I love that www.etymonline.com has a list of trending words. Sometimes I click on them solely out of curiosity…like when I saw circus on there today.

Last May my family journeyed to Charleston, WV to attend one of the final shows of the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and it was frankly amazing. So amazing that we really wished we’d given it a try way earlier so we could have attended more and caught all their different shows. Up until then, I’d never gone to a circus, be it large or small, though a tiny little one set up once on my high school’s grounds. I saw the elephants from the road, but we had something else going on that weekend and I couldn’t go. Kinda wish I had. 

But anyway! Did you ever notice that circus looks an awful lot like circle? And circumference? And all those other circ- words that denote something round? This isn’t a coincidence. The word comes directly from Latin, where it meant “a ring, a circular line.” It was used in Ancient Rome for the open-roofed enclosures used for races and so on. The Latin word had been borrowed from the Ancient Greek kirkos, which meant the same thing.

In the early 1700s, the word was applied in English to buildings arranged in a circular pattern, hence Picadilly Circus, and also to a ring road. By the end of the 1700s, it had also been applied to the arenas used to showcase feats of horsemanship, acrobatics, etc.–but at first, it was just for the tent. It took about 40 years for it to come to mean the company or traveling show itself by 1838 or so. Another twenty years, and it had taken on the metaphorical sense of “a lively uproar, a hubbub.” And finally, during WWI, it was used to describe a squadron of aircraft.

Have you ever gone to a circus? What did you think of it?

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary–17 years since I first said “I do” to the love of my life. ? So naturally, today I thought I’d take a look at the words!

Wed is from Old English weddian, which means “to pledge oneself, vow; to betroth, to marry.” This is similar to other Germanic languages’ words, and while those other languages still reflect the original in their words today, English is a bit unique. While we retained wed in wedding, most often people today don’t say they hope to wed so-and-so–it sounds archaic.

English has instead adopted the French marier as well, giving us two options where other languages have stuck with one. Marry has pretty much the same meaning as wed, and it joined the English language in the 1300s, so it’s certainly been around a while.

Kind of interesting to think, though, of how the two have been assigned certain typical functions, right? Like we never ask for a piece of marriage cake. Nor do we look for our marriage gown. And yet we don’t exchange wedding vows on the day. We’ve come to view wedding as the specific event in which we bind ourselves, and marriage as the ongoing state (there’s the old-fashioned sounded wedlock for that too, but we don’t hear that much anymore, do we?). Which is rather interesting, since its early uses were also just for the ceremony, the initial pledging.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to another year with my husband. If you’re married, in what month is your anniversary? I’d never imagined I would be a June bride–I always wanted a December wedding, but the allure of a beach wedding instead drew me away from all my childhood plans, LOL, and I have no regrets! How about you?

This one is a special request from my daughter, who came across it in a book. ?

So, tootles. Being a 90s tween/teen, I grew up hearing this word as “goodbye” (or maybe it was toodles? Hard to say, as apparently it never appeared in writing, and it has no entry in any dictionary I can find…And my kids, being children of the 2000-10s, think of Toodles as a character on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, so…)

But in fact, tootles is from the 1820s as “a frequentative of toot.” Now, first of all, I’ve never noticed another word described as “a frequentative of.” Spellcheck doesn’t even think “frequentative” is a word, LOL. But it just means exactly what you’d think–“when it happens frequently.” So tootle is when you toot frequently upon a horn or flute, for example.

Interestingly, and the use that grabbed my daughter’s attention, is that it later came to mean “to drive or move along in a leisurely fashion.” I can’t find a particular date on when that came into use, but she had encountered a sentence where the characters were tootling along in their car, which apparently struck her as hilarious.

So there we have it! Happy Monday!

Sometimes it’s so interesting to look at the history of the words that are so very common to our language! God is certainly one of those.

I’d heard at some point over the years that god and good are related . . . and I imagine most of you have heard the same. But apparently this is most definitely not the case–and largely because the word for god existed in Old English before Christianity arrived, and lemme just tell you, pagan gods are not good, generally speaking. So the words had no reason to be associated in their creation.

In fact, god has two possible sources. It could have come from the root Indo-European ghut, which means “that which is invoked.” Or perhaps it’s from ghu-to, “poured.” As in, the being to whom one would pour out libations.

Our English word is most likely derived most directly from the Nordic or German words of similar sound, and it’s interesting to note that in German, it was originally a neuter noun. But with the coming of Christianity, it became a masculine noun. (Goddess apparently dates from the 14th century.)

Good, quickly, is from Indo-European ghedh, “suitable.”

So there we have it. Though god and good do sound and look similar and have been tied together through Christian tradition, they, in fact, come from different words . . . and in the time when they both entered the language, they didn’t yet have any reason to be connected! ?

Time for a sweet treat of a word!

Cookie. In American English, we all know what this means. Yummy…

Tasty…

Delicious sweet treats…

My favorites are soft and chewy. Some prefer crisp and buttery. But in my opinion, all cookies are awesome. What they aren’t, however, is called the same thing everywhere, or in all of history.

I noticed when finding Colonial-era recipes that cookies were at the time called “little cakes.” What I didn’t realize was that the word cookie, which infiltrated American English by 1808, is from the Dutch koekje, which literally means “little cake.” Interestingly, while the Dutch had koekje, the Scottish also had cookie, as early as 1730, meaning “small, flat, sweet cake.” It’s thought that the American came from the Dutch, but it must surely have been influenced by the Scottish word of the same sound and meaning.

In the 1920s, the word was occasionally applied to people, especially women. The phrase “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” is from around 1955.

I admit, cookies are one of my favorite desserts. I can pass up cake, but not a cookie. What’s your favorite sweet treat?