Word of the Week – Cloche

by Roseanna White | Jun 19, 2017 | Word of the Week

A nice and simple word for this week, as it’s a super busy one!

I don’t know if anyone has seen the recent DQ commercials with the silver cloche over the food, but they inspired a question from daughter, who said, “I thought a cloche was a hat.” The girl comes by this assumption naturally. In my head, cloche equals pretty 20s style hat, end of story. 😉

As it happens, cloche was originally a type of bell-shaped jar (c. 1882); the word is borrowed from the French, where it literally means “bell.” The French was derived from the Latin clocca, of the same meaning.

So both the domed lid and the hat take their name from the bell-shape. The hat–which is seriously the only important use of the word, right??? LOL–dates from 1907.

Don’t forgot to catch my Live Chat on Facebook tonight at 7 EDT! I’ll be chatting about Gwen and Thad and Whispers from the Shadows.

Also–head’s up on a HUGE giveaway coming later this week! The WhiteFire Publishing authors are teaming up on a Scavenger Hunt that will be giving away thousands of dollars worth of prizes! That will start at 9 a.m. Eastern on Thursday, June 22 and will start right here. So mark your calendars!

Word of the Week – Coffee

by Roseanna White | Jun 12, 2017 | Word of the Week

I featured this word before, but it was 6 years ago, and I know much of my readership has changed. And let’s be honest–coffee deserves to be featured again. Because it’s one of the most beautiful creations in the universe. 😉

Word of the Week – Boss and Bossy

by Roseanna White | May 22, 2017 | Word of the Week

This isn’t one of those words I expected to be surprised by–but I was.

So. Waaaay back in the day, in the 1300s, the word boss was in English. But it was a noun meaning “a protuberance, a button.” It came from the French boce, which meant “something swollen or protruding.”

For nearly 350 years, that was the only boss in the English language…until American English adopted the same word in imitation of the Dutch baas, which means “overseer.” Americans, you see, had an interest in a word other than “master” for someone in charge of a workplace, especially to distinguish between slave and paid labor. So around 1640, boss became the American term for an overseer, especially on a ship.

It wasn’t until 1856 that boss is recorded as a verb. And not until 1882 that bossy became a word. (Though back in the Middle Ages, bossy was used to mean “something decorated with buttons.” Wee bit different meaning there!) So all in all, a much newer word than I thought, with a far different meaning before the familiar one came about!

I’m going live on Facebook at 7 p.m. EDT to talk about A Soft Breath of Wind. Which has some of my all-time favorite elements and characters in it, and I’m so excited to chat with you about Zipporah and Samuel and Benjamin and Dara!

Word of the Week – Kerfuffle

by Roseanna White | May 15, 2017 | Word of the Week

So last weekend when we were still in Charleston, WV after watching one of the last shows of Ringling Bros and Barnum & Baily (AWESOME), we had the news on in the hotel room. A reporter was interviewing two basketball players after they’d gotten in a fight. Here’s the abbreviated form of the report

Reporter: So do you have anything to say about last night’s kerfuffle?
Player 1: That is a word right there. Say that again.
Reporter: Kerfuffle?
Player 2: Kerfuffle. I like that. Good job, dude.

Insert me and my children rolling in laughter. And Xoe exclaiming, “There’s your next Word of the Week!”

So, here we go. Kerfuffle.

At first glance, this word that means “a fuss or commotion” is really new. As in, from 1970. Which really shocked me. But as it happens, that’s just that particular spelling. The original spelling of the word was curfuffle, and it dates to 1813, first appearing in works by Scottish writers. Still newer than I thought, but that’s because it’s taken from a Scottish word.

Fuffle is a Scottish verb dating from the 1500s (muuuuch better!), which means “to throw into disorder.” The ker/cur was added to make it a noun in the same way that we see it on words like kersplat and kersplash–an onomatopoeia prefix meant to imitate the sound of something having fallen.

So there you have it, combative sports players–kerfuffle.

Word of the Week – Mess

by Roseanna White | May 8, 2017 | Word of the Week

No, that is not a picture of my dresser. I don’t think . . . 😉

So this is another one of those words that is a big part of our everyday language, but which has some surprisingly late additions to it!

As a noun, mess has been around since about 1300–as a word for “food for one meal.” It’s from the Latin, via the French, meaning literally “a course of food.” By 1530, it had been extended to the military use of “a communal place for eating” and then “the group of people eating.”

It wasn’t until the 1730s that it became “mixed food,” especially for animals. But that meaning is what led people to apply mess contemptuously to any “jumble or mix” of things in the 1820s, which quickly took on the metaphorical sense of “state of confusion” or “untidiness” (by 1850s).

The verb form largely mirrors the noun; first it meant “to serve up portions” or “take one’s meal,” extending into the metaphorical senses as the noun did. So in the 1850s we got make a mess, and mess with, as in “interfere with” is from 1903. Mess up, however, didn’t come along until 1933! Which is, of course, the one I wanted to use in my book and couldn’t, LOL.

First of all, don’t forget that I’ll be doing my next live chat tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern on my Facebook Page!

Next, as I was chatting with my friend on our writing retreat, she shared an idea I think I’ll start instituting–namely, pulling old articles from my archives and reposting them once a week or so, since I have nine years’ worth of ’em. I’ll probably do this on weeks when I don’t manage my three posts on M/W/T and will create “Fridays from the Archives.” Categories may vary, but it should be fun to revisit!