A Waste of Words

A couple of words recommended themselves for this blog on this week’s trip to Alaska. The hotel at which I was staying had a room in which you were encouraged to deposit your “refuse.” It occurred to me that refuse as a noun is somewhat different in meaning from refuse the verb. How could two words like refuse come into English. Are they connected etymologically?

The answer is yes. The first to make its way into English was the verb, which originally meant reject, disregard or avoid; it now means very much the same thing, although the uses disregard and avoid have been disregarded and should be avoided. Refuse as a verb now means to decline to accept or give or submit or (if you are a horse) leap. It came from the Old French word refuser in about 1300 (according to etymonline.com) and the Old French got their word from the Vulgar Latins (many of whom drive sporty convertible cars) whose word refusare came from a form of the Latin word refundere, which meant to pour back or give back and from which we get our word refund. So refund and refuse are cousins.

The noun refuse developed shortly after the verb (about 50 years later). It was originally used to refer to an outcast, then to anything rejected, including waste and trash. The Old French word from which it came was refus, a back-formation of the word refuser from which we get the verb. The noun now identifies anything discarded, including (according to Dictionary.com) rubbish, trash and garbage.

Those who read this blog religiously (and prayer is never a bad idea when reading this blog) may see a diversion to other words coming. Why do we have several words for that which we discard? What is the difference between refuse and waste and garbage and rubbish?

Let’s begin with waste, which according to Dictionary.com is a useless expenditure or something neglected or eroding or devastated. But that does not explain its use as a close cousin to garbage. According to etymonline.com waste has been used since about 1400 in the sense of refuse matter (although "waste basket" first appeared in 1850.) Merriam-Webster.com provides no more appropriate definition but does include a meaning “an action or use that results in the unnecessary loss of something valuable.” So what you put in a waste basket is not likely waste until dictionaries catch up with usage. What a waste! The word wast from which we get waste is an Anglo-French and Old North French word; its entry into English, beginning about 1200, was originally to describe desolate regions, not that which is discarded.

Garbage primarily refers to animal or vegetable matter that is discarded, but has expanded to include anything thrown out. It came to English in the early 1400s to describe first the giblets of a fowl, then the waste parts of any animal, and by 1580 developed the meaning we have today. It may come from Old French or Proto-German, but there is no certain etymology.

Rubbish is unwanted material being thrown out or rejected. It appeared about the same time as garbage, in about 1400, (must have been a dirty century) and came from the Anglo-French word rubouses.  Where the Old French got the word is lost in the dustbin of history (as Leon Trotsky would have put it). While it is not exclusively  British in use it is used more so in Britain (and perhaps other parts of the erstwhile British Empire) than in the United States.

Trash? Also things unwanted and thrown away. But unlike most of the other words, this one likely comes from Scandinavia, since several Scandinavian languages have similar words, usually for leaves and twigs more than animals or vegetables.

So there is really very little difference between the words. You can refuse to use whichever ones you wish; discard the rest. It's a waste of words.

The Task of Askew and Askance in One Basket

I promised last week that we would look askance and askew at the task of discussing basket and cask.  That means you will have to wait until next week to find out what peruke means (a new word for me that I read this last week.) Do not "wig out" while you wait.

Askance and askew both begin with the letters that form the word ask, but are they related? Since askance means “with a side glance” and askew means “to one side” it seems likely, right?

Well, askance has some mystery in its etymology. Chaucer used it, although as two words (ase and quince) to mean “in such a way that” or “even as; as if” according to etymonline.com. Its appearance as one word can only be traced to the 1520s. The Oxford English Dictionary has separate listings for both askance and a Middle English word askances but there seems to be no connection between the two. The word is likely a compound for of “as” and an Old French word quanses (pronounced like Kansas) that meant “how if” and came to Old French from the Latin word quam that means “how” combined with si meaning “if.” From the sideways squint to a look of suspicion or disapproval is a short distance. Seldom is the word in the U.S. except in pairing with a form of the word “look.” It is an adverb, but seems only to ad the verb look.

Askew, on the other hand, while also having a secondary meaning of disapproval, means “to one side” or “out of line.” Its etymology is similarly uncertain, but when it appeared in the 1570s it may have been as a combination word (like askance) meaning of “a skew.” It may have come from the Old Norse a ska, but since we also have the English word skew I think it more likely to be related to that word. Skew is from the late 1400s, and means “to turn aside.” It came to English from the Old North French word eskiuer that meant to “shy away from” or “avoid.” Skews sense of turning something else aside coincides with the first appearance of askew, and it was not until 1872 it was first used of an unfair characterization, and not until 1929 did was it used of numbers unfairly characterized.

If you are reading any books from the 1400s you may run across the word askoye with the same meaning as askew. Don’t look askance at it.  But remember the words askew and askance come from different sources.

Task is the only one of today’s words for which we know the etymology. It arrived in English in the early 1300s, like Skew from the Old North French, from their word tasque. It originally meant a bit of labor imposed as a duty. The French word came from the Vulgar Latin word tasca, which is a metathesis of the Medieval Latin word taxa, which is a back-formation of the Latin word taxare, from which we get the word tax.  The expansion of the meaning of the word task to a general chore is from the 1590s.

The phrase “take one to task” is more closely related to the old meaning of forcing someone to undertake a certain work as a duty or tax. While some people pronounce ask as if it were axe I have not heard the same substitution of tax for task, yet the two are more closely related etymologically.

That leaves us with only basket in our basket of words for today. A basket is a container made from thin strips of wood woven together or anything that looks like it. (Except the basket in basketball, which originally was a bushel basket but now is just woven string.) The word basket came to English in the early 1200s from an Anglo-French word, bascat. Another word with obscure etymology, it may have come to Anglo-French from the Latin word bsascauda, but the Roman Poet Martial says that bascauda is from Celtic Britain, so “back atcha!” The mystery continues.

Just like, for one more week, the mystery “What does peruke mean?” will continue. 

Basking in Masked Flasks

At the beginning of the month this blog covered ask and other words in that arena. As I was writing the blog other words using “ask” as part of the word came to mind. While I considered askance the task of blogging about words like basket I nonetheless decided, with cask and flask nearby, to bask in some of those words and unmask any common roots.

Let’s get some of the etymology out of the way and see which of these words, as Sesame Street puts it, “just doesn’t belong here”:

Askance – Old English as with Old French quanses (which they got from Latin)

Askew – Uncertain, possibly from “on skew”. Skew is from Old French.

Bask – Old Norse baðask

Basket – Anglo-French bascat

Cask – Middle French casque (from Spanish and Vulgar Latin)

Flask – Medieval Latin flasco

Mask – Middle French masque (from Italian and Middle Latin and maybe more)

Task – Old North French tasque (and eventually a metathesis of Vulgar Latin)

In case you are not up for the mental rigors of the Sesame Street game, the two that are not from or through French, bask and flask, are where we will begin.

Bask, which means either to be exposed to a pleasant warmth or a pleasant situation, came to English in the late 1300s. It originally meant to wallow in blood, and while its root word baðask has two syllables the English has always been bask. (It is likely not because that letter that looks like a crossed d is confusing.) 

How do we get from wallowing in blood to wallowing in pleasant warmth? Blame Shakespeare. In the play “As You Like It” he used the word in reference to sunshine. Had it already morphed by 1600 into a less sanguine meaning already or was that a Shakespearean invention? We may never know. By the way, sanguine has had a similar softening metamorphosis from meaning bloody to meaning  rosy – like cheeks – and optimistic.

Flask came directly from the Medieval Latin word for container or bottle. If anyone tells you the word is actually Teutonic in origin, let them know that, according to the OED, it may be “chronologically legitimate, and presents no difficulty except [for the] absence of any satisfactory etymology.” Don’t you love it when you can “zing” someone that effectively? The word flask is now used mostly in two ways: for the glass bottles we find in laboratories, and for the flat, usually metal, bottle found in someone’s pocket and filled with alcohol.

The other word I want to look at this week (the rest you’ll have to wait a week to find out about) is mask. It came into use in English in the 1530s, from the Middle French. The Middle French got it from the Italian word maschera, which came from the Medieval Latin word masca, meaning with mask or ghost or nightmare. It is uncertain where the Medieval Latin word came from. It is possible it came from the Arabic word maskharah (Sounds like it, doesn’t it?) except maskharah means mockery or buffoon. If a mask originally was meant to mock someone, that would make sense. There also was an Old French word mascurer that meant to blacken the face. But, etymonline.com says, “compare Occitan mascara “to blacken, darken,” derived from mask- ‘black,’ which is held to be from a pre-Indo-European language, and Old Occitan masco ‘witch,’ surviving in dialects; in Beziers it means ‘dark cloud before the rain comes.’”  Occitan is a language spoken mainly in Southern France east of the Basque (no relation except phonologically to bask) areas of France.

Mask came to English before masquerade, which arrived 60 years later, but from the French word mascarade. (Why did we use the French que when they didn’t? Another mystery.) Or it may have come from the Spanish mascarada (a masked party or dance) or the Italian mascarata (a ball at which masks were worn.) Choose your favorite language source.

Yes, the Italian word maschera is the same root word from which we get mascara, the cosmetic for covering lashes. For 40 years it was spelled mascaro. It was only in 1922 it took the Spanish spelling of mascara. The phrase "40 lashes" has nothing to do with mascara. 

Next week: the task of askance, askew, basket, cask, task. 

The Porky Pig Family

Several years ago this blog addressed the difference between lamb and mutton, beef and cow. I did not address the differences between pork, pig, hog, sow, boar and swine. There are a lot of good stories in this word family.

Pig comes is defined as “a young swine of either sex, especially a domestic hog…weighing less than 120 pounds” (like lamb versus sheep or calf versus cow.) It now has a broader meaning, and has developed a number of additional uses.

Pig comes from Old English, where it originally referred only to the young of the species. The first variation from this meaning was in the 1540s when it began as a negative description for people. In the 1580s it was used to describe an oblong piece of metal, as in a large, heavy lump of metal. Flying pigs were used to describe something unlikely to happen as far back as the 1610s. Police were not referred to as pigs until 1811.

Pork came into English in the early 1300s from the Old French porc, that was used of pigs, swine, or boars.  (The Old French got it pretty directly from the Latin porcus.) Like mutton and beef, it goes back to the Norman conquest. The “pork barrel” is where one could go to cut a portion of bacon for home consumption is an Americanism from 1801. Congress did not get into the practice of pork barrel spending (or at least it was not called that in writing) until 1907. 

That was about the same time the phrase “bringing home the bacon” began being used (same source image, used since at least 1906 to refer to earnings from work.) Bacon, the back and sides of the hog, was adopted into English in the early 1300s from the French word of the same spelling. One of my favorite comedy bits is Jim Gaffigan's video on bacon; the version linked is missing his comment "I even like films with Kevin Bacon!" 

An interesting story behind the words porker and grunter that sailers call this animal can be found here.

Swine is the “stout, cloven-hoofed artiodacthyl of the Old World family Suidae.” Swine is also the plural of swine. People were called swine by the late 1300s, long before they were called pigs. The phrase “pearls before swine” is from Matthew 7:6 and is a very descriptive story (read the Bible for yourself - it will be good for you). However, when the Bible was translated into French the Latin word became confused with the French word for the daisy, and the Dutch phrase ended up as “roses before swine.”

Hog is any hoofed member of the Suidae family, including both boars and swine; it also refers to any swine that weigh more than 120 pounds. Since the late 1100s it has been used of any swine raised specifically for its meat. By the 1400s it was used of a greedy person. The phrase “to go the whole hog” may have come from the discount received by buying the whole animal, and has been used since 1828; but in 1779 the story was told in English about “the Muslim sophists, forbidden by the Quran from eating a certain unnamed part of the hog, who debated which part was intended and managed to exempt the whole of it from prohibition.” 

Road hog has been around since 1886, and only since 1967 has hog been used of Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

Boars are “uncastrated male swines.” (Yes, removing the ovaries can be called castration just as removing the testicles is.) It is Old English and is of unknown origin. Sows (pronounced as in flower) are females, and the word is used not just of swine but of other animals, like bears.

The phrase “pig in a poke” dates back at least to the 1520s. A poke is a bag, and buying a pig in a poke is buying the animal without seeing it. Back when meat was scarce a person could cheat another by selling them a bag of expensive pig but substituting more common cats or dogs for the pig. This practice of cheating someone is also the origin of the phrase “let the cat out of the bag,” which now means to tell a secret.

One final note – Porky Pig will celebrate his 80^th birthday next year. Like many in Hollywood, I think he’s had plastic surgery over the years. 

Petitio Principii

This blog used the word entreaty last week. Why entreaty rather than ask or request or inquire or plead or beg or implore? What is the difference between these words? Most of these words are both verbs and nouns; plead is the verb form of plea, and beg and implore are only used as verbs.

As often is the case, the differences can be instructive. Beg has a sense of powerlessness that plea does not, although both can be strong words. Request, ask, and entreat are not as obvious.

Ask means to put a question to, or inquire about. It is the most innocuous of the words in this spectrum. Ask comes from an Old English word, acsian, that had the same meaning. According to etymonline.com the acsian “would have evolved by normal sound changes into ash,  [or] esh, which was a Midlands and southwestern England dialect form. [The] modern dialectal ax is as old as Old English acsian and was an accepted literary variant until c. 1600.”

Inquire means to seek information by asking. It seeks an answer to a question, where ask may know the potential answers but request a decision as to which one applies. Inquire came to English in the late 1200s from the Old French word enquerre, which came from the Vulgar Latin word inquaerere. Quaerere means inquire, while the in- prefix means into; so inquaerere means ask into.

Request has a sense of formality or politeness to it that ask and inquire do not. Request came to English first as a noun, in the mid-1300s, and was not used as an English verb until the 1530s. It came through Old French (requeste) and Vulgar Latin (requaesita)  from Latin (requesita) and meant “a think asked for.” The verb could have been formed from the noun or from Middle or Old French.

Plead has more emotion involved than ask, inquire, or request. It is defined as “to entreat earnestly.” Plea and plead both came to English in the 1200s, with the noun beating the verb by a few years. Both originally had only a legal sense (which is retained in English usage) and came from Anglo-French. The noun form came from the Old French word plait, a 9^th century word that meant lawsuit or decree. It came from the Medieval Latin word placitum, which in classical Latin meant opinion or decree, and literally meant “that which pleases, thing which is agreed upon.” Yes, the word please comes from the same Latin root word.  The sense of begging is first recorded in the late 1300s.

Beg usually means either to ask for charity or alms, or to implore or ask fervently. Beg also arrived in English in the 1200s, but its etymology is not clear. While there is an Old English word bedecian that meant “to beg” but apparently the more common Old English word for beg was wædlian, which was formed from the Old English word for poverty, wædl. There is a polite use of beg in the phrase “beg pardon,” usually a means of asking for forgiveness for a minor offense. It has been used in that sense since about 1600. More recent is the command to dogs to “beg” which has been used since 1816. One other phrase using the word beg is “to beg the question”, which is a literal translation of the Latin phrase “petitio principii.” Etymonline.com says the Latin “means ‘to assume something that hasn’t been proven as a basis of one’s argument,’ thus ‘asking’ one’s opponent to give something unearned, though more in the nature of taking it for granted without warrant.”

Implore has a sense of pity to it that the others don’t. It usually does not indicate the financial need that beg does. Implore arrived in English the latest of all these words, in about 1500. It came from the Middle French word implorer which came directly from the Latin word implorare, that meant “call for help”. It is formed from the prefix in- combined with plorare, which means to weep or cry out.

So, if asking does not work, be more polite and try requesting, but if you really need more information you may want to inquire. If it’s a legal matter or has some desperation about it you may want to plead, and if it’s not legal but desperate you can implore. If you’re financially pressed try begging. I beseech you.