865: golliwog, polliwog, and poll Apr 21, 2017

You might be surprised by the etymological similarities between a fictional doll, frogs, and voting. The word around which they all center is, 'poll'. In the case of the doll, 'golliwog' entered the English language denoting soft dolls, especially with bright clothes and dark faces in the late 1800's after the name of a character in a book by Bertha Upton which is thought to be inspired by 'polliwog' to some extent. The relation to 'poll' here in first half of 'polliwog' is also connected to the term 'tadpole'. Both of those words, and the earlier 'pollywiggle' have the 'poll' which is a dialectal way of saying, 'head'; the '-wiggle' and '-wog' denoted the way that they look like wiggling heads, and 'tad-' was a from the Old English for 'toad'. Finally, voting, or in this case political polling, was a sense of this word that only came about relatively recently in poll's history, but relates to heads just as much as any other derivative. In the political sense, the word came from the idea of counting heads, or individual people. If you don't think about it too hard, this really gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'ahead in the polls'.

864: sinister and ambidextrous etc. Apr 20, 2017

If someone is clumsy she could be described as having two left feet, though someone else nimble or graceful would not be said to have two right feet, at least not commonly and seriously. There are a number of other situations where left- or right-relating words pop up, such as with the adjective 'sinister' meaning 'evil' coming from the Latin for 'left'. For centuries Christians, and other groups, had sinful connotations towards left-handedness which thus giving English that last definition, but one can also see the difference in words like 'ambidextrous' meaning in Latin 'right-handed on both sides (of the body)'. Likewise, 'ambilevous' and 'ambisinistrous'—though fairly rare—mean 'left-handed on both sides', although in this case it denotes clumsiness rather than evil.

For more left- and right-words, click here.

863: Historical Names (bjørn & loðbrók) Apr 19, 2017

Historically names were more indicative of what someone did, or how or where he lived than they are today. Surnames aren't created too often anymore, and now many are dying out quite rapidly, but many people for a long period in history would have had far more personal names than now. Because of this practice, names were quite often just words, or were conventional in some way but were either once words that could have morphed or been abandoned in a modern lexicon, or were words from other languages, often from the Bible. The Scandinavian name 'Bjørn' is somewhat rare for historical forenames as it did and continues to mean 'bear'.  The father of a famous Bjørn, legendary Ragnar Loðbrók (who may or may not have been real) did not inherit his surname from his father, but instead from his pants. There is some debate about where his name really comes, but many people have translated 'Loðbrók' as 'rough pants' since he supposedly wore pants of cow-hide dipped in tar. The element 'brók' still appears in words today, such as the Icelandic 'nábrók', which are pants made out of human skin after that person died. Coins would be placed in what is translated as 'death-pants' for good (financial) luck.

862: Rhymes for Purple & Silver Apr 18, 2017

Poets attend: despite the popular myths suggesting otherwise, and even the post to this blog 333 days ago claiming that there were no words in English to rhyme with 'purple' or 'silver' (and 'orange' and 'month'), there are a few. Though these would likely not be deemed common by anyone aside from perhaps a few old farmers in Scotland, 'curple' refers to the butt (or 'arse' if you're from that region) of anything though especially a horse, and 'chilver' is a ewe-lamb; it is also etymologically related to 'calf'. 'Hirple' as well rhymes with 'purple', and it means to limp. It was not simply a joke at the expense of farmers before, and these quite rare words are considered dialectal used more or less exclusively in Northern England and Scotland. Urban Dictionary lists 'chilver' as "a word used to prove that something rhymes with silver", but each word does have a long history, dating back to Old English. 

861: Classifications of Yupik, Inuit, and Aleut Apr 17, 2017

Politically correct movements do not really have the power to change a language in any major way, but often individual words will be dropped for others that are felt to be less offensive. This is, according to Ben O'Neill's antidiscrimination-paradigm, useless in the long-run, but some words deemed more accurate, scientific, or simply less offensive have already replaced various dysphemisms. People tend to use the word 'Inuit' now instead of 'Eskimo', but the problem here is that this term is not completely accurate. There are many groups of people with far more subdivisions than this, but in the arctic there are the Inuit, the Yupik, and the Aleut, with distinct languages and cultures. Those in Canada, and Greenland are all Inuit, though of course this can be split up into groups including Kalaallisut, Inuktitut, and Inuvialuk. There are also those on the Aleutian Islands who speak Aleut, as well as those in Alaska and Russian who speak Yupik languages, neither of which are Inuit peoples. In fact, the broader language family is called Eskimo-Aleut, descended from Proto-Eskimo. While 'Eskimo' may not be what any group calls itself, the most inclusive word to use when talking about these arctic peoples would be 'Eskimo' as it does not exclude those in Alaska and Russia.

860: run (of Germanic Origin) Apr 16, 2017

Often dictionaries will simply list words as 'of Germanic origin', even when it says that the word comes from Old English. This is not simply redundant and there happen to be several editorial and etymological reasons. While English is classified as a West Germanic (WG) language, viking invaders who spoke North Germanic (NG) languages heavily influenced the vocabulary of Old, and thence Modern English. While it's a good rule of thumb that most simple, non-technical words one comes across in English will be Germanic, common words like the strong verb 'run' do not necessarily resemble their Modern German (which is WG) counterparts, in this case, 'laufen'. While 'run', deriving from the Old English 'rinnan, irnan' is one of those such words listed as "of Germanic origin", this is not to say that 'run' is separate to other WG words. It is true that 'run' was reinforced by the Old Norse (which is NG) 'rinna, renna', but it is also related to the Old High German (which is WG) 'rinnan', also meaning 'run'. It would be unfair to say that the word is specifically WG or NG, and indeed the word is far older than the split between different Germanic languages occurred with related words coming even from Sanskrit. In fact, the word 'laufen' is also Germanic, but is related to the English word, 'leap' and 'lope', with the typical English P where there is a German F.

859: Word-Order Apr 15, 2017

Of the many factors that play into sentence-structure, languages are often classified by how the subject, object, and verb are placed. In English the order is subject-verb-object (SVO) while in Latin it tended to be subject-object-verb (SOV). Given that there are three elements here, there are 6 ways to arrange them, with the two most common being SVO and SOV, and the two least common OSV and OVS in that order. Malagasy spoken on Madagascar is one of the only well-documented languages to have object-subject-verb which is one noticeable indication that it is not related to other languages on mainland Africa. Klingon, the invented language created for Star Trek by Marc Okrand is in OVS which is incredibly rare globally as Okrand wanted his language for aliens to sound as foreign for humans as possible, though of course to someone who doesn't know Klingon this feature would be entirely lost. If you wanted to learn a natural OVS language, you might have to learn Portuguese first because the only known ones are spoken in the jungles of Brazil.

For more like this, click here

858: glamour and American English's Dropped U Apr 14, 2017

American and British (and otherwise non-American spellings) are mostly similar with a few exceptions here and there. In general, when there is a difference it is the case that the American spelling is less similar to an Old French origin for words deriving from this language. The simple reason for this is that the United States gained its independence from Great Britain before universal standardized spelling, and lexicographers, especially Webster, had the chance to come up with new rules. Most of the efforts to change spelling was to make it more closely match the way that people spoke, and while Webster's push for 'tongue' to be spelt 'tung' failed, dropping the U in words like, 'color', 'honor', and 'behavior caught on eventually. One word that retains its U in American writings is 'glamour', but here, the word was neither from Old French, nor did it enter English much before American independence. The word was adopted in the early 18th century from Scots Gaelic originally meaning ‘enchantment’ ultimately as alteration of 'grammar'. That word, which is from Greek was never used to mean 'magic' or anything of the like but the Latin word 'grammatica' was used to mean ‘learning’ and this included the popular association with practicing sorcery.

857: gallimaufry Apr 13, 2017

When one word has two or more distinctly different meanings, like 'gallimaufry' referring to a jumble of things or a food, there tends to be a historical reason.  The word comes from the two elements 'galer' which was Old French for ‘have fun’, and the Picard (which was the dialect of French that has most influenced English) 'mafrer' meaning ‘eat copious quantities’. While that wasn't very specific, the word which became 'galimafrée' took on the meaning of an unappealing dish. More specific still, the word soon was used to reference a meal of minced meat, especially hash. Much in the way that 'hodgepodge' is used to mean something somewhat carelessly thrown or jumbled together first meant a mutton stew, 'gallimaufry' now has the meaning of a medley of things which was gained from earlier food-related connotations. For more on mixes, click here.

856: maybe, perhaps, and mayhap Apr 12, 2017

The words 'maybe', 'perhaps', and 'mayhap' can generally be used interchangeably, though some are chosen more frequently than others. Not only do those terms have related meanings, but their formations are all quite similar; the three of them were all originally stated as a phrase in the same way as 'goodbye' began as 'G-d be with you'. 'Maybe' may be the most understandable, as—much like in that clause—'may' is a modal verb and so guarantees that 'be' is not conjugated. Since 'may' in this case will always be followed by 'be', people just joined these together and interpreted the meaning adverbially. With 'perhaps' and 'mayhap', these both happened to come from 'hap' which is not used often at all anymore, but meant 'occur by chance' or more intuitively, 'happen'. 'Perhaps' comes from the meaning of 'per' as 'through' i.e. 'through chance', while 'mayhap' has the same first element as 'maybe'.

855: inevitable and unavoidable Apr 11, 2017

There are many words that are created by back-formation such as 'gruntled' from 'disgruntled', but plenty of words exist which have no positive form, such as 'inevitable'. This word was adopted into Middle English from the Latin 'inevitabilis' which is the negative form for 'evitabilis' (‘avoidable’). While 'unavoidable' is a synonym for this, it is not the case that one ultimately comes from Latin and the other from, say, Old English; both 'avoid' and 'inevitable' are Latinate, but 'avoid' came through Old French first. Moreover, 'avoid', originating from the Old French 'evuider', initially meant ‘clear out, get rid of’, relating more to the modern word 'void' (or 'vuide') meaning ‘empty’. This is related to the Latin 'vacare' (‘vacate’), and while in Middle English, 'avoid' could mean to empty something such as a trash it also denoted abandoning something. In this way, 'unavoidable' and likewise 'inevitable' referred to something that could not be abandoned. Though with 'avoid' now, the sense of emptying is obsolete, this meaning is still kept with the verb 'void', as in 'voiding one's bowels'.

854: baby Apr 10, 2017

The word 'baby', much like the word, 'mom' and 'dad' come from imitating the way and infant babbles. In fact, even 'babble' comes from the way babies may repeat 'ba'. This same garble that gave English 'baby' and French 'bébé' also gave Hindi 'babu' and kiSwahili 'baba', the latter two both meaning 'father'. In the same way that people will make words in association to the way simple, basic manner babies speak, there are a great number of phrases that come from the many connotations people have to babies. One of many of these idioms, 'baby blues', refers to blue eyes that babies have, but for a long time this also was a sort of euphemism for postpartum depression.

853: error, err, and errand Apr 9, 2017

While 'wander', 'wonder', 'wind' etc are all related through a Germanic root, you will also find in English a slew of words related to the meaning of wander that come from Latin. The words 'error' and the verb 'err', which rhymes with 'her' and it is considered erroneous to be pronounced like 'air', all (including 'erroneous') come from the Latin verb 'errare' meaning 'to make a mistake', but also 'go astray' either from a literal path or perhaps a more philosophical one. The words that were adopted into English tend to relate to mistakes and not meandering, but you might now assume that 'errand' would be related. If you did, then keep in mind that to err is human, and it turns out 'errand' is Germanic and the Old English 'ǣrende' meant 'message' or 'mission'.

For more, see 'vagabond'

852: delilah Apr 8, 2017

Plenty of common Western names have some biblical relevance. It is usually from the frequency of these names that terms like 'john' referring to a man who hires prostitute, or foundation the baseball team, Yankees, come about. Some names, such as 'Delilah', are also used as nouns separate from the name, but with connotations stemming from Scripture, and not contemporary connotations. It is from the story of Samson and Delilah where the sense of the word as 'seductress' began, but the name was around for much longer than this. There is disagreement concerning the true etymology of this word, but it either comes from the Hebrew element 'dal' meaning 'weak' or the Hebrew for 'delight'. Unlike other much older names like 'Matthew' or 'John', 'Delilah' only started to be used as a name in the 17th century with the Puritans, though it gained more popularity following Saint-Saens' opera, Samson and Delilah (1877). Like 'John' which also appears in other languages as 'Jean', 'Juan', 'Jan', etc. Delilah has at least 15 variant transcriptions including 'Dalia', 'Dalialah', 'Delylah', and even 'Dalida' in French.

851: Quotation Marks Apr 7, 2017

Much like with capital letters, quotation marks were initially used just to identify what the author felt was particularly important. This mark, which appeared as two lines like || in the margins, could be for anything, not just for quotes. When printing-presses became more common, printers in Central Europe especially started to use curved lines and in the 17th century,the usage of these for quotations became more or less the standard. What was not standard was the appearance of these marks, and this is still the case today. The French, and later Russian, Arabic etc quotation marks: «  » kept the punctuation in the middle, closer to how there were initially hand-written, whereas Germans lowered one and elevated the other: „ “ and kept them pointed inwards. Other countries adopted variations of these such as the Swedish ” ” with both facing the same direction, and the similarly angled „ ” used in parts of Central Europe, not to mention American English's, “ ”. This gets even more varied when alternates are included, as two countries that use the same primary quotation marks may use two different sorts of punctuation when adding in extra quotes, e.g.
I said, "Mr. Smith told his son, 'eat your soup' ".
This sentence which uses American standards would, for instance, have use the opposite quotations (single and double) in the UK.

850: cygnet Apr 6, 2017

When diminutive suffixes are added to words in English, they tend to be specific to certain words. For instance, a young duck is a 'duckling', a young goose is a 'gosling', but a young cat is a 'kitten', not a 'catling', even though all of those words are of Germanic origins. Some words for animals do not even use suffixes, but employ adjectives like 'cub', though this is equally dependent on individual terms. The term for a young swan, 'cygnet' does not appear so use a diminutive suffix, but certainly does not use an adjective either (unless some people may prefer 'baby swan' for simplicity). While some terms for young animals, as with 'puppy' or 'baby' are completely separate that the word for the mature form, but 'cignet' does have a diminutive suffix after all. The word 'swan' comes from Old English, but the word 'cignet' comes from the Old French 'cigne' ('swan'), so the '-et' suffix, logically, is also from Romantic origins. This suffix is also present in 'budget' and 'ballet', also from French.

849: arse and cuss Apr 5, 2017

When it comes to the aspects that distinguish accents or dialects, any number of subtle differences may be noted, but this tends to boil down to pronunciation, vocabulary, and certain syntactic differences. Someone from New York would not say, 'car' in the same way as someone from London, but this is more obviously a difference in pronunciation of a the same word and not a different word as is the case with 'truck' 'lorry'. In the case of 'car', it is the rhoric-r for the Americans but a non-rhotic-r for the English. It might seem that 'cuss' is just another vocabulary word, distinct from 'curse', but in fact this is due to historically non-rhotic r's employed in the southern United States that eventually got its own spelling. In America, for standards in pronunciation, people tended to use the conventions in the North where there were more people and more money, however this did not happen in the case of 'ass'. In parts of the United Kingdom that still use rhotic-r's, 'arse' is said instead of 'ass', but as luck would have it, this became an exception to the rhoticity in what is now considered Standard American English. Of course, there is no single consistent way of speaking, even in one region, which you can learn about here.

848: aardvark Apr 4, 2017

Spelling, and pronunciation-rules are nothing more than conventions in order to maintain understandability. This is especially true in English were the sound /a/ in 'father' or 'tot' can be written with an 'a' or an 'o'. It is quite telling then to see a word with that sound spelt with 'aa' in 'aardvark' and one could expect not only would this unlikely be English in origin, but probably wouldn't come from, say, Swedish which uses the character 'å'. The double-a is quite common in certain German orthographies, but more notably perhaps: Dutch. This in fact originates from the Afrikaans—or South African Dutch—words 'aarde' meaning ‘earth’ and 'vark' meaning ‘pig’. Funnily enough, this spelling was kept when it was adopted into English, but now it is spelt 'erdvark' in Afrikaans. English also got the word 'aardwolf' from this same Afrikaans word, but those creatures are more closely related to hyenas than aardvarks.

847: nonchalant Apr 3, 2017

Among the synonyms for 'nonchalant', you would find, 'calm', 'composed' and 'blasé', as well as 'cool'. One cannot, at least not in any standard English way, be 'chalant' because the word was adopted from a French term meaning ‘not being concerned,’ with the 'non-' prefix already added. The stem of that verb is derived from the Latin 'calēre' meaning 'to be warm'. While it may not sound like it, 'lee-' as in 'leeward' meaning the side shielded from wind also is related to this, although that word originates from the Old English, 'hlēo'. Quite often, words for emotional distance or kindness are related to temperature, and even the terms, 'warm', 'cool', and 'cold' are used to describe people's attitudes. It should not be a surprise then that even words borrowed from other languages still follow this same pattern with 'nonchalant' meaning 'not warm' in a literal or historical sense. 

846: guinea Apr 2, 2017

There is an abundance of terms that feature the word, 'Guinea', including,  'guinea fowl', 'guinea grass', 'guinea worms', 'guinea (coin)', and the countries 'Equatorial Guinea', 'Guinea', and 'Papua New Guinea', not to mention 'guinea pigs'. All but the last two items of that list relate to Africa, specifically the region of West Africa, south of the Senegal River along the Gold Coast. English gets the word from the Portuguese 'Guiné' which refers specifically to the people of the region, but the etymology of this is uncertain. A leading theory, however, is that it comes from Berber 'Genewah' meaning, 'burnt people'. The terms denoting things outside of Africa, may still relate to this region, but only distantly. While 'Papua' is a native word, the latter half of 'Papua New Guinea' comes from 'Nueva Guinea' coined by Yñigo Ortiz de Retez when he thought that these people looked similar to Africans. While that was not based on anything scientific, some controversial genomic analyses in the last decade have indicated that an early wave of Africans may have migrated to Papua New Guinea tens of thousands of years before the wave of migrants into Eurasia whom eventually branched out and over time populated the rest of the continents.