Word Facts

Whatever the philosophical or otherwise academic thought may be, there is a chance that it will simply met with, 'whatever'. Nothing is certain about attitudes of societies in the past, but a fair guess is that a similar the same response would be given, regardless of the era. The Latin, 'quodlibet', or 'any whatever' was a name designated for various academic arguements. No one is quite sure of how that meaning was then also transferred to musical mélanges, but more sensibly, 'quibbling' is also related to a quodlibet. 

There are generally two ideas associated with the word, 'iota': first, something that ninth in a set. Much like how 'alpha' 'beta' or 'omega' mean 'first', 'second' and 'last' respectively, based upon their positions in the Greek alphabet, in astronomy, Iota refers to the ninth star in a constellation. Far more commonly, second, it is used to connote small things. This meaning refers to the size of iota, which is the smallest letter in that alphabet. Interestingly, scholars writing the name could either use a (consonantal) I or a J, and so much like how the Latin, 'Iupiter' became 'Jupiter', 'jota' gave us the word 'jot', as in to write something short or quickly, or just the noun meaning "a tiny amount"

Language can be a wonderful tool for answering mysteries and other confusion. Certainly, knowing French or German, or better yet, Latin and Old English, would help to break down words and understand their meanings, but that skill comes in handy outside of just vocabulary. Hyenas look odd, with some cat-like features and some dog-like ones as well. The first place that might help to determine how it is classified would be to look at its scientific name, Hyaena: a genus comprised of 3 species. Since that is neither Canis nor Felis, this is not useful. The etymology would be another place to look, as sometimes, such as with 'ocelot' meaning 'field tiger' in Nahuatl, that can be indicative of classification. Unfortunately in this case, 'hyena' comes from the Greek 'huaina' (from 'hus') meaning 'pig' in reference to its bristly hair, only complicating the matter. In truth, hyenas are neither canines nor felines, although they are closer relate

Generally, things that are concrete and physical are easier to understand than things that are abstract. This is notifiable in grammar, for something that is 'palpable' is not something able to be palped (whatever that would mean) but it is able to be felt. Alongside 'palpitation', 'palpable' comes from a Latin verb meaning 'stroke'. A few centuries after adopting that word, English took on the word 'tangible', which comes from Latin's 'tangere' meaning 'to touch'. Both of those words are used to refer to abstract concepts, so long as those concepts are simple enough to seem physically perceived.

Adding or removing prefixes from a word can be a fun and enlightening way of studying. 'Distinguish' for example, was formed irregularly from the French 'distinguer', but is from the Latin morphemes, 'dis-' meaning ‘apart’ and 'stinguere' meaning ‘put out’ ultimately from a word meaning ‘prick’. Even though that is an irregular formation, 'extinguish' was formed from the same word, except that the 'ex-', meaning 'out', emphasizes the meaning that we have today. Also from 'exstinguere' comes 'extinct', fairly logically. Here, however, prefixes do not help, since 'intinction' is not the opposite of 'extinction', or even related to it, as the prefix might suggest. In fact, this word comes from the Latin, 'tingere' meaning ‘dip’.

Homophones can be tricky things, and not all of them were always so different. While the verbs 'steel' and 'steal' have nothing to do with each other besides some similarity in pronunciation nowadays, 'metal' and 'mettle' were originally the same, both spelt 'metal'. Over time, the meanings of the two words, which initially were the same, diverged and mettle was used figuratively so often that it took on a meaning of its own to discuss someone's character. Now, 'mettle' is only used for its meaning as a personality trait, and metal is only physical metallic substances.

Apples are wonderful and have versatile purposes in cooking. Moreover, the word apple has had wonderfully versatile uses in language. 'Æppel' in Old English meant 'apple' but also any general 'fruit'. For example, 'dates' were 'fingeræppla' (finger-apple) and 'cucumbers' were 'eorþæppla' (earth-apple). Even more recently than Old English, this happened with the European discovery of 'pineapple' in the Age of Enlightenment. The French word for 'apple', 'pomme' has a similar uses, except 'pomme de terre' (apple of the earth) is a potato. In the Middle Ages, 'oranges' were 'pomme de l'orenge' (apple of the orange tree), and still in Swedish oranges are 'apelsin' (China-apple). This modern misunderstanding of what an apple is won't ever be too serious, but anyone who reads Genesis will see that the fruit which Eve and Adam eat is not a red-delicious or granny smith or any

Everyone at some point or another has forgotten the best, most suitable word. This can be caused by anything from confusion to distraction or perhaps there simply is not a single word that would be effective to communicate one idea. While some languages may have some entertaining words that don't translate, like German's 'Kummerspeck' meaning 'grief-bacon' (for the weight one puts on while grieving), all people has 'negativity bias'. What this means is that people focus on negative thoughts and emotions more than positive ones for a flew of evolutionary reasons, and in turn, it influences language. There are more words, for example, categorized as negative than positive, words for unfortunate emotions like 'angst' or 'anxiety' are created fairly often, and it makes discussing negative thoughts easier than positive ones.

The words 'hark' and 'hearken' may now seem old and outdated, which is only reinforced by where they may appear most often. In Shakespeare's, The Taming of the Shrew, Lucentio in Act 1, scene 1 says, "Hark, Tranio! Thou may’st hear Minerva speak" and later on, one of the five occasions here in which Gremio says 'hark' is in the line, "Hark, hark! I hear the minstrels play". Not all the lines that contain 'hark' also contain 'hear', but these two do, and that isn't really an a ccident. The verb 'hearken', sometimes spelt, 'harken' comes from the Old English 'heorcnian' and is likely related to 'hark'. Although 'hear' comes fro, the Old English 'hīeran', and is therefore not related etymologically, the EA in 'hearken' was added in the 16th century to make clearer association. Despite any differences in spelling or pronunciation the connotation has always meant '

Sometimes in series of words, there may be an existing overarching historical theme that is now lost from its meaning. Europeans learned, for example, early on that the Americas were not India, yet the word stuck around for a long time, and in comparison to 'Indians', 'Native American' or 'First Nation' are much newer. For certain peoples though, this concept didn't go away, and 'Indio' is the term for any indigenous American those of eastern Asia in once under the rule of Spain or Portugal, still used today, and it means nothing more than ‘Indian’ in the languages of those two aforesaid countries. Moving on from ethic groups, the color 'indigo' comes via Portuguese, and Latin from Greek meaning 'Indian', as India is home to many plants from which blue dyes are extracted exclusively, even today.

Learning words from other languages can be useful to understand one's own in terms of comparison. Although the word, 'king' comes from Old English, we have Latinate words like 'regal' which come from words in Latin meaning 'to rule' or 'king'. It may not be a surprise to know that the Sanskrit, 'rajan' like 'raja' are related, but so is the word 'royal'. Sometimes the loss of G is what happens when words are adopted from one language to another, but this happens naturally over time as well. 'Rain' comes from the Old English, 'regn'; even the other, 'reign' has a G from its Latin roots but is pronounced like a diphthong Y. See more on GH from the post on December 20, 2015 .

All is fair in love and war, so they say. Everyone knows what kamikaze is, either in the historical sense or just to mean something that requires self-destructive in order to realize the goal. That is what the Americans brought back certainly, though not true to the Japanese origins. The word comes from the parts, 'kami' meaning 'divinity' and is even the name for a divine being in the Shinto religion, while 'kaze' means 'wind'. Originally, and for a long time, this word referred to a storm than the fleet of Mongol invaders in the early 13th century. Of course, it is now a war crime to use the weather as a weapon, as happened during the Vietnam War, so there would be little use for the word's original sense anyway.

The past tense is perhaps the easiest to define of the 3 (or 2) tenses in English. Most denote activity, or quality that happened and ended in the past. Still, there are multiple ways that this can be interpreted. Events, as well as habitual actions can be expressed like this quite simply. Nevertheless, the past tense has other uses. For example, the past tense can be used to indicate present or future time. The attitudinal past, as it's called, is used to reflect a lack of definitiveness, such as in, "did you want to have ice-cream?" because it is less blunt than the present tense in some cases. With indirect speech, certain verbs like 'say' allow the speaker to use the past tense to report the present, such as, "did you say you had ice-cream", which pragmatically asks whether the listener currently has ice-cream.

Usually when people use the word 'guttural', it is an imprecise way of to discuss any sound that is unpleasant to those listeners. The word used to have more precise meanings, signifying a sound that was produced in the throat. In fact, 'guttur' in Latin simply meant that very thing. Because so many people don't happen to like those sounds very much, any sound formed by the throat, lips, tongue, or a combination may be considered guttural. For the purposes of distinction, 'guttural' is not closely related to 'gutter' or 'gut' even though they are all tracks for things to move along. 'Gutter' comes from the Anglo-French meaning, 'drop', and 'gut' comes from Old English.

Usually on this blog, etymology is presented in a very matter-of-fact way. The problem with that is much like any social science, what is understood or believed changes over time with new information and new ways to think. For over 150, specialists struggled with how to analyze 'kibosh', which was used often among lower-class English people, featuring in a work by Charles Dickens in 1836. First, people thought that it was Yiddish, but there is no sign of a Yiddish source. Later, others thought that the word came from the Irish, 'caidhp bhais' meaning 'coif of death', and was headgear worn by those being put to death. This is now not considered plausible either, with little evidence of that usage, and no reference of the word until much later than 1836.

Words are arbitrary; there is nothing that necessarily connects the sound of a word to its meaning except what is given to it. It can be therefore thought that in one way or another, words were just made up. This would in truth be an unfair generalization as words change and progress over time, influencing other languages and ideas along the way, however, sometimes words are very simply fabricated. In 1754 Horace Walpole came out with, The Three Princes of Serendip. In his fairy tale, the protagonists, “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. We get 'serendipity' from this newly created word.

The dean of a school or a college may be tasked with overseeing hundreds or more students, but it did not use to be this way. 'Dean', as would not be uncommon for a word belonging to the world of academia originates from late Latin 'decanus' meaning ‘chief of a group of ten’ which is ultimately from 'decem' for ‘ten.’ Another word, 'doyen', comes from a more recent derivative of 'dean' than Latin; it comes from the Old French 'deien'. Over time, that word, as well as 'decimate' which originally meant to kill one out of every ten, they lost their connection to any specific numbers.

Legends are wonderful as stories, and can come in all sorts of places, like myths or modern folklore. What we consider legendary today is not what would have been only a couple centuries ago. The original meaning was the story of the life of a saint. The Middle English word gets its meaning, unsurprising for something with Christian connections, via Old French, 'legende', from medieval Latin 'legenda', a participle of 'legere' meaning ‘things to be read’. The word is ultimately from Greek, 'legein' and even earlier 'logos' meaning 'reason'. For more on 'logos' see Word Facts from August 4, 2016 ( http://stonewordfacts.blogspot.com/2016/08/605-pedagogue-and-synagogue-aug-4-2016.html )

There are a number of ways to think of speech between two people. Syntactically, one can "talk to" or alternatively "talk with" someone. There is a great deal of debate about the meaning of the prepositions in those senses, but they can be used fairly interchangeably. Not only that, but there is 'conversation' 'dialog' that exists between 'interlocutors'. Are three of those words in quotes use prepositions from Latin; the first, 'con-' means 'together/with', and last, 'inter-' means 'between'. Not only that, but 'dia-' means 'through' and although it does have a variant 'di-', the sense of 'di-' as 'two' is not so connected to the meaning.

Any language with a large enough groups of speakers is going to have separate dialects caused by social differences or geographic distinction. Usually though, when it comes to adopting words from those language into others, dialects don't make as much of a difference, unless it is due to contact with large groups of other populations. Mexican Spanish has, for example, influenced Western American English due to exposure. This also happens when large immigrant populations enter into a new area. Mafia are known for being Sicilian, and even the word is Sicilian for 'bragging'. Sicilian Italian is also why 'capisce' is only 2 syllables, but in Standard Italian the word is 3 syllables, 'capisci', from the verb 'capire' meaning 'to understand'.

It's easy to think of insults that are body parts, but not much variety about which ones. While calling someone 'a foot' is not terrible offensive, it is still pejorative. 'Pejorative' comes from the past participle of the Latin 'pejorare', a verb meaning, "to make or become worse", from the irregular comparative, 'pejor' meaning 'worse'. Through the Indo European root, the word is related to the Sanskrit 'padyate' for 'he falls', but also to the Latin 'ped-, pes' which means 'foot'.

Even though it is quite possible to invent words when necessary, it is much simpler to just adopt existing ones. European explorers when arriving in modern day Virginia, saw raccoons for the first time and used the Algonquian 'aroughcun'. Nevertheless, scientific names do not originate from indigenous American languages, so something else had to be done. 'Lotor', which is the scientific name comes from Latin meaning, ‘one who washes’. Raccoons are not, as you may now think, know for being especially clean, but they do utilize their front feet to obtain food in water.

Although it is hopefully the case that mothers are wise and levelheaded, 'mature' and 'mother' are not related. Instead, 'mature' comes from the Latin 'maturus' which means ‘timely, ripe’. The word is also related to another word with a connection to time: 'matins', coming from the plural in Old French of 'matin', which French speakers will recognize as 'morning'. The reason why the original French is secular in nature, but the English form is religious is due to influence from ecclesiastical Latin's word, 'matutinae' for ‘morning prayers’. Moreover, not only is there a religious connection for English speakers to 'matins', but it comes from the name of a Roman goddess, Matuta.

The peanut gallery is a term that emerged from the days of Vaudeville meaning the cheapest seats with the rowdiest people. Also the cheapest in those theaters were the peanuts, which would be, for bad shows, thrown at the performers in outrage. The term was used in the days of Vaudeville, but then repopularized by Howdy Doody in the '40's when it was a radio and then later TV program as a term for the children in the audience.

Any one of you readers who's kept up with Word Facts in the past would have known the way that Latin word change and been modified, either via other languages, or simply by the age of the word and the unforeseeable nature of language development to become the ones people know today. Sometimes, a lot less often than that, words will be taken directly from Latin, and used without modification. 'Fiat' is a word used to describe currency and commands among other things. It means literally, 'let it be done', and comes up in situations where there is no further rationale. A dollar bill, for example, can but does not have to represent something of actual value like water or gold; it is arbitrary, and therefore a fiat.

Across languages, and even within the same ones, knowing the way that variations and equivalents often occur can be a good way to judge what is related. As discussed here before, P is Greek or sometimes German often will be F in English, C at the beginning of a word in Romance languages will be H, and S in German will be T. As such, 'flash' and 'flush' which are Middle English words are related to, and influenced by 'blush', 'plash' (and its alteration: 'splash'), all relating to the meaning of something springing up.

It's often very easy to compare words from across languages that are related, so long as you are careful of false cognates. Sometimes, however, it is less intuitive. The French for 'white' is 'blanc', and the Spanish is 'blanco', even though the Latin is ' albus '. In English, we have 'black', which isn't related to the German equivalent, but is related to those aforementioned Romance languages' words. All of these words come from the Proto Indoeuropean word 'blegh' meaning 'flash' or 'flame'. Some languages took this meaning and kept its meaning associated to the light that is produced in a flash. Other languages kept the meaning of what is left over: the soot, ashes, and darkness.

The same word can easily become a noun, verb, and adjective in English, evidenced with the example from Hulu ads, the slogan "come TV with us" uses 'TV' as a verb (separate in meaning also from 'televise'). Likewise, there are many different affixes that indicate that a word is being used in a different part of speech. 'Voracious' does not have a verbal derivative, but the '-ous' was used to make the original Latin verb an adjective. There are many nounal suffixes in English, and therefore more than one way to make something into a noun. The earliest form of 'voracious' as a noun was 'voracity' appearing in print in the 1530's. Around a century later 'voraciousness', was being used, because it is easier to grasp.

"Man and wife" is now seen as sexist or archaic; people may instead choose to opt for "husband and wife". 'Wife' comes from the Old English simply meaning 'woman'. 'Husband' on the other hand, comes from Old Norse for "house owner", and even today in the UK some people use 'husband' to mean 'manager' or 'business owner'. The arbitrary nature of words means that people can have a problem with the usage of words that have not always had such intentions.

It is thought that humans store, not all individual words, but the parts of the words called morphemes separately in the mind. All affixes therefore are added on with their own meanings applied as the word is constructed. The order of the construction can lead to some confusion. The word 'unlockable' has two meanings therefore depending upon whether 'unlock' or 'lockable' came first. With the first, it means that it is able to be unlocked from its currently locked state. The second means that it is not able to be locked, such as something that is closed not with a lock but with a buckle or button; a shirt is unlockable. For more on this topic, click here for yesterday's.