I was driving recently along a street near my house in Sacramento, which is the capital of California, and saw a sign for capital nursery. While the words constitute the name of the business, they were not capitalized on the sign, which got me thinking: “What’s the difference between capital and Capitol? And why?” Another blog in the making.
I found out that Capitol (capitalized with an “o”) refers only to the building where Congress meets. It was used by Thomas Jefferson in 1793 and derived from the Latin Capitolium, which is the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (sounds like a Transformer) in ancient Rome. While early usage extended to Virginia state houses, the word Capitol has not been extended to centers of state government. And it is always capitalized.
Instead, for states the word is capital, and its history and usage precedes Jefferson’s use of Capitol. While capital was first used in the 1660s to refer to the city where the government resides, its history goes back further. (In fact, the noun form in Old English is heafodstol. How that translates to capital I don’t know.)
It makes sense that the city where the head of the government resides is called the capital because the word comes from the Latin word caput, which means “head”. The word capital came to English from Latin in the 13th century, from the Latin word capitalis. Capitalis means “of the head” so the various meanings for capital all have some sense of primary or top. A capital offense is one that affects life (historically by decapitation – another word that comes from caput.) Even a capital letter usually is the first letter, the head of the word.
Now that I’ve made that differentiation in my mind, perhaps history can help me remember the difference between stationary and stationery. Because I just looked it up in my dictionary I know that stationary refers to something not moving, and stationery refers to writing materials, specifically paper and envelopes used for letters.
According to my dictionary, stationary came from the Middle English word stacionarye, which came from the Latin word stationarius, a form of the word statio, from which we also get the word station. It came to English in the early 15th century, originally in reference to planetary movements.
Stationery comes to English much later, in 1727. It was derived from referring to “stationery wares,” or the items for sale by a stationer, a word much more commonly in use in the early 1700s than now. A stationer was a seller of books and paper, which in 14th century Middle Latin was stationarius, or “stationery seller”.
Etymonline.com adds some interesting additional information. In the Middle Ages, when this word came into usage in English, “roving peddlers” were common. Those with fixed (they avoided using the word stationary) locations were usually associated with and licensed by universities. “The Company of Stationers, one of the Livery Companies of the City of London, was founded 1556.”
Michael Quinion (worldwidewords.org) tells a little more of the etymology that etymonline only refers to: “In medieval times a stationarius was a trader who had a fixed station — a shop — rather than travelling from fair to fair, like a pedlar. These were usually booksellers (whose stock was too bulky to be carried about) and were mostly linked to the medieval universities, which is why such an elevated Latin word came to be attached to them. It became stationer in English, a form that’s recorded from the fourteenth century.” A station where books and writing items were sold was a stationer, and what they sold stationery.
Remembering that a stationer (you wouldn’t spell it with an “a”) sells stationery helps me remember which one to use: the one with the “a” or the one with the “e”. Several websites gave the mnemonic device of “e” refers to envelopes, so now you have two ways to remember.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
More Scrabble Words
Continuing with my effort to support my coworker Scrabble aficionados, here is more from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_with_uncommon_properties:
“The highest-scoring words that would fit on a Scrabble board are benzoxycamphors (45), sesquioxidizing (42) (sesquioxidized is in the OED), or oxyphenbutazone (41) (in both the TWL06 and SOWPODS official scrabble dictionaries).” TWL06 refers to the Scrabble Tournament Word Listing for 2006; it contains 178,691 words, some as few as two and some as many as fifteen letters long. SOWPODS is the word list used in most places outside the United States. It is a combination of and its name an anagram of the acronyms for the two main Scrabble dictionaries, the OSPD (Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) and the OSW (Official Scrabble Words).
Back to words: “With the Q and Z fortuitously on the double-letter-score squares, 'sesquioxidizing' played across an edge of the board (which has three triple word squares) could score (62 × 27) + 50 = 1724 by itself (the additional 50 points being awarded for using all seven letters on the player's own rack.” That might be worth remembering, for that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use it. And it beats by over 80 points the next highest scoring word: benzoxycamphors. “Benzoxycamphors would score (59 × 27) + 50 = 1643 while oxyphenbutazone would score (54 × 27) + 50 = 1508.”
The problem is, a player in Scrabble has only seven letters in their rack. That means that “8 of the 15 letters of these words need to be on the board already. Using SOWPODS words only in the rest of the game, single move scores could hypothetically be obtained of 1785 points with oxyphenbutazone and 2044 points with sesquioxidizing.” The likelihood of any of these words ever being useful is infinitesimally small. So let’s look as some other words that might come in useful.
Aia is a Brazilian bird, ooecia is the plural of a part of the reproductive system of some primitive animals, and then there’s always aureola and aureolae (the plural of aureola).
Short on vowels? Try hymn, lynx, lynch, myth, pygmy, gypsy, myrrh, nymph, lymph, flyby, or syzygy. Of course, since there’s only two “y”s in a Scrabble game, syzygy won’t help. Neither will zyzzyx, which is a type of wasp and reminds me of the exit on the interstate between Barstow and Las Vegas for the town named Zzyzx.
In case you’re not aware, Scrabble has become an international tournament game with every bit as much stress and study as chess or a spelling bee. (And lest we get too far away from my normal blog routine, the word bee meaning a “meeting of neighbors to unite their labors for the benefit of one of their members”, the origin of its use in the phrase spelling bee, is an American construction first used in 1769. It was used because the activity of a bee – whether a quilting bee or spelling bee – is similar in comparison to the activity in a hive. Spelling bee itself as a term was first used in 1809.)
“The highest-scoring words that would fit on a Scrabble board are benzoxycamphors (45), sesquioxidizing (42) (sesquioxidized is in the OED), or oxyphenbutazone (41) (in both the TWL06 and SOWPODS official scrabble dictionaries).” TWL06 refers to the Scrabble Tournament Word Listing for 2006; it contains 178,691 words, some as few as two and some as many as fifteen letters long. SOWPODS is the word list used in most places outside the United States. It is a combination of and its name an anagram of the acronyms for the two main Scrabble dictionaries, the OSPD (Official Scrabble Players Dictionary) and the OSW (Official Scrabble Words).
Back to words: “With the Q and Z fortuitously on the double-letter-score squares, 'sesquioxidizing' played across an edge of the board (which has three triple word squares) could score (62 × 27) + 50 = 1724 by itself (the additional 50 points being awarded for using all seven letters on the player's own rack.” That might be worth remembering, for that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use it. And it beats by over 80 points the next highest scoring word: benzoxycamphors. “Benzoxycamphors would score (59 × 27) + 50 = 1643 while oxyphenbutazone would score (54 × 27) + 50 = 1508.”
The problem is, a player in Scrabble has only seven letters in their rack. That means that “8 of the 15 letters of these words need to be on the board already. Using SOWPODS words only in the rest of the game, single move scores could hypothetically be obtained of 1785 points with oxyphenbutazone and 2044 points with sesquioxidizing.” The likelihood of any of these words ever being useful is infinitesimally small. So let’s look as some other words that might come in useful.
Aia is a Brazilian bird, ooecia is the plural of a part of the reproductive system of some primitive animals, and then there’s always aureola and aureolae (the plural of aureola).
Short on vowels? Try hymn, lynx, lynch, myth, pygmy, gypsy, myrrh, nymph, lymph, flyby, or syzygy. Of course, since there’s only two “y”s in a Scrabble game, syzygy won’t help. Neither will zyzzyx, which is a type of wasp and reminds me of the exit on the interstate between Barstow and Las Vegas for the town named Zzyzx.
In case you’re not aware, Scrabble has become an international tournament game with every bit as much stress and study as chess or a spelling bee. (And lest we get too far away from my normal blog routine, the word bee meaning a “meeting of neighbors to unite their labors for the benefit of one of their members”, the origin of its use in the phrase spelling bee, is an American construction first used in 1769. It was used because the activity of a bee – whether a quilting bee or spelling bee – is similar in comparison to the activity in a hive. Spelling bee itself as a term was first used in 1809.)
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Shakespeare's Hapax Legomenon
Here’s a first: I have encountered a word with quite a history, but it is not found in Webster’s New World Dictionary, etymonline.com, or dictionary.com.
The word is honorificabilitudinitatibus, and Michael Quinlin, on his website worldwidewords.com, tells us it is used by Shakespeare (in Love’s Labor Lost), and by James Joyce (in Ulysses), and the man known as the Water Poet, John Taylor (a Thames waterman). The webpage http://www.bartleby.com/81/10490.html says that the word frequently appears in old plays and refers us to Bailey’s Dictionary.
Shakespeare’s use of the word in Love’s Labor Lost is found in Act 5, Scene 1, where the character Costard, the clown, says ” for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus.”
Where did he get this word? There is a Latin word honorificabilitudinitas that is formed from the Latin word honor, and it lacks only an ibu near the end to be the same word. According to www.shakespeareonline.com/biography/shakespearetopquestions.html “the word honorificabilitudinitatibus is the dative singular conjugation of a medieval Latin word.” It also says that “Dante actually used it more than once, as did other writers of the period. A translation of it would be ‘the state of being able to achieve honors.’" Other sources (including Wikipedia) say the Latin is the ablative plural. Where’s a Latin scholar when you need one?
The word has become the center of numerous suspicions and theories, including a unique one I found at http://www.sirbacon.org/gallery/karl.html that gets into numerology as well. The most common is that the word is an anagram for Hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi which, in English, can be translated as: “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.” It is a conspiracy theorist’s “proof” that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
Michael Quinion weighs in on the famous interpretation of honorificabilitudinitatibus by saying that. “This little gem of misapplied cryptography was presented by Sir Edwin Lawrence-Durning in 1910 in his book Bacon is Shakespeare as a hidden message left by Francis Bacon, who (as some are convinced) actually wrote the plays usually said to be by Shakespeare. This is all nonsense, of course — as every schoolboy knows, they were really written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. But the same set of letters, tested in the common tongue, makes up Inhibit in fabulous, idiotic art, Inhabit furious libido in attic, Habitual if ionic distribution, and Hi! fabulous tit in idiotic brain. What would Sir Edwin have made of all these?” (A copy of part of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence’s – as the website lists his name – treatise can be found at http://www.wattpad.com/13241.)
The website wordsmith.com also discounts the Francis Bacon anagram idea, saying “Of course, that doesn't prove anything -- the word had been used by other writers earlier. And if you torture words enough, they confess to anything.” (The site also refers you to wordsmith.org which has an anagram server that will allow you to input anything and find anagrams from it; Larry Hostetler is an anagram for hearty stroller or try stellar hero.)
The word is honorificabilitudinitatibus, and Michael Quinlin, on his website worldwidewords.com, tells us it is used by Shakespeare (in Love’s Labor Lost), and by James Joyce (in Ulysses), and the man known as the Water Poet, John Taylor (a Thames waterman). The webpage http://www.bartleby.com/81/10490.html says that the word frequently appears in old plays and refers us to Bailey’s Dictionary.
Shakespeare’s use of the word in Love’s Labor Lost is found in Act 5, Scene 1, where the character Costard, the clown, says ” for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus.”
Where did he get this word? There is a Latin word honorificabilitudinitas that is formed from the Latin word honor, and it lacks only an ibu near the end to be the same word. According to www.shakespeareonline.com/biography/shakespearetopquestions.html “the word honorificabilitudinitatibus is the dative singular conjugation of a medieval Latin word.” It also says that “Dante actually used it more than once, as did other writers of the period. A translation of it would be ‘the state of being able to achieve honors.’" Other sources (including Wikipedia) say the Latin is the ablative plural. Where’s a Latin scholar when you need one?
The word has become the center of numerous suspicions and theories, including a unique one I found at http://www.sirbacon.org/gallery/karl.html that gets into numerology as well. The most common is that the word is an anagram for Hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi which, in English, can be translated as: “These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world.” It is a conspiracy theorist’s “proof” that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
Michael Quinion weighs in on the famous interpretation of honorificabilitudinitatibus by saying that. “This little gem of misapplied cryptography was presented by Sir Edwin Lawrence-Durning in 1910 in his book Bacon is Shakespeare as a hidden message left by Francis Bacon, who (as some are convinced) actually wrote the plays usually said to be by Shakespeare. This is all nonsense, of course — as every schoolboy knows, they were really written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. But the same set of letters, tested in the common tongue, makes up Inhibit in fabulous, idiotic art, Inhabit furious libido in attic, Habitual if ionic distribution, and Hi! fabulous tit in idiotic brain. What would Sir Edwin have made of all these?” (A copy of part of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence’s – as the website lists his name – treatise can be found at http://www.wattpad.com/13241.)
The website wordsmith.com also discounts the Francis Bacon anagram idea, saying “Of course, that doesn't prove anything -- the word had been used by other writers earlier. And if you torture words enough, they confess to anything.” (The site also refers you to wordsmith.org which has an anagram server that will allow you to input anything and find anagrams from it; Larry Hostetler is an anagram for hearty stroller or try stellar hero.)
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Wikipedia and Scrabble
As I was looking for the word (used in the August 8 blog) for two consonant sounds (a consonant cluster) in succession, I encountered an interesting Wikipedia listing. If you want to read the entire listing, it is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_with_uncommon_properties.
The listing is a range of various discussions on (as it says) English words with uncommon properties. As I read the listing I realized that this is a good source of information for several of my coworkers who have become engaged in the Iphone app Scrabble.
For instance, if you find yourself with nothing but vowels, the word you want to remember is euouae. It is a type of cadence in mediaeval music and one of the longest words made up completely of vowels. Maybe you have a bunch of vowels and can play off a q. You want to remember the only common word in the English language that has five vowels in a row: queueing.
Speaking of vowels in a row, “there are many words that feature all five regular vowels occurring only once in alphabetical order, the most common being abstemious and facetious.” (I mentioned this recently to a coworker, but at the time I thought they were the only words of their kind; I made them into adverbs - abstemiously and facetiously - to include the y.) “Two of the shortest, at eight letters, are caesious and anemious (OED); and aerious (OED) has only seven letters. Some others are abstentious, acheilous, arsenious, arterious, tragedious, fracedinous, and Gadsprecious (all in OED). Considering y as a vowel, the suffix -ly can be added to a number of these words; thus the shortest word containing six unique vowels in alphabetical order is aeriously, meaning ‘airily’, with nine letters (OED); the much more common facetiously has eleven letters.“
These don’t help much with Scrabble, nor are you likely to use them in common conversation, but there are actually people who get into this kind of research. As long as we’re on the subject, however, here’s more from the Wiki listing:
“Subcontinental, uncomplimentary and unnoticeably are common words having the five vowels once only in reverse order. One of the shortest such words, at eight letters, is Muroidea, a superfamily of rodents.”
There are words that use all the vowels and are shorter, but they’re not in order. “The shortest words with all six vowels (including y) are oxygeusia (an abnormally acute sense of taste), Oxyuridae (a family of parasitic nematodes), Oxyurinae (a sub-family of ducks), and aeriously, with nine letters.”
So, what if you’re playing Scrabble and you have all consonants and there are no vowels open on the board? “Rhythms is the longest common word containing only y as a vowel. Gypsyfy, gypsyry, symphysy, nymphly, and nymphfly are as long or longer, but are not as common.”
I’m not sure how much this blog will help with Scrabble play, but when you think I’m the only one who finds obscure words remember the Wikipedia listing and realize I’ve got a long way to go. At least my words are useful for something other than Scrabble…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_with_uncommon_properties.
The listing is a range of various discussions on (as it says) English words with uncommon properties. As I read the listing I realized that this is a good source of information for several of my coworkers who have become engaged in the Iphone app Scrabble.
For instance, if you find yourself with nothing but vowels, the word you want to remember is euouae. It is a type of cadence in mediaeval music and one of the longest words made up completely of vowels. Maybe you have a bunch of vowels and can play off a q. You want to remember the only common word in the English language that has five vowels in a row: queueing.
Speaking of vowels in a row, “there are many words that feature all five regular vowels occurring only once in alphabetical order, the most common being abstemious and facetious.” (I mentioned this recently to a coworker, but at the time I thought they were the only words of their kind; I made them into adverbs - abstemiously and facetiously - to include the y.) “Two of the shortest, at eight letters, are caesious and anemious (OED); and aerious (OED) has only seven letters. Some others are abstentious, acheilous, arsenious, arterious, tragedious, fracedinous, and Gadsprecious (all in OED). Considering y as a vowel, the suffix -ly can be added to a number of these words; thus the shortest word containing six unique vowels in alphabetical order is aeriously, meaning ‘airily’, with nine letters (OED); the much more common facetiously has eleven letters.“
These don’t help much with Scrabble, nor are you likely to use them in common conversation, but there are actually people who get into this kind of research. As long as we’re on the subject, however, here’s more from the Wiki listing:
“Subcontinental, uncomplimentary and unnoticeably are common words having the five vowels once only in reverse order. One of the shortest such words, at eight letters, is Muroidea, a superfamily of rodents.”
There are words that use all the vowels and are shorter, but they’re not in order. “The shortest words with all six vowels (including y) are oxygeusia (an abnormally acute sense of taste), Oxyuridae (a family of parasitic nematodes), Oxyurinae (a sub-family of ducks), and aeriously, with nine letters.”
So, what if you’re playing Scrabble and you have all consonants and there are no vowels open on the board? “Rhythms is the longest common word containing only y as a vowel. Gypsyfy, gypsyry, symphysy, nymphly, and nymphfly are as long or longer, but are not as common.”
I’m not sure how much this blog will help with Scrabble play, but when you think I’m the only one who finds obscure words remember the Wikipedia listing and realize I’ve got a long way to go. At least my words are useful for something other than Scrabble…
Sunday, August 15, 2010
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...
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...
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Dote on Me, Please, Part 2
…the church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople (now Istanbul). Hagia Sophia is “one of the chief monuments of architecture in the world.” Justinian's wife, who had been a “dancing girl” prior to their marriage, is the alleged source of many of the “Anecdota”; some consider the book to be more fiction than fact. But the name of the book contributed to the establishment of the word anecdote. It is what developed the meaning of “revelation of secrets” which had “decayed” in English to “brief, amusing stories” by 1761.
Etymonline then contains another reference, to De Quincey’s 1823 coinage (“jocular formation” according to etymonline) of the word anecdotage, which it calls “garrulous old age”. It is a portmanteau word (in itself another word to discuss later) formed from anecdote and dotage. As I get older I catch myself engaged in more anecdotage, or the telling of sometimes uninteresting stories from my memory.
De Quincey was an English author who was most famous for his book “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” (he was addicted to it for most of his life), used the word first in the line “All history, therefore, being built partly, and some of it altogether, upon anecdotage, must be a tissue of lies.”
Which brings us to dotage. The word came to English about 1300 when it was created from the Middle English word doten and has no known history before Middle English. It now (and since the late 14th century) means “feeble and childish state due to old age; senility” (see blog on 5/23/10) and less commonly but more originally “a doting; foolish or excessive affection.”
In the first part of this two-part blog I mentioned the word whit, which is almost always used in a phrase that includes the words “not a whit”. Whit is an early Modern English respelling of the word wiht, because to us and my spellcheck wiht looks wrong. Etymonline.com ignores the spelling issue, simply detailing that in the 12th century the phrase in na whit, meaning “in no amount”, was used, and came from the Old English nan wiht, where wiht meant amount, having once meant person or human being (from which the obsolete and archaic word wight came, so why bring it up except to add that the Isle of Wight has a completely different etymology?) Whit now has come to mean “the least bit; jot; iota.”
Of course, to use jot and iota together is redundant. Jot is the Latin transliteration of the name of the Greek letter iota, which when it gets to English is the letter “i”. The word jot is used in the King James Version of the Bible in Matthew 5:18 where it says “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” Which raises the question “What’s a tittle?”
A tittle is now what you would call the dot on a lower case i or j. It has been used to refer to various small marks to distinguish letters in some way.
And that, certainly, is enough anecdotage.
Etymonline then contains another reference, to De Quincey’s 1823 coinage (“jocular formation” according to etymonline) of the word anecdotage, which it calls “garrulous old age”. It is a portmanteau word (in itself another word to discuss later) formed from anecdote and dotage. As I get older I catch myself engaged in more anecdotage, or the telling of sometimes uninteresting stories from my memory.
De Quincey was an English author who was most famous for his book “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” (he was addicted to it for most of his life), used the word first in the line “All history, therefore, being built partly, and some of it altogether, upon anecdotage, must be a tissue of lies.”
Which brings us to dotage. The word came to English about 1300 when it was created from the Middle English word doten and has no known history before Middle English. It now (and since the late 14th century) means “feeble and childish state due to old age; senility” (see blog on 5/23/10) and less commonly but more originally “a doting; foolish or excessive affection.”
In the first part of this two-part blog I mentioned the word whit, which is almost always used in a phrase that includes the words “not a whit”. Whit is an early Modern English respelling of the word wiht, because to us and my spellcheck wiht looks wrong. Etymonline.com ignores the spelling issue, simply detailing that in the 12th century the phrase in na whit, meaning “in no amount”, was used, and came from the Old English nan wiht, where wiht meant amount, having once meant person or human being (from which the obsolete and archaic word wight came, so why bring it up except to add that the Isle of Wight has a completely different etymology?) Whit now has come to mean “the least bit; jot; iota.”
Of course, to use jot and iota together is redundant. Jot is the Latin transliteration of the name of the Greek letter iota, which when it gets to English is the letter “i”. The word jot is used in the King James Version of the Bible in Matthew 5:18 where it says “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” Which raises the question “What’s a tittle?”
A tittle is now what you would call the dot on a lower case i or j. It has been used to refer to various small marks to distinguish letters in some way.
And that, certainly, is enough anecdotage.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Dote on Me, Please, Part 1
I recently heard what was either a mispronunciation or a misuse of the word anecdote. It is not an easy word to pronounce since it contains an unusual consonant cluster that contains an unvoiced velar stop followed by a voiced dental/alveolar stop, which is a pedantic (blog posting 1/18/10) way of saying that’s not easy to pronounce. Now that I’ve made that pronouncement, let’s get back on topic.
The word antidote, which is easier to pronounce, was used when the speaker should have said anecdote. It’s not the first time I have heard the replacement, so let’s make sure the difference is understood, and in the process go through ancient Greece, visit Emporer Justinian, stop off and visit the English writer De Quincey before I get to my dotage.
The word antidote is simply understood from its etymology. Most of us know that anti- as a prefix means “against”. So what’s the –dote? We have to go back through the Latin word antidotum, which was taken from the Greek word antidoton, literally translated as ”given against”. The word is a Greek verbal adjective formed from the word antididonai, which means “give in return”. The –didonai means “to give”. Antidote was first used in English in the 1510s, although if we can identify the decade I don’t know why we can’t identify the year. An antidote, according to my New World Dictionary, is “a remedy to counteract a poison” or anything that “works against an evil or unwanted condition.”
The word anecdote also has two definitions. The first uses anecdote as a plural word meaning “originally, little known, entertaining facts of history of biography,” and second “a short, entertaining account of some happening, usually personal or biographical.” My dictionary’s etymology for the word is bland: it came to English from French, which got it from the Middle English word anecdota, which came from the Greek anekdota, the neuter plural of the word for unpublished (anekdotos). Anekdotos was formed from an-, meaning “not”, and ekdotos, which is a form of the word ekdidonai (give out), created from the words ek-, meaning “out” and didonai, (see above) meaning “to give”.
That’s the bland etymology. Etymonline has much more interesting information. While it disagrees not a whit (another word we'll get to later) with my dictionary on the actual etymology, it adds that it came to English in the 1670s and originally meant “secret or private stories.” Then it refers to Procopius’ sixth century book “Anecdota”, which were the unpublished memoirs of the Emporer Justinian.
Emporer Justinian had, according to www.newadvent.org, a historic reign: “The thirty-eight years of Justinian's reign are the most brilliant period of the later empire.” He codified what had become disparate sets of laws throughout the Roman Empire into one Corpus Juris Civilis, which has become “the basis of civil law in every civilized country.” It was also during his reign that the architectural style known as Byzantine was perfected, and he was responsible for the building of the church of Our Lady in Jerusalem (now known as the El-Aqsa mosque) and…
The word antidote, which is easier to pronounce, was used when the speaker should have said anecdote. It’s not the first time I have heard the replacement, so let’s make sure the difference is understood, and in the process go through ancient Greece, visit Emporer Justinian, stop off and visit the English writer De Quincey before I get to my dotage.
The word antidote is simply understood from its etymology. Most of us know that anti- as a prefix means “against”. So what’s the –dote? We have to go back through the Latin word antidotum, which was taken from the Greek word antidoton, literally translated as ”given against”. The word is a Greek verbal adjective formed from the word antididonai, which means “give in return”. The –didonai means “to give”. Antidote was first used in English in the 1510s, although if we can identify the decade I don’t know why we can’t identify the year. An antidote, according to my New World Dictionary, is “a remedy to counteract a poison” or anything that “works against an evil or unwanted condition.”
The word anecdote also has two definitions. The first uses anecdote as a plural word meaning “originally, little known, entertaining facts of history of biography,” and second “a short, entertaining account of some happening, usually personal or biographical.” My dictionary’s etymology for the word is bland: it came to English from French, which got it from the Middle English word anecdota, which came from the Greek anekdota, the neuter plural of the word for unpublished (anekdotos). Anekdotos was formed from an-, meaning “not”, and ekdotos, which is a form of the word ekdidonai (give out), created from the words ek-, meaning “out” and didonai, (see above) meaning “to give”.
That’s the bland etymology. Etymonline has much more interesting information. While it disagrees not a whit (another word we'll get to later) with my dictionary on the actual etymology, it adds that it came to English in the 1670s and originally meant “secret or private stories.” Then it refers to Procopius’ sixth century book “Anecdota”, which were the unpublished memoirs of the Emporer Justinian.
Emporer Justinian had, according to www.newadvent.org, a historic reign: “The thirty-eight years of Justinian's reign are the most brilliant period of the later empire.” He codified what had become disparate sets of laws throughout the Roman Empire into one Corpus Juris Civilis, which has become “the basis of civil law in every civilized country.” It was also during his reign that the architectural style known as Byzantine was perfected, and he was responsible for the building of the church of Our Lady in Jerusalem (now known as the El-Aqsa mosque) and…
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Grateful Dead
I have (hopefully until today) always had to consult my dictionary when determining which is the good word: approbration or opprobrium. I know one is a good thing and one is not, but which is which has yet to sink into my mind. So this blog today is as much for me as for elucidating anyone else.
Approbation, according to my dictionary, is official approval, sanction, or commendation. So it’s the good word. It is the noun form of the transitive verb approbate, which comes through Middle English (approbaten) from Latin (approbatus, the past participle of approbare, which means approve.) Unfortunately, there is disagreement in the sources. Etymonline.com agrees that the source word is approbare, but says that the lineage goes through the noun form of the past participle of approbare¸ which is approbationem, and from there went into Old French as aprobation in the 14th century before coming into English. I anticipate a knock-down, drag-out fight over that disagreement. Watch the news closely….
I noticed in the listing for approbate something I can’t remember seeing in my dictionary before at the beginning of a definition: “[Now Rare].” I concur; while I’ve encountered the word approbation I’ve never seen approbate.
Opprobrium, on the other hand, is the disgrace or infamy attached to conduct viewed as grossly shameful. Its other two definitions refer to anything that brings shame and the considering of something with shame and contempt. It also comes originally from Latin, from the word opprobrare, which means to reproach and is formed from ob- (toward, for, before, or about) and probrum, which refers to a disgrace. Probrum comes from pro- (before, forward) and the base word ferre, which is the Latin word for bear (as in carry, not like the animal). Opprobrium was first used in English in the 1680s, but etymonline suggests it first came in the form opprobrious in the 14th century, derived from the Old French word opprobrieux. The Old French got it from Late Latin (opprobriosus) which got it from opprobare. While this disagreement isn’t as contentious as for approbation (no one threw down the gantlet - see blog of 1/24/10), it still shows the difficulty in tracing back how a word made its way to us.
A word that fits somewhat in with these two words that I have wondered about the etymology of is the word grateful. By all rights it should mean full of grate, with grate being a noun and a synonym for appreciation. But grate means to rub against, or grind into shreds. As a noun it is a frame of metal bars. How did grateful come to mean feeling or expressing gratitude? And why isn’t the word gratitudeful?
The word grate (that meant agreeable and thankful) came from the Latin word gratus (meaning pleasing, and is the source of the word grace). Grate in this form is, alas, an obsolete word. It has left the list of endangered species and is dead (hence the title for this blog). But it evolved into the word grateful in the 1550s and continues to exist in that form. And for that we are grateful.
Approbation, according to my dictionary, is official approval, sanction, or commendation. So it’s the good word. It is the noun form of the transitive verb approbate, which comes through Middle English (approbaten) from Latin (approbatus, the past participle of approbare, which means approve.) Unfortunately, there is disagreement in the sources. Etymonline.com agrees that the source word is approbare, but says that the lineage goes through the noun form of the past participle of approbare¸ which is approbationem, and from there went into Old French as aprobation in the 14th century before coming into English. I anticipate a knock-down, drag-out fight over that disagreement. Watch the news closely….
I noticed in the listing for approbate something I can’t remember seeing in my dictionary before at the beginning of a definition: “[Now Rare].” I concur; while I’ve encountered the word approbation I’ve never seen approbate.
Opprobrium, on the other hand, is the disgrace or infamy attached to conduct viewed as grossly shameful. Its other two definitions refer to anything that brings shame and the considering of something with shame and contempt. It also comes originally from Latin, from the word opprobrare, which means to reproach and is formed from ob- (toward, for, before, or about) and probrum, which refers to a disgrace. Probrum comes from pro- (before, forward) and the base word ferre, which is the Latin word for bear (as in carry, not like the animal). Opprobrium was first used in English in the 1680s, but etymonline suggests it first came in the form opprobrious in the 14th century, derived from the Old French word opprobrieux. The Old French got it from Late Latin (opprobriosus) which got it from opprobare. While this disagreement isn’t as contentious as for approbation (no one threw down the gantlet - see blog of 1/24/10), it still shows the difficulty in tracing back how a word made its way to us.
A word that fits somewhat in with these two words that I have wondered about the etymology of is the word grateful. By all rights it should mean full of grate, with grate being a noun and a synonym for appreciation. But grate means to rub against, or grind into shreds. As a noun it is a frame of metal bars. How did grateful come to mean feeling or expressing gratitude? And why isn’t the word gratitudeful?
The word grate (that meant agreeable and thankful) came from the Latin word gratus (meaning pleasing, and is the source of the word grace). Grate in this form is, alas, an obsolete word. It has left the list of endangered species and is dead (hence the title for this blog). But it evolved into the word grateful in the 1550s and continues to exist in that form. And for that we are grateful.
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