Category: Etymology

Metagrobolised, gruntulous noses

By Simon

Yesterday I learnt the wonderful word metagrobolised on a radio show about words and language called A Way with Words, in which they discuss and answer listeners’ questions about words, idioms and language. It’s broadcast of public radio in the USA and podcasts of the show are available online. I was aware of the show before, but only got round to listening to it yesterday, mainly because they mention Omniglot on the latest one.

metagrobolised means “totally perplexed and mixed up” or “full of difficulty or confusion or bewilderment” [source]. It is also spelt metagrabolised, metagrabolized or metagrobolised. This word appears as matagrabaliser in Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of The Works of Rabelais, and was “a word forged at pleasure, which signifies the studying and writing of vain things.” Apparently the word matagraboliser first appears in Rabelais’ story Gargantua and Pantagruel and combines the Greek words μάταιος (mataios – useless), γράφω (grapho – write),
and βάλλω (ballo – to throw away), making ματαιογράφοβαλίζειν, which became matagrabaliser in French. [source].

In François Lacombe’s Dictionnaire du vieux langage françois, matagroboliser is defined as “prendre beaucoup de peine pour ne rien fair qui vaille” (to take great pains to do nothing of worth).

Other interesting words they discuss include gruntulous – to speak in a grunting fashion, and spox [spoʊks], a journalistic abbreviation of spokesperson. They also ponder why curiosity is associated with the nose – if you’re interested in other people and what they’re doing, you might be called nosy, or you are said to have a big nose, or to be sticking your nose/beak into things.

According the the Online Etymology Dictionary, nosy meant “having a prominent nose” in the 17th century, and came to mean “inquisitive by the late 19th century. The name “Nosey Parker” for an inquisitive person dates from 1907.

The word nose comes from the Old English nosu, from the Proto-Germanic *nusus, from Proto-Indo-European *nas-. From the late 16th century nose was used to mean “something obvious”, and the sense of “to pry or search” was first recorded in the 1640s, while the expression “pay through the nose” appeared in the 1670s [source].

Is the nose associated with inquisitiveness and prying into other people’s business in other languages?

Gwrthryfelwyr

By Simon

The other day while listening to a news report on Radio Cymru about the situation in Libya, the word gwrthryfelwyr caught my attention. It means rebels and is made up of the elements gwrth (against, counter), ryfel, from rhyfel (war), and wyr, from gwŷr (men). I’d heard the word before and knew what it meant, but hadn’t really thought about the individual parts in this way, and this lead me to thinking that the meaning and etymology of Welsh words is often easier to work out than that of English words as many of them are made up of native roots with meanings I know or can guess.

I also thought about the etymology of the rebels and realised that it actually has a similar structure to gwrthryfelwyr, though from Latin roots. I knew that the bel part had something to do with war and appears in such Latin phrases as antebellum (before the war) and postbellum (after the war), and guessed that in this context the re- prefix might mean against. I checked this and found that rebel comes from the Old French rebelle, from the Latin rebellis (insurgent, rebellious). from rebellare (to rebel, wage war against) from re- (opposite, against or again) and bellare (wage war), from bellum (war).

The Welsh prefix gwrth- appears in many Welsh words, including:

– gwrthblaid – opposition (party) [“against/counter party”]
– gwrthbrofi – to disprove, refute [“counter prove/test”]
– gwrthdyb – paradox [“counter opinion/surmise/conjecture/notion”]
– gwrthdystio – to protest [“testify against”]
– gwrthgorffyn – antibody [“counter little body”]
– gwrthneidio – to rebound [“counter jump”]

Mizzle

By Simon

On Sunday I visited Bakewell, a small town in the Peak District, with a friend. It rained on and off all day and we were trying to decide whether the rain could be described as drizzle or mizzle, a word I hadn’t heard before. Apart from a few brief heavy showers, it rained lightly most of the time – something I would describe as drizzle.

According to Weather Online:

Mizzle is a term used in Devon and Cornwall for a combination of fine drenching drizzle or extremely fine rain and thick, heavy saturating mist or fog. While floating or falling the visible particles of coarse, watery vapor might approach the form of light rain.

Etymology: from the Frisian mizzelen (drizzle)

According to the Oxford Dictionary, mizzle is mainly a dialect word meaning ‘light rain or drizzle’; or ‘to rain lightly’, and it comes from late Middle English.

The Free Dictionary defines mizzle as:

– (verb) To rain in fine, mistlike droplets; drizzle.
– (noun) A mistlike rain; a drizzle.
– (verb, British slang) To make a sudden departure

Have you come across mizzle before?

Mice, muscles and mussels

By Simon

Larry, the official mouser at 10 Downing Street

Today I came across the German word Mäusefänger (mouse catcher) in an article, sent to me by a friend, about the cat that recently took up the position of chief mouse catcher at 10 Downing Street, the official residence of British Prime Minister David Cameron. Number 10 apparently has a bit of a problem with mice, and there’s a long tradition of keeping cats at the prime minister’s residence and the treasury.

Mäusefänger is made up of two words: mäuse, the plural of maus (mouse), and fänger (catcher, fielder, interceptor, trap). Maus, which is of course related to the English word mouse, comes from the Proto-Germanic. *mus (a small rodent), from PIE *muHs- (mouse) [source]. The word muscle comes from the same root, via the Latin musculus (muscle, lit. “little mouse”), as does mussel, via the Old English muscle/musscel, and the Late Latin muscula [source].

While looking up some of the words in the article, I came across a useful German dictionary, canoonet, which not only gives information about German words (in German), and links to dictionaries for other languages, but also has grammatical information, such as noun and verb conjugations. There is also a Morphologie-Browser, which shows the words derived from a particular word – here’s an example with the word sehen (to see).

Cave canem!

By Simon

Carea Castellano

I received a email today asking when the Spanish word perro (dog) replaced can, a word for dog derived from the Latin canis, which appears in the name Canary Islands, (Islas Canarias in Spanish).

The Spanish word perro first appeared in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española in 1737 [source]; was originally pejorative [source] and is possibly of onomatopoeic origin from the growling sounds made by dogs, perr perr (sounds more like a cat’s purr to me). Shepherds also used that sound to call their dogs. Another possibility is that perro comes from a pre-Roman language [source].

In Spanish the word can was used for dog until about the 14th century, after which it was gradually replaced by perro. The words for dog in most other Romance languages come from the Latin word canis: cane (Italian), chien (French), câine (Romanian), cão (Portuguese), can (Galician). One exception is Catalan, in which the word for dog is gos. [source].

The root of the Latin word canis, which appears in biological name for the subspecies of dogs: canis lupus familiaris, comes from the Proto-Indo-European base *kwon- (dog). This is also the root of the English hound (via the Proto-Germanic *khundas and the Old English hund), the English canine, the Greek κυων (kuōn), the German hund, the Irish cu and the Welsh ci [source].

The English word dog comes from the Old English docga, a word of unknown origin which was probably the name of a particular breed of dog, and had largely replaced the word hound as the general term for dog by the 16th century [source]. Hound started to be used to mean “a dog used for hunting” from the 12th century [source].

The name Islas Canarias probably comes from the Latin Insula Canaria (Island of the Dogs), which was originally just the name of Gran Canaria. It is possible that the dogs referred to were seals [source].

Taverns, columns and caps

By Simon

What do the words in the title of this post have in common?

Well, they all originally come from Etruscan, according to Nicholas Ostler in Ad Infinitum – A Biography of Latin and the World it Created, one of the books I’m reading at the moment.

The English word tavern dates from the late 13th century, when it meant “wine shop”, and later came to mean “public house”. It comes from the Old French taverne, (shed made of boards; booth; stall; tavern; inn), from the Latin taberna (shop, inn, tavern) – originally “hut or shed”, from Etruscan [source]. The Greek word ταβέρνα (taverna) comes the Latin [source].

Column comes from the Old French colombe (column, pillar), from the Latin columna (pillar), which the Online Etymology Dictionary says is a collateral form of columen (top, summit), from the Proto-Indo-European base *kel- (to project), but which Nicholas Ostler believes comes from Etruscan.

Cap comes from the Old English cæppe (hood, head-covering, cape), from the Late Latin cappa (a cape, hooded cloak), which is possibly a shortened from capitulare (headdress) from caput (head) [source], or from the Etruscan.

Other Latin words that are thought to come from Etruscan include voltur (vulture), ātruim (forecourt), fenestra (window), caseus (cheese), culīna (kitchen), tuba (trumpet), urna (urn), mīles (soldier), Aprīlis (April), autumnus (autumn) and laburnum (shrub).

Bellies, bags and bellows

By Simon

Yesterday a friend asked me whether bellyache was considered rude or vulgar, and whether tummy ache or stomach ache were preferable in formal conversation. I thought that the word belly might be seen as vulgar and/or informal by some; that stomach ache might be better in formal situations, and that tummy ache tends to be used by and with children. Would you agree?

Belly comes from the Old English belg (bag, purse, bellows, pod, husk), from the Proto-Germanic*balgiz (bag), from the PIE base *bhelgh- (to swell), which is also the root of the Old Norse belgr (bag, bellows) and bylgja (billow); the Gothic balgs (wineskin), the Welsh bol (belly, paunch), the Irish bolg (abdomen, bulge, belly, hold, bloat), and the Latin bulga (leather sack). The English words bellows, billow, bolster, budget and bulge also come from the same root [source].

In English belly came to refer to the body during the 13th century, and the abdomen during the 14th century. By the late 16th century its meaning had been extended to cover the bulging part or concave convex surface of anything. In the late 18th century some people in England decided that belly was vulgar and banished it from speech and writing – replacing it with stomach or abdomen. [source].

Colds, streams and rivers

By Simon

A snow-covered Siliwen Road in Bangor

It’s rather cold here at the moment with daytime temperatures not much above freezing, and nighttime dropping to -10°C (14°F) or even -20°C (-4°F) in places. As a result, some of the snow that fell last week has frozen solid and been trampled down on pavements and ungritted back streets making them decidedly icey and slippery.

I also have a cold at the moment, so I thought I’d look into how to say “I have a cold” in a number of languages. In French it’s “Je suis enrhumé” or “I am enrhumed”. Enrhumé comes from rhume (cold), which comes from the Old French reume, from the Latin rheuma, from the Greek rheuma (stream, current, a flowing), from rhein (to flow), from the Proto-Indo-European *sreu- (to flow). The Proto-Indo-European *sreu- is also the root of the Irish sruth (stream, river), the Welsh ffrwd (stream) and the Polish strumyk (brook). [source].

The Czech word for cold rýmu appears to be spring from the same source – mám rýmu is “I have a cold” by the way – as does the English word rheumatism. You can also say jsem nachlazený for “I have a cold” in Czech, which has a similar structure to the French phrase – “I am colded” or something like that.

In Welsh you don’t have a cold but rather a cold is on you: mae annwyd arna i, and the other Celtic languages use the same structure, “Is cold on/at me”: tá slaghdán orm (Irish), tha ‘n cnatan orm (Scottish Gaelic), ta feayraght/mughane aym (Manx).

In German “I have a cold” is Ich bin erkältet (“I am becolded?”), with erkältet coming from kalt (cold).

In Mandarin Chinese you say 我感冒了 (wǒ gǎnmào le) or “I catch cold [change of state particle]”.

Russian mountains

By Simon

Yesterday evening I discovered that the French term for roller coaster is les montagnes russes or Russian mountains. This got me wondering what roller coasters have to do with Russian mountains, and I’ve found that from the 17th Century the Russian were constructing “Russian Mountains” – series of hills and slides of ice reinforced with wooden supports designed for sleighs. They were especially popular during the 18th century in St. Petersburg, and the idea spread to other parts of Europe. A version using wheeled wooden carts on tracks was built in Paris in 1804 and named Les Montagnes Russes.

During the early 19th century a number of mining and railway companies in the USA started offering the public rides on steeply-inclined sections of track at quiet times. These were known as scenic gravity railroads. In 1884 LaMarcus Adna Thompson opened a Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway at Coney Island in 1884, and patented many aspects of the roller coaster, including a patent for a Gravity Switch-back Railway in 1885.

The origins of the name roller coaster are uncertain. One theory is that it comes from the rollers fitted to the slides or ramps on early American roller coasters along which sleds coasted. Another theory is that the name comes from a ride located in a roller skating rink in Haverhill, Massachusetts which consisted of a sled that moved along the rollers that made up the track. The inventors of this ride, Stephen E. Jackman and Byron B. Floyd, claim the first use of the term “roller coaster”.

Russian Mountain is term for roller coaster in Spanish (montaña rusa), Portuguese (montanha russa) and Catalan (muntanya russa), and Russians call them американские горки (amerikanskie gorki) or American Mountains.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_coaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Mountains

Nurdles

By Simon

I came across the word nurdle in a book I read last week. Which of the following definitions do you think is the correct one?

  1. Nurdle, noun: A small furry creature that lives in burrows in the hills of Yorkshire
  2. Nurdle, verb: To score runs (in cricket) by gently nudging the ball into vacant areas of the field.
  3. Nurdle, noun: Something small and cute
  4. Nurdle, verb: To waffle or muse on a subject about which you know little.
  5. Nurdle, noun: A plastic pellet
  6. Nurdle, verb: To faff about doing nothing constructive.
  7. Nurdle, noun: A blob of toothpaste shaped like a wave.
  8. Nurdle, verb: To play a (tiddly)wink so close to the pot that it’s almost impossible for your opponent to pot it.

Can you suggest any other definitions for this word?