627: apt and appropriate Aug 26, 2016

It is common to find 'appropriate' as the first definition of 'apt' in a dictionary. Despite their similarity in sound and spelling, 'apt' and 'appropriate' are not from the same word. For starters, they have different roots, but also, 'apt' has a meaning that 'appropriate' does not, "quick to learn". As such, 'inappropriate' is the opposite of something suitable: a negated meaning of both words, but 'inept', the opposite of 'quick to learn" negates only the meaning carried by 'apt'. The change from A to E in 'inept' is just due to old conventions before standardization, but it is still a (direct) derivative.

626: Backformation Aug 25, 2016

Plenty of words have no logical antonym: a topic that has been covered several times on this blog. When a word does not follow a pattern, usually reassuring affixation, it is possible to create words. The '-er' suffix, for example, can be used to indicate agency, among other things, but the word 'buttle' was made through backformation from 'butler'. Additionally, the prefix, 'dis-' usually has a positive form, but in the case of 'disgruntle', 'gruntle' was only created humorously in the 1920's.

625: feudalism Aug 24, 2016

It makes sense that economic systems would be named after what is important within the ideology; 'capitalism' comes from 'capital' which is simple personal financial wealth, and 'communism' is founded around the idea of commonly shared wealth and power. Feudalism, in the way we understand feuds, does not relate to the root in meaning. 'Feudal' comes from the Latin 'feudum', a form which in Medieval Latin gave English 'fee'. Related as well are the words 'fief', both the person and the plot of land, as well as 'feu', a fixed rent. So while such usages like that in Family Feud, may seem distant from a system of localized hierarchical land renting and ownership, the words were in another, separate way, connected.

624: toilet Aug 23, 2016

Somethings may seem essential and timeless, but in fact toilets, meant something very different. Toilet is originally a French word, 'toilette' but with a very different meaning than the word carries today. Though we may now think of them as porcelain, originally, the word meant ‘cloth wrapper’ as a diminutive of 'toile'. 'Toile' as well was adopted into English, first meaning a canvas for artwork, which is derived from the Latin for 'web', but in French meant 'cloth' and usually a cheap one. 'Toilette' in its earliest usage expressed a cloth used to wrap other clothes. Over the years, the meaning of the word changed to "the cover for a dressing table" and "act of dressing". Later still, the word was used to mean "wash oneself". In America, where plenty of its own slang developed, 'toilet' came to mean "a dressing room with washing facilities", which is why, in addition to sensitivity, very often 'bathroom' is used to refer to a water closet, lavatory, toilet, or however you choose to phrase it.

623: gefilte fish Aug 22, 2016

It may have been a shock to discover that gefilte fish are not found swimming in any body of water: it's made from ground whitefish, carp, and pike. The word is from Yiddish, unsurprising since the dish is that of Ashkenazi Jews. Much like how in English, '-ed' suffix is used to make past tense verbs and participles, German and Yiddish generally use a 'ge-' prefix. 'Filte' means 'to stuff' or more cognitively, 'to fill', so in this way, 'gefilte fish' just means 'filled fish'.

622: broccoli and broccolini Aug 21, 2016

To indicate that something is smaller, or less important, many languages have ways of indicating that grammatically. English has the diminutive suffix, '-ish' (see Word Facts post from July 20, 2016), but English also adopts words with the native language's diminutive form. 'Broccoli' is originally an Italian word, and like many Italian words used in English, the singular is rarely used but ends in O. 'Broccolo' means ‘cabbage sprout' in Italian, and is the diminutive of 'brocco' meaning ‘shoot’. 'Broccolini' is a trademark, as it is not natural occurring, but it is an interesting word because the '-ni' acts as a diminutive suffix, so the word has two diminutives attached to it.

621: -spire Aug 20, 2016

When something is important to people, it tends to be incorporated into language even if the meanings do not entirely make sense. 'Respire' means, usually for literary purposes, "to recover hope and strength", but more commonly the word just means 'to breathe'. That word comes from the Latin root, 'spire' meaning 'to breathe', but 'respire' is not the only word in English to derive from it. Some of the words now still relate in some way to breath, such as 'perspire' which in Latin meant 'breathe through'. Plenty of words branched off from the meaning of the different parts that make it up, fairly soon after their creation even. 'Conspire', 'inspire' and 'transpire' all come ultimately from that same Latin root, yet the prefixes mean 'together', 'in' and 'across' respectively, which do not relate to the meanings that the words carry today. 'Spire' on its own however, though it still does not relate to breathing is not related to the Latin 'spire'.

620: plant and plan Aug 19, 2016

Plants are partly responsible for the transition into the first of two major change in human civilization. Planning agriculture allowed people to live in one area, and plan more for the future. The word 'plant' comes from the Old English 'plante' meaning 'seedling'. This is from the Latin 'planta' for ‘sprout' or 'cutting’, and was influenced by 'plantare', a French verb meaning 'fix in a place’. Similarly, the word 'plan' came into English in the late 17th century: from French an earlier word 'plant' meaning ‘ground-plan' and was further influenced by the Italian word 'pianta' which was a ‘plan of building’. Both 'plant' and 'plan' come from the same Latin root.

619: kith Aug 18, 2016

The phrase 'kith and kin' contains the otherwise rare word 'kith'. The word comes from the Old English, 'cyth' meaning 'knowledge'. A few centuries later, the meaning of the word had changed to 'one's homeland'. Originally, therefore, the phrase meant, the things close to someone: "homeland and family". That notion then led to the third meaning of the word, which we use today, meaning 'friends'.

618: hypo- and hyper- Aug 17, 2016

The prefixes 'hyper-' and 'hypo-' generally can be added to the same words with opposite effect, such as with 'hypothermia' and 'hyperthermia'. 'Hyper-', much like the adjective, 'hyper' (which comes from 'hyperactive) means 'above', and is related through the Indo-European root to 'over' 'Hypo', meaning under, is related surprisingly to the word 'up'. When there is no equivalent, it is not due to grammar but to logic, as a 'hypodermic (needle)' is one that goes 'under the skin'. One could perhaps say that clothing is 'hyperdermic', but it would be odd.

617: Present Tense Aug 16, 2016

Although there is the term 'present tense', it has multiple forms and different meanings. The present tense can be used to indicate truths that would not change for the past, present or future, such as 'fire produces heat', or 'two times three is four', and this is called the state present. The habitual present indicates events that are continuous or repeating, such as 'I eat breakfast every day. In African American English, this is taken a step further with the habitual 'be', such as in 'she be working' to mean generally that she has a job. The instantaneous present is used to show that an action has just occurred but it is also completed at the time of the speech, such as if a commentator were to say "Jones falls and injures his knee". There are other uses of the present that don't indicate present action at all. The historic present states past actions in the present for emphasis, such as "Booth opened the door, pulled back the trigger, and shoots Lincoln". Here, the first two verbs were in the past tense, but the last was in the present. Finally, the present can be used to indicate a future action usually with an adverb, such as "I fly out tomorrow".

616: Old Conventions Aug 15, 2016

There are a lot of ideas that people have about language which are not consistent with the way that people talk, or even write. 'Plural' would often be defined as "more than one"; 0 is less than 1, but it takes the plural, such as in "I have zero dogs". Many ideas like that, or also that sentences have a subject and a verb—when most things people to the Greeks or Romans. Not including the ways that prescriptivism is often to make English appear more as Latin, people think about languages in ways laid out by such people as Aristotle, but those old ideas about Greek are still stuck in the minds of English speaking people. Aristotle also thought that objects roll on the ground because of demons, but that's a different matter.

615: sloth and month Aug 14, 2016

There are plenty of suffixes in English that turn adjectives into nouns, including commonly '-ness' and '-ity'. Older, Germanic words may occasionally have the '-th' ending, such as how 'wide' turns to 'width', 'warm' turns to 'warmth' and interestingly, 'moon' turned to 'month' because months went by moon-cycle. These endings are a bit rare, and often people won't notice if someone says 'deepness' instead of 'depth'. The quality of being slow, could be 'slowness' as well, but traditionally it is 'sloth'. When Europeans found the animal sloths, remarking upon the slow nature of the animal, names then after their speed.
For more information on suffixes, click here.

614: natant and natal Aug 13, 2016

The rare adjective, 'natant'—similar to the synonym for 'indoor-swimmingpool', 'natatorium' or 'natation' meaning 'swimming skill'—means 'swimming'. The word gets its origins from the Latin 'natant-' of the same meaning. Some people have tried to make a connection to the much more common adjective, 'natal' which comes from the Latin, 'nat-' which means ‘born’. Either way, outside of scientific and or medical usages, the words' Germanic equivalents tend to be much more popular, and far less formal.

613: sorbet and sherbet Aug 12, 2016

Sometimes there is confusion between 'sherbet' or 'sherbert' and 'sorbet'. The word, 'sorbet' came to English in the late 16th century, and as one could likely guess from the name, it comes from French. Via Italian, the word comes from the Turkish word, 'şerbet' which is based on the Arabic 'šariba' meaning ‘to drink’. While we may not think of sorbet as a drink, the word is also related to our word, 'syrup', and although it is adopted from Old French, ultimately is derived from the Arabic, 'šarāb' meaning ‘beverage’. 'Sherbet', or also the common and sometimes accepted misspelling 'sherbert', is different to 'sorbet' in that it milk or egg-whites are added. Nevertheless, 'sherbet' has similar origins to the word 'sorbet', and derives ultimately from the same word, 'šariba'.

612: finn Aug 11, 2016

A great deal of the nationalities that we know today are vastly different from the native form. This can be seen in the terms, such as 'German' that were adopted from Latin, but to be clear, English has made many of its own as well. For the Anglo-Saxons, no matter where in Scandinavia the Viking raiders came, they were typically referred to as Danes. We see this in the term Danegeld meaning 'Dane gold", which was money paid to Vikings such that they would leave. In addition, Finland in Finnish is 'Suomi'. 'Finnas' was an Old English word for the peoples in northeastern Scandinavia who speak Finno-Ugric languages, such as Estonian or Finnish.

611: confuse Aug 10, 2016

Although for someone with a good eye for these things, words like 'confused' are clearly latinate, as most words with 'con-' or 'com-' are. Nevertheless, just that would not indicate the history and evolution of the meaning of the word, at least not necessarily. In Middle English 'confused meant 'bring to ruin’): ultimately from the Latin past participle of 'confundere' meaning 'to mingle together’. At its start, all of its senses were passive, and therefore appeared only as the past participle, 'confused'; for the active sense, people would use the word 'confound'. Only in the 19th century did confuse gain the active sense, and became far more common than confound .

610: handsome August 9, 2016

There are many words now like 'manufacture' 'manual' and 'handle' that derive from 'hand', or the Latin word for 'hand', 'manus'. Those words still manage (also from 'manus') to retain some connotation to hands, however. 'Handsome', on the other hand, does not have the same connotation. It comes from the Middle English ('hand' and 'some') in the sense of 'easy to handle'. This later denoted something that was good or desirable, like a handsome sum or money, or a handsome man like we say today.

609: don and doff Aug 8, 2016

People used to talked about doffing and donning articles of clothing with about the same frequency. In the mid-1800's however, the 'don' became significantly more popular, and left doff to the dust as a relatively obscure word. Both of them have originated a pair since the 14th century, from the phrase "to do off" and "to do on". Shakespeare wrote, "what's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet...Romeo, doff thy name; and for that name which is no part of thee, take all myself, which is the first recorded use of the word meaning "to rid oneself of" in a sense that is not clothing.

608: -graphy Aug 7, 2016

Sometimes the suffixes and other elements that people learn can have a meaning that is generally true and is easy to understand, but is not always going to be appropriate. '-graphy' in most cases means or has the meaning of 'writing', even in the word 'pornography' which comes from the Greek 'pornographos' meaning ‘writing about prostitutes’, which comes from 'pornē' meaning ‘prostitute’. Likewise, the word 'topography' comes from late Middle English ultimately from the Greek 'topographia' the later form of 'topographein', which is a compound of 'topos' meaning ‘place’ and '-graphien'. Topography, is related to the word 'carve' which comes from Old English 'ceorfan', in that 'carve' is related to the Greek word 'graphein' which had often also denoted carving, as opposed to just writing.