Word of the Week – & (Ampersand)

by Roseanna White | Aug 22, 2016 | Word of the Week

At Dictionary.com last week, my attention was grabbed by one of their slideshows about punctuation. Because, yes, I’m a grammar nerd. This has been well established. 😉 But the very first slide was far and away the most interesting to me.

Both of these things have always been an enigma to me. Where in the world did we get that curly thingy-ma-bob, and why did it mean “and.” And why in the world was it called an “ampersand”? Questions I have long gone without knowing the answers to. But now it’s all clear. 😉

The original ampersand was the one that looked like the above, in the graphic–the others are just deviations. And the reason is quite simple. When writing in cursive, Latin scribes would combine and quicken the letters in “and”–et. That combined et made its way into other Latin-based languages like English as a symbol. But it wasn’t called an “ampersand” until the 1830s.

At that point in time, this symbol was being taught as a 27th letter of the alphabet. The schoolchildren’s recitation would say, “X, Y, Z, and per se and.” That “and per se and” got slurred–into ampersand!

And there we go. Your weekly dose of word . . . er, punctuation? . . . fun. 😉

Word of the Week – Cranky

by Roseanna White | Aug 8, 2016 | Word of the Week

We have one more week left of summer vacation. One more little week, then back to the homeschool grind we go. Needless to say, that has inspired a few sighs and a whimper or two (okay, perhaps that was more from me than the kids, LOL).

With the end of days of freedom and fun (or in my case, work-work-work), a little crankiness is to be expected. And so, today I thought I’d look at the history of the word. =)

Cranky has its roots, obviously, in crank–a word which is as old as English itself, taken from the Proto-Germanic krank: a handle for turning a revolving axis. We obviously still use this meaning of the word as well, though both German and Dutch have apparently leaned away from the literal ancient meaning and instead gone toward a figurative “sick, weakly” meaning.

This is where our cranky comes in. Around 1803, cranky appeared in English texts, meaning “sickly or ailing.” By 1825, crank itself was listed in dictionaries as having a secondary meaning of “hard, difficult.” (Like  a crank job.) Crank meaning “an irritable person” came along in 1833–a back-formation from cranky.

Though to give my kids credit where it’s due, they’re less cranky about school starting than I thought they’d be–in part at the promise of going to Staples and stocking up on pens and paper. (They are so my children, LOL. Fresh writing supplies make everything better.)

Happy Monday, everyone!

Word of the Week – Class

by Roseanna White | Aug 1, 2016 | Word of the Week

Class. It seems like a simple word. One that has surely been around forever, right? Well, I looked it up last week because I wanted to make sure that classy was in use for a story. And instead I learned that the whole word was rather surprising.

Class comes from the Latin classis, which is the word for how Servius Tullius divided the Roman people for purposes of taxation. This also had something to do with how the people were called to arms, which is the original meaning (and spelling) carried into English first. It wasn’t until around 1600 that it was shortened to class . . . at which point it meant a group of students.

In the 1650s, class was expanded from the group of students to mean a course or lecture students might take in school–based on the idea that it required reaching a certain academic level.

In 1705, the word became a verb–“to divide into classes.” In 1753, scientists began talking about classes of plants and animals.

But it wasn’t until 1772 that class began to mean “divisions of society according to status.” I was really surprised it was that late! And so, the notion of class being “high quality” was unheard of until the 1840s. My classy, therefore, didn’t come around until the 1890s.

Word of the Week – Kulturkampf

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. =)

Word of the Week – Chintzy

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.

Word of the Week – Tab

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!