Word of the Week – Cue

Word of the Week – Cue

by | Mar 27, 2023 | Word of the Week

In English, we have two main meanings of the word cue. The first is the billiards stick; and the second is the signal to begin an action. Cue is also how we spell the letter Q. Which is important. Remember that. 😉

So our word for the billiards stick or other sporting equipment that bears the same name is actually an anglicized spelling of the French queue. We know that word, of course, because we still use it for “a list” or “a line,” especially in British English. In French the word means “tail,” but you can see the similarity there.

Alright then, what about the second meaning of cue, which we today use far more often? This one is fun. It’s actually where that spelling of the letter comes in–because we in fact, when we use cue for “a signal to begin” mean Q. Short for quando, the Latin word for “when.” That Latin direction was written in the scripts given to individual actors’ partial copies of plays. They didn’t copy the whole things out for everyone, just the line before their own, and then their parts. That line before was marked with quando at first and then abbreviated Q. So the line before your own is your Q … or cue … to begin. We can see this written in original copies of Shakespeare!

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Word of the Week – Nightmare

Word of the Week – Nightmare

by | Mar 20, 2023 | Word of the Week

Nightmare.

We all know what it is. A bad dream that leaves you breathless. Or any situation that conjured up those horrible feelings. Right?

Well, today…sure. But in fact, nightmare didn’t mean “any bad dream” until 1829! What did it mean before then, you ask?

Well, it was actually a mythological creature’s name. The nightmare was thought to be a goblin or incubus who preyed on both people and horses in their sleep, pressing on their chests and trying to suffocate them.

That “horse” connection made me wonder if it’s still a solid equestrian word, if this particular incubus resembled a horse or something…I’m not entirely certain, but I can tell you that the spellings aren’t identical in the root Old English they come from. Not to say they’re not related somehow.

An interesting note is that the idea of a goblin nightmare stems from the same mythology that ascribed a demonic identity to echo as well. Echo was a goblin that mocked humans it heard out of doors…Nightmare was one that oppressed us in our sleep.

Nightmare became metaporical for any bad situation in 1831, an nightmarish came along in 1834.

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Word of the Week – Ye

Word of the Week – Ye

by | Mar 13, 2023 | Word of the Week

We’ve probably all come across those cutesy, old-timey signs, right? “Ye Olde Sweets Shoppe” or the like. Cutsey and old-timey because they’re using spellings no longer in use, which our modern eyes immediately recognize as coming from the 18th century or earlier.

What most of us don’t realize is that in this case, “Ye” is not pronounced like yee, the also-old-timey word for you. Nope. Wanna guess how it’s pronounced?

Like “the.”

Cue the lightbulbs…and the questions. Why, you ask, would we pronounce it in the familiar way but spell it with a Y?

Answer: it’s not actually a Y. It’s a combination-letter called Thorn. Way back in the days of Old English, this letter, which came from Scandinavia and to English by way of Scotland, was used for the “th” sound. It looked a bit like a p with a tall staff.

Writing cursive forms of the letter 'thorn'

As Old English turned into Middle English, using this digraph became more and more popular, especially with short words like “the” and “that.” But at the same time, the writing of the letter became less and less distinct. That p-looking thing became more of a y-looking thing. And rather than take up horizontal space with the whole word, people started using a superscript e to write “the.”

This persisted for a good long time…but during that time, printers became more and more popular. Only, printers didn’t like creating separate type for all the combo letters that were around. So instead, they used a “standard” letter to represent the digraph. In this case, they used a Y for the “th”-sounding thorn.

And that, my friends, is why so many things say “ye” when they really meant “the.” It never would have been pronounced with a y-sound…it was just a typesetting shortcut for what everone knew was a th-sound.

Fun tidbit: Icelandic is the only surviving language that still has the letter thorn!

 

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Word of the Week – Quintessential

Word of the Week – Quintessential

by | Mar 6, 2023 | Word of the Week

When we use the word quintessential today, we use it to mean “something is typical or representative of a particular kind.” So to an American, apple pie is the quintessential pie, perhaps. (Let’s not start a heated debate here, now, you cherry lovers! It’s just an example, LOL.)

But let’s look at the word, going back to the root word, quintessence, for a minute. Quint, we know, is Latin for “five.” And essence is, well, essence. 😉 Something’s very being. So when we put that together we get “fifth essence.” Which, hmm. What does that mean?

It starts clicking into place when you replace essence with a synonym in meaning here, element. The ancient world understood all matter as being composed of four main elements in various combinations: fire, water, earth, and air. The fifth element or essence, then, was thought to be something heavenly, something pure that imbued all things. The pure being that is in all of us and everything around us.

This fifth essence was thought to be incorruptible, pure, bright. It was of course nullified in most things by the other elements, but if you get at it…if you could get to the heart of a thing, to its being, to that purest of essence…well, that was the quintessence, or the quintessential part.

The word itself has been around since the Middle Ages, entering English in the early 1400s. In Medieval alchemy, in fact, the attempts to do things like turn lead into gold was all about finding the quintessence and bringing it out. And so too today, in our metaphorical meaning, something that typifies a kind will represent it purely.

Word of the Week – Toilet

Word of the Week – Toilet

by | Feb 27, 2023 | Word of the Week

When we moderns here the word toilet, me may be inclined to wrinkle our noses. But our ancestors of centuries past would have had a far different response.

Toilet has been in the English language since the 1530s, when it came to us from French as “a garment bag.” Yep, that’s right, it was first cloth or net used to protect one’s clothing, from toile, which means “cloth, net.” We still have the word toile for a particular kind of cloth, but thanks to the deviation in pronunciation in English, we may not have made that association.

By the 1700s, toilet referred to the rather complicated process of upper-class dressing. That “cloth to protect clothing” began to be used for a protective cloth laid out upon a dressing table, upon which all the tools of the art were placed. It didn’t take long for it to refer, instead, to the stuff put on that table–the mirrors, pots, combs and brushes, bottles, pins, cosmetics, and so on. As time marched on, both English and French began to use the word to describe the process or ritual of dressing, especially of doing one’s hair.

In the early 1800s, the sense began to shift from the process, to the room in which it happened. A dressing room was referred to as a toilet by around 1819…and of course, the best dressing room would have a lavatory attached. American English can be credited with transferring the word to the porcelain lavatory fixtures, in 1895–probably as an attempt to make it sound prettier than the business warranted. 😉 This euphemism was used for toilet paper by 1884, so it wasn’t unique.

I personally find it interesting that, while we Americans are the ones who first applied the word to the lavatory and its fixtures, we have since begun to euphemize that with “bathroom” for our rooms and even commode (which has a similar etymology) for the fixture, while our friends in England use toilet for the room. As an American, I found it a bit disconcerting to see signs for the toilets everywhere. How uncouth! 😉 Or…very couth, as the case may actually be.

Word of the Week – Apron

Word of the Week – Apron

by | Feb 20, 2023 | Word of the Week

Did you know that “an apron” used to be “a napron” … until eventually people got confused about the ellision and changed the spelling to match? Even funnier is that this has happened quite a lot in English (and other romance languages that have articles with n, like French, Italian, etc) with words originally beginning with n (see orange).

Faulty separation of the word from its article aside, the word apron, meaning “a cloth to cover one’s front to keep one’s clothes clean” is from the mid 1400s, from the French naperon, meaning “small tablecloth.” (Yeeeepppp. We just tie a tablecloth over us, like in a cartoon. No fooling.) Naperon, in turn, is a diminutive of nappa, meaning “cloth,” which came from the Latin mappa. Apparently those Old French speakers had a tendency of changing Ms to Ns.

By the 1700s, it was extended to other objects that looked or acted like an apron, and it has been used to refer to the business of a housewife since the 1610s!