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. 

Pining for My Opinion?

It has been a hiatus of a couple of weeks since my last post – my travel schedule has made posting most difficult. (I have only been at home six days this month, although the last six have been a vacation, so I am not complaining.) It is time to catch up on words related to previous posts

In a previous post I included the word abjure. But in reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry I ran across the very similar word adjure. It means to charge, bind, or command earnestly and solemnly, often under oath or the threat of a penalty. It can also mean to entreat (I would have used the word ask or plead) or request earnestly.  It came to English in Latin in the late 1300s from the word adiurare (no letter J in Latin), and meant to confirm by oath, or add an oath or swear in addition. It had the sense of another oath, although the prefix ad- meant to swear and the iurare is the word from which we get jury. But now adjure can mean oath or a very strong assertion or entreaty. And if you renounce what you formerly adjured, you abjure it.

Even further back is a post on rapine, which is not to be confused with repine or opine. Rapine is the taking away of someone’s property by force. Repine is a verb that means to fret or complain. Opine is the verb for having an opinion. And while we’re on the subject,  the words to the song from Evita could have easily been “Don’t pine for me, Argentina,” because the verb  pine means to yearn deeply for. So how do words with pine in them have such different meanings?

Let us go back to Old English, where the word pinian (not to be confused with pinion, a gear with a small number of teeth that often interfaces with another gear known as a rack) meant to torture or cause pain (not to be confused with the medieval form of torture known as the rack). It may have come from the Latin word  for punishment, poena, or the Greek word poine, from which we get words like punishment and penal (not to be confused with penile). The idea of pining causing a languishing or a wasting away came into use in the 1300s. To yearn deeply or suffer with longing is now the primary definition.

A couple of hundred years later, in the mid-1500s, someone added the prefix re- to the very pine and formed the word repine. It has come to mean to be fretfully discontented, although I have seen it used to describe a positive experience of pining, or longing in a good way. I would use pine in a negative sense and repine in a positive and less intense sense.

Opinion and opine also go back to the 1300s and 1500s. While the noun opinion also came into use in the 1300s it was not until the mid-1500s that the verb opine came into English. Both words came from French, opinion from the Old French word of the same spelling and meaning, and opine from the Middle French word opiner, that came directly from the Latin word opinari. Opinari means to have an opinion while opine means to express that opinion. We have not come far from the original meaning with this set of words.

Now you know my opinion; don't pine for me.... 

Any Port in a Storm

A couple of years ago this blog reported on disport and comport but not on import or export or report. 

Report has five meanings in my dictionary. Four of the definitions refer to an account, announcement, or statement of an event, and the fifth is a loud noise like from a rifle. It came to English in the late 1300s. The noun word report came from the Old French with the same spelling and meant a pronouncement or a judgment. The Modern French word is rapport.

The verb form of the word report came from the Old French word reporter which meant to tell or relate.  The Middle French got reporter from the Latin word reportare, which meant to carry back or bring back. It was formed by adding the prefix re- to portare. Re- indicates “back” as in Latin as it does in English, and portare meant “to carry” or carry through or way through or passage. It is a cognate of portus, that means harbor or port, from which we get our English (and before that Old English) word port. The Latin word porta is another cognate, and means gate or door; it is the source of our word portal, that means gate or gateway, even though we got portal – again in the late 1300s – from the Old French word portal that they got from the Medieval Latin word portale which was formed from the Latin word porta.

Not much later (in the early 1400s) the Latin word importare, meaning “to bring in or convey” came into use in English to mean “convey information , express, or make known”, a very similar meaning to report. It was 1500 before it was first used to refer to that which was brought from abroad (into a port).  The noun import (meaning that which is imported) was not used until the 1680s, though the noun import (meaning consequence or meaning or purport) had been used for 100 years.

Export, on the other hand, is much more straightforward.  Since the 1610s it has basically had one meaning: to send or carry out or away.  It comes directly from the Latin word exportare, ex- being a prefix denoting “away.”  It was not until 1660 we encounter the first use of the word to relate to international shipping, and twenty years more until its first use in noun form.

I mentioned rapport earlier.  Our current meaning of connection or harmonious or sympathetic relation does not suggest a connection with the Modern French word rapport that is related to report. But as we already know the etymology it may be a surprise to learn it is not that straightforward. In the 1660s the French had taken the word rapporter, that means bring back or refer to, and was formed from the prefix re-  and the word for bring, apporter (from the Latin word apportare), and backformed the word rapport, meaning the way you carry yourself or your bearing, but also meaning yield, produce, harmony and agreement.

A definition of the noun import used the word purport. Purport has the meaning of presenting or appearing to be, or professing or claiming. It can be used as a noun or a verb, and both words came to English in the early 1400s from Anglo-French words (the verb from purporter and the noun from purport).  The Old French got the words from the Latin prefix pro- that means “forth.” So I purport that the word purport has the etymological meaning of “to put forth” and idea or claim.

The import of purport is reported to be exported when there is a rapport between ports. (I am not sure that sentence makes sense but it uses all of today’s words.)