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.

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.