837: ragtag and bobtail Mar 24, 2017

It can sometimes be difficult to pin-down where phrases come from, especially as they pop-up and disappear from use so commonly. 'Ragtag', which now can mean 'ragged' or 'disorganized' as an adjective, and as a noun can be a synonym for 'motley' has stuck around for several centuries however. This phrase first began as 'tag-and-rag' and denoted the lower-class in the 16th century, and in the 18th, it was expanded to 'ragtag and bobtail' which is still used today. This variation retained its older meaning, but gained another sense as 'the whole of something' with 'bobtail' referring to the docked tail of a horse or a dog, i.e. "everything including the undesired parts". The phrase is not as often used in its expanded form today, but it still does carry the connotation of "undesirable and scrappy".

If you're interested in other words that historically related to the lower-class but have changed somewhat (then you have a very specific interest), but you can see these:
'peanut-gallery' or 'jacquerie'.

836: happy, cordial, and cereal Mar 23, 2017

Not all adjectives have an adjectival suffix, but enough do that there are usually some good indicators of what is, or was, the form of the word as a noun. 'Happy' does indeed come from the noun, 'hap' which used to mean, 'luck', in the same way that the German, 'glücklich' means both 'happy' and 'lucky', even if no one much uses 'hap' anymore. This trick works with an interesting effect for other words like, 'cordial' which has the common '-al' suffix. This word, denoting friendly or strong feelings and also liqueur or medicine meant, in Middle English, ‘belonging to the heart’. While that is still mostly true, it takes some sleuthing to see that this adjective comes from the Latin, 'cord' (‘heart’), which was not adopted into English as a noun, in the way that English has both, 'ether' and 'ethereal', though that is largely because it was adopted as a noun first. This is also apparent in some words that aren't even adjectives, such as 'cereal'. While now this isn't an adjective at all, it was in the 19th century, and related to the Roman goddess of agriculture, 'Ceres'.

835: nasty, nest, and nether Mar 22, 2017

There are a number of etymologies that are still unknown, but usually even if there isn't a consensus, there will still be some reasonable theories. 'Nasty' for example, is considered to have unknown origins, but since it is an adjective that ends in '-y', it would be fair to guess that there is a noun, 'nast', or something similar out there. While there is no English word nast—though one could be formed from back-formation—one theory suggests that the word 'nest' may be related. 'Nest' comes from Old English but it is related to many other words from an Indo-European root meaning ‘down’ and also 'sit'. This root also gave English the word, 'nether'—explored in more depth here—meaning 'low'. 'Nether' is on its own does not relate necessarily to filth or moral impurity as seen in 'Netherlands' simply meaning 'low-lands' as it merely denotes the flatness of the area compared to southern Germany. However, as 'nether' is also found in 'nether-regions', essentially a kenning for 'genitals', or Chaucer's famous line about "nether [e]ye" meaning 'anus', it would not be too far of a conceptual leap to get to 'nasty' from the same base as from where 'nest' originates.

834: naught, aught, wight, and naughty Mar 21, 2017

Every now and then there will be a word, especially a compound, which has an extremely obvious etymology, such as 'nothing' deriving from the combination of 'no' and 'thing'. The word, 'naught' is less obvious both visually and in terms of its pronunciation, but not too dissimilarly it comes from the Old English 'nāwiht', which—broken down—would be 'nā' (‘no’) and 'wiht' meaning ‘thing’. The words were more or less interchangeable, but 'wiht' tended to mean ‘creature’ and led to the Modern English word, 'wight' meaning 'man' or sometimes 'animal'. Even so, the word, 'naughty' does in fact derive from 'naught' but did not relate to animalism or aught such as that. Instead, the original sense of the word meant, 'having nothing' though this quickly led to the meaning of the word as 'wicked' which is the current sense. Influences from 'wiht' don't end there; the word, 'aught' meaning 'anything' comes from this, but instead of 'nā' in the compound it uses 'aye' which meant 'always'. Somewhat confusingly, both 'aught' and 'naught' are used to mean the number: zero. Also, this word 'wight' is not related to the Isle of Wight, which comes from the Latin 'Vectis' of Celtic origin meaning, "place of the division".

If you liked that, you might also like this: 'or' and 'nor'

833: Structure and Inflection Mar 20, 2017

There are many ways to classify languages, but it should be noted that due to the inherently flexible nature of grammar, these are only ever really just conventions. One way to classify language is based on how meaning is added on to words. Latin and German, inflectional languages, rely largely on suffixes to indicate the subject in verbs and show the case in nouns whereas with nouns in English depend on prepositions and word-order. Other languages take this even further with agglutination, such as in Turkish or Hungarian with verbal meaning indicated with long strings of infixes and suffixes, and the furthest still with synthetic and polysynthetic languages like Greenlandic. In these languages, entire clauses can be just one or two words. Meanwhile, in Mandarin everything from number, tense, etc. relies on using separate words, and it is said that comparatively this is easier to learn for adults than a polysynthetic language would be. Languages tend to shift closer to analytic structure, evidenced with modern Romance languages not having inflected nouns like Latin.

832: Diminutives, puddle and yankee Mar 18, 2017

Diminutives, to put it simply, imply smallness of a word; in some languages like Dutch, Spanish, and Italian these often appear as suffixes whereas in English people tend to use adjectives like, 'little'. In English, however, there is sometimes a trace of lingering diminutive suffixes, such as the '-le' in 'puddle'. In Old English 'pudd' meant 'ditch' and is related to other words meaning 'pool'. You can see more on these other words like 'chicken here. Today, the closest any English suffix may come to being a universal diminutive is perhaps '-y', but this is mostly non-standard and often only informal. As mentioned before however, Dutch has plenty, and words adopted into English occasionally carry this which you can read more on here. The American baseball team, the Yankees, comes from the nickname 'Janke', which is a diminutive of 'Jan' (‘John’). In Spanish, this would typically be done with '-ito' such as in the nickname, 'Carlito' sometimes, though not always, indicating that the father has the same name, which in English would be denoted with the title, Jr.

831: Pig Latin and 'ixnay' Mar 18, 2017

Pig Latin is fun way to transform English words by taking any initial consonant or consonant cluster in a word, putting it at the end, and adding 'ay' such that 'Pig Latin' would be "igpay atinlay". The exclamation 'ixnay' with a preposition means stop, such as 'ixnay on the yelling'. 'Ixnay' became popular slang in the 1930's from Pig Latinizing 'nix', which was used for about 200 years prior to that. 'Nix' itself comes from the German noun, 'nichts' meaning, 'nothing', and could be thought of as the informal synonym for 'naught'. This is perhaps the only instance of a term in Pig Latin becoming part of an English vernacular, and can sometimes signal that there will be other words in Pig Latin that would not be otherwise. As such, and to keep with the example from before, nobody would say, 'stop ellingyay' for 'stop yelling' but could say, 'ixnay on the ellingyay'.

For more on fun ways to rearrange words, see this on anagrams.

830: Passival (building) Mar 17, 2017

In English, a verb can be either active, meaning—simplistically—that the subject performed the action, as in "I wrote that book" or passive, meaning that the subject has the action performed to it, as in "that book was written (by me)". For a while in English, however, there was the passival, which was a middle voice indicating an action that was progressing grammatically actively but semantically passively. Keeping up with the example before, it would be "the book is writing". The word 'building' meaning, 'something being built' came from this before this grammatical feature was replaced by the progressive passive. Middle voices are fairly rare; Latin writers who could not use a middle voice were quite jealous of Greek's, and went to great lengths to emulate it. It is a shame that this form is now archaic.
If you're curious about other traces of archaic grammatical features, click to see Functions of S

829: tittle Mar 16, 2017

There are a number of idioms relating to spelling that mean "be careful" including "mind your P's and Q's". Before the printing press, and therefore that phrase, people still had to be careful to "dot their I's and cross their T's", an action which could easily be overlooked especially when writing in cursive. The word for that dot over a lower case I is not only called a 'dot' but also a 'jot' and a 'tittle'. The last item of that list can also refer to the horizontal line on the T.  The Latin origin for this word, 'titulus', also gave English 'title' initially denoting a placard placed over an object, which is not too different from the modern understanding of that term. There is also a phrase "to jot and tittle" meaning literally to add the secondary marks to I and T respectively, but is used generally to mean, "add finishing touches". This phrase is said to have started with the line in Matthew 5:18 which translates to "For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota[jot], not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished". It should be noted that 'iota' and 'jot' were once the same were, as explained here.

828: pastoral Mar 15, 2017

Someone unfamiliar with the word, 'pastoral' might very well still be confused after looking in a dictionary as the two definitions are: "relating to country-life" and "concerning the giving of spiritual guidance in the Christian Church". Originally, going back to the Latin root, the word 'pastoralis' which came from 'pastor' meant ‘relating to a shepherd’ and could refer to his flock but also nature in general. The verb from which this derives, 'pascere' meant 'feed' and featured in the quite famous line in Psalm 23, "Dominus pascit me" often translated as "The Lord is my shepherd". A literal translation, however, would be "The Lord feeds me" as 'pascit is a verb and 'me' is not a possessive pronoun. Nevertheless, the connotation of 'pascere' with 'leading' persisted in ecclesiastical Latin giving English the word the religious leader, 'pastor' and hence, 'pastoral'.

For two more examples of how The Church has change the meaning of words over time: check these out these on heathen and heaven. 

827: macKenzie Mar 14, 2017

English speakers—and speakers in general—will speak regardless orthography. There are a few instances, however, where the spelling has changed the way people pronounce or at least perceive pronunciation. When the printing press spread, predominantly from Germany, Flanders, and France, they did not include some characters that were used in the British Isles like þ, ð, or ƿ which you can see more on here: Caxton Printing. Substitutions had to be made; in the three examples before, all of them were replaced with what approximated that sound, TH for the first two and W for the last. The letter ʒ (yogh) however was written with a Y, a GH to represent the sounds; in fact the spelling name for the letter coincidentally contains the two main sounds it represented. Also—and mostly in Scotland—yogh was replaced with a Z. This led to the change in many spellings which you can still see in the abbreviation for the Shetland Islands. The pronunciations remained entirely the same for most words, but the pronunciation for the name MacKenzie gradually changed from its original Mackenʒie when English people saw it enough in writing.

826: Straitjacket Mar 13, 2017

Spelling in English can be confusing but does lend certain clues to the way in which different words were formed and what they mean that simply spelling the words as they sound would not. It is common enough to see the word 'straight-jacket' referring to the jacket that straps the sleeves to the back as to restrain the wearer, but this is not considered correct. Traditionally held as correct is 'straitjacket' coming from the base of 'straitlaced' which is also often written––to the dismay of editors––as 'straight-laced'. The problem with 'straight=jacket' besides merely the spelling is that 'strait' means "narrow or tight", as in the Bering Strait that lies between Alaska and Russia, but it also means "strict or rigorous" and is related etymologically to 'strict'. In this way, a 'straitjacket' was named such as it was used in a correctional manner.

For another set of words which are often, and perilously confused, see this on 'cyprian' and 'cypriot'

825: operate, opera, and opus Mar 12, 2017

Most English speakers probably know the verb, 'operate', the synonym of 'to work'. This comes from a Latin word, 'operat-' unsurprisingly meaning ‘done by labor’. Perhaps more surprisingly, the word, 'opera' became an English word in the mid 17th century via Italian from Latin for, you guessed it, ‘work’. A little less than a century later, the word 'opus', referring to one work in a larger collection by that composer, came about from the same Latin origin. The counterpart of sorts to 'opus', 'oeuvre' referring to a complete collection of artistic pieces (from a single artist) comes from the French for, ‘work’ as well. Indeed, while the word 'work' is not etymologically related to the rest of these, it is the idea of the work of an artist of any sort, not just musical, that led to, among these and other phrases, 'work of art' which could simultaneously be a 'work of genius'.

If you are now curious about the origins of 'soap-opera', click here.

824: gordon bennett and gorblimey Mar 11, 2017

To anyone traveling to another country: while it's always more convenient if your native language is spoken, there are always going to be slang and other phrases that might be unrecognizable. In England, 'Gordon Bennett' is an expression of shock, but it isn't used in other English-speaking nations. The exclamation is an reference to James Gordon Bennett Jr. who was an American publisher and sports-sponsor, but was regarded infamously as a trouble-maker. The reason that this name—excluding his forename—caught on as slang as opposed to the many other lewd and obnoxious wealthy people of his time, is thought to be due to the relation to 'gorblimey'. This word comes from the phrase, 'God blind me'; it was normal to alter phrases that included the word, 'God' in this era as also occurred with 'gadzooks'. While 'gorblimey' was also later used as a term to denote odd or cheap clothing, 'blimey'—which originates from the same phrase—was only ever used as an exclamation. 

823: vagabond Mar 10, 2017

The Proto-Indoeuropean word giving English 'wander' also lend to a slew of other terms, which you can see more on here: 'weather' 'wander' and 'wind'. Among these words of mostly Germanic origin, the Latinate 'vagabond' managed to enter English through Old French. While in Latin, 'vagabundus' meant, 'man who wanders', in Middle English the term originally  denoted a criminal. The concept then extended to someone without a home, particularly a loner.

822: buxom Mar 9, 2017

The history of words—especially those that have changed greatly over time—can often be quite telling of culture. 'Buxom' today refers to a chesty woman but it didn't always. Falsely, this word is often associated with 'buck' referring to a wily man, often found in the phrase "buck naked". The term is actually formed on the base of the Old English 'būgan' meaning ‘to bend’, which also gave English the word, 'bow'. The original meaning of this word, which was essentially "bend-some" or "bow-some" was ‘compliant, obliging’. Later on the sense became that of ‘lively and good-tempered’ which led to the modern association good health but especially plump features, indicating what was seen as compliant or good-natured.

For more on 'bow', see this link

For more on 'buck', see this link

821: exchequer Mar 8, 2017

It might be surprising that the word, 'exchequer'—denoting a national treasury—comes from a medieval Latin word meaning, 'chessboard', although you may know more if you are aware of the origins of 'checkmate', which you can see down below. While in Latin, and even earlier, the initial sense did in fact reference the game, the patterning of the board became associated with, among other things, accounting. Those employed to look over England's royal revenues after the Norman invasion—called 'Exchequer'—were so named for the tablecloth over tables on which they kept records. While the Latin word, 'scaccarium', meaning 'chessboard, and even the Old French 'eschequier' which gave English the word in question today are both spelt with S's, the spelling was changed to resemble the common Latin prefix, 'ex-' meaning, ‘out’ even though it bears no meaning.

'checkmate' and 'check'

820: passage and the Roman Mile Mar 7, 2017

There are many derivatives of a word that would probably seem pretty obvious, like 'passage' and 'passed' from 'pass', though rarely is that the whole story. The word 'past' too is a variation of 'passed'—the two of them still being often confused for each other—much in the same way as 'built' and 'spelt were formed. More to the point, the word, 'passage', comes is an alteration of the Italian 'passeggiare' which was not a noun as it is in English but a verb meaning ‘to walk’ based on Latin noun, 'passus' meaning ‘pace’. This word was often also used to mean 'mile' all by itself, or would be used in combination, such as the line in Bellum Gallicum by Caesar, "vicies centum milium passuum" meaning "twenty-hundred (2,000) thousands-steps (the Roman mile)". The word 'pace' also come from this root, ultimately from the verb, 'pandere' meaning ‘to stretch’ (though not 'to pander') referring to the stretch of a leg. This is has a shared Indoeuropean root with many other words, including the German, 'Fuss' ('foot') which gave the game 'fussball' its name.

There are many other words that come from the Indoeuropean root for 'foot', including this example here: the root of pejorative.

And for more on 'passage', see this: messenger not messager

819: gnome Mar 6, 2017

The word 'gnome' does not have any agreed-upon origin, but that doesn't mean that the theories do not follow just as logical patterns as more certain etymologies. 'Gnomus' was a term that Paracelsus used to mean 'Pygmaeus' ('pygmy'), and denoted a race of very small people who supposedly lived in Ethiopia and India. One theory states that this word  comes from the Greek 'genomos' meaning "earth-dweller" which would follow the same pattern with 'thalassonomos' meaning "sea-dweller'; the E would have only been left out as an error in transliteration if this is true. Another theory states that the word comes from the homonym meaning 'intelligence'. That word comes from the Greek 'gnomikos', from 'gnome' meaning, 'mind', ultimately from the base for 'gignoskein' which means 'to learn; this is where English gets—among other words—'diagnosis'. Alternatively, this word could have just been fabricated by Paracelsus. If it is true that 'gnome' is simply made up, this would not be the only instance of an invented word for a small humanoid creature entering common vernacular; L. Frank Baum is credited with creating the word, 'munchkin', first used in 'The Wizard of Oz", which is now popularly used to refer to children or short people.

Yesterday's post

For more on 'pygmy' and 'dwarf': click here

818: Giving and Taking in PIE (nimble and metronome) Mar 5, 2017

There are no known writings of the people who spoke Proto-Indoeuropean; in fact, there are still a number of disputes as whether they came from modern-day Ukraine or Anatolia, but through some linguistic clues, people can start to gain some idea of the culture of this people. For example, words meaning 'to take' in one language, and 'to give' in other Indo-European languages often are cognates of each other, which perhaps means that they were related culturally. This is evidenced in a somewhat surprising pair of words: 'metronome' and 'nimble'. The latter comes from the Old English 'nǣmel' meaning, ‘quick to seize or comprehend,’ and is related to 'niman' which meant ‘take’; the -B- was added to 'nimble' as it is is easier to pronounce that way. While 'niman' is related to a number of other Germanic words, it is also related to the Greek, 'nemein' meaning, 'distribute' or 'manage', and along with that, it is related to the Greek word for 'law', 'nomos'. 'Metronome', on the other hand, is an early 19th century that comes from a compound of the the Greek 'metron' meaning ‘measure’ and the aforementioned 'nomos' in the sense of "giving out". The relationship between giving and taking through this Proto-Indoeuropean root could signify their acknowledgement of that connection inherent in bartering. For more on how people can speculate on this long-dead culture, see these links:
Religion in Proto-Indoeuropean

Family in Proto-Indoeuropean