Grace Tierney's Blog, page 12

Word History of Battery – from Bowls to Cannon and Ben Franklin

Hello,

The next time you change the battery in your kitchen clock, or a child’s toy, spare a thought for its long history.

In Middle English we had the noun bateri but it was for forged metal-ware. I’m thinking of metal mixing bowls in the kitchen but it could have covered a multitude.

Old French had the word baterie (a beating or thrashing) by the 1100s thanks to the verb batre (to beat) and ultimately from Latin battuere (to batter). That’s where English acquired battery in the 1530s as the idea of battering somebody. It arrived in a legal sense and we still have charge of battery on the statute books today.

The meaning evolved over time from one person hitting another, to one army hitting another. First, battery was to rain heavy blows on city walls or a fort, and then it became the name of the artillery doing the bombardment. A battery was an artillery unit by the 1550s in English. At this point the battery rested for a while. Recharging perhaps?

That’s was until Ben Franklin used the term to name an electrical cell in 1748. This was possibly because of the idea of discharging electricity in the same way a cannon discharged a ball at the enemy. Either way, it stuck and nowadays we’re more likely to be speaking about small energy cells than cannon when we refer to a battery.

One odd use, which didn’t stick, was in baseball where a battery was the term in the late 1800s for a pitcher, or the pitcher and the catcher unit.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling with plenty of battery energy,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

A Brief History of Bumf and Alphabetary

Hello,

This week’s words are with thanks to “The Dictionary of Lost Words” by Pip Williams. With a title like that you might expect nonfiction but actually it’s a charming historic fiction novel about a young woman’s coming of age during the early 1900s in the shadow of the First World War, the female suffrage movement, and the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. She collects neglected words along the way and these included bumf and alphabetary.

First to alphabetary. This is a word the heroine loves but which isn’t included in the dictionary (hence the idea of lost words). This sadly obsolete word means rudimentary (i.e. basic) and has its roots in the Latin word alphabetarius. As you’d expect this all links back to the alphabet (the letters of a language arranged in a particular order) which has been in English since the late 1500s. Alphabet is borrowed from Greek alphabetos which was compounded from alpha and beta – the first two letters of their own alphabet.

As for bumf, its origins are somewhat less lofty.

Bumf is used to describe unwanted leaflets and excess paperwork. Apparently it entered English in the late 1800s as slang by British schoolboys for toilet paper. Certainly by the advent of World War One it was in widespread use perhaps by soldiers lacking certain basic supplies? The idea is that it’s a shortening of bum-fodder (hence the toilet link). I can only hope my books are never regarded as bumf!

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. this post contains affiliate links which make a small payment to the blog if you choose to purchase through them. #CommissionsEarned. Alternatively, you can use my digital tip jar to say thanks for my work.

The Fleshy History of Sarcasm and Sarcophagus

Hello,

This week’s post is with thanks to the wonderful QI Elves podcast “No Such Thing as a Fish”. It’s not specifically about words and etymology but sometimes they let slip a mention which sends me scurrying for the dictionaries, as was the case this week. This time it was the notion that sarcasm and sarcophagus have something linguistic in common – the idea of biting. Naturally I had to explore.

First let’s take a look at the word sarcasm. Sarcasm, tagged by Oscar Wilde as “the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence”, is one of my favourite forms of humour. It has been with us as an English word since the 1570s when it was spelled sarcasmus and was defined as a biting taunt or satirical remark. Aha, our first mention of biting.

Sarcasmus was a borrowing from Latin and before that from Greek sarkasmos (sneer, taunt, mockery) so presumably the use of sarcasm even existed in Ancient Greece. Sarkasmos had its roots in the verb sarkazein (to speak bitterly or to sneer). It translates literally as “to strip off the flesh like a dog”. Sarx or sarkos (genitive form) translated as flesh or a piece of meat. This worries me. As a vegetarian do I need to stop using sarcasm?

Back in English the spelling evolved into sarcasm by the early 1600s and has been with us ever since although most people don’t think about dogs ripping meat with their teeth when they make a sarcastic remark nowadays.

But what about the sarcophagus? How do ancient Egyptian coffins get in on the act?

While you may find the whole dog-biting thing a tad grim on sarcasm, wait for the next level grimness of sarcophagus. The word enters English around the year 1600 to describe not the Egyptian coffins themselves but to name the type of stone used in them. It came from the same word in Latin and before that from Greek sarkophagos lithos (limestone used for coffins) where the sarkophagos adjective translates as – flesh-eating. Delightful.

The idea was that the particular type of limestone (which was from a quarry near Assos in Troas in what is now modern day Turkey) helped to quickly decompose bodies. Given all the effort the Egyptians put into preserving their dead, I’m surprised they favoured this stone.

The word itself is compounded from sarx (see above, same root in sarcasm) which meant flesh and phagein, the verb to eat.

For a hundred years the word sarcophagus in English was all about the stone. The idea of it being a stone coffin didn’t arise until 1705. The word was shortened in Latin to sarcus and gives us the word for coffin in French (cercueil), German (Sarg), and zerk the Dutch for tombstone.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. I’m trying out Bluesky, the new social media app. If you’re on there you’ll find me at @wordfoolery.bsky.social . Yes, I’m still on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram too, don’t worry.



The Word Roots of Radical

Hello,

It’s raining too much today to potter in my garden so I thought I’d explore the word roots of radical, which surprisingly has a connection to garden roots.

gnarled tree roots

The adjective radical has been with us in English since the late 1300 and back then its only definitions related to plant roots. Its meaning was “originating in the root or ground” and “vital to life”. It joined English thanks to the Latin word radicalis (of or having roots). This source also gives us the word radish for that particular root vegetable. The Latin word came from a Proto Indo European root word (pardon the pun) wrād (branch, root). If you described something as being radical then everybody knew you were referring to roots.

Radical gained a figurative meaning from the 1600s onwards when it was defined as something essential and getting to the origin of things. It’s easy enough to see why. A plant’s roots are vital and getting to the root of something does mean digging down to the origin or core of it.

By 1817 radical had acquired a new meaning – a political reformer. It was used to describe members of the more extreme wing of the British Liberal party who had been calling for radical reform for decades by then. They were seeking change “from the roots”. If you look around today you’ll probably still find somebody somewhere calling for radical reform.

By the 1920s in North America if you called somebody radical you meant they were unconventional. The 1970s boom in surfer slang added that something radical was at the very limits of control – an on the edge surfing move, presumably.

Radical also found use in mathematics (since the 1680s). Radical chic was popularised by novelist Tom Wolfe’s use of the term in the 1970s. It implied that people were merely dabbling in radical ideas because it was seen as cool. You’ll find more on that term here.

William James coined the phrase radical empiricism in 1897. I did read up on it when writing this piece but honestly the theory was somewhat beyond me. However empiricism itself is the idea that one should rely on direct experience and observation rather than on theories.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

Lagniappe – The Word History of a Little Gift

Hello,

This week’s word is lagniappe, with thanks to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, as explained below. Depending on where you live you may not be familiar with this word. It means a present or extra item given by a seller to a customer to encourage patronage. Long time Wordfoolery fans may recall a similar idea with the word handsel, of Viking origin, which I explored a few years ago.

A lagniappe (also spelled lagnappe) may be something like a 13th cupcake if you buy 12 or what’s called a luck-penny – when the vendor gives back a small amount of the purchase price to the buyer (I’ve seen this done on second-hand cars, for example). Handselling (or hanselling) was usually a few coins thrown into a new bag or wallet by the vendor (or gifter).

Lagniappe entered English in the mid 1800s. Vocabulary.com claims it originated as yapa (gift) in the Native American language Quechua and was borrowed by Spanish speakers as la ñapa (the gift). It was given a French flavour in New Orleans to become lagniappe. Apparently it is still used in Louisiana and other areas of the South.

The word is popular with writers (who always love to gather unusual words). Mark Twain wrote about it in “Life on the Mississippi” in 1883 calling it an “excellent word – a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get” and said “they pronounce it lanny-yap.” The pronunciation I would go with is lan-yap, as given in Merriam-Webster.

Two other writers also used lagniappe, which I discovered via my own reading and word note taking. I can’t help wondering if it was a writing dare for them each to use it in their published works.

In the wonderful story “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back” (2015) Neil Gaiman included the line “I wound up obtaining my own lagniappe to make up the deficit.”

His lifelong friend Terry Pratchett used it differently in his excellent Discworld novel “Raising Steam” (2013). The Patrician (the ruler of the city of Ankh-Morpork) is upset about his morning crossword. His assistant, Drumknott, says to the hero Moist “I’m sure it’s not intended to be a form of torture, and I’m certain that there is no such word as lagniappe.”

Drumknott in this case was incorrect. Lagniappe is a word, just one not often used in Irish or British English.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

The Fugger Family and the History of Pettifogging

Hello,

Despite writing this blog since 2009 I still find words I want to write about and am stunned to discover I haven’t already covered them. Such a one is pettifogging. Collins Dictionary tells me “You can describe an action or situation as pettifogging when you think that unnecessary attention is being paid to unimportant, boring details.”

Pettifogging is not a word I use everyday but sometimes it’s just perfect.

Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with fog.

Pettifogging pettifoggers have been with use since the dawn of time, I suspect, but the word for them arrived in the 1560s when it described an inferior lawyer (attorney). In the 1580s there was also a pettifactor who was a legal agent who undertook small cases. As both are so close in meaning and spelling their origins may be entangled.

The word is formed from two words (and in the past was sometimes hyphenated) – petty and fogger.

Petty had been in English since the late 1300s (original spelling peti) to mean small or minor. It had been borrowed from the Old French adjective petit (small) which is still used in Modern French. Petty wasn’t originally a negative adjective as we can see in petty cash (small sums of money) since the 1800s and petty officer (a minor military officer since the 1500s). However the use of petty evolved in the 1500s. By the 1520s petty could mean of small importance and by the 1580s it described somebody as being small-minded. Both of these extra meanings feed into pettifogging.

A fogger is a term used nowadays in specific trades – disinfection and pest control – but a fogger in the 1500s was a very different thing. A fogger was a cheat. It may have arrived in English from the now obsolete Dutch word focker (from the Flemish verb to cheat) or the Middle English word fugger.

Both the Dutch and the Middle English terms are believed to come from a famous merchant and banking family of the 1400 and 1500s in Augsburg, Germany. Books have been written about their family history and there’s a dedicated website if you want to dive deeper. For the purposes of language history it’s enough to know that in German, Flemish, and Dutch their name became a term for a money-lending monopolist.

To be a fogger then was to be a financial trader. To be a pettifogger was to be the small version of that – somebody who would try sharp moves on a smaller scale to turn a profit. The association with lawyers, well I wouldn’t want to cast shade on a noble profession. Presumably the more recent association with attention to tiny details was because lawyers do like to attend to details in their contracts and often turn a good profit along the way.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

The Word History of Pilates

Hello,

If, like me, you’ve reached an age where some of your muscles and joints creak like an old sailing ship in a gale then this week’s word is for you.

Pilates is one of those eponyms I missed in my book on the topic (“How to Get Your Name in the Dictionary”). Yes, pilates is named for a person and a rather interesting person at that.

The word pilates has been with us since the 1980s to describe a physical fitness routine which became a worldwide craze at that time, but to understand the word you need to look a little earlier in history, in a war internment camp.

Joseph Hubertus Pilates (1883-1967) was born near Düsseldorf, Germany to a Greek father and German mother. His health was poor as a child and his father introduced him to gymnastics to help him become strong. This led him to a strongman job in a circus where he posed as a Greek statue to display his well-developed muscles.

His circus was touring England in 1914 when the World War I was declared. As a German national he was arrested and interned in a camp on the Isle of Man (between Britain and Ireland).

Joseph was inspired, so the story goes, by the movements of the island’s cats (who famously have no tails) and the contrast between their stretches and energy in contrast with the prisoners. He created a series of exercises to stretch human muscles, possibly even creating some gym equipment from the camp’s beds.

The legend goes that the prisoners learned his routine and when sickness hit the island none of them fell sick. They left the camp in better shape at the end of the war than when it began. Given that he then went on to craft a business from his exercises you may need to take a pinch of salt with that claim.

Pilates was released from the camp in 1919 and in 1926 journeyed to Manhattan, meeting his wife Clara on the ship. Their business was founded on Eight Avenue and soon boasted the dancers of Balanchine’s ballet company and various Hollywood stars as clients. However, ordinary folk attended too and Pilates was always keen to display his physique to impress them.

He cut an impressive figure and not just for his muscles. He had a glass eye (possibly a boxing injury), long white hair, drank heavily, and smoked 15 cigars per day. Not the modern image of a fitness guru but he lived to the age of 86, dying in 1967. His system of exercise experienced a huge boom in the 1980s making his name an entry in the dictionary. Today it’s estimated that 12 million people worldwide practise pilates.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. this post contains affiliate links which make a small payment to the blog if you choose to purchase through them. #CommissionsEarned. Alternatively, you can use my digital tip jar to say thanks for my work.

p.p.s. Some of the biographical information in this post is drawn from an excellent article about Joseph Pilates by Danielle Friedman in India Vogue.

Neanderthals and Poetry – a Word History

Hello,

Neanderthals are not commonly associated with poetry but the word caught my attention today and poetry formed part of the story as I explored its etymology.

I was listening to a podcast last night (“You’re Dead to Me”, a comedy history podcast hosted by Greg Jenner of Horrible Histories fame on BBC sounds – a great source for world history) and one of the guests mentioned in passing that Neanderthals are named for the Neander Valley.

This attracted my attention as a few years back I published a book (“How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary”) about words which entered the dictionary from the names of people and places. The first is an eponym (e.g. Tupperware is named for a man called Tupper), the second is a toponym (e.g. Hunky dory is named after a street). Since then I’ve stumbled on a few more words I missed in that book and I gather them in case I ever decide to publish a second edition. Neanderthal is now on that list but it’s a toponym and an eponym, which is fun.

Neanderthal is defined as an extinct species of human that was widely distributed in Ice Age Europe. It first appeared in English in the 1860s to refer to a specific extinct hominid from Neanderthal in Germany where their fossilised remains were found in 1856. Neander Thal is the name of a gorge near Düsseldorf. Thal means valley apparently.

The place name comes from Joachim Neumann (1650-1680) who was a German pastor, poet, and writer of hymns who particularly loved this spot. Neumann translates literally as new man and in Greek would have been neo-ander. It was popular in Germany during his lifetime to adopt a Greek or Latin form of your surname – hence Neander for his name, and ultimately Neanderthal for the place. It’s a wonderful piece of wordy luck that a man called New Man gave his name to the place where a new form of human was found.

Neanderthal as a word was being used to describe a large stupid person by the 1920s although the science doesn’t support that jibe. It was long disputed if they had bred with modern humans but DNA settled that question in 2013 – they did. We have no idea if they enjoyed poetry, but a poet gave them his name thanks a beautiful piece of the German landscape where both spent time.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

p.s. this post contains affiliate links which make a small payment to the blog if you choose to purchase through them. #CommissionsEarned. Alternatively, you can use my digital tip jar to say thanks for my work.

The Word History of Immolate

Hello,

I’ve made it as far as the letter i in “Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable” (a great read, but it takes time) and I was very surprised to find the origins of the word immolate had nothing to do with burning, so I thought I’d share that with you.

Let’s start with the current definition. Merriam-Webster says “The meaning of immolate is to kill or destroy especially by fire.” Cambridge says “To kill yourself or someone else, or to destroy something, usually by burning, in a formal ceremony”. Collins says “to kill or offer as a sacrifice , esp. by fire”.

Notice anything all these definitions have in common? Fire.

This, plus the modern usage of the word, had always led me to believe that to immolate meant to burn. In fact, immolation didn’t start out that way at all, although it does have a strong historic link to sacrifice.

Etymology Online gave me somewhat more information on immolation because they had the original definition from the 1540s – to sacrifice, without any mention of burning. It comes from the Latin verb immolare (to sacrifice, originally to sprinkle with sacrificial meal). It formed from im (in, on, upon) and molere (to grind).

Brewer added more context. He says it came from an Ancient Roman custom of sprinkling wine and fragments of sacred cake (mola salsa) on the head of a victim to be offered in sacrifice.

As a well known cake lover it would have been rude not to find out more about the sacred cake and I found a long explanation here. First to the name – mola salsa. Mola means mill, and by extension flour. Salsa, doesn’t mean sauce when it comes from Latin, it means salted. The cake was made by the Vestals for various festivals and ceremonies.

The cakes were used as a grain offering to the gods, sometimes replacing blood sacrifices. Ovid says the cakes were called Februa and offered at that time of year to give us the month name February. I examined the history of month names in my first book (“How To Get Your Name in the Dictionary”) and concluded February‘s origins are unclear. Some claim it for the Etruscan god of the underworld, Februus, while others support the claim of Februa, the Roman festival of purification celebrated in this month (with the sacred cakes).

Salt was used for purification and the Vestal Virgins made the cakes from spelt flour, water and salt. The water came from a sacred spring and the cakes were thin circular wafers. Anybody Catholic reading this may notice the similarity of these cakes with the wafers used for Holy Communion, another form of sacrifice. The connection to Jesus as sacrifice would have been totally clear to early Christians living under Roman rule.

The only connection to burning I could find about the mola salsa was that sometimes they would be burned as an offering. Many animal sacrifices made at the time would have been burned on altars, hence the burning of the cakes instead. This association clearly stuck (or, flippantly, the Vestal Virgins were terrible cooks and burned the wafers by accident?).

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

The History of the Word Horsepower

Hello,

Even modern electric vehicles will have the word horsepower somewhere in their technical manual which is somewhat surprising considering the term was disdained in the 1800s and dates back to the age of steam.

Not sure of the horsepower of this model

Horsepower is defined as a unit of power measurement for machines, engines, and motors equal to the raising power of 33,000 pounds one foot high in one minute. This was fixed by James Watt when he wanted to describe the power of his famous steam engine design. He estimated that a strong work horse working for eight hours per day averaged 22,000 foot-pounds per minute. He increased that by a third and this has been the recognised unit ever since, although sometimes listed a BPH (brake horsepower).

The term dates to 1805 and is a compounding of horse and power. Technical writers during the 1800s berated the term as “very fallacious” and “shockingly unscientific” which it probably is. Who defines an average horse, for example, and why add a third, but the term stuck and we’re still using it.

I was charmed to discover as a teen that the classic 2CV Citroen car seen so often in France was so named because it had two horsepower – deux chevaux means two horses and provides the CV element of the name. This popular car also has a multitude of nicknames – Ugly Duckling in the Netherlands and Tin Snail, Dolly, and Upside-Down Pram in England.

Horse has been with us in English since hors in Old English which comes from a Proto-Germanic root word harss which also gives us cousin words in Old Norse, Frisian, Saxon, Dutch, and German. There is a much more complex story of conflicting roots, but I’d need an entire post to delve into the history of horse, perhaps another day.

Power has also been with us for a long time. It starts with pouer around the year 1300. This was ability and strength, especially in battle. It came from Anglo-French pouair and Old French povoir (to be able). The French verbs came from Latin potis (powerful) and the Proto Indo European root word poti (powerful, lord) which is, as you might guess behind the word potentate also.

Power originally referred to a person who had power but by the early 1400s it also referred to an ability of capacity and by the 1700s was being used as a term in mechanics which led Watt to adopt it for his horsepower term.

So the next time you power up your car – be it a modern EV or an ancient 2CV, remember the working horses and steam engines are behind it.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)