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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.)

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Autumnus!

Monday Etymology Lesson: autumn

autumn 11:10:14

The word autumn comes from the ancient Etruscan root: autu- which was borrowed into Latin to become autumnus and means “the ending of the year.”  Prior to the 16th century, harvest was the most commonly used word for this season, but as people moved from farms to cities, we needed a less agriculturally relevant term, so autumn was borrowed from the French, who had since evolved the word from the Latin autumnus to autompne or automne.  Fall is really only used in North America in modern times, and is a Germanic word, likely borrowed from Old Norse. 

Enjoy the day! Autumnus!