Posts tagged words

I’ve had a fun month of wandering throughout Europe - a lovely mix of catching up with family and friends, library adventures, meeting up with some amazing linguists and a bit of sightseeing on the side. I have a suitcase full of Euro-goodies to take home, but I think that ideally I’d like to souvenir a couple of words from some of the countries that I’ve visited. Of course, you can capture all of these ideas in English, but there’s something really nifty about wrapping it all up in a single little word.

Fusy n. Polish It’s a word that captures both the grounds left in a coffee pot and tea leaves left in a tea pot. It doesn’t have the same negative extension that ‘dregs’ carries. Given that we’re a pluri-beverage household we’re always dealing with fusy when it comes to washing up time.

Fika n. or v. Swedish This is the kind of word that always gets wheeled out in ‘why doesn’t English have a word for X’ articles - and for good reason, because it really is a lovely concept. Fika is the combination of a non-alcoholic beverage (usually coffee) and some kind of cake (usually outrageously sweet) and taking time to chat with friends/family/colleagues. It’s not entirely dissimilar to how the word ‘coffee’ is used as a verb in my lab, but I really like the emphasis on the social aspect (and the cake). Needless to say I made the most of every fika opportunity while in Stockholm.

Syrah n. French/English Ok, this one always existed in English. I always thought it was some obscure little grape variety. Turns out that it’s the French name for what Australians and New Zealanders more often call shiraz. In what can only really be a classic case of sound symbolism, if you’d asked me to describe these grapes before I knew this crucial fact I’d have said that shiraz is bolder and more peppery. This trip I’ve learned a new (for an Aussie) wine word, and made sufficiently sure to drink enough syrah to ascertain that it is just as peppery as a shiraz.

Although I’ve spent this week in Sweden, I’ve been staying with a Polish speaking aunt, and so I’ve had the chance to keep brushing up on my Polish skills.

One thing I’ve always found fun, but challenging about Polish is the use of diminutives. A diminutive is when you make something ‘smaller’ or ‘cuter’ by changing the word a little (my polyglot Polish friend settled on the Japanese word kawaii as the best way to capture the way diminutives are often used in Polish). For example, we walked past a bar in Warsaw old town called piekłoka which would be best translated as ‘little hell’ - but that doesn’t capture the warm, fuzzy affection that separates the diminutive form from the original.

English isn’t very replete with diminutives - but something like the process of calling a dog a doggy is close (although there’s an element of child-speak there too), or nicknames where Elizabeth becomes Lizzie and Robert is Robbie.

Polish, like many other Slavic languages is rich in suffixes for diminutivising things. For example, my friend Anna could easily be given any one of the following nicknames: Ania, Anka, Ańcia, Anusia, Anuśka, Aneczka, Anulka, Anuleczka or Anula. Non-human and inanimate items can also be diminutivised, so flowers (kwiaty) could be kwiatki, kwiatuszki, kwiateczki. Even adjectives and adverbs can be made diminutive.

There are underlying patterns, which are partly dependent on the gender of the word. Not all diminutives follow patterns though, and there are lots of randomly irregular ones, just to keep you on your toes!

Some diminutives become regular words, for example stołek meaning ‘stool’ is a diminutive of stoł ‘table.’ Diminutives can also be ‘stacked’ so to speak, so that the word koteczek ‘kitty’ is from kotek ‘kitty,’ which is itself from kot ‘kat’ (all of these examples, and more, are thanks to Wikipedia).

Diminutives may not make life easy for the Polish learner, but when you start to get the hang of them they’re heaps of fun!

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.

If there is one word in the Christmas vocabulary that divides people when discussing its origin it would have to be boxing day. Celebrated mostly in some countries of the Commonwealth, the 26th is a public holiday that in recent years has come to be associated with cut-throat bargain shopping for many, but in my family involves grazing on Christmas lunch left-overs and playing with new toys. In many countries with a Christian tradition the day is often celebrated as St. Stephen’s day.

But where did the term boxing day come from? Snopes have a great article tracking various myths about the origins of the name. The earliest attested source is in a book from 1833, and it appears a few years later in Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers. Both Worknik and the OED make reference to the fact that it’s the day that post men and servants receive gifts. According to this origin of the word one gave equals their gifts on Christmas day, and their inferiors gifts on boxing day - it appears that even the Christmas spirit must give way to the pragmatics of class relations.

And that’s about as much as anyone is willing to say on the matter, as there isn’t much more evidence to give any certain definition of the term. The stories about boxing day relating to violent fist-fights, or throwing out unwanted gifts, will probably always linger in the absence of anything more exciting. But I’m happy to just kick back, find the last few mince pies and acquaint myself with some new and exiting books.

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.