Spend is descended from the Old English spendan with the same meaning, in turn from Proto-Germanic *spendaną, a borrowing from Latin expendō “I weigh out”, “I pay out”, “I judge”. The meaning “pay out” derived from “weigh out” from the fact that historically money consisted of valuable metals, such as silver or gold, so that paying for something involved weighing out a particular amount of the metal. This was also the source, as a direct borrowing, of the English expend, and related words such as expense.
Expendō, in turn, was a compound of ex- + pendō “I weigh”, “I pay”, “I suspend”. The closely-related verb pendeō with much the same meaning became French pendre “to hang”, whose present participle, pendant, was the source of the English pendant.
Also related was the noun pondus “weight”, “heaviness”, etc., and the adverb pondō “by weight”. That adverb was borrowed into Proto-Germanic as *pundą “weight”, “pound”, which became Old English pund, and thence Modern English pound. The currency sense derives from the fact that it was originally literally one (troy) pound (c. 373 grams) of silver.
Both the verb and the noun ultimately derive from Proto-Indo-European *(s)pend “to stretch”, “to pull”
The word ambassador has a complicated history, involving repeated borrowing between languages in different branches of Indo-European. In a way, a kind of ironically appropriate history given the meaning. The immediate source is Anglo-Norman ambassadeur, a borrowing from Old Italian ambassatore orambassadore, from Medieval Latin ambasiātor, ultimately from the Gothic andbahti “service, function”, from Proto-Germanic *ambahtiją “service”, “ministry”, “office”, “function”, from the noun *ambahtaz “servant”, a borrowing from Gaullish ambaxtos “vassal” or “high-ranking servant” from Proto-Celtic *ambaxtos “servant”, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h2m̥bih2éǵtos from *h2m̥bi- “around” + *h2eǵ “to drive”, perhaps via the concept of a messenger being sent from one place to another. Thus, it traveled from Celtic to Germanic to Romance and back to Germanic.
These same roots produced the Latin verb ambigō “I go about”, “I wander”, “I hesitate”, “I doubt”, “I question”, “I wonder”, which was the source of the adjective ambiguus “going two ways”, “moving from side to side”, “changing”, “fluctuating”, “hybrid”, “uncertain”, etc., the source of English ambiguous.
The “scuit” in “biscuit” means cooked, so technically, anything cooked is a monoscuit (cooked once), but the stuff special enough to cook twice deserves a special name - biscuit (cooked twice). Don’t even get me started on Triscuits. Million dollar idea: Tetrascuit.
I don’t think there’s ever been a funnier piece of lore in a video game then the etymology of the word “gun” in FFXIV
@wibbley-wobble So in XIV lore there was a queen named Gunhilder who ruled a country that was conquered by the big bad guy nation, galemald, and she had a royal guard called “gunhilder’s blades” who fought with swords that had triggers on them and were used for channeling magic, and these were called gunblades after the royal guard, When garlemald conquered bozja they copied the design of their swords but garleans can’t use magic so to adopt their fighting style they switched to a mechanical design that used black powder. Later on firearms were developed off of this concept and since they were “gunblades without the blade” people started calling them guns.
OH I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU ABOUT THE ETYMOLOGY OF GUNS IN REAL LIFE.
the name tyler sounds like it was first used post-ww2 like maybe 1960 until you find out it literally meant “guy who lays tile” (tile-er) 11th century england to refer to people that built houses. and then you read it as tile -er for the rest of yourlife
does piper mean guy who lays pipe
I know this is a sex joke, but… do people genuinely not know that a lot of surnames stem from professions? Tiler/Tyler became the surname for somebody who laid tile. Piper became a surname for somebody who played the pipes. Archer, Brewer, Butler, Carpenter, Clerk/Clark, Dexter, Farmer, Fisher, Mason, Miller, Potter, Sawyer, Sheppard/Shepherd, Smith, Tanner, Taylor/Tailor, Weaver…
People later started to give old family surnames as first names, and then over time, many of those became popular as first names in their own right. Is… is this not known?
a fun fact: germanic jews were forced en masse to adopt last names only a couple centuries ago, for tax reasons. before then it was just ‘dude son of guy’. so mostly the rabbis made everyone’s last names up themselves because they were the logical guy to do the census paperwork.
so that’s why ‘jewish names’ are so like that. goldstein (gold rock), goldfarb(gold colored), goldshmidt (goldsmith). three or four hundred years ago some tired rabbi ran out of ideas. you get tons of jews who are just something-thalbecause-thalmeans valley and that’s where they were when they got named. my favorite traditional jewish surname is just klein, small, because three hundred years ago some rabbi looked at a local guy and wrote down ‘shorty’.
The one thing I know with absolute certainty is that these things are not well known. Because there’s the whole trend of naming kids surnames, which seems like a weird attempt to Assign Career At Birth.
Like “Mason” (stone mason) or “Chandler” (candle-maker). Or patronymics, like “Grayson” (son of the bailiff).
Then there’s nicknames becoming full-fledged first names: “Katie” and “Jack” are things you’d see on birth certificates, instead of being seen as nicknames for “Catherine” and “John.” (And if you’re confused about English nicknames with k sounds at the end, like Chuck and Jack and Hank, it’s the remainder of an older diminutive suffix, like the -ie sound in Katie, Sally, and even doggie/kitty.)
I used to be confused about why “Handicap” became offensive, too (as I remember it, the movement to stop using it started picking up steam in the early 1990s). And then, a few years ago, I went on a deep dive into the history of it for part of a book I was working on (My main source for this info was an article in an academic journal I found online that’s now behind a paywall {sigh}).
But this is what I remember. I love it as part of word history, because it says so much about how we perceive things, and how we choose the words we do.
Anyway:
TheFolkHistory of the word says that’s because it comes from the phrase “Cap-in-Hand” – in other words, begging, and gives the suggestion that the only thing disabled people are good for is begging.
Thetruehistory of the word is that it started out associated with sports (Golf, and Horse Racing) and referred to an extra difficulty the stronger competitor had to deal with in order to even up the stakes for the weaker competitors.
Around the turn of the 20th century, it started being applied to children with intellectual impairments, and framing their lives as being burdened by their limitations. It might have started out as neutral at the time, but it quickly morphed first to a term of pity porn, and a derogatory term (The children are burdened by their impairments, and they are, in turn, a burden on Society).
At the end of World War 1, the word “Handicap” began to be applied to all disabilities, especially to the wounded soldiers coming back from the War, and applying for government assistance. And then, the military system spread to the civilian sector, and the way states ran their welfare systems.
And so, by the middle of the 20th century, the word “Handicap” came to be associated with bureaucracy and having to submit to “experts” examining us, to decide how much help we deserve, and how many hoops we have to jump through to get it (some things never change). And so that feelslike begging with “Cap in hand,” even if that isn’t where the word actually comes from.
And then, by the ‘90s, the “Social Model of Disability” began to take hold – that’s the idea that we’re not only disabled by our own impairments, but also by how our society is built (lack of accessible housing, inflexible employment requirements, etc.) and the word “Handicapped” implies that our impairments are burdens we carry for ourselves, and “Disability” doesn’t.
So that’s why the consensus was gradually reached that “Disability” was the better word.
(Sorry this got long; I’m something of a word and history geek)
i get a lot of asks about the etymology and evolution of the word ‘dyke’!
here is a history essay by JR Roberts, published in sinister wisdom no. 9, 1979, that posits a few theories and provides some explanations. note that this does contain some offensive historical language and slurs. it is about six pages long, so i’m going to place it under the cut!
One interesting thing about Finnish is the names of the months. Contrary to almost any other European language they are not related to the old Roman calendar, but instead use old terms, describing the farming year in Finland.
❄️ Tammikuu (Core Moon) - January: Tammi means oak, but in some dialects also means heart or core, which is the root of this name. This is the middle – or core – of winter in Finland.
Helmikuu (Pearl Moon) - February: Helmi means pearl, and the name comes from icy pearls frozen to twigs and branches you can often see glinting in the sunlight in this month.
Maaliskuu (Ground Moon) - March: Maa is the ground, maallinen means earthy. This is the month where normally snow melts for the first time, and the bare ground with no vegetation on it yet is visible.
Huhtikuu (Clearing Moon) - April: Huhta is cleared woodland. In this month, woodland was burned and cleared to make space for new fields.
Toukokuu (Planting Moon) - May: Touko is the seed and planting time, which obviously happens in May.
Kesäkuu (Summer Moon) - June: Kesä means summer, June is the first month of summer in Finland, and also the midsummer month. Therefore, it is more likely, that this name comes from “kesanto”, which is fallow ground. In June, fallow fields are ploughed for the first time.
Heinäkuu (Hay Moon) - July: Heinä is hay, and July is the month when the hay is cut and brought in.
Elokuu (Harvest Moon) - August: Elo means life, but is also an old word for crop, and this is the harvest month.
Syyskuu (Autumn Moon) - September: Syys is a poetic word for autumn, and this is the first month of autumn.
Lokakuu (Mud Moon) - October: Loka means mud – in October it rains and snows a lot, creating muddy ground.
Marraskuu (Death Moon) - November: Marras is an archaic word for dead (we can even find a connection to Latin here: mors!) or the soul of a dead person. Obviously, nothing grows in November, the trees are bare, plants have died down.
Joulukuu (Yule Moon) - December: Joulu now is Christmas, but goes back much further than that, to the pre-Christian Yule feast. In Finland, the feast was not renamed to a more “Christian” sounding name, but instead one feast has just replaced the other without a name change.
‘ard’ is a real suffix in the english language just like ‘ly’ or ‘ify’, it just isnt common enough for us to notice its usage. ‘ard’ means ‘too much’ or ‘too easily’
so ‘mustard’ is something that is ‘too pungent’, just as ‘wizard’ is someone who is too wise, ‘coward’ is someone too easily cowed, and ‘drunkard’ is someone too often drunk
this implies that ‘bastard’ is someone who is too ‘bast’ and this needs experimentation and research
Are you fucking serious omg
This is pretty much correct. According to the OED bastard is from Old French and the bast- part means “pack saddle” which was used as a bed by mule drivers, giving the phrase fils de bast, a child conceived on the pack saddle instead of the marriage bed. In English it becomes bastard, the -ard being a pejorative. It is the same one as wizard and coward and drunkard.
I think my favorite part of this is finding out wizard is a pejorative.
Hm, Interesting. I would have guessed that “bastard” was not “too bast” but “too base” – as in “base-born”
I love me some secretary birds. They’ll up and stomp a snake just for gettin’ in their territory. And don’t come at them when they’ve got eggs! Breeding season is year-round depending upon food supply, so you never know when you’ll be smacked down!
Their name is thought to be because of their quill-feathers, resembling a secretary with a quill pen behind their ear, as was common at the end of the 18th century, when the bird was first described by a European.
While they’re one of only two terrestrial birds of prey (the Caracaraof Central America and northern South America being the other), secretary birds fly easily. They’re about 4.5 ft (1.4 m) tall, and primarily hunt small animals. Mice, hares, crabs, and lizards make up the bulk of their diet, but they’ve been known to hunt snakes, tortoises, baby gazelle, and even baby cheetah at times.
Album of Abyssinian Birds and Mammals. Entries by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Published by the Field Museum of Natural History [Chicago]. 1930.
Here’s a very good video about the history of the word “gay”, from the channel The Origin of Everything. If you want to know more about how words change meaning over time, check out our video on semantic shift! And we’ve got some exciting stuff going on with Danielle Bainbridge, the channel’s host, but more on that tomorrow. ^_^
Cardinal comes from Latin ‘cardinalis’, which means 'principal, essential, foremost’. But it’s also a noun, meaning 'that guy who wears red in the church’, or 'that bird who wears red in a tree’. Being that they’re both bright red, one is clearly named after the other. Which came first?
The answer is– ding, ding– the liturgical meaning. The bird, being a New World animal, was named so around 1670, presumably when some smallpox-infested weirdo exclaimed, “fuck, does that bird look Catholic!”
Salary is a weird word, because it means almost exactly what you think it does, but not in quite the way you think.
Have you ever watched that HBO show, Rome? There’s a scene where a character encounters the Roman army, and is trying to find a friend within its masses. Because cell phones are a few (hundred) decades off, he’s gotta yell and hope the right person hears. He starts trying to bribe other soldiers as to the whereabouts of his friend. He doesn’t bribe them with money, though, he bribes them with salt.
This is because, like cell phones, refrigerators are also a few hundred years off. But, no matter what era you’re born in, food is precious. And so anything to preserve food is equally precious. So, basically, welcome to a world where salt is a totally justifiable way to pay your soldiers.
The Latin word for salt is ‘sal’, and thus your salary was 'salarius’, an adjectival form of salt ('salarius’ means 'something that has to do with salt’, which, if salt is how you get paid, describes your salary pretty well). This mutated into 'salarium’, which literally meant 'salary’ as we understand the word today. Then the French got a hold of it, and the word 'salarie’ was born. By the fourteenth century, some monk lobbed the 'ie’ off, and thus the word 'salary’ as we know it today was born. Even two-thousand years later, when the people using the word don’t get paid in salt anymore.
Portamanteau is, like most words with too many letters, French. It first appeared in the 1540s, where it refereed to the guy who carried the mantle of the prince, from ‘porte’ (think 'porter’) and 'manteau’ (think 'mantle’). It took about fourty years for that word to mutate from the 'person’ part of a noun to the 'thing’ part, coming to refer to a type of suitcase.
And then, in 1882, some douchebag (you may have heard of him) decided it should have an entirely new meaning, and that meaning stuck. Since you can pack two things up at once in a suitcase– or a portamanteau– you can certainly pack two meanings up in one word.
And so a word completely changed its meaning due to some guy thinking it was a good idea at the time.
The word ‘dick’ has a much simpler history than the word 'cock’, yet it’s also very similar. 'Dick’ is inevitably a nickname for the word Richard.
So, to talk about 'dick’, we have to talk about names.
Let’s… think about this for a second. Nicknames today are endearments that you call one person to show you’re close to them and possibly shorten their name. In the Middle Ages, though, nicknames were things you used to tell all of your children apart. Because, in the Middle Ages, you had a lot of kids, and not a lot of names.
Today, people strive to find the most original, special, unique name possible for their children. In the Middle Ages, this was way, way less popular– entire populaces would have maybe twenty first names to their, uh, name. This isn’t to say that these people were unaware of the existence of other names. The way they approached naming and names was just plumb different from how we do today. So you might know several people named Margaret. To tell them apart, you call one Margaret, another Marge, maybe another Meg, and then one gets called Peg.
Now, imagine a world where Richard is one of the most popular names. So, you have a kid named Richard, and also know four other people named Richard, so to differentiate you get a Richard, a Rich, a Rick, and a kid called Dick. Dick was a popular endearment of a name– it was short and cute and kind of ubiquitous. It came to the point where, if you’re talking about a guy, the chances are so high that his name is going to be Richard, you can just call him 'dick’.
Can you see where this is going? Just like saying someone’s penis is their 'John Thomas’, saying someone’s penis is their 'dick’ makes just as much sense. The jump from 'male person’ to 'male member’ was fairly easy, and the British Army in the late 1800s made it with amplomb.
Cock originally meant ‘a rooster’. This is, unsurprisingly, an onomatopoeia, but it’s a French one! Sort of. It comes from Old English, through Old French, and, looking back, even Old Norman and Old Germanic: 'kukkaz’, 'kokkr’, 'coq’, 'coc’, and eventually in English, 'cock’.
Eventually, through the magic of slang, 'cock’ could also mean 'one who walked, strutted or swaggered like a cock’, and thus could be colloquially used to refer to young, self-assured, cocky boy.Of course, this meaning took hold in the Middle Ages– 'cocky’ sprung up in the 1760s.
Of course, if 'cock’ means a certain type of male, it’s only a short time before it means something else generally associated with men. 'Cock’ coming to colloquially refer to a penis happened around the early 1600s (probably much earlier than that, honestly). It’s a similar jump to calling a penis a 'Johnson’ or 'John Thomas’– if one is a common name for a man, than, logic follows you can call a dick the same thing.
There is also, related but not quite, the word 'cock’ meaning 'to stand up’ (“She cocked her head to the left…”) is from 'cocken’, which originally meant 'to fight’, but, possibly thanks to the rooster-related meaning (think about how the tail of a rooster stands pertly, cocky, etc), has come to mean standing or leaning in a certain way.
For all of this to work, in your head, you have to imagine a world where everyone is immediately familiar with how a rooster sounds, how it looks, how it walks. Chickens and roosters were everywhere in the European Middle Ages– and, since we’re specifically talking about the English language, in Medieval England.
They were ubiquitous to the point that the term 'cock’ became something of an endearment. It meant 'young boy’, and thus to add that to the end of your child or friend’s name was a cutesy-yet-roughish endearment. This is where we get 'Willcox’ (William + Cock), 'Hitchcock’ (Richard + Cock), Adcock (Adam + Cock), and many others.
The word 'cock’ was basically a meme, a word that meant nearly everything, all because roosters were fucking everywhere.
‘Thus’ is from Old English, from the same place as 'that’ and 'this’. Thusly is thus’ ugly second cousin who was born with a tail. The word originally appeared in 1869, and was mostly used ironically. The joke was 'thusly’ was such a silly, stupid word that only an uneducated person trying to sound educated would stoop so low as to use it. However, due to the fact that it’s just plum linguistically useful, it’s crept into the vernacular despite the best efforts of people who even today insist that it’s 'incorrect’.
