Carnival of Etymologies
[A regular Thursday feature of "Done With Mirrors," delayed for a day by Blogger problems]
Today's list of words to be dissected was dragged, writhing and begging for mercy, from phrases that appeared in the Google "Zeitgeist" and the top 50 searches on Lycos for the week ending March 26.
Pope is a very old word in English, one of the first to cross over from Latin, when the Anglo-Saxons bowed their heads to baptism. It comes from Medieval Latin papa, which in turn was adopted from Greek papas, a title of patriarchs and bishops that originally meant "father." It's essentially the same word as papa. It first was applied to bishops in Asia Minor and taken as a title by the Bishop of Alexandria c.250. In the Western Church, it has been applied especially to the Bishops of Rome since the time of Leo the Great (440-461) and claimed exclusively by them from 1073.
The vowel shifted in Middle English; papal, and papacy, which were adopted into English later, preserve the original Latin vowel.
Though pontiff looks related, it's not. It comes from Latin pontifex, the title of members of the supreme college of priests in ancient pagan Rome. The Christian Romans picked it up as a title for their bishops, and like pope, its use eventually narrowed to "the bishop of Rome."
Latin pontifex seems to be a compound of the stem of pons "bridge" and the root of facere "to make." If this is so, the word originally meant "bridge-maker," or "path-maker." The etymologist Ernest Weekley (whose German wife Frieda ran off with D.H. Lawrence) in pondering this word points out that "bridge-building has always been regarded as a pious work of divine inspiration." But the term may be metaphoric of bridging the metaphysical space between earthly world and the realm of the gods.
* * *
A related word that shot to the top of the search engines this week was Vatican. It's a case of what is called metonymy, a figure of speech in which an attribute or adjunct is substituted for the thing meant: in this case, the name of a place is substituted for the name of the institution that functions from there (i.e. "the papacy"). Just so, the Ottoman court at Constantinople used to be called the Porte, which was the official name of the central office of the Ottoman government, the government of the U.S.S.R. could be referred to as the Kremlin, and the U.S. presidential administration as the White House. The Italian government in Rome used to be distinguished from the Vatican by reference to the Quirinal, the name of the hill where the royal palace stood.
Vatican is short for Latin Mons Vaticanus, the name of the Roman hill on which the Papal palace stands. Vaticanus probably is an Etruscan word, not related (as some have speculated) to Latin vates "sooth-sayer."
Two others, among the Seven Hills of ancient Rome, have seen their proper names become nouns in modern languages.
Palace "official residence of an emperor, king, archbishop, etc." comes from Latin palatium, which is a common noun formed from Mons Palatinus, "the Palatine Hill," where Augustus Caesar's house stood (the original "palace"). Later it was the site of the splendid residence built by Nero. The hill name probably is ultimately from palus "stake," on the notion of "enclosure." But another guess is that it is from Etruscan and connected with Pales, the supposed name of an Italic goddess of shepherds and cattle.
Capitol, meanwhile, is from Latin Capitolium, the name of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill. It first was used in the sense of "building where U.S. Congress meets" in 1793, in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, though the word earlier was applied to the Virginia state houses (1699). Its use by the Founders deliberately evokes Roman republican imagery. The relationship of this word and capital is likely but not certain.
* * *
The news reports about the process of choosing the next pope have leaned on the word conclave, some even pointing out that it comes from the Latin compound meaning "with key." This is correct, but if the writers mean by that to suggest some esoteric meaning, it's misguided. This word, too, originally referred to a place -- in this case, "a room that can be locked," like the one where the cardinals met to deliberate.
The clavis part of that Latin word comes from the proto-Indo-European root *klau-, which formed words for "close," "shut," "key" (its relatives include claustrophobia, closure, exclude, include, conclude, clause, recluse, and closet).
But if you get it down to the root, its oldest sense is "hook, peg, crooked or forked branch." It affords one of those linguistic moments that can make you shudder with the sense of discovery: this little nub of word drifted all the way down from the ages when our ancestors lived in huts and used a sliver of wood as a bolt to latch a door. Like sailing across still, dark waters and suddenly catching, just for an instant, a glimpse of something deep in them. Frost wrote it:
Conclave also has a less recognizable relative in clitoris, which is a 17th century scientific Latin word based on Greek kleitoris. Exactly what the old anatomists were thinking when they coined this word is difficult now to know. It's either based on a word for "to sheathe," or one meaning "peg;" either way it comes from the same root as clavis.
The Italian anatomist Mateo Renaldo Colombo (1516-1559), professor at Padua, claimed to have discovered the clitoris ("De re anatomica," 1559, p. 243). He called it amor Veneris, vel dulcedo "the love or sweetness of Venus." It had been known to women since much earlier, of course, but evidently they didn't tell him about it. Or if they did, he wasn't listening.
* * *
I'm not drawing parallels here, just reporting what the search engines say. But along with the Pope, the other death that drew most hits recently was that of Mitch Hedberg, the comedian, who died March 30 and topped Google's Zeitgeist for last week.
His fans say more than half the humor in his act lay in his delivery. But even if you don't have his voice in your head, reading through his one-liners in mass can get you smiling after a while:
Comedian, meaning "comic actor" is attested from 1601; but the meaning "professional entertainer who tells jokes, etc." only dates from 1898.
Comedy comes from Greek komoidia "a comedy, amusing spectacle," from komodios "singer in the revels," which is a compound of komos "revel, carousal" and oidos "singer, poet."
The classical sense is similar to the modern one, but in the Middle Ages the word came to mean poems and stories generally (albeit ones with happy endings), and the earliest English sense is "narrative poem" (as in Dante's "Commedia").
The adjective comic thus originally meant "of comedy in the dramatic sense." The meaning "intentionally funny" first appeared in the late 18th century, and comedic has since then picked up the classical sense of the word. But the confusion lingered long enough for George Bernard Shaw to complain about it in a review from 1897:
* * *
Comedy is a straightforward word compared to its mate, tragedy. The second element is the same in both, but the first element in Greek tragodia apparently is tragos, which would make a tragedy, literally, a "song about a goat." No George W. Bush Sept. 11 jokes, please.
Somehow, that doesn't seem right. Some linguists suggest the meaning may lie in satyric drama, from which tragedy later developed, in which actors or singers were dressed in goatskins to represent satyrs. But many other theories have been made (including "singer who competes for a goat as a prize"), and even the "goat" connection is at times questioned. But no one's got a better guess.
Today's list of words to be dissected was dragged, writhing and begging for mercy, from phrases that appeared in the Google "Zeitgeist" and the top 50 searches on Lycos for the week ending March 26.
Pope is a very old word in English, one of the first to cross over from Latin, when the Anglo-Saxons bowed their heads to baptism. It comes from Medieval Latin papa, which in turn was adopted from Greek papas, a title of patriarchs and bishops that originally meant "father." It's essentially the same word as papa. It first was applied to bishops in Asia Minor and taken as a title by the Bishop of Alexandria c.250. In the Western Church, it has been applied especially to the Bishops of Rome since the time of Leo the Great (440-461) and claimed exclusively by them from 1073.
The vowel shifted in Middle English; papal, and papacy, which were adopted into English later, preserve the original Latin vowel.
Though pontiff looks related, it's not. It comes from Latin pontifex, the title of members of the supreme college of priests in ancient pagan Rome. The Christian Romans picked it up as a title for their bishops, and like pope, its use eventually narrowed to "the bishop of Rome."
Latin pontifex seems to be a compound of the stem of pons "bridge" and the root of facere "to make." If this is so, the word originally meant "bridge-maker," or "path-maker." The etymologist Ernest Weekley (whose German wife Frieda ran off with D.H. Lawrence) in pondering this word points out that "bridge-building has always been regarded as a pious work of divine inspiration." But the term may be metaphoric of bridging the metaphysical space between earthly world and the realm of the gods.
* * *
A related word that shot to the top of the search engines this week was Vatican. It's a case of what is called metonymy, a figure of speech in which an attribute or adjunct is substituted for the thing meant: in this case, the name of a place is substituted for the name of the institution that functions from there (i.e. "the papacy"). Just so, the Ottoman court at Constantinople used to be called the Porte, which was the official name of the central office of the Ottoman government, the government of the U.S.S.R. could be referred to as the Kremlin, and the U.S. presidential administration as the White House. The Italian government in Rome used to be distinguished from the Vatican by reference to the Quirinal, the name of the hill where the royal palace stood.
Vatican is short for Latin Mons Vaticanus, the name of the Roman hill on which the Papal palace stands. Vaticanus probably is an Etruscan word, not related (as some have speculated) to Latin vates "sooth-sayer."
Two others, among the Seven Hills of ancient Rome, have seen their proper names become nouns in modern languages.
Palace "official residence of an emperor, king, archbishop, etc." comes from Latin palatium, which is a common noun formed from Mons Palatinus, "the Palatine Hill," where Augustus Caesar's house stood (the original "palace"). Later it was the site of the splendid residence built by Nero. The hill name probably is ultimately from palus "stake," on the notion of "enclosure." But another guess is that it is from Etruscan and connected with Pales, the supposed name of an Italic goddess of shepherds and cattle.
Capitol, meanwhile, is from Latin Capitolium, the name of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill. It first was used in the sense of "building where U.S. Congress meets" in 1793, in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, though the word earlier was applied to the Virginia state houses (1699). Its use by the Founders deliberately evokes Roman republican imagery. The relationship of this word and capital is likely but not certain.
* * *
The news reports about the process of choosing the next pope have leaned on the word conclave, some even pointing out that it comes from the Latin compound meaning "with key." This is correct, but if the writers mean by that to suggest some esoteric meaning, it's misguided. This word, too, originally referred to a place -- in this case, "a room that can be locked," like the one where the cardinals met to deliberate.
The clavis part of that Latin word comes from the proto-Indo-European root *klau-, which formed words for "close," "shut," "key" (its relatives include claustrophobia, closure, exclude, include, conclude, clause, recluse, and closet).
But if you get it down to the root, its oldest sense is "hook, peg, crooked or forked branch." It affords one of those linguistic moments that can make you shudder with the sense of discovery: this little nub of word drifted all the way down from the ages when our ancestors lived in huts and used a sliver of wood as a bolt to latch a door. Like sailing across still, dark waters and suddenly catching, just for an instant, a glimpse of something deep in them. Frost wrote it:
Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Conclave also has a less recognizable relative in clitoris, which is a 17th century scientific Latin word based on Greek kleitoris. Exactly what the old anatomists were thinking when they coined this word is difficult now to know. It's either based on a word for "to sheathe," or one meaning "peg;" either way it comes from the same root as clavis.
The Italian anatomist Mateo Renaldo Colombo (1516-1559), professor at Padua, claimed to have discovered the clitoris ("De re anatomica," 1559, p. 243). He called it amor Veneris, vel dulcedo "the love or sweetness of Venus." It had been known to women since much earlier, of course, but evidently they didn't tell him about it. Or if they did, he wasn't listening.
* * *
I'm not drawing parallels here, just reporting what the search engines say. But along with the Pope, the other death that drew most hits recently was that of Mitch Hedberg, the comedian, who died March 30 and topped Google's Zeitgeist for last week.
His fans say more than half the humor in his act lay in his delivery. But even if you don't have his voice in your head, reading through his one-liners in mass can get you smiling after a while:
"I recently took up ice sculpting. Last night, I made an ice cube. This morning I made 12; I was prolific."
"I got my hair highlighted, because I felt some strands were more important than others."
"I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it."
"I had a paper route when I was a kid. I was supposed to go to 2,000 house or to two dumpsters."
“When I was on acid I would see things that looked like beams of light, and I would hear things that sounded an awful lot like car horns.”
Comedian, meaning "comic actor" is attested from 1601; but the meaning "professional entertainer who tells jokes, etc." only dates from 1898.
Comedy comes from Greek komoidia "a comedy, amusing spectacle," from komodios "singer in the revels," which is a compound of komos "revel, carousal" and oidos "singer, poet."
The classical sense is similar to the modern one, but in the Middle Ages the word came to mean poems and stories generally (albeit ones with happy endings), and the earliest English sense is "narrative poem" (as in Dante's "Commedia").
The adjective comic thus originally meant "of comedy in the dramatic sense." The meaning "intentionally funny" first appeared in the late 18th century, and comedic has since then picked up the classical sense of the word. But the confusion lingered long enough for George Bernard Shaw to complain about it in a review from 1897:
"Speaking of the masters of the comedic spirit (if I call it, as he does, the Comic Spirit, this darkened generation will suppose me to refer to the animal spirits of tomfools and merryandrews) ...."
* * *
Comedy is a straightforward word compared to its mate, tragedy. The second element is the same in both, but the first element in Greek tragodia apparently is tragos, which would make a tragedy, literally, a "song about a goat." No George W. Bush Sept. 11 jokes, please.
Somehow, that doesn't seem right. Some linguists suggest the meaning may lie in satyric drama, from which tragedy later developed, in which actors or singers were dressed in goatskins to represent satyrs. But many other theories have been made (including "singer who competes for a goat as a prize"), and even the "goat" connection is at times questioned. But no one's got a better guess.
Labels: etymology
