English language Archives | Page 4 of 7 | The Saturday Evening Post

In a Word: This Is Gorgeous

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.

Barbra Streisand’s first silver-screen appearance in Funny Girl is a significant moment in American film. The click of her heels, the gold-framed mirror, the high collar of her leopard-print jacket, and finally, those two words: “Hello, gorgeous.” As biographer Neal Gabler put it, “When Streisand addressed her image in that mirror, she was asserting her beauty and validating a new kind of glamour, a new kind of star, a new kind of power.”

Though she didn’t know it, she was also drawing on a word with a long history and an unexpected evolution.

In ancient Rome, the Latin word for “whirlpool” was gurges. If you picture a whirlpool, it’s easy to see how the word was metaphorically extended in the third century A.D. to mean “throat.” You might imagine, for example, the contents of a wine glass swirling whirlpool-like down your gullet to your stomach. The word entered Old French as gorge “throat,” which eventually gave English both the noun gorge, meaning “a ravine with steep walls” and the verb to gorge, meaning “to overeat” — that is, to stuff too much food down your throat. But neither of those words led to gorgeous.

During the late Middle Ages, the wimple became a common article of women’s clothing. A wimple is a headdress that covers the head, neck, and chin, and sometimes the shoulders, leaving only the wearer’s face exposed. In Middle French, the part of the wimple that covered the throat was called the gorgias, though the word was often applied to the whole wimple.

Picture of a medieval woman — This portrait of a wimpled young woman was painted by Rogier van der Weyden in the mid-15th century. Notice the gorgias covering her gorge. (Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Some nuns today still wear wimples, but they’re usually fairly simple wimples. Well-to-do women of the Middle Ages, though, would craft more elaborate ones, and intricate gorgias became so common and so fashionable that gorgias made the jump from noun to adjective, meaning “elegant” or “fond of dress.” This adjective entered Middle English as gorgayse and was later recast into the more common -ous pattern of other English words.

Today, gorgeous means “dazzlingly beautiful,” a far cry from its roots in whirlpools and gullets. The word has evolved so much that a fashionable woman from the Middle Ages would be confused by Barbra Streisand’s “Hello, gorgeous” line; after all, she’s not wearing a wimple, and you can’t even see her throat.

Featured image: Shutterstock

In a Word: Our Impeachment Error

With the impeachment hearings practically monopolizing news coverage, many have been asking themselves, “How did we get here?” While I won’t weigh in on the politics, I can shed some etymological light on how we got to impeachment.

Impeach stems from the Latin root impedicare “to fetter, entangle.” That ped in the middle indicates “foot,” and it also appears in the word Latin verb impedire, literally “to tie the feet together” but also the source of the related word impede. And when impeach (also sometimes spelled empeach) entered the English language via Old French in the late 14th century, that’s all it meant: to impede.

So in The Merchant of Venice (III.3), when Antonio says

The duke cannot deny the course of law:
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of his state…

he isn’t speaking of a legal procedure but of how the duke’s actions might get in the way of justice.

We can find examples of impeach used as a synonym for impede into the late 1600s, but it also found its way into courts pretty quickly. At the end of the 14th century — not long after it entered the language — impeach in a legal sense meant to bring charges against someone — anyone. By 1560, its meaning had narrowed — first to an accusation of treason, then specifically to a charge brought against a public official.

It’s likely the legal meaning came about because of a misinterpretation. Latin was long considered the language of the well-educated, and the learned judges and counselors of centuries prided themselves on their knowledge of and skills with that dead language — but they didn’t always get it right. It’s believed that impeach found its way into the court out of the mistaken belief that it stemmed from Latin impetere (“attack or accuse,” the root of impetuous) and not impedicare.

If not for this misunderstanding, we might all be watching impetement hearings instead.

As many have pointed out, the impeachment is the bringing of charges against a public official, not the act of removing them from office, though that may be the end goal. Both Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were impeached. Both were found not guilty (by a single vote in Johnson’s case) and served out their terms as president.

At the time of writing, Donald Trump has not been impeached because no formal accusation of a crime has been presented — the hearings are to determine if impeachment is warranted, and if so, for what reasons. Our “Quick Guide to Impeachment” details the impeachment process in Congress.

Featured image: Shutterstock.com

In a Word: Bad Guys and Good Guys

“Remember, remember the fifth of November, / The gunpowder treason and plot. / I see no reason why gunpowder treason / Should ever be forgot.” To many Americans who read this, it will immediately call to mind the graphic novel and then movie V for Vendetta. But in Britain, this little poem (or some version of it) is a centuries-old reminder of the foiling of what could have been the most horrific mass murder of the 17th century.

November 5 — two days ago — was Guy Fawkes Day, also called Bonfire Day. It is a British holiday commemorating the day in 1605 when London’s royal guards stopped Guy Fawkes from blowing up the Houses of Parliament while they were in session. He and his conspirators had secreted 36 barrels of gunpowder into a cellar under the House of Lords, with a plan to detonate them while King James I was attending a session of Parliament overhead. Had this Gunpowder Plot, as it came to be known, succeeded, it would likely have resulted in the death of the king, numerous members of Parliament, and countless civilians.

Word of the foiled plot spread quickly, and that very same night, to celebrate the king’s safety, people lit bonfires and burned effigies of Guy Fawkes. And before the next November 5 rolled around, it had been declared an official holiday.

Though some of the traditions have shifted over the years, the burning of Guy Fawkes in effigy has lasted. Back in the day, these effigies — human-shaped contraptions wearing shabby clothes and stuffed with rags and straw — were referred to simply as Guys. Effigies, on the whole, aren’t realistic works of art; they’re lumpy, fitted in outcast clothes, and often missing hands and feet. People took note of the odd appearance and started using the word guy to indicate any strangely dressed or odd-looking real-life fellow. In the United States, the word guy was diluted further and became an informal synonym for man and, in modern times, for a person of any gender.

So the next time you find yourself greeting friends with “Hey, guys!” or even saying “These guys are the best!” remember that English wouldn’t even have that innocuous word if a group of Englishmen hadn’t plotted to kill the members of its government all at once.

Guy as a name comes from French; it’s related to the Italian name Guido. Both of these names come not from Latin, as one might expect for two Romance languages, but from a Germanic origin that appeared in Old French as guie “a guide.” This is also the source of another guy: a rope, chain, or cable that serves as a brace or guide. Guylines, guy-wires, and guy-cables — or just guys — brace the tall masts of sailing ships against the wind, and they keep those tall red-and-white radio towers from crashing down.

Featured image: Shutterstock.com

In a Word: Salary: Are You Worth Your Salt?

As a Roman soldier, when you’re pushing through foreign lands on your leaders’ quest to conquer the Western world, the coin of the land isn’t going to be very useful. There’s simply nowhere to spend Roman coins in ancient Gaul or Germania. Recognizing this dilemma, Roman leaders paid their soldiers with something more useful: salt.

Some resources say that Roman soldiers were given an allowance for the purchase of salt, and others say they were paid directly in salt. (It’s possible both were true at different times and in different places.) Why salt? It wasn’t because the foods of conquered lands were overly bland, but because salt is a preservative. Having salt available meant that soldiers didn’t have to hunt for a fresh meal every day: The meat from one catch, properly preserved, could last for a week or more without spoiling.

The Latin word for salt is sal, and soldiers’ “salt money” was called salarium — a word that continued to refer to soldiers’ remuneration even after more conventional means of payment were contrived. This concept of compensation for work entered Old French as salaire and then passed from French into English in the late 13th century as salarie — or, in modern English, salary.

Salt was a valuable commodity around the world — more valuable than gold to some, because having salt to preserve food meant that you could eat year-round. That’s why spilling salt became such a bad omen. It’s also how the idiom “the salt of the earth” came to describe a good and honest person when, from a literal standpoint, salting the earth is a bad thing: Over-salinization of soil can destroy crops and ruin cropland. (Salinization and saline also find their roots in the Latin sal.)

And if you’ve ever said that someone isn’t “worth his salt,” well that goes back to those Roman troops dashing through Europe: It refers to a soldier who isn’t doing enough to earn his salarium.

Featured image: Shutterstock

In a Word: Propaganda!

The Age of Discovery — from the 15th to the mid-17th century — opened the world to new exchanges of products, cultures, and languages. It also opened millions of “heathen” people to proselytizing and conversion by the Roman Catholic Church. Throughout the 16th century, such missionary work was largely handled by Spain and Portugal, with little direct guidance from Rome.

But Pope Gregory XV wasn’t happy with that. He believed that because Rome was the highest seat in the Catholic Church, it ought to have a stronger role in religious outreach. So on June 22, 1622, Gregory XV issued a papal bull that established the Congregatio de propaganda fide (the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), a committee comprising 13 cardinals, 2 prelates, and a secretary who were to be the ultimate arbiters of ecclesiastical affairs in non-Catholic countries.

In short, the committee was in charge of spreading and glorifying Catholic doctrine around the world. The committee was sometimes referred to informally as just Propaganda, from the Latin verb propagare “to propagate.”

Propaganda in this specific ecclesiastical sense appears in English writing during the 1700s, but by the late 18th century and through the 19th century, a more generic sense of propaganda propagated, applying to the strategic dissemination of any type of principle or doctrine. The term was often used contemptuously, but its negative connotation didn’t become so widespread and hard-core until World War I, when propaganda became an important tactic for all sides.

During World War II and in all conflicts since, propaganda has become an important and common aspect of psychological warfare. Subject to exaggeration and often outright lies, it focuses on sparking emotional reactions — to the detriment of logical thought.

Featured image: Shutterstock.com.

In a Word: An Autumn Mystery

Autumn is officially upon us, and though the word is just as common as any other season’s name, it has a more mysterious past. While our other season names — spring, summer, winter, and fall — are native English words that we can trace back to our Germanic roots, autumn has a more mysterious past.

In Old English, the season was referred to as harvest — because it was the time to bring in the crops. But during the late 14th century, the Old French word autumpne, which finds its roots in the Latin autumnus, found its way into English, and it became pretty popular pretty quickly. It makes sense, too — harvest could otherwise refer to the actual crops or to the act of bringing in those crops, so opportunities for confusion were abundant. (Imagine, for example, if we called winter snow.)

However, how autumnus entered Latin is a mystery. As the Roman Empire grew, it seems neither Roman scholars nor politicians were much interested in studying, much less preserving, the culture, traditions, or — most important for this discussion — languages of conquered peoples. Their existence was not lost completely, though; some pieces were absorbed, including local words. We can usually trace words to these languages, though, even if they are now dead.

Not so with autumn.

A common approach to hunting down the etymology of difficult English words is to compare them to other known Indo-European languages. Languages change in sometimes predictable ways, and careful study can reveal not only the history of a word’s evolution, but its physical route across the land. But with autumn, no such luck. The names for this season vary widely — from Croatian jesen to Corsican vaghjimu to Greek phthinoporon — with little to indicate any distant relation to autumn. One theory is that the word comes from Etruscan, an extinct language once spoken on parts of the Italian peninsula, but we may never know for sure.

So for now, the word’s past will lie hidden beneath centuries of bright fallen leaves.

Featured image: Shutterstock.com

In a Word: Minutes, Seconds, and the Geometry of Time

With the omnipresence of digital clocks these days, I sometimes worry that younger generations are missing out on the everyday geometry that is the analog clock. But the mathematics of time-telling go deeper than just the circular clock face — they’re embedded in the very words we use to track time. It all goes back to Medieval geometry.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, the greatest analytical minds Europe were making leaps and bounds in mathematics and geometry — largely because of the spread of the Arab numerical system that we use today and the study of earlier work by Eastern thinkers. One thing geometricians did was to divide the circle (and, not much later, the hour) into 60 equal parts. This division resulted in 60 sections of 6 degrees that were each called, in Medieval Latin, pars minuta prima “first small part.” This name for 1/60 of a circle (or of an hour) entered English in the late 14th century — through Old French — as the abbreviated minute.

That minuta in pars minuta prima comes from the Latin minutus, meaning “small, little” — the same root that led to the adjective minute. So, yes, the noun minute (short i and first-syllable accent) is etymologically related to the adjective minute (long i and second-syllable accent) — and closely so.

But what about that prima? Why did they call it the first small part? Because they did it again: Each 60th was again divided into 60 equal parts, each one-tenth of a degree, leading to the secunda pars minuta, the “second small part,” each representing 1/3,600 of a circle — or of an hour. Minute was already taken, so this came into English as second.

So when you’re counting your minutes and seconds — at least, when you’re doing it with an analog clock — you’re putting to use a nice bit of geometric division that dates back to Medieval times and reusing a bit of Medieval Latin to describe it.

Featured image: Shutterstock

In a Word: Denim Jeans and Geography

Say the word jeans and most people will conjure up the same sort of image: a rugged pair of pants, probably blue, made of a fabric called denim. Denim and jeans go hand in hand so much that denims is a fairly common synonym for jeans, as well as a word to describe a pair of denim overalls.

It isn’t uncommon for a particular cloth or weave to be named for the place where it originated. Damask, chambray, and suede, for example, all derive from place names (Damascus, Cambrai, and Sweden). What is uncommon, though, is for two words derived from the names of two cities in different countries to converge in the way that jeans and denim have.

Jean as a cloth comes from the phrase jean fustian, a modern spelling from the mid-16th century of Gene fustian. Fustian is a type of twilled cotton cloth. Gene (or Genes) is a Middle French spelling of Genoa, the port city in northwestern Italy. Jean fustian, or just jean, was a particular fabric that was manufactured in and distributed from Genoa, Italy.

Denim, on the other hand, comes from Nîmes, near the southern coast of France. Serge is another type of durable, twilled cotton fabric — the word deriving from the Latin sericus “of silk.” Cloth-makers in Nîmes manufactured a type of serge that was called, naturally, serge de Nîmes. This entered English as serge denim in the 17th century.

Which fabric — jean fustian or serge de Nîmes — more closely resembles today’s denim? I have no idea. My interest is in the history of language, not textiles. But the next time you pull on a pair of blue French/Italian trousers made from an Italian/French fabric, pause a moment to bask in the wonderment of our wild, multifarious, multicultural, multidimensional jigsaw puzzle of a language.

Featured image: Shutterstock

In a Word: The Skillful Right and the Evil Left

Not many generations ago, children caught favoring the left hand were often forced — sometimes painfully so — into using their right hand instead. Some psychologists had associated left-handedness with contrariness, perversity, clumsiness, and, farther back in time, even pathological behavior and criminality. The Devil himself was believed to be a southpaw, and during the Inquisition, a woman could be accused of being a witch just for being left-handed.

Our hostility against things on the left goes back to antiquity: Omens that were viewed on the left — say, a flock of birds taking flight — were considered inauspicious or signs of misfortune. In Latin, such bad omens were sinister, meaning “left” or “on the left,” and from this early augural start, the word sinister over time gained the sense of “harmful” and, eventually in English, “evil.”

The opposite of the Latin sinister is dexter “situated on the right.” Because most people did better work with their right hand, dexter also developed the sense of “skillful.” In the 16th and 17th centuries, this “skillfulness” found its way into the English language as dexterity and dexterous, both etymologically referring to being right-handed.

Tacking on the prefix ambi- (“both”) gives us ambidextrous, meaning “having equal facility with the left and right hand” but literally translating to “having two right hands.”

The right side has long been considered the stronger or more important side. According to the Bible, for example, Christ sits at the right hand of God. The word right itself dates back to Old English riht, but it didn’t originally indicate handedness. It meant “straight (both literally and metaphorically), proper, good” — hence righteous.

Because most people were stronger and more agile with one hand, that became the “proper” hand for doing things, and therefore the right hand. That lexical shift from “proper, stronger hand” to “hand on the opposite side from the heart” didn’t occur until the 13th century. The other hand then became the left, which probably comes from an Old English dialect word that means “weak.”

So, according to our language, left-handedness is weak and evil and right-handedness is good and strong. It’s no wonder, then, that for so long southpaws were pressured — or forced — to conform to a right-handed world. It wasn’t until the neurological and anatomical studies of the mid-19th century that the scientific community even gave much consideration to the natural forces that govern handedness. And even then, it took another century before left-handers started gaining wider acceptance in civilization — in part because tools and equipment designed to be used left-handed was a profitable and previously untapped market.

While left-handedness today is no longer linked to moral turpitude or psychological disability (5 of our last 8 presidents were left-handed), its linguistic heritage lives on in our language — though thankfully (for us lefties), it seems to be fading away. Sure, one’s most important confidant might still be called a “right-hand man,” and someone who simply cannot dance still has “two left feet.” But on the other hand (see what I did there?), English speakers are now more likely to receive a “backhanded compliment” than the older “left-handed compliment.” And while in some languages a clumsy person might be accused of “having two left hands,” in English, you’re more likely to “be all thumbs.”

Featured image: Shutterstock.com

In a Word: Cracking Open the Walnut

Trees in the genus Juglans have been cultivated, both for their wood and their nuts, in continental Europe for so long that their historical distribution cannot be accurately tracked. It took some time, though, for them to make it to Great Britain. When the English finally got their hands on these nuts, they called them, in Old English, wealhhnutu — that’s wealh “foreigner” + hnutu “nut” — to differentiate them from their native hazelnuts. Over time the name was simplified to walnut.

Walnuts are literally “foreign nuts.”

So the wal- in walnut has nothing to do with walls, nor is it the same as the wal- in walrus. (Walrus is of Scandinavian origin and literally means “whale horse.”) But that Old English root is shared with a couple of other words you might not expect.

When the Anglo-Saxons invaded what we now call Great Britain, wealh (“foreigner”) and its adjective form wælisc (“foreign”) are what they called the island’s native Celts — which, yes, is ironic considering they were the invading force. The words stuck, and over time, those labels became Wales and Welsh.

The Welsh don’t call themselves foreigners, of course. In the Welsh language, the country is Cymru and the people are Cymry. Both words are pronounced “KUM-ri” and derive from an older word meaning “compatriot.”

Featured image: Shutterstock

In a Word: Paper View Cartoons

When I was a kid, Saturday morning was the one day a week I could start my morning unprompted. No alarm clock, no mother calling up the stairs, no pulling the pillow over my head for “just five more minutes!” Why? Because something was waiting for me on TV: Saturday-morning cartoons. From sunrise to lunchtime, Saturday-morning TV was the one broadcasting block devoted to the entertainment of children, and I was there for it, whether it was new episodes of G.I. Joe and The Smurfs or reruns of The Jetsons and The Flintstones.

With 24/7 online access to video entertainment, the unfettered excitement of Saturday-morning cartoons is largely lost for the children of today, but the cartoons themselves are not. The world is awash in animation, from big-screen, Emmy-winning feature films to small-screen standbys. Cartoons themselves have been around for several centuries, but the cartoons of old weren’t so animated or joyous, and they definitely were not made for children.

Renaissance artists, when they were preparing a new work, would often begin with preliminary sketches or paintings — smaller versions used to work out balance or details, and even full-sized renderings they used as guides for the completed work. They would create these sketches on heavy paper or pasteboard, which was inexpensive but also durable enough to last through the creation of the finished piece or to ship abroad to patrons for approval. That heavy paper was called carton in French and cartone in Italian, both words finding their root in the Latin carta “paper” — the root that also gives us charter, cartridge, cartel, and cartography.

In the same way that people started calling containers made of tin tins, artists over time began referring to these preliminary drawings by the paper they were created on. By the late 17th century, English-speakers were calling these sketches cartoons.

Once cartoons became the name of the artwork instead of the medium, it didn’t take long for the word to find new meaning outside fine art. The first cartoons in the more modern sense — finished works of their own, rather than preliminary sketches — appeared in newspapers and magazines in the first half of the 19th century. They were mostly attacks or defenses of certain political ideals or opponents — essentially political cartoons.

But from there, the art form blossomed into comic strips, comic books, moving animation, graphic novels, and, of course, my beloved Saturday-morning cartoons.

Bonus history: This heavy paper cartone was good for more than artwork. People used it to make sturdy but disposable boxes, and in the early 1800s, the name for the paper became the name for the boxes, too. English-speakers call them cartons.

Featured image: The Miraculous Draught of the Fishes, one of the seven surviving “Cartoons of Raphael” created in 1515-16 as preliminary designs for tapestries in the Sistine Chapel. (Lent by Her Majesty The Queen, Victoria & Albert Museum, Public Domain)

In a Word: Infants in the Infantry

If dentistry is the purview of dentists, poetry of poets, and ministry of ministers, who, then, should we find in the infantry? Infants?

Actually, yes. In a manner of speaking.

Both infant and infantry trace back to the Latin word for a baby or young child, infans, which literally translates as “not able to speak.” The Romans extended the sense of the word into later childhood, long after the age when we sometimes wish today’s children would stop speaking so much. That extension is embedded in some of the Romance languages; in Modern French, for example, the word for child is enfant.

We see the same extension in English, too. Adults are often enough called lad, lass, baby, child, kid, girl, or boy by older folks, sometimes in a demeaning way, but more often in a familial or intimate way.

In Renaissance Italy, the Italian word infante, indicating “young person,” made the jump into military terminology as infanteria, meaning “foot soldiers” — those young men who hadn’t yet had enough experience to serve in the cavalry. This came through French to English, probably in the 14th century, as infantry, the men on the ground who were the youngest and least experienced, and whose opinions on the course of a battle were probably considered about as important as an infant’s.

Of course, today’s infantry units aren’t the dumping ground for the young and inexperienced that they once were. For many, an infantry regiment isn’t a stepping stone but a destination in the Armed Forces, and they proudly display their regiment insignia — certainly on their uniforms, but also on hats, shirts, and tattoos — for the rest of their lives.

In a Word: Stepchildren, from Bereaved to Blended

Since before the days of The Brady Bunch, divorce and remarriage have been creating loving blended families across the country. There are few Americans who don’t know someone who can be described as a stepchild or stepparent, if they aren’t one themselves. While today those labels are common and unremarkable, the origin of that prefix step- is much grimmer. The original stepchildren weren’t created by divorce, but by death.

That step- finds its roots in a verb that means “to bereave”; in a time when divorce was rare — and the average life span was much shorter — stepchild (steopcild in Old English) referred to a child who had lost one or both parents to death. A stepchild was a bereaved orphan.

That loss wasn’t erased when an orphaned child’s remaining parent remarried or when he or she was taken in by another family: The step- remained, and the stepchild became a stepson (steopsunu) or stepdaughter (steopdohtor).

Not long after the introduction of stepchild into English, we also start finding references to stepfathers and stepmothers to describe the biologically unrelated parent. As life expectancy rose and divorce became more common, those step- words took on the meanings we know today.

A strange thing happened with the word stepchild in 19th-century America: We started seeing the idiom “beat like a red-headed stepchild,” implying abundant abuse of something unwanted. We find the phrase used more and more in print from the 1910s to around World War II. (Why specifically a red-headed stepchild? There are a number of theories, including anti-Irish sentiment and the tradition that Judas Iscariot was a red-head.)

In modern times, though, the obvious connection to child abuse and the implication that stepchildren are unwanted make this phrase at best tone-deaf, and sometimes downright mean. It’s best avoided except when used ironically by actual red-headed stepchildren.

Bonus trivia: French speakers have a lovelier way of talking about the people in a blended family. In French, stepdaughter and stepson are belle-fille and beau-fils — literally “beautiful daughter” and “beautiful son.”

Featured image from Paramount via Wikimedia commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In a Word: Who Put the Awk in Awkward?

We English speakers are used to seeing the -ward suffix, indicating a direction or tendency of movement, in words like southward, backward, and afterward. But then a strange thing happens with the word awkward. Exactly what direction is awk? And how did the spelling of awkward, with that rare letter sequence -wkw-, become so, well, awkward?

It’s true the -ward in awkward is the same suffix we find in, say, northward. It’s from the Old English suffix –weard, literally “turned toward.”

Awk, derived from the Old Norse afugr, turned up in Old English and meant “turned the wrong way.” In the beginning, awkward meant either “turned or done in the wrong way” or “backhanded,” and it wasn’t the only awk word out there. Awky, awkly, and awkness are all attested in the English language, but they had become obsolete by the 18th century. Today, awk lives on only in the word awkward and its various forms.

The general sense of wrongness that awkward carried made it flexible enough to apply in many areas of life and love, so that today we can speak of awkward dancers, awkward situations, awkward angles, and an awkward load.

Have you read the word awkward enough now that it ceases to look like a real word? In my opinion, that isn’t just semantic satiation; awkward is autological — it’s a word that describes itself, like multisyllabic, noun, and unabbreviated. Awkward is awkward to write and to read.

Though that -wkw- combination is rare in English, it isn’t, I discovered, unique to awkward. It also appears in hawkweed, a plant related to the dandelion and with a similar yellow bloom.

Featured image: Shutterstock.com

In a Word: The Lunatic Moon

Strange things can — and often do — happen during a full moon. Ask any medical professional: Anecdotal evidence reinforces the idea that the night of a full moon is a busy time for hospitals. Women go into labor and give birth under odd circumstances, emergency rooms are flooded with bizarre injuries, and psychiatric wards run out of beds.

It isn’t a new phenomenon, either. People have long linked the full moon to all manner of strange and destructive behavior, from suicide and murder to madness and, of course, werewolves.

So it would only make sense that the word for such peculiar and seemingly widespread madness — such lunacy — should make a direct reference to the moon. And it does: Lunacy and lunatic derive from the Latin word for the moon, luna, making them etymologically related to the words lunar (“of or pertaining to the moon”), lunette (something shaped like a crescent moon), and clair de lune (French for “moonlight” and the title of a beautiful Debussy piano solo inspired by a Verlaine poem).

No one knows just why a full moon might lead to such a rise in strange behavior. In fact, a number of statistical studies have shown that there really is no correlation between the full moon and hospital admission and birth rates. (For dogs and cats, though, it’s a different story.)

But don’t tell that to the people who work in emergency rooms and maternity wards, who continue view the full moon as a harbinger of chaos. You don’t have to be in the medical profession long before you’ll have your own story of a weird, wild night at work that begins, “There was a full moon… ”

Featured image: Shutterstock.

Logophile Language Puzzlers: Wild On-Stage Antics

Madeleine’s wild on-stage antics were a sharp contrast to her normal ______ demeanor, …
1. straight-laced
2. strait-laced
3. strate-laced
…but her slapstick comedy act was nonpareil — it was
1. unmatched.
2. not at all funny.
3. amateurish.
Madeleine likes silhouettes but not outlines, magnolias but not dogwoods, and mesmerism but not hypnotism. What does Madeleine like?

Answers and Explanations

1. b. strait-laced

It’s a common mistake to write straight-laced when, in fact, the idiom is strait-laced. Strait, which derives from the Latin strictus, means “narrow, constricted.” As an adjective, it’s an archaic word that today exists almost exclusively in two phrases: in straitjacket, a garment designed to be extremely constrictive; and in the idiom at hand, strait-laced, which means “strict or conservative in morality or behavior.”

The confusion is easy to understand. You might consider someone who is strait-laced to be on the straight and narrow, and conflation of the two would lead to straight-laced. But also consider: You can’t lace up something — shoes, a girdle, a straitjacket — and still keep the laces straight.

As a noun, strait is less archaic; you can find it on many maps. This type of strait is a narrow waterway between two larger bodies of water — and again the idea of constriction is evident here.

2. a. unmatched

It probably comes as no surprise that nonpareil came to English through French — in this case, Middle French. It derives from a Vulgar Latin form of the word par, meaning “equal” (think on par with). Nonpareil, then, means “having no equal,” or “unmatched.”

Nonpareil is also a little round chocolate covered in sugar.

3. Madeleine likes eponyms, words named after people.

Silhouette comes from Étienne de Silhouette, France’s finance minister under King Louis XV, who, as a hobby, enjoyed cutting profile portraits from paper.
Magnolias were named for French botanist Pierre Magnol, who devised the system for classifying plant species.
Mesmerism derives from the surname of Franz Anton Mesmer, an Austrian physician who devised a theory about a mysterious bodily fluid that allowed one person to hypnotize another.

Eponyms abound in English, and they aren’t always obvious. You probably recognize boycott and gerrymander as eponyms, but so are chauvinist, diesel, leotard, and ritz. So is madeleine, the small, shell-shaped cakes; they’re believed to be named for Madeleine Paulmier, the 19th-century pastry cook who is thought to have invented them.

—Andy Hollandbeck is the Post’s copy editor and managing editor.

This article is featured in the July/August 2019 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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