Making a Hash of Words - and Fashion

I promised last week to cover heterogeneous and medley this week.

Heterogeneous means different in kind or unlike. It can also mean composed of different kinds of parts. It came to English in the 1620s from the Medieval Latin word heterogeneus, which came from the Greek word heterogenes, a combination of the Greek words for different (hetero) and gender/race/kind (genos, from which we also get genus.) Earlier in the 1600s they tried out the word as heterogeneal, but apparently heterogeneous won out. I don’t think the battle was as fierce as between vhs and beta (a reference that anyone under the age of 30 will likely miss) but a battle nonetheless

Notice it is het-er-uh-jee-nee-uhs, six syllables. While combining the last three syllables into jeen and yuhs is also given (as in genius), the stress is not on the syllable with the o, and there is a long e sound after the n. While heterogenous is a biology or pathology term for something outside the organism, it is a different word from heterogeneous. Now that I have that off my back, let’s look at some similar words.

The opposite of heterogeneous is homogeneous (again, homogenous is a biology term – get it straight!). It arrived in English 20 years or so after heterogeneous (they were looking at differences before they looked at similarities, apparently). I don’t think it will surprise you to find out that the Greek word for similar is homo. As with heterogeneal, there was an earlier version of the word, homogeneal, that lapsed into disfavor and was eventually shut up in the Tower of London.

The other word from last week is medley. In my mind a medley is a succession of items, but my dictionary defines it as “a mixture, especially of heterogeneous elements.” Medley arrived in English in about 1300, and has a very interesting etymology. It came from the Old French word for hand-to-hand combat, medlee. Within a couple of hundred years it developed a meaning of a combination or mixture, and was not used to describe the musical composition of diverse parts until the 1620s. So the next time some guy (anyone but me) shows up at work with striped pants and a plaid shirt with a paisley tie and a checkered jacket, refer to his outfit as a medley instead of a hodgepodge.

While we have space, let me follow up on last week’s coverage of the word hash. “Hash browns” and  “hash marks” have come into use in English. What have they to do with hash? While Hash browns is the earliest of the three, having arrived in English in 1917. It refers to potatoes that were hashed (i.e. chopped up) and then fried. The –ed was eventually also chopped. While my source (etymonline.com) doesn’t state that it is a product of the first World War, the other one (actually two) is/are.

Hash marks were first used in the armed forces to describe the service stripes on the sleeve of a military uniform. They’ve been used in that sense since 1909 (actually before the first World War, but give me a break) and were called that supposedly because they marked the number of years one had eaten the free food/hash from the Army. The similarity in appearance of the lines on an American Football field (I know this blog has readers in other parts of the world) to the stripes on a uniform sleeve resulted in them getting called hash marks, but not until the 1960s. On the football field they look more like dashes than hash, but who am I to quibble?

Are you ready for some football?