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Centenarian

Etymology: centenarian

Today, my dear sweet grandma is 100 years old!  Although I credit my grandfather for my love of words, anything that’s practical, skillful, witty or quietly nourishing about me I owe to my amazing grandma Betty.  Due to quarantine rules, we are unable to celebrate this momentous day with her in person, so we’ll settle for a family Zoom video call. She’s currently dealing with a positive diagnosis for COVID-19, but is blessedly asymptomatic and her doctors are optimistic that she will stay that way. Still, we welcome any good thoughts to be sent her way!

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Though she will likely shy away from any acknowledgement of this achievement in her usual mildly self-deprecating way, it’s obviously quite a big deal to those of us who love her. She is now a centenarian! Has a nice distinguished ring to it doesn’t it?  The first recorded use of the word was in 1805.  Prior to that, people used the word centenary either as an adjective to describe things related to or consisting of 100 years, or as a noun to describe a period of 100 years or the celebration of a hundredth anniversary.  This word is still used in British English, but in America we tend to use the word centennial.

Both centenary and centenarian come from Latin centenarius, which formed from the word centum, meaning “hundred.”

As an aside, the English word hundred comes from a Proto-Germanic word, *hundam.  The Proto Indo European root for both centum and hundam is the word, *dekm-, which actually means 10.  This PIE root gives us a clue as to how the somewhat different sounding words centum and hundam happened. There’s this thing in spoken language where consonant sounds evolve over time, often due to people skipping or combining sounds to speed up speech. There are lots of different ways and reasons why this happens.  (Here’s a good wikipedia article about it for those interested.) Basically people added some suffixes to *dekm- to multiply it for use as the number 100.  Latin ended up with the one that sounded more like satam or centum, and Proto-Germanic ended up with the one that sounded more like hundam.  Language is weird.

Anyhow, I’m happy to be celebrating my favorite centenarian today. 100 years of Betty is never really enough, but I’ll take it. Here’s to 100 more!

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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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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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Dream

Wednesday Morning Etymology Lesson: Dream

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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.