Category: Fun Etymology

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?

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.