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by Charles Hodgsonthe blog & podcast for word lovers - surprising histories of words you thought you knew
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tangent - podictionary 609
28/09/2007
Now it's amazing how complicated people are. You think you know them and suddenly you realize that there is a whole other side to them that you never even realized existed. Here I am looking at a website that I wasn't expecting. Let me read you what it says: Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics: It is a little known fact, that Britney Spears is an expert in semiconductor physics. Not content with just singing and acting, in the following pages, she will guide you in the fundamentals of the vital laser components that have made it possible to hear her super music in a digital format. Who'd a thunk it? I'll include a link to that site on the podictionary blog. Now you may think I'm going off on a tangent here and that Britney Spears has very little to do with etymology. And of course you are right, but I'm doing it for a reason. When someone goes off on a tangent"and I do it all the time"they are invoking a word that comes from math. You know of course what a tangent is in math. Actually it's a couple of things. In geometry a tangent is a straight line that touches another line, often a circle, in just one place. The reason this is called a tangent is that in Latin the word tangere meant "to touch" and that's what the line does, it just touches the circle. In trigonometry there's also a tangent. While this kind of tangent seems more complicated it really isn't. The word trigonometry also comes from Latin of course and it literally means "triangle measurement", so once you know that, trigonometric tangents can be a snap. Think of that geometric tangent touching the circle (A). If you draw a line from the place it touches the circle, to the middle of the circle (A, O), then you'll have two lines that are at 90 degrees to one another. To make a triangle you just need one more line slapped in there somewhere. If you start that third line at the middle of the circle (O) and draw it out to cross the tangent line at some random place (Q), it becomes pretty clear that the place it crosses the tangent line will be farther away when the angle (X) is bigger between this third line and that other line to the middle of the circle. The relationship between the angle and the distance out the touching line is called the tangent function. But enough of that. I've put a simple diagram on the blog too if you can't follow my logic. The point is that a tangent touches once and then goes away and that's why, when I'm telling stories that seem to have nothing to do with etymology, I'm off on a tangent. The first guy to use this mathematical word with a rhetorical meaning was that famous Scottish poet Robbie Burns. The mathematical meaning appeared first in 1583 in Latin and before the century was out was popping up as if the word was English, which of course is what makes a word English. About 200 years later Robbie Burns used the now English word"not in one of his poems that are written with such a heavy Scottish brogue that they're sometimes hard to read"but instead in a letter to a friend which is written in refreshingly understandable English. That's what I was getting at when I brought up Britney Spears and how people have more sides to them than we often realize. I was happy to see that Burns didn't always write in such an impenetrable way. Maybe he was a closet math geek if he was the first one to use tangent with a non-mathematical meaning. But imagine my shock and horror when I learned that one of his favourite things to write in letters to his friends was dirty poetry. I guess like Britney Spears there are some sides of some people that I'd just rather not know.
crater - podictionary 608
27/09/2007
When a meteor bashes into the ground, or a bomb goes off and leaves a big hole we commonly call the result a crater. The first time anyone did this in English was in 1613 and the guy who did it was named Samuel Purchas. He wasn't talking about a meteor or explosion crater though, he was talking about the crater in the top of a volcano. He took this meaning from Latin where as well as the mouth of a volcano, the word crater had meant a bowl or basin. It took more than 100 years before another meaning for the word crater made it into English, but even though it arrived later, its meaning was more faithful to the original. That latecomer was crater meaning a large bowl for mixing water and wine together. These days we like our wine as it comes from the bottle, which is usually pretty nearly as it came from the grape, without any water added. But the ancient Greeks would have looked down their noses at such barbarous ways because they felt the correct way to enjoy wine was to pour it into water"never the other way around"in a large mixing bowl. Actually in Greek krater means "mixer" and that's what they called these vessels. They used to throw drinking parties that lasted all night and some of the mixing bowls they used were simply enormous. In the 1950s near Paris archeologists dug up one of these things that's now known as the Krater of Vix. It stands more than five feet tall and holds about 250 gallons. That guy I mentioned who first wrote about volcanic craters Samuel Purchas, he wrote it in one of a series of travel books he authored back there in Shakespeare's day. The party theme continued when it was over that very book that Samuel Taylor Coleridge fell asleep one night and aided by opium instead of wine dreamed up his famous poem: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree
metaphor - podictionary 607
26/09/2007
The American Heritage Dictionary defines a metaphor as: "A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison" They give as an example Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage." Clearly all the world is not a stage but Shakespeare had the line delivered from a stage and compared the people of the world to actors playing their parts. It was more than a century before Shakespeare that the word metaphor came into English and it did so in a most appropriate document. The year was 1477 and the document something called The Ordinall of Alchimy by one Thomas Norton. This is actually a kind of poem about the secrets of alchemy and the reason that the subject of alchemy is so appropriate for the word metaphor is that writings on alchemy written by alchemists had always been as obscure as possible and used piles of metaphor in favour of straightforward explanations on how to turn lead into gold. The author himself tells us that it is traditional for alchemists to not explain themselves except to one deserving pupil who they train up. That, in fact, it was forbidden among the secret sect of alchemy to write down the formulas and spells required for their art. To this end all descriptions are made by actually describing something else, or describing the opposite and then contradicting oneself. The point being to be as confusing as possible to those who don't understand alchemy, while leaving sufficient clues for those who do. Sounds something like a tax form to me. In any case, the etymology if metaphor is a great one. It comes to English from the French of the Norman Conquest and of course from Latin before that. But originally the word came from ancient Greek where it literally meant "between bear" or less strictly "carry across." So it is the idea that an analogy can carry a concept across from one scenario to another. But the best part is that in Greek it still means "carry across" or "transfer" and Greek moving vans are labelled metaphor. Link to Amazon for Charles Hodgson's book
scuttlebutt - podictionary 606
25/09/2007
Although one contributor to Urbandictionary attempts to tie the word scuttlebutt to the butt that is short for buttocks, the truth is that the butt in scuttlebutt was once a barrel. These days scuttlebutt means "gossip" or "rumor" to most people. That meaning is first cited in the Oxford English Dictionary only just over 100 years ago from a navy magazine called the Smoking Lamp. The reason scuttlebutt means what it means to us today, is that before that it meant a place where people gathered for a drink. When people drink they will talk, but in this case the beverage on offer was just water. Here's the story. About 500 years ago the English navy began to call the hatches in the decks of its ships scuttles. Exactly why this was so is unclear. It might have come from French, similar words seem also to have been in use in Spanish and Portuguese as well. There is some sketchy evidence also that this word scuttle actually had earlier applied to the hatch cover, not the hatch itself, and as such could possibly be related to our word shut. But the point is that a scuttle was a square hole in the deck of a ship. For reasons that I can't imagine ship owners and captains through history have sometimes found it justifiable to sink their own ships on purpose. You may recognize the word scuttle as also applying to this action. It's easy to figure out that if you cut holes in the hull of a ship it will sink, hence, the transference of the word from a hole on the top side of the ship, to the result of a similar hole on the bottom side of a ship. So much for scuttle. The word butt, as I've said, was once a barrel. Sailors need to drink water like everyone else and so a barrel of water was usually kept up on deck for them to come by and dip their cups into. A sealed barrel didn't help much so two cuts were made into a barrel lying on its side. The cut barrel staves would then be removed leaving a nice square opening that looked a lot like a hatch. So the water barrel gained the name of scuttlebutt. Just like people sometimes refer to rumor that they heard at the water cooler, sailors gained their gossip at the scuttlebutt and so the word scuttlebutt began to be applied to the gossip and rumor. I said that the first citation we have for this was from a naval magazine called the Smoking Lamp. It turns out that smoking lamp was chosen as the title of the magazine for similar reasons that scuttlebutt came to mean rumor. Although it never caught on as a phrase meaning news, smoking lamp referred to a lamp that used to be carried aboard ships for two purposes. The main purpose was to keep sailors from smoking near explosive cargo. To achieve this the lamp, which was the old kind of lamp that actually had a flame, was lit or put out according to when it was approved time for sailors to be smoking. But the smoking lamp was more than that. Like the scuttlebutt it was a place to gather and exchange news and gossip, because it represented a light from which they could light their pipes and cigarettes.
orange - podictionary 605
24/09/2007
This is one of those chicken and egg words that seem a bit strange in terms of which came first. It seems strange to me anyway that this name we give a color never existed in English before it appeared as the name of a fruit. The first citation we have for orange is from 1400 and it is in what might be called an early Latin English dictionary that translates the Latin words for "citrus apple" into the English orange. It was another 150 years before anyone wrote down that orange was a color. English speakers must have seen things that were this color before 1557, but what did they call it? The only candidate I can come up with that seems to predate orange is saffron. Oranges themselves were first eaten in China and then over the millennia became items of trade that made their way west to India and the Middle East before Europeans had ever heard of them. It was in India that the parent word of orange seems to first have attached itself to the fruit before being carried through Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic into Spain and the rest of continental Europe. Just as Spanish at the time was somewhere between being Latin and Spanish, Italian was between being Latin and Italian. Old French took the word for the fruit from the Italians before handing it over to the English. These days oranges are common enough, but even I'm old enough to remember tales from my parents, or was it grandparents, of an orange being a thrilling gift to find in your Christmas stocking. Better than a lump of coal I guess. Anyway to an Englishman 600 years ago they must have seemed pretty exotic and so it's fitting that the first citation I mentioned is by a guy who likely was using oranges for medicinal purposes. John Mirfield was the author and he was a priest-physician in St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London those 600 years ago. Aside from his medical Latin English dictionary John Mirfield wrote a couple of encyclopedias. These were in Latin, but one was on religious matters, the other on medical matters. His aim was to help other professionals like himself kill fewer patients. He has some good advice in there, like boil your water if you don't want it to make you sick. He even discusses the implications of administering more than one drug at a time. But he has little time or sympathy for non-professionals which in his mind include the illiterate"a group that in his day constituted the vast majority of the population"and especially women who he felt had a natural inability as medical professionals. I guess he'd disapprove of the fact that almost a third of practicing physicians in North America today are women, about 40% of graduating physicians are women and that about half of medical school applications are from women. Orange you glad he was mistaken about that? Just to wrap this up, Orangemen, the Orange Lodge and William of Orange are all just accidentally related to orange the fruit and the color. All of those oranges take their name from a town in France that evidently was founded by the Romans and had nothing to do with the fruit or color except a similarity in sound. Link to Charles's book on the words we use for our bodies.
