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 18.
* * *
Giacomo rallied in the stretch at 50-1 to win the Kentucky derby. But why is a big horse race called a derby? The name comes from the annual Derby horse race in England, which was begun in 1780 by the 12th Earl of Derby. It was such a big deal that Parliament always adjourned for it, and the name was being extended to other major horse races by 1875.
The type of hat called a derby got its name because it supposedly was worn at the races. Most sartorial sages seem to identify it with the bowler hat, which sometimes is said to honor a 19th century London hatmaker named J. Bowler, but which may simply be formed from bowl, which is what the hat looks like.
The shire name Derby in England goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, when it was Deorby, which literally means "deer village."
* * *
Giacomo is the Italian form of James, from Late Latin Jacomus, altered from Latin Jacobus. The Welsh form was Iago. The proper name comes to Church Latin via Greek, from Hebrew Ya'aqobh, which literally means "one that takes by the heel."
* * *
Speaking of the early Church, the new Crusades movie "Kingdom of Heaven" was a big deal online this week. Why do people think Orlando Bloom would make a convincing warrior? He's a pretty boy. He was right as Paris, in "Achilles," and he was adequate as Legolas, who fought with a bow and a knife, not a broadsword.
Heaven is a good Germanic word; in Old English it was heofon. It's almost certainly a relative of continental words like Old Norse himinn, Dutch hemel, and German Himmel, but the middle consonant seems to have undergone an odd shift in English.
The Christian use of this word for "the home of God above the sky" is an extension of its earlier meaning, which simply was "sky." It comes from an ancient Proto-Indo-European root which meant "to cover."
Another offshoot of this root is chemise, which comes via French from Late Latin camisia "shirt, tunic," originally a soldiers' word attested about c.400. Linguists think the legionnaires got it from Gaulish, and the Gauls got it from the Germans (German hemd "shirt" seems to be related). Outside of linguistics, however, few people would put a chemise on the same path as heaven.
* * *
A new "Star Wars" movie must be coming. The other day, driving past the comic book store, we saw a couple of storm troopers and a Darth Vader waving to traffic. Darth must have had daddy duty that day; he kept turning around to fiddle with the infant in the baby basket in the shade behind him. Forty years from now, some psychiatrist somewhere is going to hear some interesting stories.
Star is one of those widespread words that appears almost unchanged in languages far apart in time and place. In Old English, it was steorra; in German, it's Stern, in Sanskrit, star- in Hittite, shittar, in Latin stella, in Breton sterenn, and in Welsh seren. Greek, with its fetish for vowels, added one to this base and made it into aster.
War on the other hand is an English peculiarity. It's a Germanic word, but it came to us via French, and it probably originally didn't mean "war" in Germanic; the original sense seems to have been "to bring into confusion." One of its living relatives is the modern German verb verwirren which means "to confuse, perplex."
Just because they didn't use war, though, don't get the idea that the ancient Germanic peoples were pacifists. At the dawn of historical times they had a list of words for "war" as long as your sword-arm, among them the ones represented in Old English by guð, heaðo, hild, and wig (all of which were common in personal names, showing just how warlike they truly were).
But the most common Old English word used to translate Latin bellum was gewin. The basic meaning of this word was "struggle, strife." In the early Middle Ages, however, the sense drifted towards "gain by struggling for," and it ended up as our modern word win. Perhaps because of that shift, 11th century English-speakers began to use another word to mean "war," and they found it in the other available pool of language on the island, the French words that came over with the Normans.
Specifically, they used werre, which was the northern French way of saying the word that, in Paris French, came out as guerre. This Germanic word supplied the basic term for "war" not just in French but in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. The Romance languages rarely reached into German for their basic words, but this is an exception. Linguists speculate that the Romanic-speakers turned to Germanic for this word to avoid Latin bellum, their native word for "war," because it was tending to merge in sound with bello- "beautiful."
Our ancestors knew enough about war to know what it wasn't.
* * *
Speaking of "beautiful," with bikini season approaching, it's not surprise that diet keeps moving up the "most popular searches" list.
Diet took a roundabout route to its main modern sense of "to regulate ones food intake to avoid being fat." This sense first turns up about 1660. Earlier in Middle English it was used only as a noun and meant "regular allowance of food, daily food allotment," though since the 14th century this had begun to have a sense of "food restriction."
It comes via French from Medieval Latin dieta which meant "a day's work, diet, daily food allowance" (also "parliamentary assembly," a sense that still survives in historical writing).
Here someone with a little familiarity with Latin might guess a connection with dies "day." But that's a wrong turn. The classical Latin word is diaeta "prescribed way of life," and it comes from Greek diaita, originally "way of life, regimen, dwelling," which is related to diaitan, "separate, select" (food and drink). The roots of it are dia- "apart" and ainysthai "take."
An obsolete English word for "avoid fatness by limiting food intake" is banting.
* * *
"The Amazing Race" seems to be a TV show of some sort. I stopped watching TV in the '90s, so don't expect me to know this. Maybe it's a good show. You might think that because even a Web site that bothered to register the domain name theamazingracesucks.com is loaded with glowing reviews of it. But that's the Internet for you.
Race meaning "act of running" is one of the words that came into English with the Viking invasion (and settlement) of the early Middle Ages. Its immediate ancestor is Old Norse ras "running, rush (of water)." Originally the word's use was limited to the northern parts of England, where the Vikings settled, but it became general in England around 1550.
Is this related to the race that means "people of common descent?" Probably not. Linguists think that word came into English (about 1500) from French razza "race, breed, lineage," which possibly comes from Italian razza, a word of unknown origin (one etymologist, with a strong background in Semitic, suggests a connection with Arabic ra's "head, beginning, origin," which is cognate with Hebrew rosh).
The original senses of this second race in English were much broader and included "wines with characteristic flavor" (1520), "group of people with common occupation" (c.1500), and "generation" (c.1560). The meaning "tribe, nation, or people regarded as of common stock" emerged about 1600.
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 18.
* * *
Giacomo rallied in the stretch at 50-1 to win the Kentucky derby. But why is a big horse race called a derby? The name comes from the annual Derby horse race in England, which was begun in 1780 by the 12th Earl of Derby. It was such a big deal that Parliament always adjourned for it, and the name was being extended to other major horse races by 1875.
The type of hat called a derby got its name because it supposedly was worn at the races. Most sartorial sages seem to identify it with the bowler hat, which sometimes is said to honor a 19th century London hatmaker named J. Bowler, but which may simply be formed from bowl, which is what the hat looks like.
The shire name Derby in England goes back to Anglo-Saxon times, when it was Deorby, which literally means "deer village."
* * *
Giacomo is the Italian form of James, from Late Latin Jacomus, altered from Latin Jacobus. The Welsh form was Iago. The proper name comes to Church Latin via Greek, from Hebrew Ya'aqobh, which literally means "one that takes by the heel."
* * *
Speaking of the early Church, the new Crusades movie "Kingdom of Heaven" was a big deal online this week. Why do people think Orlando Bloom would make a convincing warrior? He's a pretty boy. He was right as Paris, in "Achilles," and he was adequate as Legolas, who fought with a bow and a knife, not a broadsword.
Heaven is a good Germanic word; in Old English it was heofon. It's almost certainly a relative of continental words like Old Norse himinn, Dutch hemel, and German Himmel, but the middle consonant seems to have undergone an odd shift in English.
The Christian use of this word for "the home of God above the sky" is an extension of its earlier meaning, which simply was "sky." It comes from an ancient Proto-Indo-European root which meant "to cover."
Another offshoot of this root is chemise, which comes via French from Late Latin camisia "shirt, tunic," originally a soldiers' word attested about c.400. Linguists think the legionnaires got it from Gaulish, and the Gauls got it from the Germans (German hemd "shirt" seems to be related). Outside of linguistics, however, few people would put a chemise on the same path as heaven.
* * *
A new "Star Wars" movie must be coming. The other day, driving past the comic book store, we saw a couple of storm troopers and a Darth Vader waving to traffic. Darth must have had daddy duty that day; he kept turning around to fiddle with the infant in the baby basket in the shade behind him. Forty years from now, some psychiatrist somewhere is going to hear some interesting stories.
Star is one of those widespread words that appears almost unchanged in languages far apart in time and place. In Old English, it was steorra; in German, it's Stern, in Sanskrit, star- in Hittite, shittar, in Latin stella, in Breton sterenn, and in Welsh seren. Greek, with its fetish for vowels, added one to this base and made it into aster.
War on the other hand is an English peculiarity. It's a Germanic word, but it came to us via French, and it probably originally didn't mean "war" in Germanic; the original sense seems to have been "to bring into confusion." One of its living relatives is the modern German verb verwirren which means "to confuse, perplex."
Just because they didn't use war, though, don't get the idea that the ancient Germanic peoples were pacifists. At the dawn of historical times they had a list of words for "war" as long as your sword-arm, among them the ones represented in Old English by guð, heaðo, hild, and wig (all of which were common in personal names, showing just how warlike they truly were).
But the most common Old English word used to translate Latin bellum was gewin. The basic meaning of this word was "struggle, strife." In the early Middle Ages, however, the sense drifted towards "gain by struggling for," and it ended up as our modern word win. Perhaps because of that shift, 11th century English-speakers began to use another word to mean "war," and they found it in the other available pool of language on the island, the French words that came over with the Normans.
Specifically, they used werre, which was the northern French way of saying the word that, in Paris French, came out as guerre. This Germanic word supplied the basic term for "war" not just in French but in Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. The Romance languages rarely reached into German for their basic words, but this is an exception. Linguists speculate that the Romanic-speakers turned to Germanic for this word to avoid Latin bellum, their native word for "war," because it was tending to merge in sound with bello- "beautiful."
Our ancestors knew enough about war to know what it wasn't.
* * *
Speaking of "beautiful," with bikini season approaching, it's not surprise that diet keeps moving up the "most popular searches" list.
Diet took a roundabout route to its main modern sense of "to regulate ones food intake to avoid being fat." This sense first turns up about 1660. Earlier in Middle English it was used only as a noun and meant "regular allowance of food, daily food allotment," though since the 14th century this had begun to have a sense of "food restriction."
It comes via French from Medieval Latin dieta which meant "a day's work, diet, daily food allowance" (also "parliamentary assembly," a sense that still survives in historical writing).
Here someone with a little familiarity with Latin might guess a connection with dies "day." But that's a wrong turn. The classical Latin word is diaeta "prescribed way of life," and it comes from Greek diaita, originally "way of life, regimen, dwelling," which is related to diaitan, "separate, select" (food and drink). The roots of it are dia- "apart" and ainysthai "take."
An obsolete English word for "avoid fatness by limiting food intake" is banting.
* * *
"The Amazing Race" seems to be a TV show of some sort. I stopped watching TV in the '90s, so don't expect me to know this. Maybe it's a good show. You might think that because even a Web site that bothered to register the domain name theamazingracesucks.com is loaded with glowing reviews of it. But that's the Internet for you.
Race meaning "act of running" is one of the words that came into English with the Viking invasion (and settlement) of the early Middle Ages. Its immediate ancestor is Old Norse ras "running, rush (of water)." Originally the word's use was limited to the northern parts of England, where the Vikings settled, but it became general in England around 1550.
Is this related to the race that means "people of common descent?" Probably not. Linguists think that word came into English (about 1500) from French razza "race, breed, lineage," which possibly comes from Italian razza, a word of unknown origin (one etymologist, with a strong background in Semitic, suggests a connection with Arabic ra's "head, beginning, origin," which is cognate with Hebrew rosh).
The original senses of this second race in English were much broader and included "wines with characteristic flavor" (1520), "group of people with common occupation" (c.1500), and "generation" (c.1560). The meaning "tribe, nation, or people regarded as of common stock" emerged about 1600.
Labels: etymology
