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Defenestrate

Friday Morning Etymology Lesson: defenestrate

Today’s word comes from my friend Nemo, who says this is his favorite word.  Defenestrate means “ejection from a window” and is our word for Friday because who among us hasn’t wished to throw a coworker or two out the window by the time Friday rolls around?  The word comes from the Latin word fenestra meaning “window.”  This is an exciting word, not just because its meaning brings to mind tossing unsavory objects out of windows, but because it is one of a few words that was created because of a real-life incident!  Two incidents, in fact.  Apparently back in the Middle Ages (and beyond), the people of Prague were quite fond of throwing their officials out of windows.  These two incidents came to be known as the Defenestrations of Prague (in 1419 and again in 1618) precipitating the Hussite War & Thirty Years War, respectively.  Of course the people of Prague weren’t the first, or unfortunately the last, to throw people out of windows, but the description of the events of 1618 mark the first time defenestration was used officially. 

Note: As I type this I am watching a man hanging off the side of a building cleaning its windows. Coincidence? I think not!

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Tutu

To make up for today’s earlier word, here is a less gross one, suggested by my friend Noelle Boc:  tutu

tutu

The etymology of tutu is a bit naughty to be honest.  Tutu actually comes to us from the latin culus meaning, [clears throat] “backside or undercarriage.”  It was shortened to cucu and then changed again to tutu by the flirty French.  How did this word come to mean a fluffy skirt that ballerinas wear?  Well, in the traditional theaters back in the 1700s & 1800s, ordinary citizens stood in an area called “the pit,” located below stage level.  The elite sat in the balconies gazing down on the action.  Dancers back then were really pushing the envelope on how much leg they could show.  Not with the intent to be naughty, but because they worked so hard on fancy leg and footwork and wanted to show it off.  Underwear, as we know it to be, wasn’t invented until the late 1800’s.  Everyone wore pantaloons and long knickers back then, which would disturb the line of the leg, so dancers didn’t bother with underwear.  Thus, the mob in the pit had quite the view of the undercarriage of the dancers, otherwise known as the tutu area, whilst the genteel folk upstairs did not.  I’m sure you can imagine the chaos this would create.

In order to disguise the tutu area, costume makers created a sort of multi-layered drooping dress with frills that were joined across the bottom and over time the special dress took on the commoners name for the area it was meant to cover.  Voilà: Tutu!  Très risqué! 

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Pus (eew)

Thursday Etymology Lesson: pus

Brought to you from the mind of my pal Joe Fallon, I had to choose this word today as I am at the hospital (nothing serious).  Today’s word is pus!  You know, that white stuff inside of zits.  This word comes to us from the late 14c., from Latin pus “matter from a sore.”  Pus is related to puter meaning, “rotten” which you may recognize from the word putrid.  Puter is an old word that comes from the Sanskrit words puyati meaning, “rots, stinks,” and putih meaning, “stinking, foul.”  Also from the Greek puon “discharge from a sore,” and pythein “to cause to rot.”  Eeeeeew.

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Maelstrom

Wednesday Etymology Lesson: maelstrom

maelstrom 11:19:14

From two Danish words (neither of which mean “bad” or “storm,” by the way, but I see why you might think that), maalen meaning “grind or whirl” and stroom meaning “stream or flow.”  Maelstrom was first used to describe a whirlpool, and not just any whirlpool but a mythical whirlpool that was supposed to exist in the Arctic Ocean, west of Norway called the Moskstraumen (see image).  It is described by Edgar Allan Poe in his short story A Descent into the Maelström.  The Mokstraumen does exist, but it is a series of currents, not a giant whirlpool in the middle of the sea.  Some other famous maelstroms include the Saltstraumen in Norway, the Corryvreckan off the coast of Scotland, and the Old Sow, located between Deer Island, New Brunswick and Moose Island, Maine.

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Debauchery

Tuesday Morning Etymology Lesson: debauchery

Today’s word comes from my pal Bree.  What a fun word!  Debauch is, obviously, a French word from the 1590s meaning “to lead one astray from work.”  The word is made up of two other words de and bauch, meaning “make less” and “beam or plank” respectively.  Thus, debauch literally translates to “make less the beam, or plank.” 

So how did it come to mean “entice from work or duty?”  There are several theories.  One is that a literal use of the word, “to shave wood from the beam,” [clears throat] was bastardized into urban slang. 

I’m sure if we put our thinking caps on we could find some, let’s say, less than wholesome ways “shave wood from the beam” could be used as a euphemism. 

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Moist

Moist Monday Etymology Lesson: moist

Today’s word is much despised by many, and aptly describes today’s soggy state, yes my friends, it is time to learn all about the etymology of MOIST.

For those who hate the word, you have the French to blame for moiste, a word derived from Old French, meaning “damp, wet, or soaked.”  Some linguists think its Latin root is musteum, meaning “fresh, green, or new.” While others think it stems from the Latin mucidus, which means “slimy, moldy, or musty.”

Enjoy your Moist Monday, friends!

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Holy

Friday Morning Etymology Lesson: holy

I’ll spare you the long and twisty history of how we got the word holy in modern English, involving things like proto-indo-european linguistics, but it begins waaaaay back in prehistory with a root word: sol- which means, “whole”.  You will recognize this root word from many modern words, like solar and solitary, which might sound different from each other, but they have one thing in common and that thing is ONE, a whole, a single entity.  The root sol- informed many words related to wholeness, health, soundness, etc.  So in its most basic form, holy relates to health. It makes sense that holy came to mean something sacred, since in ancient times, health was generally thought to be a gift from the divine, and healers were believed to be connected to the divine.

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Karaoke

Thursday Morning Etymology Lesson: karaoke

Relevant to last night’s activities (I sing karaoke most weeks on Wednesday nights), today’s word is karaoke!  Obviously the word is Japanese, but not entirely!  It translates as kara, meaning “empty”, oke, which is a shortened version of okesutora.  Okesutora is an example of the linguistic practice of Japanization of an English word, in this case, orchestra.  So karaoke means “empty orchestra”.

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Dream

Wednesday Morning Etymology Lesson: Dream

dream 11:12:14
Matteo Scalera’s Morpheus/Dream of The Endless, from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman Graphic Novel Series

Because I had some vivid ones last night, today’s word is dream, which has a somewhat dissatisfying etymology for traditional linguists, in that the Old English word dream meant “joy, mirth, noisy merriment” and no one can really figure out why in the mid 13th century it came to mean “sleeping vision” instead.  Theories include a borrowing from the Old Norse word draumr which comes from a Proto-Germanic word draugmaz, meaning “festivity, dream, ghost, hallucination, delusion, deception.”  My own personal theory has to do with olde-timey festivals being closely tied with substance imbibing which would likely lead to “sleeping visions,” should one be feeling festive enough.

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Pineapple

Tuesday Morning Etymology Lesson: Pineapple!

In most other languages, pineapples are referred to by their scientific name: ananas, which means, aptly, “really good fruit,” and comes from the Tupi languages spoken in South America.  However, because Europeans liked to pretend they discovered everything, when they “discovered” the fruit in the Americas in the 1500s, they dubbed them pine apples because of their resemblance to those things that grow on pine trees back home in Blighty.  (Note: They hadn’t named those “pine cones” just yet. That word doesn’t come up until the mid-late 1600s.)