"Just Take This Thing" - A Phrase My Wife Used in Parturition

So what I thought would be one blog post has turned into three. Parturition, parturient, and pare are still left from the subject of the last two posts. Then we'll get to some other words.

Parturition and parturient are related forms, parturition being the noun and parturient being the adjective . 

Parturient is the older, having come into English in the 1590s, and means bearing young or about to do so, although it is sometimes used of an idea, although nascent is a more common word for that concept. Parturient comes from the Latin word parturientem, a form of the word parturire that means to be in labor. It literally means "desire to bring forth" according to etymonline.com, being the desiderative (I didn't know there was such a thing in Latin) of parere, which means "to bear."

Parturition, which came from the Latin word parturitionem, which is a "noun of action" (no wonder I flunked Latin...twice) from the past participle stem of parturire. Parturition came into use in English in the 1640s, so for 50 years in England you could only talk about the process, not the act of giving birth. It would be another 136 years before men would gather in Philadelphia to parturition a nation.

The Latin word parere gives us another English word, pare. Pare means to cut off or cut away the outer layer of something (in my experience most often an apple). It is the oldest of these three words, having arrived about 1300 into English from Old French, where the word was parer, which the Old French got directly from the Latin parere. Parere had many meanings, according to etymonline.com. Their list is "make ready, prepare, furnish, provide, arrange, order; contrive, design, intend, resolve; procure, acquire, obtain, get; get with money, buy, purchase." I suppose today the difference between provide and purchase is not great, and maybe it wasn't so in ancient Rome, either. The point is that it the word pare had other meanings derived from French and Latin and it was not until the 1520s that the meaning of taking a peel off came into preeminence. 

So instead of saying “in labor” or “act of giving birth” you can say parturient or parturition. Not that it’s much shorter. “In delivery” or “delivery seem to be the more common usage.

We have space to look at an unrelated word today. 

I ran across a post on Mental Floss.com (which today highlights a post "11 Paraprosdokians That Will Make You Think Twice") written by Arika Okrent entitled "11 Weirdly Spelled Words and How They Got That Way.  One of the words was "knead" and I thought what was written was interesting:

Two things happened in the early 1500s that really messed with English spelling. First, the new technology of the printing press meant publishers - rather than scribes - were in charge, and they started to standardize spelling. At the very same time, the Great Vowel Shift was underway. People were changing the way they pronounced vowels in vast groups of words, but the publishers weren't recognizing the changes yet. This is why we ended up with so much inconsistency: 'ea' sounds different in knead, bread, wear, and great. Along with the vowel changes, English lost the /k/ shound from /kn/ words, the /w/ from /wr/ words, and the /g/ from gnat and gnaw. But by the time the change was complete, the writing habits has already been established.  

While that is great, the two things not said were that knead is a verb that means to work into a uniform mixture by pressing folding, and stretching (and punching and throwing and squeezing) or that it comes from the Old English word cnedan (Saxon, Dutch, German, and Old Norse all use the k in their forms of the word, in case you wonder.)

Not that you kneaded to know.