Carnival of Etymologies
[A regular Thursday feature of "Done With Mirrors"]
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 April 22.
The 109th Boston Marathon was run April 18. This event was one of the earliest to take the name "marathon" when it was revived from classical history in the modern sense of "an athletic footrace of roughly 26 miles." That took place in 1896 with the revival of the Olympic Games.
The marathon race comes from the story of Athenian hero Pheidippides, who ran the 26 miles and 385 yards to Athens from the Plains of Marathon to tell of the Greek victory there over the great Persian army sent by King Darius in 490 B.C.E. But this is a later and less likely story. The original story (in Herodotus) is that he ran from Athens to Sparta to seek aid as the Persians approached. The Spartans, typically conservative and mistrustful of Athenian ambitions, dragged their feet. But they did have enough feeling for Greek unity to send out an army, which got to the battlefield too late to participate in the fight. The Spartans, then the mightiest military force in Greece, looked it over and pronounced that the plucky Athenians had done an amazing thing in routing the vast Persian army, a victory which probably surprised the Spartans as much as anyone.
The word marathon in ancient Greek means "fennel." The plain probably was named for the plants that grew there, and the Persians probably chose it to fight on because it was one of the few big, open, level places in Attica, and their cavalry could operate freely there.
* * *
For no good reason, except perhaps to prove that nothing is so bad but Hollywood can make it worse, "Amityville Horror" has been made again.
Horror is a Latin word that meant "roughness, rudeness," and also "bristling." The notion in the modern sense is of the hair standing on end in fear. As the name of a film genre, horror has been in use since 1936. The original chamber of horrors (1849) was a gallery of notorious criminals in Madame Tussaud's wax exhibition.
* * *
According to AP, the "only whale-dolphin mix in captivity has given birth to a playful female calf, officials at Sea Life Park Hawaii said Thursday."
Wholphin, the name given to this cross-breed, thus made the list of most-searched terms for the week. It's a modern car-wreck of a word, the kind of thing linguistic purists despise as a miscegenation of Germanic and Latin.
Whale is from Old English hwæl, a word recognizable across the Germanic language map, from Swedish val to German Wal. Dolphin, on the other hand, came to English in the Middle Ages via Old French daulphin, from Latin delphinus.
The "whale" in this family is not a true whale but a False Killer Whale, which really is a large relative of the dolphins, in the same genus as the orca, or killer whale.
Orca is a Latin word that the Romans used for some kind of whale, and it has been used in English in reference to whales since the 16th century. But there is another, older orc in English, which turns up in Anglo-Saxon writings in the plural form orcþyrs or orcneas and was used as the name of certain monsters or demons.
This word probably came from the Continent, and it may be the same word as the whale name (the French used it in reference to sea monsters). Or it may be a variation of the root of ogre and come from Latin Orcus, meaning "Hell," itself a word of unknown origin. This second orc was the one revived by J.R.R. Tolkien as the name of a brutal race in "The Lord of the Rings."
* * *
The Romans got delphinus from Greek delphis "dolphin," which is related to delphys "womb," probably via the notion of the animal bearing live young, which sets it apart from other sea creatures the ancient Greeks would have known.
Dolphins, of course, have a long association with humans who venture on the sea, and perhaps it is a mark of sailors' regard for dolphins that the word began to be used as a proper name for sons and daughters born to families on the Mediterranean coastal regions of what is now France.
The lords of Viennois, an important principality in the French Alps north of Provence, were said to have featured a string of princes with this name in the early middle ages, and in the 12th century, three dolphins were placed on the coat of arms of the lords of Viennois. The province began to be called Dauphiné. When Humbert III, the last lord of Dauphiné, ceded the province to Philip of Valois in 1349, he stipulated that the title be perpetuated by the eldest son of the king of France. And so dauphin meant "eldest son of the king of France" as long as the title was in use (until 1830).
Another relative of dolphin is the back half of Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love." Greek adelphos was one of the words the ancients used for "brother;" it literally means "from the same womb" (from the copulative prefix a- "together with," and delphys "womb").
* * *
The new pope has chosen his name, and it wasn't my pick, Ringo George. He wants to be Benedict XVI. Well, good for him. The name is an old one popular among Church fathers. It means "blessed," and it derives from Latin benedicere "to bless," literally "to speak well of." It's a compound of bene "well" and dicere "to speak."
This also produced the English surname and proper name Bennet. In French, it has come down as Benoît. One of the most famous recent Benoits was Benoit B. Mandelbrot, who made fractal geometry popular. A modern Italian descendant of bene is Bono, as in Sonny Bono, or, perhaps, the lead singer of U2.
In the 19th century, when educated people knew their Shakespeare inside and out, Benedict was newspaper shorthand for "newly married man." That comes from the character Benedicke in "Much Ado About Nothing."
* * *
Most old pope names are rooted in the Bible or early Church history. A few of the common ones reach back into pre-Christian Roman times. One is Sextus/Sixtus, which, oddly, simply means "the sixth."
Free Roman citizens had names in three parts: a praenomen, a nomen, and a cognomen. Having the three names was an important social distinction, but really only two were necessary for daily activity. The first name, unlike in modern times, was the least important, and it usually was given from among a small pool of names. For instance, the ancient Romans known to us as Julius Caesar, Catullus, Caligula, Gracchus all had the common praenomen Gaius.
In fact, after a family had used up the few boys' praenomena it cared to bestow, subsequent sons were named with numbers: Among the Reoman records we meet men named Decius, Quintus, Secundus, Sextus, and Tertius. Girls' names were bestowed even less creatively, and it was not unusual for the first three daughters born to a Roman family to be named Primia, Secundia, and Tertia, in birth-order.
Sextus Iulius Africanus was one of the important Church fathers, and a pope who ruled in the early 2nd century (his dates and reign are obscure) took the name Sixtus.
Four subsequent popes have taken that name, but the most well-remembered today is Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere), who was pope from 1471 to 1484 and built a grandiose private chapel for the popes in the Vatican. It still is known by his name -- the Sistine Chapel -- though a better candidate for the honor might be Michaelangelo, who painted the great works that decorate it.
But language doesn't behave, or follow the most just path through history. It serves no cause and flows like water through natural channels. It evolves as blindly and cruelly as biology itself. And the results, while serviceable, often are ugly. Shakespeare's Scottish thugs spoke a high diction, but Tolkien put into the mouths of his orcs the common working-class soldiers' speech of the trenches of the First World War. He had been immersed in Welsh romantic ballads and Gothic scriptures.
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 April 22.
The 109th Boston Marathon was run April 18. This event was one of the earliest to take the name "marathon" when it was revived from classical history in the modern sense of "an athletic footrace of roughly 26 miles." That took place in 1896 with the revival of the Olympic Games.
The marathon race comes from the story of Athenian hero Pheidippides, who ran the 26 miles and 385 yards to Athens from the Plains of Marathon to tell of the Greek victory there over the great Persian army sent by King Darius in 490 B.C.E. But this is a later and less likely story. The original story (in Herodotus) is that he ran from Athens to Sparta to seek aid as the Persians approached. The Spartans, typically conservative and mistrustful of Athenian ambitions, dragged their feet. But they did have enough feeling for Greek unity to send out an army, which got to the battlefield too late to participate in the fight. The Spartans, then the mightiest military force in Greece, looked it over and pronounced that the plucky Athenians had done an amazing thing in routing the vast Persian army, a victory which probably surprised the Spartans as much as anyone.
The word marathon in ancient Greek means "fennel." The plain probably was named for the plants that grew there, and the Persians probably chose it to fight on because it was one of the few big, open, level places in Attica, and their cavalry could operate freely there.
* * *
For no good reason, except perhaps to prove that nothing is so bad but Hollywood can make it worse, "Amityville Horror" has been made again.
Horror is a Latin word that meant "roughness, rudeness," and also "bristling." The notion in the modern sense is of the hair standing on end in fear. As the name of a film genre, horror has been in use since 1936. The original chamber of horrors (1849) was a gallery of notorious criminals in Madame Tussaud's wax exhibition.
* * *
According to AP, the "only whale-dolphin mix in captivity has given birth to a playful female calf, officials at Sea Life Park Hawaii said Thursday."
Wholphin, the name given to this cross-breed, thus made the list of most-searched terms for the week. It's a modern car-wreck of a word, the kind of thing linguistic purists despise as a miscegenation of Germanic and Latin.
Whale is from Old English hwæl, a word recognizable across the Germanic language map, from Swedish val to German Wal. Dolphin, on the other hand, came to English in the Middle Ages via Old French daulphin, from Latin delphinus.
The "whale" in this family is not a true whale but a False Killer Whale, which really is a large relative of the dolphins, in the same genus as the orca, or killer whale.
Orca is a Latin word that the Romans used for some kind of whale, and it has been used in English in reference to whales since the 16th century. But there is another, older orc in English, which turns up in Anglo-Saxon writings in the plural form orcþyrs or orcneas and was used as the name of certain monsters or demons.
This word probably came from the Continent, and it may be the same word as the whale name (the French used it in reference to sea monsters). Or it may be a variation of the root of ogre and come from Latin Orcus, meaning "Hell," itself a word of unknown origin. This second orc was the one revived by J.R.R. Tolkien as the name of a brutal race in "The Lord of the Rings."
* * *
The Romans got delphinus from Greek delphis "dolphin," which is related to delphys "womb," probably via the notion of the animal bearing live young, which sets it apart from other sea creatures the ancient Greeks would have known.
Dolphins, of course, have a long association with humans who venture on the sea, and perhaps it is a mark of sailors' regard for dolphins that the word began to be used as a proper name for sons and daughters born to families on the Mediterranean coastal regions of what is now France.
The lords of Viennois, an important principality in the French Alps north of Provence, were said to have featured a string of princes with this name in the early middle ages, and in the 12th century, three dolphins were placed on the coat of arms of the lords of Viennois. The province began to be called Dauphiné. When Humbert III, the last lord of Dauphiné, ceded the province to Philip of Valois in 1349, he stipulated that the title be perpetuated by the eldest son of the king of France. And so dauphin meant "eldest son of the king of France" as long as the title was in use (until 1830).
Another relative of dolphin is the back half of Philadelphia, the "City of Brotherly Love." Greek adelphos was one of the words the ancients used for "brother;" it literally means "from the same womb" (from the copulative prefix a- "together with," and delphys "womb").
* * *
The new pope has chosen his name, and it wasn't my pick, Ringo George. He wants to be Benedict XVI. Well, good for him. The name is an old one popular among Church fathers. It means "blessed," and it derives from Latin benedicere "to bless," literally "to speak well of." It's a compound of bene "well" and dicere "to speak."
This also produced the English surname and proper name Bennet. In French, it has come down as Benoît. One of the most famous recent Benoits was Benoit B. Mandelbrot, who made fractal geometry popular. A modern Italian descendant of bene is Bono, as in Sonny Bono, or, perhaps, the lead singer of U2.
In the 19th century, when educated people knew their Shakespeare inside and out, Benedict was newspaper shorthand for "newly married man." That comes from the character Benedicke in "Much Ado About Nothing."
* * *
Most old pope names are rooted in the Bible or early Church history. A few of the common ones reach back into pre-Christian Roman times. One is Sextus/Sixtus, which, oddly, simply means "the sixth."
Free Roman citizens had names in three parts: a praenomen, a nomen, and a cognomen. Having the three names was an important social distinction, but really only two were necessary for daily activity. The first name, unlike in modern times, was the least important, and it usually was given from among a small pool of names. For instance, the ancient Romans known to us as Julius Caesar, Catullus, Caligula, Gracchus all had the common praenomen Gaius.
In fact, after a family had used up the few boys' praenomena it cared to bestow, subsequent sons were named with numbers: Among the Reoman records we meet men named Decius, Quintus, Secundus, Sextus, and Tertius. Girls' names were bestowed even less creatively, and it was not unusual for the first three daughters born to a Roman family to be named Primia, Secundia, and Tertia, in birth-order.
Sextus Iulius Africanus was one of the important Church fathers, and a pope who ruled in the early 2nd century (his dates and reign are obscure) took the name Sixtus.
Four subsequent popes have taken that name, but the most well-remembered today is Sixtus IV (Francesco della Rovere), who was pope from 1471 to 1484 and built a grandiose private chapel for the popes in the Vatican. It still is known by his name -- the Sistine Chapel -- though a better candidate for the honor might be Michaelangelo, who painted the great works that decorate it.
But language doesn't behave, or follow the most just path through history. It serves no cause and flows like water through natural channels. It evolves as blindly and cruelly as biology itself. And the results, while serviceable, often are ugly. Shakespeare's Scottish thugs spoke a high diction, but Tolkien put into the mouths of his orcs the common working-class soldiers' speech of the trenches of the First World War. He had been immersed in Welsh romantic ballads and Gothic scriptures.
"But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it." ["Return of the King," 1955]
Labels: etymology
