Word of the Week – Career V. Careen

by Roseanna White | Oct 16, 2017 | Word of the Week

The other day, my husband asked, “So what’s the difference between career–as in to career down a hill, the verb, and careen?”

To which I brilliantly said, “Uh . . . er . . . I don’t know.”

So naturally, I had to look it up. And it’s SO INTERESTING!

Let’s start with career. We all know it mainly today as the noun–our job path–right? But that’s a derivation of the original meaning dating from the 1530s, which was “a set course to run.” A horse would run down a career in a joust, for example. Or a runner might sprint through the career in a race. It’s from the French carriere, and before that the Latin cararia, and is the same root as words like “carriage” and “chariot.” (Who knew?!)

About 60 years after the noun entered English, the verb joined it–meaning “to charge at a tournament,” from that idea of the horse running the career. By the 1640s, it had taken on a broader meaning of “to move rapidly, run at full speed.”

So our notion of career-as-a-noun is actually directly from that original noun definition–it got broadened to mean “general course of action” by around 1600, and hence more specifically “course of one’s public or professional life” by 1803.

So what about careen? Dating from the 1590s it’s from the French cariner, which is in turn from Latin carina, which is literally the keel of a ship. So to careen was to turn the ship on its side and expose the keel–first in the sense of an inspection, but later came to be any time the ship tossed from side to side. By the 1880s it had taken a turn toward the general, and was applied to anything tossing from side to side, especially at high speeds. But apparently it wasn’t confused with career until the 1920s. Before that–perhaps because ships were still such a standard part of life (my musing, not the official one)–the two were never used interchangeably.

Word of the Week – J

by Roseanna White | Oct 9, 2017 | Word of the Week

Okay, so it’s more a letter of the week. 😉

My curiosity over the letter J began in part when I saw a Facebook rant, claiming that we’re all in big trouble spiritually because we’ve forgotten the true name of the Son of the God–that it was Yeshua, not Jesus.

The Greek scholar in me immediately took note…especially because there’s no “sh” sound in Greek, so I kinda laughed. The way Jesus is spelled in Greek is more like “Iesus.” (Pronounced “Yay-soos.”) Depending on the part of speech. Like all other words, names change in Greek depending on how you’re using them. But regardless, no “sh” sound. Now, I assume it would be present in the Hebrew…and given that the stories of His life were written in Greek, I’m also assuming He heard His name pronounced both in the Hebrew and Greek fashion–and so far as I know, He didn’t raise a fuss about it.

But I digress. How, I began to wonder, did we move from pronouncing it with a Y to pronouncing it with a J?

Well, that’s pretty fun. See, in both Greek and Latin, it’s actually spelled with an I (or the Greek equivalent). But I contained, in both languages, a y sound at the beginning of words many times, because it’s a natural slur of the tongue–say “ee-ay-soo” out loud. It sounds like “yay-soo,” right? So there we go.

J was actually the last letter added to the Latin alphabet (which English, or course, uses), and it was at first just a swash version of I, used when I came at the end of a sequence, especially a number. For instance, 13 would be “xiij” to let you know that was the end of the number. It had no sound of its own, it was interchangeable with the I.

It wasn’t until the Renaissance that a scribe named Gian Giorgio Trissino began differentiating the two and assigned J a sound of its own–the soft “j” sound like in “jam.” From there, it also took on other sounds, like in “Taj Mahal”–and still retained that “y” sound in words like “hallelujah.”

It’s worth noting, however, that in many languages, “J” still keeps that “Y” sound as its primary one–consider German, for instance. And then in Spanish, we get an “H” sound for it.

My conclusion? Jesus didn’t show any great issue with how His name was pronounced at the time, insisting on either a Hebrew or Greek pronunciation, so I really doubt He gets upset that Trissino developed a new sound for the letter J which subsequently changed how His name was said by certain people groups using the Latin alphabet. All the same, it’s quite interesting to realize where the J came from, how its sound has changed over the centuries, and how that took us from “Iesu” to “Jesus.”