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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

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?

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:

Cisgender is not an insult; it’s simply a descriptor.
Transgender and cisgender are about personal gender identity, not sexuality. They are not synonymous with homosexual and heterosexual.
Likewise, being transgender is not about physical characteristics. The word does not apply only to people who take the big step to undergo sex confirmation surgery or hormone treatments.
Cishet is a common abbreviation for “cisgender and heterosexual.”

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

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

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

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

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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In a Word: The French Lieutenant’s Spelling

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

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

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

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

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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In a Word: Mitigation Softens Up Hard Times

As thousands suffer from COVID-19 and the rest of us hunker down in our homes (or should), we’re all looking for ways to mitigate something: symptoms, anxiety, fear, sadness. Put another way, we’re hoping to “soften up” hard times — and mitigate is the exact right word to use here.

Mitigate — “to make less harsh, severe, or painful” — stems from Latin mitis “soft or gentle” and agere “to do.” From these roots came the Latin verb mitigare, literally “to soften, mellow, or ripen” but used figuratively to mean “to pacify or soothe.”

Mitigate is a transitive verb, which means it requires an object upon which to act. For example, in Aspirin mitigates a headache, “a headache” is the required object. Put another way, a transitive verb like mitigate does not require a preposition to help it along. But sometimes writers want to slip the word against in there: Aspirin mitigates against a headache is a word too long. Just remember that mitigate is synonymous with alleviate and craft accordingly.

But sometimes that extra against is a sign that mitigate is the wrong verb. Scores of lists of commonly confused words point out that mitigate is often confused with militate — “to exert a strong influence or effect” — especially when against is used with it. A correct example: Three nonprofits came together to militate against loosening the standards.

Frankly though, militate can sound rather formal and highfalutin’. Any sentence that uses it could probably be made clearer by substituting a more common and recognizable verb. Which means whenever you see either mitigate against or militate against, you should consider a little editing.

One final usage tip: If something can be mitigated, it is mitigable, not mitigatable.

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In a Word: Bissextus: A Short History of Leap Years

Normally, I devote this column to exploring surprising roots of common words, but today my focus is on a word so uncommon that we only use it every four years. The word is bissextus, and it brings with it a lesson on the history of Roman calendars.

From near the founding of Rome (approximately the eighth century B.C.), its people relied on a local lunar calendar to keep track of seasons and religious ceremonies. A lunar calendar is one based on the phases of the moon instead of, like today’s calendar, on the Earth’s relationship to the sun. This ancient Roman calendar included ten months of 30 or 31 days each, and the new year began in March. (In the beginning, then, September, October, November, and December really were the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months, as their names indicate.) The resulting calendar year contained only 304 days, which were followed by an uncounted winter season.

According to tradition, the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, decided he wanted wintertime on his calendar, so he added the months of January and February to the end of the year, creating a 354-day calendar. This was followed soon after with a similar Roman republican calendar that had 355 days. In 153 B.C., the start of the new calendar was pushed back to January 1 — after the Senate saw some push-back from an angry mod of citizens.

To keep the dates in sync with the seasons, the people in charge of the calendar occasionally added weeks or even a whole month to the calendar to realign the dates. Unfortunately, those “people in charge of the calendar” were politicians, so new days were sometimes added sporadically and for the wrong reasons, including to extend one’s term in office.

In the mid-first century B.C., the calendars had become so misaligned with the seasons that the vernal equinox, usually in the last third of March, was falling in the calendar in the middle of May. Julius Caesar, by this time emperor of Rome, had had enough. He called on a top astronomer to offer a solution to the mess that was the Roman calendar.

The result — what we today call the Julian calendar — was a solar (or tropical) calendar, giving up all pretense to being guided by the moon’s phases. It recognized that a solar year was 365.25 days long (which is close to being accurate, but not spot on), and so it established that a regular calendar year would contain 365 days, and every fourth year would have one extra day added to it. It also reaffirmed that the new year would begin on January 1.

So we have arrived at the modern idea of the leap year, but the Romans didn’t call it a leap year, and that extra day isn’t the one you think it is. With the old lunar calendars, the days of the month weren’t simply numbered consecutively; they were named by counting backward from the next calends (the first of the month, coinciding with the new moon), ides (middle of the month, on the full moon), or nones (approximately nine days before the ides). This system wasn’t abandoned in the new Julian calendar.

When it came time to decide where to put that extra day every fourth year, Caesar and his astronomers didn’t stray from older calendar traditions: They decided to add that extra day where they had been inserting extra days for centuries — after the sixth day before the calends of March. That means, from a certain point of view, a second sixth day before March 1 was added to every fourth year. And this is where our word bissextus comes from.

Bissextus, or the bissextile day, comes from the Latin bis “twice” + sextus “sixth.” A leap year is also known as a bissextile year. We refer to February 29 as “leap day,” but to purists, that added bissextile day was actually last Monday, February 24.

The Julian calendar, with some later, minor adjustments (including a modern numbering system), sufficed for centuries. But a solar year is actually 365.242199 days long, not the nice round 365.25 that Caesar’s astronomer reckoned. By the mid-16th century, the Julian calendar was off by about 11 days, which was causing problems with the calculation of religious holidays.

A new solution was issued in 1582 as a papal bull from Pope Gregory XIII. The Gregorian calendar — which is what mall calendar kiosks are selling every November and December — eliminated 10 days from October of that year, thus realigning the spring equinox to March 21. It also established a new calculation for leap years: For centennial years, only those divisible by 400 would be leap years. The year 2000, then, was a leap year, but 2100, 2200, and 2300 will not be.

Protestant countries weren’t so keen on this new calendar because of its source, so it took time before it was widely adopted. England and its colonies didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752, which is why George Washington, for example, appears to have two birthdays in 1731: February 11 according to the Julian calendar his parents would have used when he was born, and February 22 according to the Gregorian calendar we use today.

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In a Word: A Carnival of Names for Mardi Gras

Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Pancake Day. The Christian holiday celebrated this year on February 25 goes by many names, and not all of them make sense at first blush. So what does the day mark, and where do all these names come from?

You can’t talk about this holiday without talking about Lent, the period of fasting and personal sacrifice that begins on Ash Wednesday (February 26 this year) and lasts for 40 to 46 days, depending on how it’s counted. (Though Lent began as a tradition in the Catholic church — whose official language remains Latin — the word Lent comes from an Old English word meaning “springtime.”) Modeled after Jesus’ 40-day fast in the desert, Lent is a time of spiritual preparation for Easter, the most important celebration on the Christian liturgical calendar. The day before Ash Wednesday, then, is a time to prepare for Lent — and people go about it in different ways.

Shrove Tuesday

The word shrove is a past-tense form of shrive “to take confession.” Someone who has confessed their sins and repented is shriven. Shrive comes from an early borrowing into Old English of the Latin scribere “to write” — the source of scribble, script, and scripture — which then evolved within the English idiom. Shrove Tuesday, then, came up through Anglo-Saxon Christian tradition. On Shrove Tuesday, parishioners go to the confessional to be absolved of their sins before the Lent — a sort of spiritual cleaning out before the fast begins.

Pancake Day

Another thing that needs to be cleaned out before a fast is the pantry. The day before Ash Wednesday is the last day to use up rich ingredients that should be avoided during the Lenten season, including sugar, eggs, and fats. Throw in a bit of flour, and what’ve you got? Pancakes! It has become a tradition in many places, especially in Europe, to make pancakes on the day before Ash Wednesday. In fact, in some communities, the people are called to confession by the ringing of a bell which some people call “the pancake bell.”

Fat Tuesday and Mardi Gras

If we’re eating all the rich foods in our pantries at once, what we’re really talking about is a feast. And eating all that food can leave a person feeling, well, fat. Hence, Fat Tuesday, which in French is Mardi Gras, a last chance for overindulgence (in more ways than one) before the weeks of fasting and sacrifice begin. French-founded New Orleans — where they celebrate with king cakes instead of pancakes — usually has the largest Mardi Gras celebration in the United States every year.

Carnival

Whether you call it Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, it’s just one day on the Christian liturgical calendar. In many places, that one day is the culmination of days- or weeks-long celebrations leading up to Lent. Some places have a whole carnival season.

In Rio de Janeiro, massive public Carnaval celebrations begin the Friday before Ash Wednesday (that’s tomorrow!), offering an extra-long weekend packed with food, street parties, parades, and samba dancing. In Italy, Venetians commit most of February to the Carnevale di Venezia, the famous Carnival of Venice.

The word carnival — from the Italian carnevale, which is a shortening of the earlier carnelevare — comes from the Latin caro “flesh, meat” and levare “to remove, to raise.” Part of the Lenten fast involves giving up meat on specific days, so the world carnival fits right in whether you think of it as meaning “to raise meat up” or “to remove meat.”

Carnival entered the English language in the mid-1500s specifically in reference to the celebrations before Lent, but by the end of that century, the word was being used to indicate revelry more generally. The “traveling amusement fair” type of carnival is a much more recent invention that followed the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which featured the world’s first Ferris wheel.

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