Words from The Plague and The Patient

I noticed the title to a recently rebroadcast episode of Law & Order Criminal Intent: Palimpsest. I ran across the word in two books I’ve read this year, also: In the Wake of the Plague, an interesting book by Norman F. Cantor, and The Private Patient, an enjoyable mystery by P.D. James. In fact, each book generated several words for my blog. Along with palimpsest, In the Wake of the Plague gave me words like demesne, hypostatize and salubrious, while The Private Patient generated uxuorious, minatory, mullion, and a few others. We won’t get to all of these this week, but let’s get started.

Palimpsest, the catalytic word, is a noun for a parchment (in particular) or similar document from which writing has been erased to make room for other text. Kind of like those paintings that were painted over another painting, these are documents where words have been removed and other words written over them. With the dawn of technology that allows for correcting texts easily, such palimpsests are less prevalent.

Palimpsest came to English in the 1660s through the Latin palimpsestus from the Greek palimpsestos, which means “scraped again.” The Greek word was formed by combining palin, which means “again” and psen, which refers to the rubbing smooth of something. Palin is also the source word for palindrome, a word that describes a word or phrase that reads the same backwards as it does forwards (like my brother’s name – Bob – or “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.”) Palindrome came to English in the 1620s.

Demesne was an entirely new word to me, perhaps because it came from English feudal law. It was, according to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, the word used for “that portion of a manor not granted to freehold tenants but either retained by the lord for his own use and occupation or occupied by his villeins or leasehold tenants.” That clears it up, doesn’t it? Dictionary.com defines it as “possession of land as one’s own” primarily, but a second definition is “an estate or part of an estate occupied and controlled by, and worked for the exclusive us of, the owner.” The third definition it gives is “land belonging to and adjoining a manor house.” Back in feudal times, when there were various arrangements by which people worked and lived on land owned by the lord, demesne was land and property not given over to such use.

Demesne came to English sometime around 1300, and was originally spelled demeyne. It came from the Anglo-French word demesne or demeine, which came from the Old French word demaine, which the Old French got from the Latin word dominicus, which means “belonging to a master” and was formed from the root word dominus, which is the word for lord. An interesting note in etymonline.com tells that the word was respelled demesne by the late 15^th century by Anglo-French legal scribes, who were influenced by the Old French word mesnie, which referred to a household, since the concept of demesne referred to land attached to a mansion. But etymonline.com also says that Anglo-French legal scribes (those wild and crazy guys) had a “fondness for inserting –s- before –n-.” 

So why aren’t they Asnglo-Fresnch?

Little Words

I don’t care one whit, not an iota, nary a bit about that, and it’s a tad selfish and a mite foolish of you to bring it up. If you had a smidgen of self-respect… Well, I don’t.

As the highlighted linked words show, we have already discussed whit and iota, but a coworker of mine used the word “tad” this week, and sent me off on this foray into small words about small things. What’s the difference between whit, iota, bit, tad, mite, and smidgen? And does it make a difference which one you use? And what do these words have to do with Abraham Lincoln, pirates, or the Bible?

Let’s start with Lincoln. I knew that President Lincoln referred to his son Thomas as Tad, but I was not aware that he coined the nickname and the word we use to describe a small amount or quantity of something. The speculation is that the President gave his son the nickname “Tad” as a shortened form of tadpole. While Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 and “Tad” died in 1871 at age 18, the use of the word tad to describe a small child (especially a boy) is first recorded in 1877. However, it was used only in reference to small children until 1915, the first recorded use in reference to something other than a child. Today it’s primarily used in reference to small amounts, or a bit of something.

Bit, on the other hand, first came into use in English in about 1200, a relative of the Old English words bite, which we still use, and bita, which refers to that which was bitten off. (No reference to it being the past tense of bite yet.) The act of biting is why we use it to describe the piece of a drill that actually does the boring (as opposed to the kind of boring I’m doing right now). That usage developed in the 1590s. And of course, the part of the bridle placed in the horse’s mouth has since the 14^th century been called a bit, since that’s what the horse did with the piece. It wasn’t until after these two usages were in place that the word came to refer to a small amount or a piece of something. (The first use in that sense was about 1600.) Its expansion to refer to time rather than an object took place in the 1650s. And so it remained until 1909 when a small part in a theatrical production came to be known as a bit part.

But there’s one other usage that evokes images of pirates and the bounding main. The Spanish Real was in colonial times the equivalent of today’s US Dollar: an international unit of money. But because the value of a Real was significantly more than many goods, change would be made by dividing or cutting the Real in half or quarters or even into wedges of eighths. An eighth of a Real is one bit, a quarter is two bits, etc. You can still on occasion hear the quarter referred to as “two bits” in the U.S. Because of the proliferation of the coin during the heyday of pirates in the Caribbean, the concept of bits still attends to the image of pirates.

Speaking of coins, the word mite has also come to mean something small. There are several mite words. One refers to a small arachnid, the largest of which grow to be ¼ inch large and the smallest of which are microscopic. But the second mite refers to a Flemish copper coin of such little value that it developed a proverbial use in English to mean a very small amount of money. That is the sense in which John Wycliffe used it in his English Bible translation of the Latin word minutum in Mark 12:42. (It’s also used in Luke 12:59 and Luke 21:2.) The minutum was a translation of the Greek word lepton, which was the smallest coin in use in Palestine during Roman times.  One etylomogy suggests the word mite was a contraction of minutum. One source indicates that a mite was equivalent to six minutes’ work. Not much now, not much then. Just a little bit.

That leaves smidgen, a larger word for a smaller amount. Its first recorded use in English is in 1845, but its etymology is not certain. It could have come from the Scottish word smitch, which referred to both a small or insignificant person or to a small amount. Smitch is found in 1822, so the adoption into English a couple of decades later makes sense. Etymonline.com also suggests it might come from the word smidin, which means small syllable, but I could find no other reference online to smidin.

I find that a bit disconcerting, or a mite odd, or a tad unusual.

Who's Going to Win on Tuesday?

I was reading a story about early voting and how to interpret the numbers when I ran across the word salience. And there it was – my starting point for today’s pre-election blog.

So I went to the dictionary to find the definition of salience is…the state or condition of being salient. (A definition like that is like kissing your sister.) So one must go to the word salient for real understanding. Salient is defined as prominent or conspicuous. It second definition is “projecting or pointing outward”, and the third definition given is “leaping or jumping.” It sounds like a good word for something that “jumps out at you.” In my experience it is generally used in reference to arguments or debate points.

Salient came to English in the 1560s when it was used as a “Heraldic” term for “leaping”. It came from the Latin word salientem. Over a century later (in the 1680s) it developed a military sense of “pointing outward”. I would have thought it a geometric phrase, but I would have been wrong. It wasn’t until the 1840s that it developed the sense of something prominent or striking, although the phrase “salient point” can be traced to the 1670s. Aristotle used the phrase punctum saliens, literally “leaping point” or we might say “point of departure” or “jumping off point.”

The story about early voting also was related to semiotics, the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior. As a philosophy it is usually divided into pragmatics, semantics, and syntactics. But  I think it’s applicable because the media are full of semiotics, in many cases of dueling semiotics as campaign operatives strive to balance their polling, observations, and anecdotal information with what places their candidate(s) in the best position to pick up last minute voters or inspire the base to turn out. There was a link in the aforementioned story to early voting statistics by precinct so you could interpret for yourself whether your candidate has an early advantage or not. It’s that close an election.

Semiotics as a field of study was first used in the 1880s, but the adjective semiotic came to English in the 1620s and meant “of symptoms”. Its use in psychology only dates back to 1923. It came from the Greek word semeiotikos, which meant observant, particularly of signs or symptoms.

Another good word to use in anticipation of the election is latitudinarian. I encountered the word in the book Bunts, by George Will (a book on baseball that I highly recommend). Latitudinarian means “allowing or characterized by latitude in opinion or conduct, especially in religious views.” It is not something you see much during campaigns. When Chris Christie shows latitudinarian attitude toward Obama’s response to the storm Sandy, it was salient, standing out from most of what we’ve been hearing for months. Latitudinarian came to English in the 1660s from the Latin prefix latitudin-, or freedom from narrow restrictions. It was originally used in reference to Epicopalian clergymen who were characterized by their broad-mindedness in doctrinal matters. We get the word latitude from the same Latin root.

Who’s going to win on Tuesday? Using semiotics and watching the salient returns, your guess is as good as mine. Let’s just agree to be latitudinarian, not matter who wins.