From Poison to Potable

In December last year I discussed the word gift (12 21 14). But what I did not share at that festive time is that in German Gift means poison (as it does in Swedish, Dutch, and Danish). Last month I could have expounded upon poison on the Ides of March, but my father’s passing made that inappropriate. So let’s get into some poison today (figuratively, not literally).

Poison, while now both a noun and a verb, entered English as a noun first, in about 1200. It was first used as a verb around 1300. The word for any substance that is injurious to health up to and including being deadly can be used both figuratively and literally. It comes to English from Old French where it was spelled puison or poison until Modern French settled on poison.

In Old French poison was initially a drink, especially if medical in intent, then later a magic potion. The Old French got poison from the Latin word potionem which was a form of the word potare. (Raison and rationem had the same changes of t in Latin to s in French, but reason and rational are words for another week.) While Latin is the source of the Italian pozione and the Spanish pocion, etymonline.com suggests “the more usual Indo-European word for this is represented in English by virus.” The Old English word for poison was ator, and we retain ator in a word for a spider (or a person who’s as bad as a spider), attercop. (Attercop was an entirely new word to me. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered it before.)

The Old French had the word enerber or enherber to use when talking about killing with poison plants, hence poison took time to develop the English meaning in French.

Perhaps you realized that the word potion shares the Latin root word potionem. Potion also came to English from Old French, where it had become pocion. It then (as now) is a drink especially if it is medicinal or magical, although it can also refer to a poisonous drink. And etymonline.com shares that potus (now an acronym for President of the United States) “as a past participle adjective in Latin meant ‘drunken.’” Remember: they said it, not me.

Potus is a form of the word potare which is also the source of the word potable. Potable as an adjective refers to any liquid suitable for drinking. It came to English in the early 1400s, also from Old French, where it was also spelled potable. “Drinkable” in Late Latin is potabilis, explaining how the Old French got from potare to potable.

And that is how you get etymologically from poison to potable. It is easier than the process of getting from salt water to potable water (which, in one word, is desalination).

The Measure of a Man

I was talking with my wife recently (Hey! It could happen!) and we were speculating whether gram is a measure of weight or volume. Then I started wondering why volume is a descriptor of size, one of a set of books, and loudness. So here we go with this week's post. 

It is difficult when talking about weights and measures to define what you're talking about. Take gram, for instance. It is defined as a metric unit of mass or weight equal to 15.432 grains or one thousandth of a kilogram. A grain is not just any grain. It is a plump grain of wheat (don't try and cheat me with a skinny grain of wheat - I'll have none of that.) That weight called a grain is the same amount in avoirdupois, troy, apothecary, British and American systems. So take 16 plump grains of wheat, cut the 16th one into 1000 pieces (wear your glasses) and put 432 with the other 15 to weigh the same as a gram. Take 15,432 plump grains of wheat and you have a kilogram. A paperclip is about the weight of one gram.

The word gram came to English (the English spelling is gramme) in 1797 as the metric system was being developed during the French Revolution. The French got it from the Late Latin word gramma, which came from the Greek word gramma, both of which mean "small weight." The metric system in France was officially adopted in 1799.

Volume can mean one of a set of published works, or it can mean the amount of space that an object of substance occupies, or it can be a measure of loudness. How do we get three such different meanings for one word? When volume came into English in the late 1300s from the Old French word volume it already had two of the three meanings, both one of a set of written works (printing wasn't invented yet) and size/girth. It referred primarily to a roll of parchment or a bound book. It had come to French from Latin, where volumen means "roll" or "that which is rolled." In the 1520s the sense developed that anything about the size or weight of a book was/had a volume of.... Within 100 years both meanings took hold in both French and English.

So where did the meaning of loudness come from? Unfortunately I have been unable to uncover that development. I consulted things like "The History of Audio and Sound Measurement", a paper presented at the 94th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society in Berlin in 1993. But I found one explanation that said "The phrase 'volume of sound' is a natural application of the 'bulk, mass, quantity' meaning. It occurs in a review of the third performance of Handel's 'Messiah' from 1784." That works for me. Eventually the "...of sound" became understood. 

There is a word above that hasn't been covered in this blog: avoirdupois. While the French adopted the metric system, the standard system of weights in England (except for gems, precious metals and medicine) since the late 1400s has been called the avoirdupois system. Avoirdupois is a misspelling of the Middle English (@1300) phrase avoir-de-peise which is a change in spelling from the Old French avoir de pois meaning "goods of weight" according to etymonline.com. The word for weight comes from the Latin word for "to weigh", pendere, from which we get the word pendant. In case you wonder, one of the early means used to measure length was the distance of a pendulum swing. (If you want to read more about the efforts of Picard and Huygens and Wilkins and Jefferson to use pendulums to establish a standard length, click here.) 

So the volume of my avoirdupois is significantly more than a gram, or a kilogram. 

Downing Q Shots

A couple of words in queue to question are quench, quell, and squelch. And maybe if there's time we can get to queue/cue, too. (As opposed to too, too cute.)

Quench is defined by several words: slake (I think quench is more commonly understood than slake), satisfy, or allay (again, allay is less understood). When it comes to fires, it means put out or quell, the same word used when using quench in response to a rebellion (something I haven't encounter lately, since there have been few rebellions quenched recently). Basically, the meaning of quench is to do what is necessary to make the situation go away. You can quench a thirst or a fire with water. It takes more than water to quench a rebellion.

Quench is the modern spelling of the Old English word acwencan, It may have come from the Old English word cwincan, or from (my favorite language I know nothing about) the Old Frisian kwinka.

Quell, on the other hand, comes from the Old English word cwellan that meant to murder or kill, which I find interesting because in my mind it has a sense of peace and quiet. Perhaps that's because it is often used in regards fears. You quell fears, not quench them But both are used of rebellions; when quenched is used I take it to mean it took some violence but when quell is used I take it to mean it was somewhat peaceful suppression of the uprising. The milder sense of extinguishing that I attach to the word came into use in about 1300.

One of the defining words for quench was slake. It also comes from Old English, from slacian or sleacian. That word (however it was spelled) meant the same as our word slack: loosen in tension or remiss in doing. Then in the early 1400s the sense of making slack or inactive was applied to the use of slake and it took off in the direction of allaying thirst, hunger, or an emotion like desire or wrath. That has now become the meaning of slake and we have (since the 1510s) used slack for the original meaning of slack. The word slacker is "an agent noun" (according to etymonline.com, not James Bond) from slack and was only popularized in 1994 though it dates back to 1897.

Fears can be quelled or allayed. The difference? Quelled has a sense of calmed, allayed a sense of relieved or done away with. My fears, when quelled, remain but are no longer relevant; my fears when allayed are set aside, no longer existing. The Old English word from which we get allay (alecgan) meant put down or give up (I like the symmetry) or remit.

How you get from alecgan to allay may be interesting to one or two people: in early Middle English (but may be not in late Old English) the differentiation between the pronunciations of the y and g sounds were not very distinct, so the word alecgan was confused with alloy and allege. The Oxford English Dictionary (bow in reverence, pardner!) explains it thusly: "Amid the overlapping meanings that thus arose, there was developed a perplexing network of use of allay and allege, that belong to no one of the original vbs., but combine the senses of two or more of them." And etymonline explains the movement from one to two "l"s thusly: "the double -l- is 17c., a mistaken Latinism."

So where does squelch fit? And why does it have an s? While squelch came into use in the early 1600s its etymology is less distinct. It originally meant simply to drop, fall, or stomp on something soft so that it crushes. Perhaps it is onomatopoetic in origin. very early in its existence, perhaps because of its similarity to quench and quell, there was an attempt to drop the s from the word. You can still find it in the dictionary; it's a little harder to find it elsewhere.

It is interesting to note that while the primary meaning in America is still listed as to crush it also has a second (and in my experience more common) meaning of to silence or suppress. Squelching applies to words rather than emotions in American use. In British dictionaries the primary definition is the onomatopoetic sense: "to walk laboriously through soft wet material or with wet shoes, making a sucking noise." Only the third definition mirrors the American use: "to crush completely or squash."

Now we add squash to the mix. The verb squash is the first word for today that does not come from Old English. It came from Old French, in the early 1300s. It was originally spelled squachen because the Old French word was esquasser, or escasser. The Old French may have gotten esquasser from Latin, from combining the prefix ex- with the Latin word for shatter, quassare. The Old French word also meant crush, which is the primary meaning in English, whether of something tangible or not. Squash is used most often in regards to something tangible. You squash a bug or a food but not often a rebellion or an emotion. When that happens I think people mean to use squelch.

You may think the noun squash, referring to the gourd fruit, got its name because it needs to be squashed to be eaten, but that's not the etymology. The Narraganset or Algonquin word for the gourd is askutasquash, which literally translated means "the thing that may be eaten raw." I've never eaten raw squash, nor do I desire to do so.

Any desire I had to eat squash has been quashed, though my hunger is not quenched. So don't quell the fire if you plan for me to eat squash, and you'll quell my concerns. They'll be allayed when I sit down to eat.

Dinty Moor Maurice

A couple of weeks ago I almost included the word dint in an email. Realizing it wasn't what I wanted to say I chose another word, but it made me think it might be a good jumping-off point for a post. It's not a word I hear much any more, and is its most common use seems to be in the phrase "by dint of."

So let's look at it. Dint means force or power in the phrase (q.v.) but can also mean dent. In fact, dent is a dialectical variant of dint or dynt, dynt being an Old English word meaning a strike with a sword during fighting (tomorrow being opening day of the baseball season, I thought I'd use the word strike). Apparently a dent in armor is caused by a dint. While dint is old, the phrase "by dint of" comes from the early 1300s, the same time as the word dent appeared in English. But dent was not used as a short word for indentation until the 1560s.

As the title of the post suggests, another word for today is Moor. First, should it be capitalized or not? And what exactly is a Moor? I've encountered it particularly in Shakespeare and in architecture, so this seemed like a good post in which to clarify some more about moor. And what is the difference between moor and Moor? (If there is one.)

Let's take the various meanings for moor in chronological order.

The first moor to arrive in English is the noun that is synonymous with heath, but refers to the wet high ground (in latitude and altitude) that is peaty and often covered with heath. Moor is an Old English word (spelled mor in Old English) used of any swamp. According to etymonline.com the Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names says "The basic sense in place names is 'marsh', a kind of low-lying wetland possibly regarded as less fertile than mersc 'marsh.' The development of the senses 'dry heathland, barren upland' is not fully accounted for but may be due to the idea of infertility."

For a long time that is the only moor (or mor) in English. Until the late 1300s when the Latin word for someone from Mauritania (northwest Africa, now Algeria and Morrocco), Maurus (or Morus in Medieval Latin) came through Old French as More, which would have been even more confusing. The Romans actually got the word Maurus from the Greek Mauros. The Greek word for "black" is mauros, so even though north Africans are lighter skinned than sub-Saharan Africans they are still darker than Europeans. This word Moor should always be capitalized. A great history of Moor can be found at taneter.org.  

The final moor is a word that can be a noun or a verb. This moor is the place where, by lines or cables, you secure a ship or airship. It is also the act of securing the ship. But the place can also be called a mooring, which is a gerund and adds to the confusion. The word mooring came first, in the early 1400s, while the verb came to modern English in the late 1400s. While the verb's etymology is uncertain it is probably from the Old English word for the mooring rope, maurels, although it could have come from the Middle Low German word of the same meaning, moren. But etymonline says the noun mooring came from the verb moor, Curiouser and curiouser.

And before we leave the morass (another synonym for moor) of moor, let's look in on Maurice.

This name is French, from the Late Latin Mauritius (q.v.). For fans of Steve Miller Band the name is familiar, from the song The Joker, which also has a reference to the 1954 song by The Clovers, "Lovey Dovey", that my wife Dovie has never liked, even though it says "You're the cutest thing that I ever did see." A sentiment with which I agree.

So it is possible for a dinty Moor to moor at a moor and be named Maurice.

High or Low Dudgeon? An Umber Umbrella in Umbria knows.

I recently used the phrase "he was in high dudgeon." I've never heard anyone speak of someone being in low or mid-level dudgeon, only in the high version. Dudgeon is a mystery word. In the 1300s the word dudgeon was used for a kind of wood used in knife handles, and may have come from a French word. But that has nothing to do with dudgeon of any elevation.

Dudgeon now, and since the 1570s, means furious or resentful or a bit of both, and is similar to umbrage. While it may have come from the Italian word aduggiare that means "overshadow" (it was originally spelled duggin; my cousin Marvin Duggins is rarely even in low dudgeon), its etymology, according to etymonline.com, is unknown.

I think it likely to be tied to aduggiare, since umbrage has a similar etymological and current sense. Umbrage, if you didn't know, means offense, annoyance, and/or displeasure. Its etymology is more certain. It came to English in the early 1400s from the Middle French word ombrage, which meant shade or shadow. The Middle French got it from the Latin word umbraticum, which meant "of or pertaining to shade", and was the neuter form of umbraticus (same meaning), which came from umbra, the Latin word for shade. While there were many figurative uses of umbrage until the 1600s the only one that is used today is the shadow of offense, which was first recorded in the 1610s. The phrase "to take umbrage at" has been used since the 1670s.

Of course, umbra is a good word for shadow, particularly in astrology. But it originally - in the 1590s - was used of a ghost (see good words for ghost here) and wasn't used of the shadow caused by an eclipse until the 1670s.

The word adumbrate also comes from the Latin root, as does the color umber.

Umber arrived in English in the 1560s, coming from Latin either through Middle French (ombre, as in terre d'ombre) or Italian (terra di ombra) or from Umbra, the feminine form of Umber that means "belonging to Umbria." Of course the color Sienna also came from that region of Italy, but that's a post of another color.

We have all these words coming from the Latin word for shade and have yet to talk about umbrella. The Late Latin word umbrella (meaning sunshade or parasol) was actually altered from the Latin word umbella because of the influence of umbra. Bet you didn't know umbra was influential, did you?

While an umbrella is protection from the sun in Umbria (and throughout the Mediterranean region) it is shelter from the rain in England. It was used first by women in England, starting about 1700, but by the 1750s the men realized they were getting wet, too.

So don't take umbrage if your umber umbrella creates an umbra in Umbria. It might lead to you being in low dudgeon.