845: Long Hundred Apr 1, 2017
Not all cultures use a base-10 system for mathematics. Some peoples have used 20 as their base for counting, and some have used 12, which is not too hard to believe considering there are separate words for eleven and twelve before getting into the -teens, not to mention that there are twelve inches in a foot and twelve sections on a clock. While that same distinction for 'eleven' and 'twelve' exists in Romance languages, the Romans counted in base-10, as can be seen with Roman numerals, and the word 'digit'. Therefore, when they encountered northern Germanic tribes, they translated what is now 'hundred' as 'centum' (100) without taking into account that the Germanic 'hundred' was equivalent to 120. To avoid this confusion between these hundreds, people now use the term 'long hundred' for the Germanic one. Therefore, when the Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturluson wrote about the size of the peasant army that fought King Olaf II in AD 1030 as 'one hundred hundred', this would be 14,400 and not 10,000.
It should be noted that while a 'long hundred' equals 120, a UK 'long hundredweight' is equivalent to 112 lb avoirdupois.
844: gallic Mar 31, 2017
The common chicken has the scientific name Gallus gallus domesticus, which is in Latin like other taxonomical classifications. Seeing then that 'Gallic' is also of Latin origin, it would not be ridiculous to assume that this would be in some way related to chickens, but it instead is a synonym for 'French' or the Gauls in particular. Etymologically, this is just coincidental, as 'Gaul' (or in Latin, 'Gallicus') does not have any direct relation to 'gallus'. Nevertheless, the rooster is in many ways symbolic of French or French-speaking culture, featuring on the emblem for French national sports teams and on various memorials, and is on the flag for the Walloon Movement. While this, again, may have been nothing more than coincident, many people throughout history have noted this connection, and this animal is thought to have been sacred to the people of modern-day France for millennia. Some records indicate that the Gauls considered this animal sacred, and the Christians then took it as a symbol for watchfulness when Catholicism replaced Celtic religions.
843: Cases: Upper and Lower Mar 30, 2017
Writing with just plain-and-simple words on a page is not too complicated and tends to be fairly straight-forward and logical. Punctuation, diacritics and fonts however are new and merely conventional. Most Roman texts, for example, had no punctuation, no lower-case, no macrons like those seen today, and spacing was not common for many centuries in that long literary history. All of those features now used in English writing were just to make things visually simpler, but the standards we have now were not always those we currently use. As mentioned, there was no lower case; these variations only came about over many centuries when scribes would use different tricks to fit more words on a page. With letters hence becoming smaller, writers needed ways to make things stick out. Elaborate rubrics for the first letters of chapters or pages were common, but so was just adding capital letters, or majuscule to important words. This started as anything: some people capitalized all nouns (as is still the case with German), some only capitalized names of people and places, and some started capitalizing the first letter of every sentence. Today, each writing-system has its own standards, but this changes language-to-language, country-to country, and especially alphabet-to-alphabet.
For more of these conventions, see this on apostrophes
842: cravat Mar 29, 2017
There is some debate as to where neckties originated, but in Europe and elsewhere, various types of neckties have been worn for centuries or even longer, especially by those in the military. Perhaps the most common type of tie today, though it may be diminishing in popularity, is the necktie, similar in style to the cravat. This resemblance is not accidental, and in much 17th century art, you'll find portraits of many European men with ruffled, oft-laced, wide ties. This fad started quite quickly after the French adopted this trend after seeing Croatian mercenaries in France whom would wear these same sort of scarves. In fact the word, 'cravat' comes from the French, 'Cravate' meaning ‘Croat’ referring to these soldiers.
841: blackmail Mar 28, 2017
In TV, books, or perhaps even real life there is more than enough blackmailing, this does not involve any dark-colored postage at all. Although it is a single word, as you might expect, this is certainly a compound of what is now 'black' and 'mail', this does not mean that the second element in this is related at all to the post. Instead, this comes from the Middle English, 'male' which comes from the Old English 'mal' meaning '(legal) agreement', and also only coincidentally is spelt the same as the sex. In some places, 'male' became synonymous for 'rent' which was often paid in silver, leading to the phrase 'white money' and 'whitemail'. Some people were forced to pay extra fees to landlords as a sort of "protection money", and this then became termed 'blackmail' in parts of England and Scottland. There is some debate as to where the 'black' comes from, but the two main theories are that it is either just opposite to 'white' with some negative connotations, but also the Scott's Gaelic word, 'blathaich' meaning 'protection' could have led to the identical spelling and pronunciation as the color.
840: nepotism Mar 27, 2017
When people talk about 'nepotism' it denotes a particular sort of favoritism that allows for people to obtain and maintain power within families. This is a fairly new word, coming into English only in the mid 17th century. There wasn't as much of a need for this word when the most common form of governing in Europe was based on ruling families with power transferring from, usually, father to son. In the papacy, however, many roles were elected, but this system was also fraught with corruption. While power technically could not transfer from Pope to son, as the pope was not allowed to have children, this still happened. The Italian word, 'nepotismo', which gave us 'nepotism' comes from 'nipote' meaning ‘nephew’ as often the Pope would give privileges to his usually illegitimate sons whom were called his 'nephews' as a sort of euphemism.
839: vandal Mar 26, 2017
When people say 'vandal' now, or any of its derivatives, it refers to someone who destroys or defaces something, especially public property more often than the historic Germanic tribe. This does come from the name of the group which in AD 455 sacked Rome, though. Many other names for the various European tribes whose original names were Latinized or simply disregarded completely by the Romans, which is why the Welsh for 'Welsh' ('Cymraeg') or the German for 'German' (Deutsch') are so different from the English, explored more here. The Latin name for the Vandals, however was 'Vandalus', as well as the Old English, 'Wendlas', came from the tribe's name for itself. It is supposed that this comes from a Proto-Germanic root for, 'wanderer', which you can see more about here with 'vagabond' or here with 'wind'.
838: digit Mar 25, 2017
It is not clear necessarily whether when someone says, 'digit' if that refers to fingers or numbers, unless maybe you are having a conversation with a mathematician or a surgeon. This similarity is not coincidental, though the connection to numbers specifically occurred later. This term comes from the Latin noun, 'digitus' meaning either ‘finger' or 'toe’. The sense of the word as a number from 0 to 9 (or 10) came about due to the practice of counting on the fingers. Not all cultures use a base-ten system of counting, but those that did relied on the number of digits making the association very strong. Fingers also are, among many other things, used for pointing; indeed another term for forefinger or index finger is 'pointer finger'. Unsurprisingly then, the term 'diction' in the sense of telling or showing is related to 'digit'.
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'.
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'
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
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'.
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'
For another set of words which are often, and perilously confused, see this on 'cyprian' and 'cypriot'