by Roseanna White | Feb 1, 2016 | Word of the Week
I’m busy working on a new project, which means the chance to look up a bunch of random words as I write them and then go, “Wait a minute. Did that exist yet?”
Last week, I looked up brainstorm. I knew I’d looked it up before for a book set pretty early and deemed it off-limits, but I couldn’t remember when it came about. As it turns out, it’s recorded in 1849, meaning, as one would expect, “A brilliant idea, mental excitement.” (The figurative use of storm entered English waaaaaay back in the Old English days.)
Here’s the only thing to keep in mind with brainstorm–it was only a noun. You didn’t brainstorm an idea. You had a brainstorm. The verb form didn’t follow for another 70 years.
Now off I go to see what my characters’ brainstorm results in. 😉
by Roseanna White | Jan 25, 2016 | Word of the Week
Last week, one of Xoe’s vocabulary words was bedlam. And while her book told her what it means, this is my daughter. She also wanted to know where it came from. So naturally, Mama hops over to etymonline.com
And I learned something!
I never had any idea where the word came from, but it’s a shortened form of “Bethlehem,” apparently. In medieval London there was a priory called “Saint Mary of Bethlehem,” which became a hospital in the 1300s, and specifically one for lunatics by 1400. In wills as early as 1440, it was referred to as “Hospital of Saint Mary of Bedlam,” or sometimes “Betleem.” Bedlam was the most common abbreviation, though…and the place was infamous for its scenes of confusion and madness.
Because of that, bedlam was used for any scene of mad confusion by the 1600s.
by Roseanna White | Jan 1, 2016 | Holidays, Word of the Week
Every year, I pray for a word. Instead of a resolution, just one word that I can strive for in the year. It doesn’t always come. But as I drove home on the last day of 2015, I knew what my word was for 2016.
Mine.
It started as a game with my kids. My husband and I would both latch hold of them, and we’d play a mock tug-of-war game amidst their giggles. “Mine!” I would say, tugging on them. “Mine!” David would argue, pulling them close for a hug. The kids both thought this was hilarious fun.
In the mornings, my son still calls to me three days out of five. He can obviously get up on his own, and he does, often. But some days he sticks to the old tradition of calling out, “Mama!” And I go in, and I gather him up, and I hold him close. “Mine,” I often whisper into his ear. “My boy. I love you.” When I go in to wake his sister an hour later, I sit down on her bed, run a hand over her hair, and say, “There’s my girl. Time to get up, sweetie pie.”
It’s a part of our family language, this claiming of the ones we love. This Mine.
Yet it touched something deep inside me when my little boy started putting his arms around me, pressing close, and saying, “Mine.” It’s his way of saying I love you. It’s his way of saying, We’re a family.
Yesterday, when I asked God what He wanted me to dwell on this year, I imagined arms bigger than Rowyn’s, bigger than David’s, bigger than the world coming around me. And a voice far deeper whispering in my ear, “Mine.”
For they are my people, and I will be their God.
The question of what it means to be His is one that has fueled contemplation and discourse for millennia. I could write a long, long post on my thoughts on the matter here and now.
I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to think about what I know about it already. I’m just going to ask.
What does it mean to belong to God?
How will my daily actions change if, before I do anything, I remember that I am His and He is mine?
My every action, my every reaction should start from that one central point.
I am His.
My speech. My writing. My everything should reflect it.
I am His.
My relationships, my family, my commitments should be kept in their proper places.
I am His.
May 2016 be a year filled with Joy and blessing. May its hardships and trials pale in comparison to the love we feel in our Father’s arms. May we find peace amidst the turmoil that has its claws in the world, and may we know the path He would have us tread. May He open our eyes to the truths of His Word, of His Spirit. May we understand what He calls us to do.
And may our every act, our every thought be rooted in that most basic truth–that God has wrapped us in His arms and whispered that claim into our ears.
Mine.
by Roseanna White | Dec 14, 2015 | Word of the Week
I am sometimes baffled by how things come into our cultural consciousness…and change over the centuries. Cue the elves.
Elf comes from Germanic folklore, with equivalents in Norse and Saxon mythology. The word itself hasn’t changed much since Old English in spelling, sound, etc.
The meaning, however…
Back then, an elf was considered to be a mean-spirited goblin-like creature with quite a bit of power. Descriptions range from creatures who are merely mischievous to “evil incubus.” Since the mid-1500s, it’s been used figuratively for a mischievous person. They were thought to create knots in hair (oooookay) and hiccups.
Over the centuries, they gradually took on new roles in people’s minds. They were occasionally referred to as “house gnomes,” and while they would act with traditional mischief if not treated properly, they were thought to scare off true evil spirits from your house if you treated them properly–people were known to leave out gifts of food and baubles to appease them.
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Scandinavian writers took this ancient tradition and decided it would be fun to apply it to Christmas. Popular writers of the day began crafting stories that assigned elves the new role of being Santa Claus‘s helpers. By this time traditional belief in elves had pretty much fallen away, so people seized this new thought that sort of revived an old belief, but in a nice, cute way. Visual artists joined this new movement and began painting pictures of what we now identify as elves–cute, small, sprite-like creatures who are all goodwill…at least unless a child in naughty, in which case some old mischief might sneak out and cause them to replace goodies in a stocking with switches or lumps of coal.
So there we have it. Elves. 😉
by Roseanna White | Dec 7, 2015 | Word of the Week
Since it’s getting rather frosty outside here in the Appalachians, I thought today we’d take a look at ice…or rather, at when some of its idioms came into use. =)
Ice itself is from Old English, from Proto-Germanic is. There are cognates for it in quite a few other languages that also derive from that old-old-old German tongue. Our modern spelling began to appear in the 1400s.
Having been part of our language for so long, it’s no surprise that eventually it began to be used in idioms. The oldest of these is to break the ice. It has been meaning “to make the first attempt” since 1580! I had no idea it was so old. But it comes about as a metaphorical allusion to boats breaking up the ice in a river.
The 1800s brought us quite a few uses. The term ice age was coined in 1832. Ice fishing began to be spoken about in 1869 (which makes me wonder…was the activity itself first practiced then or did people use to call it something different?). Thin ice, in the figurative sense, first appeared in writing in 1884. On ice–as in, kept out of the way until needed–is from 1890.
And finally, the use you may have spotted in The Lost Heiress. Ice as a slang for diamonds is from 1906. (I totally would have thought it a product of the 1920s before I looked it up for use in my book. Shows what I know, LOL.)
Stay warm, everybody!
by Roseanna White | Nov 30, 2015 | Word of the Week
I was surprised to realize this weekend past that the Advent season is officially begun–I thought it would start next weekend, but my calendar is obviously off. 😉
As a child, I knew that advent marked the season leading up to Christmas…but it wasn’t until later that I realized advent actually meant “the approach, arrival, or coming.” But once I learned that bit of information, I naturally assumed that the word had always meant “the approach, arrival, or coming,” and hence was applied to the Christmas season as it counted down to the arrival on earth of our Savior.
As it happens…not exactly.
It wasn’t until 1757 that advent took on that general meaning–then that people may have begun saying things like “the advent of summer” or the like. Until then, the word meant only the Christmas season.
Advent was present in Old English as such, taken from the Latin adventus (which does indeed mean “coming, arrival” etc.), but in Church Latin (what would have been used in English-speaking realms at the time) it was used only for the season leading up to Christmas.
As for the Advent wreath many churches and families keep today–the tradition was begun by a German pastor and missionary, Johann Hinrich Wichern, in 1839 (though there were a few earlier versions that didn’t catch on dating back to the Lutherans of the 16th century). The original version counted down the whole month for the children of the mission school where he served, with 20 red candles and 4 large white ones.
The purple and rose candles most churches use today were made to match the liturgical colors in the Catholic church for those Sundays in December.
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.