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We haven’t yet come up with a universally agreed-upon word to refer to someone we are living with before getting married.

Once you decide though, “yes this is it, we’re going to get married,” the word fiancé becomes available.

Fiancé only lasts a little while until the word husband or wife stuns you by being applicable to your own situation, instead of just to older people.

English speakers have only had fiancés for about 150 years.  The word betrothed goes back more like 700 years.

It is easy to see the word truth in the word betrothed and the same lineage of trust applies to the word fiancé.

Even further back, 800 years ago in French, fiancé meant “trust” and came into English first with that meaning.

From “trust” to “promise” is an understandable change in meaning and so the word fiancé turns up again a century or two before Shakespeare.  In this case it shows up as a verb so that to fiancé was “to promise” and specifically to promise to wed.

Thus as the verb became obsolete the noun referring to the persons who had exchanged promises arose to take its place.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary the first person to be referred to in writing as someone’s fiancé was Blanche Mary Shore Smith who at the time was engaged to be married to Arthur Hugh Clough.

Since you likely don’t recognize either of those two lovebirds I will mention Blanche’s cousin, whose name you will recognize. Arthur worked for years as unpaid secretary for her.

She was Florence Nightingale.

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Of course if you are told to take something with a grain of salt it means that whatever information you are being given should be viewed with skepticism. You should question its accuracy before accepting it.

I’ll start with the word skeptical and sprinkle the salt later.

William Shakespeare hadn’t yet become a teenager when the word skeptic appeared in English in 1575.

It may have arrived from French but this was a time in the development of English when people were pulling words directly from Latin quite freely. So it may have been a direct Latin transplant.

In either case its parent word before Latin is thought to have been skeptikos from Greek meaning “thoughtful” but itself built on the Indo-European root spec.

When you are thoughtful you metaphorically look at an idea from different angles and that’s how this root that means “look” (and is the grandparent of words like spectacles and the scope part of telescope) came to be a part of a word that means to be “doubtful” or “questioning.”

Many of the etymologies I saw make reference to someone called Pyrrho of Elis who lived about 2,300 years ago and is seen as originating a skeptical philosophy.

He must have been a very annoying person because he saw it as his duty not only to play devil’s advocate for any statement of fact presented to him, but to teach others to do it as well.

So much for skepticism.

What about taking things with a grain of salt?

This expression isn’t quite as old as skepticism but it comes pretty close. The story comes from Pliny the Elder almost 2,000 years ago.

The Latin original was cum grano salis and applied not to skepticism but to an antidote to poison. Supposedly the Roman General Pompey had discovered some antidote and part of the recipe was that it be taken with a grain of salt.

We don’t know if Pliny or Pompey or some later person was skeptical of this as effective protection against poison. In any case the phrase didn’t appear in English until 1647 and by then had adopted its skeptical meaning.

In 2001 the Random House Word Maven expressed the opinion that this “skeptical” meaning likely had developed independent of whether Pliny was doubtful. Instead speakers invited their listeners to improve the palatability of a doubtful story by adding a little salt, as they might to food.

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The old kind are called incandescent light bulbs and once upon a time they were new themselves.

You can see the word candle there inside the word incandescent and etymologically it fits. Both words are built on a Latin root candere meaning “to shine” or “to be white” or “to glow.”

The difference is that incandescence means “to shine from within.”

English didn’t invent it; it was already a Latin word and was dragged into English just over 200 years ago and applied to things like hot coals.

That only just predated the invention of the light bulb whose first stirrings began in the early 1800s and finally became a commercial product in the last 20 years of that century.

So a candle has a flame that glows, but a hot coal glows from within.

There was more hoopla surrounding the introduction of incandescent lights than there seems to be surrounding compact fluorescents.

On the 14^th of June in 1881 one of the biggest lumber producers in the world switched on their brand new electric lights for the first time. E.B. Eddy had shut down production for the event and throngs of people showed up; a band played in the streets for two hours to celebrate.

As a bonus, in researching this little factoid I discovered a new word I hadn’t known before; kerf.

When you cut up a log into boards the thickness of your saw matters.

It matters a lot if you run a big lumber mill because with thin cuts you get more boards out of a log; with thicker blades more of what should be sold as boards ends up becoming sawdust—which is harder to make a profit on.

That slot left in the wood after a saw goes through is called the kerf.

It’s an Old English word meaning “to cut” and you can remember it by associating it with another word that is much more common; carve.

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In fact mirror came into English 700 years ago from French where it was about 200 years older.

By the time it arrived in English mirror had already taken on an analogous meaning, since the first citation shows mirror to mean “an example worth imitating.” So with this meaning Mother Theresa would be a mirror.

It was only a few decades later that the meaning we’d recognize in our bathrooms appeared (although at the time glass wasn’t exactly common so mirrors were polished metal.)

The term looking glass didn’t appear until 1562 and that first citation runs “daily & hourly I might look, as in a mirror or looking-glass” which shows mirror as the standard word against which looking glass was being introduced.

All the dictionaries I looked at said that mirror came to English through French from a Latin word mirari meaning “to look at,” “to wonder over,” or “to admire.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots pushes the etymology back to smei, an Indo-European word that meant “to laugh” or “to smile.”

The sense development wasn’t that you smile in the mirror, but instead that something you would smile at might be something you would wonder over or admire.

Both the words smile and admire are thought also to be connected to this Indo-European root.

The sense of a mirror as something that represents the world around it is the reason why a number of newspapers have the word mirror in their names.

Yes, they are all related—sort of.

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I’ll start at the beginning, or as close to the beginning as I can get in etymology; Indo-European.

The other day I mentioned an Indo-European root word kwet meaning “to shake.”

This word root is the same parent of the Latin word which though French gave us squash, which according to The Oxford English Dictionary means “to squeeze, press, or crush into a flat mass or pulp.”

I’m only guessing but I’d say that the violent or destructive aspects of the Indo-European kwet “to shake” morphed into the destructive aspects of squashing something.

This version of the word squash didn’t turn up in English until 1565 which is a little late for something that came from Old French with the Normans and perhaps for that reason the OED mentions that squash also might have come about in this form based on the similar word quash that had been known in English since 1275.

You squash a bug but you quash a suggestion.

In either case the result is the same, the bug or the suggestion are dead and gone.

The name of the sport squash comes from this same source. At first it was just the ball that was called the squash, the game was called squash rackets.

The ball was called the squash because it was a soft squishy ball.

I said that the vegetable squash was also etymologically related and in saying that I was stretching the truth.

A squash that you might serve for dinner or cook into some soup is named as an abbreviation of a Narragansett Indian word  asquutasquash.

In fact since most of us only eat one squash at a time the appropriate Narragansett word should be asquutasq since asquutasquash is plural.

Moreover, since we usually eat our squash cooked the appropriate Narragansett word really should be utasq since asquutasquash means plural uncooked squashes.

And how does that remotely relate to Latin and squishiness?

Before the squash ball was called squash there was an earlier English vegetable called squash.

William Shakespeare mentioned it. Back in his day the vegetable squash was immature or unripe pea pods.

The reason pea pods might be called squash was that before the peas are fully formed you can feel the emptiness of the pod by squashing it between your fingers.

A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned.

In fact weather is of great concern to us since if it’s good we can enjoy it, and if it’s bad it not only keeps us from getting outside, but can cost billions in insurance payouts and government emergency expenditures.

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Weather the noun is as old as can be, appearing in English pretty much as soon as the language could be called English, in this case 725.

Until the 15th century the word was pronounced “weder” with a “d” instead of a “th.”

In Russian a related word vedro means “good weather” while in Lithuanian vydra means “bad weather.”

The thinking is that the root of the word comes from an Indo-European root we meaning “to blow.” In that sense a day without wind might be a day without weather.

The expression “to weather the storm” means to sit it out, hopefully in a safe place.

According to the OED the expression comes from nautical origins.

The scenario goes like this.  Sailing requires wind.  Storms or sunshine are brought by the wind and so among sailors the words wind and weather became synonyms of a kind.  So when sailing, to weather an obstruction meant to sail to the windward side of it.  When passing along a coast, this usually was the only alternative to crashing into the shore, so that to weather a rocky point meant to get safely by it.

From there it was only a short leap from meaning “to get safely through” that part of the journey, to meaning get safely through other ordeals.

Have you ever noticed how many weather vanes are roosters?

According to Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the reason for this is that in the 9th century the pope—and I couldn’t find out which pope—decreed that all churches should mount a rooster on their spire as a symbol of St. Peter who upon the day of Christ’s arrest denied being a disciple not once, not twice, but three times before the rooster crowed.

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They were equipped to save people in serious trouble; but they admitted to me that usually they are helping out people who are suffering from a broken ski binding or an inability to read a map.

The Oxford Dictionary of English says that rescue means to save someone from a dangerous or difficult situation. They give the example of firefighters rescuing a man from a river.

So today it is appropriate to call what these folks do rescue but before 700 years ago, when rescue came into English, its Latin parent had a slightly different meaning.

The Indo-European root kwet meant “to shake.”

This word made its way eventually into Latin as quatere also meaning “to shake.”

One of the descendents of this Latin word made it into English as excuss which is probably a word you aren’t familiar with.

Just as new words are being brought into English all the time, some words become less and less popular until they are obsolete. Excuss is one of those words.

Around Shakespeare’s time you might come home from a shopping trip and excuss your purchases from your shopping bag; excuss meant to “shake out.”

You can see the ex meaning “out” while the cuss comes from that Latin quatere root.

As well as meaning “shake out,” excuss meant “shake off” or “get rid of.”

Although excuss died the death of an unpopular word, its daughter word rescue survived.

Just as Latin built excuss out of two parent words, they also built rescue by sticking together re meaning “again” and the predecessor of excuss the Latin excutere meaning “get rid of.”

Thus rescue literally means “shake off again” or “get rid of again.”

How might getting rid of something relate to being saved from a dangerous situation like a burning building?

At first the dangerous situation that this word referred to was being attacked by someone or held prisoner by them. So to be rescued was to get rid of the attacker; to shake them off again.

By the time the Latin word made it into English through French in the 14^th century it had already expanded to include most of the meanings we now recognize.

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They both appeared in the written record pretty darn close to each other in English.

Someone who’d taken the lowest level of courses at an institution of learning is recorded as being called a bachelor as early as 1362.

Geoffrey Chaucer is the first person cited as calling an unmarried man a bachelor around 1386.

These dates point to a French entry point into English after William the Conqueror.

The earliest use of bachelor was recorded in 1297 according to The Oxford English Dictionary with a now largely forgotten meaning of a

• “a young knight, not old enough, or having too few vassals, to display his own banner, and who therefore followed the banner of another” or
• “a novice in arms.”

In both the case of bachelor “a four year college graduate” and bachelor “an unmarried man” it was this sense of youth that lent the word these new meanings.

The French roots of the word are usually presumed to have been from Latin but no one seems to have absolutely hammered down the exact etymology way back then.

There are quite a few suggested etymologies to bachelor but it isn’t uncommon to see several of them being suggested and subsequently shot-down on the same page. For instance the website Wordnik pulls from the American Heritage Dictionary to say “perhaps of Celtic origin” and then follows that up with an extract from The Century Dictionary saying “erroneously referred to a Celtic origin.”

One theory is that a Latin word baccalaria referred to a section of farm land and that the word bachelor came from a subordinate or tenant farmer on such land.

This land in turn might have been used for raising cows because the late Latin bacca had earlier been vacca meaning “cow.”

Another theory takes the Latin word baculum which means “stick” and suggests that the knights in training would practice using sticks instead of real swords.

Although the word bachelorette didn’t show up in English until 1935, one of the etymological theories was that in Old French there had been a word bachelle meaning “young woman” and that bachelor is simply the male equivalent of this.

Helen Rowland quipped that a bachelor thinks of himself as “a thing of beauty and a boy forever.”

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The origin of logging-in comes from filling out a daily log book.

Starting about three hundred years ago a log book was the document into which the captain of a ship wrote the important aspects of the day’s proceedings.

The most important of these were the ship’s progress across the face of the deeps.

In those days there were no GPS systems and it is from the relatively crude approach to making these calculations that we get several important words.

I don’t know what I would have done to calculate my surface speed without instruments but here’s what they did.

Every so often they took a chunk of wood tied to a string and tossed it overboard. Depending on how fast the string played out they could calculate their speed.

That chunk of wood was called the log although over time it was engineered into becoming a board designed to stand vertically in the water and resist movement from the cord pulling on it.

From this floating piece of carpentry came the term for documenting progress and eventually the term you use to describe typing in your password at a computer.

Another great word from this practice of ship-borne logging comes from the method used to calculate the length of string the log pulled out.

The sailor tossed the log and turned one of those timers that works by trickling sand through a glass. The string that played out had knots tied in it at regular intervals and he counted the number of knots that went by during the time it took for the sand to run out.

It was just a happy coincidence that the Old English word knot meaning “the tied part of a rope,” sounds the same as the Greek word for “sailor.”  Thus the speed of a ship is measured in knots.

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I heard two people this week say that something that had happened to them was humiliating. What they meant was that their pride had been hurt; something had happened that had knocked them down a peg.

Without even opening a dictionary I knew that the uncomfortable experience of being humiliated is named from the same root as the word humility.

Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary defines humility as freedom from pride or arrogance. That sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?

But being made to feel free from pride is not so good; that’s why being humiliated is not a good thing.

Humility came to English from French after the Norman Conquest but of course that French had come from Latin before it so when English began importing words directly from classical languages the word humiliate was one of the words it adopted from Latin; in this case showing up first in writing in 1533.

Having intuited my way to the word humility I wondered about the difference between humility and humble; particularly when I see that the Latin humilis means “humble.”

In the etymology for humble, The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that humble comes from humilum, a Latin word meaning “low,” “small” and “insignificant.” So it’s no wonder that the words humility and humble have such similar meanings, they come from the same Latin roots.

But then I noticed in John Ayto’s Word Origins, where he says that humble literally means “close to the ground,” that humble is a derivative of humus meaning “earth” in Latin.

Then he goes on to say that this is the same earthy root that gave us the word human.

“How does that work?” I immediately wondered.

Is being “only human” what keeps us humble?

Actually it is being not godly that makes us human, etymologically at least.

Gods are of the heavens, humans are of this earth.

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With respect to the word arrive which of the following statements is the most etymologically appropriate?

This first one is from a Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle

“While a horse was being put into a trap at the local inn, we snatched a hurried breakfast, and so we were all ready for business when we at last arrived at Yoxley Old Place.”

Next this one from Charles Dickens Great Expectations

“I so shaped out my walk as to arrive at the gate at my old time. When I had rung at the bell with an unsteady hand I turned my back upon the gate, while I tried to get my breath and keep the beating of my heart moderately quiet.”

Or finally this snippet from Mark Twain’s Following the Equator

“When a vessel arrived with spirits, they allowed nobody to buy but themselves, and they forced the owner to sell to them at a price named by themselves…”

Before I tell you the answer I’ll tell you that the word arrive has an etymology that specifically relates it to the mode of travel.

So Sherlock Holmes was travelling in a small horse drawn carriage; that’s what’s meant by a trap. In Great Expectations Pip tells us himself that he’d been walking while Mark Twain is describing the arrival of a ship.

The word arrive came to English from French.

Since England is on an island any French word had to arrive by ship and that’s appropriate for the word arrive.

Before being a French word arrive came from Latin and had been two words; ad ripa was Latin for “to shore.”

So originally arrival implied a voyage over water and so from the three examples I gave—all of which sound perfectly correct to our ears—it’s the Mark Twain extract that is most etymologically appropriate.

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The word slalom appeared for the first time in English in 1921 in the British Ski Year Book. This points us to a mother-lode of information on the history of skiing.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t attribute an author to that first citation for the word slalom but has a second citation in 1927 by a fellow named Arthur Lunn in a book called A History of Ski-ing.

It turns out that this same Arthur Lunn was editor of the British Ski Year Book and there are one or two other facts that make me think that he can be credited with bringing the word slalom into English.

Slalom is originally a Norwegian word which is appropriate since Norway is one of the cradles of skiing.

Arthur Lunn wrote another book in 1957 called The Story of Ski-ing in which he claims that modern slalom skiing is nothing like what the Norwegians originally called slalom.

The fact that this Arthur Lunn wrote about 70 books makes you wonder when he actually had time to ski but he must have because he is credited with practically inventing the sport of downhill skiing  and lobbied for downhill and slalom events to be included in the Olympics.

He didn’t invent downhill skiing but he sure popularized it.

He first wanted to use skis to help him get up the Swiss mountains he loved to climb.

By and large before Lunn people like the Norwegians who skied looked down their noses at downhill skiing. To them the best thing was cross-country skiing and ski jumping.

Remember that these are the descendants of the Vikings and macho was important to them.

People who skied down hills were people who weren’t strong enough to ski cross-country or people who weren’t brave enough to ski jump.

Their word slalom was only one of a group of words they had for different types of skiing.

Hoppelom was ski jumping; kneikelom was a run over uneven landscape, and villom meant “wild journey” and involved shooting down some really scary hillsides.

The word slalom was kid stuff and meant “gentle slope ski track.”

Heaven knows why Arthur Lunn chose this word to describe his invention of a race snaking back and forth down a hill as it looped around little flagpoles marking out the course.

Lunn was an amazing promoter and it seems he went further than he himself had intended. Skiing became too popular. He didn’t like all those throngs of common people swarming all over his mountains.

He was a bit of a snob. When he first set up a ski club in England it was restricted to people who’d been to private school (which in Britain is called public school).

To try and reduce the hordes of skiers he suggested hiring people “with arms in slings and their heads in bandages, bearing large placards [saying] ‘Victims of skiing accidents’ … to hobble up and down platforms at Victoria [Station] and Charing Cross, in order to persuade outgoing winter sportsmen to abandon skiing.”

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To a small extent the confusion still exists. I heard a comedian say that because zero is a number it was factual for him to claim to have dated a number of supermodels.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans hadn’t figured it out. There’s no Roman numeral for zero.

Europeans finally got clued-in from Arab mathematicians and when Europeans realized the superiority of the Arabic numeral system they took to it with religious zeal.

I’m not kidding. Back in the tenth century one of the important publicists for this fancy new way of counting was Gerbert of Aurillac who became Pope Sylvester II.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the etymology of the word zero traces back to an Arabic word cifr.

It took English a while longer to adopt this word. Zero appears first as an English word only four hundred years ago; well into the time when William Shakespeare was at the height of his powers.

Before that the equivalent English word was nought.

When English finally did adopt the word zero it is unclear whether we were copying the French or the Italians both of whom already had the word.

But the confusion around the value of zero actually means that English had adopted the word much earlier; but with a different meaning.

Today we think of the word cipher as meaning the code by which computers encrypt our passwords and credit card numbers.

This meaning actually evolved based on the question as to whether zero is a number or not.

Cipher first appeared in English 200 years before the word zero but came from that same Arabic cifr root.

At first it meant “zero.”

The problem was what the concept of zero meant. This thing the Arabs called cifr seemed to Europeans to be a placeholder for something that wasn’t actually there.

That’s why cipher means “code.” You’re taking your password or credit card number and replacing it with a series of placeholders that represent the numbers that aren’t there.

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Our sense of the word amateur is that while professionals are good at what they do, amateurs are simply hacks.

The histories of these words tell a slightly different tale. 

Professional is by far the older of the two words, its roots appearing as profession from Latin a century before Chaucer’s time.

Amateur didn’t show up until shortly after the United States achieved independence.

According The Oxford English Dictionary the first English meaning of “profession” was one that we would still recognise. People entering into a religious order would pledge their vows—or make a public profession or their faith—in order to be accepted.

From the Latin, profess still has the same meaning for us that it did back then; you know what I meant when I say “I don’t profess to know.”

University teachers are called professors from the same root; they have “something to say” to us.

So in an etymological sense, a professional is someone with something to say on the subject at hand.

The first people to be called amateurs were not necessarily being insulted.  The word comes from the French word for “love,” aime.

So that an amateur is someone who loves the subject at hand.

It was a fairly logical progression then for someone who loves something like bird watching, to spend a lot of time at it, so that the subsequent meaning of amateur became something like “hobbyist”—a meaning we still sometimes use.

Yet there is still a difference between spending a few weekends and evenings at stamp collecting and making a living by trading in antique philatelics.  Thus the third meaning of amateur as a contrast to professional, someone who may think they have something to profess, but in their case, love just isn’t enough.

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The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary contains the following contemporary definition for a cynic:

• one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest;
• a person who expects nothing but the worst of human conduct and motives.

Someone who is motivated only by self interest might fall into the “capitalist dog” category but it turns out that etymologically it is the cynics that are the dogs.

The word cynic arose in Ancient Greek and means “dog-like.”

There have been etymological speculations over the century that the reason for this is that people who are cynical sneer at others in the same way that a dog rolls its lips back when it growls. But the dictionaries now lean toward a sect of Greek philosophy as the source of the word, and in particular the place where it was taught.

One of Socrates pupils was a guy named Antisthenes.

When Antisthenes started his own school he did so at a place called Kynosarges.

I’ve seen Kynosarges translated as “grey dog,” “white dog” and “swift dog.”

The legend is that another even more ancient Greek by the name of Didymos was making a sacrifice to the gods when a dog grabbed the sacrificial offering.

Remember that these would have been times when burning sheep and goats and the like was seen as just the thing to stroke the ego of the divine. A hungry passing dog could be excused for thinking the meat might go to better use.

Fortunately for the dog Didymos had a vision and instead of thrashing the mangy hound the Oracle told Didymos to build a temple to Heracles where the dog dropped the offering.

So that’s why this place was called Kynosarges.

Later Socrates’ pupil Antisthenes set up his school there and the students it produced were called Cynics.

Their philosophy rejected worldly goods. As with many philosophies that reject worldly goods some of the adherents took things to extremes and began living like dogs in the street with no consideration as to how this might further confuse future etymologists.

I was ten at the time so I didn’t notice.

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The packaging on that Beatles record was plain white and so whatever the Beatles called it, everyone else called it “the white album.”

Since the word album comes from Latin albus and albus means “white,” this is fitting, if redundant.

Even in ancient Latin album (as opposed to albus) was a word in its own right. It denoted a variation on white; meaning instead “blank.”

But what is a blank sheet for except to write on?

So quickly the Latin album took on the meaning of “lists” and “official proclamations” because those were written on the blank sheet.

In English the word didn’t appear until the renaissance was well and truly up and running.

Back then using Latin was what every man, woman and child with any pretensions to education did all the time.  So in first usage, English speakers didn’t consider themselves using an English word when they used album, to them it was still a Latin word.

But the thing about English is that if you use a high faluting foreign word often enough it turns into an English word in spite of itself.

In the latter 1600s album was used to mean something like “a guest book” or “a scrap book.”  By the late 1800s an album might hold photographs.  From this vessel for collecting discrete items, in the early 1900s a collection of poems might be called an album.

The first use of album for a musical recording was in 1957 and although this use would be consistent with a sense of “a collection of discrete songs” Etymonline indicates that the reason it was called an album was that its cover was book-like.

Another word you’ll recognize would be albino.

Harry Potter, Professor Dumbledore’s first name is Albus, so he is a good wizard practicing white magic.

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With social media developing on the internet more and more people are typing messages back and forth to each other in real time.

It’s been going on a while but with new ways to do it come new words for it.

If you use Twitter you post something called a tweet. The people who use Twitter are called tweeple.

In Facebook you post to someone’s wall but I haven’t yet seen wall used as a verb.

But Facebook, like other popular services, allows chat.

In these contexts chat means only one thing.

Although you can use Skype or another service to actually talk to others over the internet using our mouths and ears, and in some cases use webcams to actually see who we’re talking with, in the internet world chat means to type messages back and forth interactively.

People seem to like doing it and I’m told it’s because they can carry on multiple conversations at once. To that extent the traditional meaning of the word chat might still be applicable.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains the old meanings include “to utter familiarly; to talk in a gossiping way” and “to talk in a light and informal manner.”

Much of the live chat that goes on is certainly light and informal.

The word chat first appeared in English in the early 1400s as an abbreviation for chatter.

Chatter had, and still has, what the OED calls a more “depreciative” meaning than we assign to chat.

You can have a good chat with a friend but it’s those other people who are chattering about nothing in particular.

Chatter appeared in English back in the early 1200s and is said to be onomatopoeic.

As if anticipating Twitter 800 years ago the first meaning we have in the OED for chatter relates to birds uttering a rapid string of chirps.

It’s the rapid succession of sound that makes for chattering.

People not only chatter when talking in groups about juicy gossip but their teeth chatter when they are cold; making a quick series of clicks.

This teeth chattering appeared in the 1400s but it is why I said that participating in online chat is etymologically accurate. Typing as you live chat does make an ongoing quick series of clicks as you hammer away at the keyboard.

It was March 1985 that the OED points to as the emergence of the new meaning of chat. From the magazine Today’s Computers

“Chat, a mode [of computers connected as a Local Area Network] in which two or more users may type messages on each other’s terminals, enabling back-and-forth conversations through the network without waiting for electronic mail to be sent and received.”

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In 1816 a doctor by the name of René Laennec was examining a patient who seemed to have heart problems.

Just as your doctor probably does to you René tried tapping his hand on the patient’s back and listening to the resulting sounds to try and interpret meaning in their thumpyness.

Unfortunately the patient was overweight and he couldn’t make head or tale of the thumps.

His next step would normally have been to lay his ear against the patient’s chest to listen to the heart but in this case the patient was young and female and pressing his face to her ample bosom seemed a little inappropriate.

Then he had an idea.

“I happened to recollect a simple and well-known fact in acoustics, . . . the great distinctness with which we hear the scratch of a pin at one end of a piece of wood on applying our ear to the other. Immediately, on this suggestion, I rolled a quire of paper into a kind of cylinder and applied one end of it to the region of the heart and the other to my ear, and was not a little surprised and pleased to find that I could thereby perceive the action of the heart in a manner much more clear and distinct than I had ever been able to do by the immediate application of my ear.”

Laennec had invented the stethoscope; now an unmistakable piece of medical paraphernalia.

He named the thing too. Stethos comes from Greek and means “chest” and scope is Greek for “to look at.”

In this case the “look at” is metaphorical. Where a telescope or a microscope actually involves seeing with your eyes a stethoscope involves seeing as in observing.

Laennec replaced his paper stethoscope with a wooden one and in 1819 published a paper on his technique. Tuberculosis was a big problem at the time and so doctors all over the place quickly started using this new piece of technology.

English picked up the word the very next year in 1820.

As I said tuberculosis was a big problem and it became a problem for Laennec as well. He died of it in 1826 at the age of 45.

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The Latin word for “lead” is plumbum.

In days of old though, plumbers were employed in other tasks than running pipe.

Around the time of Chaucer when the word plumber first appeared in French and then within 100 years in English, a plumber was a person who worked with lead for many purposes.

Because lead was quite malleable and has a low melting temperature it was used fairly extensively to seal leaks and fill gaps. Plumbers worked on roofs and windows as well as with lead pipes.

Because lead is really heavy it has also been used for its  weight.  Workers use a plumb bob to be sure the wallpaper they are hanging is straight or that the brickwork they are building doesn’t lean this way or that as it rises. The weight called the plumb bob is so called because it was so often made of lead.

A line properly established using plumb bob is absolutely straight. This leant the word plumb a meaning of “absolute” so someone who is plumb crazy is absolutely crazy.

Before the days of sonar if you needed to find out how deep the water was as you navigated a ship you plumbed the depths; again the weight was likely to be made of lead giving the action its name.

If you drop one of these weights it will plummet to the ground. The word plummet is a word also related to the weight of lead and its tendency to fall hard.

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In London the subway is called the tube. A cylinder is a tube but when I say “we use cylinders to get around” I’m thinking of internal combustion engines in which the explosion of gas in the cylinders of the engine is what drives the car.

I went looking for a quote about cylinders the one that came to hand was by James Watt.

James Watt was an important contributor to the industrial age in that he made significant improvements to steam engines which of course were the precursor to the cars and trucks and trains we use today. Every time we decide that a room needs a 100 watt bulb or a 60 watt bulb—or their energy efficient equivalents—we are honoring James Watt.

So trains and cars and subways all involve cylinders and are ways to get around, but how does that relate etymologically?

To start with the reason a cylinder is called a cylinder is because it is round.

The renaissance adoption of many Latin words into English included cylindrus in 1570 which in turn had come from a Greek word kylindros.

Back in Ancient Roman or Greek times there were no steam or internal combustion engines and what those Latin and Greek speakers were referring to was a cylinder that could be used instead to move things around by acting as a roller underneath it. In this the Greek word came from kylindein meaning “to roll.”

The rolling roundness of these words can also be seen in cycle and circle and according to John Ayto’s Word Origins traces all the way back to an Indo-European root qwel meaning “to move around.”

So that’s why in our transport-intensive society the cylinders we depend on are appropriately named.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots renders that qwel as kwel but also makes the connection to a meaning of “to dwell” as in “hang around.”

They go further and include the Latin word for “cultivate” colere.

This makes me wonder whether the sense development was because the farmers were moving the earth around, or whether in a time when people were making the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers the “around” meaning had to do with settling down to a single place instead of moving around more broadly.