Tag: Fun Etymology

Hello, our internet friends!
It’s Fun Etymology day!

Today’s word is a weird one: “penguin”!

The word “penguin” is yet another of a long string of borrowings in the English language, and that is rather unremarkable. What is remarkable though, is the language it probably comes from: Welsh.

Now what could the Welsh be doing naming a bird that lives on the opposite side of the Earth from Wales?

And the original meaning is even weirder: it comes from the words “pen”, ‘head’, and “gwyn”, ‘white’, but most penguins’ heads are black!

Well, it turns out that the name didn’t originally belong to the penguin, but to another bird: the Great Auk, a bird which is unfortunately now extinct and which lived in the northern Atlantic, and which happened to look very similar to a penguin.
Its head was also black, but it sported a very prominent white mark on its beak, which was probably the origin of its name.

It appears that sailors exploring Antarctica noticed the similarity between the two birds and were too lazy to give the newly discovered one a new name.

And that’s how a Celtic word meaning “white head” came to mean a black-headed bird from Antarctica.

Words. We never get tired of them.

Hello, followers! It’s Tuesday, and that means a shining new Fun Etymology is here for you!

Today’s word is “iron”.

It can be safely said that history changed forever when humanity discovered a way to smelt iron, an achievement comparable to the rise of agriculture or the industrial revolution. But iron was much more than that: for the peoples of Northern Europe, this metal possessed sacred and magical powers. It was thought to be able to chase away or even kill spirits and to be able to store spells.

This belief can be seen in the etymology of the word: the word “iron” comes from Old English “isern”, through a process called ‘rhotacism’ in which an ‘s’ sound becomes an ‘r’ sound between vowels. This word comes from Proto-Germanic “isarnan”, itself a loanword from proto-Celtic “isarnon” (whose descendants include Welsh “haiarn”, for example).
The Celtic word itself is thought to come from a PIE root *is(e)ro-, meaning “holy” or “powerful”, the same root from which the Greek word “hieros” (‘priest’) descends.
The original meaning would therefore had been “holy metal” or “powerful metal”.

Well met, people! Didn’t think we’d forget about our beautiful followers on Fun Etymology day, did you? Let’s get right to it!
Today, we’re going back to the origins of Fun Etymologies by bringing you another word from Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.
Today’s word is “chocolate”!

This beloved food is made from the seeds of the evergreen tropical plant Theobroma Cacao (“Theobroma” means “food of the gods” in Greek, and who could disagree?), a relative of cotton native of Central America, and enjoys undying popularity in every corner of the planet due to its amazing taste and incredible versatility.

The etymology of its name is pretty straightforward: it comes to English through Spanish from a Nahuatl compound “xocolatl” (where “x” is pronounced “sh”), literally meaning “bitter water”, in reference to the drink the Aztecs used to make from cocoa seeds. The funny thing about this etymology, however, is that no Aztec ever used the word “xocolatl”! It can’t be found in any Aztec document dating to before the Spanish conquest, where the drink was simply referred to as “cacahuatl” (which is where our word “cocoa” comes from, incidentally. The Aztec word was itself a loanword from Olmec “kakawa”. Triple language chain!). Where did this word come from then? Nobody knows for sure!
A leading hypothesis is that it was coined by the Spanish themselves to avoid the similarity between “cacahuatl” and the Spanish word “caca”, meaning, well… “animal and/or human waste”, an association which would also be brought to mind by the… ahem… suggestive colour of the drink.

Hope I haven’t ruined your snack.

Hello, splendid followers!
Let me ask you a question: how do you go from a wolf to a car model specifically designed to transport coffins?
No clue? Well, you’re in luck, because today’s Fun Etymology is about one of the English words with the most byzantine history of semantic shifts: “hearse”.

The original roots of the word are thought to be found in the Oscan word “hirpus”, meaning “wolf”. Oscan was a sister language to Latin, spoken during the time of the Roman Empire. This word would have gone extinct if some Oscan farmer hadn’t noticed how the tool he used to break up soil on his farm kinda looked like the fangs of a wolf, and decided to call it so. This word was quickly borrowed into Latin as “hirpex” and went on to describe this agricultural implement (what in modern English is called a harrow) for centuries. Then, at some point during the Middle Ages, someone noticed how certain kinds of chandelier used in churches kinda looked similar to these harrows, so they figured why not extend the meaning of this word to indicate those as well?
By this time, the word looked like “hercia”, and that’s how it was borrowed into Old English. Only guess what that particular kind of chandelier was used for in England? That’s right, it was hung above coffins during funerals! So someone thought: “What’s the harm in having this word mean “coffin” as well? It’s not like you talk about chandeliers every day, is it?”
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound, and soon the word was further extend to indicate the carriage on which the coffin was transported to the church prior to the funeral, then those carriages got replaced by cars, and here we are!

Hello, good people!
We heard your cries of despair yesterday, when the Fun Etymology failed to appear. But fear not! We haven’t forgotten about you. We only have horrid social media management skills.

Yesterday’s word was “person”!

This very common word might seem boring, but its etymological meaning is very intriguing (and, dare I say, philosophically stimulating), and its roots sink into one of the most mysterious languages of Europe.

The word “person”, like so many other words, comes to English through Old French from Ancient Rome, specifically from Latin “persōna”, which originally meant “exterior appearance, face”. Where the Latin word comes from, though, is the really interesting part.

One etymology of that word is per (through) + a form of the verb sonare (to sound, make noise). So “that through which you make noise”. This would make sense, except that nobody has been able to make sense of the long ō in persōna, which by all accounts shouldn’t be there.

A far more intriguing etymology is that the word is ultimately a loanword from the Etruscan “phersu”, meaning “mask”.

Etruscan was the language of the greatest civilisation extant in Italy before the arrival of the Romans, and it was still spoken during the time of the Roman Empire. It is not related to any other known language, and unfortunately we know very little about it. The last known speaker, Emperor Claudius, is said to have written a grammar and even a dictionary, but sadly these were lost to us.
The Etruscans were great architects and possessed a vast and famous culture. They are thought to have brought the alphabet to Rome and even to the Vikings!

So is a person just a mask? Do we really show our true selves to others?
Some questions to ponder.

Hello splendid followers!
It’s Tuesday and it’s time for our usual Fun Etymology!
Today is not only Tuesday but also May Day, the last offspring of a long tradition of Spring festivals in Europe.
But you might have wondered one thing: why do aeroplane pilots scream the name of this particular occurrence when they are in distress?

Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that the emergency signal “mayday” has absolutely zilch to do with the festival. What it is is an English interpretation (almost certainly influenced by the name of the day) of the French phrase “m’aider”, itself an abbreviated form of “venez m’aider”, i.e. “come help me!”

Feel free to quote this lovely bit of trivia to the pilot next time you’re involved in an emergency landing!*

*Please don’t bother the pilot during an emergency landing. THAT’S A REALLY BAD IDEA.

Hello everyone! It’s Tuesday again and that means another Fun Etymology fresh out of the oven!

Today’s word is “explode”.

This one is another fun example of how the meaning of a word can change drastically over the course of history.
“Explode” is another of the many words that come to English from Latin via Old French, and its original form “explodere” comes from the language of Roman theatre.

The word, formed of the two parts “ex-” (‘out’) and “-plaudere” (‘to clap or make noise’, with the ‘au’ diphthong reduced to ‘o’), literally meant “to chase a bad actor out of a theatre by making noise”. From there, it was borrowed into English in the 1500s with the meaning “to reject with scorn, chase away”, then “to expel with force”, and finally with the modern meaning of violent shattering or combustion.

So next time you are the unwilling witness of a very bad play, remember that you always have the option of exploding the actors out of the stage!

Tuesday has arrived, followers, and that can only mean one thing: Fun Etymology!

Today’s word is “zero”.

The concept attached to this little word is one we take for granted today, but it revolutionised mathematics and changed history forever.
The idea of “nothing” being a number seems intuitive today, but for millennia nobody ever thought of it, until the idea came to someone in Gupta dynasty India. From there, it exploded, and it made possible kinds of calculation previously undreamed of. Mathematics would not see such a revolution again until the invention of calculus in the 1600s.

The word itself comes to English from Arabic ‘sifr’, through Latin ‘zephirum’, then Italian ‘zero’ and French ‘zero’ (probably abbreviations born to differentiate the new word from the already existing word ‘Zephyr’, the name of a wind). The Arabic word was itself a translation of the Sanskrit ‘sunyam’, meaning ’emptiness, desert’, and is also the source of English ‘cipher’ or ‘cypher’.

A well-traveled word for a revolutionary concept.

Hey guys! The weekly circle has come full round again and here we are on another Tuesday with another Fun Etymology!

Today’s word is “manage”, and its derivation, “manager”.

Both these words appeared in the English language around the 1560s, and are especially close to me because they’re loanwords from my native language, Italian!

They come from the Italian verb “maneggiare”, a derivation of the noun “mano”, meaning “hand”. They’re exactly parallel in derivation and meaning to the English pair “hand” and “handle”.

Originally, the verb “maneggiare” meant “to handle horses” (in Italian a horse stable is still called a “maneggio” today), and, like so many Romance loanwords, it came to English through the French “manège”, where its meaning was quickly extended from “handle horses” to “handle affairs or people”.

So next time you speak to your manager at work, remember that their job title etymologically means “horse handler”.
Now that’s not very flattering towards employees, is it?

Metaphor is a powerful tool: sometimes it can distort the meaning of a word to the point of transforming it in a whole different word.
In today’s Fun Etymology we’re going to explore just one such word: “cloud”.

The word “cloud” begins its journey as the Old English word “clud”, meaning “hill” or “pile of rocks”. Somewhere along the way, someone must have noticed how clouds in the sky kinda look like big hills made of fluffy white stuff, and started calling them “hills”, perhaps as a witticism or joke. Eventually, the name stuck, and by Middle English it had almost completely substituted the original Old English word for “cloud”, “weolcan”.

Old words are hard to die, though, and the old word still survives in poetry, where it’s now taken the form “welkin”.