We're Going to Oxword

I was sitting with some friends at dinner when one of them used the word flummox, which flummoxed everyone. I followed with bollox (mistakenly remembering it as a word ending in ox) and mentioned it would be a good source of words for my blog – words ending in ox.

So here we are. Words ending in ox. I had to exempt words ending in dox or are a combination of two words (e.g., muskox, dropbox, etc.). That limits it to a blog-able number: the aforementioned flummox, lummox, equinox, and (next week) bollox, which is actually spelled bollocks (I made a bollocks of the spelling).

So let’s begin. Flummox is a verb that means to confuse, confound, or bewilder. Etymonline.com designates it as a cant word.

Do not get flummoxed by the word cant; it is not the contraction of the words can and not, it is in its own right a word, meaning a word used by a particular class or group of people, often the “underworld” or “gangsters.” Cant came to English in the 1560s from the Old North French verb canter that meant “to sing, or chant.” The Old North French got it from the Latin word for sing, cantare. By the 1640s it referred to “the whining of beggars,” and by 1709 to “insincere talk,” according to etymonline.com, which also quotes John S. Farmer’s Foreward to the 1896 publication “Musa Pedestris”:

…Slang is universal, whilst Cant is restricted in use to certain classes of the community: thieves, vagrom men, and – well, their associates…. Slang boasts a quasi-respectibility denied to Cant, though Cant is frequently more enduring, its use continuing without variation of meaning for many generations.

Back to flummox. It came to English much later, in 1837, although its origin is not certain. Etymonline.com speculates that it probably came from “some forgotten British dialect.” It then suggests there are candidate clusters in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, southern Cheshire and Sheffield. Etymonline.com then quotes the Oxford English Dictionary editors: “The formation seems to be onomatopoeic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily.” So the OED and Etymonline.com are flummoxed by the source of flummox.

The origin of lummox is also obscure, although it arrived in English usage slightly before flummox, in 1825. It is sourced as East Anglian slang, and may be from dumb ox influenced by lumbering. It is used of a clumsy or stupid person, depending on whether they are lumbering or stupid.

The other ox word for the day is equinox, the word used twice a year, when the sun crosses the plane of the earth’s equator, when at the equator the days and nights are of equal length. Equinoxes take place near March 21 and September 21. The March event is specifically the vernal equinox, while the September event is the autumnal equinox. (Vernal and autumnal will have to wait.) Equinox came to English in the late 1300s either from the Old French word equinoce or from the Medieval Latin word equinoxium, that means equality of night and day. 

So He Sold Half A Duck

I recently used the words canard and ruse in the same sentence. I was not sure it was the correct use nor that they belong together, so I thought I would post what I find and where it goes.

Canard, unless you're cooking a duck or flying an airplane (in which case there are other meanings), is defined as a story, report or even a statement that is false or baseless. It can be derogatory but most uses I have seen of the word are more about intentionally misleading. Canard came to English prior to 1850 from the French word canard, which means "hoax." Canard (or quanart in Old French) literally means "duck." So how did the French word for duck come to refer to a hoax? It is apparently the result of a punch line to a French joke.

The joke is: A duck seller, the only one in the neighborhood, had a great business selling his ducks for 8 francs apiece. Soon another duck seller moved in and undercut the original vendor by selling his ducks for 7 francs each. A price war ensued, until the original duck seller was forced to lower his price to 3 francs. But he knew he could not stay in business at that price, so in small print below the three-franc price he wrote "vendre un canard à moitié." Pretty funny, eh? Oh, in English the phrase is "for half a duck." That subterfuge and punch line became equated with perpetuating a hoax, and our English meaning was born (or hatched).

A ruse, in addition to being the name of a Bulgarian city on the Danube, is a trick or an action intended to mislead. When it came to English in the early 1400s it referred to the dodging movements of a hunted animal. But by the 1620s it had expanded to refer to any action intended to mislead. It came from the Old French word ruse or reuse, a word backformed from reuser that came from the Latin word recusare, which means deny, reject or oppose. It turns out to be a tricky word etymologically, because it is thought by some to come from the Latin word for backward, rursus.

I used the word subterfuge earlier, and it is another word in this group. It is an action used to avoid the truth or evade a rule or consequences. It came to English in 1570 either from Middle French or Latin. The Middle French word subterfuge had been in use since the 1300s. The Medieval Latin word is subterfugium,  and is formed from subter, meaning under or beneath, and fugere, which means flee and from which we get fugitive (and fugacious).

So while subterfuge is fleeing from the truth to avoid the consequences, ruse is dodging the truth by intentionally misleading, and a canard is simply a statement or story that is not true (and in common usage intended to mislead). Subterfuge is cowardly, a canard may not be intended to be mean, but a ruse is usually intentional and bad.

Bliss or Bless? Idyllic or Euphoric?

Last week, following up on my use of the word nirvana, I used the words idyllic and euphoria. While Nirvana refers to a state of perfection and heaven to a perfect place, idyllic and euphoria refer to very nice feelings.

Idyllic actually means “like an idyll.” An idyll is a writing that describes a pastoral scene or event or anything charming and simple. So idyllic means “charmingly simple or rustic.” Idyll has been used in English since about 1600, and came from the Latin word idyllium, which came from the Greek word eidyllion that meant a short, descriptive poem, usually of a rustic or pastoral scene. Eidyllion is the diminutive form of eidos and literally means “a little picture.” It was not until the late 1700s that the adjective idyllic came into use, originally only to mean “pertaining to an idyll” but in 1831 to refer to anything simple and charming or rustic.

Euphoria is a state of intense happiness and self-confidence. It was first used in English in 1727 as a physician’s term for feeling healthy and comfortable. It comes from medical Latin, from the Greek word euphoria, that means “power of enduring easily.” The Greek word is formed from combining “eu,” that means “well,” with “pherein,” that means “to carry.” We also get the word infer from pherein.  Euphoria’s non-medical use did not develop until 1882 and is now the predominant use.

In psychology euphoria is a term used in pathology to describe the manic state in those diagnosed as bipolar, in whom the normal euphoric state is exaggerated.

I also used the word bliss in last week’s post. Bliss means supreme happiness or utter joy or complete contentment. It, like heaven, is an Old English word (blis or bliðs) carried through into Modern English. It originally referred mostly to earthly happiness, as opposed to bless, which has a heavenly connotation.

Bless is also Old English in origin (bletsian, bledsian), and came from the Proto-Germanic word blodison that meant “hallow and/or mark with blood.” Blessing, according to etymonline.com,  was originally “a blood sprinkling on pagan altars. This word was chosen in Old English bibles to translate [the] Latin benedicere and [the] Greek eulogein, both of which have a ground sense of ‘to speak well of, to praise,’ but were used in Scripture to translate [the] Hebrew brk ‘to bend (the knee), worship, praise, invoke blessings.’”

While we're following up, I recently used a word that was unknown to my wife: obstreperous. It means resisting control or restraint in a difficult or unruly manner. It has been used in English since about 1600, when it was adopted from the Latin word obstreperus. The Latin word means clamorous, and is formed from ob- (meaning "against") and strepere (meaning "make a noise"). So in Latin being obstreperous is making a noise against something, or not resisting quietly. It is similar to words found in the post "Annoying Stubborn Bullies." 

My Heavens!

I used the word nirvana a few weeks ago. Nirvana often is capitalized, and needs to be when used to talk about the Buddhist state of freedom from the cycle of personal reincarnations. In Hinduism it is salvation through the union of Atman with Brahma. Its use in English has broadened to refer to any state of bliss.  It has only been used in English since 1836, coming from the Sanskrit where it means disappearance or literally “to blow out, a blowing out” (as a flame might). It was not until 1895 that its sense broadened to the state of perfection.

Nirvana is not the same thing as heaven, the place where God and the angels reside and to which Christians aspire to live in eternity. Heaven is the English word for the home of God, having come from the Old English word heofon. Prior to being God’s home it was simply the sky, and is still used in that sense today. (If you’re wondering how there can be more than one sky, etymonline states that the plural use, skies, “is probably from Ptolemaic theory of space composed of many spheres, but it also formerly was used in the same sense as the singular in Biblical language, as a translation of [the] Hebrew plural shamayim.”)

Heaven-sent has been used since the 1640s, “heavens to Betsy” first appeared in print in 1892 and may refer to Davy Crockett’s rifle “Betsy.” That still doesn't make sense, but it's the best explanation I could find. “Heavens to Murgatroyd,” for you Snagglepuss fans, was first uttered in a 1944 movie before Snagglepuss adopted it. It may have been inspired by the Murgatroyd family in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera “Ruddigore.” Several members of the line of Murgatroyd barons were ghosts having been cursed by a witch. I suspect these uses  of heaven (and others like “My Heavens”) came into being as a Christian response to the use of the word “Hell” as a curse word.

Before we leave this idyllic topic, let’s go to paradise. One meaning for the word is a synonym for heaven; another use is as the intermediate place where souls wait for the final resurrection of the dead at judgment. It has since the late 1100s referred to the Garden of Eden, and came through Old French, where it was paradis. The French got it from the Latin word paradisus, which came from the Greek paradeisos, which means park when not referring to the Garden of Eden. According to etymonline.com “The Greek word, originally used for an orchard or hunting park in Persia, was used in [the] Septuagint to mean ‘Garden of Eden,’ and in New Testament translations of Luke xxiii:43 to mean ‘heaven’ (a sense attested in English from c. 1200). “

Shangri La has been used as a term for an earthly paradise since 1938. It originated in English in James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon,” which was made into a popular film in 1937. Hilton used Shangri La as the name of a Tibetan utopia.

Utopia first appeared in 1516 as the title of Thomas More’s book about an imaginary island with perfect legal, social and political systems. (Like Francis Bacon’s 1627 novel New Atlantis, parodied by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels.) Utopia was formed by combining the Greek “ou” that means “not” with “topos” that means “place.” By 1610 it broadened to mean any perfect place. Don’t be fooled into thinking it comes from the Greek word for good, eu- (as in euphoria). It literally means nowhere.

Now back to the real world.

Stand and Scrute Understand and Scrutinize

I have found myself using the word inscrutable with greater frequency lately. It means incapable of being scrutinized, or analyzed and investigated. Scrutinize means to examine in detail with careful or critical attention. It also means to conduct a scrutiny. (Scrutiny on the Bounty, anyone?) A scrutiny is a searching examination or investigation or a surveillance or close look. So we are conducting a scrutiny of the forms of the noun scrutiny. Scrutinize is the verb form and scrutable or inscrutable the adjective form. (My spell-check does not recognize scrutable but my dictionary does. I'm going with the dictionary.)

Scrutiny came to English first, as one might imagine. It arrived in the early 1400s from the Latin word scrutinium, which meant a search or inquiry. But scrutiny did not mean examine in its original English use. Originally the word scrutiny meant a vote to choose someone to decide a question, because in Medieval Latin scrutinium meant "a mode of election by ballot."

Then, in about 1500, along came the word inscrutable. Coming from the Late Latin word inscrutabilis, it meant to not examine or ransack. Why such a difference? Scrutarini is the Latin word for examine or ransack and it is possible that the root word for both scrutarini and inscrutabilis is scruta, which is a plural word for trash or rags. Digging through trash or a pile of rags would be scrutinizing, and if you do not go to that extent to investigate something you are being inscrutable.

But scrutinize was not the word being used as a verb. In fact, until the 1590s there was no verb form. At that time the English took a French word and adopted it as a verb: scrutine. For some reason that did not take root, and by 1670 the verb scrutinize had become preeminent. Understand?

Wait. Look at that word. Un-der-stand. Past tense un-der-stood. Stand and stood have nothing to do with perceiving the meaning of something, do they? And how do you get under the stand? We understand the meaning of under and of stand, but how did they get combined to mean understand?

Under such circumstances we go to etymonline.com, which provides some background on words. Understand is the current form of the Old English word understanden that probably meant literally stand in the midst of, not stand under, because the prefix under in Old English did not only mean beneath but also among or in the midst of (like the Latin prefix inter- or the Sanskrit anter.) We still use that meaning in the expression "under the circumstances" with which I began this paragraph.

Etymonline goes on to suggest that the ultimate sense of the word use is equivalent to the Greek epistamai which is literally translated as "I stand upon" but means "I know how," or "I know." In Old Frisian the word is understonda and in Middle Danish it is understande, so the use is common to several languages.

So understand means to know or comprehend, while scrutiny and its forms is more investigative. Comprehend?

If You Can Be Ruthless, Can You Be Ruth?

I was reading something recently and the word ruth was used. Not the name Ruth, but the word. I do not recall ever seeing this simple word before; ruthless, yes, but not ruth. Yet if Ruth can be ruthless one should be able to be ruth, right?

Ruth (the word, not the name) and ruthless are opposite, and ruthless is more commonly used. It means at least without pity, mercy or compassion, but can mean cruel. So it makes sense that ruth means pity or compassion. It also can mean sorry, remorse or grief, or even self-reproach.

Ruthless is an adjective, while ruth is a noun. Ruthless came to English in the early 1300s after ruth had been around for over 100 years. Ruth may have come from an Old Norse word, hryggô, but may have formed from the work reuwen, meaning to rue. If it were the latter the word would follow the same form as true and truth. It was originally spelled ruthe. There was in the 1300s an adjective ruthful, but it has not been used since the 1600s.

Ruth, the name, comes from the Bible; Ruth was an ancestor of David and is probably a contraction of the word for companion, friend, or fellow woman, reuth. Ruth was a friend and companion to Naomi, which in English is a name only.

Since we’re on names, I mentioned in a recent post that we would get to the name Althea. While the marsh mallow plant belongs to the genus Althea, the more common use of althea is as the name of the plant known as the rose of Sharon, hibiscus syriacus. Althea is a variation of the Greek name Althaea, which may be related to the Greek word for healing, althos. It is not one of the more common names in English, and I mentioned one famous person with that name, Althea Gibson. In 1956 Althea Gibson was the first person of color to win a Grand Slam tennis event, something the Williams sisters (Venus, named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, and Serena, from the Latin word serenus that means clear and tranquil) have replicated numerous times. Althea Gibson was also the first black player to compete on the women’s professional golf tour.

Rose of Sharon was first used in English in the 1611 translation of the Bible authorized by King James. It is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for crocus. But it does grow in the Sharon valley.  I work with a Rose of Mexico City.

Women’s names that are also English words are more common than men’s names. Faith, Hope and Charity are all used in one verse of the Bible (I Cor. 13:13) and are also women’s names. While the aforementioned Venus is a woman’s name, I have yet to encounter a man whose first name is Mars. My brothers Don and Bob come close; there are words don and bob. But Don is short for Donald while Bob is a nickname for Robert. I don’t know how you get from Robert to Bob any more than I know how you get from Lawrence (not my given name) to Larry (my given name, but usually a nickname of Lawrence.)

I’m still waiting to see the trio Faith Hill, Hope Solo, and Charity Zisengwe in concert together. Chastity Bono (now Chaz) could be Hope’s dance partner, since they were both on Dancing with the Stars. Chaz also was the writer of most of the songs and lead singer of the music group Ceremony, so he could do double duty.

Other than that, what’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Puss 'n Boots

No, this is not about the lead character in the 1667 Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Charles Perraut story. And, in case you are as confused as I have been, the story is not about two characters, one named Puss and one named Boots (if it were, the contraction between the names should have an apostrophe both before and after: ‘n’.) In the story, the Puss wore Boots. 

This post is about the words puss and boot.

First, puss: actually, puss, pus, pussy and pussycat; what, other than their first three letters, do they have in common?

Pus is the oldest of these words, having arrived in English from Latin in the late 1300s. The vowel is pronounced as if spelled puhs or as if it had a double s (like muss and fuss) while our other puss words are pronounced like poo-s, as the u in push. The Latin word pus is used for any matter coming from a sore. Pus is much easier to say but sounds less innocuous than “a liquid plasma in which white blood cells are suspended” but that is essentially what it is.

As for puss, it has several meanings. In the United States it refers to a cat, while in Britain it may refer to a rabbit. The cat meaning likely comes from the sound made when trying to get a cat’s attention. It is, according to etymonline.com “A conventional name for a cat in Germanic languages and as far off as Afghanistan; it is the root of the principal word for ‘cat’ in Rumanian (pisica) and secondary words in Lithuanian (puz), Low German (puus), Swedish dialect katte-pus, etc.” Its first recorded appearance in English was in the 1520s, but it was likely in use much earlier than that. By the 1600s the word puss developed a negative sense, implying and applying the negative qualities of a cat to women, but by the mid-1800s it had regained its affectionate use as well.

By the 1580s the word pussy was being used as a term of endearment for a girl, woman, or (perhaps not affectionately) of effeminate men, but was not first used as a diminutive http://larry-whatsthegoodword.blogspot.com/2013/03/futpnbciii-follow-up-pedantic-night.htmlform of puss to refer to cats until 1726 (while rabbits were called pussies in 1715). In 1879 we find the first recorded use of pussy as a slang word for female genitalia, but it was likely in use long before being put into writing. Etymonline.com quotes a reference from Philip Stubbes’ 1583 “The Anatomie of Abuses” that says merely “The word pussie is now used of a woman.” Etymonline also states that its use in mainstream literature (like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852 where it was used as a term of endearment) argues against its more delicate use much prior to 1879.

And just to confuse matters, in 1890 the word puss was used, particularly in street fighting, to refer to the face. This use likely came from the Irish word for the lip or mouth: pus. Which takes us full circle to our first word, pus.

Our other set of words today, boot, is only a little older in English than pus. It came into use in the early 1300s, from the Old French word bote. Originally it was used only of riding boots, but now refers to any footwear that covers the foot and part (or all) of the leg. My dictionary says that in Britain it is used of any shoe or outer foot covering that reaches the ankle.

The first recorded instance of bootstrap (or boot-strap) is from 1870; perhaps that is when someone first placed a tab or loop at the top of the boot to aid in pulling the boot over the foot.

Then in 1877 the word boot was first used in writing to describe a kick. By 1880 the sense of kicking someone out (probably from a saloon in the wild west) came into being. In 1888 Steele’s school book entitled “Popular Physics” had the question “Why can not a man lift himself by pulling up on his boot-straps?” By 1916 that idea of “lifting oneself up by his own bootstraps” had expanded to mean improving oneself by one’s own effort.

Believe it or not, it was less than 40 years later (in 1953) that the word bootstrap was used to describe the “fixed sequence of instructions to load the operating system of a computer” or what we now call “booting up.” Why bootstrap or boot? Because the first-loaded program’s role is to “pull itself up” along with the rest of the programs that are needed to begin computing.

And you thought puss 'n boots was a nice little story, didn't you?