Tag: Fun Etymology

Hail and well met!

It’s Tuesday, and it’s time for our usual appointment with etymologies and fun!

Today’s word is one of the most interesting words in all European languages: “bear”.
I bet you’ve never thought about “bear” as a particularly interesting word, but I assure you that by the end of this post you’ll think differently.

In Europe, the original Indo-European root for “bear”, *rtko, survived in the Romance and Greek languages (as the descendants of Latin “ursus” and Greek “arktos”, respectively) as well as some of the Celtic branch, but was completely lost in the Germanic and Slavic branches. Why? Because the bear was a sacred animal to the Germanic and Slavic people, and uttering its true name was considered an affront to the gods, so workarounds were devised to refer to the bear without offending the powers.
The solution the Germanic people came up with was calling the bear “the Brown One”, and that’s where the modern word “bear” comes from: the Indo-European root *bher-, from which also comes the word “brown”.
Russians call the bear “the Honey Thief”, “medved'”.

As for the original name of the bear? It came back into English through Greek as the word “Arctic”, the place where bears are, and Antarctic, the place away from where the bears are.
That’s right: which of the two poles of Earth you are in is defined by whether or not there are bears in it.

Pretty interesting, is it not?

Guten Tag, mein gutes Volk!

It’s Tuesday and, as usual, it’s time for your weekly dose of Fun Etymology goodness.

If you’ve been following us on our journey so far, you know that words sometimes have the weirdest connections with other words. Today, we bring you another of those bizarre links: the one between “money” and “admonish”.

The word “money” is yet another word coming from the heap of vocabulary dumped on unsuspecting English by the French invaders in the Middle Ages and is directly cognate with modern French “monnaie”. The origin of both words can be found in the original Latin word “moneta” (which survived unchanged in Italian), and it’s the ultimate etymology of this word which is the most interesting part of our story today.

See, in ancient Rome, the official imperial mint was located right across the street from (or perhaps even inside) the city temple to the goddess Juno, the wife of Jupiter.
Now, those of you who know your Greco-Roman mythology will know that Jupiter (or Zeus) wasn’t exactly the most faithful husband a woman could wish for.
Perhaps because of her husband’s constant misbehaviour, Juno was known to be a pretty stern and severe goddess, and one of her nicknames in Archaic Latin was “Moneta”, “The Admonisher”, from “monere” “to admonish”. Sound familiar?
In ancient Rome, money was what came out of the Moneta temple, and was therefore called “moneta”, from which came Old French “monoie”, which then gave English the word “money”.

The same verb “monere” (plus the strengthening prefix “ad-“) gave English the word “admonish”, again through French.

Isn’t it amazing how the ancient religion of the Romans still influences the words we use today?

¡Hola, pueblo de Facebook!

Happy new year!

Time moves inexorably forwards for all of us, and though it might seem that seven days be a long time, they’re but one flap of a beetle’s wings in the vast incomprehensible hugeness of time.
And so, here we are again with another Tuesday and yet another Fun Etymology!
This week’s word (or better, compound) is “guinea pig”!

Guinea pigs are medium-sized rodents native of the Andes in South America. They’re unique amongst rodents in being herbivores (whereas most other rodents are omnivores), and in having in common with humans the inability to create their own vitamin C. They’re also some of the cuddliest and cutest critters out there.
Reading this description, a couple of things probably occurred to you: guinea pigs are not pigs, and they don’t come from Guinea. Why the deuce (to borrow a very Victorian expression) are they called guinea pigs then?

The answer is: nobody knows for sure! Many hypotheses have been proposed, but none is entirely satisfactory. Some think they’re called that because they arrived in England on ships which came from South America via Guinea, so-called Guinea-men; others think it’s because they resemble the young of the breed of pig known as Guinea hog (they don’t); others still think it’s because of English people mishearing “Guyana” as “Guinea” (problem is they don’t come from Guyana either, though it’s a better approximation than Guinea, that’s for sure).
As for “pig”, it’s probably because of the squealing noises they make and the fact that they tend to become very fat.

Their original name in Quechua, the language once spoken in the Inca empire, is “quwi” (often spelled “cuy”). Perhaps we should just start calling them that.

To conclude this post, we’ll leave you with a photo of admin Riccardo’s own two little furry monsters.

See you around!

Ave, popule Libri Vultuum.

How were your Winter Holidays? We hope you had fun with your family and friends and that you ate to your heart’s content, because we sure did.

We at the HLC don’t like slacking off, though, so Boxing Day will certainly not stop us from bringing the usual dose of Fun Etymology goodness to you.

What do mice, muscles and mussels have in common?
Believe it or not, their names all come from the same root word, the Proto-Indo-European *mus-, meaning “mouse”.

The word “mouse”, as you can imagine, comes to English in an unbroken line from PIE through Germanic, and has changed very little in the millennia (the only significant change happened around the 14th to 17th centuries, during the Great Vowel Shift, when all the vowels of English were jumbled around. We’ll talk about this in a future blog post).

How do muscles connect in any way to mice, though?
The answer can be found in ancient Rome.
The Latin word for “mouse” was also “mus”, and the Romans were known to be keen observers of Nature in all its aspect.
If you’ve ever ogled a ripped bodybuilder showcasing their muscular prowess, you will have noticed that muscles stretching and relaxing under the skin seem to wriggle, as if those beefy arms were really bags full of live mice.
The Romans noticed this too, and that’s why they called whatever was wriggling under their skin “musculi”, or “little mice”, from which the modern English word “muscle” ultimately derives.

What about mussels then?
Well, if you’ve ever seen a live mussel, you’ll have noticed that the function of what we call its meat is opening and closing its shell. It is, in fact, a kind of muscle.
That’s where the name of this tasty bivalve comes from, but, being a rather more humble word than “muscle”, which had to appear in many academical anatomy books, no effort was made to keep its spelling similar to Latin, and that’s how we ended up with the modern spelling “mussel”.

And that’s how you go from mice to mussels.

It’s that time of the week again, friends! Time for our weekly appointment with the history of words.

Christmas is coming! Do you hear that chiming sound? Do you feel that warm fuzzy feeling inside?
We certainly feel it: that’s why today we’ll be having a Festive Etymology.

Even though Christmas is a predominantly Christian festivity today, most of its traditions (the tree, gift giving, the stopping of all conflicts and many others) are actually much more ancient.
The tree, in particular, was an important symbol in the religion of the Germanic people, and the winter festival in which that tradition originated had a name which we can still hear from time to time: “Yule”.

The origins of the word “Yule” are shrouded in mystery. We know this word existed in Old English as “geól” (pronounced “yohl”), and in Old Norse as “jól”, and that it indicated both the festival and the month the festival was held in (modern-day December).

The word was eventually superseded by “Christmas” in English (from “Cristes Mæsse”, “Christ’s Mass”), but it remained in the Scandinavian languages, as well as Finnish, which borrowed it as “joulu” (whence their name for Santa, “Joulupukki”, literally “Old man Christmas”).

The word might have disappeared, but the spirit is still all there. So, on behalf of all of us at the HLC, Merry Yule and a Happy New Year!

Hello boys, girls and everyone else!
It’s the moment you were all waiting for: Fun Etymology time!

Have you ever had a schoolmate you remember as being kind of a jerk, who you then meet at a school get-together years later and he’s become this really nice person?
Some words are just like that, and the process they undergo is called “semantic amelioration” (fancy Latin-speak for “meaning improvement”).

Speaking of nice people, today’s word is the poster child for this process: “nice”.

The roots of “nice” lie in the Latin word “nescius”, a word meaning “ignorant” (from “ne-scire”, literally “not-know”), this word was then filtered through 12th century French and then arrived in English, where it originally meant “stupid, ignorant or annoying”. In the 13th century, the meaning shifted to “fastidious” or “fussy” (probably as an extension of “annoying”). From there, it became associated with attention to detail, then with finesse, until by the end of the 14th century, it had come to mean “delicate” or “fragile”. In the 18th century it was already commonly used to mean “lovely, agreeable”. Finally, in the 19th century, it got its modern meaning of “kind” or “enjoyable”.
In the 19th century, the use of this word had become kind of a fad, so much so that some old curmudgeons started complaining that everything was constantly being described as “nice”, to the point that the word seemed to have lost all kind of meaning. Of course, the word survived very well, thank you very much, and is still going strong today, with as much meaning as it had before, albeit a very different one.

And that’s how in just eight centuries “That guy is really nice” went to being an insult to being a compliment.
The roads words take never cease to amaze us.

Hello faithful followers.

Quick! Look at your calendars!
What day is it? That’s right: Fun Etymology day!
And what a special Fun Etymology day it is, good folk, for today we have not one, but TWO words: “shirt” and “skirt”.

As those of you who follow this little recurring segment of ours know, English is a language that borrowed quite liberally from many other languages. Amongst these languages, two have a very special place: Old French and Old Norse. Today, we’ll talk about the latter.

Old Norse was the language of Scandinavia during the Viking Age, and it was very closely related to Old English. Some even hypothesise that speakers of the two languages might have been able to understand each other with some effort.
Starting from the 9th century, the Vikings invaded and conquered parts of England, and this intense and sustained contact between the two cultures gave the English language the opportunity to borrow quite a lot of words from Old Norse, even some very frequent ones, such as the pronoun “they” (but that’s a story for another Fun Etymology).

A legacy from this time can be seen in one particular phonological phenomenon: the fate of the Proto-Germanic consonant cluster “sk”.
Both English and the Scandinavian languages have their ultimate origins in the Proto-Germanic language, but this consonant cluster evolved quite differently in the two branches: in English, it became the modern sound “sh” as in “shoe”, while in the Scandinavian languages it remained “sk”.
What this means is that if you find an English word that begins with the cluster “sk”, then it’s almost certainly a borrowing from Old Norse.

Which brings us to today’s Fun Etymology: the words “shirt” and “skirt”, which, etymologically, come from the same Proto-Germanic word *skjurton, meaning “short garment”. Where “shirt” represents the natural evolution of the word in English, “skirt” was borrowed from Old Norse, but with a different meaning.
Sometimes, in the tumultuous history of words, one word can split in two. Isn’t that neat?

How many sk- words can you think of?

Guten Abend boys and girls!

Did you know that as far as the beginning of the 20th century, the colours usually associated with boys and girls were reversed? That’s right, pink was considered to be the more “masculine” colour, since it was closer to red, while blue was the colour of girls, since it was perceived as soft and friendly. How times change, am I right?

Speaking of changing gender associations, today’s Fun Etymology is “girl”!

Back in the 13th century, when we find the first attestations of the word gyrle, it simply meant “young person”, with no distinction of sex. Only by the late 14th century did its meaning specialise as “female child”, then it extended to refer to any young woman in the 15th century. It finally became an affectionate way to refer to grown women around 1640.

The origins of this word before the 13th century are shrouded in mystery, and numerous etymologies have been proposed. Once, it was thought to be ultimately traceable to Latin garrulus, meaning “talkative”, but this hypothesis has been since discarded. Some think it might be derived from Old English gierela, meaning “clothing, garment”, in reference to the special clothes children wore in the middle ages which distinguished them from toddlers, who usually went naked. Other propose an unattested Old English word *gyrele, meaning “young person”, justifying this reconstruction from the existence of words such as Low German gære, or Norwegian/Swedish dialectal gorre/gurre, all meaning “young child”, from Proto-Indo-European *ghwrgh-.
Liberman (2008) proposes that the word is not ultimately traceable back to Proto-Indo-European, but that it was invented out of whole cloth at some point, probably because it sounded funny, and that the final -l might, in fact, be a diminutive (as in Austrian German würstl).

Quite the etymological quagmire for such a commonplace word!

Salutations to all our loyal followers!

Yesterday here at the HLC we heard a wailing cry of despair swelling from you: “Where is our Fun Etymology??”
We understand your pain, and we’re sorry. The doom-train of deadlines is barrelling out of control towards the railway exchange post of our lives, and in out eagerness to meet it head-on we have neglected our duties.
So, without further ado, here’s our very first (and let’s hope also our last) Belated Etymology!

Yesterday’s word was “acorn”.

Acorns are the seed par excellence, the tiny brown nuts which become the mighty oak. They’re also the squirrel’s favourite food, and we all know the squirrel is one of the Best Animals Ever™.

The word “acorn” is a very ancient one, going all the way back to a Proto-Germanic word that referred to all forest tree fruits. Cognates can be found in most Germanic languages (Old Norse: akarn; German: Ecker; Gothic: akran).
Some even trace the word back all the way to the Proto-Indo-European root *agr-, meaning “open space”, from which we also get the words “acre” and “agriculture”.

From the Old English form “æcern” one would expect a Modern English word spelled “akern”. So why do we get “acorn”?
Well some people in the late Old English period thought the “æc” part of “æcern” to be a variant of the word “āc”, meaning “oak”, and the “cern” part to refer to corn.
Since they come from oaks and they look like corn kernels, they reasoned, it makes sense that they might be called “oak-corn”, from whence we got the spelling “acorn”.

Even the simplest words often have the most convoluted history!

Hey there internauts and internautettes!
It is the day known as Tuesday in these Nordic lands and, as usual, it’s time for our weekly appointment with the history of words.

Today’s Fun Etymology is “pineapple”!

What a bizarre fruit a pineapple is, all yellow and spiky, and yet sooo sweet. We love pineapples.

As thousands of “English is so weird” memes have probably taught you, the word used in the English language is not the one most other languages use to name this South American fruit.
The word “pineapple” can be traced back to as far as the late 14th century, when nobody in Europe even knew of the existence of pineapples, and it used to refer to pine cones. If you think about it, it kind of makes sense, what with pine cones being the fruits (or I guess “apples”) of the pine tree.
When the pineapple was discovered, its similarity to a big pine cone prompted English settlers to refer to it with the name they usually reserved for that fruit.
Eventually, the name stuck, and the compound “pine cone” had to be invented in the 1690s to refer to the pine fruit, which had been cruelly robbed of its name.

The name most other languages use to refer to the pineapple, “ananas”, comes from a South American language (either Tupi or Guaranì, we’re not sure). The original word was “nanas”. The “a” is actually the Portuguese definite article that got stuck there when the word was transferred to other languages.

No matter what you call it though, we can all agree that pineapple is delicious, especially in cocktails.