by Roseanna White | Jan 9, 2012 | Word of the Week
My husband has been asking for months and months, “When’s my vacation?” Working for himself as he does, he can rarely take a day off. This weekend we traveled a few hours to visit friends for a birthday celebration, and we looked at it as a mini vacation.
Which of course made me wonder about the word. =) I was pretty surprised to learn that it’s as old as it is! It strikes me as a modern idea, I suppose . . . or maybe I just tend to think of the British word “holiday” as being older.
But in actuality, “vacation” dates from the 14th century with the meaning of “freedom from obligations, leisure, release.” Which I guess goes to show that as long as people have been toiling, they’ve been in need of a break. Even the formalized version–i.e. a break from school–is from the 15th century. But the idea of going away somewhere to pass this free time (a distinction I would have thought subtle) is from the late 1800s. Who knew?
Hope everyone has a lovely Monday!
by Roseanna White | Jan 2, 2012 | Word of the Week
It’s the first Monday of 2012, and though we may not all make resolutions, I imagine many of us are thinking about what we want to do differently this coming year, and what we won’t want to budge on. We’re embracing the idea of a fresh start in some areas and accepting the traditions as a way to motivate ourselves.
So I figured this would be a good word to share the history of today. =) Did you know that “motivation” wasn’t in use until 1873? Pretty late! And even then, it was only used in a literal, physical sense of “causing to move toward action.” The sense of “inner or social stimulus” didn’t come into play until 1904.
I discovered this last year when writing
Annapolis and was baffled for a good long minute. My character was claiming that his friend would question his motivations. But if he couldn’t question his “motivations” in 1783, then what was he questioning?
Then I had a “duh” moment–he would be questioning his motives. “Motive” carried that very meaning since the 15th century. Which rather begs the question of why we ever thought we had to add that “-ation” ending to it, doesn’t it?
Which brings me back to one of my favorite quotations–I believe this is from Pascal, though I’d have to look through my old notes to make sure, so if I’m wrong, please correct me. I love this one because it’s basically saying “Don’t be pretentious, dude.” So a fun one to start off our new year . . .
“Think with deep motives–but talk like an ordinary person.”
Happy New Year!
by Roseanna White | Dec 19, 2011 | Holidays, Word of the Week
In Old English, Christmas day was called geol (not to be confused with gaol, which is jail–ha ha ha), taken from Old Norse jol. Jol was a heathen feast day, taken over by English so long ago that no one’s sure exactly when it happened. Though we do know that “jolly” comes from jol. 😉
Origianlly, geol, or yule, meant solely Christmas Day. It also happens that there was a cognate, giuli, that was the Anglo-Saxon name for a two-month midwinter season of feasting, so the two got mixed together. When English first borrowed the word, it meant the 12 Day Feast of Christmas–December 25 through January 6, the Epiphany. It was largely replaced by the word Christmas by the eleventh century, except for in Danish-settled parts of England.
Writers, however, revived the word in the 19th century to capture the particular charm of Christmas in Merry Ol’ England. Oh yes, it’s always the writers, LOL.
Yultide (literally yule time or Christmastime) was recorded in the 15th century, and the first written mention of the yule log is from the 17th century and was a ceremonially chosen log (sometimes and entire tree) picked to have an enduring burn for Christmas.
Can you believe there’s less than a week until Christmas?? I hope everyone is enjoying this yuletide season!
~*~
And today I’m on
Go Teen Writers! It was a fun interview, so be sure to check it out to learn what I would do if captured by kidnappers. 😉
by Roseanna White | Dec 12, 2011 | Word of the Week
I was browsing through the entries for “get” over at www.etymonline.com, trying to discover when “get-go” came into being. Well, I didn’t find that (maybe it’s been around from the get-go. Ha . . . ha . . . ha . . .), but I did find some interesting info on “get back.”
Get back has been used since the 1600s in the sense of “return”–as in, “let’s get back to town.” That’s no big surprise, right? What surprised me was that the transitive sense of “recover”–as in, “Can you get back the money you lost?”–didn’t come about until 1808. Rather late for something so literal, in my opinion! And the meaning of “retaliate” didn’t enter English until 1888. Very late.
Pretty cool, huh? (Go ahead and say it–I’m a Word Nerd, LOL.)
Oh, and check out my post on RomCon Inc’s historical blog today!
And now, consider yourselves cordially invited to an online Colonial Christmas party! The Quillers over at Colonial Quill will all be there chatting, and I hope you can join us!
by Roseanna White | Dec 5, 2011 | Word of the Week
I can’t tell you how much time I spent chasing rabbits down trails (literarily speaking) for a one-line mention in my books. Like, did they have bells over the doors in 18th century New York? Hard to discover.
This last week, one of my random questions was, thankfully, easily answered. I wanted a character to mention a cameo necklace, which I was pretty darn sure were around and popular by the 1860s, but I’ve been wrong before. So I looked it up.
I was pleased to see that cameo, by which I mean a carved stone with two layers of color, has been around since the 16th century. Cameos maintained a steady popularity for centuries–Elizabeth I had a sizable collection, as did Catherine the Great. And since Queen Victoria favored them, they even stuck around during the fast-changing fashion of the 19th century.
In 1851 the word was attributed to “a short literary sketch or portrait.” Very much related to the pendant, which commonly depict a bust or figure (though not always). And so this sense was also transferred to the stage/film in 1928, when it came to mean “a brief role that stands out from other minor parts in a performance.”
I have a cameo necklace I inherited from my great-grandmother, and I love it. =) There’s something so very romantic about those treasures from times past . . .
by Roseanna White | Nov 28, 2011 | Word of the Week
I know, I know–what a strange, bizarre word of the week. And now y’all are probably wondering what I got into this weekend! 😉
Actually, it comes up because I’m a cruel author who just seriously injured her hero. I need him to be out of it for a while so said, “Hmm, they had some powerful drugs by then. Was morphine one of them?”
Yep.
And the name is just too interesting not to share. Did you know that morphine is named after one of the Greek gods as brought to us by Ovid in his Metamorphosis? (Not to be confused to Kafka’s book by the same name . . . and not to get into how much I despised said book-by-the-same-name each of the three times I was forced to read it . . .)
Anyway. Apparently Ovid gave the name Morpheus to the god of dreams. When the Germans named this lovely drug in 1816, they called it morphin in allusion to Morpheus, because of its sleep-inducing properties. The French, of course, changed it to Morphine. Which we borrowed in 1828 and have been using ever since.
Now to make sure my hero doesn’t develop a dependency–he has enough problems to deal with, I don’t wanna go there! LOL
And for those of you who are amassing those entries into the Great Annapolis Giveaway and/or interested in winning a free copy of Love Finds You in Annapolis, Maryland all by its lonesome, hop right back over to the Colonial Quills and leave a comment on my very first full-length blog review. =)
https://www.roseannamwhite.com/2011/11/review-of-love-finds-you-in-annapolis.html
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.