In a Word: Gladiators with Gladioluses

This week’s In a Word comes from Zoe Hanquier, the Post’s editorial intern for the summer of 2020. As always, remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

The word gladiator doesn’t tend to spark comforting images — bloodied bodies, the crumbling Colosseum, a brooding Russell Crowe. To most, the July-blooming flower gladiolus doesn’t come to mind, despite the etymological and historical connection between the two.

Both words share the Latin root gladius, which means “sword.”

We first find the word gladiator in English — taken directly from Latin — in the mid-15th century, meaning “Roman swordsman” or “fighter in public games,” but the practice of gladiatorial fighting started centuries earlier. Historians believe the first gladiator battle happened in the 3rd century B.C. as part of a funeral ceremony to honor a distinguished aristocrat. But soon, gladiators, who were often slaves or prisoners, were fighting to the death in the Roman Empire for the entertainment of thousands.

The word gladiolus arrived in the 1st century. Coined by Pliny the Elder, a Roman naturalist and author of Naturalis Historia, gladiolus literally means “small sword,” referring to the sword-like leaves of the gladiolus species Pliny knew. The flower is part of the iris family and is associated with 40th wedding anniversaries, honor, and infatuation.

Some believe that gladiolus blooms were thrown onto victorious gladiators as celebration, much like the bouquets gifted at the end of performances today. The Dutch continued this tradition into the 1950s and ’60s with successful athletes, but the practice petered out. However, Dutch road bicycle racer and 1978 world champion Gerrie Knetemann is rumored to have invented the phrase de dood of de gladiolen — “death or the gladiolus” — in the ’70s, referring to Roman history and Dutch practice. Louis van Gaal, Dutch trainer of the Manchester United football team, famously said “it is death or the gladiolus,” meaning “all or nothing,” in reference to a difficult match his team later won in 2015. Gaal is credited with bringing the phrase to English.

Gladiolus has changed some since its original naming. Old English shortened it to gladdon, although that word now refers more specifically to a different plant — the “stinking iris” or “roast beef plant,” named for its odor. But we find it returning to its Latin root as gladiol in the mid-15th century — around the same time gladiator was cementing its place in English.

Today, the flower is mostly known as a gladiolus, but there are variations. A few plant-lovers refer to a single flower as a gladiola. Some call a bouquet of them gladiolas, others gladioluses or gladioli. Smart florists skip the linguistic debate in favor of glads.

Regardless of what you call them, you can enjoy their colorful bloom this month and perhaps imagine victorious gladiators being showered with them.

(Andy Hollandbeck; Shutterstock)

In a Word: The 100th Column

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Today we reach a milestone: the 100th addition to In a Word. Yes, it’s my 100th dive into the weird, unexpected, and exciting history of common English words. And as my 100th article, there’s really only one suitable subject:

One Hundred

Most of the words I’ve focused on in this column were adopted from other languages, especially Greek and Latin (you can thank the expansion of the Roman Empire for that). In some cases, foreign words were borrowed and adapted because they described things or concepts that simply didn’t exist for the earliest speakers of English, so they didn’t already have their own names for them.

But counting is a foundational concept, one of the first areas that languages must find some way to communicate about. Consequently, number words — even if they only mark “one” and “many” — are some of the earliest words to appear in a language. And that’s true for English, too: Modern English names for numbers trace back to the very beginning of the language, having evolved from a language that even predates Greek and Latin.

Historical linguists believe that the word for “one” in nearly all languages in Europe and western Asia derived from a single, theoretical mother tongue called Proto-Indo-European. That’s why we see the similarities in, say, Latin (unus), Welsh (un), and Russian (odin). Over centuries, languages differentiated; one of those branches is Proto-Germanic, which itself branched into more languages. We can still see the similarities today in the word for one in those languages that grew from early Germanic tongues, for example, German (ein), Dutch (een), and Swedish and Danish (en).

In Old English, the word for “one” was an. If that reminds you of an indefinite article, you’re on the right track. In many European languages the word for “one” also became the singular indefinite article. For example, the French word for “one” is une, but une souris is also how you would say “a mouse.” English did the same thing, sort of. An developed into modern a and an, but during the 12th century, the word one diverged and was used only for the numerical value.

And it wasn’t until the 14th century that people began pronouncing it “wun” as we do today. Before then, it was closer to “own,” a pronunciation still used in the related words only, atone and alone and only a vowel shift away from the pronunciation of the original an.

The word hundred has a similarly long history. In its Old English form, though, the -red ending was a suffix that meant “reckoning,” basically marking the word as a number. Some Old English texts even use the shortened hund, without the suffix, to refer to the number 100.

Other Hundreds

The Greek word for 100 is hekaton. Because much of the Greek-derived language we have in English was filtered through Latin, and Latin already had well-established language for numbers, we don’t have many English words, outside of scientific jargon, that hearken back to ancient Greek number names. But you can pop open a dictionary and discover that a hecatomb is a sacrifice of 100 oxen or cattle, a hecatontarchy is rule by 100 people, and a hectogon or hecatonagon is a 100-sided figure.

As I said, Latin had its own word for 100, centum, the root for quite a number of common English words:

A Look Back

It’s hard to believe I’ve reached 100 of these little lexical explorations. We use words to tell stories, but so many words are stories in themselves — weird stories, exciting stories, unexpected stories. Even, on occasion, naughty stories. But they aren’t just stories of words; the history of a word is bound up with the history of humankind itself, and by examining where our language comes from and how it has changed we can see where we come from and how we have changed.

The history of language is the history of humanity. Sure, it can be dark sometimes, but it can also be uplifting, enlightening, and funny. Here are some of my favorite word stories; if you’re looking for sparks to ignite an excitement for etymology, these can be great places to start:

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In a Word: Cussing and Discussing

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

 

When I was growing up, we young ones weren’t allowed to use profanity around adults. And even when we were solely among peers, letting one of those “dirty words” pass our lips — even the relatively mild ones found in the Bible — would inevitably lead to some goody-two-shoes threatening to tattle on us.

In my Midwest childhood, the common term for such wicked utterances was cussing, a word that existed in my vocabulary for a long time before I understood that it was an intentional mispronunciation of cursing.

But in the meantime, I started school, where teachers were fond of discussing the topics at hand — and I made a connection. In discuss, I recognized that dis- prefix, which I vaguely understood as a negation in words like disagree, disconnect, and disregard. So it seemed reasonable in my young mind that if cussing was a type of speech that used naughty words, discussing would refer to a type of speech that didn’t use those curse words. Sure, the timeline seemed backward — the act of discussing would surely have come (and been named) before cussing — but one thing I learned at a very young age, and which still holds true, is that English is rarely logical.

I was a precocious child.

Though my early analysis of discuss was way off, it wasn’t entirely wrong. That first syllable really is the common Latinate prefix meaning “lack of, not, opposite of, away,” or in this case, “apart.” The second syllable finds its root in the Latin quatere “to strike or shake” — the root of the seemingly unrelated words quash, rescue, and percussion. In Latin, dis- and -quatere were combined to become discutere, originally “to dash to pieces, to shake apart.” But when it was still a living language, Latin, like any other language, evolved over time, and it took on the meaning “to scatter,” then the more metaphorical “investigate, examine” (imagine smashing up something complex, even a complex idea, to see how all its pieces fit together), and then “debate.”

It was around this time that the word found its way into English. The earliest written evidence we have of discuss (in this case, discussen) in English comes from the late-14th and early 15th century, in the “examine” sense, but it fairly rapidly evolved into the modern “talk about” meaning.

In the meantime, while discuss was taking this etymological trip through time, cursing showed up in Middle English, probably before the 12th century. Nobody’s quite sure exactly where curse came from. It has no known linguistic relatives. It could be related to the Old French curuz “anger,” or Latin cursus “course,” or something completely different.

Regardless of how curse began, Americans started changing cursing to cussing in the early 18th century, and we’ve been cussing ever since.

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In a Word: From Hostel to Hotel

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Though we expect a widely different set of amenities from a hostel than we do from a hotel, both serve the purpose of giving travelers temporary lodging. And now that I’ve brought them up, you’re probably noticing that hostel and hotel differ by only a single letter. That’s no coincidence; they’re basically the same French word adopted into English at different times.

They both find their roots in the Latin hospes, simultaneously meaning “visitor” and “one who provides lodging or entertainment to a visitor.” Does it seem odd to have one word that names both a guest and a host? Social expectations in ancient Rome called for a bit of reciprocity — if you stayed in someone’s home as a guest, you were expected to serve as host to your former host in your own home at some later date. That expectation of alternating visitor/host roles was reflected in the language.

Later, in Medieval Latin (A.D. 4th-10th century), hospes gave us hospitale meaning “inn, large house.” In Old French, hospitale split into hospital (or ospital) and the contracted hostel (or ostel). Both words could be used to mean “guesthouse, inn”; the former went on to become the English hospital, but the latter, which first appeared in English writings in the early 13th century, retained its meaning. Early English use of hostel wasn’t an indication of the quality or arrangement of the lodgings as it is today.

Meanwhile, something was happening in French. We’ve already seen indication of the French predilection not to pronounce the H at the beginning of a word if it’s followed by a vowel sound. But starting in the 1000s, French and Anglo-French speakers began treating an S before a hard consonant (like a T or a P) as a silent letter. Spelling wasn’t standardized back then, so in writing we find some people retaining that silent S while others dropped it — so what was a hostel to some French writers could be written as hotel by others.

Back in English, though hostel was available, inn remained a solid, shorter word for a place of temporary lodging and entertainment. The word hostel in English essentially died out after the 16th century. But in the 17th century, as rich folk built mansions, they turned again to French for a name for them. Probably unaware of the word’s previous evolution, they adopted the now S-less hotel. Though it was originally used in English to describe a large residence, through the 18th century, the word was increasingly restricted to the type of hotel lodgings we know today.

So English hostel and hotel were both borrowings of the same French word, only at different times — and with different spellings — in the evolution of French. But as hostels go upscale and hotels downsize for a more economical crowd, the difference between the two may be boiling down to bunk beds. Perhaps in the future, hostel and hotel may merge once again into a single concept.

Now, to tie up some loose ends: In France, Cardinal Richelieu created the Académie Française in 1634 as an official council to provide answers to all questions pertaining to the French language. To solve the question of the silent S and to standardize spelling, the Académie officially introduced the circumflex accent in a dictionary of 1740 as a way to eliminate that S but indicate where it once existed. Thus, Modern French has hôtel (from hostel), hôpital (“hospital”), forêt (“forest”), ancêtre (“ancestor”), pâté (“paste”), and a host of others.

And as I mentioned, hostel became obsolete in English after the 16th century. Sir Walter Scott revived the word in his writings starting in 1808, and its meaning evolved again. Youth hostel made its first appearance in print in 1931.

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In a Word: What Does ‘Cisgender’ Mean?

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Though cisgender is relatively new to the English language — dating only back to the 1990s — it’s formed from a root and a prefix that go back centuries. And it’s practically impossible to talk about the roots of cisgender without first looking at its opposite: transgender.

Transgender people — who were assigned a gender at birth, based on their sexual organs, that conflicts with their internal knowledge of their own gender — have always existed. But because of social, religious, and legal pressures, such people were long forced to hide what was considered aberrant behavior.

But things changing in the 20th century. Transgender people slowly became more visible, and therapies beyond attempts to “cure” them became more common and more widely accepted. Though Christine Jorgensen is well-known as the first American to undergo a sex change operation, in the early 1950s, hers was not the first surgical transition. The German physician Magnus Hirschfeld was offering hormone therapies and performing gender reassignment surgeries — now more commonly called gender confirmation surgeries — 30 years earlier. (Sadly, records of much of his groundbreaking work were lost to the Nazi book burnings of 1933.)

But 100 years ago, English — indeed most languages — didn’t have the words to describe these concepts, so people created them. As you can imagine, there were plenty of offensive and demoralizing coinages, but even the scientists’ more neutral suggestions — like Hirschfeld’s transvestite or Alfred Kinsey’s transsexual — had problems.

It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the term transgender made its appearance and began gaining wide approval. Its base, gender, goes back to the Latin genus, “race, kind, rank, or sex.” It entered English in the 13th century from the Old French gendre (now the Modern French genre) to describe a class or type of people who shared a particular trait. The 20th century turned it into the gender we know today as the word sex took on more erotic tones.

The prefix trans- comes from the Latin preposition that can mean “across, over, beyond,” or in this case “on the other side of.” Transgender, then, indicates a person whose gender is “on the other side” of the one they were assigned at birth.

But the growing adoption of transgender left a hole in the language: By what word do we call a person who is not transgender? This is where cisgender came in during the 1990s. The prefix cis- (pronounced “sis”) is simply the opposite of trans-; cis is a Latin preposition meaning “on the same side.”

A cisgender person, then, is one whose gender is identical to (“on the same side as”) the one they were assigned at birth.

The cis- prefix doesn’t get much play outside of scientific circles these days. It was more common in the past, though. In 1823, for example, Thomas Jefferson penned a letter to President Monroe in support of what would be called the Monroe Doctrine, writing, “Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe, our second never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cisatlantic affairs.” Keep Europe out of the affairs of this side of the Atlantic, he’s saying, and keep America out of affairs on the other side of it.

Cisgender is probably the most common cis- term in use today. And because it and other words surrounding gender identity are being used more and more, here are a few things you should keep in mind:

This column’s focus is on the history and evolution of our language, but this topic is obviously more complex and multifaceted than just the words we use to talk about it. If you would like to learn more about the transgender community — including the language issues that arise from it — I recommend checking out the websites for the National Center for Transgender Equality and GLAAD.

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In a Word: Cynical as a Dog

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

For many, cynical seems like such the default setting these days that I bet don’t even need to mention any of the baffling statements or ridiculous events of the recent past to illustrate the point — you’ve already formed a list in your mind. And though cynicism is a common player in modern social discourse, that word cynicism, along with cynic and cynical, is a rather odd one in the English language.

The word cynic literally means “dog-like” and goes back to the Greek word kyōn “dog.” Any cynophile (dog-lover) will tell you that dogs are the least cynical of domesticated animals, so what’s the connection?

It’s an old one:

In the mid-5th century B.C., Antisthenes — like his contemporary Plato, a student of Socrates — taught a philosophy that valued the pursuit of virtue above pleasure, and that virtue was enough to create happiness. According to Antisthenes’ teachings (later expounded and exemplified by Diogenes of Sinope), virtue was to be found in an ascetic lifestyle, self-sufficiency, and actions that align with the natural world. This meant shunning anything that separated man from what came naturally, including most personal possessions, houses, and even the socially determined concept of civility. A good reputation was also considered an unvirtuous social construct — and a bad reputation was therefore virtuous and desirable.

Because Antisthenes wasn’t a “pure” Athenian, he was not allowed to teach in Athens itself. Instead, he held court in a gymnasium outside of Athens called the Kynosarge, Greek for “the Gray Dog.” It’s likely because of the name of this location that his followers were first called kynikos, “dog-like,” which was Latinized in later texts as Cynic.

But the connection to dogs was also a useful metaphor for the philosophy itself, because a wild dog lived the type of life that Cynics aspired to. As noted in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Cynic once meant “one who lives a dog’s life: shamelessly, and without any settled home.” That puts a nice, positive spin on it, but contemporary Greeks weren’t so enthusiastic about them. Cynical renunciation of wealth, pleasure, and so-called civility in favor of what is natural could manifest itself in a number of crude acts — public urination being a minor example. Cynics would also question people’s virtue, accusing them of acting solely for personal pleasure.

There’s a fine line between wandering sage and dirty tramp, and for many Athenians, the Cynics spent too much time on the wrong side of it. So, to most common people, Cynic was an apt title because adherents expressed not a wild dog’s freedom and ease but its demeanor.

It was this capital-C Cynic — referring to Antisthenes’ followers — that we start to find in English writing in the mid-16th century, but in fairly short order, English speakers began using the word to describe any sneering, incessant fault-finder, and eventually the proper Cynic gave way to the common cynic.

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In a Word: Splitting Migraine

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

We’ve all felt the pain of a headache at least once in our lives. I’m thankful, though, that I‘ve never had to suffer through the agony of a migraine, which, I learned this week, usually starts on one side of the head and then spreads until your whole noggin is throbbing.

When ancient Greek physicians started treating patients with migraines, they latched on to that symptom of starting in only half the head and called it hemikrania; that’s the hemi- meaning half (as in hemisphere) plus krania, from the Greek word for skull, kranion. The word entered Late Latin as hemicrania, the second part formed from what is the more well-known medical term for the skull, cranium.

Old French took up this half-a-skull headache word as migraigne or migraine. But where did that first syllable go? The transition makes sense if you know a little French. For most French words that begin with an H — like hôtel, hôpital, Hermès scarves — the H is not pronounced. If hemicrania is said with a silent H, the first syllable of the word now just sounds like “eh,” the nonlexical sound one might make while trying to think of the next thing to say. It wouldn’t take long for that first syllable to be reinterpreted as not part of the word and dropped completely. (In linguistics, this type of word evolution is called metanalysis, and it’s more common than you might think.)

The word was adopted into Middle English around 1400 with a variety of spellings, but over time, two prominent variants emerged. The first is the migraine we know today, which is usually restricted to naming those horrible headaches. But the second spelling, megrim, found multiple, figurative meanings in the language, including the headache, an earache, an unwanted disturbing thought, and general low spirits. Megrims even appeared in this last meaning in James Joyce’s Ulysses, the 1922 novel that has been known to cause headaches in students.

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In a Word: Breaking Down Curfew

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

 

Across the country, as protests against police brutality escalate to violence, city governments have imposed curfews on their citizens — in addition to stay-at-home restrictions put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19. Though we understand what a curfew is, how we got to that word curfew isn’t so plain.

During the Middle Ages, well before the invention of modern safety equipment, houses in many European villages were often made of wood and straw and situated close together. That means open flame was a real danger; an uncontrolled fire could quickly jump from home to home. As a preventive method, a bell would be rung in the village at a designated hour of the evening as a signal to extinguish any fires that were still burning.

In Old French, that ringing of the bell was called cuevrefeu, a word constructed from cuevre, the imperative of covrir “to cover,” and feu “fire.” Cuevrefeu, and the Modern French couvre-feu, literally means “cover fire.”

Over time, the regulation of home fires abated, but the ringing of an evening bell at a set time of night became useful in other ways — including, at times, as a signal for people to get off the streets and go home. When the word was adopted into Middle English in the 14th century, with the simplified spelling curfeu, it still referred to that ringing of the bell, but was separate from any association with covering fires.

That’s how we find it used in Shakespeare; for example, in act III, scene 4 of King Lear, written 1605-1606, Edgar spies “a walking fire” in the night and proclaims,

This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet: he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the harelip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth.

“The first cock” refers to the crowing rooster, long a symbol for the start of dawn. In this excerpt, Shakespeare marks both the beginning and end of nighttime with a sound. (The “walking fire” turned out to be King Lear carrying a torch.)

Over time, the meaning of curfew expanded to include not just the ringing, but the time of night the bell was rung and the expected effect of that bell-ringing, that is, people returning to their homes for the night. By the 19th century the word had found its modern sense of “restriction of movement for a set time” — imposed either by one’s parents or by the local government.

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In a Word: Getting to the Guts of Nausea

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

It’s one of those little coincidences of language evolution that the word nausea — which has the word sea in it right there in plain English — comes from a word referring to sea-sickness. But it isn’t the –sea ­part of the word that marks its maritime beginnings.

Ancient Greek sailors (and probably those who failed to become sailors) probably noticed early on that the movement aboard a ship on rough seas could sometimes lead to that sickening feeling. That ship was called, in Greek, naus, and so they called that uncomfortable sensation nausia, literally “ship sickness.” This became nausea in Latin, and referred specifically to seasickness to the ancient Romans.

The word eventually made it into English, unaltered from the Latin (probably because it was used in medicine, and Latin was long the language of the educated). Perhaps strangely, the word never seems to have been restricted to seagoing sickness in English. Since it entered the language in the early 15th century, English speakers have been using it to refer to gastric queasiness whether it occurred on land, sea, or (later) air.

That Greek naus is the root of a number of other common English words related to the sea — like nautical and nautilus — and (at least metaphorically) to sailing, including the last syllable of astronaut and cosmonaut.

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Contrariwise: The Best Column We’ve Ever Published

—This article was published in The Saturday Evening Post on December 1, 1900

“The love of beauty,” wrote Emerson, “is mainly the love of measure or proportion. The person who screams or uses the superlative degree or converses with heat, puts whole drawing-rooms to flight.”

“The thing which impresses me most in my own country is the constant use of the superlative degree,” said a woman, recently returning from a long sojourn abroad. “I did not notice it in Great Britain nor on the Continent, but here I hear about the highest building, the best-selling novel, the paper with the largest circulation, the most eloquent preacher, the youngest college graduate, the oldest inhabitant, the fastest horse, and the most palatial yacht, till I feel like asking if there are no degrees but the superlative. The steamship which brought me over had to break the record for speed.”

“If I could find a place where people are simply good or bad, young or old, rich or poor, I would gladly spend my days there!”

I have been staying for a few days in the town where I was born and bred, and there I found the superlative degree rampant. The people voted a Morris chair to the most popular Sunday school superintendent, a ring to the prettiest girl, and a dictionary to the most popular school teacher. Perhaps by this time they are giving a silver cup to the child who has eaten the most food.

Recently I met a young man who had been the speaker in the legislature of a Western state. He was introduced to me as the youngest ex-speaker in the United States. I felt like asking what I was expected to do about it. I had never seen any work on etiquette telling one how to acknowledge an introduction to the youngest ex-speaker in the United States.

Within the last few months we have seen portraits of the youngest college president in the country. A friend told me that she had been looking up the history of the kindergarten in this country, and she had discovered that at least three women had been the first to import it from Germany.

Riding home on the train, I remarked to a friend, “If I could find a place where people are simply good or bad, young or old, rich or poor, I would gladly spend my days there!” But just at that moment, my friend put her hands over her ears, as a vendor came through the car shouting: “Blank’s chocolates are the best. Take no others.”

This article is featured in the May/June 2020 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.

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In a Word: The French Lieutenant’s Spelling

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Lieutenant is a great spelling bee word — great in the sense that it’s hard to remember how to spell. But if you break it down etymologically into its constituent parts, it’s easier to remember. Lieutenant is simply lieu + tenant.

Although lieu isn’t an uncommon word in English, it doesn’t get a lot of everyday use. We mostly find it in the phrase “in lieu of,” meaning “as a substitute for,” as illustrated in this statement by Watchmen creator Alan Moore: “While a truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.” Lieu goes back to an Old French word meaning “place, position, rank,” derived from the Latin locum “a place,” which also gave use the words local and location.

We think of a tenant these days as someone who rents or leases their home, but the key part of being a tenant is that they hold or possess that real estate by contract. Like lieu, tenant came to English through Old French, ultimately from the Latin verb tenir “to hold.” The tenant is the holder of the dwelling.

Combine lieu “place” + tenant “holder” and you get lieutenant “placeholder.” The word entered English in the late 14th century as a title for someone who is a substitute or deputy of a higher authority — someone who can speak with the power of that higher authority in their absence.

We still see this sort of use in some government positions (e.g., lieutenant governor). And, of course, it’s used primarily in the armed forces: Lieutenant, ranked just below a captain, appeared as a military rank in the late 16th century, as the title of the person who commands the company in the captain’s absence. Modern military ranks also include lieutenant generals, lieutenant colonels, and lieutenant commanders, who fall just below generals, colonels, and commanders respectively.

So remembering that lieutenant splits neatly into two other words can help you spell it correctly — that is, if you can remember the order of the vowels in lieu and that tenant doesn’t have a double-N in the middle (a particularly difficult thing for David Tennant fans). So maybe it won’t help so much after all.

So, in lieu of memorizing the word’s etymology, you can use a mnemonic device I picked up years ago:

Imagine you’re having a picnic. As you’re setting out your delicious spread, you notice a line of ten ants marching across the blanket toward your potato salad. “Oh, no,” you say. “You’re not gonna take my food!”

The ants hear you and reply in one voice, “We’re not here to take your food! Honest!”

To which you reply, “That’s obviously a LIE, U TEN ANTs!”

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In a Word: Julius Caesar’s Ongoing Contributions to Language

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

The name Julius Caesar conjures a number of images in people’s minds. Some remember history lessons about the Roman general and dictator who died more than two millennia ago. Others recall seeing him on stage in a Shakespearean drama. Still others picture the statue standing watch outside a popular casino on the Las Vegas Strip.

But there’s even more to the name Julius Caesar than a singular man. His name is the starting point for a linguistic legacy that has spanned continents, and it still has relevance in Modern English. It all began when he decided he needed an heir.

Gaius Julius Caesar adopted his grand-nephew Octavius after Octavius’s father died. According to Roman naming conventions, Octavius took on his adoptive father’s name — the whole name. He became known as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, often shortened to the anglicized Octavian today when talking about his early life.

As we all know, the Ides of March of 44 B.C. were not great for Julius Caesar, but they weren’t horrible for Octavian. In Julius’s will, he named Octavian as his heir, not only to his estate but to his power. So after the assassination — and some political and military maneuvering — Octavian assumed the role of emperor of the Roman Empire. After he defeated Marc Antony and Cleopatra, the Roman Senate bestowed a new title upon him: Augustus, meaning “illustrious one.” Octavian became Augustus Caesar, and his reign ushered in the Pax Romana.

When it came to lineage, Augustus followed in Julius’s footsteps: He adopted a boy, his stepson Tiberius, and named him his heir, bestowing upon him the name Caesar. Thus a trend was established among Roman emperors of identifying the next in succession by bestowing the title Caesar upon him, a title which was kept after ascension to power.

English contains a lot of words that are derived from Latin, in large part because of the expansion of the Roman Empire and the language it took with it. Caesar is one of those words that found its place in the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire — in fact, it was one of the first Latin borrowings into the Germanic languages. Translated into different tongues, caesar became synonymous with emperor. We find it in Old English as cāsere, and it appears in Middle English as keiser. On the continent, it became the German and Austrian Kaiser, the title that would be used by the emperor of Germany through the end of World War I.

The word caesar also evolved through the Slavic languages and into Russian, where it became czar or tsar, a title first adopted in 1547 by Ivan IV, Emperor of Russia. A German ambassador to Russia —Siegmund, Baron von Herberstein — brought the Latinized transliteration czar back to Europe in 1549, likely influenced by German spellings. Though the etymological link to Caesar is more apparent in the spelling czar, tsar is a more straightforward borrowing from the Russian.

Nonetheless, American political discourse latched on to the spelling czar, and pundits used it to indicate someone with practically dictatorial powers. In the 1970s and ’80s, we had, for example, an energy czar (John Love) and a drug czar (William Bennett), and the title keeps returning for many an administrative post — though never officially.

But we’ve been using the word to make political statements for longer than you might think: Adversaries of Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States, were calling him “Czar Nicholas” in the early 1830s. And it popped up again in 1866, with opponents of President Andrew Johnson dubbing him “Czar of All the Americas.”

Julius Caesar’s linguistic legacy isn’t limited to emperors and dictators, though. His name is also the source of Caesar’s agaric (an edible mushroom also called royal agaric) and, supposedly, caesarean section, a phrase that has been around since at least the early 17th century. Legend has it that Julius Caesar was cut from his mother’s womb, but that isn’t likely — at the time of Caesar’s birth, such an operation would have been rare on a living woman and would most certainly have killed her, and history shows that Caesar’s mother lived to see him become one of Rome’s greatest generals. It’s more likely that caesarean (and perhaps Caesar’s name) is derived from the Latin caedere “to cut.”

One thing that is not part of Julius Caesar’s lexical ancestry: the Caesar salad. That was named for Caesar Cardini, the man who invented it in 1924.

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In a Word: The Hardest Substance on the Planet

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

 

Even if you aren’t much of a fan of comic books or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you’ve probably heard the word adamantium before; it’s the fictional metal that covers Wolverine’s skeleton. Adamantium is supposed to be the hardest substance on the planet, meaning that his retractable claws can cut through just about anything.

Though adamantium doesn’t exist, its name is well-made, with historical roots that connect it with the actual hardest known substance on Earth.

Long ago, the Greek word adamas — a noun form of an adjective that means “unbreakable” — was the name used for a hypothetical hardest material. This entered Latin as adamantem, then Old French as adamant, which was borrowed into English in the 14th century. That word adamant still exists in English today, of course, but it indicates something only figuratively hard: it’s an adjective meaning “unshakeable, unyielding.”

So when the good folks at Marvel Comics needed to cover Wolverine’s skeleton with an unbreakable metal, it didn’t take an etymological deep dive to add -ium, a scientific suffix indicating a metallic element, to the end of adamant.

But thousands of years before comic books, there was a problem with adamas: It was a name for the hypothetical hardest substance on Earth, but it took time for the multitude of stones and metals to be discovered and studied, and still more for scientific measurement to make accurate comparisons possible. When diamonds reached Western civilization about two millennia ago, they were called adamas, but so were a number of other hard substances.

But people understood that those clear, sparkly stones of almost pure carbon were something special. So about the 4th or 5th centuries A.D., they started using the Late Latin word diamas to differentiate diamonds from other hard substances called adamant — probably influenced by the other dia- words derived from Greek. Diamas became diamant in Middle French, which was borrowed as diamaunt into Middle English, which became our diamond, the name for the hardest known substance on the planet.

Marvel Comics has come out with a few fictional mutants who can turn their flesh into diamonds, the most prominent being Emma Frost, but there hasn’t yet been a definitive battle between one of these characters and Wolverine to decide which is harder: adamantium or diamond.

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In a Word: An Anecdotal Word History

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

 

On one hand, anecdotes — those little stories we tell about the weird things that happen to us — can be some of the most intimate, informative, and enjoyable things we hear all day. But on the other, some people cling to these anecdotes as indicative of universal fact, even in the face of significant amounts of scientifically collected data to the contrary. Politicians, scientists, and statisticians warn us that anecdotes are unreliable when it comes to accuracy.

This is true historically as well. The “original” anecdotes probably weren’t all that accurate either, though they made for titillating reading. It all goes back to the early Middle Ages and a man called Procopius.

After Justinian I became Emperor of the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 527, the scholar, historian, and scribe Procopius became the legal advisor and chronicler for Justinian’s chief military commander, Belisarius. Much of what we know today about Justinian’s reign comes from Procopius’s writings, as he recorded his experiences in Constantinople and in military campaigns around the Mediterranean. In his lifetime, he published two historically important works: On Buildings and History of the Wars, the latter encompassing eight volumes.

But not every story he was witness to was safe to publish. He also recorded embarrassing and scandalous stories and court gossip about Justinian, Belisarius, and their wives. Because these tales exposed the (most assuredly exaggerated) sordid details of the private lives of his political superiors, Procopius feared possibly lethal retribution were he to publish them. So he kept them to himself … for a while. He planned to have them published after his death.

This posthumous work, often referred to as Secret History in English or Historia Arcana in Latin, was originally titled Anekdota, a Greek word combining the prefix an– “not” and ekdidonai “to publish” (ek- “out” + didonai “to give”). These were Procopius’s “unpublished stories,” the Middle Ages equivalent of the political tell-alls that are all too prevalent today.

Historians knew that Anekdota was actually published because it was mentioned in the Suda, a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, but for a long time, the original text seemed to have disappeared. That is, until the 17th century — more than a millennium after its publication — when it was rediscovered in the Vatican Library and reprinted. The book’s title — anecdota in Medieval Latin — became the French anecdote, which was adopted into English in the 17th century.

The word originally referred to “secret or private stories,” but by the 18th century, anecdote was widely used in the more general sense we use today, “a short, amusing personal story” — and not “a short personal story that proves undeniably a scientific fact.”

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In a Word: My Gods! What Day Is It?

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

One consequence of always working from home is that the days blur together even more than usual. I’m sure I’m not alone when I find myself legitimately trying to work out whether it’s Wednesday or Thursday. But that wondering opened up a new line of thought about why the days are called what they’re called. And why is it even that our weeks are seven days long and not six, or eight, or thirteen?

The seven-day week goes back millennia, at least to the ancient Sumerians, and it makes perfect sense if you think about it: Seven days is approximately the time it takes for the moon to move from one phase to the next. The spread of Jewish and Christianity tradition certainly helped to solidify this concept as well: God created the world in seven days, not thirteen.

Ancient Rome, however, relied on an eight-day nundinal cycle that they inherited from the Etruscans. Not until Julius Caesar made other massive adjustments to the annual calendar did the seven-day week really start to take hold in Rome. They named those days of the week after the seven known planets (which included the sun and moon), which were, in turn, named after Roman gods.

As the Roman Empire expanded, it took these names into northern Europe, where the Roman mythology behind the days’ names was filtered through Norse and Germanic mythology. Those names found their way into Old English and then evolved into the days of the week we love today, even if we don’t know which day it is right now.

Sunday

The first day of the week comes from the Old English sunnandæg “day of the sun,” a literal transcription of the Latin dies solis. As Christian influence spread across Europe, English stuck with the planetary reference, while other languages turned Sunday into the “day of the Lord,” dies Dominicus in Latin, which became, for example, domingo in Spanish and Portuguese and dimanche in French.

Monday

In Old English, mōndæg, a contraction of mōnandæg, literally meant “day of the moon” — Máni was the Norse personification of the moon. It traces back to the translation of Latin Lunae dies, which is the root of the name of this day in most Romance languages, like Italian (lunedi) and Spanish (lunes).

Tuesday

In Rome, the third day of the week was named for the god of war, Mars, and most Romance languages kept that association: It’s mardi in French and martedì in Italian.

Tyr (Tiw or Tiu in Old English) was the original supreme deity of ancient Germanic mythology, more akin to Jupiter (Zeus) than Mars. But in that old mythology, Tyr was also, as Encyclopædia Britannica puts it, “the god concerned with the formalities of war,” and so he was associated with Mars, and the day was named tiwesdæg after him.

Wednesday

The hardest day of the week to spell was even worse in Old English: wodnesdæg “Woden’s [Odin’s] day.” Odin was the king of the Norse gods, like Tyr more obviously associated with Jupiter than any of the other Roman gods.

In Latin, the day was dies Mercurii, for the god Mercury, hence mercredi in French and miércoles in Spanish. How did we get from Mercury to Odin? They do share one characteristic: Both are psychopomps, beings who transport the souls of the dead to the afterlife.

Thursday

The fifth day of the week was, in Old English, þurresdæg, a contraction of þunresdæg. That first character, þ, is called a thorn. It was a letter in Old English that was eventually replaced by th — in large part because early printing presses were manufactured in places that didn’t have that letter in their alphabet. Þunor is more commonly known as Thor today (also the source of the word thunder), and þunresdæg, Thursday, is “Thor’s day.”

In Rome, we finally get to the day named for the king of the gods, Jupiter aka Jove: Jovis dies “Jove’s day” (itself a loan translation of the Greek dios hemera “day of Zeus”). Of course, Thor wasn’t the king of the Norse gods, but both Thor and Jupiter/Zeus were their respective gods of thunder.

Romance languages continue the link to Roman mythology: Thursday is giovedi in Italian and jueves in Spanish.

Friday

In Norse mythology, Frigg was Odin’s wife. Scholars have long argued about whether Frigg and Freya (or Freyja) are completely separate deities or they began as a single goddess who differentiated into two beings as the mythology grew. (For more adventures in blurred lines between goddesses, read my earlier column “Trivia Three Ways.”) This ambiguous separation plays a role in the source of Friday, which was called in Old English frigedæg “Frigga’s day.”

In Latin, the sixth day of the week is dies Veneris “day of Venus” — which has evolved into, for example, vendredi in French and vineri in Romanian. Venus, of course, is the counterpart of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess associated with love, beauty, and fertility.

Friday is named after Frigga, it’s clear, but Freya is the Norse goddess associated with love, beauty, and fertility — that is, the goddess who most closely mirrors Venus.

Saturday

In Rome, the last day of the week was Saturni dies, “Saturn’s day.” Perhaps because the mythology of northern Europe didn’t have an obvious analogue to Saturn (Cronus in Greek mythology), a new god wasn’t assigned to this day, and it became, in Old English, sæternesdæg. (Some Norse languages did draw from an older tradition, giving Saturday a name that translates as “bath day.”)

But in a strange twist, Europe’s romance languages did veer away from the mythological association, reaching back to Hebrew. Sabbath became sábado in Spanish and Portuguese, samedi in French, and sabato in Italian.

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In a Word: The Patience of Patients

Managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.

Any nurse will tell you: Not all patients have patience; sometimes it’s the nurses who have to show patience to their patients. Human failings aside, the nouns patient and patience are etymologically bound together.

Patience came first, around the beginning of the 1200s, from the Old French pacience, meaning “the willingness to calmly endure adversity and suffering” — essentially the same meaning it holds today. It derives from the Latin adjective patientem, literally “the quality of suffering,” from the verb pati “to endure, undergo.”

We didn’t have to wait long after the noun patience made its appearance in English for the adjective patient to find its way into the language. By the mid-14th century, we find English speakers being patient, “capable of enduring suffering or misfortune without complaint.”

But quickly, the focus of the word shifted from the suffering to the sufferer. Near the end of the 1300s, we start finding references to patients — as today, people who are sick or injured and being treated medically, but also sometimes just referring to people who suffer without complaint.

In those early days, the literate English speakers would have spelled the words more like the French did. Thus we find the words pacience and pacient (both the noun and the adjective) numerous times in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written at the end of the 1300s.  Later spelling reforms changed them into the words we know today.

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