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In a Word: Propaganda!

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 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: Plagiarism — from Small Game to Big Controversy

In the time of the Roman Empire, a hunter might use a net or snare called a plaga to capture wild game, and the act of catching an animal in such a way was called plagium. The sense then expanded from snagging animals to nabbing people, often to be sold as slaves, so that plagium also meant “kidnapping.” Such a kidnapper was called plagiarius.

In the first century A.D., the Roman poet Martial was using plagiarius to indicate a literary thief, further extending the sense from a kidnapper to a word nabber. The fact that he didn’t feel the need to explain the word’s extended sense indicates that it was probably fairly commonly understood by then.

Plagiarius found its way into English in the 17th century as plagiary, which has been used in a few senses. Someone could accuse either a kidnapper or a plagiarist (in the modern sense) of being a plagiary, or someone who claimed another’s work to be his own could be accused of committing plagiary. Though the first two senses are obsolete, plagiary in the last sense still occasionally appears in legal documents. But for the most part we’ve said goodbye to the -y in favor of the -ism.

Every high school and college student is warned about plagiarism, so it may surprise some to learn that it isn’t a legal term in either civil or criminal law. One doesn’t sue for plagiarism but for copyright or trademark infringement.

Bonus History:

The word kidnapper has a history that is more obvious than you might expect. The kid part really does just refer to what was then a slang term for “child,” and the napper is another word for “thief” — probably from a variant of nab. A kidnapper, then, is a child nabber.

The noun kidnapper is recorded earlier than the verb kidnap, so the latter is likely a back-formation from the former — just like editor and edit.

But we don’t want to go linking those two groups, now, do we?

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.

Featured image: January 3, 1942 The Saturday Evening Post cover by J.C. Leyendecker; © SEPS.

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.

In a Word: Fantabulous Portmanteau Words

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, young Alice chats with Humpty Dumpty, who boasts that he can “explain all the poems that were ever invented — and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.” To challenge him, Alice recites the first stanza of the poem “The Jabberwocky”:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

In his explication, Humpty Dumpty explains that slithy means “lithe and slimy.”

“You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up in one word.”

To readers of the time, a portmanteau was a piece of luggage that opened into two equal-sized compartments. The word comes from the French porter “to carry” + manteau “cloak or mantle.” But since Through the Looking-Glass was published, a portmanteau word has been one whose spelling and meaning are derived from the blending of two other words. (Lexicographers call such words blends.)

Smashing together two existing words can be a fun way to coin new ones, like Friendsgiving (friends + Thanksgiving), Galentine’s Day (gal + Valentine’s Day), and Obamacare (Obama + healthcare). But the process has given us a number of fairly common words as well. Brunch (breakfast + lunch) and smog (smoke + fog) are probably the most often cited common portmanteau words, but there are many others out there that you might not even recognize as such blended formations. For example:

malware = malicious + software
motel = motor + hotel
motorcycle = motor + bicycle
Muppet = marionette + puppet
podcast = iPod + broadcast
slosh = slop + splash
transceiver = transmitter + receiver

Gerrymander is a blend, too, that predates Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty speech by 60 years. When Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry and his party redrew the commonwealth’s districts in 1812 in such a way as to suppress the Federalist vote, someone noted that the outline of the new districts resembled a salamander. That salamander became the gerrymander.

I wouldn’t care to guesstimate how many portmanteau words are out there, but I’m sure it’s a ginormous number. They won’t all be useful, but coining such blends can be a fun form of edutainment — just don’t get flustrated if they don’t come easily at first.

And don’t overdo it, either. You wouldn’t want to trigger a portmantocalypse.

Featured image: Scene from Through the Looking-Glass. Illustrated by John Tenniel. (Wikimedia Commons)

In a Word: Extravagant Wanderings

I don’t host a lot of parties, but when I do, they’re pretty low-key affairs. My parties could never be described as extravagant — so does that mean that they’re just vagant? What exactly is vagant, and how much vagancy must one have to reach extravagancy?

It turns out that the extra- in extravagant doesn’t mean “beyond a usual size or amount,” like with the extra-large soda you might drink during extra innings at a baseball game. In this case, the extra- is a Latinate prefix that means “outside of,” as it does in extraterrestrial, extrasensory, and extraordinary.

So what vagancy is extravagancy outside of? This bit of the word traces back to the Latin verb vagari, meaning “to wander about.” (The wandering part is more evident in two other words from the same root: vagrant and vagabond.) The Latin word extravagari means “to wander outside or beyond,” and it’s from this source that extravagant wandered into the English language.

So something that is extravagant is wandering outside its normal place. Shakespeare used this word in the most literal sense in the first scene of Hamlet. Horatio, having seen the ghost of King Hamlet arrive and disappear, notes that, as the cock’s crow trumpets in the morning, “Th’extravagant and erring spirit hies / To his confine.” The spirit of King Hamlet wasn’t dressed in bright colors or gaudy jewels; he had been wandering outside his usual place in the afterlife, but hurried back at the first sign of morning.

Since before Shakespeare, though, extravagant has been used to describe various things that fall outside of normality, and the word has only grown in the language. Extravagances and extravagancy are both well-used, and extravaganza appeared in the mid-18th century. There’s even a mostly forgotten verb to extravagate, which means either “to wander off” or “to exceed the limits of need or propriety.”

From its start as a word to describe wandering about, extravagant has certainly grown beyond what one might have once expected. You might even call its etymological evolution … well, you get the picture.

Featured image: Shutterstock

In a Word: The Barbecue Pirates

When Spanish explorers in the 1600s landed on what is now called Hispaniola (the Caribbean island that is today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic), they were met by the now-extinct Taino people. The Taino had a way of roasting and curing meats that the Europeans hadn’t seen before: It involved creating a framework of sticks called a barbacoa — at least that’s what it sounded like to the crew.

Meat cured and dried in the Taino way could be stored for long periods; in a time before refrigeration, this became a valuable skill for sailors. Over time, barbacoa took on more meanings than just the wooden frame, and eventually it found its way into English as barbecue.

If this business of preparing meat on a wooden frame sounds familiar, it should. I quickly glossed over a word with a similar story in “The Difference between a Swashbuckler and a Buccaneer.” When French explorers came to the area, they learned the same native meat-curing process, only they learned it from the Tupi, who called the wooden framework mukem. The French transliterated the name to boucan, and people who prepared their meats in that way were called boucaniers.

These boucaniers made their way to Hispaniola and Tortuga for the good hunting but, to quote the American Heritage Dictionary, “subsequently adopted a more remunerative way of life, piracy.” The boucaniers became, in English, buccaneers.

So this Independence Day, if any pirates show up at your backyard barbecue and offer to helm the grill, maybe hand over the tongs. They’ve got a history with meat roasting and curing that you can’t hope to match.

Featured image: Shutterstock

In a Word: What’s so Radical about Radishes?

You might be surprised by how many different types of radishes are there, and the array of colors they come in. You’re probably familiar with a number of garden variety radishes in white, pink, red, and even purple, or even with the Asian daikon radish, which comes on both white and purple varieties. What you might not know about are the aptly named Spanish black radish (black skin around white flesh) or watermelon radish (green skin around dark pink flesh).

Regardless of their color, what all these radishes have in common is that the part we eat is the plant’s root — and that’s how the radish got its name. Radish comes from the Latin word radix, meaning “root.”

A photo collage of radishes: a daikon, cherry belle, watermelon radishes, and a black spanish radish. — 1. Daikon, also called mooli. 2. Cherry Belle radishes, what you probably buy at the supermarket. 3. Watermelon radishes. 4. Black Spanish radishes. (Shutterstock)

But language is a fertile soil, and what began as a word for a physical root found purchase in metaphor. The root of a plant is considered its base, from which the rest of the plant grows. So when Western thinkers needed a word for a basis of thought or government, they reached for the Latin adjective radicalis, “of or having roots.” By the 14th century, this had become radical in English, and it was a synonym for fundamental.

Mathematics flourished, too. In the 16th century, mathematicians began talking of the roots of numbers — square roots, cubed roots, and so on — and when they created a mathematical symbol for it, they used the same vocabulary and called it the radical sign (√).

So in philosophy, science, and math, the word radical for a long time pointed back to a root of some sort. But then things changed. At the tail end of the 18th century, an extreme section of the British Liberal Party was calling for fundamental changes in their party’s stance. They called for radical reform — radical because they wanted to reform the party’s ideological roots — and very quickly these reformers became known as radicals.

By the end of the first decade of the 19th century, radical had come to mean not the metaphorical root but a large change or shift from that root — a complete flip from its earlier meaning. The concept of “radical beliefs,” then, means exactly the opposite today as it did 250 years ago.

The word radical continued to grow and change, from the notion of “unconventional” in the 1920s to 1970s surfer slang to general 1980s youth slang, so that today, radical has gone far from its root in root.

But a radish is still a radish.

Featured image: Shutterstock