Carnival of the Etymologies
[A regular Thursday feature of "Done with Mirrors"]
Writing about certain cartoons this week got me thinking about that word and where it came from. The extension of cartoon to "comical drawings in newspapers and magazines" is fairly recent, perhaps no older than this June 24, 1843, reference in the British magazine "Punch":
The word itself has been in English since 1671, as an artists' term meaning "preliminary sketches made on strong, heavy paper." The word comes via French from Italian, and originally meant the paper itself.
[Carton is the same word, directly from Latin through French. Cartons were made of the same heavy pasteboard artists used for sketching.]
If you follow these words back through Medieval Latin, you discover them as the augmentive case of carta "paper," which is from Latin charta "leaf of paper, tablet."
That connects them to card, chart, and other similar words. The Romans seem to have got this productive word from Greek khartes "layer of papyrus," which probably is from some Egyptian word.
When terrorists bloodied London last week, they left their scars on one of the quirkiest and most beloved mass transit institutions in the world, the Tube. The London subway was christened the "Twopenny Tube" even before it even opened, by H.D. Browne, in the "Londoner" of June 30, 1900.
Tube for "cylindrical railway tunnel" is attested from 1847. The noun tube first appears in English in Shakespeare's day, from Middle French tube, which is from Latin tubus "tube, pipe," a word of unknown origin.
Tuba, the musical instrument, is related. Its source is Latin tuba "straight bronze war trumpet," an etymological cousin of tubus. Tuber "thick underground stem" probably is out of the family, however. Its Latin source is tuber "lump, bump," which is perhaps related to tumere "to swell."
Many cities have underground railways, but only London has the Tube. The Paris Metro (1904) is from the French abbreviation of Chemin de Fer Métropolitain "Metropolitan Railway." Berlin's U-bahn (1938) is a German shortening of Untergrund-bahn, literally "underground railway."
The preferred American subway for "underground railway in a city" is attested from 1893, first in reference to Boston.
In my favorite coffee shop this week, the owner had a box on the counter with the label “please return thermoses here.” We started speculating on the correct plural of thermos, but we didn’t come up with an answer.
Thermos (still a trademark name in Britain) was registered in 1907. The thing itself was invented by the Scottish scientist Sir James Dewar, who, among other accomplishments, first liquified hydrogen, was co-inventer of cordite, made a bubble four feet across, and was the first to predict what is now called superconductivity.
His discovery of the vacuum flask was a side-effect of his research in cryogenics. He built the first one in 1892, but no one bothered to manufacture them commercially until 1904, when two German glass blowers formed Thermos GmbH. The thermos itself was patented then, and named, in German. Supposedly the company sponsored a contest to name the thing, and a Munich resident won with a submission of Thermos. The name turns up in English three years later.
The trouble with pluralizing it is that thermos is an ancient Greek adjective (it literally means “hot”). English thermos at first generally was used as an adjective, too. People wrote of a “Thermos flask” or “Thermos bottle.” That makes the formation of a proper plural somewhat uncertain, as the ending in Greek might be different depending on whether you treat thermos as a noun or an adjective, and depending on the gender of the noun it is attached to.
Thermoses is how it usually has appeared in English, but the coffee shop owner and I agreed that doesn’t look or sound right. Thermai or therma are more etymologically correct, but they look nothing like English.
Greek thermos is related to therme “heat,” from the Proto-Indo-European base *ghwerm-/*ghworm- meaning “warm.” It’s relatives include Latin fornax “an oven, kiln;” Sanskrit gharmah “heat;” and Old English wearm (modern warm).
In ancient Persia, today would have fallen in the month of Garmapada a name formed from garma- “heat,” which is yet another thermos cousin.
Greek thermos meant both “warm” and “hot.” The distinction, based on degree of heat, between “warm” and “hot” is general in Balto-Slavic and Germanic languages, but in other tongues one word often covers both concepts, for instance Latin calidus, French chaud, Spanish caliente.
Greek nouns commonly end in -s in the singular, but -s is the overwhelming choice for pluralizing nouns in English. This has confused English-speakers who encounter words nativized from Greek. One common reaction is to snip off the -s and make a false English singular out of a perfectly good Greek one. The gyro sandwich that you get at a Greek restaurant, for instance, is really a gyros in Modern Greek (the word means “circle,” and the name originally referred to the roasted lamb in the sandwich, which was cooked on a rotating spit).
Kudos meaning “credit or praise” is another Anglicized Greek singular noun in -s, and the false singular kudo sometimes turns up in English. But kudos is rare in English, and its use generally is restricted to learned circles. Thus pedants can keep it on a tight leash and pounce on anyone boorish enough to write kudo.
The more common problem is the one presented by thermos: how to pluralize a noun that already ends in -s. Rhinoceros (from a Greek compound meaning “nose-horn”) has puzzled people for generations. “What is the plural of rhinoceros?” Sir Charles Eliot wrote in “The East Africa Protectorate” in 1905. “Well, Liddell and Scott [who wrote the authoritative Greek-English Lexicon] seem to authorize ‘rhinocerotes,’ which is pedantic, but ‘rhinoceroses’ is not euphonious.”
Fortunately, in that case, English as embraced the easily pluralized short form rhino. No such solution is offered for octopus, however, which is from the Greek adjective oktopous, meaning “eight-footed.” The proper plural would be octopodes, though octopuses probably works better in English. Octopi is an ignorant error, from mistaken assumption that the -us in the word is the Latin noun ending that takes -i in plural.
Another puzzler is biceps, which is a Latin word meaning “having two parts” (literally “two-headed”). Despite the -s, it is singular, and there is no such word as *bicep. A proper plural would be bicepses.
Perhaps the most astonishing relative of thermos is fornication, which comes ultimately from Latin fornax “oven.” Because ancient ovens were arched or dome-shaped, the word (in slightly altered form fornix) came to mean “arch, vaulted chamber.” And because Roman prostitutes commonly solicited from under the arches of certain buildings, the word acquired yet another layer of meaning, “brothel.” From there it was just a short hop to fornication.
Leaks are a hot topic in Washington, D.C., this week. The figurative meaning "come to be known in spite of efforts at concealment" dates from at least 1832; the transitive sense is first recorded 1859; the noun in this sense dates from 1950. The literal sense, of course, is "to let water in or out" [as Dr. Johnson concisely defines it], and it first turns up in English around 1420.
The direct source seems to be Middle Dutch (leken "to drip, to leak") or Old Norse (leka), and likely it was a word English sailors first picked up in the North Sea trade. There was a cognate Old English verb leccan "to moisten," but this did not survive into Middle English.
All these words come from Proto-Germanic *lek-, also preserved in German lechzen "to be parched with thirst." The whole group apparently is distantly related to lake.
NASA delayed the launch of the space shuttle this week. Shuttle as a name for a type of spacecraft that runs back and forth from Earth to space has been around since 1969; it was extended into space from a similar use in reference to aircraft (1942) and trains (1895). The image is of a weaver's instrument's back-and-forth movement over the warp.
The weaving instrument was so called (first attested 1338) from its being "shot" across the threads. The Old English word was scytel and it meant "a dart, an arrow." The word is related to shoot and to the Old Norse noun skutill "harpoon." Thus, unconsciously, the space shuttle returns the word to its roots, as it shoots through the clouds into the heavens.
In some other languages, the word for the weaver's machine takes its name from its resemblance to a boat (cf. Latin navicula, French navette, German weberschiff).
Writing about certain cartoons this week got me thinking about that word and where it came from. The extension of cartoon to "comical drawings in newspapers and magazines" is fairly recent, perhaps no older than this June 24, 1843, reference in the British magazine "Punch":
"Punch has the benevolence to announce, that in an early number of his ensuing Volume he will astonish the Parliamentary Committee by the publication of several exquisite designs, to be called Punch's Cartoons!"
The word itself has been in English since 1671, as an artists' term meaning "preliminary sketches made on strong, heavy paper." The word comes via French from Italian, and originally meant the paper itself.
[Carton is the same word, directly from Latin through French. Cartons were made of the same heavy pasteboard artists used for sketching.]
If you follow these words back through Medieval Latin, you discover them as the augmentive case of carta "paper," which is from Latin charta "leaf of paper, tablet."
That connects them to card, chart, and other similar words. The Romans seem to have got this productive word from Greek khartes "layer of papyrus," which probably is from some Egyptian word.
When terrorists bloodied London last week, they left their scars on one of the quirkiest and most beloved mass transit institutions in the world, the Tube. The London subway was christened the "Twopenny Tube" even before it even opened, by H.D. Browne, in the "Londoner" of June 30, 1900.
Tube for "cylindrical railway tunnel" is attested from 1847. The noun tube first appears in English in Shakespeare's day, from Middle French tube, which is from Latin tubus "tube, pipe," a word of unknown origin.
Tuba, the musical instrument, is related. Its source is Latin tuba "straight bronze war trumpet," an etymological cousin of tubus. Tuber "thick underground stem" probably is out of the family, however. Its Latin source is tuber "lump, bump," which is perhaps related to tumere "to swell."
Many cities have underground railways, but only London has the Tube. The Paris Metro (1904) is from the French abbreviation of Chemin de Fer Métropolitain "Metropolitan Railway." Berlin's U-bahn (1938) is a German shortening of Untergrund-bahn, literally "underground railway."
The preferred American subway for "underground railway in a city" is attested from 1893, first in reference to Boston.
In my favorite coffee shop this week, the owner had a box on the counter with the label “please return thermoses here.” We started speculating on the correct plural of thermos, but we didn’t come up with an answer.
Thermos (still a trademark name in Britain) was registered in 1907. The thing itself was invented by the Scottish scientist Sir James Dewar, who, among other accomplishments, first liquified hydrogen, was co-inventer of cordite, made a bubble four feet across, and was the first to predict what is now called superconductivity.
His discovery of the vacuum flask was a side-effect of his research in cryogenics. He built the first one in 1892, but no one bothered to manufacture them commercially until 1904, when two German glass blowers formed Thermos GmbH. The thermos itself was patented then, and named, in German. Supposedly the company sponsored a contest to name the thing, and a Munich resident won with a submission of Thermos. The name turns up in English three years later.
The trouble with pluralizing it is that thermos is an ancient Greek adjective (it literally means “hot”). English thermos at first generally was used as an adjective, too. People wrote of a “Thermos flask” or “Thermos bottle.” That makes the formation of a proper plural somewhat uncertain, as the ending in Greek might be different depending on whether you treat thermos as a noun or an adjective, and depending on the gender of the noun it is attached to.
Thermoses is how it usually has appeared in English, but the coffee shop owner and I agreed that doesn’t look or sound right. Thermai or therma are more etymologically correct, but they look nothing like English.
Greek thermos is related to therme “heat,” from the Proto-Indo-European base *ghwerm-/*ghworm- meaning “warm.” It’s relatives include Latin fornax “an oven, kiln;” Sanskrit gharmah “heat;” and Old English wearm (modern warm).
In ancient Persia, today would have fallen in the month of Garmapada a name formed from garma- “heat,” which is yet another thermos cousin.
Greek thermos meant both “warm” and “hot.” The distinction, based on degree of heat, between “warm” and “hot” is general in Balto-Slavic and Germanic languages, but in other tongues one word often covers both concepts, for instance Latin calidus, French chaud, Spanish caliente.
Greek nouns commonly end in -s in the singular, but -s is the overwhelming choice for pluralizing nouns in English. This has confused English-speakers who encounter words nativized from Greek. One common reaction is to snip off the -s and make a false English singular out of a perfectly good Greek one. The gyro sandwich that you get at a Greek restaurant, for instance, is really a gyros in Modern Greek (the word means “circle,” and the name originally referred to the roasted lamb in the sandwich, which was cooked on a rotating spit).
Kudos meaning “credit or praise” is another Anglicized Greek singular noun in -s, and the false singular kudo sometimes turns up in English. But kudos is rare in English, and its use generally is restricted to learned circles. Thus pedants can keep it on a tight leash and pounce on anyone boorish enough to write kudo.
The more common problem is the one presented by thermos: how to pluralize a noun that already ends in -s. Rhinoceros (from a Greek compound meaning “nose-horn”) has puzzled people for generations. “What is the plural of rhinoceros?” Sir Charles Eliot wrote in “The East Africa Protectorate” in 1905. “Well, Liddell and Scott [who wrote the authoritative Greek-English Lexicon] seem to authorize ‘rhinocerotes,’ which is pedantic, but ‘rhinoceroses’ is not euphonious.”
Fortunately, in that case, English as embraced the easily pluralized short form rhino. No such solution is offered for octopus, however, which is from the Greek adjective oktopous, meaning “eight-footed.” The proper plural would be octopodes, though octopuses probably works better in English. Octopi is an ignorant error, from mistaken assumption that the -us in the word is the Latin noun ending that takes -i in plural.
Another puzzler is biceps, which is a Latin word meaning “having two parts” (literally “two-headed”). Despite the -s, it is singular, and there is no such word as *bicep. A proper plural would be bicepses.
Perhaps the most astonishing relative of thermos is fornication, which comes ultimately from Latin fornax “oven.” Because ancient ovens were arched or dome-shaped, the word (in slightly altered form fornix) came to mean “arch, vaulted chamber.” And because Roman prostitutes commonly solicited from under the arches of certain buildings, the word acquired yet another layer of meaning, “brothel.” From there it was just a short hop to fornication.
Leaks are a hot topic in Washington, D.C., this week. The figurative meaning "come to be known in spite of efforts at concealment" dates from at least 1832; the transitive sense is first recorded 1859; the noun in this sense dates from 1950. The literal sense, of course, is "to let water in or out" [as Dr. Johnson concisely defines it], and it first turns up in English around 1420.
The direct source seems to be Middle Dutch (leken "to drip, to leak") or Old Norse (leka), and likely it was a word English sailors first picked up in the North Sea trade. There was a cognate Old English verb leccan "to moisten," but this did not survive into Middle English.
All these words come from Proto-Germanic *lek-, also preserved in German lechzen "to be parched with thirst." The whole group apparently is distantly related to lake.
NASA delayed the launch of the space shuttle this week. Shuttle as a name for a type of spacecraft that runs back and forth from Earth to space has been around since 1969; it was extended into space from a similar use in reference to aircraft (1942) and trains (1895). The image is of a weaver's instrument's back-and-forth movement over the warp.
The weaving instrument was so called (first attested 1338) from its being "shot" across the threads. The Old English word was scytel and it meant "a dart, an arrow." The word is related to shoot and to the Old Norse noun skutill "harpoon." Thus, unconsciously, the space shuttle returns the word to its roots, as it shoots through the clouds into the heavens.
In some other languages, the word for the weaver's machine takes its name from its resemblance to a boat (cf. Latin navicula, French navette, German weberschiff).
Labels: etymology
