by Roseanna White | Dec 15, 2014 | Word of the Week
First of all, the winner of my giveaway is
Susan Poll!
Congrats! Now on with the word of the week. =)
This weekend past was the annual performance of The Nutcracker by the ballet studio my daughter attends, so we were occupied with all things stage and dancing. I thought it would be fun to take a look at the word limelight. =)
I’d never paused to wonder where in the world that word came from, but it’s pretty simple. The popular name for the Drummond Light, this type used an incandecent of lime to create a brilliant light first put to use in lighthouses. It was then adopted for the stage in Victorian days, used to spotlight a principle actor.
Created in 1825 (for the lighthouse light), by 1877 it had adopted the slightly metaphorical sense of being the center of attention from its theatrical uses.
Do you like to be in the limelight? My daughter loves it…my son hates it…not so different from their parents, LOL. I always loved being the center of attention (odd for someone who considers herself otherwise an introvert), but my hubby will find some amazingly creative ways to avoid it. 😉
by Roseanna White | Dec 8, 2014 | Holidays, Word of the Week
Well here’s one that made me smile. I have to say that most times when I hear the word jolly, I think of Christmas. Jolly old St. Nick, jolly elves, etc.
And apparently, that’s a good thing to think of! Though the word comes most immediately from Old French jolif, meaning “festive, amorous, pretty,” there are also suggestions that it’s a loan-word from Germanic tongues, akin to Old Norse jol…which is the word for their winter feast, i.e. Yule…which is Christmas! How fun is that? So it’s totally appropriate to think of Christmas when you hear the word jolly, because it’s related!
I hope December is indeed jolly for you, and that you’re not too stressed out over gifts and wrapping and shopping and budgets. I’m enjoying the music and decorations and doing my darndest to keep that focus on the Lord this year with my kiddos. =)
Have a holly, jolly Christmas!
by Roseanna White | Dec 1, 2014 | Holidays, Word of the Week
Thought I’d go Christmasy for December. =) So today’s Word of the Week is less a word and more the etymology of a story. Because my kids asked me, after I went through the original St. Nicholas story with them, when Rudolph came about, and I had no clue.
As it turns out, our beloved reindeer was an invention of a writer named Robert L. May, who was hired by the Montgomery Ward company to create an original piece of work for their annual children’s coloring book. May devised Rudolph in 1939…to some opposition. The publishers didn’t like the red nose idea. Red noses were associated with drunkards, which certainly wasn’t the image they wanted to portray. But when May had his illustrator friend create a cutesy deer character with a beaming red nose, the powers that be relented–and the story took off to amazing success. The original poem was written in the meter of “The Night Before Christmas.”
The song we all know and love was written a decade later, by the author’s brother-in-law. It remained the all-time best selling album in the country until the 80s!
The stop-motion animation version that I grew up thinking was the only Rudolph story worth watching, LOL, came about in 1964. Though very popular, this movie apparently doesn’t stick very accurately to the original poem. Which now makes me want to look up the original and see what’s been changed!
So there we have it. Our history of Rudolph. =)
by Roseanna White | Nov 24, 2014 | Word of the Week
Okay, there’s a debate about this in my house. I made the observation a few weeks ago, when someone on TV mentioned their “bucket list,” that I was amazed at how quickly this term became a part of our daily vocabulary, when it was pretty much created by the movie.
My husband quickly said, “No it wasn’t. I’ve been hearing that term all my life.”
Naturally, I had to look it up. And what did I find in etymonline.com? Nothing. What did I find in the dictionary? Nothing. So I started doing basic Google searches for the origins of the phrase.
The first article I found on it was written by a journalist who had a similar observation to mine, and his determination was that it indeed hadn’t appeared in print until 2004 at the earliest (the movie is 2006).
I came back with a “Ha! See?” to my hubby, who said, “Yeah, not buying it. He’s just wrong.”
LOL. So I did some more digging. Here’s all I can find.
First of all, it’s pretty much accepted by all that it’s in reference to the term kick the bucket, which has been a phrase meaning “to die” since the 1780s. Moreover, bucket list has been a computer term since the 1960s, meaning a way to sort things (i.e. “that data belongs on the y-bucket list, whereas this data belongs on the x-bucket list). There’s some speculation as to whether a computer programmer was the first to snatch that phrase, decide it reminded them of kick the bucket, and make a leap in meaning. Who knows?
There are quite a few forums discussing this “is it really so recent??” question. Quite a few people who report having heard it growing up in the way in question. Which could very well be true. Historically speaking, words usually appear in spoken vernacular 20ish years before they appear in print. But we can only track things, obviously, by their appearances in print.
The OED (which my husband will say is the source for the English language) will have to be our final ruling on this. And they date the phrase at 2006, which is when it reached the number of appearances in print required to be deemed a sticking phrase in English.
So what do you think? Had you heard this phrase before the movie came out??
by Roseanna White | Nov 17, 2014 | Word of the Week
I found myself looking up the etymology of crime scene the other day. I had a feeling it was a bit modern…and I was right. The original phrase was actually scene of the crime (makes sense) and was coined by Agatha Christie in 1923.
But there were some other interesting facts to learn about scene while I was there. Not surprisingly, the word comes straight from Latin (via Old French), with the expected meaning of “a subdivision of a play.” What I didn’t realize was that is shares a root with shine–the original Latin and Greek words carried a notion of the physical stage or booth that actors used too, and hence were similar to shade and Shine.
The “part of a play” meaning existed in English from the 1530s…by the 1540s it could be used for the physical apparatus of a stage…and by the 1590s, it had taken on “the place in with a literary work occurs” and therefore also a general setting or place where anything occurs, not just literary work.
You could go “behind the scenes” of something by the 1660s. And by 1761, people could “make a scene” with their stormy outbursts.
Not that I would ever do such a thing… 😉
Have a lovely week!
by Roseanna White | Nov 10, 2014 | Word of the Week
When words are this close in spelling, I always find myself wondering if they’re related. And, yeah, occasionally get the spellings confused too. 😉 This morning I was rereading what I wrote over the weekend and saw a time where I was using the verb, demur, but put the E on the end. Which is what sent me to dictionary.com.
The verb demur dates from the 1200s and originally meant “to linger, to tarry.” Its roots came from the Latin demorari, through the Old French demorer, which meant the same thing. Okay…
Demure, on the other hand, is from the French meur, which means “fully grown, ripe” and hence “mature, grave.” Where, then, did the de- come from? Well now, that’s a good question, and etymologists aren’t quite sure. Though they suspect (another case of Isle and Island) that the de- may have been borrowed from demuré, which is the past participle of that Old French demorer. Another case of “they sound the same, so let’s spell them the same”?? Could be!
On a completely unrelated note, it’s release week for me!! Tomorrow I’ll post a blog with all my upcoming blog tour stops and a few highlights and requests. =)
photo credit: Alexander Rentsch via photopin cc
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.