by Roseanna White | Jul 25, 2016 | Word of the Week
Yes, that’s right, today’s word of the week is German. 😉
In my edits for A Name Unknown, my editor had asked me to check the history of the phrase “culture war,” as it felt modern. I’d used this phrase to describe events in Germany at the end of the 19th century, because, well, that’s what my history book had called it, LOL. But history books do tend to use language from the time they’re writing in rather than the time they’re writing about, ahem. So I took the advice and looked it up.
What I found was that the German word for culture war, kulturkampf, was actually coined at the time specifically to describe these events. The German chancellor Von Bismark (described by other politicians of his day as “a demon”) launched this war in Germany against the Catholic church specifically, but most other Christian churches took it as a sign to beware as well. For perhaps the first time in centuries, since the Church had fractured, Protestants and Catholics joined together to fight political forces that would wipe them out.
Of course, learning that this word would have been in legitimate use at the time doesn’t make it sound less out of place in my manuscript. 😉 So my challenge was trying to figure out how to use it well. And my answer was to start with the German word.
Hope everyone has a great week! I had a fabulous time at Montrose Christian Writers Conference and am now looking forwarding to getting back into my writing groove after being in teacher/editor mode all week. =)
by Roseanna White | Jun 27, 2016 | Word of the Week
If you look up chintzy, you’ll find that it means:
1. of, like, or decorated with chintz.
2. cheap, inferior, or gaudy.
But these days we don’t all know what chintz really is, right? I had some vague recollection that it was a kind of fabric, but that was where my memory ended. I was, in fact, correct–chintz is a brightly colored cotton fabric that is then glazed, usually used for upholstery or drapery. The word has been in use since 1719, from Hindi. It began as the singular chint, but was soon used in the plural form. No one’s quite sure why it was spelled with a -z instead of an -s to make it plural, but there you go.
This fabric was made quite cheaply in India, which made it very common . . . and hence looked down on. George Eliot was the first to use chintzy in a disparaging sense, in 1851.
by Roseanna White | Jun 20, 2016 | Word of the Week
Tab is a little word with a long history. I looked it up to check on the age of the phrase “keep tabs on” and found that the word itself goes back to Middle English, where it meant “a small strip or flap of material,” interchangeable with tag. From the mid-1400s on, that was the word’s sole meaning for hundreds of years. It began to be used as a verb in 1872, when it simply meant “to affix a tab to something,” again as an alteration of tag.
It wasn’t until the 1880s that tab also took on the meaning of “an account, bill, check,” and this came about, it’s thought, as a shortening of tabulation rather than anything to do with the original word. Or perhaps a shortening of tablet–as in, the paper that you write on. Regardless, this is where my phrase came from. It’s a figurative sense of this tab, but was originally used only in the singular–you would “keep a tab on someone” from about 1890 on.
Tab, as in the key on a typewriter or computer, is from 1916. As a verb meaning “to designate, label, or name,” it’s from 1924.
So in some ways, this word has a downright ancient history…but in other ways, it’s surprisingly modern!
by Roseanna White | Jun 13, 2016 | Word of the Week
No, I don’t have a headache. Not today. 😉 But this a word I’d looked up to make sure I could use it in a 1914 setting, so I thought I’d share the interesting pharmaceutical history that went along with it.
Aspirin was a trademarked name, created in 1899 by German chemist Heinrich Dreser. It’s from the Latin spiraea, or “meadow-sweet,” the plant from which it’s derived.
Here’s the interesting bit. According to German law, prescriptions had to be filled exactly as written. So chemist companies would trademark very easily-made drugs that were made from common items, using household names for things that were easy for doctors to remember. Doctors would then write a prescription, and they would have to be filled as written. No generics for them! So these companies were then making a lot of money from very simple items.
I find it interesting that, in the U.S. at least, “aspirin” is certainly not considered a brand name; it’s the rather generic name for that type of medicine, which any company can then make. I wonder if the same is true these days in Germany…
~*~
On a totally unrelated note, the paperback of A Stray Drop of Blood is finally available on Amazon again!
by Roseanna White | Jun 6, 2016 | Word of the Week
This past weekend was full of ballet for my family, as my daughter danced in her theater’s spring show, La Fille Mal Gardée.
I’ve never looked up where the word ballet comes from because, well…it’s obviously French, right?
As it turns out, yes and no. The English word–which dates from the 1660s!–does indeed come from the French ballette. (I find it interesting that we say it as the French would if it were a masculine noun, but the word it comes from is feminine, and that T would have been pronounced. Does anyone speak French and know if they still use the -ette ending or if they’ve also changed it to -et over the years?) But that French word came, in fact, from Italian.
The Italian root is ballo, which just means “a dance.” This is also where our ball comes from.
Though the word has been in use for a long time, from what I can see in the history of other ballet words (jete, plie, arabesque, etc.), the form we know and recognize today seems to have taken shape in the 1820-30s.
Made super-famous, of course, by the Ballet Russe, which of course everyone knows from reading The Lost Heiress–and you won’t want to miss A Lady Unrivaled, which features the ballet even more. 😉
Not that any of those prima ballerinas could possibly be as beautiful as my sweet Xoë. (Biased?? What do you mean???)
by Roseanna White | May 30, 2016 | Word of the Week
The other night, my husband asked if crevice and crevasse were the same word. I, being the spelling nerd that I am, quickly replied that they were spelled differently, and insisted that crevice was a small crack and crevasse a large one.
But . . . it did seem like a bit of a coincidence, so I went to look it up. And discovered that, in fact, hubby and I were both right. They’re spelled differently, and the meanings are what I said–but they’re also the same word.
Both trace their roots to the French crevasse, which means simply a gap or crack. But over the centuries, crevice (the English spelling) took on a smaller and smaller meaning . . . so in the 1800s, people went back to the original word, crevasse, to stand in for those BIG gaps and cracks, like in glaciers or river banks.
I love it when we’re both right. 😉
And Happy Memorial Day! I’m saying a prayer today for all those veterans and family members of veterans who have served our country. I owe you a debt of gratitude. Your sacrifices will not be forgotten.
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.