Category: Fun Etymology

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”.

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!