I live in the Appalachians–a place with so many shades of green that a friend who moved here from Colorado reported she’d never seen so many in her life, LOL.

But all those trees and plant life means something else, too. It means we have a lot of humidity in the air, and in summer, that means things get INTENSE. A favorite word around here is muggy.

Muggy has been used to describe conditions that are “damp, close, warm and humid” since around 1746…but why? Where in the world did this word come from?

Turns out it’s from a now-obsolete word, mug, which meant “fog or mist,” which comes from Middle English mugen, “to drizzle.” This Middle English word is from the Old Norse mugga of the same meaning…but them there? Etymologists aren’t entirely sure but suspect it’s related to the root word meug- which means “slippery or slimy.” Which is where mucus comes from.

What do you think? Are muggy and mucus related? (My husband frequently describes a muggy day as “feels like the inside of a mouth out there,” so…not so far off! LOL)

Word Nerds Merch!

SPF might not seem terribly mysterious. Anyone who wears sunblock is accustomed to seeing the abbreviation, and it’s no mystery what it stands for “Sun Protection Factor.”

But did you know that the first sunblock was not, in fact, created for sunny summer days? Nope! It was invented by a Swiss chemist with a love of mountain climbing, named Franz Greiter. He was tired of getting sunburned during his treks up and down the mountains, so in 1946 he invented the first sunblock…which he called “glacier cream.”

I just love irony like that.

It didn’t take long for those who loved the sun to pick up on his invention and start to use it for other outdoor activities. By 1954, people were using the term sunscreen (already in existence for physical items that blocked the sun) for the lotion. In the 1960s, Greiter came up with the SPF rating for his lotions, and that rating system is still what we use today!

Well…sort of. The idea behind it is that however long a person can usually be in the sun without getting burned is your base number–so, say, 15 minutes or so. Then you factor in the lotion, and however long you can now go without being burned is your end number. So you divide to get the SPF. So if you can now go 30 minutes without a burn, then the SPF is 2 (which is fact what that original “glacier cream” was rated). Modern lotions with high SPFs still recommend you reapply more frequently than the rating would indicate. 😉

As for that original inventor? His company is still making sunscreen, and they specialize in high SPFs!

Word Nerds Merch!

Ever wonder why we don’t cruit, but we cruit again (recruit)? Maybe you don’t, LOL. But as I was driving along the road a few weeks ago and saw text on the back of a tractor trailer that was wearing off, it got me to wondering. What’s the root of this word, where we use the “re-” prefix but not the word itself? Is that “re-” the one I expect or something different?

Turns out, it is indeed the usual “re-” meaning “again.” So where does –cruit come from?

The roots are Latin, from crescere, meaning “to grow.” So it’s literally “to regrow” or “to grow again.” Old French began to use a form of this to represent new growth, which is where our current meaning comes from. By the 1630s-1640s, it had worked its way into English as both a noun and a verb to mean “new supplies or military reinforcement.” It did get its start strictly in military things–soldiers or supplies for said soldiers–but it didn’t take long for it to expand to any new supplies (by 1660).

Although the idea of recruiting student athletes is pretty new, dating only from 1913.

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Tomorrow, my first romantasy releases!! My copies have already arrived, and I am SO excited to welcome Awakened into the world. So of course, how better to celebrate than to look up the history of the word fantasy? (I mean, ice cream works too…)

Fantasy came to English via French around 1400, meaning “illusory appearance,” from the French fantasie/phantasie, which means “vision, imagination.” French, in turn, got the word from the Latin phantasia, which itself came from the Ancient Greek word of the same pronunciation, both of which meant “power of imagination.” The Greek word shares roots with other words having to do with vision and light.

The idea of a “whimsical notion” actually pre-dates the main 1400 definition, and “fantastic imagination” followed by the 1530s.

What about the notion of “a daydream based on desires”? That’s pretty new, going back only to the 1920s. And the genre of fiction (obviously what we’re concerned with today, LOL) was established by 1939.

Are you a fan of the genre?

Word Nerds Merch!

Since we just featured queen, it seemed appropriate to look next at king…even though the history of this word, which traces its roots back to prehistory (seriously!), is less straightforward because of that long history.

What we know is that our current English formation, king, is a contraction of the Old English version, cyning. It meant “ruler” and is derived from the original Germanic language’s version, kuningaz. But where did that come from? That’s where things get murky, since it’s been around so long.

There are theories that the word is related to Old English cynn, meaning “family” or “race of people.” In which case king would be literally “leader of a people group.” Or it could be related to an old Germanic word that means “of noble birth,” which was originally linked to being descended from the gods, back in pagan days.

And have you ever noticed the similarity between king and kin (family)? Yeah, the experts are certain that’s no coincidence, but they can’t actually trace the connection there either.

But back in the early days of Britain, king was used to denote what we would now more call chieftans–leaders of small groups of peope that made up one or a few families. It wasn’t until the rise of Europeans nation-states as we know them now that the word in English took on the more formal, austere tones we associate with it today. And even when the notion of king grew a bit more high-faluting, the same word was still used for chiefs or tribal leaders for many years.

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Last week we explored the word wife, but it’s so closely linked to queen that I had to look into this word next!

Queen traces its roots back to the original Indo-European word gwen, which means…you guessed it…”woman.” Just like wife. In ancient Germanic languages, that’s how it was used. But by the time Old English began to evolve, we’d begun using it specifically for what one might call “THE wife”–the wife of the king. And by Middle English, quene (spelled like that rather than our current spelling) had become fully differentiated from “wife” and meant “the pre-eminent female noble; wife of a king; female ruling in her own right.”

I find it fascinating to realize that English, with queen, is one of the few languages whose word for the title is not just the female version of a our male word, king.

Word Nerds Merch!