by Roseanna White | Feb 20, 2017 | Word of the Week
Another special request today, though there isn’t quite as much information on it as there was on last week’s . . .
The questions was where the expression “the dickens” comes from.
Well, the answer’s a bit unclear. What we know is that it’s an English last name, taken from Richard. We’re not sure which Richard, or why the name became an exclamation; Skakespeare used the expression “I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.” (“Merry Wives of Windsor” Act 3, Scene 2), in which it’s clear that it’s a substitute for “the devil.” As for why? [Insert shrug here] Best guess by the Oxford English Dictionary is that it’s simply because it sounds similar.
There’s another bit of history surrounding it too, to account for some of its early uses. Apparently in the 1500s there was a maker of wooden bowls who was rather infamous for losing money, to the degree that much literature of the 1500s would refer to bad investments as “bad as Dickens.”
Whatever the why, modern readers can be assured it has nothing to do with the Dickens with whom we are most familiar–Charles–as it predates him by several hundred years. 😉
by Roseanna White | Feb 13, 2017 | Word of the Week
Another Word of the Week request! (Love those–keep ’em coming!) This week for frank as an adjective–made by someone of that name. 😉
Frank is taken directly from the people group, the Franks, who took over Gaul in the Middle Ages and named it for themselves (hence, France). At this time in history, you were either free, captive, or slave–so in this area, the only free people were the invaders, the conquerors. The Franks. Therefore, frank came to mean free.
By about 1300, the word had entered English, still carrying the meaning given it by the tribal group in Europe–“free, liberal, generous.”
So if you want to be frank with someone, or to speak frankly, it’s all because a group of people who called themselves the Franks invaded Gaul in the 400s, defeating the Huns and taking over part of what had recently been the Roman empire.
Side note on Paris–in the Roman days, there was a fort along the Seine called Lutetia Parisiorium. When one of the Frankish kings, Clovis, decided he would unite all the tribes into one nation, this is where he set up his capitol in 481. He simply shortened the Roman name of the fort to Paris and called it his city–and it’s been the capital of France ever since!
by Roseanna White | Feb 6, 2017 | Word of the Week
My daughter asked about this one as she was cutting up some paper doilies for valentines she was making. It was a quick answer, but one I’d certainly never investigated before, so I thought I’d share.
So doily as we know it is a shortening of doily-napkin, and dates from 1714. It refers to the light, lacy item made from doily–a thin, woolen fabric. It’s supposedly named for a dry-goods dealer in London. The surname comes from Normandy, and before it was specific to thin, lightweight woolens, it was used to mean “genteel and affordable woolens.” So whoever the Doily [d’Oilly] family was, they apparently carried textiles worthy of fame!
Now, stay tuned! Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a fun scavenger hunt to kick off the release of The Lost Girl of Astor Street!
by Roseanna White | Jan 30, 2017 | Word of the Week
I’m always so intrigued when words have come to mean the exact opposite of what they used to. And that, apparently, is what happened (metaphorically, at least) with ace.
Round about the year 1300, the word ace entered English. It was taken from the Latin as, which meant “one”–and is thought to be borrowed by Latin directly from the Greek eis, which means the same.
When it entered English, though, it wasn’t just to mean “one.” It was to particularly refer to the sides of dice with only one mark. Because of this, ace in Middle English was used metaphorically to mean “bad luck.” That stuck around for quite a while…until cards became popular.
In cards, ace was also used to the “one” card…but of course, in cards, that’s usually the highest, rather than the lowest. So as games switched popularity and cards began to rule the day, the metaphorical meaning of ace changed too. From “bad luck” to “top of the deck–the best.” This total flip had happened absolutely by the 18th century.
Phrases like “ace in the hole” came around by 1907; during World War I, ace became applied to the best pilots. From there, it moved into verb form–in the 1920s, you could ace in sports, which meant to score a point. In the 1950s, this sports sense was extended via student slang to mean, “score high marks.”
So there we have it–a four hundred year evolution from bad luck to the best, and then a slow move from being a noun to a verb. Ace has always meant “one”–but whether that’s a positive or negative has done an about-face.
by Roseanna White | Jan 16, 2017 | Word of the Week
Okay, more of a phrase of the week–and this one by special request (happy to report no one’s under the weather in my house! Though we had a brief stint of it last Tuesday…)
Anyway. So.
Everyone knows that under the weather means to feel sick. The question is where it came from.
As it turns out, this is in fact a phrase with nautical origins. A lot of seasickness is caused by bad weather–and the solution is to go below deck and lie down, where you’re not only out of the weather, but where the swaying of the ship isn’t so pronounced. When you did this, you were said to go/be, quite literally, under the weather. Some sources site the original phrase as being under the weather bow–which was the side of the ship getting hit by all the wind and waves etc.
So there we have it, and here’s hoping no one in your house has to claim it this week!
by Roseanna White | Jan 9, 2017 | Word of the Week
Last weekend, my daughter asked where the word Bible came from. I had an idea but wasn’t 100% sure I was right so looked it up–and indeed found my impression was correct.
Bible is a rather ancient word, meaning “the Bible or any large book” back in the medieval days. I know that in many romance languages, the word for book still has bibl- in it somewhere, so this was no surprise to me. It comes most directly to English from Latin, via French, but the Latin word is actually straight from the Greek. Biblion is any ordinary scroll or book. They called the Holy Bible, ta biblio to hagia at first, though the term for the Christian scriptures had been shorted to ta biblio in Greek as early as 223!
The Greek is thought to perhaps have come from Byblos, a Phoenician port from which Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece.
So for many hundreds of years, the English form Bible meant only the Holy Scriptures; it was then expanded again figuratively to mean “any authoritative work” around 1800.
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.