by Roseanna White | Jul 27, 2020 | Word of the Week
A couple weeks ago, my husband said something about something costing “Ten Gs” and my mother-in-law said, “Where does that come from, anyway?”
Cue the chime of “Word of the week!” from my kids, LOL.
So obviously we knew that “G” was just short for grand. But why and when did grand start to mean a thousand?
I couldn’t find a a drawn out explanation, but what’s clear is that this slang emerged around 1915, and it was primarily used at the time in the shady side of life–etymonline.com calls it “underworld slang.” So this would have been used, strictly in the monetary sense, by thieves and mobsters and bookies and the like.
What’s also clear is that it comes directly from the adjective, which has long meant things like “large, powerful, chief, important.” Phrases like Grand Canyon and grand slam had already been well established in English, so grand already had the connotation of “the big one.” And since a thousand dollars would have been quite a lot of money back then, it certainly makes sense that it would be considered a grand amount.
by Roseanna White | Jul 20, 2020 | Word of the Week
A couple weeks ago a friend sent me a list of “18 English Words That Are Actually Hindi,” and while quite a few of them I knew that about, others really surprised me.
One of those was cushy. I knew that cushy meant “soft” and so I think I always imagined it came from cushion. Cuz, you know…logical, right?
Wrong. Cushy comes directly from the Hindi khush, meaning “pleasant, happy, healthy.” That morphed into “easy” or “soft” by the early 1900s.
Cushion, on the other hand, comes from the Latin via French and has been around since the 1300s. So the fact that these two words sound very similar is largely a coincidence, but also probably has something to do with why the “soft, easy” meaning of cushy really caught on.
by Roseanna White | Jul 13, 2020 | Word of the Week
(A revisit from 2012)
Is summer hot dog season in your family? This year we’ve started grilling out on our campfire ring every Sunday with my mother-in-law, and hot dogs are pretty much always on the menu. But have you ever wondered where they got their name?
Well, a hot dog is defined as a particular type of sausage, usually served on a split bun. Check. And in the 1890s, sausages were sometimes referred to as “dogs.” Why? Well, ahem, there was apparently a suspicion that some sausages contained dog meat. And while I didn’t see any documentation on it, the articles said this suspicion was “occasionally justified.” Ewww. =(
Anyway. So earning the name “dog” was just because it was in the sausage family. The fact that they were served on buns made them a quick and easy meal when on the go, and apparently a little boy in the 1890s rushed up to a vendor and said, “Give me a hot dog! Quick!” and it stuck. (Yeah, sounds like lure, doesn’t it? LOL)
It was popularized by a cartoon that really got the name stuck. What’s even more interesting is that it only took 6 years from “hot dog” to go from the accepted name of that particular sausage to a verb used when someone’s showing off. By 1906, “Hot dog!” as an expression of approval had gained its place too. So now that we’re moving toward the season of picnics and cookouts, you’ll know why you’re tossing hot dogs on the grill and not frankfurters or weiners or plain ol’ sausages. 😉
by Roseanna White | Jul 6, 2020 | Word of the Week
I’m currently reading Siri Mitchell’s State of Lies for my book club (SO GOOD!!!!), in which the heroine is a quantum physicist. (Which her 6-yr-old son calls a fizziest, which made me giggle.) I’ve been thoroughly enjoying all the science jokes on her T-shirts, and her musings about things like black holes.
And I also thought it would fun to take a quick peek at the history of the word. Quantum is directly from Latin, meaning “as much as,” which them in turn came to be “one’s portion.” This word has always been there in Latin, but it wasn’t borrowed for scientific purposes until Max Planck decided to use it in 1900 for these small portions of energy. It was Einstein who then took up the word and made it part of our vernacular, beginning in 1905 when he used the word in his Theory of Relativity; and then in 1912 actually coined the phrase “quantum theory” and, in 1922, “quantum mechanics.”
I do find it rather entertaining that if you look up the word in Merriam-Webster, the noun version means “small increments or parcels,” but the adjective means “large, significant.” Hmm…not sure how that one happened!
by Roseanna White | Jun 29, 2020 | Word of the Week
Originally posted in May 2015
So, duh moment. Did you know that the noun fence–like, you know, the thing around your yard–is from defense?
Yeah. Duh. I’d never paused to consider that, perhaps because the
spelling has ended up different, but there you go! It has been a
shortening of defense with the same meaning since the 14th century. Then sense of that enclosure followed in the 15th century.
It had a similar verb meaning at the same times too, with the “to sword-fight” way of defending oneself arising in the 1590s.
But the reason I looked it up was for the meaning that has a fence being someone who buys and sells stolen goods…and to fence
being to sell those stolen goods. I expected it to be a pretty modern
use, but no! As the verb, it’s been around since 1610, and it was then
applied to the person doing it right around 1700–all from the idea that
it’s accomplished under “the defense of secrecy.”
by Roseanna White | Jun 22, 2020 | Word of the Week
This is another revisit…and since we were all sheltering at home for the last months of the school year, one that we’re probably all thinking about with longing. 😉 Coming at you originally from May of 2015, when Rowyn was only 7 and Xoe was 9, which of course gave me all the “awwww”s when I saw the picture I had in this one, from the year before that. 😉 (Still not sure how my babies are now going into 7th and 10th!)
~*~
Since someone asked me about this over the weekend, I figured,
hey–already looked it up, might as well share! 😉 Especially
appropriate since this is our last week of school. Oh yeah. Right about
now the kids are mighty glad we didn’t take a bunch of snow days! 😉
Field trip comes from the idea of field…not as in “an open piece of land, often cultivated” (which dates from time immemorial) but from the idea of field being a place where things happen. This is a slightly newer meaning that began evolving in the 1300s. (I said slightly
newer, not new, LOL.) By then it could mean a battleground. And by
mid-century, a “sphere or place of related things.” By the mid-1700s
people would refer to field-work as anything that took one out of the office or laboratory and into the world, where things take place.
Field trip, then, is a natural extension of this meaning. It’s a
trip into the field, going out of the classroom and into the world where
the things you’ve been learning about can be found. Though an
actually-new phrase (from the 1950s), it has its foundation on a nicely
aged idea. =)
 |
My kiddos on a field trip to a one room school house in 2014. Rowyn would be the lonely boy in the boys line, LOL, and Xoe is the one in teal and purple. (No, shockingly, not the one dressed in period attire, LOL.) They had a blast that day, and Xoe even won the little spelling bee!
|
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.