Posts tagged etymology

I was reading the comments on an online opinion article in Australia’s Fairfax press recently - it’s always a dangerous thing, reading the comments, due to the scarily frank way in which people express their opinions in these forums and the inherent high possibility of “derp”.

This time though, I learnt something new - the origin of the term “tow rag”, and also how to divert potential flame-wars into discussions about words and phrases instead.

One commenter offered this piece of reflection about Clive Palmer, the Australian mining magnate: “What a bunch of toe-rags Palmer & Co are.”

Before I knew it, another commenter had offered this clarification: “In fact the term is ‘tow rag’, and was a rag towed on a line behind ships and attached to the poop deck, the rag was towed to clean it after its unsavoury but necessary use.”

I’ve seen an alternate hypothesis that “toerag” is simply a combination of two elements (toe-rag) that can be interpreted as being low: toes being the lowest part of the body, often smelly and sweaty, and a rag the remnants of some old piece material that is absolutely worthless, worn around the feet by those who have no other shoes.

Either way: ew.

But all gross-outs aside, it’s quite a nice way to see comment threads evolve. If only all online communities were so friendly!

Colleague: ARGH
Me: You ok there?
Colleague: This document I’m reading uses the word “mentee”. I HATE the word “mentee”
Me: Oh c’mon, you can’t hate words. Words are great. But it is a weird word, yeah.
Colleague: It’s made up! “Mentor” comes from a name in mythology! You can’t just make “mentee” from it!
Me: Ah, backformation, that old chestnut. Roll with it, homie.
Colleague: *fumes*
Me: I think it’s funny, it looks like “manatee” *looks up pictures of manatees on the internet*

Indeed, “mentee” is an excellent example of backformation, the process whereby a new word is derived by removing/adding actual or supposed affixes, in this case swapping the “or” suffix for “ee”.

In the case of Mentor, the “or” wasn’t originally a suffix like we see in “director” or “leaser”, meaning ‘the one who does something’.

As my esteemed colleague correctly pointed out to me, Mentor was a figure in Greek mythology, who was then the namesake of a character in a modern book (1699) called Les Aventures de Telemaque, by the French writer François Fénelon (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor). This book is thought to have influenced the current general usage of “mentor”, meaning a trusted friend, counsellor or teacher, usually a more experienced person.

Because “mentor” has moved into general usage as a noun from its original proper noun status, we have started to deconstruct it and derive new words from it. This is the beauty of language - we can get very creative and productive, and make new words to express what we require.

In this case, we need a succinct label for the “person-who-receives-mentoring”, and “mentee” fits the bill pretty well. Most people would be able to easily derive its meaning, due to the other examples of this “ee” suffix in general use like “employer/employee”.

I think in future though I’ll make sure I use “protégé” around my colleague if I ever need to describe this relationship. I think that’ll prevent his mythological rage from arising again in the face of “mentee”.

One of the many things I loved about reading Robert Lane Greene’s You Are What You Speak is that it’s brimful of great little facts about language. One thing I learned is the origin of the country name Pakistan. As Greene mentions on page 166, the country is so called because it was originally to be comprised of the peoples of Punjab, Afghanistan and Kashmir. According to the Wiki page The ‘i’ was added partly to ease pronunciation and partly to make the Hindi/Urdu word for ‘pure’. As far as my limited bumblings in Hindi go, I’m not sure ‘paki’ is a hindi word, perhaps it’s a meaning that came after the word. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

It’s such a great, and unexpected etymology. It reminds me of the origin of the word macadamia. It’s a word I’d never given much thought to until I heard Martin Flanagan speak at the AATE conference last year. The tasty nuts are named after John Macadam, a colleague of Ferdinand von Mueller, who first described them. Such origins of words are easily hidden by the change in stress of the new form.

I always find such unusual origins of words fascinating - and  good examples as to why you should never bother trying to guess the origins of some words without looking up the evidence!

For those who celebrate a secular silly season Christmas already seems long gone in a haze of over-eating, lots of socialising and maybe a few good toys. Today is the twelfth day of Christmas, and the end of the festive season on the Christian calendar. Just as Boxing Day is St. Stephen’s day on the Christian calendar the twelfth day of Christmas has it’s own name; the feast of the Epiphany.

To give a short, non-theologically correct summary of the events of the Epiphany: When baby Jesus was born a giant star came and hung around. Three wise men saw the star, and in what is one of the earliest recorded instances of satellite navigation followed it to Bethlehem. Quite what they were expecting there I’m not sure, but they seemed sufficiently happy to find a small baby in a stable and and gave him a variety of bling.

I’ve always been fine with the story, but a bit miffed by the name of the event. An epiphany in any context except the 6th of January means a sudden perception of the reality of something. I’ve always been curious about where this festival meaning comes from. Does it have something to do with the three men suddenly appearing? Did someone suddenly make sense of the whole shenanigan and that’s why they call it the epiphany?

It turns out that, as is usually the case, I’ve got everything backwards. The person doing the appearing is Jesus, which is kind of obvious when you think about it. And the word epiphany first related to the religious event and then broadened out. The word is first attested in English in the 14th century - in relation to the events above. It was then broadened out into the manifestation of any divine or superhuman being a few centuries later.

Interestingly the OED doesn’t have a separate entry for the sense of a sudden manifestation of an idea or revelation - even though it’s the use that I (and most people) would probably know. Etymonline first cites it in the writings of essayist Thomas De Quincy in 1840.

We’ve gone right though with Christmasy words right up until today, the twelfth day of Christmas. We’ll resume normal non-festive Superlinguo action next week! All references in these posts thanks to the always reliable Oxford English Dictionary, Etymonline and Wordnik.

My family have developed a Christmas tradition of strawberry daiquiris before the big Christmas lunch - which is a perfectly acceptable festive tipple on a warm summer day. For many others the Christmas cocktail of choice is eggnog. Most of the definitions on Wordnik give the ingredients in eggnog as egg, milk, sugar and some kind of spirit (usually brandy). The OED is much more liberal with its choice of booze, suggesting that the drink can be made with not only spirits but also beer, cider or wine. Eggnog is more or less the same as an egg-flip (at least to the uneducated such as myself), but eggnog is the preferred Christmas-y name. It’s become so popular that it’s even possible to find it ready-made sans alcohol in the supermarket. 

The OED gives its earliest cited reference as 1825, but Etymonline trace it back earlier to 1775. The egg part is rather easy to figure out - but what about the nog?

Nog is a particularly strong beer brewed in Norfolk in England. That use dates back to the 17th century and it appears it was somehow picked up to be used in the name eggnog. Only after this are there citations for nog being used to refer toa strong alcoholic drink and not just beer from a small corner of England. It sounds like there is scope for a great story to explain how that link happened.

As a bonus factoid - the word nog also appears to be the origin of the word noggin, which used to be the term for a small cup, but was then used colloquially to mean head - immortalised in the phase “to use you noggin.”

We’ll be going right though with Christmasy words until the twelfth day of Christmas, so if you’ve got a Christmas word you’ve ever wondered about yet us know! All references in these posts thanks to the always reliable Oxford English Dictionary, Etymonline and Wordnik.

Tonight is the night when people around the world will stay up past their bed time, drag out the last of the Christmas booze and as the old year slips into the new one will all try and sing a song with words they don’t understand. When I was a kid I would ask the adults every year what Auld Lang Syne meant and every year I was fed some more sugar and a distracted reply (these were the pre-internet answers everything days).

Auld Lang Syne is a poem, famously attributed to Robbie Burns, who - depending on the version you believe - recorded it or wrote it himself. As a phrase it means something like “the good old days” or “the days gone by” - but looking at each individual word is when the linguistically interesting stuff starts.

Auld means old.It’s a Scots and Northern English form of the Old English word ald, which also gave rise to our modern English form old.

Lang is also a Scots form of a similar sounding word, in this case it’s long. The word was spelled either lange or longe in Old English - indeed it has an o (longe) in Beowulf. It wasn’t until Middle English that longe won out in standard English, but the northerners kept the other form. 

Syne is a little more opaque than the others, but not much. It comes from the same Middle English origin as since, and of the two has fared much worse in the popularity stakes - although there are attested sources less than a century old this ngram makes it clear it’s been on the wane ever since. I think this is something of a shame, as it means we miss out on the excellent phase soon or syne meaning “sooner or later.”

So put that all back together an you get “old long since” - which gives an inkling of the sentiment but doesn’t really capture the full effect of the phrase Auld Lang Syne. 

We’ll be going right though with Christmasy words until the twelfth day of Christmas, so if you’ve got a Christmas word you’ve ever wondered about yet us know! All references in these posts thanks to the always reliable Oxford English Dictionary, Etymonline and Wordnik.

Why is it that we rarely wish anyone a Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year?

Merry Christmas is now a set phrase in English, but that wasn’t always the case, as you can see from the graph below “Merry Christmas” has been gaining in popularity since the 19th century and peaked some time in the baby boomer years. Before that it was as common a sentiment as “Happy Christmas,” which has been kicking along slowly ever since, but without the upswing in popular usage:

It can be hard to pin point how these patterns of usage start - perhaps it was popularised one year and grew ever since. It’s been attested as early as 1565 in the OED, but it probably wasn’t until something like the Earl of Sandwich saying “I wish you a Merry Christmas” in 1667 that it really took off - if he was a man stylish enough to change what people called meat-in-bread then his use of the phrase probably helped its popularity. Dialect Blog have done more research into this than I have and looked at the influence that Dickens’ use of the term has had.

when two words pop up in combination more often than you’d expect from chance it’s known as a collocation. Sometimes things that collocate end up being very closely linked in peoples minds. It appears that now merry and christmas are inextricably linked in our minds. Whether you Christmas has been merry or happy we hope it has been pleasant, and may your new year be anything, even happy!

We’ll be going right though with Christmasy words until the twelfth day of Christmas, so if you’ve got a Christmas word you’ve ever wondered about yet us know! All references in these posts thanks to the always reliable Oxford English Dictionary, Etymonline and Wordnik.