by Roseanna White | Aug 20, 2018 | Word of the Week
It has been a rainy, rainy summer here in West Virginia. The result? Critters everywhere they shouldn’t be. We live in the woods, and the rodents and spiders inside this year have been terrible.
Then…then…there’s the copperheads. These venomous snakes usually prefer the tops of the mountains, not down where we are. But rainy seasons tend to wash them down (or so is the prevailing theory). My mother-in-law, who lives up the driveway, has been on this property for 30 years, and she’s spotted copperheads maybe 3 times in years prior. But last week we saw our second of the season (and quickly dispatched it with a shovel). (And no, that photo is not mine!)
I shudder at the proximity of that most recent one to our house (it was right behind our car) and thank God above that my daughter spotted it while out of striking range. But this being me, I’m also thinking, “I know the term was used during the Civil War for those with secret allegiances…I wonder why they chose that snake in particular?”
In
Circle of Spies, final book in the Culper Ring Series, I focus on secret groups–in addition to my Culpers, we have the undercover Pinkerton agents, and the Knights of the Golden Circle, which are the ones called Copperheads.
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Upon looking it up, I found an interesting explanation! In the parts of the South where the groups originated (including where I live), there are 2 main types of venomous snakes: rattlesnakes and copperheads. Rattlesnakes are easily spotted and warn you from a fair distance away that they’re there. With the shake of their tail, they’re saying, “Get back, now. I don’t want to have to hurt you.” This, according to an 1854 historian, is what an honorable Southern man would do most of the time. He would lay out his complaint against you in a forthright manner.
But unlike the rattler, the copperhead is sneaky. Stealthy. And aggressive, often biting before people even realize they’re there. This is what the secret societies began to do. They abandoned the overt and went for the silent strikes. Well before war broke out, these societies had been dubbed “Copperheads.”
By the time the war was in full swing, the term had come to be applied especially to Northerners with Southern sympathies. That terrifying “fourth column” that Lincoln himself mentioned, and which comes up in my book. =)
So there we go. A quick lesson in terms inspired by a too-close call with a nasty little snake in my driveway!
by Roseanna White | Aug 13, 2018 | Word of the Week
Last Wednesday, I was invited to speak at retailers event near Lancaster, PA. As my husband and I were driving through Pennsylvania, also known in our family as “the land of oh-so-helpful road signs,” we saw first the “Don’t Tailgate” sign. And then one that said “Beware of Aggressive Drivers.”
My husband, who had only caught of glimpse of that one, said, “Did that say ‘beware aggressive drivers’ or ‘beware of aggressive drivers’? Because it would be funnier if there were no of. Then we wouldn’t know if it was warning us to beware of them, or just warning them.”
Naturally, this led to the next question of, “So is beware just be + aware?”
“Probably,” I said. “Or be + wary. In fact, I bet aware and wary are variations of the same word.”
And so, it turns out, they are.
Beware is from around 1200, a contraction of “be wary” or “be on one’s guard.” It’s from the Old English wær, which means “prudent, wary, aware, alert.” Aware is also directly from the Old English, from gawær, which is obviously just a slight variation, meaning “wary, cautious.”
So there we go. Our musings were correct. And Pennsylvania will forever remain the Land of Oh-So-Helpful Road Signs.
by Roseanna White | Aug 6, 2018 | Word of the Week
I live in a house with both a man and cats. So naturally, the debate about which came first, whisker for a man’s facial hair or whisker for the long, sensitive hairs on a cat’s face, has come up. (Yeah, okay, so my family’s all weird, LOL. Or my word-nerd ways have rubbed off on them. We do seriously have these sorts of conversations on a daily basis.)
First, a bit about where they came from in general. Whisker comes directly from whisk–“to move with a sweeping motion.” Interesting, the noun whisk is from the late 1300s, while the verb is from the late 1400s. It wasn’t until around 1600 that whisker came into being, as a playful form of whisk–a thing that sweeps. And it was attributed first to…
Ready for the answer? 😉
Men’s facial hair! It took another 70 years or so for it to be applied to animals.
Which does make me wonder what it was called on animals before that? Anyone know?
by Roseanna White | Jul 30, 2018 | Word of the Week
Before bed one night, while we were waiting for his sister to finish washing her face and brushing her teeth, my son and I were coming up with silly reasons for each season’s name.
It began with the easy-to-determine
fall. “Hey!” Rowyn said, “I bet it’s because of when the leaves fall.” I assured him that was, indeed, the reason. “Then what about
winter?” he asked.
I thought for a moment, and then said, “Because that’s when all the leaves already wint.”
He laughed at my deliberate mispronunciation of went and said, “So how about spring?”
Another real answer. “It’s when new life springs forth. But for summer…?”
Rowyn thought for a little while then said, “I know! It’s when the school year is all summed up.”
Aren’t we just the cleverest things. 😉 I’ve already looked into the real etymologies of pretty much all those season words, but it occurs to me that I’ve never looked up season itself! So a quick lesson.
The English word (which has been in use since English itself originated, in the 13th century) comes directly from the French saison, which means exactly what the English does–“a period of the year; the appropriate time.” But if you trace saison back, it comes in fact from the Latin sationem, which literally means, “to sow, to plant.” In the days of Vulgar Latin, the word was used most often to indicate spring, when said sowing and planting was done. It was the French who broadened it to mean any season, and we of course borrowed that from them.
I hope you’re enjoying your summer season!
by Roseanna White | Jul 9, 2018 | Word of the Week
Slang. Something we all know. And probably use. “Informal language.” Those words not accepted as proper but not bad. That informal language is in fact usually “characterized by vividness and novelty.”
Mostly, the word hasn’t changed that much…but it’s broadened. And is, in fact, itself nearly impossible to trace the etymology of. Various experts have posited various theories, but none can be proven and said experts can’t seem to agree with each other. It might have Scandinavian roots…or French ones…or something else entirely.
What we know is that its first uses were very specific. In 1756 we have a record of it appearing to mean “the specific vocabulary that thieves use.” By 1801 it was the terminology specific to any particular field. But the definition we know now was only a few years behind, having been firmly established by 1818.
So we might not know where it comes from. But we certainly know where it’s been. 😉 And because I have a strange household, my children will occasionally actually argue about whether a word is slang or “accepted.”
Was “slang” acceptable in your family or school growing up?
by Roseanna White | Jul 2, 2018 | Word of the Week
It’s summer. And so, as I was casting around looking for words to feature, my daughter said, “Do something summery! Like, you know…a carnival, or the fair.”
When I’m writing this, our County Fair has just finished up, and the neighboring county’s is scheduled for a few weeks from now. But I have to confess, I’ve never researched the history of these traditional events.
I started, of course, by looking up the word. First of all, I discovered that fair, the adjective, and fair the noun aren’t related at all. The adjective dates back to the Old English fæger, meaning “pleasing to the sight, beautiful, morally good.” Similar words can be found in other Germanic languages.
The noun, however–“a regular meeting in a city or town for buying and selling”–is from the 1300s, Anglo-French, from the Old French feire or faire. I had no idea these were totally different words, from different languages!
Back in the day, a fair was much like a market. But centuries ago, big events (often city- or county-wide) began to be scheduled for once a year, where people didn’t just buy and sell, they came to see the latest innovations, enter their food and livestock into contests, and basically stay up-to-date with the rest of the world.
The earliest county fair in America is recorded in 1641, in New Amsterdam. By the 1800s, they could be found in just about every county. They were still primarily agricultural expos. This was where new farm equipment was demonstrated and new techniques discussed. But by this time, a bit of the carnival atmosphere had also come in. Games, contests, and competitions offered something for everyone.
I love that these events are still a part of our culture! I admit that my family mostly likes to go for the rides…and maybe the food, LOL. But I love that horse-pulling competitions have just morphed into mud-bogging and demolition derbies. That people still enter their livestock into competitions, and people still bring baked goods to pit against their neighbors’.
Do you go to your County or State Fair? If so, what’s your favorite part?
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.