In The Nature of a Lady, my heroine, Lady Elizabeth “Libby” Sinclair, is a naturalist. She not only loves nature–as in, being out in it and enjoying it–she loves studying nature. Her most prized possession is a microscope, and she spends much of her holiday on St. Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly out collecting specimens to study under magnification, or sketching the flora and fauna she sees.

One thing that causes her no small amount of anxiety is the fact that the world she sees–orderly, following rules, and capable of adaptation–seems at odd with the world of faith as it’s been taught to her–that the world is “mysterious,” and that scientists who suggest that aspects are capable of changing and adapting on their own are sacrilegious. Of course, leading the debate in that day and age were the works of scientists like Charles Darwin. It’s interesting to note that he was awarded the highest scientific honor in England…and that immediately upon publication, his theories split the church. Some thought they didn’t contradict the Bible at all, others thought his theories were of the devil. By the point of my story, it was still a hot topic, but most of the Church had decided that Darwin and his theories were ungodly.

Today, I simply want to take a look at the word most closely associated with him: evolution.

Did you know that evolution literally means “to unroll”? It’s from the days when a book (or more accurately, a scroll) was literally unrolled or unfurled to reveal more of itself, and hence more information, dating from around 1620. By the 1660s, it was used in mathematics and medicine to mean “a growth to maturity in an individual.” The word was first applied to species in 1832, by Charles Lyell.

What’s really fascinating is that Darwin only ever used the word ONCE. That’s right, one time, in the closing paragraph of The Origin of Species. He preferred the much clunkier phrase, “descent with modification.” I find it so interesting that the word that in our modern minds equates with Charles Darwin was a word he didn’t even like, LOL. It was other biologists who followed Darwin who began to use the word to describe changes within or between species.

Have you ever read The Origin of Species? I did in college, and I was surprised to learn that the controversial theories Darwin is known for aren’t actually present in his most famous work–those came later in other works. The Origin of Species talks mostly about evolution within a species (micro-evolution), which most people have no problem with.

So here’s the nutshell version: dreckly is just the Cornish way of saying “directly.” The end. Shortest post in history. 😉

Okay, so a liiiiittle bit more. The word directly has of course been in the English language for a good long time. In the 1300s, it meant “completely.” In the 1400s, it meant “in a straight line” or, metaphorically, “clearly, unmistakably.” By around 1600, it means “immediately.”

But apparently in Cornwall (and no doubt elsewhere), when someone says they’ll get to something dreckly, it generally means, “Hold your horses, I’ll do it when I do it, don’t rush me.” 😉 Yet another fun example of how a word that means “immediately” is used to mean “whenever, eventually.” LOL

Whenever I write a book set in a region with a dialect (or even a language) all its own, I love to look up endearments and slang unique to them. I first looked up Cornish words when I wrote A Name Unknown, set near Land’s End in Cornwall. Well, I got to dust off that research again when I decided to write the Secrets of the Isles series, set in the Isles of Scilly, which is also part of Cornwall.

Two closely related words that I love using are dearover and dearovim (feminine and masculine, respectively). The words are just contractions of “dear of her” and “dear of him.” It’s thought that it was first a phrase used as an exclamation of affection when someone did something kind “Oh, isn’t that dear of her!” and eventually was elided together. “Isn’t that dearover!” And then eventually became a term for the person herself or himself. “Oh, dearover, come here for a cuddle!” 😉

It’s a term I’ve used in my books because that “dear” part makes it recognizable to our ears and eyes and doesn’t require much of an explanation.

Are there any terms of endearment unique to your region, or perhaps to your family?

In the weeks surrounding the release of The Nature of a Lady, I thought it would be fun to take a look at some words that appear in the book. We’re going to start by looking at a few of the Cornish slang words that make an appearance. =)

And given that my heroine is a young lady from the Somerset area, coming to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly for a holiday (or to escape a match she despised the thought of, as the case may be), this first one certainly comes up. If you’ve ever visited the Cornwall area, you may have heard the word incomer tossed around. It’s local slang for “tourists.” Apparently, there is also a term for the same, emmet, taken from the name of a swarming ant, which these days is used for summer tourists, and incomer is reserved today for those who move into the area permanently but aren’t born there. I’m not sure if the same distinction existed in 1906, the time of my story, but I use incomer because it’s easy to understand. =)

The etymology of incomer isn’t hard to decipher–they’re literally people coming in to the area. But I love that they have their own word for it, and it appears throughout my series. Sometimes it’s spoken with fondness, sometimes with exasperation. The Isles of Scilly rely largely on tourism for their living by the point of my story…but that doesn’t mean that the holiday-goers don’t occasionally make the locals mutter “Incomers!” under their breath.

In The Nature of a Lady, my heroine quickly falls in love with the isles, and she’s different enough from most tourists that the locals soon love her. One of the themes of my book comes from something my hero’s grandmother says. She says that there are those born on the islands, those who visit, those who move there. But you’ll only stay forever if “the islands know your name.”

Is there a place that seems to “know your name,” where you feel as though you truly belong?

Words that Shakespeare Coined

Did you know that gloom was originally a verb? Yeah, neither did I. 😉 It’s apparently a Scottish word that originally meant “to look sullen or displeased,” dating from the 14th century. Well, in the late 1500s, Shakespeare got ahold of it; around this same time it also began to be used as a noun for “a sullen look,” and Shakespeare then added that -y to the end and created the adjective. He used it twice, first in Henry VI, Part 1 (“…but darkness and the gloomy shade of death environ you”) and then in Titus Andronicus (“the ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods”).

It’s interesting to note that the original meanings of both the noun and the verb gloom applied directly to people and their attitudes, but Shakespeare used his adjective metaphorically, to describe a forest and death. This is perhaps what led the way for gloomy and gloom to mean “dark/ness” rather than just “sullen.”

Words that Shakespeare Coined

Elbow. No, not the noun. 😉 That one has obviously been around for a while…from around 1200, as a matter of fact, in Old English. El is the length of the forearm, and bow comes from boga, which means “arch.”

Shakespeare, however, was the first to use it as a verb, which he did in King Lear, Act 4, Scene III.

KENT: A sovereign shame so elbows him: his own unkindness,
That stripp’d her from his benediction, turn’d her
To foreign casualties, gave her dear rights
To his dog-hearted daughters, these things sting
His mind so veomously, that burning shame
Detains him from Cordelia.

Shakespeare was a true master of language, being fluent in seven of them (!); he often created new words for English that came from others, but he also did this sort of thing all the time–taking a noun and turning it into a verb, or vice vera. So no need to get annoyed with people today making up words like “momming,” “adulting,” “mathing,” or the like–it’s a practice as old as language itself! And if Shakespeare can do it… 😉