647: serendipity Sep 15, 2016
Some places, as according to foreigners, have the same place-names applied for a long time despite differing from the native one, like how China and Wales were basically the same exonym since the time of the Romans, while places like Germany have tons of names. The fact that the island nation of Sri Lanka has gone by many names (really, exonyms) over its history including Ceylon and the Persian-derived Serendib, is perhaps just as serendipitous, or perhaps not. In 1754 Horace Walpole came out with, The Three Princes of Serendip, on the basis of an earlier Persian story. In his tale, the protagonists, “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of”. We get 'serendipity' from this word.
646: dean, doyen, decimate Sep 14, 2016
The dean of a school or a college may be tasked with overseeing hundreds or more students, but it did not use to be this way. 'Dean', as would not be uncommon for a word belonging to the world of academia originates from late Latin 'decanus' meaning ‘chief of a group of ten’ which is ultimately from 'decem' for ‘ten.’ Another word, 'doyen', comes from a more recent derivative of 'dean' than Latin; it comes from the Old French 'deien'. Over time, that word, as well as 'decimate' which originally meant to kill one out of every ten, they lost their connection to any specific numbers.
645: legend Sep 13, 2016
Legends are wonderful as stories, and can come in all sorts of places, like myths or modern folklore. What we consider legendary today is not what would have been only a couple centuries ago. The original meaning was the story of the life of a saint. The Middle English word gets its meaning, unsurprising for something with Christian connections, via Old French, 'legende', from medieval Latin 'legenda', a participle of 'legere' meaning ‘things to be read’. The word is ultimately from Greek, 'legein' and even earlier 'logos' meaning 'reason'. For more on 'logos' see Word Facts from August 4, 2016 (/stonewordfacts/2016/08/605-pedagogue-and-synagogue-aug-4-2016.html)
644: Dialog and Conversation Sep 12, 2016
There are a number of ways to think of speech between two people. Syntactically, one can "talk to" or alternatively "talk with" someone. There is a great deal of debate about the meaning of the prepositions in those senses, but they can be used fairly interchangeably. Not only that, but there is 'conversation' 'dialog' that exists between 'interlocutors'. Are three of those words in quotes use prepositions from Latin; the first, 'con-' means 'together/with', and last, 'inter-' means 'between'. Not only that, but 'dia-' means 'through' and although it does have a variant 'di-', the sense of 'di-' as 'two' is not so connected to the meaning.
643: capisce and mafia Sep 11, 2016
Any language with a large enough groups of speakers is going to have separate dialects caused by social differences or geographic distinction. Usually though, when it comes to adopting words from those language into others, dialects don't make as much of a difference, unless it is due to contact with large groups of other populations. Mexican Spanish has, for example, influenced Western American English due to exposure. This also happens when large immigrant populations enter into a new area. Mafia are known for being Sicilian, and even the word is Sicilian for 'bragging'. Sicilian Italian is also why 'capisce' is only 2 syllables, but in Standard Italian the word is 3 syllables, 'capisci', from the verb 'capire' meaning 'to understand'.
642: pejorative Sep 10, 2016
It's easy to think of insults that are body parts, but not much variety about which ones. While calling someone 'a foot' is not terrible offensive, it is still pejorative. 'Pejorative' comes from the past participle of the Latin 'pejorare', a verb meaning, "to make or become worse", from the irregular comparative, 'pejor' meaning 'worse'. Through the Indo European root, the word is related to the Sanskrit 'padyate' for 'he falls', but also to the Latin 'ped-, pes' which means 'foot'.
641: raccoon Sep 9, 2016
Even though it is quite possible to invent words when necessary, it is much simpler to just adopt existing ones. European explorers when arriving in modern day Virginia, saw raccoons for the first time and used the Algonquian 'aroughcun'. Nevertheless, scientific names do not originate from indigenous American languages, so something else had to be done. 'Lotor', which is the scientific name comes from Latin meaning, ‘one who washes’. Raccoons are not, as you may now think, know for being especially clean, but they do utilize their front feet to obtain food in water.
640: mature Sep 8, 2016
Although it is hopefully the case that mothers are wise and levelheaded, 'mature' and 'mother' are not related. Instead, 'mature' comes from the Latin 'maturus' which means ‘timely, ripe’. The word is also related to another word with a connection to time: 'matins', coming from the plural in Old French of 'matin', which French speakers will recognize as 'morning'. The reason why the original French is secular in nature, but the English form is religious is due to influence from ecclesiastical Latin's word, 'matutinae' for ‘morning prayers’. Moreover, not only is there a religious connection for English speakers to 'matins', but it comes from the name of a Roman goddess, Matuta.
639: peanut gallery Sep 7, 2016
The peanut gallery is a term that emerged from the days of Vaudeville meaning the cheapest seats with the rowdiest people. Also the cheapest in those theaters were the peanuts, which would be, for bad shows, thrown at the performers in outrage. The term was used in the days of Vaudeville, but then repopularized by Howdy Doody in the '40's when it was a radio and then later TV program as a term for the children in the audience.
638: fiat Sep 6, 2016
Any one of you readers who's kept up with Word Facts in the past would have known the way that Latin word change and been modified, either via other languages, or simply by the age of the word and the unforeseeable nature of language development to become the ones people know today. Sometimes, a lot less often than that, words will be taken directly from Latin, and used without modification. 'Fiat' is a word used to describe currency and commands among other things. It means literally, 'let it be done', and comes up in situations where there is no further rationale. A dollar bill, for example, can but does not have to represent something of actual value like water or gold; it is arbitrary, and therefore a fiat.
637: flush flash blush plash Sep 5, 2016
Across languages, and even within the same ones, knowing the way that variations and equivalents often occur can be a good way to judge what is related. As discussed here before, P is Greek or sometimes German often will be F in English, C at the beginning of a word in Romance languages will be H, and S in German will be T. As such, 'flash' and 'flush' which are Middle English words are related to, and influenced by 'blush', 'plash' (and its alteration: 'splash'), all relating to the meaning of something springing up.
636: black, blanc, and blanco Sep 4, 2016
It's often very easy to compare words from across languages that are related, so long as you are careful of false cognates. Sometimes, however, it is less intuitive. The French for 'white' is 'blanc', and the Spanish is 'blanco', even though the Latin is 'albus'. In English, we have 'black', which isn't related to the German equivalent, but is related to those aforementioned Romance languages' words. All of these words come from the Proto Indoeuropean word 'blegh' meaning 'flash' or 'flame'. Some languages took this meaning and kept its meaning associated to the light that is produced in a flash. Other languages kept the meaning of what is left over: the soot, ashes, and darkness.
635: voracity and voraciousness Sep 3, 2016
The same word can easily become a noun, verb, and adjective in English, evidenced with the example from Hulu ads, the slogan "come TV with us" uses 'TV' as a verb (separate in meaning also from 'televise'). Likewise, there are many different affixes that indicate that a word is being used in a different part of speech. 'Voracious' does not have a verbal derivative, but the '-ous' was used to make the original Latin verb an adjective. There are many nounal suffixes in English, and therefore more than one way to make something into a noun. The earliest form of 'voracious' as a noun was 'voracity' appearing in print in the 1530's. Around a century later 'voraciousness', was being used, because it is easier to grasp.
634: Marriage Vows Sep 2, 2016
"Man and wife" is now seen as sexist or archaic; people may instead choose to opt for "husband and wife". 'Wife' comes from the Old English simply meaning 'woman'. 'Husband' on the other hand, comes from Old Norse for "house owner", and even today in the UK some people use 'husband' to mean 'manager' or 'business owner'. The arbitrary nature of words means that people can have a problem with the usage of words that have not always had such intentions.
633: Ambiguity: Morphemes Sep 1, 2016
It is thought that humans store, not all individual words, but the parts of the words called morphemes separately in the mind. All affixes therefore are added on with their own meanings applied as the word is constructed. The order of the construction can lead to some confusion. The word 'unlockable' has two meanings therefore depending upon whether 'unlock' or 'lockable' came first. With the first, it means that it is able to be unlocked from its currently locked state. The second means that it is not able to be locked, such as something that is closed not with a lock but with a buckle or button; a shirt is unlockable. For more on this topic, click here for yesterday's.
632: Ambiguity: Prepositions Aug 31, 2016
There is a great deal of possible ambiguity in English as to the intended meaning of a sentence, especially without other context. An example of this is the sentence, "she paid the man with gold". Although there may be one meaning that you, individually, interpreted first, there are two ways that this could be understood. One way is that 'gold' is the currency with which the man was paid. The other is that the man already had gold when he was paid by the woman; she could have paid him in silver or dollar bills while the gold was just to further describe the man. Because prepositional phrases can be part of a verbal phrase, or also can be separate and modify a noun phrase, there is no way of knowing for sure.
631: lobster Aug 30, 2016
As was discussed March 14, 2016, 'cob' in 'cobweb' means ‘spider’. The other sense of 'cob' as in 'corn on the cob' relates to roasting animals on a spit. 'Cob' was not the only word that meant 'spider'. In addition to the aforementioned words that meant 'spider', there was an Old English word, 'loppe' which meant 'spider'. The adjectival ending, '-(e)stre' was added, making 'loppestre' in the sense of 'spider-like' giving us the Modern English word, 'lobster'.
630: decadence, decay, and chance Aug 29, 2016
Although the American 1920's were an era of decadence, 'decadence' has nothing to do with time. The word comes from the participle of the Latin, 'decadere', meaning 'to fall', first used in English in the 1530's. Emerging at the same time, and from the same Latin root, 'decay', was used, though it 'decadence' is not a derivative of it. Even older, the word 'chance' comes from 'cadere', also meaning 'to fall'.
629: Grawlix Aug 28, 2016
Have you ever wondered what the f@*k those symbols used to mask curse-words are? Much like the bleep that is used to hide words that are spoken but found to be in some way offensive in their own right, people use symbols that would be able to be easily typed, but wouldn't have to be the standard spelling. The first uses of this were in comics in the early 1900's. There is no purposeful reason that people use the type of symbols they do, or why people often could fill 'shit' as 's&*t' or 's@^t' with no standard, but the characters themselves were chosen by default because typewriters do not have that many options for characters that aren't letters or common punctuation. The name for these sorts of symbols is 'grawlix' coined by Mort Walker in his 1980 book, The Lexicon of Comicana.
628: tomorrow and morning Aug 27, 2016
English has two clear words for 'morning' and 'tomorrow', but not every language does: not even English at some points in its history. In German, for example, 'morgen' (which gives us the unit of area, 'morgen': the amount of land plowable in a morning supposedly) means 'morning' but also 'tomorrow'. 'Tomorrow' (as was covered briefly in Word Facts July 9, 2015) comes from 'to' and 'morrow', a rarely used word now, but was widespread in Middle English. 'Morrow' comes from 'morn' (the sounds we hear in 'morrow' come from other declensional forms). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, 'morning' also comes from 'morn', but was modified on the same pattern as 'even+ing'.