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! 😉
by Roseanna White | Aug 13, 2012 | Word of the Week
The other day I was looking up “war zone,” and in so doing came across some interesting tidbits on zone. =)
The noun dates to the late fourteenth century, coming directly from the Latin zona, which means “a geographical belt, celestial zone.” The Latin in turn comes from the Greek zone, which was the word for “belt.” Originally this was used solely to talk of the five great divisions on the surface of the earth–the torrid, temperate, and frigid areas, separated by the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Arctic and Antarctic circles.
It wasn’t until 1822 that zone was applied to any set region–so I could be pretty sure “war zone” wasn’t around yet in 1814, LOL. It was applied to sports in 1927.
Then we have the verb sense coming into play. “Zoning” land for a purpose dates from 1912.
Not to be confused with the oh-so-modern sense of “zone out.” This verb is from the 1980s, a back-formation of the adjective “zoned” that’s related to drug use, taken from the word ozone. I guess it implies that someone’s really high, which I’d never paused to consider. That use is from the 1960s. (Surprise, surprise, LOL.)
So there you go. Some really ancient uses, and some incredibly modern ones. =)
by Roseanna White | Aug 6, 2012 | Word of the Week
From time immemorial–or at least since the rise of pencil and pen and paper–people have been scribbling nonsensical pictures onto the page when they’re thinking. We call it doodling. But apparently we’ve only been calling it that since 1935. I had no idea it was that new a word! I figured it wasn’t old, but I would have guessed a bit older than that!
There’s a fun quote here from a play of the era:
LONGFELLOW: That’s a name we made up back home for people who make
foolish designs on paper when they’re thinking. It’s called doodling.
Almost everybody’s a doodler. Did you ever see a scratch pad in a
telephone booth? People draw the most idiotic pictures when they’re
thinking. Dr. Von Holler, here, could probably think up a long name for
it, because he doodles all the time. [“Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,”
screenplay by Robert Riskin, 1936; based on “Opera Hat,” serialized in
“American Magazine” beginning May 1935, by Clarence Aldington Kelland]
And yet we see the word (not with the “draw aimlessly” meaning) way before that, right? It’s derived from dawdle, it seems, and has a meaning of “fritter away time.”
But in the 1600s it meant “a simple fellow.” It was, in fact, a derogatory term thought to have a, um, rather crude connection. Let’s just say it was extracted from “cock-a-doodle-do” as a euphemism for one of the other words in that sound effect… Yeah, see? Crude. So the British really weren’t being nice when they came up with “Yankee Doodle.”
At any rate, when my 1814 heroine has drawn absentmindedly upon paper, “doodle” is not a word I can use to describe it. 😉
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.