OZ Again

I realized, in trying to decide what words to blog about today, that I have waiting in line (queue for my British friends, “on” line for those in New York) that I have a very unusual coincidence. Wednesday’s words began with o and z, and I have another set of o and z words waiting for exposition. The very unusual thing about it is that zeugma was the first word beginning with the letter z (zed in Britain) that I’ve expounded upon. So, to have two in two successful blogs doubles the uniqueness of the situation.


So what are the words? Words that should be more familiar in Modesto (and Napa and France) than they probably are: oenophile and zymurgy.

An oenophile (pronounced ee – nuh – fahyl) is a person who loves wines, usually as a connoisseur (see blog of Nov. 14). The –phile suffix we covered in the blog of June 16, which only leaves us with the oeno- to discover. Etymonline.com says that the word itself was coined in the 1930s (after prohibition ended and at the time when Ernest and Julio Gallo started making wine in Modesto for worldwide enjoyment). It used the Greek word for wine, oinos, which had been used since 1894 in the word oenology, which my dictionary says is an alternate spelling of enology, the science or study of wine and winemaking. I am assuming (since my brief study of enology – the word, not the activity – didn’t reveal how the o was dropped) that since the o is silent it eventually was pruned from the word. Why it was spelled oeno- when the original language has the letter i instead of an e is still a mystery to me. And how it came to be pronounced with the hard e sound instead of the oy sound of the Greek is also lost to my sources. I suppose that the activity distracted students from the etymology. (I’m tempted to use oetymology, but then it would lead to a pronunciation like wet- omology, as opposed to dry- omology, which would be the study of prohibition.)
Before I get too far off the track (it sometimes happens with the over-consumption of wine) let’s look at the word zymurgy. It is the word for the branch (too many vine allusions?) of chemistry that deals with wine-making and brewing. Zymurgy is the last word in many dictionaries, including mine. It was first used in English in 1868 and comes from the combining of the Greek words for leaven (zymo-) and working (-ourgia). The word ourgia comes from ergon, which is also the source of our English words urge and erg.

The word erg coined in 1873 by the British Association for the Advancement of Science to describe the amount of work done by a force one dyne exerted for a distance of one centimeter. It is equal to one gram centimeter-squared per second-squared, which obviously makes it also equal to 100 nanojoules (or ten to the negative seventh power joules).

After all that, I need a drink.