Word of the week
3 May, 2011
Today’s news is that Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, has been killed during a helicopter assault on a purpose-built fortified compound in an affluent suburb of Abbottabad, a city in Pakistan. The hideout was close to a cinema, a police station and a hospital.
Abbottabat was named after British military officer James Abbott, who founded the city in 1853. Abad is a very common ending for the names of cities in the sub-continent.
Abbottabad 60 km north of Islamabad
The suffix, abad, comes from Persian for dwelling place or inhabited place. Persian was introduced into the region by the Mongols. Persian is related to the European languages through common descent from an original Indo-European language. The relationship is very clear when abad is compared to the word abode in English, which is descended from the Old English verb, abad, to have abided. So these Persian named cities could also be translated as the abode of whoever they are named after.
Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, means city of Islam (Islam is the most popular religion in the city—95% of the population are Muslim).
Jacobabad, in northern Pakistan, was founded by another British military man, General John Jacob, in 1847 and was named after him.
Allahabad, in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, means settled by God (Allah).
Hyderabad, is the capital of the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. The city is named after Ali Ibn Abi Talib, also known as Hyder, the son-in-law of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. Hyderabad has developed into an information technology centre and is also known as “Cyberabad”.
There are also Jahanabad in Eastern India called after the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666) and Jahangirabad, in Uttar Pradesh, called after another Mughal emperor Jahangir (1569-1627).
Fayzabad in northern Afghanistan is translated as the abode of divine bounty, blessing, and charity.
There are quite a few more cities with the same ending, for instance, Jalalabad, Ahmedabad, Aurangabad, and Muzzafarabad.
So with all these cities in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India it should come as no surprise that Osama bin Laden found his ending in abad place.
21 Apr, 2011
Saturday 23 April is International Book Day. The words that we associate with books and their production carry within their meanings the long history of book-making and contain some interesting surprises, particularly the survival of the word book itself.
Modern books (ebooks aside) are made from pages or leaves of paper stitched or glued together between card that are printed with a permanent message meant for continued public circulation.
Biblio-
Bible—the Devil's Codex
The common word for a book in Ancient Greece was biblion. It was derived from Byblos, the Phoenician port (modern Jebeil in Lebanon) from which Egyptian papyrus was imported. The Bible gets its name from a shortening of the Ancient Greek ta biblia to hagia meaning the holy books. English retains biblio- in bibliography, the list of books referenced in an academic work, and in bibliophile, for a book-lover.
Paper, card and chart
Most everyone would know that the word for paper comes from papyrus. The Egyptians made the original paper by gluing strips of the papyrus reed together in vertical and horizontal layers. This created a rectangular page.
The word for page comes originally from the Latin pagina for the strip of rectangular papyrus fastened to the others. Pagina was derived from pangere meaning to fasten, referring to the gluing together of the sheets. The word card comes from the Greek word khartes for a layer of papyrus. Chart is a 16th century French adaption that was used for map.
Scroll and volumes
The rectangles of papyrus (up to about thirty) were glued together to form a long roll known as a scroll. This was the earliest form of book and the Romans called it a volumen, from the verb volvere, to roll. English gets volume from this. However, the English word scroll is 13th century from scrowe (with a slight change to sound like roll) originally from Frankish skroda meaning scrap or shred.
Tome
There was no limit to the length of a scroll. But the longer they were the heavier they became. Accordingly, the scholars who had to read them, cut up the longest rolls into shorter lengths called tomes. Tome, in Latin, means to cut. Tome in English has, ironically, come to connote a large and scholarly book.
Album
At the same time as scrolls were being used by academic Romans, wax tablets were used by the working Romans as notebooks (or jotters). A notebook was called an album and consisted of a thin sheet of white wood (albus being the Latin for white) covered with a film of dark wax, which was written on using a metal or bone stylus to score the wax thus creating white writing.
Codex and codicil
When several albums were combined they were held together by a cord running through a corner. Such a stack of albums was known as a codex, meaning a block of wood. A codex was sometimes used to write a book of laws, this meaning has come directly to English. A small codex took on the Latin diminutive codicilli—a little codex, which, as codicil in English, refers to a supplement to a will or document.
Schedule
A schedule originally referred to the slips of paper attached to a document in an appendix. This came to English from Old French, cedule, from Latin schida for a strip from a papyrus sheet; originally from Greek, skhida for splinter.
Parchment
A German parchment maker from 1568
In Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries parchment started to significantly replace papyrus for writing. Parchment is made from stretched animal skins treated with lime (in a process quite different to curing leather). The word, parchment, has had a slow evolution—lately from French, perchemin; from Latin pergamenum; and originally from Greek pergamenon, which meant of Pergamon, the modern city of Bergama in Turkey. It was from Pergamon that Europe sourced all its early parchments.
Vellum
Vellum was a superior parchment; it was thinner and smoother because it was made from calfskins (or sometimes lambskin or kidskin). The word, vellum, is directly related to our word for calfmeat, veal, and comes to English from the Norman French velin, for parchment made of calfskin. The Old French word for calf was veel (modern French veau).
Palimpsest
Parchment was sometimes re-used by cleaning the original writing off. Such a manuscript was called a palimpsest from the Greek palimpsestos meaning scraped again.
The shift to parchment and vellum, which were smoother than papyrus, caused changes in writing. The use of uncial script (from Latin uncialis meaning of an inch, inch-high), an upper-case script using rounded, simple, pen strokes is a direct result.
Folio
Parchment sheets were not cut before they were sold but creased and folded and made into a folio. The size of the folio was dictated by the size of the skin. Thus the terms quarto, octavo, duodecimo relate to folios created from folding the parchment, respectively, four, eight, or twelve times. Folio is from the Latin word folium for leaf (directly related to foliage).
Book
Vindolanda wooden writing tablet with a party invitation written in ink, in two hands, from Claudia Severa to Lepidina.
So far our little history shows the dominance of Latin, Greek and French language on our book words. The medieval church and Latin scholarship obviously dominated the vocabulary of book production for the last two thousand years. But, yet, there is the word book itself, which has a completely different history. Not from the academic world but from the vernacular of “low” Anglo-Saxon.
Book comes into English from the Germanic languages where it is still bok in the Scandinavian languages (bog in Danish), boek in Dutch and buch in German. Buch is originally derived from the Old German word buche for beech.
Why beech? It is probably from the early use of beech-wood split into tablets to write on. When the Romans left Britain and Western Europe the locals continued to write their notes not on parchment or papyrus and probably not on what the Romans had called albums. The album tablets were made from woods that were not native to Britain.
Evidence from Vindolanda, a fort near Hadrians Wall, in England shows that the local Romans were also using thin leaves of wood less than 1 mm thick and about 20 cm long and 9 cm wide to write notes on with ink. The tablets were cut from sapwood of young trees; the writing was made using a pen with ink made from carbon, gum arabic and water; and once completed they were folded over so that the writing on the inner faces was protected.
When the Romans had gone the locals wrote not in Latin or Greek but in adapted letter symbols such as the runes of Scandinavia and the ogham of Britain. The Celts associated their religion or magic with the folklore of trees and their writing was also associated with trees. The 25 characters of the ogham alphabet were given the names of sacred trees and plants. But there are no surviving wooden tablets with runes or ogham script so how do we know that they existed? We don’t, however there is one piece of evidence. That piece of evidence is that most of the Germanic languages that were spoken in Britain and Northern Europe managed to keep a word for books that refers not to papyrus or parchment but to wood.
So when we speak of books we do not associate with the religious or academic writing on papyrus or parchment but with the beech tree tablets on which our ancestors wrote their magical characters.
7 Apr, 2011
Climate change skeptics are claiming that carbon dioxide emissions are not pollution because CO2 is a natural substance. This is a misinterpretation of the word pollution that seems to have come about by using poor definitions of the word. A quick review of the history of the word pollution gives it a proper context.
The Quadrant published a long exposition of carbon as a natural occurring, organically necessary, environmentally common substance. This had the objective of debunking the whole concept of carbon emissions as pollution. According to Quadrant carbon dioxide can’t be pollution because it is natural and a fundamental building block of life!
But the problem with this argument is that it relies on a very narrow definition of pollution? The Oxford On-line Dictionary says:
Pollution is the presence in or introduction into the environment of a substance, which has harmful or poisonous effects.
Therefore carbon dioxide is a pollutant only if we accept that it has harmful effects such as raising the temperature of the world by a couple of degrees. But, by this definition, a raised atmospheric carbon dioxide level is not pollution if you do not believe in global warming.
This definition of pollution only works if the contaminant has harmful or poisonous effects—if a contaminant causes harm it is pollution but if it doesn’t it is simply a foreign substance in the environment. This narrow definition has crept into mainstream usage but is neither historically right nor scientifically plausible. It is not scientifically plausible because “harmful” can be interpreted very broadly.
Wikipedia (today), a good gauge of popular thinking, proved to be somewhat loose with its definition:
Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into a natural environment that causes [sic] instability, disorder, harm or discomfort to the ecosystem i.e. physical systems or living organisms.
This is very unscientific. Pollution can occur in all environments, natural or artificial; and an ecosystem is both the physical system and its living organisms. Pollution enters a system at one level (environment, ecosytem, niche, organism, organ, cell, organelle) and moves between levels so that it might not necessarily be an ecosystem hazard at all but cause damage to an organism living within the ecosystem.
I went back to my old Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and sought a more reliable definition. The Shorter Oxford lists three definitions:
- The action of polluting, or condition of being polluted; defilement; uncleanness or impurity;
- Ceremonial impurity or defilement; profanation; and
- Seminal emission apart from coition.
And of course we need to refer to pollute, the verb, as pollution is defined against it:
- To render ceremonially or morally impure; to profane, desecrate, to sully, corrupt
- To make physically impure, foul or filthy; to dirty to stain, taint, befoul
The etymology of pollution follows the definitions in the Shorter Oxford. In the mid-14th century pollution originally referred to the non-coital discharge of semen but soon reverted to its Latin meaning of desecration or defilement.
Pollution originates from the Latin polluere which means to soil, defile, or contaminate, and is made up of por meaning before and luere meaning smear. Luere is related to lutum for mud and to lues meaning filth. It is derived from the Ancient Greek lyma meaning filth, dirt, disgrace, and lymax for rubbish, refuse.
This word history suggests that the impacts of pollution need not be harm but less destructive effects such being dirty, unclean or impure. The Encyclopaedia Britannica provides a scientific definition of pollution that is consistent with this broader definition:
the addition of any substance or form of energy (e.g., heat, sound, radioactivity) to the environment at a rate faster than the environment can accommodate it by dispersion, breakdown, recycling, or storage in some harmless form.
And the Oxford Dictionary of Geography:
A substance which causes an undesirable change in the physical, chemical, or biological characteristics of the natural environment.
and the Gale Encyclopedia of Public Health:
… a chemical or physical agent in an inappropriate location or concentration.
Pollution is the over addition of any substance to the environment whether it has a harmful effect or not. Contamination is a similar word. We taint our environment with foreign substances, we dirty our rivers, and we increase atmosphere impurities. This is all pollution even without evidence of “harm”. Allowing the definition of pollution to require that the pollutant creates harm is dangerous and narrow.
So in conclusion, carbon dioxide emissions are pollution.
14 Mar, 2011
Meme is considered to be a recently created word with particular usage in describing the cultural impact of the Internet in transmitting particular ideas. However, it has a much older relative that shows that it is a very old concept with a very old name.
According to Wikipedia, an Internet meme is:
… a catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, social networking sites and instant messaging.
A meme is an important concept for understanding and driving communications on the Internet. A meme can be carried by almost any electronic communication from viral videos or photos to chain e-mails or Facebook questionnaires. In marketing, Internet memes are essential in creating buzz for a product or service.
- Mnemosyne—a picture by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Rosetti
The word meme is generally claimed to have been coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He used it to emphasize the similarity between the way genes are propagated biologically and the way ideas are propagated culturally. He explained his derivation as a shortening of the Greek word mimema, meaning something imitated.
However, although Dawkins can probably claim the first usage using this spelling, the word mneme appears first in English in 1921 as a translation from a German term relating to the memory of feelings. Later in the decade it was used to describe a concept similar to Dawkins’. This word, mneme, is a direct borrow from the Greek word mneme for memory. It relates to the English word, mnemonic to do with the mind and memory.
But long before English started borrowing from the Greek language, and before Dawkins claimed to have coined a word for the transmission of ideas, the Ancient Greeks revered a goddess of memory and remembrance called Mnemosyne (from the Greek for memory, remembrance). Ironically, Mnemosyne is now almost forgotten amongst the Greek gods and godesses. She was the mother of the Muses (the goddesses that inspired poets and musicians and promoted the arts and sciences) and she was attributed with inventing language and words. Before the introduction of writing, she preserved the stories that became history. It was her role to ensure the cultural transmission of ideas across the ages.
So Dawkins cannot be given credit for the concept of the meme because the Greeks had the concept epitomised in their goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. This forgotten goddess was the original carrier and protector of memes.
6 Mar, 2011
I thought it might be interesting to look at ogham as the word of the week. Ogham is a form of Celtic writing that was used in inscriptions from about 300 AD to 600 AD. It is formed using simple furrows across a line or an edge in stone to form the letters.
It has proved most interesting but after hours and hours of reading I have found myself struggling with too many disputed possibilities so I am going to apply Occam’s Razor (no more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary). It is undoubted that ogham was used as a secret language in post Roman Britain and because of this there is much folklore surrounding it. Understanding where the word, ogham, comes from is also difficult but may help substantiate the belief that ogham was a secret druid language.
Ogham is read from bottom to top from left to right. This is the ogham alphabet.
Ogham is known from about three hundred insciptions, found mostly in Ireland but also in Wales, Scotland and Cornwall. They are mostly grave markers. It is also explained in detail in several later manuscripts so there has never been any problem with translating the inscriptions.
Some scholars suggest that ogham was used as a secret sign language by the Druids after the Romans had invaded Britain and was only used in public inscriptions when the influence of the druids was in decline. There is an ogham inscription on a sandstsone slab on the Isle of Man, which reads Dovaidona Maqi Droat, meaning Dovaidona son of the druid!
The ogham alphabet uses between one and five lines scribed across an edge for its letters and this provides strong evidence that it was used as a secret sign language. In forming the letters of the sign language one, two, three, four or five fingers from the left or right hand were placed across a line on the body, to either side, accross or at an angle. There are references to cos-ogham (leg ogham) probably using the shin; sron-ogham (nose ogham) probably across the bridge of the nose; and a slightly different finger form.
Ogham is based either on Latin or Runic text. It did not arise independently as a text but was used as representation of a spoken language. The link to the druids comes because the inscriptions are found mainly in Ireland or places in mainland Britain not conquered by the Romans and in places of later Irish settlement. However another idea was that it was used by early Christians as a script or sign language that could not be understood by the pagans around them in late Roman Britain.
There are 100 variants of written ogham described in the Lebor Ogaim (The Book of Ogams also known as the Ogam Tract) an Old Irish book on the ogham alphabet.
The Ogham Tract
The magical, Druidic associations of ogham have been enhanced by the letters’ traditional links with the magical properties of trees. The first letter, Beith, from Old Irish, Beithe, represents the birch-tree, the Druid symbol for the Bards, and is the bringer of promise, light and new beginnings.
The origin of the name of the text, ogham, has had several suggestions. One idea suggests that it comes from the old Proto-Indo-European word ogmo for furrow or track, consistent with the way ogham is written. But this would suggest that ogham pre-dated Roman Britain, which is unlikely.
Another popular suggestion is that ogham got its name from the Celtic poet god, Ogma Grianainech (Ogma Sun Face) also known as Ogma Milbel (Ogma Honey-mouth), the god of eloquence, healing, fertility, and prophecy. It is he who is credited with inventing the ogham text.
Ogma, is the Celtic version of the Gaulish god, Ogmios. Ogmios, who wore a lion skin and carried a club was the Gaul’s equivalent to the Greek god, Herakles. But where Herakles was known for conquering his foes with strength, Ogmios, conquered his foes with eloquence. Symbolically, Ogmios is depicted as leading his willing followers with a golden thread from his tongue to their ears.
If ogham got its name from Ogma Sun Face, then it is more closely related to pre-Christian Celtic beliefs than it is to Christian symbols. So for me, I am happy to think that ogham is the secret alphabet of the druids, named after their god of eloquence, and to move on.
25 Feb, 2011
Today in Christchurch, New Zealand they are sending teams into the cathedral to try to recover the bodies of people killed there during the earthquake. We cannot think of much else than the terrible emotions that the New Zealanders are feeling with the loss of so many people to this unpredictable act of nature. So this week’s word is written in sympathy for New Zealand.
Earthquakes are primordial forces and the word to describe them is old and a bit mysterious. While the word for earth, comes from Old English, eorpe, and can trace its origins back through the Germanic languages, quake has no such history.
The word for quake, cwacian, comes from Old English and meant quake, tremble, and chatter (of teeth). It was related to a similar word, cweccan, which meant to shake, swing, move, or vibrate. Neither word has relatives in other languages and their predecessors are not known.
Quake has a more powerful connotation than other words with the same sense, such as, shake, tremble, vibrate and shiver. Quake is not related to shake, which comes from another Old English word, sceacan meaning to vibrate, make vibrate, or move away. Shake is derived from an old German word and has relatives in other Germanic languages (for instance, skaka in Swedish and skage in Danish).
Although shake and quake are near synonyms, shake is the less violent of the pair, while quake is reserved for the shakes associated with fear and panic. The Quakers were given that name because as part of their religious observance they were to tremble at the word of the Lord.
Tremble and vibrate are derived from Latin words, tremulus, meaning trembling or tremulous; and vibrare meaning to move quickly to and fro, or shake. Shiver is thought to come from a Middle English word chiveren derived from an Old English word, ceafl meaning jaw—from the association with chattering teeth. Seismology, the study of earthquakes, is derived from the Greek word for earthquake, seismos.
Words are not enough for our New Zealand friends but our thoughts are with them. Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), an American poet, described her experiences in London during the First World War in Ancient Wisdom Speaks. There may be some small solace in her words:
Remember these (you said)
who when the earth-quake shook their city,
when angry blast and fire
broke open their frail door,
did not forget
beauty.
17 Feb, 2011
A dragon is a mythical monster often represented as breathing fire, having a scaly reptilian body, wings, claws, and a long tail. It is also sometimes portrayed as a giant snake. Dragons in European tradition are most often symbols of chaos, of evil supernatural forces and are the natural enemy of humanity. In Asia the dragon is usually benevolent, spiritual, and a great source of wisdom.
The word, dragon, originates from ancient Greek, drakon, meaning a serpent or giant seafish. It may have been derived from derkesthai meaning to see clearly which has been explained as the one with the deadly glance (somewhat like the basilisk which, in one form, is a giant snake with a deadly stare). Latin took the same word, Draconis, for snake or serpent.
The dragon features strongly in western mythology denoting the ultimate force that a hero must overcome. In Greek mythology the dragon, Ladon, guarded the Golden Apples of the Hesperides and another dragon guarded the Golden Fleece. Pythia and Python, a pair of serpents, guarded the temple of Gaia until it was seized by Apollo, who then draped them around his winged caduceus which he then gave to Hermes.
In the Judeo-Christian canon, dragon is the translation used for the Hebrew word tannin in the Old Testament, perhaps denoting crocodiles, whales or sea creatures in general and even wolves or jackals. In Isaiah 51:9 it is the Egyptian pharaoh:
Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD; awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago. Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?
But in the New Testament whenever dragon is mentioned it refers to the devil. From Revelation 12:9:
And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world— he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
Over time the dragon has come to represent the epitome of primordial evil in western culture. It is portrayed as a metaphorical force opposed to the civilizing nature of humanity. DH Lawrence writes:
Every new stroke of civilization has cost the lives of countless brave men, who have fallen defeated by the “dragon,” in their efforts to win the apples of the Hesperides, or the fleece of gold. Fallen in their efforts to overcome the old, half sordid savagery of the lower stages of creation, and win the next stage.
The magical and deep-seated malevolence of the dragon in our culture may be explained in the context of the Jungian collective unconsciousness. The dragon in our imaginations may be a manifestation of our instinctual fear of predators. This has been imprinted in the DNA of our brain and our behaviour in the long distant past when our pre-simian ancestors scuttled around in trees trying to avoid the serpents and raptorial birds that preyed upon us. If this is the case the dragon, the serpent with wings, will continue to wage its magical battle with us for a long time to come.
10 Feb, 2011
In honour of the “tsunami of obesity” that has been recently identified as drowning the world’s population, this week’s word is doughnut (or donut)! According to research released last week by the Imperial College London, Harvard and the World Health Organisation the international rate of obesity has almost doubled since 1980.
A doughnut is a confection most often made from flour dough, deep-fried in oil and then covered in sugar or icing or filled with jam. It never appears on a healthy eating menu as its ingredients are salt, sugar and fat; it contains between 200-300 calories; and provides very little nutritional value other than energy. While the doughnut is still legal, international obesity will never disappear. I suggest that national obesity rates correlate very strongly with each nation’s per capita consumption of doughnuts.
Although deep-fried battercakes are part of all national cuisines (for instance, France has oreillettes) it is the American torus-shaped, doughnut that has become the deep-fried cake of choice among the world’s gourmands. In geometry, a torus is a surface generated by revolving a circle in three dimensions around a central point. Torus-shaped objects include inner tubes, lifebuoys and O-rings—however in plain English they are more often referred to as doughnut-shaped.
The first literary reference to doughnuts was from Washington Irving in 1809 in his History of New York where he described them as:
… balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts, or olykoeks.
The olykoek was a Dutch word meaning oil cake that, understandably, did not catch on, and if it had, we may not be in the trouble we are now. It also indicates a possible Dutch origin for the recipe. The first written mention of doughnuts is in an English cookbook of 1803 referring to American cuisine.
The word doughnut is made up of two parts: dough and nut. While the dough part is straightforward the origin of the nut part has proved difficult to find. There are many theories as to how the cakes became nuts: some doughcakes are formed from a knot of dough so the original word may have been doughknots; they are cooked in oil similarly to nuts hence doughnuts; or the shape resembles a zero so they may have been known as doughnoughts.
As attractive as these explanations are the answer is probably more a confusion or association of the cooked ring with its cooked hole. The reason doughnuts have a hole in the centre is to help them cook evenly. A large ball of dough cooked rapidly in hot oil often ended up with an uncooked centre. The initial solution was to cut the centre out with a hole cutter. Rather than waste the small ball of dough it was also cooked and this is probably what became known as a dough nut!
And this probably provides the answer. If we want to end the global obesity tsunami we should encourage the consumption of the doughnuts’ holes rather than their rings.
4 Feb, 2011
As Sydneysiders suffer our dog days (see note below) the Bureau of Meteorology appease us by suggesting that thunderstorms are on their way. We pray for the sound of thunder to bring a change from the constant heat.
Thunder is the sound caused by lightning as it passes through the air. Lightning heats the air around creating a high-pressure area. The air expands supersonically creating a shock wave which we hear as thunder.
Our forefathers did not think in terms of shock waves but in terms of thunderbolts and associated the powerful noise of thunder with their gods. In Greek myth, Zeus was a sky god who been given thunder and the thunderbolt by the Cyclopes for setting them free of Cronus. Jupiter or Jove, in Roman mythology, was the king of the gods and the god of the sky and of thunder. In Judeo-Christian tradition thunder was the voice of God (Psalm 18:13):
The Lord thundered from heaven;
the voice of the Most High resounded
In Scandinavian mythology Thor was the god of thunder. And it is from Thor that most of the Germanic languages, including English, have taken their words for thunder. In Old Norse, por, and in Old High German donar, the words for thunder were the same as for Thor the god. In modern Swedish the word for thunder is tordön which literally translates as Thor’s din.
The Anglo-Saxon god that was equivalent to Thor was Thunor. It is from him that we get the English word thunder with the ‘d’ having slipped in (an example of epenthesis where a consonant becomes added to help pronunciation), as it did in the Dutch word donder closely related to the modern German word donner without the ‘d’.
So it would appear that we still look to our pagan gods when we pray for thunder to relieve us from the long dog days of summer.
NOTE: There was an unusual touch of classical Rome in the Daily Telegraph yesterday when it referred to Sydney’s longest heatwave as our “dog days”—the sweltering days of summer when the temperatures are too hot and the air is stagnant. The Romans used the term because Sirius, the dog star from the constellation Canis Major (big dog) and the brightest star in the night sky, rose with the sun over the hottest part of the northern hemisphere summer. The Romans thought that the dog star added to the sun’s heat, which, of course it didn’t.
25 Jan, 2011
There are two cricket words in English, the game and the insect. The words are mostly unrelated to each other. The word for the insect comes from Old French criquer meaning to creak or rattle and is imitative of the cricket’s call.
The word for the game has a more uncertain history but seems to have been derived from a group of related words with similar meanings: Old French criquet meaning a kind of club, goal-post, or stick; Middle Dutch or Flemish krick(e) meaning a stick or staff; or the old English cricc or cryce (meaning a crutch or staff).
One explanation of the word’s origin suggests the French word criquet may derive from the Flemish word krickstoel, a long low stool for kneeling in church, which resembled the low wicket using only two stumps that was used in early cricket. There is an interesting contrast with the word, wicket, which dates from early 13th century Anglo-French and meant a small door or gate. However, a cricket wicket referring to the three stumps at each end of the pitch was first recorded in the 18th century.
That cricket comes from a French word makes sense when you realise that cricket is a very old game with evidence it was being played in medieval England around 1300 by royalty. The English ruling classes were then still talking Norman French. The evidence from the Wardrobe Accounts of the Royal Household mentions that large sums were being spent on Prince Edward, the son of Edward I, to equip him for the game of creag (another spelling of cricc perhaps).
Three hundred years later in 1598 the modern word cricket is first recorded in an account of a game being played by boys at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford.
The meaning of cricket referring to a sense of fair play is first recorded in 1851 referring to the notion of cricket as it should be played.
However, in Australia in 2011, with the Ashes having been lost so easily to England this summer, cricket is not a word we want spoken of.
28 Nov, 2010
It is Christmas party season and I love to go out and socialise although I always have a fear of making a faux pas or a gaffe. Both of these words for social blunders have come from French, a faux pas is literally a false step and a gaffe is a clumsy remark. However, I have a new strategy, if I do say the wrong thing I shall admit to my gaffe and then distract them with the story of the word as follows.
Gaffe or gaff is a multiple loan word from the French. It was first borrowed directly from the Old French to describe a boathook (a gaff) and then later to describe saying the wrong thing (a gaffe). Both these meanings come directly from the French.
Gaff is a word that has been used in many different ways and has picked up a few meanings among English-speaking dialects and the patois of certain sub-cultures. Gaff, as a hook, spike, or spar has many applications particularly in fishing, sailing or in electrical work. Mainstream meanings, along these lines, include a:
- spear or spearhead for taking fish or turtles;
- handled hook for holding or lifting heavy fish;
- metal spur for a gamecock;
- butcher’s hook;
- climbing iron or its steel point used by a telephone lineman; and
- spar on which the head of a fore-and-aft sail is extended.
Gaff may also have had a much older parent than the French gaffe in an Old English word, gafspraec, meant buffoonery or scurrilous talk. This meaning may have been the source of some of the slang uses:
- foolish talk, nonsense;
- stand the gaff (in the US and Canada) to endure ridicule or difficulties; and
- blow the gaff (in Britain) to divulge a secret.
A gaffer referred to an old man in the 16th century—it is thought to be a contraction of godfather. In Britain this sense became used for foremen and supervisors and has become established usage on television and film sets for the electrician in charge of lighting. When cables are taped down on a stage or set gaffer tape is used and they are said to be gaffed or gaffered.
There are other theatrical uses of gaff. A cheap or low-class theatre or music hall in Victorian England was known as a penny-gaff. A gaff is also an item of clothing worn by men impersonating women to flatten their genitalia when they are wearing tight clothing. One only assumes that this name relates to the associated preparation which involves taping things away!
So now that I am prepared to tell the story of gaffs, gaffes, and gaffers I must be careful that if I want to make polite conversation that I don’t make a gaffe about that gaff.
18 Nov, 2010
Madeleine is a feminine given name. It is a form of Magdalene, first used in the New Testament referring to Mary Magdalene, the female follower of Christ. Magdalene, is thought to have meant from Magdala, an unknown city in ancient Israel.
In France a madeleine is the name of a small, shell-shaped cake baked in a mould and said to be named after Madeleine Paulmier, a French pastry cook.
When the narrator of Proust’s novels has a madeleine with his tea it instigates the nostalgia that is the great narrative thread of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past in the English translations). This series of novels stretches for 3200 pages and is perhaps the longest trip down memory lane ever created.
So madeleine, from this famous fictional incident, became the name of a small thing that triggers memories or nostalgia.
The word, nostalgia, in English is only a hundred years older than Proust. It was originally coined by a Swiss physician to refer to severe homesickness and was equivalent to the German heimweh. Its first use in English was in 1770.
Nostalgia is made up of Greek nostos for homecoming and algos for pain, grief, or distress. The modern sense of wistful yearning for the past is only from the early 20h century.
Why should we get nostalgic? Today is the anniversary of Marcel Proust’s death on 18 November 1922.
12 Nov, 2010
Robert Heinlein and his wife on the set of Destination Moon (1950)
Most words in English come from Latin, French, Greek or Old Germanic with a collection of words from every other populated place on the planet. However, grok is a word that comes from much further afield, from the interplanetary language of the Martian’s according to Robert A Heinlein’s 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land.
I searched nostalgically through my old paperback science fiction collection for Stranger in a Strange Land but, amongst all those yellowed Silverbergs, Asimovs, Dicks, Aldisses and Heinleins, I could not find it. These were the books I devoured in my young teenage years and grew out of in my later teens. They were full of imaginative ideas but few were considered anything but genre fiction and they were certainly not mainstream.
Martian is quite a guttural language (Heinlein describes it as sounding like a bullfrog fighting a cat) so words like grok would certainly predominate. Even though it is an unpleasant sounding word it describes the very desirable concept of understanding something profoundly and empathically. As Heinlein writes:
Thou art God, and I am God and all that groks is God.
In the 1960s the word was picked up by the counterculture and particularly by science fiction writers. There is a famous cross-fertilisation with Star Trek in the slogan I Grok Spock, which was used on promotional buttons and T-shirts in 1968 (a bit incorrect as Spock was not a Martian) and is still used as a Trekkie saying.
The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests that the word is “perhaps obsolete now except in internet technology circles”, which means, really, that it is a nerdword. Wikipedia, the Internet-technology’s encyclopedia, in a wonderful piece of unintential irony, lists one example of the mainstream usage of grok as follows:
In the straight-to-DVD Futurama outing Into the Wild Green Yonder, Number 9 of the Legion of Madfellows says their group has “been grokking some super weird junk” from the life force Ch’i. The Legion of Madfellows are a group of (crazy, homeless) mindreaders that defend the universe.
It might be a real stretch of the imagination to suggest that our only Martian word is yet part of mainstream English but grok has survived in the outer limits of the language for almost 50 years—from its birth in 1961 in a science fiction novel to accompanying Spock bolding exploring the universe in 1968 all the way to the Legion of Madfellows defending the universe in 2009. Perhaps it is here to stay.
More of our words of the week
30 Oct, 2010
Soon the English cricket team will be arriving in Australia to play for The Ashes and we will all be barracking for the Aussies. All cricket followers know that The Ashes came into being as a result of the great rivalry between Mother England and the Australian colonies (when the English team were first defeated by the Australian colonials the wooden bails from the stumps were burnt by English supporters and placed in an urn to signify the death of English cricket).
But few cricket supporters would know that Australian cricket also introduced the word barracking to the world.
Remember that a barrack is a building or group of buildings used to house military personnel and often used in the plural, barracks. It comes originally from the Spanish barracas, for soldiers’ tents or huts.
As a verb it can mean to house someone in a barrack but it also has the meanings in Britain to jeer or shout at a player, speaker, or team and in Australia to shout support for a team. How did it end up with these two opposite meanings.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable explains that the word barracking first came into use in the 1880s in Australia where it was used to mean supporting or cheering on your team. It is thought to have been used to describe the supporters of an army cricket team from the Victoria Barracks in South Melbourne, ie barrackers. It is more likely to have come from a Northern Irish dialect term, barrack, meaning to brag but may well have been an amalgam with the aboriginal word borak, meaning to banter.
Brewer’s, a British publication, suggests that the word was probably introduced into England by Australian cricketers and their supporters and further suggests that the English picked up the opposite meaning (to jeer at, shout against, or interrupt with rude comments) quite understandably.
8 Sep, 2010
It is now time for lickspittle as word of the week—I have had notes sitting in my folder for quite a while. After 17 days of being courted by both parties Australia’s three country independents have decided that Labor will form the Australian Government. For these 17 days these men where the most important men in Australia and were praised by all around them.
Earlier Mr Wilkie a Tasmanian Independent, not included in the trinity had given his support to Labor. The trinity have managed to negotiate some Parliamentary reforms and to get their requirements on the political agenda: Mr Oakeshott got $75 million for the Port Macquarie-based hospital and the offer of a Ministerial position, Mr Windsor gets broadband and a climate change policy that he likes, and Mr Katter, with the reforms in place, has supported the Liberal Opposition.
However, now that the decision has been made the obsequiousness of the Liberal politicians towards the independents has disappeared quicker than the carbon pollution reduction scheme, leaving only Labor politicians tugging their forelocks.
A lickspittle is a relatively new word and equivalent to the Latin derived sycophant. It was first attested from 1825 and refers to a person who behaves obsequiously to those in power. It is one of the words that Ambrose Bierce saw important enough to redefine in his Devil’s Dictionary:
Lickspittle, n. … Lickspittling
is more detestable than blackmailing, precisely as the business of a
confidence man is more detestable than that of a highway robber; and
the parallel maintains itself throughout, for whereas few robbers will
cheat, every sneak will plunder if he dare.
The word has a distinguished political genesis having been derived from one of the poems of Jonathan Swift, the 18th century satirist and author of Gulliver’s Travels (A Libel On The Reverend Dr. Delany, And His Excellency John, Lord Carteret):
A genius for all stations fit,
Whose meanest talent is his wit:
His heart too great, though fortune little,
To lick a rascal statesman’s spittle …
So let us hope that the lickspittling stops and our politicians start working for what is best for the country rather than what is needed to keep power.
15 Aug, 2010
Modern horses (Equus ferus caballus) were first domesticated on the northern European steppes 6000 years ago by people we identify as the Proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE). These Proto-Indo-Europeans called their new friend the ekwos. They used it to conquer Europe and Asia and to spread the descendents of their language firstly across these continents and ultimately to the world.
Ekwos became the Greek hippos, which has given us: hippodrome – a place where horses run, from hippos + dromos for racetrack; hippopotamus, or horse of the river from hippos + potamos for river; and a part of the brain that was thought to resemble the seahorse, the hippocampus from hippos + campus for sea monster.
The name Phillip is derived from the Greek Philippos meaning friend of horses. By implication, Phillips were of noble blood because only they could afford to own horses.
Ekwos also became the Latin equus which has given us: equine, of or pertaining to horses; equerry, originally an officer in charge of the horses; and equestrian, as of or pertaining to horse-riding.
The dignified Roman word equus was reserved for the best horses while the common slang word for a horse was caballus, referring to packhorses or work horses and implying they were hacks or nags. Caballus was picked up by Roman soldiers in their campaigns with the barbarian tribes and brought back into Roman language. Caballus became cavallo (Italian), cheval (French) caballo (Spanish), capall (Irish) and ceffyl (Welsh). Cheval, the French word, has given English chivalry, cavalry, cavalcade and cavalier.
Nag is a native English word for a small horse and has an unknown origin. A hack is a shortening of hackney, for an ordinary horse, referring to the horse breeding pastures of Hackney near London (and now very much in London). Many of the horses pulled taxi-cabs and the use of hack became associated with hired horses. This led to the identification of hack with being tired and broken down. It was applied to certain types of writers.
There was also an Old English word, eoh, derived from the PIE, ekwos, but it disappeared from the language to be replaced by horse. Horse is a Middle English word derived from the Old English word, hors. This is the most difficult word of all to trace.
Remarkably horse may also be a word that can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-Europeans. A strong argument is that horse is derived from kurs, the PIE word for run, which was used as a euphemism for horse instead of ekwos. Ekwos may not have been used as the everyday word due to a religious or hunters’ taboo on using the name of the animal.
The argument is that the PIE word kurs became khursa in Proto-Germanic which gave Old Norse, hross, Middle Dutch ros, German Roß and of course Old English, hors. Kurs also became the Latin currere, meaning to run and also gave rise to our Modern English hurry!
So while we wonder at the skills of equestrians as they ride their horses (Equus ferus caballus) around the hippodrome we should remember that the words we are using have their origins at least as long ago as there have been horsemen.
19 Jul, 2010
Rummaging through a junk shop recently I came across a poster for Ray Lawrence’s 1985 film, Bliss. The film was based closely on Peter Carey’s 1981 novel of the same name. Seeing the poster brought back memories of both the book and the film. These memories, quite appropriately, created a small moment of bliss.
I had been introduced to Peter Carey’s short stories at University and had devoured Bliss, his first novel, when it was first published. Carey is a wonderfully creative writer and Bliss delivered a wickedly comic satire of modern life in suburban Australia.
I lived in London for part of the Eighties and I remember taking some friends to see the film at a cinema near Picadilly Circus. I was delighted to see the wonderfully funny story played out in such distinctively Australian locations and against the Sydney skline. But my English friends found the film quite comfronting (as had, I found out later, some of the audience at its screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1985). Some did not understand the satirical intentions and took the story at face value.
Bliss means extreme happiness or ecstasy. In a Christian, religious context it is the ecstasy of salvation or the joy that comes from spiritual connection with the divine.
Bliss, for several centuries, has been associated with ignorance as Thomas Gray describes in 1742 (from On a Distant Prospect of Eton College):
Yet ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
‘Tis folly to be wise.
In the opening pages of Bliss, the central character dies and has a post-life experience sliding “between the spaces in the air itself”. The character is Harry Joy and he is experiencing an ecstasy.
Harry Joy returns to life and as he appraises his life he comes to believe that he has been living in hell. One aspect of this is that he believes all of his advertising clients are producing products that cause cancer. Harry believes that he has been living in a state of bliss not seeing the evils around him.
Peter Carey ran a very successful advertising business and Ray Lawrence spent most of the time between Bliss and his next film, Lantana (2001), making television commercials. They both must have had a blissful time with their portrayal of the evils of advertising.
30 Jun, 2010
Percy Bysshe Shelley, the romantic poet, described clouds as the daughters of Earth and Water and the nurslings of the Sky. The word cloud comes from Old English, and from a most unpoetic source, originally meaning a lump of rock. It’s brother, clod, means a lump of soil and its cousin, clot, a lump in a liquid.
So how did our light and airy cloud manage to escape it’s family of clods and clots? The probable explanation is that large, dense cumulus clouds were thought to resemble lumps of rock so took the name, cloud, and the lumps of rock were left being called lumps of rock.
Meteorologists have named clouds in a very ordered and logical way as you might expect. The main types of cloud have good scientific names chosen from solid Latin roots:
Alto – high cloud – from Italian for high and from Latin Altus;
Cirrus – thin, wispy cloud – from Latin for curl, fringe;
Cumulus – tall, fluffy cloud – from Latin for a heap or pile;
Nimbus – rain-bearing cloud – from Latin for raincloud; and
Stratus – a broad flat cloud – from Latin for spread out.
These basic cloud types can be combined to describe in-between types, for instance, a cumulonimbus is a cumulus cloud bearing rain or a cirrostratus is thin and wispy and spread out.
However, there appears to be some mischievous meteorologists out there who find this all far too dull. Watch out for mammatocumulus or breast clouds (from Latin mamma for breast or udder); tuba clouds that look like trumpets hanging from cumulus clouds; and scud clouds that shoot along under storms (scud, related to scuttle, means to move quickly and perhaps comes from the Middle English scut meaning to race like a hare).
You can only think that Shelley would have been proud of them.
16 Jun, 2010
I have watched my first game of the World Cup. I was surprised by the constant, boring bee-drone of the crowd – I had never heard anything like it before. Of course, I soon found out it is the vuvuzela, the soccer horn. It is plastic, a metre long, brightly coloured and sounds like an amplified bee! The instrument is played with huge enthusiasm by the South African and visiting fans but is also causing a huge amount of annoyance to television viewers.
The vuvuzela can perhaps claim ancestry from the kudu horn. The kudu horn came from a large antelope and was the traditional call to African villagers to attend village meetings.
There are two explanations of the origins of the word vuvuzela One theory suggests it comes from isiZulu for making noise. The other, that it comes from township slang for shower, because it showers people with music and looks like a shower head.
The vuvuzela has created the tournament’s early controversy. Many people hate them and there have been calls to have them banned. BBC broadcasters are contemplating turning off the crowd noise after receiving hundreds of complaints. However, many of the local and visiting fans are enjoying the noise far too much. The FIFA president, Joseph Blatter, has ruled out a ban, saying on Twitter that:
I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country. … Africa has a different rhythm, a different sound.
Boogieblast, a South African manufacturer of vuvuzela, suggest a simple explanation (and a nice little piece of marketing):
… you only hate them, if you don’t have one …
11 Jun, 2010
We often hear about octogenarians, those folk aged between 80 and 89. Being an octogenarian is an achievement of an advanced age beyond our allocated three score years and ten (according to Psalm 90) so is something to be celebrated:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
But becoming a quinquagenarian, being fifty-something, a person aged between 50 and 59 years, is not an achievement that is happily celebrated. Being fifty is generally accepted as being the beginning of late middle age – not a milestone to be welcomed. Youth has flown away.
The effects of ageing have become undeniable; quinquagenarians have found their eyesight has deteriorated, their muscles ache and their memory matter is disappearing in a process of cognitive decline.
Quinquagenarians have started to realise that the process of ageing is inevitable. So they have started thinking about activities recommended to minimise the decline including staying mentally active (for instance, by reading word-of-the-week blogs), staying socially active, exercising, reducing stress, and maintaining a good diet.
Although there is no cure for ageing, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have recently discovered that feeding old rats a combination of acetyl-L-carnitine and alpha-lipoic acid has rejuvenated the rats. The research leader reported “these old rats got up and did the Macarena”. These supplements are available from health food stores.
However, Oscar Wilde probably summed it up for the majority of quinquagenarians when he wrote:
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
del.icio.us
digg
Furl
Spurl
Technorati
Yahoo My Web