One Word Leads to Another...

In writing the blog for Aug. 11 I used and then discussed the word whit. In doing so another word came to mind, and I wondered about the derivation of it and its connection to whit (if any). The word is Whitsunday.

It turns out that Whitsunday comes from the Old English (where it was spelled Hwita Sunnandaeg, or White Sunday). It may have gotten its name due to the number of baptisms which would take place on this celebratory day, The new Christians would wear white robes for the baptism, hence the source of the word white. The word refers to what is more commonly known in the United States as Pentecost Sunday, which takes place seven weeks (or 50 days, which is where the pente, or five, comes into the word) after Easter. It would be a favorite time for baptism for several reasons, not the least of which that when baptisms were held outside in rivers it would be much warmer than Easter.

The other word I used in the blog and promised to get to later was portmanteau. It is a word of French derivation, coming to English in the 1580s. The context in which I used it belies its original (and still current) other meaning; I used it in describing a portmanteau word, or a word that is created by blending two other words (the word to which I was referring was anecdotage). But the use of the phrase portmanteau word was coined by Lewis Carroll (of Alice in Wonderland fame) in 1882. He was known for combining words to form new words, and in describing that proclivity in the creation of “Jabberwocky” he grabbed the word portmanteau.

Undoubtedly it was because the original meaning of portmanteau is to describe a travelling case or bag, especially the kind that hinged on the bottom and opened up to contain two sections. (The linking of two cases into one piece of luggage coordinates with the linking of two words to form one new meaning.)

Portmanteau, as mentioned earlier, comes from the Middle French (portemanteau). It is the combining (or portmanteau word) of two Middle French words: porte, which is the imperative word we could translate “carry!”, and the word for cloak or mantle, manteau. In other words, those who had sufficient power to order someone to “Carry my coat!” would say “portemanteau”. It eventually came to refer to any “court official who carried a prince’s mantle.”

Near the end of the third paragraph above I used the word proclivity. I might as well use the rest of this space to look into that word, since I still have room. Proclivity came to English in the 1590s from the Latin word proclivitatem, which meant then and means now “a tendency or propensity”. Proclivitatem comes from the Latin word for “prone to”, proclivis, which literally means “sloping.” Which might help explain the dual meaning of a synonym for proclivity: inclination.

Since there is a word pro-clivity, is there a word con-clivity? No, but there is a word declivity. It also refers to a slope, and means a downward slope. And its antonym is not proclivity but acclivity. And so on and so on...