by Roseanna White | Feb 6, 2017 | Word of the Week
My daughter asked about this one as she was cutting up some paper doilies for valentines she was making. It was a quick answer, but one I’d certainly never investigated before, so I thought I’d share.
So doily as we know it is a shortening of doily-napkin, and dates from 1714. It refers to the light, lacy item made from doily–a thin, woolen fabric. It’s supposedly named for a dry-goods dealer in London. The surname comes from Normandy, and before it was specific to thin, lightweight woolens, it was used to mean “genteel and affordable woolens.” So whoever the Doily [d’Oilly] family was, they apparently carried textiles worthy of fame!
Now, stay tuned! Tomorrow I’ll be participating in a fun scavenger hunt to kick off the release of The Lost Girl of Astor Street!
by Roseanna White | Jan 30, 2017 | Word of the Week
I’m always so intrigued when words have come to mean the exact opposite of what they used to. And that, apparently, is what happened (metaphorically, at least) with ace.
Round about the year 1300, the word ace entered English. It was taken from the Latin as, which meant “one”–and is thought to be borrowed by Latin directly from the Greek eis, which means the same.
When it entered English, though, it wasn’t just to mean “one.” It was to particularly refer to the sides of dice with only one mark. Because of this, ace in Middle English was used metaphorically to mean “bad luck.” That stuck around for quite a while…until cards became popular.
In cards, ace was also used to the “one” card…but of course, in cards, that’s usually the highest, rather than the lowest. So as games switched popularity and cards began to rule the day, the metaphorical meaning of ace changed too. From “bad luck” to “top of the deck–the best.” This total flip had happened absolutely by the 18th century.
Phrases like “ace in the hole” came around by 1907; during World War I, ace became applied to the best pilots. From there, it moved into verb form–in the 1920s, you could ace in sports, which meant to score a point. In the 1950s, this sports sense was extended via student slang to mean, “score high marks.”
So there we have it–a four hundred year evolution from bad luck to the best, and then a slow move from being a noun to a verb. Ace has always meant “one”–but whether that’s a positive or negative has done an about-face.
by Roseanna White | Jan 16, 2017 | Word of the Week
Okay, more of a phrase of the week–and this one by special request (happy to report no one’s under the weather in my house! Though we had a brief stint of it last Tuesday…)
Anyway. So.
Everyone knows that under the weather means to feel sick. The question is where it came from.
As it turns out, this is in fact a phrase with nautical origins. A lot of seasickness is caused by bad weather–and the solution is to go below deck and lie down, where you’re not only out of the weather, but where the swaying of the ship isn’t so pronounced. When you did this, you were said to go/be, quite literally, under the weather. Some sources site the original phrase as being under the weather bow–which was the side of the ship getting hit by all the wind and waves etc.
So there we have it, and here’s hoping no one in your house has to claim it this week!
by Roseanna White | Jan 9, 2017 | Word of the Week
Last weekend, my daughter asked where the word Bible came from. I had an idea but wasn’t 100% sure I was right so looked it up–and indeed found my impression was correct.
Bible is a rather ancient word, meaning “the Bible or any large book” back in the medieval days. I know that in many romance languages, the word for book still has bibl- in it somewhere, so this was no surprise to me. It comes most directly to English from Latin, via French, but the Latin word is actually straight from the Greek. Biblion is any ordinary scroll or book. They called the Holy Bible, ta biblio to hagia at first, though the term for the Christian scriptures had been shorted to ta biblio in Greek as early as 223!
The Greek is thought to perhaps have come from Byblos, a Phoenician port from which Egyptian papyrus was exported to Greece.
So for many hundreds of years, the English form Bible meant only the Holy Scriptures; it was then expanded again figuratively to mean “any authoritative work” around 1800.
by Roseanna White | Dec 19, 2016 | Holidays, Word of the Week
Today I’m not examining the etymology of the word itself so much as the history of the tradition of hanging mistletoe at Christmas. Is this part of your family’s tradition?
I’ve never really taken part in it, but certainly we all know that if one pauses beneath mistletoe, one cannot refuse a kiss. In past centuries, this was believed to be good luck and to guarantee love, marriage, and children in the coming year (for those still unmarried). The ball of mistletoe would be burned after the Twelve Days of Christmas to seal the fates of those couples who had kissed beneath it.
But where did the tradition come from? Well it dates back far beyond the coming of Christianity to Europe. For millennia, mistletoe was revered as a sacred plant and thought to contain powers of fertility and good luck and the ability to ward off evil. The plant typically grows on apple trees, but once in a while can be found on oaks (also sacred), so the oak mistletoe is especially sacred and would be cut by Druids with a golden sickle.
The legend goes as follows: the goddess Frigga had a beloved son, Balder, who was the god of summer and hence all things growing and alive. Balder had a terrible dream that he was going to die, so his mother went to every part of nature, above the ground and below, asking them to promise not to kill her son. But she neglected to request this of the mistletoe, which neither had roots below ground nor grew on its own above. So the tricky god Loki, enemy of Balder, made a poison from the berries of the mistletoe and dipped an arrow in it, shooting and killing Balder. For three days, every element and plant tried to revive him, to no avail. Finally, his mother’s own tears revived him, which then turned to little white berries on the mistletoe. She was so overjoyed that she kissed everyone who passed beneath the hanging plant.
You can see where this would easily become part of a tradition surrounding the birth of Christ, right? Someone who lay dead for three days and then was brought back to life, ultimate Love triumphing over Death. Especially since this plant was cut traditionally on the solstice already–and the winter solstice had long been established as the birth of Christ (read why here, if you haven’t already). It was easily incorporated into new traditions and became a lasting one–though still tinged with superstition.
So where do you come down on mistletoe and kissing beneath it? Fun custom? Good luck? Or something to be avoided at all costs? 😉
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.