Tag: Fun Etymology

Howdy, followers!
It’s Tuesday and, as usual, this means a fresh out of the oven new Fun Etymology!

Today, we want to try something a bit different. For the past several months, we’ve brought to you the history of various words in English. But that is only half the fun in etymology!
The real fun is exploring how a word evolves in related languages, so today we bring you the first Fun Etymology Tree of Amazement! (Cooler name pending, suggestions accepted and highly encouraged)

Today’s word is “gold”, the shiniest of shiny metals and eternal symbol of wealth and status.
Words in rhombuses are not direct descendants but result from borrowing.

Did you know that in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, the word for gold, “teocuitlatl”, literally means “god poop”?

Hello hello hello good people!
It’s Tuesday, and that means the time of Fun Etymologies is come!

Often, when words are borrowed from one language to another, they change meaning, sometimes even dramatically. We’ve already seen it happen in some past Fun Etymologies. However, some kinds of meaning change (or semantic change, as we linguists like to call them) are more frequent than others. Today, we want to introduce you to semantic narrowing: this is when a word which originally had a very broad meaning comes to mean something very specific, and it happens all the time in borrowing.

For example, take the Japanese loanwords “katana”, “kimono” and “sake”. In Japanese, these words mean “sword”, “dress” and “alcoholic drink”, respectively. When they were borrowed in English, however, their meaning became specialised: while for a Japanese speaker beer, wine and whisky are all “sake”, to an English speaker the word only refers to Japanese rice wine, for which they have a number of names depending on the variety; to a Japanese, a European medieval Zweihänder is as much a “katana” as what we call a “katana” in English, whose technical name should be “nihonto” or “daito”.

Another example is “sombrero”, which in Spanish simply means “hat”, but which was borrowed in English to mean a particular kind of wide-brimmed hat used in Mexico.

Narrowing also occurs within a language over time: the ancestor of the modern English word “hound” once simply meant “dog”, but today only refers to a specific set of breeds.
An extreme example is the word “deer”, which comes from Old English “deor”, which simply meant “animal”!

We at the HLC want to recognise International Women’s Day by doing what we do best – talking language.

Did you know that many of the pejorative terms we have for women, in the English language, weren’t always pejorative? For example, the word ‘hussy’ is an abbreviated form of ‘housewife’ which used to be a neutral female equivalent of ‘husband’, i.e. referring to the mistress of a household. In today’s blog post you may have sighted the infamous “c-word” (you know the one). This word’s original form was mostly used in place names and landscape descriptions, its meaning being something like ‘cleft’. Female terminology undergoing pejoration is not only the case in English, of course; the Swedish equivalent of the c-word originally had the meaning ‘wet meadow land’ – we’re not convinced that these nature descriptions originally had the pejorative meaning they developed once they began to refer to something female.

Not entirely surprising, we find the opposite pattern for male terms: the word ‘boy’, for example, used to be a pejorative term for male servants, which then developed into today’s neutral term. The term which used to refer to young males before ‘boy’ is the word ‘knight’, which developed into meaning ‘boy servant’ before it finally reached the heightened meaning we associate it with today. (Of course, ‘boy’ unfortunately survives as a pejorative term reserved to address certain groups in society).

Words are powerful, so we should choose them wisely.

Hello, lovely followers!

It’s Tuesday and, as usual, that means Fun Etymology time!

You know we at the HLC like to point out unlikely links between seemingly unconnected words, and today we’re not going to let you down. Today’s question is what does the salary you receive each year have to do with salt?

Well, apart from the money you earn being useful for buying salt, not much, isn’t it?

But actually, the word “salary” and the word “salt” share the same origin, the IE root *sal- ‘salt’.

Why is this so?
At the time of the Romans salt was a very precious commodity: it was difficult to extract from salt water and from mines, and the demand for it was very high, making it even more precious than gold in some circumstances (that’s where the common superstition that spilling salt is bad luck comes from. Imagine spilling over a pot of gold dust!).
Due to this, during the Roman Empire very well-payed professions, such as soldiers, received part of their pay in sal, a kind of payment which was called a “salarium”, or “salt-money”, a word derived from “sal”, “salt”.
This, like many other words, made its way through Old French, where it became “salarie”, and finally to Modern English “salary”.

Next time you season your food, think about how lucky you are that you live in a time when salt doesn’t cost like actual gold!

Hello, lovely followers!
It’s Tuesday, and that means our Fun Etymology is here!

Today, we want to go back to the origins of Fun Etymologies and talk to you once more about surprising foreign influences on the English language.

During the 19th century, an…ummm…ethically problematic period in the history of England, the British Empire had, through subterfuge (as well as instigating an actual war), obtained exclusive mercantile access to the Chinese city of Hong Kong. In the ensuing decades, commerce with China exploded, and interest in that millennia-old isolationist empire bloomed as well.

To communicate with the people they were doing business with, the English and Chinese merchants developed what is called a pidgin, a language that develops whenever speakers of two totally different languages have the need to communicate, and which “mixes” grammar and vocabulary from both its parent languages.
The opening of commerce with China was so world-breaking that numerous words made their way from this pidgin to the English language, some of which we still use every day. Here’s a short list:

1. The word “pidgin” itself: probably representing a Cantonese pronunciation of the word “business”.
2. The word “ketchup”, from Min-Nan 鮭汁 (ke-chiap), which originally indicated a kind of fermented fish brine used as a sauce. That’s why Heinz bottles still specify it’s TOMATO ketchup.
3. The expression “long time no see”, a direct translation of Chinese 好久不见 (hǎojiǔbújiàn).
4. The word “chopsticks”, which is a blend of the Cantonese word 速 (approximately pronounced “chuck”, meaning “fast”), with the English word “sticks”, probably influenced from the homophony of the words for “fast” and “chopstick” in Mandarin (both pronounced “kuài”). So basically, a mix of an English word with a Cantonese-Mandarin pun. Talk about complicated!

These are some of the most prominent, but the list is amazingly long. If you look around, you’re bound to find a lot more.

Just another example of how misguided people who want to keep the English language “pure” actually are.
See you next time!

And now for something completely different:
It’s…
Monty Python’s Fun Etymology!

You probably all know the comedy troupe Monty Python. Their revolutionary brand of absurdist and deconstructionist comedy has been deemed as influential for the comedic art as the Beatles’ songs have been for rock music.
Heck, all of us could probably recite the entire script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by heart.
Don’t try to deny it.

As with many other influential personages in literature and art in general, Monty Python have influenced the English language to a surprising degree. The most obvious word originating from them is “pythonesque”, an adjective used to describe particulary absurd or surreal comedic situations, but there are a couple of others which are far more surprising.

The most famous and by far most prevalent contribution to the English language Monty Python made is the modern meaning of the word “spam”. The origin of the word, as most of you will know, is the name of an American brand of tinned meat produced by the Hormel Food Corporation. Nobody knows where its name ultimately comes from, and Hormel insists its origin is known only to a select few within the company. The most popular theory is that it’s an abbreviation of “spiced ham”.
However, the word “spam” today has another meaning which is far more frequent than its original one, and that is “unwanted or unsolicited messages”, especially in reference to e-mail advertising.
This surprising usage doesn’t come from any particular tendency Spam had to be advertised via e-mail, but from a Monty Python sketch filmed for their series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
In it, a couple walks (or rather descends) in what looks like a sordid cafè entirely patronised by Vikings and asks the waitress for the day’s menu, which she obediently lists. Every single dish in this menu contains bewildering amounts of Spam, with the word “spam” often repeated multiple times within the same dish. Trouble is, one half of the couple doesn’t like Spam, and repeatedly asks for it to be removed from some of the dishes, a request which is invariably met with disgust by the waitress and her husband, who both love Spam and want to have as much as possible. This intrusion of the word Spam in every other sentence persists until the end of the episode, and even during the credits, where the names of various people are frequently interrupted by this annoying canned product.
When e-mail was invented, the tendency of some unscrupulous advertisers to program bots to send thousands of unsolicited e-mails reminded people of this sketch, and the rest is history.

Fun fact: the same episode containing the Spam sketch also contains a sketch about a Hungarian tourist with a comically inaccurate phrasebook trying to buy cigarettes.
This sketch originated a common running joke among translators, which is including the sentence “my hovercraft is full of eels” in phrasebooks, even though the circumstances in which one might use it are, to put it mildly, very unlikely to occur.

Here you can find a page with the sentence translated in an enormous number of languages!

Hello, fellow users of the World Wide Web.
It’s Tuesday, and it’s time for our usual appointment with Fun Etymologies.
Today we continue our little series of words which have acquired a new meaning with the rise of computers with an exploration of the word “patch”.

This word, like many other words, comes from Old French, but what its original form was exactly is a bit of a mystery. The most common conjecture is that it comes from Northern Old French “pieche”, a dialectal variation of the Old French word “piece”, which was imported into English unchanged, another example of words splitting in two during their history.
The ultimate root of the word is the Indo-European root *kwezd- “division, piece”, which evolved into Gaulish *pettsi, which was then borrowed into Vulgar Latin as *pettia (pronounced “pettsia”) and finally evolved into the form we all know and love today.

As far as computers are concerned, a patch is a change applied to a program’s code in order to correct bugs (see last week’s Fun Etymology for the history of this one!), and its name once again goes back to the earliest computers. Back in the day, computer programs were stored on punch cards: pieces of cardboard with patterns of holes punched into them which told the computer which circuits to switch on or off and when. Writing a program in this format was tedious work, not to mention that these programs were often huge (thousands of cards long). This meant that mistakes often crept in.
When the mistake consisted of a lack of a hole where one should have been, the solution was simply punching in the missing hole; but when the mistake was a hole where no hole should have been, how would one go about solving it?
The solution was quite literally applying a patch to the extra holes, so that the machine would not be able to read them, as seen in the photo below.

So next time your Xbox starts downloading a patch for your favourite game and you have to wait for it to finish, take solace in the fact that at least you don’t have to physically patch thousands of holes on a mile-long strip of paper.

If current_day == Tuesday

print “Hello faithful followers!”
run (FunEtymology.exe)

return TRUE

Hello faithful followers!

On today’s Fun Etymology, we’ll start a miniseries of maybe five episodes or so dedicated to computers (as you might have guessed from the horrific imitation of code used as a greeting today). Computers are a relatively new phenomenon, having really taken off only in the latter part of the 1960s, but they already have an extensive, intriguing, and sometimes funny terminology associated with them.
Today we’re going to explore the history of the word “bug”.

The root meaning of the word “bug”, as you all know, is “insect”, but the origin of the word is shrouded in mystery. It only appeared in English in the 1620s, with no indication of where it could have come from.
The most common hypothesis is that it might be a descendant of the Middle English word “bugge”, meaning “monster” or “something frightening”, a meaning which only survived in the modern word “bugbear”, which is NOT a plantigrade with arthropodal characteristics, but a kind of goblin.

The origin of the word “bugge” are hypothesised to lie either in Welsh “bwg” meaning “goblin” or “monster”, or in the same Indo-European root that gave English the word “buck”, a male goat.

We all know what computer bugs are, and we’ve probably met many in our dealings with these friendly (for now) machines: it’s when some fault in a programme causes errors and malfunctioning, which in extreme cases can shut it down.
The term as applied to computers can be traced back to the 1940s and 50s, when the very first computers were operated through electromechanical switches, little iron switches which could flick open and closed dozens of times per second, thanks to magnetic actuators.
Unfortunately, the electromagnetic fields needed to operate these switches attracted certain species of moths, which use them to orient themselves in space, and from time to time one would get caught in a switch, blocking it and crashing the computer.
That’s why we say that a malfunctioning programme has a “bug”.

See you next time!

大家好！
How’s life, faithful readers? If you’ve been paying attention the past few months, you’ll have noticed a pattern in what we publish each week on Tuesday.
That’s right: it’s Fun Etymology time!

Today, we want to talk about hidden words.
Sometimes words hide inside other words, camouflaging their forms so that you have to know where to look to find them.
Such words are like the fairies of old: mischevious and adept at hiding from the mortals’ prying eyes. One such word is today’s word: “elf”.

Readers of Tolkien (and of fantasy in general) will surely be familiar with the image of the Nordic Elf, the elf as imagined by the people of ancient Scandinavia: beautiful, ethereal, and dangerous in some subtle way. In English and Celtic folklore, however, elves were a different beast altogether: short, ugly, and terribly mischevious if not even malicious.

The word “elf” goes back a long time: it comes unchanged from Old English, and has cousins in many other Germanic languages (such as German “Alp” and Old Norse “alfr”). Ultimately, it can be traced back to Proto-Germanic *albiz, but beyond that its origins are mysterious. One hypothesis is that it could come from Proto-Indo-European “*albho-“, meaning “white”.

Where does this word hide, you ask? Well, if any of you is called Alfred, Alvin, or (less likely) Eldridge, it’s right in your name!
In the Middle Ages, people believed that fairies and elves lay hidden around the world ready to snatch children and waylay adults, and had a fearful respect for such creatures. Many names still used today contain the word “elf”.
The three names I’ve just cited, for example, come from Old English “Ælfræd”, meaning “Elf-counsel”, “Ælfwine”, meaning “Elf-friend”, and “Ælfric”, meaning “Elf-ruler”, respectively.

Who knows what other mischevious words hide within our names? Can you find out?

Salvete, amici!

It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means: Fun Etymology time!

This week, we’re getting a little literary. J. K. Rowling snuck a lot of clever things into the Harry Potter books. One of those is the word “Wizengamot.” In the books, the Wizengamot is the wizards’ highest court of law and parliament. The name is a blending of “wizard” and the Old English word “witenagemot,” meaning “meeting of the wise men.” Like the wizarding equivalent, the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot was a governing council that advised the king.

“Witenagemot” breaks down into two words. “Witena” comes from “wita,” meaning “wise man.” “Gemot” means “meeting or council.” It also appeared without the prefix as “mot,” which is the source of our Modern English word “moot” (meaning “debatable or irrelevant”). The modern sense of the word comes from a Renaissance usage by law students to refer to a discussion of hypothetical law cases, hence “debatable.” (Anyone who’s sat through a pointless meeting or a discussion that’s gone on way too long and circled back around can guess how that morphed into “irrelevant.”)

Speaking of literature, Old English “mot” is also the source of Tolkien’s Entmoot, literally “meeting of the Ents.”

Books, am I right?