by Roseanna White | Jan 14, 2013 | Word of the Week
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| Scolding by Jose Ferras de Almeida |
I have children. Therefore I have uttered the phrase (a time or two–ahem) “Don’t talk back.” Or perhaps occasionally, “No back-talk.” But when I had a character using the same, I ran into a problem.
Back-talk, meaning “an impertinent retort” didn’t come around until 1858. Which is, I suppose, why we see phrases like “No impertinence” in older works instead, LOL. Interestingly, the phrase is believed it have originated in literary circles, when writers tried to imitate “low” Irish idioms. Who knew?
Talk back is a form of back-talk that followed it about a decade later. For some reason I thought that one would have been the original, but shows what I know, I suppose. 😉
I hope everyone’s week is off to a great start! And stay tuned–I have some good news to share with y’all later in the week. =)
by Roseanna White | Jan 7, 2013 | Word of the Week
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| A Wet Sunday Morning by Edmund Blair Leighton, 1896 |
Wow, it feels like forever since I’ve done one of these! LOL. Ah, the holidays. =) But the Twelve Days and Epiphany are over, my tree is down, and it’s back to the grindstone completely this week.
One of the words I’ve had to look up in the last couple weeks and surprised me is slosh. I believe I looked it up when someone in a historical referred to someone as sloshed. A few clickety-clacks and I verified that this was a colloquialism for “drunk” by 1900, so was no problem in this particular book. But what surprised me was that slosh as a verb meaning “to splash about” didn’t come about until 1844. (I have a feeling I may have misused that in a book somewhere…) And the verb meaning “to pour carelessly” didn’t follow until 1875. Who knew they were so new?
So the adjective meaning “drunk” came from the verb, and the verb came from the noun form, which made its appearance in 1814 meaning “slush, sludge.” Which is funny, because that’s the form least-used now, methinks.
And there was have it. Not until the 1800s did this word come in to play at all, and not until 75 years after the noun did the adjective transform from the verb, so that you can say lovely things like “Only when sloshed would he slosh through the slosh.” 😉
by Roseanna White | Dec 10, 2012 | Holidays, Word of the Week
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| 1922 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal |
I remember, as a child, writing stories and assignments for school around this time of year and occasionally using the abbreviation “X-mas” for Christmas. I remember teachers telling me not to use abbreviations in my assignments, and I remember someone else (can’t recall who) telling me not to use that one for Christmas because it just wasn’t right to take Christ out of Christmas (or something to that effect) and replace it with an X.
So in my middling years, I refused to use it, thinking it somehow mean to Jesus…then later I actually learned where it came from.
Pretty simple, really. The Greek word for Christ is Χριστός. You might notice that first letter. Our X, though it’s the Greek “chi.” No paganism here, no dark, dastardly scheming to remove Jesus from his birthday. Scholars started this as a form of shorthand. The first English use dates to 1755 in Bernard Ward’s History of St. Edmund’s College, Old Hall. Woodward, Byron, and Coleridge, to name a few, have used it to. And interestingly, similar abbreviations date way back. As early as 1100, the form “Xp̄es mæsse” for Christmas was used in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
So. It’s still an abbreviation and oughtn’t be used in formal writing and more than w/ or b/c, but it’s also perfectly legitimate as what it is. Always nice to discover something like that. =) And I hope as everyone gears up, they have a truly wonderful one! I’m happy to say we survived the crazy Nutcracker weekend around here. 😉
by Roseanna White | Dec 3, 2012 | Word of the Week
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Estes Park, Colorado, Whyte’s Lake by Albert Bierstadt, 1877
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Happy December, everyone! I don’t know about you, but with small kids in the house, the Christmas spirit has descended around here. Yesterday was spent making salt-dough ornaments, and this coming weekend my little girl will be in The Nutcracker. Gotta love it. =)
For today’s Word of the Week, I bring you another one that surprised me in some respects when I, for some reason or another, thought to look it up. Park, as a noun, has been around pretty much forever, at first meaning an enclosed area for hunting. There’s some speculation that its root comes from the word for the fencing, rather than the land enclosed. But by the 1600s, it had taken on its now-traditional meaning of a place in a town or city for public recreation.
What got me was the verb. It derived from a particular form of the noun that was reserved for military vehicles, and so became “to arrange military vehicles in a park” in 1812. So late! I kinda thought that as long as there were vehicles, there would be a word for parking them. But apparently it wasn’t park for quite a while, LOL. And it didn’t get extended to non-military vehicles until 1844.
Not surprisingly, the application to cars is more modern still. As a transmission gear, park made its debut in 1949. (Anyone know what they called it before that? Anyone? I have no clue…) And park-and-ride joined the scene in 1966.
And now that I’m firmly parked in front of my computer, it’s time to get back to trimming
Whispers from the Shadows. Hope everyone has a lovely week!
by Roseanna White | Nov 26, 2012 | Word of the Week
I hope everyone (at least those of you in the U.S.) had a lovely Thanksgiving! Ours was great and led into a wonderful weekend. The best part of which was that I didn’t have to cook since Wednesday, what with all the invitations to share leftovers. 😉
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| L’enfant avec les raisins, Antonio Rotta, 1884 |
So in honor of the feast of leftover food, this week’s word is snack. It sounds a bit modern, right? But in fact it traces its roots back to the 1300s, when snack was solely a verb which described a dog biting or snapping. It took it 400 years, but by 1757, it had become the noun we know, meaning “a bite or morsel to eat.” Fifty years later the verb followed suit and meant “to have a small amount to eat,” in 1807 (in case you haven’t had your coffee yet and don’t wanna do the math). Snack bar came about in 1930.
And there we have it!
For those of you who are really observant, you might notice that I updated my blog over the weekend. It now matches my website, and also has new tabs and pages, the old ones for the
Annapolis blog tour finally going bye-bye. Do please check out the page for Ordinary Heroes, a series I’ll be starting in 2013. I need stories! =)
by Roseanna White | Nov 19, 2012 | Word of the Week
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| Water as a–ahem–living force 😉 |
Getting down the basics, aren’t I? 😉
I had actually looked up water to determine when “water closet” came to be used for a bathroom, but there were some other interesting entries too.
And it starts with the beginning. Did you know that there used to be two words for water? One began with ap- and the other with wed-. The first was for water as a living thing, meaning “animate.” A force of life. (And fire most likely had the same thing, though they haven’t traced it so clearly.) The second was for the inanimate, regular ol’ version.
Then we get into the fun phrases. =) “To keep one’s head above water” in the figurative sense surprised me by being from 1742. I would have thought it slightly newer than that. Also surprising is the one I looked the word up for–“water closet” is from 1755.
In 1818 they were introduced to “water-ice,” a confections…like a snow cone, I should think, right? “Water cooler” joined the club in 1846, and “water polo” in 1884.
And as we’re entering Thanksgiving week, allow me to wish everyone a wonderful holiday. I know I’m super-thankful for each and every one of you!
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.