by Roseanna White | Oct 1, 2012 | Word of the Week
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| Palermo: Fishing Net in Mondello by Dedda71 |
When one is writing a series about a secret espionage organization, one frequently finds oneself using modern words to describe this group. And then one must constantly check oneself and go, “Aw, man! That wasn’t around yet!”
One such word is network. Though historians will use the word network to describe the widespread Culper Ring, they certainly wouldn’t have used it themselves. It’s been a word since the 1500s, don’t get me wrong–a word that meant “net-like arrangement of thread or wires.” So you could have a network of string tangled around your feet. A network of rope with which to catch fish. And . . . yeah, that was pretty much it. 😉
By 1839, the word saw it’s first expansion and was applied to any inter-locking system. Like railways, canals, roads. From there the word traveled with us into the radio age and got applied to “a broadcasting system of multiple transmitters.” And then, finally, in 1947 that was taken a step further to a group of people who are connected.
Yeah, definitely not using that one in The Culper Series.
I hope everyone enjoys their first day of October! This signals the busiest month of my year . . . and of course, it’s the month I intend to finish
Whispers from the Shadows, which will require another 40-50,000 words written. So feel free to say a prayer for me as I balance writing time with family fun every weekend.
by Roseanna White | Sep 17, 2012 | Word of the Week
I was actually reading this weekend (oooo…ahhhh), and oh-so-enjoying losing myself in the pages of a fine historical. A fine historical that at one point made me pause when these 1866 characters used the word sketchy.
Insert Roseanna narrowing her eyes and scratching her head. And being word-nerd enough to pause and go, “Really? I trust this author and publisher, but…really?”
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| Da Vinci, Head of a Woman sketch |
So naturally I had to look it up. =)
And indeed,
sketchy was a word by then. By, in fact, 1805. At which point it had a literal meaning of “sketch + y” says
www.etymonline.com. Which made me scratch my head again, because I’ve honestly never heard it used in a literal sense. So I hop over to
dictionary.com to see what
that is and discover it means (duh) “like a sketch, giving only outlines or essentials.” Which…yeah, okay. From which came the meaning of “imperfect or incomplete.” But
that sense didn’t emerge until 1878.
Not sure when the informal, slang meaning of “disreputable / shady” joined the family, but that one, I’m pretty sure is more modern. And how I usually hear it used. 😉
Hope everyone had a great weekend! I’m happy to report that I’ve finished going over my galleys for
Ring of Secrets and am ready to send the manuscript home to Harvest House today. =) Quite a relief, as now I can focus on preparing for conference. Woot!
by Roseanna White | Sep 10, 2012 | Word of the Week
I’m mixing things up today! Don’t worry, there’ll still be a wee bit of etymology here. But I also want YOUR thoughts.
So this past week there were two different times when I wanted an old-fashioned word for crazy. I found one I was looking for, which is:
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| by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta |
Crack. As in crack-brain fellow–this means, quite simply, crazy. Voila. To spice it up a bit more, you can even say something like cracked in the nob. (Nob being “head”…) This has been a meaning of crack since the 17th century, and the equivalent word was even used in Ancient Greek by Aristophanes! (Who, for the record, is not my favorite Greek playwright. He was a little, how shall we say, vulgar. Just so ya know…)
The thought there is pretty obvious–that your head/brain got cracked and all the sanity leaked out. (Oh, there are days…)
But I’d like to collect a few more. See, my heroine has been suffering severe sleep deprivation, which can result in some crack-brain symptoms like hallucinations and major mood swings. So twice I have someone wondering about her sanity. But I really shouldn’t use the same word both times, and “mad” and “crazy” and “insane” just get so boring, don’t they?
So who else can come up with a fun expression that would have been around in 1814? (I just found one other popular one that was, in fact from 1810. Let’s see if you can.) 😉
Ready…set…GO CRAZY!
by Roseanna White | Sep 3, 2012 | Word of the Week
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| Idle Hours by Henry Siddons Mowbray |
Today I’m going to examine the origin of a particular phrase rather than a particular word. 😉 Friday, as I was working on
Whispers from the Shadows, my hero was exclaiming something about how it was time to take action himself, since those who ought to be continued to…
Sit on their hands?
Twiddle their thumbs?
Do nothing, but that was far too boring an option for his current state of mind. So Roseanna headed to
www.etymonline.com. =)
I was somewhat surprised to find sit on one’s hands in the listing, because, well, I figured “sit” would have about a thousand idioms associated with it and didn’t know if that would make the cut. But in fact, it was one of the few they included.
And certainly not around in 1814, when Whispers takes place. No, to sit on one’s hands comes from the notion of doing so to withhold applause and originated in 1926. Not until the ’50s did it get extended to “do nothing; be idle.”
So Thad certainly couldn’t be accusing the politicians of sitting on their hands. What, then?
The next phrase to leap into mind was twiddling their thumbs. Here I got closer. Twiddle is from the 1540s, when it meant “to trifle.” But the notion of twiddling one’s thumbs, i.e., having nothing to do, didn’t emerge until the 1840s. Closer, closer. But not quite there.
But in the entry for twiddle was the earlier phrase that twiddle one’s thumbs replaced–to twirl one’s thumbs. Ah! Fun. Enough of a variation to sound old-fashioned to us, but still recognizable. And from . . . 1816.
At first sight, argh. Because that’s two years past my date. But then I remembered that etymonline uses the first written appearance (because what else could they possibly go on?) and in those days, a phrase usually appeared in writing several years after it had entered the common spoken vernacular. So I decided that was close enough, and my up-to-the-minute hero could well be using a newfangled, popular phrase that his father would be less likely to try out. 😉
And so a few key politicians in Washington City are twirling their thumbs. And Thad has decided it’s time to do himself what they refuse to…
Happy Labor Day, all! Enjoy some idle time today. Sit on your hands for a while, guilt free. Or better still, pick up a good book. 😉
by Roseanna White | Aug 27, 2012 | Word of the Week
This is a short one, but surprising. I always thought of wow as a modern word. So when I looked it up, I was shocked to see that it’s from 1510!
Wow is a Scottish interjection, one of those that arise from a natural sound we make when surprised by something. Much like whoa, ow, ouch, huh, and the like.
It became a verb in more modern days, though–we only started wowing people in the 1920s, originating in America. 😉
But in my defense, it’s a word that waxed and waned in popularity. It apparently took on new life in the early 1900s after being not so in use prior, and then had another surge in the 1960s. Which has carried through to now.
And of course, had led to one of my four-year-old’s favorite sayings: Wowwy-zowwy-coppa-bowwy! (Or however one would spell that…)
by Roseanna White | Aug 20, 2012 | Word of the Week
Mean is one of those words that I knew well would have been around forever, but I looked it up to see about some of the particular uses. And as usual, found a few surprises. =)
As a verb, mean has meant “intend, have in mind” even back in the days of Old English. No surprise there. It shares a root with similar words in Dutch and German and various other languages, perhaps from men, which means “think.” But the unexpected part–the question “Know what I mean?” is only from 1834! Of course, that’s as a conversational question, a saying. I daresay the words were uttered as a particular question before that. Know what I mean? 😉
As an adjective, it began life as “low-quality.” Like “a mean hovel” that the poor dude lived in. But it also carried a meaning, rather related, actually, of “shared by all, common, public.” And presumably if something were shared by all, it wasn’t really high in quality, eh? So “inferior, second-rate” was also a natural progression for the word, and came about in the 14th century.
I knew this definition would be the oldest but, when I looked it up, was more interested in when the most common meaning if mean (meaning of mean–ha . . . ha . . . ha . . .) came into play. It acquired the “stingy, nasty” implication in the 1660s, and was then pretty strong. We Americans had to come along to give it a softer side of “disobliging, pettily offensive,” so that didn’t come about until 1839–again, there’s the surprise!
And an interesting note on it too. The inverted sense of “remarkably good,” (think “wow, he plays a mean piano!”) is from 1900, most likely from a simple dropping of a negative, like “he is no mean piano player,” (
mean here being either “inferior” or its
other meaning of “average.”)
Have no mean Monday, all! 😉
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.