Great Grandparents or Great-grandparents.

This past week my father died. He, and my grandfather and my great-grandfather all lived to be in their 90s. So it bodes well for this blog to go on for another few decades. I was wondering why we call our parent's parents "grand" and their parents "great." So let's find out and see where it goes.

The use of grand- in talking of your parents' parents came originally from Latin and Greek. Grandis in Latin means big or great, or full or abundant. (Perhaps the abundant meaning is the reason behind the appellation. Many grandparents delight in the abundance of the number of grandchildren they have. I know my dad did.)

The use came into English in 1200 or earlier. It came from Anglo-French, where the words were graunde dame. 

But where did "great" come from? It was apparently first used to describe a relationship once-removed, and the earliest attested use if of a great uncle. In Old English you would have referred to your great-grandfather as your þridda fæder, which literally translated is "third father." By Middle English the term was furþur ealdefade. (Any Middle English people out there know what furþur ealdefade is, literally translated? My guess is "further old father.)

Great-grandfather was first used in the 1510s, and it took a decade for great-grandmothers to be included.

I used removed earlier to mean "distant in relationship by a degree," in this case once-removed. I thought that while we're in the 1500s we might as well cover its meaning, since it came into use in the 1540s.

Removed in a genealogical sense refers to a generation. So your great uncle is your uncle once removed, or your father's uncle. So your grandparent's relatives are twice removed, and your great-grandparents relatives are three times removed. I just filed a photo of my grandmother and her brother Milt: my uncle twice removed.

Does the hyphen need to be in great-grandparent? Yes. For instance, my grandson Noah no longer has any great-grandparents, But he has some great grandparents, if I do say so myself. Our family is blessed with great ancestor, even though one more was "removed" this week.

The Long and (Mostly) the Short of it

This week’s readings (a book and a magazine) were replete with words appropriate for blogging: aperçu, divertissement, embonpoint, mordant, and rigmarole. Two of them have been posted on previously (the ones in purple, which will take you to their post when clicked on), so that leaves three for today’s post. Let’s take them in reverse alphabetical order just because I can be contumacious sometimes.

Rigmarole is a word I remember hearing my mother say, although she pronounced it as if it were spelled rigamarole. It is apparently an accepted variant spelling of rigmarole, because the Collins English Dictionary says so. But the preferred spelling is rigmarole; the word is a noun for any long or complicated procedure, or for a set of pointless statements or just garbled nonsense. Rigamarole is more fun for an utterance; it has a cadence to it and works well in dactylic tetrameter poetry, as the first part of this sentence might illustrate. (You provide the aperçu.)

Its etymology is almost as much fun as its utterance. While it came to English in 1736 to describe “a long, rambling discourse,” according to etymonline.com, it seems to have come from a colloquial Kentish use from the 1520s, a form of “ragman roll,” which coincidentally will be the name of my next album. “In Middle English a long roll of verses descriptive of personal characters, used in the medieval game of chance called Rageman” was the reference. But the name of the game (rhyme of the ancient blogman) may be from “Anglo-French Ragemon le bon ‘Ragemon the good,’ which was the heading on one set of the verses, referring to a character by that name.” For two hundred years it referred to a long, rambling discourse until 1939 when the idea of a foolish activity or commotion was added. The etymological explanation in itself may qualify as a rigmarole.

Our next word today is divertissement. It is NOT synonymous with diversion, because a diversion can be anything that entertains or distracts, while a divertissement is defined as anything that serves as an interlude in a performance. It is short, while a diversion is of indeterminate length. It is also related to performances: if you’re not watching a performance of a play, opera, or concert, that which provides entertainment between pieces is a diversion. For those who have never been to a play, opera, or concert, consider the Super Bowl commercials or halftime show as divertissement and you have the idea. Short entertainment between the main entertainment.

Divertissement came to English directly from the French in about 1720. The French word means amusement or diversion, but its English meaning is influenced by the Italian word divertimento, used in music for a piece of music either providing light amusement or using a small group of performers.

Finally, let’s get an aperçu at aperçu. Aperçu (pronounced to rhyme with “at her sea” if you’re still on that poetry kick) is a quick glance, or a glimpse of something. It can also mean a quick estimate or insight, or just an outline or summary. Whatever your use, it should be short and quick, not a rigmarole.

Aperçu, it won’t likely surprise you given the cedilla, is from the French word of the same spelling (although cedillas are also used in Portuguese, Catalan, Old Spanish, and Visigoth, which is probably where you encountered it.) It came to English in the 1820s. The French got it from Latin, from ad percipere, to perceive. Get it? Or was that too much of an aperçu?

Anyway, that’s the long and the short of it. Mostly the short.

Garbanzos and Gileadites

I used the word ersatz in a recent email, and checked to see if I'd covered it in this blog. I hadn't, so let's make up for that oversight and see where the word takes us.

I wondered if it was a Yiddish word that I'd missed in my posts on that subject, but etymonline.com says that it is a German word meaning literally compensation, replacement, or substitute. It was used in 1875 as an adjective to refer to military units held in reserve. It is now used as an adjective to describe anything artificial or substitute. It was then used as a noun starting in 1892, to mean any artificial substance or article used to replace something genuine. Like those pink, blue or yellow packets that are ersatz sugar.

As referenced in the opening paragraph, when researching a word it is interesting to see what other words have a connection to the word being researched, or how it compares with similar words. Ersatz provided neither. So let's go with another word and see where it takes us.

In a goodreads book review I used the word shibboleth, and again double checked against this blog. It turned out to be another word I had yet to expound upon with a very interesting and expansive etymology.

As I wrote the review I wanted shibboleth to mean the equivalent of "sacred cow" but found that it means far more. The third listed meaning is, indeed, close 'to sacred cow: a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth. In fact, "sacred cow" might itself be a shibboleth.

The second meaning of shibboleth is "a slogan or catchword." I can't recall having seen shibboleth used with this meaning. And the primary definition is "a peculiarity of pronunciation,behavior, mode of dress, etc., that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons. So a shibboleth would be the Texas Rangers' (the lawmen, not the baseball team) cowboy hats, or the uniform of people in the Salvation Army.

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word, and it arrived in English in the late 1300s directly from the Hebrew, undoubtedly from its use in Judges 12:4-6. In Hebrew it means both "flood or stream" and "ear of corn." (Don't ask me why those two! Maybe a Hebrew scholar can post a comment to explain.)

Here's the Judges story: the Gileadites were fighting the Ephraimites, and in order to protect themselves from Ephraimites posing as Gileadites they decided to use the password "shibboleth" because Ephraimites could not produce the "sh-" sound. This led in English to the word shibboleth meaning "watchword" or "password" as it has since the 1630s. It wasn't until 1862 it developed the meaning of an outmoded slogan or common saying with little current meaning.

This isn't the only instance of a word being used to distinguish one nationality from another. In 1282, during a massacre called the Sicilian Vespers (now THERE's a title for a movie about the mafia) the Italians used the shibboleth cicera to identify those who were French, because they could not pronounce the word that means "chick peas." Apparently they could pronounce garbanzo, though.