Posts Tagged ‘etymology’
“Turkey: A large bird whose flesh, when eaten on certain religious anniversaries has the peculiar property of attesting piety and gratitude”*…
Your correspondent is hitting the road, so (Roughly) Daily will be in hiatus for ten days ro so. Regular service should resume on (or about) May 24…
Tal Lavin devotes the latest installment of The Sword and the Sandwich, the wonderful newsletter he co-authors with David Swanson, to the quintessentially-American fowl, the turkey…
There are very few occasions in life in which someone gets to choose their own name: confirmation, conversion, or, in my case, transition from female to male. Out of all the names in the world, I chose my own; I wanted to pick something that would allow me to present as my male self, that would erase confusion, that would say something essential about me. Choosing your own name is not to be taken lightly.
In the case of the turkey—that busty bird whose thinly-sliced meat is a ubiquitous filler for club sandos, Thanksgiving-leftover feasts and deli lunch-hour specials—the ability to choose its own name might have been a mercy, and avoided a tremendous amount of confusion. The etymological journey of why a turkey is called a turkey makes the fraught rite of transgender name-choosing seem like a cake walk (or bird strut).
The turkey, meleagris gallopavo, is a big galumphing bird indigenous to the Americas, famous for its huge breast, commanding carriage, and bland but abundant meat. In English, it is named after Turkey, which is a country across an entire ocean from its native stomping grounds. In Turkish, the language of Turkey, a turkey is called a hindi, which means “from India.” In Hindi, the language of India, a turkey is called a टर्की (Ṭarkī). In Slovak and Albanian, its name means “chicken from overseas.” In Scandinavian languages and Dutch, it’s named for Calicut, a major trading post along India’s Malabar Coast. In Welsh, it’s twrci. In Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, it’s indyuk, indyk or indeyka—Indian bird.
In other words, languages across the entire world are eager to praise (or blame) the wrong country for this entirely American bird. And they can’t even agree on what wrong country to attribute it to. Linguists and historians have put their heads together on why this is, and it seems to come down to a fowl case of mistaken identity.
What’s undoubtedly central to this geographical misunderstanding is the role the Ottoman Empire played in trade to Europe around the period of the Columbian Exchange…
Read on the rest of the fascinating story: “Turkey,” from @swordsjew.bsky.social.
* Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
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As we gobble, we might recall that it was on this date in 1607 that a group of 104 colonists from England arrived in what we now know as Virginia and established the first permanent English colony in America. They named the settlement Jamestown in honor of King James I.
We might also recall that we have this group (as it grew)– not the New England pilgrims– to thank for Thanksgiving.
The first documented English Thanksgiving in North America happened in Virginia in 1619, one year before the Pilgrims even arrived at Plymouth Rock. This first Thanksgiving lasted “10, 15 minutes,” according to Graham Woodlief, the president of the Virginia Thanksgiving Festival. No Native Americans were invited, no women were present, and there’s scant evidence of turkeys or yams.
We might also note that it was on this date in 1968 that Frank Zappa released his debut solo album, Lumpy Gravy on MGM’s Verve Records label (an early version of the album had been issued by Capitol Records on 4-track cartridge in August 1967).
“Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed – fading away like water on stone.”*…
Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about “two-ness.” Sophie Hardach on why they died out…
Which word would you use to refer to yourself? “I”, presumably, in the singular. And how about you and a group of people? “We”, of course, in the plural.
But how about you and one other person?
In modern English, there is no word for that. You would probably just use “we” or “the two of us”.
But more than 1,000 years ago, you would have said: “wit”.
This term, once also used affectionately to describe the closeness between two people, is one of many personal pronouns that have been lost or transformed amid huge social and political change over the centuries. The English language has become simplified – but at times this has left gaps, creating confusion.
“Wit” means “we two” in Old English, a Germanic language spoken in England until about the 12th Century, which evolved into the English we speak today. Now completely lost, “wit” was part of an extinct group of pronouns used for exactly two people: the dual form, which also includes “uncer” or “unker” (“our” for two people) and “git” (“you two”). That dual form vanished from the English language around the 13th Century. (You can hear how some of these were pronounced in the short clips later in this article.)
“There’s a whole history in the [personal] pronouns”, including the impact of Viking and Norman invasions on the English language alongside shifting norms and customs that have changed how we talk, says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland.
Many Old English pronouns are still in use, says Birkett. Our oldest English personal pronouns include “he” and “it”, as well as “we”, “us”, “our”, “me” and “mine”, Birkett says. They have made it through more than 1,000 years of history and upheaval, almost intact.
“‘He’ definitely is a very old English form, and also ‘hit’, which lost the ‘h’ and became ‘it’,” Birkett says. The Old English “Ic” has also been resilient, losing only one letter, to become the modern English “I”.
But other pronouns were cast off – such as the once-common dual form. “It’s fairly widespread in Old English texts. Particularly in poetry, we get the use of ‘wit’ and ‘unc’ for ‘us two, the two of us’,” says Birkett…
Fascinating- read on: “Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy.”
* Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Words
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As we choose our words, we might recall that it was on this date in 1828 that Noah Webster copyrighted the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language. Published in two quarto volumes, it contained 70,000 entries, as against the high of 58,000 of any previous dictionary. Webster, who was 70 at the time, had published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1806, and had begun then the campaign of language reform (motivated by both nationalistic and philological concerns) that initiated the formal shift of American English spelling (center rather than centre, honor rather than honour, program rather than programme, etc.). His 1828 dictionary cemented those changes, and continued his efforts to include technical and scientific (not just literary) terms.
“Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going”*…
From Colin Gorrie, how our world also shapes our language– and in the example he uses, also our sense of duty…
Debt is old. It’s older than writing. The first writing system, Sumerian cuneiform, evolved out of marks used for accounting. From the beginning, writing was used to track who had what, and, crucially, who owed what to whom.
The influence of debt also extends to language more generally. In many languages, including English, the experiences of owing and being owed provided the blueprint for more abstract notions of duty, necessity, and obligation.
Words meaning ‘to owe’ developed into abstract expressions of obligation so often that it’s useful to have a name for the phenomenon. I call it the owe-to-ought pipeline, named after one of the clearest cases of this development. The word ought is, in fact, nothing but the old past tense form of owe.
This pipeline shows us something about how language changes and develops over time. First, it shows how easily words can slide from one meaning to another, although that’ll be no surprise to anyone who has watched the development of slang over a few decades.
The more important lesson owe-to-ought teaches us has to do with where grammar comes from. Wait, don’t run away! This isn’t a grammar lesson. What I want to show you is how languages create grammar — a collection of abstract meanings such as plurality and verb tense — out of the concrete realities of our shared human experience.
And what human experience is more common than debt?
This is the story of three families of words: owe, should, and the word debt itself. Understand these three families, and you’ll understand how the English language built its way of expressing duty, necessity, and obligation — not to mention guilt and sin — out of the raw materials of accounting…
A case study in how our vocabulary (and our sense of obligation) evolved: “How debt shaped the way we speak,” from @colingorrie.bsky.social.
* Rita Mae Brown
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As we acknowledge our antecedents, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that Rose Marie Reid was granted one of her several patents, US2535018A. A swimwear designer and manufacturer, Reid has already been the first swimsuit designer to use inner brassieres, tummy-tuck panels, stay-down legs, elastic banding, brief skirts, and foundation garments in swimwear, and the first designer to introduce dress sizes in swimwear, designing swimwear for multiple sizes and types of bodies, rather than just producing one standard size. This patent was, in its way, even more revolutionary– it was for a one-piece bathing suit made of elastic fabric “embodying a novel construction for causing it to snugly fit the body of a wearer in a flattering manner [that would] shape and support portions of the body of the wearer in areas of the bust and abdomen in a flattering manner without discomfort or impedance to free movements of the body.” The elastic fabric and elastic securing bands were designed to enable the garment to be put on without having buttoned openings which would “detract from the appearance of the garment.”
Reid assigned her patent to her company and enjoyed huge sales success, in part due to her impact in Hollywood and the motion picture industry. Famous screen actresses (e,g, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, and Rhonda Fleming) wore her swimsuits. And her suits also appeared in several California beach party films from the late 1950s and the early 1960s, including Gidget, Muscle Beach Party, and Where the Boys Are.
“By gold all good faith has been banished; by gold our rights are abused; the law itself is influenced by gold, and soon there will be an end of every modest restraint.”*…
Timely etymology from Dan Lewis…
If you follow politics (or, more likely, a politics-themed TV sitcom or drama) you’ve probably heard the term “slush fund” — and usually, it’s tied to something shady. A slush fund is money set aside for unofficial, often unethical, and sometimes illegal uses. It’s the kind of fund that no one really wants to talk about, and if they do, they don’t want to explain too much about it. If someone has a slush fund, you could say that there’s something fishy going on.
And you’d be right — literally speaking.
The word “slush” dates back to at least the mid-1600s, referring to the cold, wet muck that is formed when snow begins to melt. It’s unpleasant texture must have made an impression of the people of the day because a century or two later, “slush” took on a new, second meaning — at least, if you were on a boat.
Salt pork — salted (for preservative reasons) pieces of pork belly — was a staple on fishing and whaling ships of the early-to-mid 1800s. Crews aboard those ships spent a lot of a time at sea, and salt pork was a good, long-lasting protein source in an era before refrigeration. Salt pork was typically fried, and as the ship’s voyage continued onward, fat, grease, and other waste products would build up in the cooking vats. This residue became known as “slush,” likely because of its similarities to the melted snow seen back on land.
But this pig-created slush wasn’t just thrown overboard as waste — it turned out to be useful; as One Word a Day notes, “sailors used it as a lubricant and to waterproof the rigging and sails on their ships.” So they kept it around, and when their whaling or fishing expeditions ended, they typically still had a large amount of slush left over. And it turned out, there was a market for the stuff. Other ships could also use it to help their sailing efforts (before they started cooking up their own salt pork). As The Straight Dope notes, it could also be used by candle and soap makers. Once back on land, there were plenty of people who would gladly buy the slush off the ship’s cooks or other sailors.
That turned out to be a boon for the crew. Because the slush was a byproduct of the efforts to feed the crew, ship owners rarely, if ever, cared about the value of the slush itself — to them, it was waste created by the cost of doing business, not an asset. So when the sailors sold off the slush, they kept the money for themselves and their crewmates. Per Merriam-Webster, “The money from the sale of slush was reserved for the crew of the ship, and would be used to purchase items, such as musical instruments or books, which were not considered necessary enough that a country’s navy, or a ship’s owner, had to provide them for a crew.”
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, as a result of this usage, the phrase “slush fund” first appeared in our collective lexicon in 1839. It would take a generation or two before it gained its current, negative connotation often implying bribery. And with that came another term for financial shenanigans, which also comes from the use of salt pork byproducts to fund sailors whims: “greasing,” meaning “bribing.” The Etymology Dictionary explains “The extended meaning ‘money collected for bribes and to buy influence’ is first recorded 1874, no doubt with suggestions of ‘greasing’ palms.”
The term “slush fund” didn’t originally imply anything untoward — the association with bribery came later, as noted above. And the same is likely true for the word “bribe” itself. Per the Online Etymology Dictionary, “bribe” comes from the Old French term of the 14th century of the same spelling meaning “a gift,” and specifically, “bit, piece, hunk; morsel of bread given to beggars.” It took 200 or so years before the modern, sketchy meaning developed, and it’s unclear why…
“The Original Slush Fund” It was greasy. Literally. @nowiknow.com
(Image above: source)
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As we lament lawlessness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 that an 18-1/2-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
Still, the tapes were damming. The White House released the subpoenaed tapes on August 5. One tape, later known as the “Smoking Gun” tape, documented the initial stages of the Watergate coverup. On it, Nixon and Haldeman are heard formulating a plan to block investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was involved.
It’s a measure of how different those times were from ours that, once the “Smoking Gun” transcript was made public, Nixon’s political support practically vanished: the ten Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee who had voted against impeachment in committee announced that they would now vote for impeachment once the matter reached the House floor.
“A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass”*…
Holes. Caity Weaver wonders about them:
What is a hole?
A hole is a portion of something where something is not. Beyond that, holes are slippery. (As a concept — only some in reality.) Is a hole necessarily empty on both sides, like the gaps in a slice of Swiss cheese? Or need it only be empty on one side, like a pit dug into the earth? Is a hole with a bottom less of a hole than one without one? Can a slit be a hole, or must a hole be vaguely round? Does a straw have two holes, as one Reddit user pondered, or just one — a single thick hole, if you will?…
[She then proceeds to explore the concept etymologically…]
Wait — What Is a Hole?
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy goes right for the, well… philosophical:
Holes are an interesting case study for ontologists and epistemologists. Naive, untutored descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of reference, on a par with ordinary material objects. (‘There are as many holes in the cheese as there are cookies in the tin.’) And we often appeal to holes to account for causal interactions, or to explain the occurrence of certain events. (‘The water ran out because the bucket has a hole.’) Hence there is prima facie evidence for the existence of such entities. Yet it might be argued that reference to holes is just a façon de parler, that holes are mere entia representationis, as-if entities, fictions.
[There follows a fascinating account of the theories of holes…]
Holes
A whole lot about nothing…
*Henry Moore
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As we hit ’em where they ain’t, we might spare a thought for mathematician Henri Cartan; he died on this date in 2008. A founding member (n 1934) of and active participant in the Bourbaki group, Cartan made contributions to math across algebra, geometry, and analysis, with a special focus on topology (that branch of math that plays with holes in toruses, Klein bottles, and other other-worldly shapes).
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