FUTPNBCVI (Follow Up - The Pedantic Night Before Christmas, Part VI)

Time for more Follow Up on the Pedantic Night Before Christmas.

Welter is our first word of the day. It’s a very useful word, both a noun and a verb. There are seven definitions given for welter, four for the verb and three for the noun. Three of them include a rolling, tossing, or tumbling. Two of them involve a state of commotion or turmoil, and the others are: a confused jumble (noun) and a verb form - drenching in something fluid (especially blood). The verb welter came to English in about 1300, from the Middle Dutch or Middle Low German word welteren, which meant to roll. The noun is a recent arrival, having first been used to describe a confused mass in 1851. 

While it may seem that the common designation in boxing of welterweight might have come from welter, it more likely came from welt, which was a verb used in about 1400 to mean “beat severely.” In 1832 welterweight was used to describe a heavyweight horseman, and in 1896 used for a specific weight grouping in boxing. It avoided the confusion created by an earlier (1804) use of welter to also describe the horseman or boxer. Welt came to English in the early 1400s as a shoemaker’s term, and may have been related to the Middle English word welten, which mean to roll or turn over. Welten is a distant cousin (an Old Norse cousin) of welteren. We now use welt to describe a raised ridge on the skin caused by a wound, but that usage didn’t appear for 400 years.

Our next word is inspissate, which as a verb may have been misused in PDBC, since it refers to thickening by evaporation. I do not imagine St. Nick was thickening by evaporation; by consumption of cookies and milk, yes. By evaporation, no. One of my dictionaries lists this word as an archaic one, but another doesn’t. Since I ran across it in my reading, it is rare but still being used. Even rarer is a related word, spissitude, which means thickness or density. Spissitude actually arrived in English about 1400, far before inspissate, which didn’t land on English shores until the decade the pilgrims landed in Plymouth, the 1620s. They both come from Latin, spissitudo become spissitude and inspissatus becoming inspissate; the meanings did not change from Latin to English.

Fey is a short word with much to convey. It has several definitions, depending on where you live. In much of the English-speaking world it refers to something that is supernatural, like Santa or elves or fairies. But in Scotland (chiefly) it means appearing to be put under a spell. And at other places in the United Kingdom (chiefly Britain) it means doomed or fated to die. Quite a range of definitions and geographic variety. As an adjective its supernatural meaning can not only refer to someone who believes in the supernatural, but someone who is visionary or clairvoyant. And to bring it back to the Scottish meaning, it can also refer to “being in unnaturally high spirits, as were formerly thought to precede death” (Dictionary.com).

Its etymology is difficult to discern. It could be related to the Old English word fæge, which meant “doomed to die”, and it seems certain the British usage comes from that word. But in Old Norse there is a word feigr that has many cognates in other languages and also means doomed. How it developed any sense of supernatural is not indicated. 

Perhaps one of the fey readers of this blog can discern its origin.

Torturous or Tortuous?

Last week I used a couple of words that haven’t been covered yet: penultimate and tortuous.

Tortuous is close to torturous in spelling, but has a far different meaning. Knowing which is the good word is helpful (in fact, knowing that there are two words spelled and sounding very similar is also good).

Tortuous means winding or twisting, or full of turns, like a slow moving river or a road climbing a mountain that is full of switchbacks. It came to English in the late 1300s, from an Anglo-French word with the same spelling. The Anglo-French got the word from the Latin word that means full of twists, tortuosus, which was a form of the Latin word for twisting or winding, tortus.

Torturous is the adjective form of the noun torture, and describes anything that causes pain. The noun came into English in the early 1400s, from the Old French word torture, which came directly from the Late Latin word for turning or twisting, torture. I’m not sure how the word came to be associated exclusively with pain, but somewhere between the use of the “rack” and a twisted ankle it developed that sense. The adjective developed later in the 1400s, then the verb in the 1580s.  

Something that is tortuous can also be torturous, but it is not always the case. Something that is torturous may be tortuous, as any number of wrestling moves would demonstrate, but waterboarding is an example of something torturous that is not tortuous.

The penultimate word today is penultimate. Having a spate of forms (penult as noun or adjective, penultima, penultimate), the most common use today is penultimate, an adjective describing the next to last. The penultimate syllable of the word penultimate is ti-. The first form of the word to arrive in English is the adjective form penult, which arrived in the 1530s. By the 1570s penult became a noun, then the more Latinate noun penultima arrived in the 1580s, and penultimate came to English in the 1680s. The words are all related to the Latin phrase penultima syllaba, which means next to last syllable. Penultima is formed from the feminine form of the adjective penultimus, which was formed from adding paene (meaning “almost”) to ultima (meaning “final.”)

Our last word today is one I used in the last paragraph: spate. While you may have thought I exhausted words for numbers back in October last year when I posted about words like panoply and manifold and multiplicity, I missed the word spate. A spate is a sudden outpouring, and in Britain refers primarily to water, like a flood or a heavy rain. In America it has a broader sense, referring to any large pouring out. It was originally a Scottish and northern English word (in the 1400s), and while we do not know its etymology the Dutch word spuiten, which means to flow or spout, or the Old French word espoit, which means “flood” are two likely sources. The use of the word to refer to any large quantity of an item was first used in about 1610. 

It may have been a tortuous path to get to spate, but I hope it wasn't torturous.

Misusing an Apostrophe is not a Catastrophe

The Greek dramatic device called a strophe has spawned a number of words, some of which I knew and some of which I have learned in preparing this week’s post.

In ancient Greek tragedy, when the chorus first began singing an ode it moved from right to left, before it would turn and head back left to right (the antistrophe). Strophe comes from the Greek word strephein which means “to turn.” It came into English in about 1600.

So it isn’t difficult to get from strophe, a dramatic turn, to catastrophe, another dramatic turn.

Catastrophe, which now refers to a widespread disaster, also can mean a negative reversal, or a reversal of expectations. It is formed from adding the Greek kata- (meaning “down”) to strephein, thereby forming katastrephein, which to the Greeks meant to turn down or overturn or come to an end. In fact, it originally referred to, according to etymonline.com, “especially the fatal turning point in a drama”, which sounds to me like the ending of Romeo and Juliet. The Romans adopted the word from the Greek, changing its spelling in Latin to catastrophe, from which in the 1530s the English brought it into use. Its (not it’s – see below) first use to describe a sudden disaster in English took place in 1748, although the disaster of note isn’t mentioned.

Another word we get from strephein is apostrophe. Formed by adding the Greek prefix meaning “from”, apo-,  apostrophe meant the mark to indicate a letter taken from a word when it arrived in English in the 1580s. An apostrophe is still the punctuation mark used to indicate a missing letter, but it also is used in the possessive form of a noun. The opening paragraph today uses an apostrophe to indicate the possessive form of week in describing this post. The penultimate word of the preceding paragraph illustrates the missing letter use of apostrophe: the apostrophe indicates the commonly used contraction “isn’t” for the words “is not.”

Apostrophe had a more tortuous path to English than catastrophe did. Also being formed in Greek (as apostrephein), then adopted into Latin, by the time of Late Latin it had the form apostrophus, which the Middle French adopted as apostrophe and the English took without spelling change.

An aside – in the 1530s the word apostrophe was first used in English to describe an orator’s turning aside from the crowd to speak to an individual. In formal rhetoric it retains this meaning.  

While an apostrophe is used to indicate a possessive noun, an exception is the possessive neuter pronoun its. Originally the possessive of it was it’s, but since the possessives of other personal pronouns (hers, theirs, yours) don’t use the apostrophe it only made sense that "it" followed suit. And its use without the apostrophe helps distinguish it from the contraction “it’s.”

I say “helps.” The misuse of the apostrophe with the pronoun it is a common grammatical error to this day, even though the change has been in common use (and misuse) since the early 19^th century. But it's not a catastrophe.

Them's Fighting Words!

We’ve been looking at words that came to English from the Latin root word pungere.

To get an intensive form of a word like pungere in Latin you add the prefix com-. Doing so gives you the word compungere, and in Late Latin compungere became compunctionem, which meant something that pricked the conscience and caused remorse. The Old French adopted the word as compunction, and in the mid-14^th century the English also began using the word to refer to any feeling of unease or anxiety of conscience, or any wavering in consideration of which is the correct action to take.

Pungere and punctionem (the less intensive form of compunctionem) developed in Old French into the word for the tool that makes a puncture, a poncho or poinchon. In the mid-14^th century the English adopted poinchon as puncheon and later shortened it to punch. Within 100 years it also came to refer to the action of using the puncheon to create a hole, and eventually to any quick stab or jab that we call a punch (as now with a fist.)

Poignant also comes from pungere. The Old French took the present participle of pungere, which is poindre, and created in the 13^th century the word poignant to mean sharp or pointed. By the late 14^th century the English adopted the word to refer to any painful feeling (physical or emotional).  In addition, etymonline.com tells us it involves a “linguistic trick play, a double-reverse.” Pungere is from the same root word in Latin as pugnus, which means fist, and poignant “represents a metathesis of –n-and -g- that later was reversed in French.” Isn’t wordplay fun?

Pugna, the Latin word for fist, is the source of pugnacious, which is a back-formation of pugnacity, the original word that arrived in English in about 1600. The Latin word pugnacitas means fondness for fighting (with fists), and came pretty directly into use in English as pugnacity. Within 40 years the adjective pugnacious was formed.

Have we exhausted words from pugnare? Hardly. You could take pugnus (fist) and form pugil, the Latin word for boxer or fist-fighter, from which in 1789 we got the word pugilism. Or you could take the word pugnare, add the Latin prefix for reverse, re-, and get the Latin word for fight back: repugnare, the present participle of which is repugnantem and from which in the late 14^th century English created the adjective repugnant. Repugnant describes a reaction to anything that is distasteful or offensive.

One final word before we leave this topic. Impugn is a verb that means to challenge as false or cast doubt on the veracity of someone or something. Take our word of the day, pugnare, add the prefix meaning in or into or on, in-, and you get through the magic of Latin the word impugnare, which means to attack or assault. The Old French changed that into impugner, and in the late 14^th century the English adopted it as a word to mean any attack by argument.

Them’s fighting words!

Get to the Point!

The word punctilious came up in my reading recently, and it started me thinking about how unusual the punc- construction is. Is punctilious related to puncture? Punch? How about compunction? Where did these words come from?

Dictionary.com says that someone who is punctilious is someone extremely attentive to punctilios. (Love those circular definitions.) Punctilio is, in my experience, less used than punctilious. A punctilio is a detail in a procedure or ceremony. Someone who is punctilious is careful about the fine points of observances, formalities or amenities. Both punctilio and punctilious came to English from the Italian word puntiglio, which means “fine point.” Etymonline.com says the Italians got punctiglio from the Latin word for prick (a sharp point or a puncture), which is punctum. It is interesting to me that our words keep the c in place and don’t use the g.  Punctilio arrived in the 1590s while the adjective punctilious came across in the 1630s.

Etymonline.com also says about punctum "see point." So let's see it. 

Point is a much more common word, and has been used in English since about 1200, at least in its noun form, which means a sharp end, or a single idea. What’s interesting is that etymonline suggests that the word is a merger of two words that both came from the Latin word pungere (which means pierce or puncture and from which we also get pungent). The neuter past participle of pungere  is punctum, and was used to refer to the small hole made by a single-point of puncture (as opposed to a blade which causes a slash rather than a circular wound). Its meaning broadened to include anything that looked like that puncture, a dot for instance. Punctum begat the Old French point, which refers to a dot or a small amount, “which was borrowed in Middle English by c. 1300.” And we haven’t given it back, so I think it’s fair to say we “took” it, not just borrowed it.

“Meanwhile,” continuing to quote etymonline.com, “the Latin feminine past participle of pungere was puncta, which was used in Medieval Latin to mean ‘sharp tip,’ and became the Old French pointe ‘point of a weapon, vanguard of an army,’ which also passed into English, early 14c.”

The French words point and pointe continue to have a difference of meaning in French, while we have combined their meanings in English.

Pungent refers to something that smells or tastes sharp, or something that is poignant. While pungent is derived from the present participle (pungentem) of the above reference pungere, in Middle and early Modern English there was a verb, punge, which has lapse into obsolescence. It meant to pierce or prick, and hence to smart or sting. The word pungent arrived in English at the same time as punctilio, from the aforementioned pungentem. 

Pungere is related to pugnus, hence to pugnacious and inexpugnable. The past participle of pungere is punctus, from which we got puncture (a pointed piercing or pricking) in the late 14^th century.

And we've reached the end of today's post, but not the end of words from pugnere. More next week.