Presenting Presents in the Present (Gifts)

Two years ago this blog posted “The Pedantic Night BeforeChristmas” and last year we looked at words for love and joy. In the spirit of Christmas we’ll begin this year by opening some presents.

Why does a word (present) that is a tense and an adjective that means “at this time” also have the noun meaning of a gift or the giving of a gift? And what kind of a word is gift?

Present as a noun meaning gift was the first to arrive in English, in about 1200. It came from the Old French word present that came from the Medieval Latin word presentia. Etymonline.com adds “from phrases such as French en present ‘(to offer) in the presence of,’ mettre en present ‘place before, give,’ from Late Latin inpraesent ‘face to face,’ from Latin in re praesenti ‘in the situation in question,’ from praesens ’being there’…on the notion of ‘bringing something into someone’s presence.’” For me, that quote fits into the category of too much information.

The next versions of present to arrive in English were both the noun and adjective meanings of “the current time” as opposed to future or past. The noun arrived about 1300 from the Old French word present and from the Latin praesens that means “being there.” The adjective arrived concurrently to the noun but directly from the Latin praesentem meaning “at hand, in sight.” Interestingly (perhaps) the meaning in English of “being there” attached to “present” did not occur until the mid-1300s, about the same time that the word was used to describe the grammatical tense.

Just to complete the forms of speech, the verb use of present (pronounced with a long "e" in the first syllable and emphasis on the second syllable) also entered English about 1300. Meaning “to introduce formally” or “give formally” it comes from the Old French presenter and directly from the Latin praesentare, “to place before, show, or exhibit.”

I was surprised to find that the word gift arrived in English after the various words present. Perhaps due to the various forms of present the need for an exclusive word for that which is given was needed. Gift, according to etymonline.com, was used in surnames from as early as about 1100, but took until the middle of the 1300s for it to convey its present meaning. (See how I used present in a way that can refer to either "now" or "the thing being given"?) Gift came to English from a Scandinavian source; Old Norse has the word gift or gipt meaning gift or good luck. But Old Saxon also has the word gift and Middle Dutch has it spelled ghifte. The Old English noun for giving or gift was spelled giefu.

In this season of giving, my present to you is the gift of words. I’ve collected them for years, and hope you enjoy the interrelationship and discovery of how words came to be. (For instance, in German, the word Gift means poison. Wait until next year for that post.) It has been a gift (not the German word) to me to be able to give time to this blog and I trust it has been enjoyable for you as well as (on occasion) enlightening.

That's it for the present(s). Next week we're on to the future.

Tincture: A Hint of Tint, But T'aint about Taint

I ran across the word tincture recently and wondered what, if any, relationship the word had to distinct, extinct, and instinct. It turns out tincture is more closely related etymologically to taint, tinge, and tint than any of the other “-tinct” words.

Let’s follow the etymology of tincture. The noun tincture came into English in about 1400 from the Latin word for the act of dyeing: tincture, which came from tinctus which is the past participle of tingere. Within 100 years the verb tinge appeared in English from the Latin word tingere. Then by 1600 the nouns taint and tinct (from the Latin tinctus) appear. Taint came from the Old French word for color, dye or stain: teint. The Old French got teint from the Latin word tinctus and within 20 years of its arrival the English had added the sense of corruption or contamination. By that time tincture was also being used as a verb. Before another 20 years had passed tincture was also being used of a solution of medicine in alcohol, as in tincture of iodine (but also tincture of benzoin and even of opium). In 1717 the word tinct was altered to the commonly used tint, probably influenced by the Italian word for color which is tinta. But the etymology of words from tingere wasn’t complete: in 1752 we have the first recorded use of tinge as a noun.   

What is the difference in meaning? When do you use tincture rather than tint, tinge, or taint?

Tincture, when not meaning something in a solution of alcohol, means to give color to, tinge, or to “imbue or infuse with something” according to dictionary.com. It has lost its close association with color, and now is often used in the imbuing or infusing sense.

Tinge as a verb means to impart a slight trace or degree of tint (or now taste or smell) to. When used of color it can be synonymous with tint, although tint alludes to a more general or complete but weak coloration while tinge would have an even more limited or visible coloration.

Tint (the word formerly known as tinct) is a color or hue, but can also mean a color that has been diluted with white. It is most often used of a diluted or lightened color and among these words is the one most often used in coloring hair.

Taint is the negative infusion or imbuing of something. It can be infection or contamination, can be physical or moral, but is rarely anything but bad. It is possible to find examples without a negative meaning, but that is the misuse of the word. Use tint or tinge if you wish to describe a hint of a color or something good.

So where do distinct, extinct, and instinct come from? They are all related to the past participle forms of Latin words (extinctus, instinctus, and distinctus), which is why they also have the -tinct ending. All three are related to the Latin word for prick or goad or quench: stinguere. And etymonline further elucidates with the tieing the “ish” forms of words like extinguish and distinguish to the “Latin inchoative suffix –iscere).

Unfortunately there’s no space to delve into this today, so stay tuned. 

Daring to Endure the Use of Derring-do During the Day

What does derring-do mean? If it’s related to daring, why is it spelled differently?

Derring-do is a noun that means doing a daring or heroic action. It’s been an English word for a long time, since the 1300s, and was originally dorrying don, two words that literally meant “daring to do.” So it IS related to daring.

But in Middle English the present participle form of the verb was durring. The Middle English equivalent of dares was durren. Dare in Old English was durran, and the verb was conjugated as darr, dearst, dear in the singular. A form of the past tense of dearst, dorste, survives in the word durst, an increasingly rarely used past tense of dare. The verb dare means having the courage or boldness to do something.

So how do we get from durring to dorrying to derring? How do we get from verb to noun? Remember, at that time English was not written much, and it was not until the King James Version of the Bible and the writings of Shakespeare that much standardization of spelling came to take place.

In the 1500s durring was misspelled as derrynge and the poet Edmund Spenser mistook it for a noun rather than a verb as it had been. It is Spenser who attached the chivalric meaning, that of a hero performing daring acts.

It was not until the 1590s that the verb dare (however it was spelled at the time) also developed a noun sense.

In case you’re wondering, and why would you, the preposition during comes from a different word, from duren, that in the late 1300s meant “to last or endure” according to etymonline.com. The present participle form of duren was durand, and it is from durand that we get during. So when we say during the day it is a vestige of the old meaning of “while the day lasts or endured. The English got the word duren from the Old French word durer which the Old French got from the Latin word for endure, durare, the word from which we get our word endure. The phrase “during the day” is (again, etymonline.com:) “a transference into English of a Latin ablative absolute (compare durante bello ‘during (literally ‘enduring’) the war”).” Don't you love the ablative absolute? Absolutely.

And while we’re there, the adjective enduring, meaning lasting, came to English in the 1530s, while the verb endure had arrived in the late 1300s. Endure, meaning to hold out against or to last through, came from the Old French word endurer, which meant to make hard or harden or bear and tolerate. The Old French got the word from the Latin word indurare, meaning to make hard. In Late Latin the word meant to “harden (the heart) against.” My most enduring recollection of the phrase “harden the heart” is from the King James Version account of the exodus of the Jews where it is used 12 times in Exodus (three times in chapters 10 and 14, twice in chapters 8 and 9, and once each in chapters 4 and 11.)

So dare to endure the use of derring-do during the day.