In 2013, the Oxford Dictionary added more than 2,000 new
words, and now the world's foremost authority on the English language
includes such entries as badassery, showrooming, live blog, emoji, bitcoin and, naturally, twerking. The ubiquitous selfie
moreover was named Word of the Year by the OD after its use skyrocketed
by 17,000%, and it soon spawned an array of derivatives like belfie (a picture of your behind), helfie (a 'hair-selfie'), and shelfie (the
word you'll need next time you take a picture of your own bookcase).
To
language purists, words like these are at best considered ungainly, and
at worst represent a collapse in language standards. To less
conservative English users, they are just signs of the times, and new
words of any type are exciting reminders that the language is constantly
developing and evolving. No matter what you might think of them,
however, there's no denying that, etymologically at least, these words
are a fairly uninspiring crop.
Yes they have an undeniable
quirkiness, but etymology deals with the history and origins of words --
their nuts and bolts, their development over time -- and here, well,
there's little to report. The Class of 2013 are typical of a great many
modern neologisms in that they offer few etymological surprises, few
eyebrow-raising moments. On the one hand there are blends and compounds -
fusions of two pre-existing words smushed together into an amalgam like
twerk (twist + work apparently). On the other there
are "semantic conversions," wherein a word migrates from one part of
speech to another -- use a noun as a verb and you'll have something like
showrooming. In between are the borrowings, pilfered from other languages and parachuted into English (like emoji, Japanese for "picture character"), and the usual technical compounds and online jargon (bitcoin, live blog). All in all, it's a fairly predictable bunch.
I
spent much of the last two years trawling through dictionaries and
glossaries collecting together 500 interconnected word origins for a
book, Haggard Hawks & Paltry Poltroons (so-called as both haggard and poltroon
derive from hawking and falconry), and along the way I stumbled across
some truly extraordinary etymological tales. A Victorian prison
punishment now found in gyms. The original blockbuster. The
twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet. Compared to these remarkable
stories, often hidden behind some fairly unremarkable words, selfies and belfies are fairly unimaginative.
Eleven
of these etymologies, amongst the most curious and most surprising that
the language has to offer, are listed here. They show us how
extraordinarily unexpected the English language can be. They show us how
interesting the mundane can be. They show us why English is the finest
melting-pot of a language in the world. So if you get the chance to coin
a new word in 2014, why not make it a good one?
Ampersand
Until as recently as the early 1900s the ampersand, &, was
considered a letter of the alphabet and was listed after Z in
twenty-seventh place. At the time it was common practice to use the
Latin phrase per se ("by itself") to differentiate between individual letters and single-character words -- so A would be A per se, I would be I per se,
and so on -- and so to avoid confusion between & and "and," the
alphabet would usually finish with a final "X, Y, Z and per se &."
This and per se and eventually ran together, and the ampersand was born.
Archipelago
Archipelago comes from the Greek word for "chief sea," and as
such was originally just another name for the island-strewn Aegean Sea
separating Greece and Turkey. In fact, the Aegean is so famously strewn
with islands that the name archipelago soon came to refer to any similar arrangement of islands, or to an island chain or group.
Blockbuster
The original blockbuster was an enormous aerial bomb, literally
large enough to be capable of destroying an entire block of buildings.
Developed by Britain's Royal Air Force in the early 1940s, the first
blockbuster -- weighing in at 4,000 pounds -- was used during an attack
on Germany in 1941. Within just two years, the RAF had started using
bombs three times this size, and dropped more than 25,000 blockbusters
in 1943 alone. The name blockbuster was soon popularized by the press, and by the late 1950s had come to describe anything particularly vast or successful.
Curfew
The earliest curfews come from Mediaeval France when
regulations were originally put in place that demanded all fires and
flames be extinguished at a given time each evening to prevent fires
from breaking out overnight. This couvre-feu or "fire-cover"
was adopted into English in the early 14th century, and long after the
law against extinguishing fires dropped out of use, curfew came to refer to any directive restricting activities or movements after dark.
Deadline
A deadline was originally precisely that -- a line drawn on the
ground of a military prison that, if crossed, a prisoner would risk
being shot. The term first became widely known in the Civil War era with
the trial and execution of a Swiss-born major of the Confederate Army
named Henry Mirz, who infamously employed a strict deadline during his
brutal command of Camp Sumter in Anderson, Georgia. This sense of a
"line that should not be crossed" eventually gave rise to the modern deadline, a time limit or closing date, in the early 1900s.
Handicap
Imagine two traders, each offering an item up for exchange. Between them
is a neutral umpire who is so determined to arrange a fair swap that if
he believes one item to be less valuable than the other, the owner of
the cheaper item will have to add this difference, in cash, into the
exchange.
Both traders then simultaneously go to place a small amount of
money for forfeit into the umpire's hat: If they agree with his
assessment they drop their money into the hat, but if they disagree they
keep it in their hand. The trade only goes ahead so long as both
traders are in agreement, in which case the umpire is rewarded for his
fairness by keeping the forfeited cash. If only one (or neither) party
agrees, the umpire gets nothing, and no trade takes place.
This means of
bartering an exchange is the original handicap, or
"hand-in-cap," which dates back to the Middle Ages in England. Handicap
horse racing eventually developed from this idea of assessing a
difference in quality between two things in the 18th century.
Hypochondria
Long before it came to refer to an unhealthy obsession with your health, hypochondria was a medical term referring to all of the bodily organs that lie beneath (hypo) the cartilage (chondros)
of the chest and upper abdomen. Any illness affecting these organs, it
was once supposed, could cause "melancholy," a vague feeling of unease
or upset with no obvious cause.
Ostracism
Alongside inventing democracy, the Ancient Athenians also had an
amazingly simple means of ridding themselves of the least popular
members of their society. Ostracism, as it was called, saw the people of Athens write on tiles or pieces pottery (known as ostrakons)
the name of anyone they wanted out. The unlucky Athenian whose name
came up the most would then be banished from the city, typically for a
period of 10 years.
Paraphernalia
Paraphernalia literally means "beside a dowry," and originally
referred to all of a woman's possessions that remained her property
after marriage and did not automatically pass over to her husband. By
Roman law, a husband could not use or sell any of these possessions --
known as a paraferna -- without his wife's permission, and she
retained the exclusive control to bequeath them to others in her will,
rather than have them obligatorily pass to her spouse on her death.
Tragedy
Tragedy derives from a Greek word, tragodia, literally
meaning "goat-song." Precisely why Ancient Greek tragedies were given
this name is admittedly unknown, although one suggestion claims that it
perhaps refers to actors dressing in goatskins and furs to portray the
satyrs and other mythical beings that often appeared in the stories.
Treadmill
Designed by the English inventor Sir William Cubitt, the first treadmill
comprised an enormous cylinder that could be made to turn by a person
or group of people treading on a series of steps lining its edge. If
you're not a fan of the gym then it will come as no surprise that this
original treadmill was an enormous man-powered contraption used not only
to ease laborious tasks like raising water or crushing rocks, but also
as a hard-labor punishment in Victorian prisons, wherein inmates would
be made to trudge away on the mill for hours at a time.
CLARIFICATION: This post has been updated to reflect that the press referred to bomb models of varying weight and size all as 'blockbusters.'
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