Word of the Week - Roseanna M. White

Word of the Week – Grub

by Roseanna White | Apr 30, 2018 | Word of the Week

Today’s Word of the Week comes as a special request from Lynne F.’s nephew, who asked about grub, and how/when it came to be a slang word for food.

Well, grub is the larva of an insect, and has meant that since the early 1400s. Etymologists aren’t actually sure if it’s from the verb grub, which means “to dig around in the dirt” and has been around since the 1300s, or from the unrelated Middle English word of the same sound and spelling that means “a dwarfish fellow.”

By the 1650s, however, two different uses of the word had come into being. First, it can mean “a dull drudge.” But also, the one more familiar to us today: “food.” This sense came from birds eating grubs, but also because of how similar it sounds to bub, which was a popular drink at the time.

Word of the Week – Reckless Vs. Wreck

by Roseanna White | Apr 23, 2018 | Word of the Week

This is actually a repost of a word from 6 years ago, but my daughter asked me about it last week, so it seemed a fine time for a revisit. 😁

Reckless is one of those that always confused me as a kid. I mean, why was it reckLESS when you were indicating that people were apt to wreck?

Of course, I knew there was that missing “w”…but still. For years it made me shake my head, and I rated it up there with “inflammable = flammable.” (Yeah, just try puzzling that one out without the help of the etymology! LOL.)

As it turns out, it is indeed mere coincidence that reck and wreck are homonyms and carry meanings that can be so opposite. Reck is from a very old Germanic word that means “care, heed.” So since the days of Old English, reckless (or its original receleas) has meant “without care or heed.”

Wreck, on the other hand, is from the Old Norse wrek, which for centuries had ONLY ship-wreck meaning–flotsam, that which washed up after a ship went to pieces. It wasn’t until the 1700s that “wreck” was applied to any remains of a thing ruined. As a verb, it has carried the meaning of “ruin or destroy” since the 1500s.

So there we have it. Two totally different roots that happen to end up with identical sounds in modern English. Solely to confuse school children across the English-speaking world, I’m sure. 😉

Word of the Week – Hat Trick

by Roseanna White | Apr 16, 2018 | Word of the Week

Some families are football families. Baseball families. Basketball families.

We are a hockey family. And since the playoff just began and we’re cheering our Penguins on, I thought I’d pause to look at one of the hockey terms. (Okay, so it was a trending word on www.etymonline.com, which is where I actually got the idea, LOL. Still!)

When I first started watching hockey with my husband, it was a constant case of, “What does that mean? Why are they doing that?” I knew none of the rules. Even now, twelve years later, I still occasionally have to ask for clarification or reasoning.

One of the early terms I needed defined was hat trick. Simple definition: when a single player scores three points in a game. In hockey, when a player gets a hat trick, the fans celebrate it by throwing their hats onto the ice. (One night, this happened during Free Hat Night, when every fan had been given a souvenir ball cap. Oh. My. Gracious. The ice was black with them!)

But where did this come from?

As it turns out, the phrase originated in the 1870s and was used in cricket for a player who took three wickets on three consecutive deliveries. The why isn’t entirely clear. Some say that he’d be given a hat by his club, commemorating the feat. Some say he got to pass that hat around for congratulatory donations. Some say it’s surely influenced by the magician’s trick of pulling something out of his hat, which is recorded for the first time in the same few years. Probably a little bit of all of these.

By 1909, the phrase had been borrowed by hockey, for the feat mentioned above, and it’s been a term in the sport ever since!

Word of the Week – Mannequin

by Roseanna White | Apr 9, 2018 | Word of the Week

I looked this one up, wanting to use it in a book set in 1917…only to find a history I knew nothing about!

So mannequin has been around since 1902, but it wasn’t a form used to display clothes. Or rather, not a non-living one. When mannequin first appeared, it was the term used for a fashion model! So those well-formed young ladies who modelled clothes were the mannequins, not the dress-forms used in display windows. That meaning didn’t come along until 1939!

That said, the word did sometimes mean “artificial man” before 1902, apparently especially in the translation of Hugo. This because it’s directly from French.

Interesting to note that we also have the word manikin, from the Dutch for “little man,” which was specifically a jointed figure used by artists. So the little 4-inch tall artist’s model I got my daughter for Christmas is a manikin. The meanings have blended over the years, but they were once two distinct things from two different languages. Who knew?

Word of the Week – Easter

by Roseanna White | Mar 26, 2018 | Holidays, Word of the Week

I’ve done this Word of the Week before, but it was six years ago, so I figured a revisit wouldn’t be begrudged by anyone. 😉

When Anglo-Saxon Christians first started celebrating the Mass of
Christ’s Resurrection, they gave it the name Easter, after Eastre, the
goddess of fertility and spring, whose holiday was likely the vernal
equinox. Have you ever looked up Eastre? She was a magician-goddess, and one of her tricks was to turn a chicken into a rabbit…but it still laid eggs. This, friends, is where we get the Easter Bunny bringing eggs for our baskets. Not exactly something that has to do with why we’re celebrating the day as Christians…

Now, all neighboring languages use a word derived from Latin pasche, or passover, for the holiday. (Which makes a whole lot more sense. I really wish English did this too!)

Easter eggs are attested from 1824 (though let it be noted that eggs are part of the Passover feast too, so there’s legitimate reason to include them in Resurrection celebrations). The Easter Bunny is from 1909. And as a
matter of fact, Easter Island is so named because the discoverer did so
on Easter Monday.

The voice of the empty tomb - Rev. Alan Rudnick

The Empty Tomb – Pinterest

Although Christianity has a long history of “taking over” pagan
holidays and traditions and using them to get new converts to observe
Christianity instead, I have to say I don’t like the English word. I’d
never paused to consider it until my piano teacher back in the day
refused to use the word “Easter” and instead called it “Resurrection
Day.” (Of which I fully approve!) She would even re-title songs for our
recitals when necessary. One year I was playing “Easter Song” on the
organ, and it became “Resurrection Song.”

This is something I try to do in my speech, though I do frequently slip and old habits take over. But I’ve at least trained my kids to correct me. 😉 So around here, we’ll be celebrating Resurrection Day this Sunday–with a sunrise service, a breakfast at church, and then visiting a local nursing home before the family gathers for a scavenger hunt and dinner.

How do you celebrate the resurrection of our Lord?

Word of the Week – Sabbath and Saturday

by Roseanna White | Mar 19, 2018 | Word of the Week

Today’s Word of the Week is actually just inspired by www.etymonline.com‘s trending word list, LOL. Which is funny, because those who know me well know that my church has actually opted to keep Saturday as the Sabbath rather than Sunday, so you might think I have an agenda with this word…but in fact, it just has an interesting history!

Our word for sabbath does come directly from the Hebrew shabbath (that ‘th’ is pronounced like a ‘t’), which is from the verb shabath, literally meaning “he rested.” In English it was spelled sabbat until the 16th century. Interesting to note that it didn’t just mean “a day of rest” but specifically “Saturday as a day of rest” until the 15th century. Up until then, though the Christian Church had adopted Sunday as their official day of worship long before, they never called it the Sabbath, only the Lord’s Day.

But the part that I actually found interesting here is that the very word for Saturday in many languages comes from sabbath–pretty much all Latin or Greek derived languages, including Spanish, Italian, French, German, Romanian, Hungarian, and many more.

English’s Saturday is of course from Saturn–and was preserved in English and other Norse languages largely because they had no god that would compete with the Roman Saturn, so they felt no objection to it when the Romans brought that name for the day of the week to their regions, LOL. But as Christianity spread in other regions, it was changed in the languages mentioned above away from the name of a Roman god and to something in keeping with biblical principles.

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