If You Can Be Ruthless, Can You Be Ruth?

I was reading something recently and the word ruth was used. Not the name Ruth, but the word. I do not recall ever seeing this simple word before; ruthless, yes, but not ruth. Yet if Ruth can be ruthless one should be able to be ruth, right?

Ruth (the word, not the name) and ruthless are opposite, and ruthless is more commonly used. It means at least without pity, mercy or compassion, but can mean cruel. So it makes sense that ruth means pity or compassion. It also can mean sorry, remorse or grief, or even self-reproach.

Ruthless is an adjective, while ruth is a noun. Ruthless came to English in the early 1300s after ruth had been around for over 100 years. Ruth may have come from an Old Norse word, hryggô, but may have formed from the work reuwen, meaning to rue. If it were the latter the word would follow the same form as true and truth. It was originally spelled ruthe. There was in the 1300s an adjective ruthful, but it has not been used since the 1600s.

Ruth, the name, comes from the Bible; Ruth was an ancestor of David and is probably a contraction of the word for companion, friend, or fellow woman, reuth. Ruth was a friend and companion to Naomi, which in English is a name only.

Since we’re on names, I mentioned in a recent post that we would get to the name Althea. While the marsh mallow plant belongs to the genus Althea, the more common use of althea is as the name of the plant known as the rose of Sharon, hibiscus syriacus. Althea is a variation of the Greek name Althaea, which may be related to the Greek word for healing, althos. It is not one of the more common names in English, and I mentioned one famous person with that name, Althea Gibson. In 1956 Althea Gibson was the first person of color to win a Grand Slam tennis event, something the Williams sisters (Venus, named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty, and Serena, from the Latin word serenus that means clear and tranquil) have replicated numerous times. Althea Gibson was also the first black player to compete on the women’s professional golf tour.

Rose of Sharon was first used in English in the 1611 translation of the Bible authorized by King James. It is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for crocus. But it does grow in the Sharon valley.  I work with a Rose of Mexico City.

Women’s names that are also English words are more common than men’s names. Faith, Hope and Charity are all used in one verse of the Bible (I Cor. 13:13) and are also women’s names. While the aforementioned Venus is a woman’s name, I have yet to encounter a man whose first name is Mars. My brothers Don and Bob come close; there are words don and bob. But Don is short for Donald while Bob is a nickname for Robert. I don’t know how you get from Robert to Bob any more than I know how you get from Lawrence (not my given name) to Larry (my given name, but usually a nickname of Lawrence.)

I’m still waiting to see the trio Faith Hill, Hope Solo, and Charity Zisengwe in concert together. Chastity Bono (now Chaz) could be Hope’s dance partner, since they were both on Dancing with the Stars. Chaz also was the writer of most of the songs and lead singer of the music group Ceremony, so he could do double duty.

Other than that, what’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Puss 'n Boots

No, this is not about the lead character in the 1667 Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Charles Perraut story. And, in case you are as confused as I have been, the story is not about two characters, one named Puss and one named Boots (if it were, the contraction between the names should have an apostrophe both before and after: ‘n’.) In the story, the Puss wore Boots. 

This post is about the words puss and boot.

First, puss: actually, puss, pus, pussy and pussycat; what, other than their first three letters, do they have in common?

Pus is the oldest of these words, having arrived in English from Latin in the late 1300s. The vowel is pronounced as if spelled puhs or as if it had a double s (like muss and fuss) while our other puss words are pronounced like poo-s, as the u in push. The Latin word pus is used for any matter coming from a sore. Pus is much easier to say but sounds less innocuous than “a liquid plasma in which white blood cells are suspended” but that is essentially what it is.

As for puss, it has several meanings. In the United States it refers to a cat, while in Britain it may refer to a rabbit. The cat meaning likely comes from the sound made when trying to get a cat’s attention. It is, according to etymonline.com “A conventional name for a cat in Germanic languages and as far off as Afghanistan; it is the root of the principal word for ‘cat’ in Rumanian (pisica) and secondary words in Lithuanian (puz), Low German (puus), Swedish dialect katte-pus, etc.” Its first recorded appearance in English was in the 1520s, but it was likely in use much earlier than that. By the 1600s the word puss developed a negative sense, implying and applying the negative qualities of a cat to women, but by the mid-1800s it had regained its affectionate use as well.

By the 1580s the word pussy was being used as a term of endearment for a girl, woman, or (perhaps not affectionately) of effeminate men, but was not first used as a diminutive http://larry-whatsthegoodword.blogspot.com/2013/03/futpnbciii-follow-up-pedantic-night.htmlform of puss to refer to cats until 1726 (while rabbits were called pussies in 1715). In 1879 we find the first recorded use of pussy as a slang word for female genitalia, but it was likely in use long before being put into writing. Etymonline.com quotes a reference from Philip Stubbes’ 1583 “The Anatomie of Abuses” that says merely “The word pussie is now used of a woman.” Etymonline also states that its use in mainstream literature (like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852 where it was used as a term of endearment) argues against its more delicate use much prior to 1879.

And just to confuse matters, in 1890 the word puss was used, particularly in street fighting, to refer to the face. This use likely came from the Irish word for the lip or mouth: pus. Which takes us full circle to our first word, pus.

Our other set of words today, boot, is only a little older in English than pus. It came into use in the early 1300s, from the Old French word bote. Originally it was used only of riding boots, but now refers to any footwear that covers the foot and part (or all) of the leg. My dictionary says that in Britain it is used of any shoe or outer foot covering that reaches the ankle.

The first recorded instance of bootstrap (or boot-strap) is from 1870; perhaps that is when someone first placed a tab or loop at the top of the boot to aid in pulling the boot over the foot.

Then in 1877 the word boot was first used in writing to describe a kick. By 1880 the sense of kicking someone out (probably from a saloon in the wild west) came into being. In 1888 Steele’s school book entitled “Popular Physics” had the question “Why can not a man lift himself by pulling up on his boot-straps?” By 1916 that idea of “lifting oneself up by his own bootstraps” had expanded to mean improving oneself by one’s own effort.

Believe it or not, it was less than 40 years later (in 1953) that the word bootstrap was used to describe the “fixed sequence of instructions to load the operating system of a computer” or what we now call “booting up.” Why bootstrap or boot? Because the first-loaded program’s role is to “pull itself up” along with the rest of the programs that are needed to begin computing.

And you thought puss 'n boots was a nice little story, didn't you? 

S'more

In reading Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, I came across a sentence to the effect that one part of the United States grew thick with marshmallows. I was taken aback, in that I never thought that marshmallows grew on trees (I’ve always thought money did). Which made me wonder, what are marshmallows? And, of course, this being summer, wondering about smores, since that’s where I consume the most of my annual intake of marshmallows.

So, today we take a summer break, gather ‘round the campfire, and consider the origin of one of camping’s favorite snacks, the s’mores.

First the marshmallow. It turns out that the original pastry confection was made from the root of the Althea officinalis plant, commonly known as a mallow plant, that proliferates near salt marshes. (We’ll cover Althea in an upcoming post on women’s names. Do you know about Althea Gibson?) The plant has been called a mallow since before 1000, although in Old English the words were mersc-mealwe. Etymonline.com says the confection has been called marshmallow since 1877. According to my dictionary, the confection is made from the “mucilaginous root” of the plant. Doesn’t sound so sweet now, does it? Today the confection is likely made with another type of gum or gelatin but retains the name.

Speaking of marshmallow confections, the noun peep, meaning a short chirp (both being onomatopoetic  words) has been used since the early 1400s in English. The meaning of the word as used in the phrase “…and I better not hear a peep out of you” in which the word means any sound or utterance is attested to from 1903. The confection was known as marshmallow chicks until Sam Born bought the company in 1953 and began mass-producing them. (They had previously been hand-formed.) He named them “peeps” and in a delightful eponymous pun promoted them as “Just Born.” The company is now incorporated as Just Born, Inc., and is based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

S’mores, or smores, are a contraction of the phrase “some more” and the recipe for “Some Mores” was first printed in a 1927 Girl Scout publication. The contraction “s’more” apparently didn’t make it into English usage until 1974, although in 1968 Clarice Nelms provided this recipe: “Place a square of milk chocolate on a graham cracker. Toast a marshmallow and put it on top of the chocolate, then a second graham cracker on top of the toasted marshmallow and squeeze and you will want ‘s’more’.” The word “s’mores” is not in my dictionary or on etymonline.com.

Speaking of creations without etymology, graham crackers are another eponymous creation. In 1829 Presbyterian minister Graham Sylvester created a cracker from graham flour (made from combining wheat bran and germ with unbleached wheat flour) as a healthy cracker. It was meant to help curb “carnal urges.” Of course, now s’mores can be a carnal urge. Sometimes the best laid plans….

One more ingredient to go: chocolate. Dictionary.com defines it as “a preparation of the seeds of cacao, roasted, husked, and ground, often sweetened and flavored, as with vanilla.” It does not use the word nirvana in its definition, as I would. The word chocolate came to English in about 1600 from an Aztecan word xocolatl. (The first Aztecan word this blog has covered.)

Chocolate was first brought to Spain from the New World prior to 1520, from where it made its way to Switzerland and Belgium and other parts of Europe. It was originally consumed as a drink made from the paste of the seeds. Pepys, in his “Diary”, wrote in Nov. 24, 1664 of going “To a Coffee-house, to drink jocolatte, very good.”

So there you have it. Is that enough, or do you want s’more?

I Grue Up and Threw Up

Reading is always a source of new words for me, and there are a couple of words that are a good follow up to a trip to Alaska: grizzly and grisly. And if you get too close to a grizzly, grue and gruesome.

Grizzly (although in a book of the collected letters of S. J. Perlman it was spelled grizzlie) is an adjective that means gray, gray-haired or hoary. It has been used as an adjective in English since the 1590s, and only became a noun (part of the grizzly bear name) in 1807.

The bear was likely originally described as grizzly because the tips of its hair appear gray or gold. As a noun grizzly now refers to the species is known as the ursus arctos ssp of the brown bear family, and another rung down the species ladder are four kinds of ursus arctos ssp: the Kodiak, the peninsula grizzly, the Mexican grizzly, and the California grizzly.

The California grizzly, or ursus horribilis, was named by George Ord in either a pun or ignorance of the difference between grizzly and grisly. Ursus horribilis is the bear that is on the California state flag. The last wild California grizzly in captivity was captured for William Randolph Hearst in 1889 and lived out its life with the name of “Monarch” in the zoo in San Francisco. Monarch was the model for the bear on the California flag. Monarch died in 1911, the same year the flag was officially adopted.

Grisly is a different word, not a different spelling of grizzly. It is the word used for horror movies or murder mysteries. A grisly murder is one that causes one to shudder or feel horror, although its secondary meaning is less severe: if you are grim or formidable you can also be grisly (usually, it seems, used of old men). The word comes from the Old English word grislic, which meant horrible or dreadful. You can find similar words in Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Dutch, German, and High German, but its source to Old English is unknown. So while grizzlies may be grisly and gruesome, they are also grizzly.

Gruesome is a common word, defined as that which is grisly, causes great horror, or is horribly repugnant. Gruesome, the adjective form, has been used since the 1560s. It is not defined as something full of grue, though it could be. Unlike many words (see Be Ept, Some Abraham Lincoln, and Ravenous but not Rapacious) gruesome actually means full of grue.

Grue is now (according to dictionary.com) chiefly a Scottish word, but is a verb that means to shudder. It came to modern English from the Middle English word gruen sometime around 1300. Like grisly, its etymology is uncertain and there are cognates in Middle Dutch, Middle Low german, and Scandinavian. Etymology.com says it is “one of the many Scottish words popularized in England by Scott’s novels.”

So it is not necessarily a bad thing to be grizzly, unless you encounter a bear by that name. And if you want to encounter something grisly or gruesome, go to a horror movie and be prepared to grue.