Radio Script #687

Little Talks on Common Things

April 10, 1966

More than once on this program I have disclosed my interest in the meaning of words. It has for half a century been more than a hobby. When the pressure of administrative work forced me to give up most classroom teaching, I held tenaciously to my favorite class, a course in the History of the English Language.

So, on today’s broadcast, let us have a little session on the interesting, sometimes amazing origins of very common words.

All through our language are survivals of the fact that most abstract words were once associated with concrete things. Let us take a few examples. The original meaning of the word investigate meant to look for footprints, and the word vestige itself at first meant a footprint. If that seems peculiar, look at the word peculiar itself. It originally referred to cattle, deriving from the Latin word pecus, the herd. One of mankind’s first media of exchange, his first kind of money, was cattle, as indeed it is today among certain African tribes. Now see how word meanings change with the centuries. A person’s cattle, his money, was his own. So at first peculiar meant private or personal. Since everyone also has characteristics, mannerisms, that are distinctly one’s own, peculiar came to mean distinctive as applied to one’s attitudes and habits. Since bad news always travels faster than good, it was an easy jump to distinctive, objectionable qualities, what we mean today by peculiarities.

The word pedigree, which is now applied chiefly to thoroughbred animals, originally referred to the foot of that long-legged bird, the crane. In the drawings of the family trees of distinguished people the customary three-line graph looked like a crane’s foot.

As words change through the centuries, they often go up or down in their reputation. Some words improve their association immensely. Today’s respectable steward was once the styeward, the keeper of pigs. That highly respected figure in Maine villages a hundred years ago, the old squire, got his name from the medieval slave who carried his master’s shield. The word prestige once referred to juggling tricks, sleight of hand and even earlier meant simply blind-fold. The boudoir was the sulking room, to which the lady retired when she was peeved. The bargaining word “to barter” originally meant “to deceive”. Our elevated word ambition at first meant going around soliciting votes.

Just as some words are elevated, others degenerate. While some go up, others go down. The word precocious was originally a specialized word in the field of botany, applied only to plants. and referred to early ripened fruit. It was next extended to things cooked beforehand, before they were needed. Possibly because food cooked too soon became cold and unpalatable, precocious came to mean halfbaked. Then the word took a turn to the better until it was a compliment to speak of a precocious child. He was smart rather than half-baked. Then modern psychiatry began to take a long look at that kind of child. Perhaps he was half-baked after all. So today we can’t be sure that a mother will take it as a compliment when we call her child precocious.

Consider the present low associations of the words villain and imp. Once the villain was the peasant, the tiller of the soil, and an imp was only a younger son. The word stupid once meant amazed or stunned by surprise. To daub, which now means to smear or make dirty, meant to whiten. The word sullen is only a variant of the word solemn and once was its exact synonym. Counterfeit at first meant simply to imitate. Insane meant only not healthy, and there was nothing bad about an asylum; it was the sacred place of protection where enemies dared not strike.

Now let us turn again to some of those word origins that are just as peculiar as that of the word peculiar itself. The word attire in the sixteenth century referred to powdering the face. When the translators of the King James Bible phrased the sentence “Jezebel tired her head”, they were using the short form of the word attire common in Shakespeare’s time, and everybody knew what it meant, that Jezebel was putting on cosmetics.

The old French word corps, meaning body, was derived from the Latin word corpus of the same meaning, familiar to most people in the phrase habeas corpus. From this we get not only corpse, but also corset, a little body. Corsage was once the trunk of the human body, then the waist of that trunk, finally flowers worn at the waist. Garter originally meant where the knee bends, from the French verb garet, to bend the knee.

Did you know that the common garment we call pants was named for a Saint? The patron saint of Venice was St. Pantalone. In the myriad plays of the middle ages he was represented by an actor wearing tight trousers with long legs, quite different from the usual knee breeches that men then wore. Then clowns adopted the same kind of garb, and the word pantaloon was what a clown wore. The word soon became generalized to mean any trousers with long legs. Because we don’t like long words for common things, even when they are long trousers, the word was soon shortened to pants.

The word whiskers derives from a wisp of straw, and is akin to whisk, as in a whisk broom. Mustache is from an old French word for the upper lip. Aggravate meant to make heavy; astonish was struck by lightning; extravagant was outside the limits. One would hardly suspect that humility had anything to do with the soil, but originally it did. Humility was the quality of being on the humus, that is, on the ground. To pester a person was to hobble him, to keep him out to pasture.

A very picturesque word in its origin is the word trivial. Of course nearly all words beginning with tri refer to three something, and when in the days of passenger trains in Maine we used to have two lines between Portland and Waterville, we used to speak of going to Portland via Augusta or via Lewiston. The modern use of the Latin via means, of course, by way of. Trivial is thus tri via, three ways. Three ways formed one of the commonist of the old Anglo-Saxon crossroads in a village. There was often set up the village shrine, and there the women came to gossip. Because their talk at the trivia was often just inconsequential jabber, the place where they met, the trivia, gave an adjective to that jabber — trivial.

The word apothecary at first had nothing to do with drugs. The Greek word apotheke meant a storehouse, and the Latin apothecarius was a storekeeper. As late as Shakespeare’s time the English apothecary sold general merchandise; he was the forerunner of the Yankee keeper of a general store. For several centuries British business was controlled by the guilds, the mercers, the clothiers, the weavers, the hatters, the silversmiths, the tailors, and the sellers of various kinds of goods. Those guilds were called companies, such as the Merchant Tailors Company. In the early 1700’s the Apothecaries Company of London separated from the Grocers Company and began to deal only in drugs. So in 1805, when Dr. Moses Appleton set up his first drug dispensary in Waterville, such a place had long been called an apothecary shop.

The first brokers did not deal in stocks and bonds. They were brokers, that is, breakers or broachers of wine casks. The present use of brokers as sellers came about in a not very reputable fashion. Many a low grade fellow who served as a wine cask opener in London’s disreputable grog shops had a side line as a pimp getting customers for prostitutes. The next step was to use the word for any salesman who did not actually sell goods over the counter. Then, for some unknown reason, the word became specialized, and a broker was a dealer in stocks and bonds.

Our verb to charge, with its variety of meanings, is related to the Roman carrus, the chariot. After that vehicle became obsolete, the carrus became the military baggage wagon, and its cognate verb carricare meant to load a wagon. From this comes the French verb charging, and in all its senses the meaning of load is retained. To charge a weapon is to load it; to charge the enemy is to load him down with overwhelming force. One charged with a crime is loaded with the burden of accusation and must free himself from the load of implied guilt. A charge account is to accept a load of debt. When an employee is fired, he is discharged.

Did you know that when you dicker on a trade you are doing something that was once connected with fur. In etymology the word dicker is related to the Latin decem, the word for ten. Just as was true of white men’s first trade with the Indians, so many centuries earlier, the first Roman trade with the northern barbarians, the German and the Norse peoples, was for furs. Fur became a recognized medium of exchange, used as money just as cattle were used in the ancient Roman republic. Decuria meant ten pelts, a common unit of the fur trade. The French brought the word to Canada as decurier, still meaning ten pelts. From it we get the word dicker.

Many interesting word origins are concerned with food. Bread at first meant a fragment, a small piece. Bread was then only a part or a piece of the loaf. In 17th century France broken bits of confectionary sweets got the name pucre cande, broken sugar. The phrase came to England as sugar candy. Only two centuries later was it generalized to cover all confectionary. Chowder originally referred to the pot in which it was cooked. In Brittany on the coast between France and Spain it was long ago the custom for fishermen to toss bits of their catch into a common mass of fish and biscuit cooked in a big pot or chaudiere. The chaudiere and its appetizing dish were introduced into Newfoundland by the Breton fishermen who gave their natural name to Cape Breton Island. Thence it spread over the maritime provinces and into New England. The delicious contents became so much more famous than the pot in which they were cooked that it was the contents, not the pot. that in America came to be called chowder.

Some of our English words are the result of just plain blunders. One such word is omelet. The phrase lit lamelle (thin plate) entered French as la melle, but soon became l’alamelle. But French already had a word much like it, alemette. While la melle meant a thin plate, alemette meant a thin blade of a sword. To distinguish alemette from alamelle, the former got an initial 0 instead of an A and became omelette. So you see the word omelet in its origin has nothing to do with eggs.

Likewise the buttery, that old-time room off the kitchen, had nothing to do with butter. It was the boiterie, the bottlery, the place where the wines were kept. The pantry was not a place for pans, but a place for French pains, the bread.

Now if all this has given you no zest to know more about word origin, don’t get sour. For the word zest at first meant lemon peel.

Year: 1966