Word of the Week – Booty

by Roseanna White | Aug 10, 2015 | Word of the Week

Arrr!

I occasionally have a pirate in my house–this is to be expected when one has a 7-year-old boy. I never quite know when a rather adorable little figure is going to appear with his sword in hand and demand all my booty. But last time he did, his sister–being so very much my daughter–asked, laughing, “Where does that come from, anyway? Did they put treasure in a boot or something?”

As it happens…no. 😉 Booty is from the Old French butin, which is turn from the Germanic bute, which means “exchange.” So booty is quite literally something gotten in exchange for something else (in the pirate’s case, they got it in exchange for a fight, I suppose…) But in Old English we also had the word bot that meant “an improvement,” which had, by the time butin came into our vernacular, become boot. So we combined the two into booty, making it something profitable.

The noun that means “a woman’s posterior” is from the 1920.

Word of the Week – You’re Fired! (or sacked)

by Roseanna White | Aug 3, 2015 | Word of the Week

No, not in honor of Donald Trump. 😉 The question arose this past week with my hubby and son, as to where “fired” and “sacked” come from. So naturally, I ran out to my computer to answer it.

Fire, as in to terminate employment, is an Americanism from about 1885 that’s right up my alley, since it’s a total play on words. Before then, “discharge” had been the word used in this context. But “discharge” is also what a weapon does when it…fires. Which, yes, was another word for that early on. So people thought, “Ha! Since discharge has two meanings, and one of those meanings is ‘to fire,’ let’s apply ‘fire’ to its other meaning too!” So they did. I love it. =) (Not that I love getting fired…well, not that I’ve ever been fired per se, but…you know.)

Another word that means the same thing is sack. This one dates from about 1825. It was originally a noun–“to give someone the sack.” This appealed to the visual idea of handing them their sack full of tools when they were done a job. It then just became used as a verb as things are wont to do in English. =)

Word of the Week – Apple

by Roseanna White | Jul 27, 2015 | Word of the Week

Yesterday my hubby called our daughter “The apple of my eye,” and she looked at us like we were off our rocker. “The apple? How does an eye have an apple?”

Good question, my girl. Good question. =)

The word apple has been in English as long as there was English to be in…but in a much broader sense than you might think. It applied to all fruit, even including nuts and berries. This was true as late as the 1600s. (So translating Genesis with the forbidden fruit being an apple was being rather vague, really…)

As for “apple of the eye”–it was literally the pupil, which people thought was a solid thing; but by calling it the apple, they were saying it represented that which was most treasured or cherished. It’s a phrase that comes from Old English too, in which case, it shouldn’t be too surprising, since all fruit in an area belonged to the lord in the days of serfdom, and commoners seldom tasted it.

Word of the Week – Skeleton

by Roseanna White | Jul 20, 2015 | Word of the Week

Not to be gruesome or anything. 😉 I was looking this one up to see when the phrase “skeleton in the closet” came about.

Skeleton itself first arrived in English in about 1570, meaning a mummy, dried-up body, or bone remains. The word came from Latin, but the Latin word had come in turn from Greek, so it’s an ooooollllddddd concept, closely tied to the verb form that meant “to dry up, parch, wither.”

The meaning of “bare outline” followed in about 1600, from which we get “skeleton crew” or “skeleton key.” The phrase that sent me in search of it to begin with was coined right around 1812.

Word of the Week – Raptor

by Roseanna White | Jul 6, 2015 | Word of the Week

My son is 7. Which means he’s obsessed with dinosaurs. Which means that he was in 7-year-old heaven when the new Jurassic World movie came out. Given that he has a really great grasp of “it’s just a movie using robots and special effect”–we watched behind the scenes on the original, because he wanted to know how they made the T-Rex–we took him to the theaters to see it.

Now, “every day is velociraptor day!” around here. Rowyn has “practiced a really long time” to perfect what he calls his “raptor run.” And his raptor hiss. And his raptor…everything. So naturally, he has made me look up all this stuff many, many times too. 😉

Most recently he was wondering which word came first–velociraptor or raptor as applied to eagles, hawks, falcons, etc.

As it turns out, raptor is straight from the Latin word of the same spelling, a noun form of the verb rapere–to steal. So it’s quite literally “a thief.” The word entered the English language round about 1600. It wasn’t, however, applied to the class of birds until 1873.

The first fossil of a velociraptor was discovered in 1923 and named in 1924; it was called “speed thief” (velocity + raptor) because scientists believed it was a very swift, if small, carnivore.

Word of the Week – Scalawag

by Roseanna White | Jun 29, 2015 | Word of the Week

Scalawag is one of those words that we think of as being a very old-fashioned insult–and it is…but it’s not quite as old as some might think.

Meaning “disreputable fellow,” scalawag only dates from 1848. It originated in American union jargon, and though where it came from isn’t quite clear, it’s thought that it may have been borrowed from the Scotch scallag–a farm hand or rustic. Scallag, in turn, is derived from Scalloway, one of the islands with Shetland ponies, which were deemed undersized and worthless–so to call someone a scallag, and then a scalawag, was to insult their worth. During the Civil War, Southererns used the term as an insult against white, Southern-born men who were not Confederates.