religious training and thought it was a patch of land for growing things, because you see the root of both words, seminar and seminary, is from the Latin for “seed.”

Which also by the way, is the root for the word for semen.

According to Hugh Rawson’s Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk, this sexual connection, however, oblique, and particularly this MALE sexual connection so offended one professor at Washington University—as reported in 1991 in the New Yorker—that they refused to give seminars.

They gave ovulars instead.

I hate luggage.

My theory of travel includes a thin suitcase and a fat wallet.

Consequently I never travel.

The word “luggage” appears first in 1597 and one of the first citations is Shakespeare’ Henry IV where the King’s son Hal asks his friend to

bring your luggage nobly on your back

The word “luggage” is supposed to be modeled after the word baggage.  But a bag is the container.  The luggage refers to the thing we have to lug around.

“Lug” is an older word and it has always meant something to do with pulling.  So these roller bags that make it easier to lug your junk around airports are in keeping with etymology stretching back more than 600 years.

Originally “lug” is thought to have come from Old Norse and is reflected in Swedish where lugga refers to pulling a person by the hair.  But it also at various times meant to pull out your sword and to take a pull at a bottle.

I took a look at the word slug, thinking that if lug meant to take a little drink, maybe taking a slug was related.  The OED says this form of slug is a slang usage, not tracing the origin.  But etymonline offers two other possibilities, a slang expression “fire a slug” that used to mean take a drink, or from Irish slog that meant swallow.

Since our word “luggage” didn’t come from Latin I am interested to see that in the Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary the Latin translations they give for luggage include impedimenta—which is how I feel about luggage—and onus.

Onus is Latin for “burden.”

The Columbia Guide to Standard American English seems to feel that dragging luggage around is classier than carrying baggage.  I think the fat wallet idea is the classiest.

In English the word “pupa” is the stage of life of an insect.  For example between being a caterpillar and being a butterfly the stage where this kind of insect morphs is called its pupal stage.

This is the idea of Carl Linneas who in the 1750s came up with the classification system we still use today for plants and animals.  He borrowed the Latin word for “girl” pupa which also meant “doll” in Latin.  He did it in a documented format so we know who to blame, but the traces on a number of other related words are not quite so well established, but the traces are there just the same and the connections are pretty believable.

In Latin it’s easy to see how the word for girl might be applied also to a doll.  I mean its more often girls who play with dolls and today we certainly call our own little girls dolls, living dolls.

In fact our big girls too sometimes.

Since French grew out of vulgar Latin the links to their word for doll poupée are also clear.

“Puppet” didn’t appear until the mid 1500s and before that it had been “poppet.”  The movie Pirates of the Caribbean has Keira Knightley’s character Elizabeth Swann being called a poppet by the kidnapping pirates.

Then as today we think of a puppet not only as a plaything, but as a representation of a person that is actually controlled by a real person behind the scenes.  Political puppets are actual people controlled by someone behind the scenes.

Keira Knightley was being called a poppet though, because another old meaning of the word is a dainty, pretty girl.

Now Keira Knightley is no dog but it turns out that puppet is a word related to what we call young dogs.  In the middle ages lap dogs were also called poupée because they were thought of as playthings—not working dogs.  Poupée morphed to puppy and so with time any little dog began to be called a puppy.

I did a random search of the New York Times to see how people were using the word “nemesis”

• The Los Angeles Lakers Kobe Bryant is quoted as saying the third quarter of their games this season has been their nemesis.
• Kristanna Loken, is said to be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s nemesis in Terminator 3.
• The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin is said to have a nemesis in his own Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

All these usages line up well with the dictionary definitions I turned up.  To use The New Oxford American Dictionary as an example, a nemesis is

“the inescapable…agent of someone’s…downfall.”

The OED tells me that this word comes from ancient Greek where Nemesis was a goddess.  Her job was to keep an eye out for people who were being overly successful, particularly when the success is undeserved and even more so when it is ill gotten.

She is the goddess of righteous anger; divine retribution and vengeance, but only where vengeance is actually fair in balance.

In the pantheon of ancient gods she appears to me to be unusually reasonable.

Her name is said to translate as “to give what is due.”  She’s the daughter of night, or at least the goddess Nyx and is still said by some to have evaded the advances of Zeus.

I’m liking her more all the time.

I see that the entrys in the OED second and draft third edition are a little different.  They have pushed the date of the first citation back by 25 years or so to 1542 and there are several more subtle varieties of definition in there.  But the new entry I like the most relates to astronomy.

In 1984 in the journal Nature, a paper by Davis, Hut & Muller proposed a twin star to our sun as a possible explanation for an apparent cycle of mass extinctions on earth that seemed to show up every 26 million years.  Their theory was that the orbit of this star every 26 million years moved into an area called the Oort cloud and dislodged comets that then pounded the earth.

However unjust this may be, they suggested that if and when this companion star is found, it be named NEMESIS.

Isaac Asimov wrote a book on the idea.

In the 20 odd years since, nobody has found this theoretical star and the idea that extinctions come and go every 26 million years is also up in the air.  But the OED citation shows a certain sense of humor about it that originates with the authors of the theory Davis, Hut & Muller; they go on to say

“We worry that if the companion is not found, this paper will be our nemesis.”

The other day on the blog The Oxford Etymologist Anatoly Liberman just happened to mention in passing that the word “window” evolved from an earlier pair of words “wind” and “eye.”

So a window is the space in the wall where the wind looks in; or at least did until people started sticking sheets of glass in the way.

According to the OED the word “window” shows up first in English in the Ancrene Riwle, an old text I’ve talked about before here at podictionary.  This puts window around the year 1225, but its roots are quite a bit older.

There had been another word that English men and women used to describe the things we now call windows.  In Old English these were called eyethurls and since thurl is an old word for hole, this means eye holes.  This word had been part of English since the Germanic peoples came across the English channel in around 450.

I spent a few moments on a sort of sidetrack with thurl because I’ve come across it before in writing my book and looking at the word nostril, obviously nostril is nose thurl. Thurl is related to the word through which is obviously related to holes.

Anyway, eyethurl lost out in its battle as an English word to window.

There was another contestant that came into English around the same time as window.  The word “fenester” came from French and was used in English concurrently with the word “window” for more than 300 years up until about Shakespeare’s time.

The winner as we know wasn’t eyethurl, nor fenester, but window which didn’t come from French or Germanic Old English, but was brought down from the north by the invading Vikings, who, once they stopped burning and raping and pillaging, settled down and started living relatively peacefully with their English neighbors and thus injected words such as window into the language.

The American Heritage Dictionary says that window is an example of a type of word called a “kenning” that the Norse loved to invent.

Wikipedia tells me that a kenning is called a kenning from a norse phrase translating as “to express a thing in terms of another.” The example that is often trotted out is from Beowulf where the kenning “whale road” is used to mean the sea.  So the wind’s eye became window.

Government is always working on ways to get taxes, and if they are a good government they look for ways to make taxation fair.  About 100 years after the word window left eyethirl and fenester in the dust appeared one of these efforts.

Today I pay my municipal taxes based on an assessment of what my house is worth.  Centuries ago tax assessors didn’t have the real estate records to compare house values, much less the computers to crunch the numbers, so a few simpler tricks were tried.  If you were rich enough to have a hearth in your home you were rich enough to pay taxes.  Two hearths, ah, more tax please, etc.

Then in the late 1600s, if you have more than six windows in your house, tax.  More windows, more tax.

This lasted in England until 1851, over a century and a half with the result that a bunch of homeonwners bricked up a few windows so they wouldn’t have to pay.  My sources say that some of these windows are still bricked up.

Once the window in a building had gained its name for good and all, people started using the word window as a metaphor.  For example “the eyes are windows on a person’s soul” and in fact I see from one Oxford quotation that a nice pair of shoes are a window on someone’s soul too.

More recently we have windows of opportunity and of course we have windows on our computers.  Microsoft Windows of course isn’t the only operating system but all operating systems that open and close little panes on the screen are using a concept of windowing that was supposedly dreamed up and named at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre in the early 1970s.

In fact I want to talk about both cement and concrete and explore what is different about them.

The word cement seems to have come into Middle English from Old French and ultimately from Latin.  The earliest ancestor word in Latin has a meaning of small stones that have been chipped off a larger piece.  This name fits with the technology of cement which required the mixing of ground stone of specific kinds, and later more refined processes included heating it until it almost fuses, then re-grinding it into powder.  The resulting material was then, and is now used to mix with water and forms a sort of stone glue to stick blocks of stone or bricks together.

This meaning of mortar was the one that stuck to cement when it entered English in 1300.  Since then it has come to mean other types of glue like rubber cement.

I never made much distinction between cement and concrete, but etymologically the have a different background and evidently they are technically different too.

Concrete is also from Latin but instead of meaning stone chips or dust, the parent word for concrete holds a meaning of growing together.  So in the construction industry concrete is the stuff that results when you mix cement with filler material like sand or gravel.

The cement, cements the gravel together, concretes it together.

When I hear the word concrete used in conversation for example in the phrase “concrete proposal” I always assumed that the proposal was solid, like concrete.  But historically the word concrete was used to apply to things that were blended together tightly, before it was ever poured onto a construction site.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that in 1651 the voice sliding up the scale was referred to as an example of concrete sound—as opposed to discrete sounds—while the mixing with gravel and cement had to wait until 1834.

Concrete is given as a sort of antonym of discrete, and although both concrete and discrete are from Latin and one means grow together while the other means separate and distinct, they don’t seem to have been thought of as antonyms until they got into English.

In thinking of cement’s origins with chips from larger blocks of stone I kept thinking of the phrase “a chip off the old block” but I see that according to Michael Quinion of world-wide-words.org the allusion is to carpentry and a block of wood.  He puts the first instance as “chip of the same block” in 1637.

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Garlic features in the the cold soup gazpacho that I like too but not in its etymology.

While vichyssoise can be dated to about 100 years ago, gazpacho has a much longer history and one that’s a little harder to date.

The OED online gives a first citation of gazpacho from 1845 and even gives a recipe. I see though that Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives a first English citation of 1775.

Via the OED, according to the 1845 Handbook of Travels in Spain,  gazpacho “is a cold vegetable soup, and is composed of onions, garlic, cucumbers, pepinos, pimientas, all chopped up very small and mixed with crumbs of bread, and then put into a bowl of oil, vinegar, and fresh water.”

Both Mark Morton’s Cupboard Love and Larousse Gastronomique tell us that the name for this soup comes from Arabic and means “soaked bread.”

Certainly my first exposure to the stuff came from my uncle who insisted that one of the key ingredients was stale bread.

At the time he had a Spanish visitor who scoffed at us eating our gazpacho, dipping bread into it to soak up the delicious juices. He quoted what I supposed to be an old Spanish proverb: “bread with bread is a fool’s meal.”

Well too bad for him, this fool still loves the stuff.

Though the “soaked bread” etymology appears in a few sources the OED simply says it’s from Spanish. The American Heritage Dictionary however expands on this saying it is probably of Mozarabic origin; akin to the Spanish word caspicias meaning “remainders” or “worthless things.”

I needed to lookup Mozarabic which turns out to be a language group that occupied Spain based on the Latin that had been there from Roman times, morphing due to the Arabic of the Muslim conquerors of the area who hung out there until about 500 years ago.

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So the etymology of vichyssoise will come first.

Vichyssoise is made with potatoes and leeks and cream. The dictionaries only show a date of 1939 for a first citation but the origins of vichyssoise go back to before 1900.

It was in 1900 that Louis Diat turned 15 years old and let’s assume that the story he told New Yorker Magazine in 1950 goes back to an earlier stage of his childhood.

Louis Diat was a French chef and he worked for the Ritz restaurants in Paris and London before the Ritz Carleton opened in New York and he was sent there to run the place.

In the summer of 1917, he was inspired by the memory of the potato-and-leek soup of his childhood, which his mother and grandmother used to make. He said “I recalled how, during the summer, my older brother and I used to cool it off by pouring in cold milk, and how delicious it was.”

In creating the soup Diat got to name it and he named it after the city of Vichy near where he grew up.

Vichy might have gotten its name, according to Adrian Room, either from the personal name of some otherwise forgotten Roman Vippius, or else as a shortening of vicus calidus meaning warm village, because of some hot springs there.

That’d be a little ironic, that cold soup would be named after hot springs.

Anyway it was Louis Diat who once said that “there are five elements: earth, air, fire, water and garlic.”