905: pear tree (from Twelve Days of Christmas) Jun 1, 2017

Now that it's June, Christmas is probably not at all on anyone's mind, though perhaps pears are. Either way, much like many other old jingles and nursery rhymes, The Twelve Days of Christmas has undergone a number of changes and has a significant amount of variation from version to version. An example comes from one of the more famous lines: "a partridge in a pear tree" which has also been found as "some part of a juniper tree" and "the sprig of a juniper tree" by a misunderstanding of the words. That is not to say, however, that "partridge in a pear tree" is any better. This phrase comes from a similar French jingle in which the words 'perdriole' or 'perdrix', depending on the version, feature. Both of those words mean 'partridge', but it is commonly held that some mishearing of the word 'perdrix' lead to the phrase 'pear tree' which only appears in the English version of the song, even though there are many besides just the English and the French.

904: business and busyness May 31, 2017

'Business' is spelt nothing like it sounds in a manner that is strange even by English standards. It is for that reason that unlike other adjectives ending in Y that take the '-ness' suffix like 'happiness' or 'craziness' for which the terminal Y gets rewritten as an I, 'busyness' keeps its Y from 'busy' as a way to disambiguate itself from 'business'. If to you it feels like 'busyness' should also be written as 'business', know that it was for a very long time. In Old English the word was 'bisignis', or what would today just be 'busy' and '-ness', though the need for the suffix to make it into a noun in this case is rather odd as there was already the Old English noun 'bisig'. The original sense of this 'business' in Old English was 'anxiety' and '(state of being) busy' which was kept in Middle English and Early Modern English, but eventually the senses of being given a task, or having an occupation, as well as every other modern sense, arose, necessitating some differentiation between 'business' and 'busyness'.

903: espouse and spouse May 29, 2017

The verb, to espouse, something means to support a belief, while the noun, spouse, is a married partner to someone. If today, one wanted to express that noun as a verb, there are plenty of ways to say that, including, 'wed' or 'engaged' or others depending on the situation, so there isn't much need for a new way to express this, but historically, 'espouse' was synonymous with 'marry'. That word originated as a participle from the Latin verb 'spondere' meaning 'betroth', and even when 'espouse' meant 'wed', it tended be be found as 'be espoused to', just like it would have been translated from Latin. Though of the pair, only 'spouse' kept its association with marriage, 'wed' has gained the sense of being attached to an idea separate from marriage, similar to 'espouse'.

902: More about glob May 28, 2017

Last week on Word Facts you might have learned that 'glob' comes from a combination of 'blob' and 'gob', though this is not where the story ends. 'Blob', which was generally synonymous with 'bubble' and has quite a similar form to many other words that denote droplets of water or another liquid, including 'blotch' 'and 'botch', whose origins are unknown, and 'plop' which is imitative, as well as 'blot' from Old Norse. Many of these words, just like 'glob' itself are blends of other words; 'blotch' is thought to be at least partially a blend of 'blot' and 'botch'. All of these seem to follow the pattern of bubbles of liquid, which is reasonable for this list, so it may be surprising that 'blubber' denoting fat, not water, would be on this list as well. As it happens however, 'blubber' initially denoted sea-foam and other bubbles on the water, and not just animal fat. If you know of, or suspect any other words that could be on this list, feel free to write them in the comments.

901: snivel, snuff, and sniff (Snu) May 27, 2017

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word for 'nose' is thought to have been 'snu' which led to the derivation of many other words relating to noses such as 'snout', 'snot', and more nouns, It also led to the creation of certain verbs we have today like 'sneeze'. 'Snivel', which is more often found as the adjective 'sniveling', comes from the Old English 'snyflung' as a verbal noun from 'snofl' meaning ‘mucus’, though it has only been recorded as a verbal noun. The word nowadays doesn't relate to noses, at least not directly, but the related word 'snuffle' certainly does. Having so many of these other related words helps to influence the formation of more, as was the case with 'snuffle' which was first found in the 16th century but is also related to 'snuff', as in tobacco found about a century later. Not off of the 'sn-' words that relate to noses can be attributed to PIE however, as though it was the foundation for many words, some do pop up on their own somewhat. Both 'sniff' and 'sniffle' were created in the last few hundred years due to onomatopoetic imitation of how those sound; no one is sure about much concerning PIE, but it might be safe to assume 'snu' was formed the same way.

900: record (re-) May 26, 2017

This is the 900th Word Facts, if you were keeping a record; thank you for all the likes, comments, and shares. The subject today, 're-', has a few different uses explored on this blog, including its function to express intensive force which you may remember from, 'remember', and to refer back to something such as with 'refer' coming from Latin meaning 'bring back'. With the word 'record', before technological means to document things, could mean "repeat to commit to memory". The word has a Latinate verbal prefix, but now the word when accented differently can be a noun, this sense came about later. By that time, the word already connoted written documents and laws, but originally what has now become a 'record' was oral, and meant in the English translation of Latin, in essence, "back to the heart" ('re- cord'), not terribly dissimilar to the expression, "remember something by heart", as was the original understanding of the word. 'Cord' has its own interesting relationship to the English word 'heart' which has already been discussed here several times.

899: Greek Numerals May 25, 2017

In many countries people write numbers using Arabic numerals, though these are poorly named as they come from India, and in the Middle East today very few of their numerals look the same; e.g. 2, 3, and 4 appear as ٢,٣, and ٤ respectively. There are many more systems of writing numbers out there, but in the West there tend to only be two used commonly, including the Arabic numerals of course, and Roman numerals. The latter use letters—I, V, X, L, C, D, and M—to express numbers, similar to many other systems. The Greek numerals, though less common than their Roman counterpart today, also use alphabetical letters to represent numbers. Some on the Roman system was somewhat arbitrary, such as V and L for fifty when the Latin word for both starts with a Q, but Greek numerals represented 1-10 with the first ten letters of their alphabet, and 20-90 (going up by tens) is represented by the 11th through 18th letter, and hundreds are represented by the 19th through 27th letter (including the archaic sampi).

898: austro- May 24, 2017

Combining forms are a good way to indicate relation between two areas. This appears in terms of conflicts, such that the Austro-Sardinian War, but also to denote regions, such as the Austro-asiatic language-family. The problem with this is that the aforementioned war, also called the the Franco-Austrian War took place between the Austrian Empire and the French and Sardinians, whereas Austro-Asiatic languages are spoken in Southeast Asia, and does not relate to Austria at all. In this case, the name 'Austria' and the name 'Australia' both come from the Latin 'australis' meaning 'south'. The Austro-Asiatic language family also does not relate to Australia, but they are found in the south of Asia.

897: frank and the franks May 23, 2017

People should endeavor to be frank with each other, even if they aren't named Franklin. Interestingly, the name and the adjective share the same root, though this is not to say that people named Franklin have been associated with honesty, in the same way that 'dick' denoting a penis derived from the frequency of people named Dick. While today Franklin might not mean anything more than the name, in the days of Feudal societies the term referred to a landowner who was free but wasn't noble, ultimately coming from 'francus' meaning ‘free’. This is the same origin as 'frank', but it is was used far before these land-owners; the Germanic tribe, the Franks were the only group to have full freedom in Frankish Gaul. The name for this tribe is from the Old English 'franca' meaning ‘javelin’, similar to the root for 'Saxon' but was also reinforced by the Latin 'francus'. As mentioned in the post yesterday, modern day France composed the majority of the Frankish empire, and indeed 'France' comes from the has the same derivation.

896: frankfurt May 22, 2017

There are plenty of misleading city-names, like Strasbourg discussed here yesterday, that have the appearance of being part of from one country, or linguistic region, but for whatever reason are not. This happens with towns and cities on national borders more often, but they do not have to be, like with 'Kluczbork' (in German 'Kreuzburg') in south-central Poland. This is true also of the City of Frankfurt am Main. Though many German immigrants settled in the Midwest in the United States leading to different spelling 'Frankfort' in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, the word comes from the days of being in the Frankish empire, which consisted of most of modern-day France, much of southeast Germany, and elsewhere. The latter half of the name is of Germanic origin, related to the English 'ford' meaning a shallow part of a river.

895: Strasbourg, and Other City-Names May 21, 2017

If you look on a map of the United States you would see a lot of cities named after other places that already exist. There is, for example, St. Petersburg in Florida, Berlin in three different states, and a few Cairos and Delhis as well. With the exception of some names derived from indigenous American tribes, such as Miami and Tallahassee in Florida, there is not too much linguistic reasoning. In other places, there can be a few clues, such as with Brčko, which based off of the lack of many vowels and the inverted circumflex over the C, one might guess this is in Eastern Europe; it is in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Places ending with '-burg' or variations thereof tend to be in Germanic-speaking regions, but 'Strasbourg' is a city in France, and not only has the Germanic ending, but also the 'Stras-' is a cognate with the German 'Straße' ('street'). It would be easy to mistake this for a German city, not helped by the fact that there is an central Austrian town, Straßburg. This is due to the French city's name originating from when it was part of the Holy Roman Empire after being an important area in Gaul.

894: globerate, glob, conglomerate etc. May 20, 2017

Either for fun or for research, it can lend a new perspective on words to look into the relation between ones you suspect may share a common ancestry. If you stumble upon the words 'conglobate', 'conglobulate', and 'globulate' (outside of this post) then you might be reading some very odd, old things, but you may notice the similarities. The words are certainly rare, and they all relate to joining things together, especially into a ball, so it wouldn't be crazy to assume they are indeed related. Unsurprisingly then, it turns out that they are, as well as a few other, generally astronomical, geological, or biological terms like 'globular', from the Latin 'globulus' meaning 'sphere', as well as the more commonly found 'globe'. 'Glob' is not among these related words as, though visually, semantically, and maybe even phonologically it may appear similar, it is thought to come from a blend of the words 'blob' and 'gob' (referring to sailors, not mouths). It would also, however, be incorrect to assume that this is related to the far more common, 'conglomerate', which also has its own group of related scientific words like 'glomerular', coming from the Latin, 'glomus' meaning ‘ball (of thread)’.

893: The Acceptability of Yid May 19, 2017

So long as someone is proficient enough in a given language, even without needing to read any grammar-books that speaker would have an understanding of how to form new words from existing patterns. 'Yiddish' is an adjective, and nominally is the name of a language; like many others that have those same qualities such as 'Swedish', 'Finnish', and 'Danish', to form the demonym, one simply has to remove the suffix, '-ish'. Neverhtless, while 'Swede', 'Finn', and 'Dane' are all fine to use—common enough and not offensive—'Yid', created by back-formation, is considered informal and often offensive, though it should be noted that 'Jew' is perfectly accetable. By the same pattern, someone who is Amish could be thought of as an Am, but this is not used by any or at least many people seriously.

892: double entendre May 18, 2017

English has a large amount of vocabulary that comes from French at one time or another. This could be from Old French, adopted up to a millennium ago, or this could come more recently from Modern French. It might not be surprising to learn that many of the words used in Old French are not the same as those used today, but even newer words that are used in English are sometimes not used in French. The word 'double-entendre', for example, comes from a French word 'entendre' meaning 'listen', now taken to mean 'understand', though in fact this is a corruption of the French phrase 'à double entente', a word you might recognize from the Triple Entente or Entente Cordiale: alliances during WWI. The problem here is that if one were to say 'double entendre' to a speaker of Modern French (assuming that person is not also relying on English) it would not mean anything, and effectively go from denoting a double-meaning to zero-meaning. Instead, a French speaker might say 'double sens'.

891: False Suffixes May 17, 2017

Suffixes are pretty common in English and even more in other languages but what is and is not a suffix can be more difficult to determine than at first glance. If they are considered to be morphemes attached to words in order to form a derivative but that don't have meaning on their own, like '-en' which has the power to make words into verbs, adjectives, nouns, and more, this covers most of what makes up a suffix, but leaves room for some confusion and argument. For example, some words have endings that just naturally formed to have certain letter-combinations, so while likely no one would say the '-er' suffix in 'teacher' or 'toaster' is the same as in 'over', with other words like 'mountain', 'fountain', 'obtain' and others it may seem more confusing, since they all have the same ending, and if you know Latin you may even recognize they come from the same word, 'tenere' meaning 'to hold'. This is not considered a suffix however, as without it, the words would not have any meaning. With other possible ones, like '-crat' in 'autocrat', 'democrat', plutocrat' etc. here it is considered a combining form because it contributes to the meaning, but does not determine the function of the words. There will be more on this on a later date, but if you have any questions or comments about suffixes, leave them in the comments.

890: doomsday May 16, 2017

Doomsday machines, or doomsday devices are ideas that were popularized in the 1950's during the cold war, when the concept of a machine that could wipe out all, or most, of humanity was at least theoretically conceivable, and the terms have been used in science fiction a great deal since. The actual term 'doomsday', or 'Domesday' goes back all the way to Old English however, with the words 'dōmes' and 'dæg', when the word that eventually became 'doom' meant 'judgement' or 'put in place'. Originally, this referred to Judgement Day, which in Christianity was the day at the end of the world when humanity would be Judged by God. Eventually, this 'Domesday', which is still used, turned into 'doomsday', such as with the 'Doomsday Book' (also found as 'Domesday Book') which laid out the record of ownership of land, and other things, in England in 1086. Soon after, in the 12th century, the sense of that book as the final authority was associated with the Final Judgement.

889: chthonic and humble May 15, 2017

While it is not possible to know the etymology of all words without doing some research beforehand, generally if one knows to look for various signs it is reasonable to make some guesses. For example, if a word begins with a silent letter like M in 'mnemonic' or P in 'pterodactyl' it would be fair to guess that it comes from Greek (and they both do here), because those sounds are possible in Greek but would not be in the beginning of natively English words. Other words that have silent beginnings like with 'chthonic' and 'chthonian' have fairly common suffixes as far as English vocabulary is concerned, but the initial CH which is not pronounced. These words mean 'relating to the underworld' and come from the Greek 'khthōn' meaning ‘earth’. Not all words that come from or are related to Greek ones have to have these sort of spellings, as is the case with 'humble' which is from the Latin 'humus' for ‘ground’, and is akin to 'khthōn'.

888: panel May 14, 2017

If you talk about a panel today, it would mean a thin board of something, perhaps metal or wood, or a group of people assembled to discuss something in particular. When the word was adopted into English from Old French, the word meant ‘piece of cloth’, going back to the Latin, 'pannus' which also meant ‘cloth’. Initially, this took on the meaning of ‘piece of parchment’ on which people would write. From here, it eventually gained the meaning of ‘list’ which then had the sense of ‘advisory group’. The other sense today of section of thin metal, wood, or even comic strips comes from the connotation to framing on the older meaning of panel, and soon enough this gained the sense of a thin surface-material that we have today.
This is not the only time that a word for 'cloth' has taken on another meaning, as this also happened with 'toilet'.

887: lobby May 13, 2017

Like 'logistics' which originally was associated with buildings, the word 'lobby' originally denoted cloisters, coming from the Latin, 'lobium' meaning ‘covered walk’. For a while, this is all that the word meant, as it still would when referring to lobbies in buildings today. Later on however, the sense of 'lobby' as a verb meaning 'influence political official on an issue' arose from the practice of visiting the lobbies of the places where legislature was written in order to influence the members. The German 'Laube' is related, but the sense of somewhere covered here denotes trees and not man-made structures.

886: logistics May 12, 2017

A significant amount of words, including a number of fairly recent ones, have come from initially being only used in the military, such as 'beleaguer'. The word 'logistics' now can refer to pretty much anything relating to coordinating people or things irrespective of purpose, but originally the word had the sense of 'conveying troops and equipment'. The word is also related to 'lodge' as something logistic (or in French, 'logistique') would have related to housing people and supplies. The word was adopted in the 19th century, and eventually took on a more domestic meaning.