Carnival of the 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 May 4.
I've been resisting this, as the phrase climbed the search engine lists, but it's time to bite the bullet. It's time to etymologize "American Idol."
Second word first. Idol in the sense of "person who is an object of intense admiration and devotion" dates from Shakespeare's day. It's an extended meaning from idol's original sense in (Middle) English of "image of a deity as an object of (pagan) worship."
During the era after Alexander the Great, when the Greek language spread across the Middle East and was the common educated speech on the shores of the Mediterranean, it lay oddly over the dark monotheistic cults of the desert lands. The Semitic peoples took up the tongue, but it lacked words for important concepts in their cultures.
So they made shift. The Greek word for "image" was taken by Jewish and early Christian writers for "image of a false god." Greek eidolon had been used in Homer for "phantom," and in other Greek writers for "image" (reflected in a mirror or water, or in the mind). But nowhere had it meant "false god," a concept that wouldn't even have occurred to the merrily polytheistic Greeks.
But soon even the Greeks were Christian, and, via ecclesiastical Latin, the word spread into most of the Romance languages and the Celtic ones. It got into English by the mid-13th century, via Old French, one of the mass of words that, invisibly, crossed the Channel in the wake of William the Bastard.
There it displaced the older Germanic word for "false god," represented in Anglo-Saxon by afgod. It's a compound that literally means "off-god," and it obviously was an invention of the first missionaries into the German lands (before they got their heads chopped off).
This word or something like it remains in most of the other Germanic languages. In modern German, however, it has been displaced by Götzen. This literally means "little god," and originally it was the word used to describe the statues of saints. Luther began using it in the sense of "false idol," no doubt deliberately.
There was no ancient word for "false god, idol" in Proto-Germanic, or in the ancient Indo-European language, because our ancestors were polytheists who understood no such thing as a god who was felt, but not real. In Indo-European languages of peoples who never fell into monotheism, it remains an alien concept. Sanskrit translations of the New Testament, for instance, borrowed the Indic word pratima-, meaning "image, statue," but which in its native form has hardly any notion of falsehood.
The original sense of Greek eidolon was merely "appearance." It's one of a large group of words that trace to Proto-Indo-European root *weid-. Just as modern English has a rough distinction between the verbs see, look, and watch, perhaps there was such a distinction in Proto-Indo-European, because the evidence points to more than one word for "to see." But the meanings have shifted around so much in different languages over the centuries that it is impossible now to say what the original senses of each root were.
*Weid- forms words for "to see" in Greek, Latin (videre), and Balto-Slavic (Russian videt' "to see," thus also vest' "news," in Izvestia, the former mouthpiece newspaper of the Soviet government in Moscow).
The *weid- root also forms the basis for words meaning "to know" in Greek (oida), Celtic, Germanic (German wissen "to know"), Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit veda "knowledge," also "sacred book"). Despite the wide spread of this sense, linguists think the "know" meaning is probably the secondary one in *weid-, via the concept of "having seen." But it is also possible that both the "see" sense and the "know" sense stem from a common notion of "to recognize."
Other cousins of idol, through the Latin branch and videre, include voyeur (literally "one who views;" the proper term is scopophiliac), review, provide (literally "to look ahead"), evidence, advice, visit, envy -- from Latin invidere "envy," earlier "look at (with malice), cast an evil eye upon" -- video, and interview.
In the Germanic branch of the family are wise and wit. On the Greek side is idea. But unlike the Latin relations, these seem an awkward fit with what capers across the screen on an average "American Idol."
* * *
America first appears as the name of the "New World" in 1507, in cartographer Martin Waldseemüller's treatise "Cosmographiae Introductio." It is named, of course, for Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), a native of Florence who made two trips to the New World as a navigator. His published works put forward the idea that it was a new continent, not the East indies, and he was first to call it Novus Mundus "New World." But why was the continent called after his first name? Apparently for no other reason than that Amerigo is more easily Latinized than Vespucci.
The name Amerigo is said to derive from an old Gothic name, Amalrich. It would not be unusual to meet a Germanic name in Italy, which was ruled by the Goths for several generations after the fall of Rome. In fact, Germanic originals underlie such popular Italian names as Aldo (short for Teobaldo), Bruno, Alphonso, Ricardo, Alfredo, and Leonardo.
Amalrich seems literally to have meant "work-ruler," perhaps in a sense where we now would use boss; that is, "designator of tasks." Or it might carry a sense of "master workman."
The name in its pure Germanic form has come down as surnames such as Emmerich and Emery. In its feminine form, in Italian, it merged with another female name, based on an old Roman gens, and became Amelia and Emily.
Charlotte Mary Yonge observed in her "History of Christian Names" (1884) notes the blind and sinuous paths of history whereby "thousands of miles, and millions of men, bear the appellation of the forgotten forefather of a tribe of Goths -- Amalrich, the work ruler; a curiously appropriate title for the new world of labor and progress."
Despite millions of puns in newspaper headlines and TV Web sites, however, there's no known connection but coincidence of sound between idol and idle, which is only found in West Germanic languages.
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 May 4.
I've been resisting this, as the phrase climbed the search engine lists, but it's time to bite the bullet. It's time to etymologize "American Idol."
Second word first. Idol in the sense of "person who is an object of intense admiration and devotion" dates from Shakespeare's day. It's an extended meaning from idol's original sense in (Middle) English of "image of a deity as an object of (pagan) worship."
During the era after Alexander the Great, when the Greek language spread across the Middle East and was the common educated speech on the shores of the Mediterranean, it lay oddly over the dark monotheistic cults of the desert lands. The Semitic peoples took up the tongue, but it lacked words for important concepts in their cultures.
So they made shift. The Greek word for "image" was taken by Jewish and early Christian writers for "image of a false god." Greek eidolon had been used in Homer for "phantom," and in other Greek writers for "image" (reflected in a mirror or water, or in the mind). But nowhere had it meant "false god," a concept that wouldn't even have occurred to the merrily polytheistic Greeks.
But soon even the Greeks were Christian, and, via ecclesiastical Latin, the word spread into most of the Romance languages and the Celtic ones. It got into English by the mid-13th century, via Old French, one of the mass of words that, invisibly, crossed the Channel in the wake of William the Bastard.
There it displaced the older Germanic word for "false god," represented in Anglo-Saxon by afgod. It's a compound that literally means "off-god," and it obviously was an invention of the first missionaries into the German lands (before they got their heads chopped off).
This word or something like it remains in most of the other Germanic languages. In modern German, however, it has been displaced by Götzen. This literally means "little god," and originally it was the word used to describe the statues of saints. Luther began using it in the sense of "false idol," no doubt deliberately.
There was no ancient word for "false god, idol" in Proto-Germanic, or in the ancient Indo-European language, because our ancestors were polytheists who understood no such thing as a god who was felt, but not real. In Indo-European languages of peoples who never fell into monotheism, it remains an alien concept. Sanskrit translations of the New Testament, for instance, borrowed the Indic word pratima-, meaning "image, statue," but which in its native form has hardly any notion of falsehood.
The original sense of Greek eidolon was merely "appearance." It's one of a large group of words that trace to Proto-Indo-European root *weid-. Just as modern English has a rough distinction between the verbs see, look, and watch, perhaps there was such a distinction in Proto-Indo-European, because the evidence points to more than one word for "to see." But the meanings have shifted around so much in different languages over the centuries that it is impossible now to say what the original senses of each root were.
*Weid- forms words for "to see" in Greek, Latin (videre), and Balto-Slavic (Russian videt' "to see," thus also vest' "news," in Izvestia, the former mouthpiece newspaper of the Soviet government in Moscow).
The *weid- root also forms the basis for words meaning "to know" in Greek (oida), Celtic, Germanic (German wissen "to know"), Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit veda "knowledge," also "sacred book"). Despite the wide spread of this sense, linguists think the "know" meaning is probably the secondary one in *weid-, via the concept of "having seen." But it is also possible that both the "see" sense and the "know" sense stem from a common notion of "to recognize."
Other cousins of idol, through the Latin branch and videre, include voyeur (literally "one who views;" the proper term is scopophiliac), review, provide (literally "to look ahead"), evidence, advice, visit, envy -- from Latin invidere "envy," earlier "look at (with malice), cast an evil eye upon" -- video, and interview.
In the Germanic branch of the family are wise and wit. On the Greek side is idea. But unlike the Latin relations, these seem an awkward fit with what capers across the screen on an average "American Idol."
* * *
America first appears as the name of the "New World" in 1507, in cartographer Martin Waldseemüller's treatise "Cosmographiae Introductio." It is named, of course, for Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), a native of Florence who made two trips to the New World as a navigator. His published works put forward the idea that it was a new continent, not the East indies, and he was first to call it Novus Mundus "New World." But why was the continent called after his first name? Apparently for no other reason than that Amerigo is more easily Latinized than Vespucci.
The name Amerigo is said to derive from an old Gothic name, Amalrich. It would not be unusual to meet a Germanic name in Italy, which was ruled by the Goths for several generations after the fall of Rome. In fact, Germanic originals underlie such popular Italian names as Aldo (short for Teobaldo), Bruno, Alphonso, Ricardo, Alfredo, and Leonardo.
Amalrich seems literally to have meant "work-ruler," perhaps in a sense where we now would use boss; that is, "designator of tasks." Or it might carry a sense of "master workman."
The name in its pure Germanic form has come down as surnames such as Emmerich and Emery. In its feminine form, in Italian, it merged with another female name, based on an old Roman gens, and became Amelia and Emily.
Charlotte Mary Yonge observed in her "History of Christian Names" (1884) notes the blind and sinuous paths of history whereby "thousands of miles, and millions of men, bear the appellation of the forgotten forefather of a tribe of Goths -- Amalrich, the work ruler; a curiously appropriate title for the new world of labor and progress."
Despite millions of puns in newspaper headlines and TV Web sites, however, there's no known connection but coincidence of sound between idol and idle, which is only found in West Germanic languages.
Labels: etymology
