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Pandemic

Etymology: pandemic

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First recorded in the 1660s, this word comes from the Latin word pandemus, which itself comes from the Greek pandemos, pan- meaning “all, every, whole,” derived from PIE pant- meaning “all,” and dēmos, meaning “people.”  You’ll recognize dēmos, in words like demotic, which refers to the language of the common people.  The word dēmos actually comes from the PIE roots da- and mo- which together mean “division.”  Thus this word implies a division between the common people and the elite.

The -ic part of pandemic is a word-forming element from Middle English -ick, –ike, or -ique, that’s used for making adjectives.  It means, “being, made of, caused by, similar to, having to do with, having the nature of.”  It comes from French -ique, from Latin -icus, and Greek -ikos, all of which come from the PIE suffix -(i)ko.  This suffix is thought to be the origin of the Slavic suffix -sky, Polish -ski, and Russian -skii and means “pertaining to.” You’ll recognize this suffix in many Slavic names, like for example my dear sweet friend Jenn Sutkowski’s name.

The word epidemic is older than pandemic and it is thought that the word pandemic was modeled after epidemic.

Pandemic is a pretty fun and challenging board game as well, and might be worth checking out for something to do during your quarantine.

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Cavalry

Etymology: cavalry

This morning I typed the word cavalry, and decided it was a weird word and needed to be looked up so here we are, the etymology of cavalry.

This is one of those words that comes to English from romance languages.  Middle French, cavalerie, and Italian, cavalleria and cavalliere, meaning “mounted soldier.”  It comes from the Vulgar Latin word for “horse,” caballus.

Side note 1: Old Latin called horses equus, which comes from an old PIE root ekwo-.  You’ll recognize this root in words like equestrian, hippopotamus, hippocratic, and even the word alfalfa.

Side note 2: alfalfa has a very interesting history as a word.  It comes to us from Spanish, but it came to Spanish from Arabic, and to Arabic from two Old Iranian root words, aspa- meaning “horse,” and -sti- meaning “food.”

Side note 3: the word horse, is a very old word and it’s unclear what its origin story is.  Some people think it’s a loan-word from the Sarmatian language spoken by the Sarmatians of ancient Iran.  They migrated northwest, eventually settling in the areas now known as Ukraine, Southern Russia and Poland.  It’s one of those words that sounds the same in many languages, regardless of their roots, even in the Uralic languages like Finnish which are super weird and not really like anything else.  The Finnish word for “horse or stallion” is varsa, which if you say it out loud, sounds a lot like “horse” spoken with a weird accent.

Ok back to cavalry.  So the Vulgar Latin word was caballus, which is thought to have been a loan-word from some long dead Anatolian language, and originally it meant specificially, “work horse,” but it somehow caught on and became just the general word for “horse.”  B sounds often morph into V sounds over time, so from caba you get cava and then cavalier, and then cavalry.  Cavalier used to mean, “gallant, knightly, brave,” but then came to mean “easy, offhand and disdainful.”  Funny how words do that.  The surname Chevalier, and the word chivalry, come from this word.

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Sublime

Etymology Lesson: sublime

In an email, my wonderful pal Ashley used the word sublime. It was the best word she could think of to describe the feeling she felt when they put her son on her chest after she gave birth to him. I think it’s the perfect word for that experience and here’s why.

Let us start by separating the word into its two parts, the prefix sub-, from the Latin preposition of the same name, meaning “under, beneath, at the foot of,” and also “up to, towards, within, and during.”

Next, -lime, from Latin, limen, meaning “threshold, edge, limit, boundary.” Also the source of the word liminal. So the word sublime literally means, “at the foot of the threshold,” or “beneath the edge.”

I can’t think of a better word to describe those precious and rare moments in life where you are in a space of perfect presence with something hugely important. Before that moment was struggle, pain, and effort, and you know that on the other side of that moment is responsibility, the mundane, and everything else, so you stay with it as long as you can. The sublime.

 

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Kid

Etymology Lesson: kid

This morning I had to ask my friend Adam which he meant, a human kid, or a goat kid and that got me thinking about which came first.  Did we start calling human children kid because they reminded us of goat children?  Or was it the other way ’round?

Turns out it was goats first.  From Proto-Germanic, kidjom, to Old Norse kið, meaning “young goat,” and was pronounced either as kith or kih.  It has no as yet discovered PIE root.  The first recorded use of kid as slang for “child” was made in the 1590s.  The word’s use as a verb, as in kidding, wasn’t recorded until the early 1800s, and meant “to coax, wheedle or hoax.”  

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Somewhat related, the word kidnap, is the only surviving form of the word nap in its verb form, meaning not, “a short sleep” but, “to catch or seize.”  We now know this word as nab, but it was originally nap.  The word is likely from a Scandinavian source since there are the words nappe and nappa meaning the same thing in Norwegian and Swedish respectively.

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Creature

Etymology Lesson: creature

The other day I was thinking about the word creature and that got me thinking about the word creator, so here is an etymology lesson for those.

Both words have the same PIE root, in Shipley’s it’s ker-(VI), which itself means “to grow,” and informs words like, crescent, increase, procreate, recruit, and accrue, and the name of the Roman goddess of agriculture, Ceres. (pictured)

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Side note: my dear friend Sarah named one of her feline companions Ceres, only to find out later that Ceres was a boy, (R.I.P. Ceres! You were a big fluffy dummy and we miss you!)

For creator, ker-(VI) combines with the latin suffix -ator, which is basically the noun form of a verb that ends in -ate, in this case, create. (I think?  Latin suffixes perplex me, so maybe someone who has studied Latin can school me?) So, creator means “one who causes things to grow,” and creature means, “a thing that has been grown.”

The PIE ker- root variations are pretty vast, Shipley’s has seven distinct ones, with meanings like, “to turn,” “to burn,” “to scratch or cut,” “of or related to having horns,” “to cry out,” “to grow,” and “to destroy.”  It reminds me that PIE is at best a well-researched theory, but I suppose everything is.

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Hoarfrost

Etymology Lesson: hoarfrost

The other day, a client of mine mentioned seeing some spectacular hoarfrost on a trip to Canada, which got me thinking about the word hoarfrost.  If you’ve not seen this phenomenon, its a form of frost caused by dew that rapidly freezes when it collects on vegetation or objects that are colder than the air. It forms feathery crystals that are stunningly beautiful and transform forests into icy winter fairy tale worlds.

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So why is it called hoarfrost?  The hoar in this word comes from hoary which means “venerable, grey haired, ancient.”  You may recognize a similar sounding word Herr, which in German is a title of respect given to men.  It has roots in an Old Norse word harr, meaning, “grey-haired, old.”  And, according to Shipley, this word is related to the PIE root keiro, or koiro, which meant “grey, old, worthy.”  So hoarfrost references the resemblance of this phenomenon to everything being covered in soft, feathery hair.

Frost comes from a Proto-Germanic word frustaz, and is pretty much the same word in all Germanic languages.  The verb form of frustaz is freusanan, which meant “to freeze,” and can find its origin in the PIE root word preus-, which meant both “to freeze” and “to burn,” referring to the power cold has to both freeze and burn.

Here in New England, we have, thusfar, had a rather mild winter with not much snow or frost, which surely means we are about to get nailed with a huge storm any moment now!

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Window

Etymology Lesson: window

This morning I was doing my Duolingo Norwegian course and it gave me a new word, as it sometimes does, as sort of an invitation to see if I can guess what the word is.  Today’s word was vindu, which means, “window.”  As I discussed in my post on the etymology of defenestrate, many other languages use some form of fenestra as their word for window.  But this Norwegian word, vindu, sounds enough like window, that it inspired me to look up the etymology to confirm that the word is indeed of Old Norse origin.

It is indeed, and the etymology is pretty cool. It comes from two words vindr, meaning “wind,” and auga, meaning, “eye,” combined into the Old Norse word vindauga, or “wind eye.”  The word auga can be traced back to the PIE root, oku-, which means, “to see,” and the root can be found in lots of words that relate to seeing, like monocle, oculus, optic, and cyclops.  Wind also has a PIE root, we-, which means “to blow,” and can be found in words like weather, wing, vent, and Nirvana, which, by the way, does not literally mean “transcendence,” it means “disappearance,” like a fire blowing out.

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My cat, Dr. Nelson Tangles, in the window.
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Apology

Etymology Lesson: apology

Recently I made a few mistakes and hurt someone dear to me, so I needed to make an apology, and it got me thinking about the origins of the word.  Let’s break it down a bit.

There are two PIE roots, ap- and apo- which both mean, “reach, extend, put hence, put off, put away.”  You’ll recognize these roots from words like apostate, apotheosis, apogee, apocalypse etc., all of which have a sense of something set apart or distant that has reached its finality.

Next is the PIE root leg- 1, (there are two leg roots) which is interesting because it means, “to gather, consider, and choose” but in the distinct context of there being an intent to pick things out, in this case, words, from that collection of information.  So from leg – 1, we get the Greek word, logos, which means, “word, speech, discourse” and also “reasoning.”  So an extended definition of the word means “to gather, consider, choose, reason, and then speak about in discourse.”

So when you combine apo and logos together, you get an extended definition that means “an extension to finality of the gathering, consideration, choosing, and reasoning of a personal account, which will be spoken about in discourse.”  The word itself is an invitation to really consider what has occurred, gather what information you can about it, and then figure out the best way to reach forward for some discourse to some finality on the topic.

Can’t think of a better way to put it really.  Apologizing isn’t easy, and, not that I’m an expert on it, but a lot of people are REALLY bad at it.  Right there in the word though are instructions for how to make a good apology.  If you haven’t carefully considered what has occurred and aren’t able to even articulate what you did wrong, how can you ever really offer an apology?

On a lighter note, I will always take any excuse to post this video, because even though Justin Bieber is kind of a tool, Parris Goebel and ReQuest Dance Crew are awesome and I’m not sorry about it:

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PIE: eis

From time to time, I will dive into certain PIE (Proto Indo European) roots.  PIE is fascinating because it is essentially a reconstructed language that linguists uncovered within the languages spoken by Indo-Europeans today.  Since it was likely to have been spoken in Neolithic times, no one has ever heard anyone speaking PIE, yet its roots can be heard every day.  I have most certainly used a very large amount of PIE root words in writing this paragraph.  Count them if you have an hour or two to spare and let me know what you find!

Today I’d like to talk about the PIE root eis, from which we get words like pediatrics, ire, hierophant, and so on.  Shipley defines eis thusly, “set in quick motion ; wrath ; divine power.”  In a way, this root imbues a word with a kick of that divine power.  Take, for example, the word iron, from the German, eisen, meaning “holy metal.” Iron certainly changed our world, to the extent that an entire age of mankind is named after it, so it is no wonder that the ancient germanic people gave this substance a name that recalled for them the passion of wrath and divine power.

Or consider the way we name specialized medical fields, pediatrics, geriatrics.  In these words you can find the Greek word iatros, which meant, “healer.”  And where did the Greeks get iatros from?  That’s right, the PIE root eis.  It makes sense why, when you consider that in ancient times, the healing arts and spirituality were inseparably intertwined.

There are also those who think this root can be found in words like estrogen and estrus. Two words which represent the divine power possessed by the females of species to create life itself.

Pictured is an image from the Thoth Tarot deck of the trump card The Hierophant, from the Greek words hieros, meaning, “sacred,” and phainein, meaning, “to bring to light.”  Thus, literally, “one who brings to light the sacred.”

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Midwife

Since I’m doing some reading for my doula training, here is some etymology of the word, midwife.

You may assume that the mid in midwife just means, “middle,” but it actually has roots in an Old Norse word that means, “together with,” or “in the company of.”  Modern day Nordic languages still use a version of this word to mean “with,” usually the word med, and you’ll see it on food packaging a lot.  “Med smak av jordbær,” means “with flavor of strawberries” in Swedish, for example.

Wife is one of those super old words that used to just mean “woman.” In fact the word woman is just the words wife and man put together and then loosened by lazy tongues. Man used to just mean, “mankind” and wasn’t as gendered as it has come to be in modern English.  Thus, midwife literally means, “with woman,” and midwifery literally means, “the art of being with woman,” which I think is a really nice, though quite gendered, way of describing the role of a person helping out another person who is giving birth.