- Day 01: PREPOSTEROUS
-- meaning "completely contrary to nature, reason, or common
sense" comes from the Latin praeposterus meaning "with the
hinder part foremost." pre- (prae-) is an element occurring
originally in loan words from Latin, meaning "before," "in front of.
. . ." -post- is "behind," "later," "after. . . ." So preposterous
is proceeding with your dorsal side first (i.e., with your
buttocks forward. It's doing something "bass aackward," as we
used to say in Boy Scouts.
From the same Latin root (ponere) comes posit-,
"to place" or "to put down," as in "deposit," "dispose"
("to put away," as in garbage . . .") "disposal," "propose"
(to put forth an idea of doing something)," "impose" (to put
something on someone), "oppose" (to put oneself against),"
"decompose" (to reverse the putting of things together), "compounds"
(things put together), "posture" the "position" we put ourselves
in, and "post" (where soldiers are put and what the soldiers do with
their letters to their girlfriends when they propose by mail
when they can't be there in person to position their posture
and preposition on one knee).
In this class you will also see "preposition," which is
something which you place before a noun, and, of course, "compose"
(to put things together). In this course we propose you put
your best side forward, preposterous as that may sometimes
sound. More on the course next time. (TROE, RHCD)
- Day 02: RECURSIVE
Chapter 1 of the text states, "Researchers often describe the
process of writing as seamless and recursive, meaning that its goals
or parts are constantly flowing into and influencing one another,
without any clear break among them." Cursive comes from the
Medieval Latin cursv(us), meaning flowing or running. Cursive,
as in handwriting, has flowing strokes with the letters joined (or
run) together. Cursor is a little thing that "runs" across
the screen of your word processor. -or is tacked on to denote
a person or thing that does something, or has some particular function
Related is the Latin curs(us), now course, "a running,"
or "to run." Tack on -eer or -ier (they're variants
of the same thing) and you get "someone who is concerned with, or
employed in connection with, or busies himself with something," in
this case running: courier. Re- means "again and again,"
and, sometimes, "backwards." -ive is tacked onto adjectives
(and nouns of adjectival origin) to express "tendency, disposition,
function, connection. . . ." Related words include current
(running water or electricity), corridor (which is an -idor
or place which runs the length of a building), career (your
professional running), concur (run with), excursion
(a running out), discourse (running to and fro with discussion),
intercourse (a running between), precursor (a forerunner),
recourse and recur (running back), occurring
(running to meet), recourse (to run back), and succor
(run under to help).
In this course you have no recourse but to recurse,
unless, of course, it's to curse the course.
Cursing is of disputed origin, but may be from the Old Irish,
crsagim, "I blame." So if you're Irish, you can curse
and re-curse the recursing course. But do it
anyway. (TROE, RHCD)
- Day 03: Word of the
Day -- Mirriam-Webster
- Day 04: RASHOMON
- Day 05: LIBRARY
--from Latin noun, liber, originally, "the inner bark
of a tree." Eventually it became "a sheet of papyrus
for writing" (more on papyrus on Day 10), then it became "a book, volume, long
document." From that came library and librarian. -ian
means "person of."
- Day 07: INTERVIEW
--the meeting of a person face to face. Interview is a
word first known from the 16th century. From the early French entrev(e)ue,
"to have a glimpse of," which was from s'entrevoir, "to see
each other." Literally it came from the French entre, meaning
inter- + voir "to see." INTER-, a preposition
meaning "between," "among," is itself from the French and is related
to the 14th century French word meaning "to cause to go in, put in
or onto." Related words include intervene ("to come between"),
interpose ("to put between"), intercept ("to put yourself
in position to seize or take away"), interlude ("to play between"),
international ("pertaining to between stocks or races"); there
are others. (TFH) Also related are evident
("making itself seen"), and, of course review ("to see again").
(RC) See again Day 03.
So when you interview, you cause yourself to be put into a position
to meet or see the other face to face.
- Day 08: Word of the
Day -- Mirriam-Webster
- Day 09: REVISE
-- from Latin revise(re) "(to) look back at, revisit;
freq. of revidere, "to see again." re-/red-
- Day 09: PROSE
Prose sometimes contrasts with poetry. Prose is
spoken or written language without the metrical structure (meter and
verse) that poetry has. The word comes from the Latin liturgical word
known from the 14th century as prsa literally meaning "straightforward
speech." Actually the original root of the word had something to do
with turning. Thus prose is really more of a "turning forward,"
or, in modern English, straight-forward, rather than not turning.
In the 16th century the word came to mean "matter-of-fact expression."
In the 17th century pros-y ("dull, tedious"--"pros-aic")
discourse arrived--actually the discourse was probably already here,
the name for it just arrived. In between (in the 16th century) the
word pros-aic arrived. The pros-aic is "dull, commonplace,
unimaginative"--by definition, like most definitions, straightforward
and not always so imaginative. A pros-er is a person who talks
or writes prose. And nowadays, we can have a prosy poet--a
seeming contradiction to our 14th century ancestors.
A pro-poser is something else; it's one who sets forth
a proposition, sometimes related to marriage, sometimes related
to other things--like Project
#5 in this class. (RC, RHD, TH)
Today we revise prose, or "look again at that [writing] which
is [supposed to be] turned [straight]forward."
- Day 09: AUDIENCE
-Ence/-ance in nouns and -ent/-ant
in verbs comes from the Latin -encia. This suffix appears in
adjectives formed from verbs of Latin origin, and in nouns formed
from those verbs. The Latin word in this case is audit-, "to
hear." So you have audi- and -ence to make up "hearing
or listening." So if you go listen to the Pope, you have an audience
with the Pope. If the Pope listens back, it's a miracle. Audience
as we know it in the sense of a group who will listen to you, first
appeared in the records in the 14th century.
Related words include audit-orium ("listening place"),
audi-ble ("able to be listened to"), and Audio King
(place where you go to by supermega listening equipment), and audit.
If you're listening to all of this, you are an audit-or.
If you are paid by the IRS to listen, you are also an audit-or.
If you get called in by the person who listens to you for the IRS,
then you are in a listing situation, an audit. If the IRS audit-or
does not like what s/he hears from the audit-ee, that's trouble
(which comes from another Latin word meaning "turbulent" or "restless,"
which is probably what you've been all along in the IRS audit),
and that starts with "T" and that rhymes with "P" and that stands
for "POOL" (which comes from a French word meaning "a young hen").
If you are just sitting in class and not expecting to get credit
for this course, you're audit-ing--just "in the process of
listening." If you are sitting in the class just listening
and still expecting to get credit for this course, that's real
hope. Hope, by the way, is of unknown origin. Audacity
is something else.
- Day 10: BIBLIOGRAPHY
Biblio comes from the Greek word
biblía ("[the] books"), which itself is a diminutive
(a term of familiarity, smallness, affection . . . , like "Timmy")
of búblos, which originally meant "papyrus, scroll,"
and which later meant "book, papyrus." Byblos (now the city
of Jubayl in Lebanon) is the name of the Phoenician city from which
papyrus was exported in the old days.
Papyrus is a writing material made from pressed-together thin
strips of the pith of the papyrus plant (which is "a tall, aquatic,
cyperaceous plant," whatever that is). Ancient Egyptians, Greeks,
and Romans used ancient papyrus. The earliest books were rolls
of papyrus. The Romans called that rolled up papyrus volumen,
from the Latin verb volvere, meaning "to roll," because they
rolled it all up on an old rolling pin. [The word pie as in
what we eat didn't appear until the 14th century, itself apparently
coming from the Old French (13th century) word for magpie, so we know
that they must have had a whole bunch of unused rolling pins laying
around, and so they must have used them for the purpose of rolling
up the papyrus scrolls.]
By the 5th century parchment made from sheep, goat, or calf skin
had generally replaced papyrus because it was tougher, could be cleaned,
and could be used on both sides. Parchment could also be folded and
bound, which eliminated the need for rolling up the texts. And because
they loved to barbecue, they had a lot of old sheep and goat skins
around, from which they made volum-inous tomes. [In
those days they didn't call it "barbecue," however, because
that was a Caribbean Indian word (barbacoa to the Spanish)
which Columbus had not yet discovered, although when he did discover
it, he found out that they were having their neighbors over to
barbecue, rather than to a barbecue, or so they say.]
Tome, by the way, comes from the Greek tómos,
"slice, piece, roll of paper, book. . . . A tome, any heavy
large book, can also be one volume of a two-or-more-volume
The early Latin word volumnen was borrowed into the French
as volume, which by the 14th century became part of the English
vocabulary. By the 16th century volume had acquired the additional
meaning of "the size or bulk (of a book)," which eventually led to
the word meaning the size or volume of anything.
Of course, the most famous volume is The Bible (the name
of which comes from the Greek word meaning "the books," which it was
called since it is actually many books, not one, although it is
often physically one book, and therein--as one in many, many in one--is
much like the Trinity described in the New Testament section thereof),
which originally was holy scripture written, in part, on a roll of
papyrus from Byblos.
Now that papyrus is "paper" on which you write, and which
you write. And which you will soon be writing on and writing on for
your project #4 speech.
Speaking of writing, -graphy often is a suffix which denotes
the processes or styles of writing ("calligraphy," "orthography"
. . .), but -graphy is also used to denote sciences ("geo-graphy,"
"lexico-graphy," "strati-graphy" . . . ).
Could biblio-graphy be the science which deals with books?
. . . YES! That's it! Bibliography is "the science that deals
with the history of books, their physical description, printing, publication,
editions, etc. [sic.]" (RHD, p. 131).
The word bibliography also now means the list of informations
produced by that science of the written descendants of the markings
on the export of Byblos. And that's what you're supposed to
have brought in for today. (M-W WH, TH, RHD)
- Day 11: COORDINATE AND SUBORDINATE
A geek is a geek in part because he can't coordinate things.
(Can you have a female geek?) He may,
for example, wear a different colored sock on each foot. (Geek,
by the way, is probably an English variant of the Scottish word geck
which means "fool." In later years geek came to mean a carnival
fellow who performed acts such as biting off the head of a live chicken
or snake. More recently it came to mean one who is nerdy, or, in a
word, a "dweeb." What do you get when you cross a nerd and a jerk?
A nerk, which is the modern English variant of nerd.)
Coordinate means "to get your _ _ _ _
together." Literally speaking the word is co-ordinate, where
the ordinate part means "having your _ _ _
_ in order." The original Latin of that was ordintus,
"arranged," or "ordered." From the 17th century on the co-
meant "being together," or "[something done] joint(ly)"--as in co-habit,
wherein -habit means "dwelling" (as in in-habit-ing),
rather than having a bad one of. The prefix co- also implies
equality of parts! [Note: when was the last time you saw an exclamation point used in this
syllabus? What does that tell you?]
Thus the co-ordinate-ed things
that are arranged are always approximately equal (like two feet, or
two socks . . .). So co-ordinate thusly is "having your order
[of equal things] together"--like being able to put one foot in front
of the other, or, "having [equal] things arranged [together]"--like
having your socks match--which is what geeks often have a hard time
But even geeks recognize that SOME THINGS ARE MORE IMPORTANT
THAN OTHERS--like, it's more important to have your shoes
on the correct feet than to have socks that match. When you are trying
to organ-ize (literally, "put things in order") in a way that
some things are more important than others, that's sub-ordination.
Here sub- means "under" as in sub-marine, "[a thing
which goes] under maris, 'the sea.'" (A sub-marine sandwich,
however, is different, and somehow under-went metamorphosis from a
"hero sandwich." Maybe that's what the heroes in submarines ate, but
I don't know. I didn't see anyone eating submarine sandwiches
in The Hunt for Red October or Das Boot.) Anyway,
according to like thinking, your sub-ordinates are those that
are under you.
When you sub-ordinate in your writing you put one thing
under another. With
sub-ordination the important point is that things
that are arranged are not equal . . . and that
they are lined up in the order of their importance. (M-W, ODNW, RHD, TH, WH)
- Day 12: KETCHUP
From the Chinese, ketchup, or ke-tsiap (sometimes
ke-chiap), was originally a pickled-fish brine. Pickle
is a word of unknown origin, which used to be spelled pykyl.
Fish is an English word meaning "fish," originally spelled
fisc. Fisc with a c seems more logical.
Maylays call that pickled-fisc brine kechap. So we know
it was going around that part of the world. Yep, over there they were
really pouring it on, so to speak.
Earlier on in England (17th century), the sauce was spelled catchup,
which is, in part, what we're going to do today. Sometime around A.D.
1200 the English borrowed some catch up from the Old North
French. It was cachier to the French, which meant "to chase,"
as in hunting. Maybe that's why Americans, offspring as they are of
English colonials, like catchup on their French fries.
Q: What do the French call French fries?
A: "Fried potatoes." British call them "chips." ". . . What do
they call a Quarter Pounder in France . . . ?"
British don't use catchup on their "chips." Same with
cowboys. The British usually eat their chips with fisc--without the
fisc brine. They, the British, eat their chips with "vinegar"--which
is a Romance term meaning "sour wine." (How much romance can
there be in sour wine? About the same amount as pickled-fisc brine
in your "Chow-Mein" [which is Chinese for "fried dough"]).
Caught, as in what the English did to the fisc before they
ate them with their chips and sour wine, interestingly enough, didn't
come from the French. There is a limit to what the English will take
from the French and they drew the line between catch and caught.
"Catch, catch, caught" was formed by analogy from the English
"latch, latch, laught"--as in "Did you laught the gate
last night when you went out with that rogue you've been coquetting?"
(Coquetting, by the way, comes from the French word meaning
"strutting like a cock before hens," presumably when the cock was
the cachier-or rather than the cachier-ee; hmm, here
all the while I thought it was the chicks that did the coquetting.
. . .) Anyway, some people, being stubborn, and Scottish, and not
hating the French as much as the English
used the word catched--as in "I catched cold," or, "I
catched hell from my Mom for putting too much ketchup
on my French fried potatoes." Potato is Spanish, from patata.
Sometimes the Spanish call their French fries fried papas--which
is also what happens when students total out their fathers' cars.
Q: What do the Irish call French fries? A: They don't bother with
calling them anything because they like their potatoes boiled. Russians,
on the other hand, like their potatoes distilled. The Chinese don't
like potatoes at all. They like rice--with pickled-fisc brine on it.
(M-WWH, ODEE, RHD)
- Day 13: SPEECH
SPEECH. Speech comes from the West Saxon word sp.
They both came from Germanic for speak, which became specan
or sprecan in Late Old English, and speken in Middle
Dutch. "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" "Spreekt u Nederlands?"
Talk, on the other hand, is a 13th century word based on
the Middle English base tal-, of tale and tell.
A tell-tale is a gossiper who gives out to an audience information
concerning the private affairs of others; a tell-tale is a
tattler, so to speak. Tattler comes from the Middle
Dutch word meaning gossip, or prattling talk, or idle talk. (Gossip
comes from the Old English word godsibb or baptismal sponsor.
Prattle comes from the French prate, which, in turn,
comes from the Middle Dutch praten, which means "to utter idly
or emptily." "Idle chatter" means to "speak with words of little value
or significance, with frivolity, and with trifling." Idle itself
means "empty or useless.")
Back to tal-, of tale and tell. In the related
Dutch, taal was/is a speech (like the one you're writing) probably
coming from the Old High German zala, "number," as tale
also meant "reckoning number"--from German zhlen which means
"count, recount, mention numerically." Speech, harangue,
oration, lecture, address, talk, sermon,
homily, and discourse all denote something said to an
audience (which you remember from before, and which
will be listening to your speech). Harangue means "to
speak out loudly, like someone in the Army." Oration means
to speak out to God. Lecture means to read out, or, later,
to teach to someone. Apparently, we're supposed to read to you when
Address comes from the Latin ad- directus,
which means "go straight to." Talk originally meant to chatter.
Technically speaking, sermon is a discourse or speech
given which is based on a passage of the Bible. Sermon actually
means "talk" in Latin. Homily means to speak on morals or on
proper conduct to the same crowd, all at once (from the Greek homos,
"the same," ilé, "crowd.") Discourse is "a running"--maybe
running out of . . . the mouth? To that list of things said to a crowd
or audience you can also add utter--something not to be confused
with the large pendulous bovine gland, udder. (Bovine,
by the way, comes from the Latin bovinus which means ox, the
female of which also has one of those large pendulous bovine glands.)
Utter originally meant "to put forth," as in "she uttered
something for sale." It also rarely still means "reveal, put on the
market, sell, give currency to (as in 'coin something'. . .)." If
you published a book in the old days, you uttered it. If you
utter a book nowadays, you're probably cussing your textbook.
Nowadays utter means "give out audibly, speak, pronounce."
The 14th century word for utter comes from Middle Dutch, teren,
originally meaning "drive away, speak, show, make known." In the Middle
Low German the related tern meant "turn out, sell, speak, demonstrate."
It was also related to the word which meant "outward, outer, extreme,
total," from which we get our modern English word utter-ly--"way
out, man." Utter-ance is a putting or speaking out. Utter-er
is the one who puts or speaks out.
Speaking out is parlance. In medieval monasteries the monks
weren't allowed to speak. If they wanted to say something, either
to each other or to visitors, they had to go to a special room called
a parlor--a "place where one talks." Later on, many people
had parlors in their homes--rooms which served as a reception rooms
for visitors and as a ceremonial rooms for family gatherings on Sundays
and important occasions. The word parlor came into the English
language from the French in the 13th century. The French word comes
from the Latin word meaning "to talk," which came from the Greek parabolé,
meaning "juxtaposition." Also related to the word parlor are
parable, parabola, and parliament. And parlez-vous.
The French parlez-vous-ed in the parlor. Raymonde Carroll,
in "Money and Seduction" (Reading [R15B] for Day 16), suggests that
the French were doing more than talking in the parlor. They
parleyed, sure, we all know that, and we'll find out on Day
16 whether or not that had anything to do with "juxtaposition." Parlay,
by the way, is different. Parlay means to bet what you just
won. Discussion next time. (M-W WH, ODEE, RD-GED,
- Day 14: DISCUSSION
DISCUSSION. Talk you heard and
saw last time (p. 24). Discuss has two meanings: (1) "to investigate,
decide, examine," and (2) to "dispel or disperse." In the 15th century
it also came to mean "examine by argument." All of these come from
the present participle stem of the Latin word discutere, meaning
"to dash to pieces, disperse, dispel." In the Romance languages it
came to mean investigate, from dis- + quatere, "shake."
The dis- appears in words adapted directly from Latin.
dis- has at least seven meanings, but basically it means "apart,"
"asunder," "separately"--as in "disperse," "discuss,"
"dismantle"--or "with a negative or reversive force"--as in
"disaster," "disturb," "disgust," "disagree."
"Disgust" must be negative gusto, or negative "relishing
the taste of something." Relish is made from Middle English
reles, "taste"--so a negative tasting of the taste of things
Discus is what you throw in the Olympics, where they go
for the gold with gusto. Discus comes from the Greek
word "throw" (diskos; dikein). Olympics comes from the
Greek word for Olimpiás, a mountain in Thessaly which is home
of the gods, and home of the Olympic festival now known as the Olympic
Games. (Why is Olympic Games capitalized and
olympiad not? What is the olympiad?)
Olimpiás is not all that far from Marathon,
home of the marathon, of which Grandma's Marathon is one. (What's
with the capitalization in the last sentence?)
Discus has an interesting history, having been thrown around
a lot over the years:
"Latin discus meant 'platter' or 'quoit' and was borrowed
unchanged by English in the mid-seventeenth century in a sports sense
similar to the Latin. Discus was re-borrowed a few years later
as disk, now shorn of the Latin grammatical termination -us,
for astronomical applications, referring to the round shape of the
sun and moon. But discus had already been borrowed, more than
a millennium earlier, appearing in Old English as disc 'platter'
and evolving by regular sound changes into dish. Latin itself,
meanwhile, had not stood still, and the classical discus had
spun off a Medieval Latin desca 'table', [sic] which
English borrowed and which is the source of modern desk. [What
is this [sic.] about?] Discus
also underwent comparatively radical sound change as the Latin spoken
in France evolved into French; the Old French version of discus
is now reflected in English dais 'raised platform'. (The
Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991, p. 150.)
But this doesn't fully explain, for example, the sentence, "A
real dish mans the disco desk." Could it be another doublet?
Words which go back to the same source but look different because
they arrived by different routes are called "doublets."
More on man-ning and woman-ing (or
should it be -izing?) next week. Today we need to dispel,
investigate, examine, disturb, and disperse
writing. I hope it is not a disaster.
- Day 15: CONVERSE
CONVERSE (no, not the shoe). Last class
we discussed discussion. On Day 13 (p. 24) we talked the talk,
and spoke the "speech." Today it's a little "Coffee
and Conversation." Conversation, an informal talk with
someone, is also known as "colloquy." ("Criminal conversation"
is something altogether different, although it too probably starts
out with informal talk.) Related are colloquium (like the Philosophy
Department often has on Wednesday afternoons), colloquial,
colloquialism, and colloquially--all related in one
way or another to talking in a familiar or informal style. All of
those words come from the Latin colloquium meaning "conversation."
Actually it literally means com + loqui, or "coming
together to speak."
A "Brown Bag Lunch" is a colloquium, a place where you
come together to have an informal talk with someone. Informal
means not formal, or not "characterized by or given to a scrupulous
adherence to rule, convention, or etiquette," particularly those related
to academia. (Academia--from whence comes words like
academics, academy, academic freedom, Academe--comes
from the Greek Akadmeia, the grove of Akadmos where Plato,
friend of Socrates, taught. Plato is also a small town west of Minneapolis.)
Informal is like you behave when you have coffee and conversation
Converse comes from the Old French, "to live with." That,
in turn, comes from the Latin convertere, meaning "thoroughly
+ to turn," as in convert, to "turn thoroughly." So in your
"Brown Bag Coffee and Conversation" talk you want to "get- together-
without- following- conventional- rules- for- debate- and- convert-
someone- to- something- while- drinking coffee."I suppose you could
also drink beer, although a "Beer and Conversation" paper would probably
be a horse of a different color.
Speaking of colored animals . . . Coffee is brown.
And brown is coffee. Coffee comes to English from Turkey
via the Italians. The Turkish word for coffee is qahveh,
from the Arabic qahwe. Qahwe now is sometimes also java.
Java is an island of Indonesia, now also called "Malaysia."
Java is also a type of domestic chicken with black or black-and-white
feathers. Next time we'll have a talk about "women." Java
woman is Pithecanthropus erectus, or, literally
"ape woman," probably named because she went ape while drinking
coffee and listening to informal talks like yours in someplace
like Plato. (OAD, ODNW, WDUD, RDED)
- Day 16: WOMAN
Feminine comes from the Latin femininus--femina,
meaning "woman." The suffix of nouns -ist--as in sexist,
environmentalist, communist, socialist, anarchist,
nihilist, rapist, Marxist-- denotes" one or that
which does or has to do with," or someone who is a devotee of or advocate
of. An -ist is often an extension of nouns ending in -ism--as
in sexism, communism, socialism. . . . -Ist
can also indicate a profession, as with sociologist, anthropologist,
archaeologist, geographist, pharmacist, chemist.
. . . It comes from the Greek ists or Latin -ista. Sometimes
you also see that as -ize. With adjectives you see it as -istic,
meaning "having the quality of," as in masochistic or humanistic.
For the -er of it see Day
Woman comes from the Old English wífmann
wherein wíf was "wife" and mann stood for "human
being." The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories has
this to say about women:
"People occasionally express the belief that woman is a
compound made from womb and man, but it is not. Woman
derives from Old English wfman, a compound formed from Old
English wf 'woman' and man 'human being'. . . .
Wfman descended to Middle English with the f blended
into the m by assimilation as wimman with a plural wimmen.
In various dialects wimman because wummon, wumman,
wommon, and womman. All of these developments in Middle
English seem to have had some influence on the mismatched spelling
and pronunciation of modern woman, women."
"The oldest word in English for 'woman' is wif. Its male
counterpart was wer. Quite early in Old English wf developed
its prevalent modern meaning 'married woman'. It was presumably the
growth of this sense that resulted in the compound wfman becoming
the word for 'woman' that would survive into Modern English. In Middle
English wife developed a meaning 'mistress of a household,
hostess or landlady of an inn'. The Middle English sense survives
in the compound housewife; the original sense serves in old
wives' tale and in compounds like midwife." (1991,
"In the fourteenth century female appears in English with
spellings such as femel, femelle, and female
and is used both as a noun and as an adjective. It is derived through
Middle French, from Latin femella, 'young woman, girl,' which
is a diminutive of femina, 'woman'. In English, however the
similarity in form and pronunciation between the words female
and male led to the retention of the spelling female
and also to the popular belief that it is derived from, or somehow
related to, male. Apart from the influence on the spelling
there is no etymological connection between them. . . .
(p. 176.)" [That is to say, male and
female have almost nothing in common. Next time we'll look
"Girl is another curiosity. In Middle English girle,
gerle, gurle, around 1300, meant 'young person of either
sex'; it did not develop its present 'female child' sense until around
1375." (pp. 290-291.)
A womanist is a Black feminist, or feminist
of color. Also, womanist is a woman who prefers the company
and culture of women, but who is committed to the wholeness of the
entire people. It is formed by adding the suffix -ist to woman,
on the model of a Black English word womanish meaning "wilful,
grown up (or trying to be too soon)," as in the expression which Black
mothers might use to their daughters: "You acting womanish."
Womanist had been independently formed several hundred years
ago in the sense of "a womanizer," but this usage did not catch
on. The word womanist was coined by the American Black woman
writer Alice Walker (see Verburg pp. 705-715)
as a deliberate attempt to challenge the racist implications of the
feminist movement, which found it necessary to speak of a separate
category of "Black Feminism" and which thereby excluded Black women
from mainstream feminism. Maya Angelou, Bill Clinton's poet laureate
(Verburg pp. 415-421), once said, "I've been
female so long that I'd be stupid not to be on my own side but if
I have to be an 'ist' at all I'd rather be a womanist. The feminist
lost me because they can't laugh at themselves." (Daily
Telegraph, 26 Oct. 1985, p. 11; M-WNBWH). Can Simone de
Beauvoir laugh at herself?
(M-WNBWH, OAD, ODNW, WDUD, RDED)
- Day 17: MAN
MAN. And about man The Merriam-Webster
New Book of Word Histories has this to say:
"As you might well suspect, man is one of the oldest words
in our language, attested very early in Old English in a number of
spellings including man, mann, mon, and manna.
Unsurprisingly it goes deep into the roots of the Germanic languages
and has cognates in every Germanic language you can think of. So deep
are those roots that there are even cognates in Slavic languages,
such as Russian muzh 'husband' and muzhchina 'man',
and in other groups within the Indo-European family. (p.
"The prevailing meaning of man in Old English is 'human
being', used both in a particular and a collective way, that is, meaning
'human being' and 'humanity'. In Old English the sex-marked words
were wer 'male person' (related to Latin vir)
and wif 'female person'. Sometime around 1000 man began
being used in the sense 'male person' and after a couple of centuries
its use drove poor old wer into permanent retirement. Wer
survives today only in the ever popular compound werewolf.
. . ."
"It is a curious fact that many of the Romance, Germanic, and
Slavic words meaning 'male person'--Spanish hombre [for example]
. . . --developed in a fashion similar to that of man, being
first sex-neutral words . . . [from the] Latin homo, which
is also sex-neutral." (pp. 290-291)
Men are full of virtue. No kidding! If you don't believe
me see The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, p.
"From their word vir, meaning [sex-marked] 'man', the Romans
derived the noun virtus to denote the sum of the excellent
qualities of [male] men, including physical strength, valorous conduct
and moral rectitude. . . . The French developed their word vertu
or virtu from Latin, and it is first recorded in the tenth
century. It was borrowed into English in the thirteenth century. In
the fourteenth century virtue came to be applied to any 'characteristic,
quality, or trait known or felt to be excellent'. By the end of the
sixteen century the sense 'chastity, purity' appeared, especially
in reference to women. . . .
"The Latin adjective virilis, 'manly, masculine', another
derivative of virile when first used in English in the fifteenth
century. The Late Latin adjective virtuosus, derived from virtus,
became virtuoso in Italian, and then was taken into English
as the noun virtuoso in the seventeenth century. Virtuoso
then as now suggested man's prowess in one sort of endeavor or another
rather than his moral virtue. The Latin noun virago, meaning
'a manlike woman', was borrowed into English in the fourteenth century
in the sense 'a bold impudent woman, shrew'. . . . (pp.
Did you know that the word mansuetude means gentleness?
It comes from the French or Latin mánsuétd, gentle,
and manus, hand. So, man is sex-neutral, men have lots
of virtue, and every man should be gentle. (M-WNBWH,
OAD, ODNW, WDUD, RDED)
- Day 18: LAWYER
attached to a noun makes it an agent-noun, or the person that is doing
whatever the -ier/-yer is attached to. Among the earliest
of these words (13th century) are tiliere, an extension with
-ere of Old English tilia, meaning "tiller, or cultivator."
Along the same line you find bowiare or bowyer (maker
of bows), brazier (a worker in brass), clothier (one
who makes clothes), collier (one who "makes" coal, i.e., a
miner), drovier (one who finishes stone with a drove chisel),
glazier (one who cuts glass), grazier (one who grazes
or pastures cattle), sawyer (one who saws wood), hosier
(one who hoses, that is, sells hoses). . . .
For the -ist of it see Day
OK. But what about lawyer? A lawyer is one who lays
something, or one who causes something to lie. No kidding.
Lay comes from the Old English lecgan, "to cause to
lie." In it's preterit form [a grammatical form signifying past time
or completed past action] lecgan was, in Old English, licyan,
"to lie or recline"--from which we get lie or lay, signifying
something laid down.
Related words include the lair (place where animals lie
[liar comes from the Anglo Saxon leogan, "to lie"]),
ledge (originally a shelf where people laid on, but
now a shelf where some people occasionally rest between classes),
ledger (originally a book lying permanently in one place,
but now one who lays their derrière on a ledge in between
classes), and lager beer (a beer that has been lying
in a cellar or warehouse).
OK. But what about lawyer?
A lawyer is one who lays down the law.
What about the law?
The law is what is laid down; it's a body or code of rules.
Law comes from the Late Old English lagu, the plural
of which is laga. In Middle English it became laze,
and lawe. In Old Norse it's lagu. In Old Icelandic it's
log, the plural of which is layer, "a share or partnership
of a place where you lay things." (Fellow, by the way, came
from the same word, and originally meant someone who laid down a "fee,"
that is, money, in a business partnership.) In the 14th century this
all became lawyer, also lawier, which is more or less
what we know today--one often associated with lying down the
law, for a fee.
OK. But what about attorney?
"A person calling himself [sic.] an attorney for another
but not licensed to practice law might be thought of as guilty of
violating the law. But while the predominant use of the word "attorney"
today is that of an 'attorney-at-law,' meaning 'lawyer', this is not
always the case, and this use was not the original use of the word.
"Attorney comes, by way of Middle English attourney,
from Middle French atorné, a past participle [a word
usually ending with -ed, -d, -en, as in billed]
of atorner, meaning 'to direct, appoint'. This derives from
Old French a 'to' and torner 'to turn (in the sense
of 'to turn to')'. Thus, in its original use, an attorney was someone
you turned to or someone you let handle your affairs for you. The
earliest use in English is from the late thirteenth century, and it
distinguishes the action of a person acting "in person" or "in his
own person" from the work of someone acting for another "by attorney".
. . . As the body of special professional legal agents became recognized
in English law, there developed, beginning in the fourteenth century,
the specific use to mean 'attorney-at-law (one licensed to practice
law in the courts). . . . (The
Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991, pp. 28-29.
M-WNBWH, OAD, ODNW, WDUD, RDED)
- Day 19: ANGST
ANGST. Angst might likely develop
in preparation for the final exam. Angst comes from the Danish
and German. And from the Old High German angust came the Middle
Low German angst, meaning "dread." From thence came Middle
Dutch, anxt, and Old Frisian, dngost, also meaning "dread,
or a feeling of anxiety." Old Frisian is a language spoken on the
Frisian Islands, in the North Sea, by Amsterdam--where it's cold and
stormy enough to give anyone dngost. And if that won't do it,
certainly the thought of the little Dutch boy pulling his finger out
of the dyke and flooding Amsterdam will give someone
dngost, now angst. The Frisians are related to people
in the Netherlands and to the West Germanic people.
The Latin root angh- meant "tight, painfully tight, painful"--from
whence comes the words anxious, or, literally, "uptight," and
anguish, which originally meant "pain or trouble." Anxiety
may bring anger along with it.
From the related Greek ankhone, "a strangling (from something
tight around the neck)" came angina (short for angina
pectoris) "a strangling chest pain." Which brings me back to
next week. The final exam may be a pain, even
"a strangling pain," a pain not around the throat, but a pain in the
a_ _--sort of an angina buttocks, so to speak. (Buttocks--butt
for short--comes from the 15th century Middle English word bott,
meaning "the thicker end of something," like a stump.) But don't angst--don't
worry . . . be happy. . . . Whistle(1)
while you work. Don't angst . . . you'll make it through the
exam . . . the course . . . and life itself . . . if you
work hard . . . and listen carefully . . . and whistle. (ODEE,
- Day 20: THE END
The End. End comes from the Old
English word ende, meaning "end." This is almost the end.
- Day 21: FINAL
FINAL. Final comes straightforwardly
from the Latin finis, meaning "end." In Middle English the
word was final, from the Old French final. That's final.
- Day 22: GOOD-BYE
GOOD-BYE. "In the Spanish adios and French adieu
'farewell, good-bye', we see an explicit wish that the person addressed
should be in the care of God (dios, dieu). The same
sentiment lies at the origin of good-bye, which comes from
the phrase God be with you. The phrase gradually eroded over
time, appearing in such versions as God be wy you (in the sixteenth
century), God b'y you (in the seventeenth), and numerous other
versions before settling on good-bye in the nineteenth century,
the final form buttressed by the example of good night and
good day. Such a process of gradual phonetic attrition has
occasionally occurred elsewhere in English, producing, for instance,
hussy from Middle English housewife
, good-bye, and God be with you, exist side by side
in the language with differing employments.
"In time good-bye was further shortened simply to bye,
at which point reduction could scarcely proceed further. To some speakers,
indeed, this meager monosyllable seemed in need of fattening, so they
produced the reduplicaton bye-bye. But bye-bye is again
thick enough to shed a little poundage; accordingly you will sometimes
hear this uttered as a breezy 'b'bye.'" (The Merriam-Webster
New Book of Word Histories, 1991, p. 199.)
1. 2Whistle is a word whose
origin lies in trying to imitate what it is. Other words of the "onomatopoeic"
type include words such as sigh, buzz, bow-wow,
honk, moo. . . .