by Roseanna White | Jan 19, 2015 | Word of the Week
A week or two ago, my best friend sent me one of those hilarious “someecards” photos on Pinterest that totally sums up my outlook on housework.
I love this. But I’m also enough of a grammarian that I had to point out the typo, LOL.
I was in college, reading all the ancient Greeks with their love of flattening opposing cities, when I came upon the word raze. While raise means “lift up,” the homophone raze means “tear down.” Don’t you just love English?? LOL
Apparently raze, which dates to about 1540, is an alteration of rasen, a 14th century word coming from Old French that meant “to scratch, slash, erase.” We see that meaning preserved in erase, which is quite closely related (who knew?).
Raise, on the other hand, comes from a Scandinavian source, likely Old Norse. It dates from about 1200 and has always meant what it means now, in the physical sense. The meaning like “raise from the dead” comes from a literal “make higher” that is taken from that physical sense, and is from about 1300. “Increase the amount” joined the fray in 1500s, usually speaking of money or price. “Bring up a question” dates from the 1640s. In the 1660s it was also applied to growing crops. It was applied to rearing children in about 1744 (though not everywhere–apparently American Southerners used it to speak of breeding slaves, and Northerners wouldn’t use it of children at all, only of crops.) And finally, in the 1820s, it became a phrase used in playing cards.
by Roseanna White | Jan 12, 2015 | Word of the Week
Last week, I made some truly beautiful southern-style biscuits (click the photo for the recipe). And oh, how delicious they were!! Of course, this being my family, the mere bread itself wasn’t the only thing we worked on. My awesome children also had to ask, “So if they call cookies biscuits in England…then what do they call biscuits?”
I know I have some English followers, so perhaps Elisabeth will chime in (hi, Elisabeth! LOL), but from my research, here’s what I found. As I stood there with flour on my shirt, the table still a mess, and my lovely white rounds rising in the oven. 😉
The current spelling of biscuit is from the 19th century–earlier it was bisket (16th century) or besquite (14th century). It comes from the Old French besquit, a word from the 12th century that literally meant “twice cooked.” The idea of a baked good actually came about in the French because it was so close a cognate with the Italian biscotto, which meant “(bread) twice baked.”
The American biscuit is first recorded in about 1818. Our idea of calling the baked sweet cookie was taken from the Dutch koekje, which means “little cake.” (You will in fact find many colonial recipes for things like “little sugar cakes”…which are just sugar cookies.)
But to answer my kids’ original question, I had to keep looking. What do they call our biscuits?? Well, there are scones…but scones are generally sweet, not the type of thing to dip in soup. Rolls are yeasty, as are buns.
So we eventually found this answer: the American biscuit just exist elsewhere, LOL, so there’s no name for it. There we go. 😉 And now I’m hungry!
Be sure to stop by tomorrow for links to a cover reveal for another of my designs!!
by Roseanna White | Jan 5, 2015 | Word of the Week
Here we are! A new year, and back on schedule for blogging. =) I had a lovely holiday, and I hope you all did too!
So today, back to a word I’d looked up for the last section of The Outcast Duchess. I use it because it rhymes with a character’s name, but I had to make sure it would have been used like that, after all. 😉
Brat. The word dates back to about 1500 as slang for a beggar child. It’s taken directly from the word for a cloak or ragged garment–Old English taken from the Celtic. The etymology sites tell me that the modern meaning came from a notion of the word being applied to a child’s apron, but I don’t think I quite get that leap, LOL. But the evolution from “beggar’s child” to “spoiled, contemptuous child” doesn’t seem as long as it may at first glance. Insults often stretch over the years, after all.
I hope everyone’s off to a wonderful (non bratty) 2015! On the blog, I’ll have some cover design posts coming up this month and should have the first peek at the cover for The Lost Heiress soon too (not that I’m designing that one)! I’ll also be sharing a bit about my St. Nicholas story, entitled Giver of Wonders, as I write it in the next month or two and get it ready for a late-fall release. It’s the Visibullis family again, just a few generations down and set in a town in what is present-day Turkey, though was Greek at the time.
In the meantime, back to the homeschool grind today (speaking of the possibility of bratty behavior…LOL). Have a great week!
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. =)
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.