Carnival of the Etymologies
A regular Thursday feature of "Done with Mirrors"
The ugly trial of Michael Jackson plodded along like one of those zombies in his old "Thriller" video. I wonder if it's even possible to watch that now without reading into it. The trial has put the word pedophile back in the headlines (not that it ever seems to leave them for long).
The noun pedophile is not recorded until 1951. It's a derivative of pedophilia, which is first attested in 1905 in the writings of the English psychologist Havelock Ellis. For all I can tell, he coined it.
Some people notice such late dates of origin for such common sexual terms and then conclude that, because such behaviors or desires were not delineated by a separate word, they were not considered shameful or criminal until this late date. But this rarely is the case. Before there was pedophilia there was pederasty (1609), and it went by still other names before that.
Why Ellis jettisoned pederasty and re-introduced the ancient Greek pedophilia, which had no living use until his works, I do not know. But the doctors of the mind, when the come to describe sexuality, tend to strive to avoid terms that have a scolding quality. Thus, since the 1980 revision of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," what used to be called fetishes or perversions now are defined under the morally neutral and more dignified heading paraphilia.
The root of both pedophilia and pederasty is the Greek pais (genitive paidos) meaning "child, boy." Paiderastes "lover of boys" was in ancient Greek (it's the word Plato uses), and it came down to English via Latin pæderastia. The second element of the Greek compound is related to eros. The Greek writer Theogenes uses paidophiles, with the second element based on philos "loving."
Ancient Greek distinguished four different kinds of love, and eros was "sexual love," while phileo meant something more like "have affection for." [The other two were agapao "have regard for, be contented with," and stergo, which was used especially of the love of parents and children or a ruler and his subjects.]
For all their imporance and frequency, in both ancient Greek and modern languages, the roots of eros and philos remain a linguistic mystery.
Pais "boy, child" seems to be from the Proto-Indo-European base *peu-, meaning "small, little, few, young." That gives it relatives in few (Old English feawe); Latin paucus "few, little," pauper "poor," and puer "child, boy;" and Sanskrit putrah "son."
Other modern words descended from Greek paidos include pedagogue (1387), which before it acquired a deprecatory sense (which dates at least from the time of Pepys) originally meant simply "schoolmaster, teacher." But the "teacher" sense evolved out of the meaning of the word in classical Roman times, when a paedagogus was a "slave who escorted children to school and generally supervised them." The second element in the Greek compound is agogos "leader."
Obviously related is pedant, which, again came to English meaning literally "schoolmaster" (1588), but within eight years of its first appearance had come to mean "person who trumpets minor points of learning." Schoolmasters seem to have been regarded as prickly and arrogant in 16th and 17th century England, at least based on the linguistic evidence. In Donne's lovely erotic poem "Sunne Rising," he bids the morning sun be off and let his love and him linger in bed, telling it, "Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide Late schooleboyes."
Less obviously related is encyclopedia which originally came to English (1531) not meaning a type of book, but "course of construction." The modern sense of "reference work arranged alphabetically" is attested from 1644, and in the late 18th century it was often applied specifically to the French "Encylopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Artes, et des Métiers" (1751-65).
The word is thought to be a false reading by Latin authors of Greek enkyklios paideia, which the Romans took as "general education," but which literally means "training in a circle." By this the Greeks probably meant the essentials of a liberal education. The second element of this is paideia "child-rearing."
The British spelling of the prefix paedo- is much superior to the American form because it avoids confusion with pedo-, which means "foot." [Ellis originally spelled the word paidophilia, which also works.] This is the base of "foot"-words like pedestal, pedestrian, and, more obscurely, pedigree. A pedigree was originally (early 15th century) the genealogical table or chart itself, and it is a garbled derivative of Old French pied de gru, literally "foot of a crane." On old manuscripts, "descent" was indicated by a forked sign resembling the branching lines of a genealogical chart; the sign also happened to look like a bird's footprint.
But probably not belonging here, though it looks like it ought to belong, is peddler. This word first emerges early in the 13th century (as peoddere). It has the appearance of an agent noun, but no verb is attested in Middle English. Some etymologists speculate that it is a diminutive form of ped, "panier, basket," but this word also is of unknown origin, and there is no record of it before about 1390.
'Deep Throat' Draws Praise, Criticism was a much-seen headline last week. Throat is a good old Germanic word. The Anglo-Saxon form was þrote, though this only is preserved in the compound þrotbolla "Adam's apple" (literally "throat boll"). It's related to a good Old English verb, þrutian "to swell," which did not survive.
Thirteen-year-old Anurag Kashyap won the national spelling bee by correctly spelling appoggiatura, some sort of musical term I confess I'd never heard or seen before.
It's an Italian word (as are a great many of our musical terms), and it comes apart in Latin into ad- "to" and *podiare "to support," which is related to pedestal and all those other foot-based ped- words I wrote about up there. So it's not at all as strange as it looks.
Finally, in the "good news" department, we had Peru Doctors Separate 'Mermaid' Baby Legs. She's not a mermaid, of course, but it's an excuse to explore the two Germanic words for "ocean" (ocean isn't one of them; it's an import).
Mermaid is a Middle English word (Old English used merewif), and the first element in it is mere "sea, lake," a word still in dictionaries, but rarely encountered alone except in dialect and old poetry. But it's a good Old English word, with relatives across the Germanic language group (Old Norse marr "sea," Dutch meer "lake," German Meer "sea")
This seems to have been the general Indo-European root for "large body of open water" (cf. Latin mare, Russian more, Lithuanian mares; also Welsh mor "sea;" Armorica, an ancient name for Brittany, is from Gaulish Are-morici "people living near the sea").
The other Germanic word is sea (Old English sæ), which has no certain connections with words in any other language group. But it is quite extensively used in Germanic. The logical conclusion is that one word originally meant "large lake" and the other meant "open body of salt water," but history rarely presents evidence of design.
Old English sæ meant both "sea" and "lake," and a look across the Germanic word hoarde shows no firm distinction between "sea" and "lake," either by size or by salt vs. fresh. The two words are used more or less interchangeably, and exist in opposite senses (e.g. Gothic saiws "lake," marei "sea;" but Dutch zee "sea," meer "lake"). Old Norse sær was "sea," but Danish sø usually is "lake," though it can be "sea" in phrases. German has See, which can be both "sea" (feminine) or "lake" (masculine).
If there ever was a clear distinction of the two words, the confusion may reflect the ancient geography of the Baltic, where the Germanic languages are thought to have originated, which was full of large lakes and small, brackish seas and evolved rapidly over time.
Mermaids were tail-less in northern Europe; the fishy form is a medieval influence from classical sirens.
One of the odd relatives of mermaid is meerkat, the small South African mammals that have become popular in Disney-type movies since about 1980. It's a Dutch word that originally meant "monkey," but it actually is a compound that appears to say "lake-cat." There's no sensible reason for this, and some linguists think the Dutch picked up the word from India, as a folk-etymology corruption of a native word there like Hindi markat "ape." The trouble with this theory is that the word meerkat was in widespread use in Teutonic by the early 1400s, long before any known direct contact between Holland and India. It was first applied to the South African mammals in 1801.
The ugly trial of Michael Jackson plodded along like one of those zombies in his old "Thriller" video. I wonder if it's even possible to watch that now without reading into it. The trial has put the word pedophile back in the headlines (not that it ever seems to leave them for long).
The noun pedophile is not recorded until 1951. It's a derivative of pedophilia, which is first attested in 1905 in the writings of the English psychologist Havelock Ellis. For all I can tell, he coined it.
Some people notice such late dates of origin for such common sexual terms and then conclude that, because such behaviors or desires were not delineated by a separate word, they were not considered shameful or criminal until this late date. But this rarely is the case. Before there was pedophilia there was pederasty (1609), and it went by still other names before that.
Why Ellis jettisoned pederasty and re-introduced the ancient Greek pedophilia, which had no living use until his works, I do not know. But the doctors of the mind, when the come to describe sexuality, tend to strive to avoid terms that have a scolding quality. Thus, since the 1980 revision of the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," what used to be called fetishes or perversions now are defined under the morally neutral and more dignified heading paraphilia.
The root of both pedophilia and pederasty is the Greek pais (genitive paidos) meaning "child, boy." Paiderastes "lover of boys" was in ancient Greek (it's the word Plato uses), and it came down to English via Latin pæderastia. The second element of the Greek compound is related to eros. The Greek writer Theogenes uses paidophiles, with the second element based on philos "loving."
Ancient Greek distinguished four different kinds of love, and eros was "sexual love," while phileo meant something more like "have affection for." [The other two were agapao "have regard for, be contented with," and stergo, which was used especially of the love of parents and children or a ruler and his subjects.]
For all their imporance and frequency, in both ancient Greek and modern languages, the roots of eros and philos remain a linguistic mystery.
Pais "boy, child" seems to be from the Proto-Indo-European base *peu-, meaning "small, little, few, young." That gives it relatives in few (Old English feawe); Latin paucus "few, little," pauper "poor," and puer "child, boy;" and Sanskrit putrah "son."
Other modern words descended from Greek paidos include pedagogue (1387), which before it acquired a deprecatory sense (which dates at least from the time of Pepys) originally meant simply "schoolmaster, teacher." But the "teacher" sense evolved out of the meaning of the word in classical Roman times, when a paedagogus was a "slave who escorted children to school and generally supervised them." The second element in the Greek compound is agogos "leader."
Obviously related is pedant, which, again came to English meaning literally "schoolmaster" (1588), but within eight years of its first appearance had come to mean "person who trumpets minor points of learning." Schoolmasters seem to have been regarded as prickly and arrogant in 16th and 17th century England, at least based on the linguistic evidence. In Donne's lovely erotic poem "Sunne Rising," he bids the morning sun be off and let his love and him linger in bed, telling it, "Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide Late schooleboyes."
Less obviously related is encyclopedia which originally came to English (1531) not meaning a type of book, but "course of construction." The modern sense of "reference work arranged alphabetically" is attested from 1644, and in the late 18th century it was often applied specifically to the French "Encylopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Artes, et des Métiers" (1751-65).
The word is thought to be a false reading by Latin authors of Greek enkyklios paideia, which the Romans took as "general education," but which literally means "training in a circle." By this the Greeks probably meant the essentials of a liberal education. The second element of this is paideia "child-rearing."
The British spelling of the prefix paedo- is much superior to the American form because it avoids confusion with pedo-, which means "foot." [Ellis originally spelled the word paidophilia, which also works.] This is the base of "foot"-words like pedestal, pedestrian, and, more obscurely, pedigree. A pedigree was originally (early 15th century) the genealogical table or chart itself, and it is a garbled derivative of Old French pied de gru, literally "foot of a crane." On old manuscripts, "descent" was indicated by a forked sign resembling the branching lines of a genealogical chart; the sign also happened to look like a bird's footprint.
But probably not belonging here, though it looks like it ought to belong, is peddler. This word first emerges early in the 13th century (as peoddere). It has the appearance of an agent noun, but no verb is attested in Middle English. Some etymologists speculate that it is a diminutive form of ped, "panier, basket," but this word also is of unknown origin, and there is no record of it before about 1390.
'Deep Throat' Draws Praise, Criticism was a much-seen headline last week. Throat is a good old Germanic word. The Anglo-Saxon form was þrote, though this only is preserved in the compound þrotbolla "Adam's apple" (literally "throat boll"). It's related to a good Old English verb, þrutian "to swell," which did not survive.
Thirteen-year-old Anurag Kashyap won the national spelling bee by correctly spelling appoggiatura, some sort of musical term I confess I'd never heard or seen before.
It's an Italian word (as are a great many of our musical terms), and it comes apart in Latin into ad- "to" and *podiare "to support," which is related to pedestal and all those other foot-based ped- words I wrote about up there. So it's not at all as strange as it looks.
Finally, in the "good news" department, we had Peru Doctors Separate 'Mermaid' Baby Legs. She's not a mermaid, of course, but it's an excuse to explore the two Germanic words for "ocean" (ocean isn't one of them; it's an import).
Mermaid is a Middle English word (Old English used merewif), and the first element in it is mere "sea, lake," a word still in dictionaries, but rarely encountered alone except in dialect and old poetry. But it's a good Old English word, with relatives across the Germanic language group (Old Norse marr "sea," Dutch meer "lake," German Meer "sea")
This seems to have been the general Indo-European root for "large body of open water" (cf. Latin mare, Russian more, Lithuanian mares; also Welsh mor "sea;" Armorica, an ancient name for Brittany, is from Gaulish Are-morici "people living near the sea").
The other Germanic word is sea (Old English sæ), which has no certain connections with words in any other language group. But it is quite extensively used in Germanic. The logical conclusion is that one word originally meant "large lake" and the other meant "open body of salt water," but history rarely presents evidence of design.
Old English sæ meant both "sea" and "lake," and a look across the Germanic word hoarde shows no firm distinction between "sea" and "lake," either by size or by salt vs. fresh. The two words are used more or less interchangeably, and exist in opposite senses (e.g. Gothic saiws "lake," marei "sea;" but Dutch zee "sea," meer "lake"). Old Norse sær was "sea," but Danish sø usually is "lake," though it can be "sea" in phrases. German has See, which can be both "sea" (feminine) or "lake" (masculine).
If there ever was a clear distinction of the two words, the confusion may reflect the ancient geography of the Baltic, where the Germanic languages are thought to have originated, which was full of large lakes and small, brackish seas and evolved rapidly over time.
Mermaids were tail-less in northern Europe; the fishy form is a medieval influence from classical sirens.
One of the odd relatives of mermaid is meerkat, the small South African mammals that have become popular in Disney-type movies since about 1980. It's a Dutch word that originally meant "monkey," but it actually is a compound that appears to say "lake-cat." There's no sensible reason for this, and some linguists think the Dutch picked up the word from India, as a folk-etymology corruption of a native word there like Hindi markat "ape." The trouble with this theory is that the word meerkat was in widespread use in Teutonic by the early 1400s, long before any known direct contact between Holland and India. It was first applied to the South African mammals in 1801.
Labels: etymology
