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.”
Dialects and accents have always been fascinating to me, particularly since I grew up in a family where no one really spoke the same dialect as anyone else. My grandparents were both from somewhat posh areas on the outskirts of Boston, and spoke with what I can best describe as an old school Yankee accent. It was a bit more high brow sounding than the much-imitated accent of President Kennedy, for example, but had similar tones in it. My grandfather also adopted different accents for different ways of speaking. His reciting-something-from-a-book accent was very different from his every day speaking accent. My grandmother is from Winchester, and she’s always had a somewhat posh sounding Brahmin accent. More like the man on the right than the left in this video, but really a combo of the two:
My mother and her brothers all speak with a Massachusetts South Shore accent (some more than others). They all speak like the man in this video.
My aunts Mabel and Meg have different accents from their other siblings. This is due to Mabel having lived abroad in England for a time, and Meg having lived in the city for the vast majority of her life. It is hard for me to describe Meg’s accent because it has a lot of different sounds in it. Meg’s husband Jimmy, however, grew up in Somerville and he speaks exactly like Whitey Bulger does in the video below. My uncle Jimmy is a character and a half. (CW: Whitey is talking about some violent behavior in this video so consider yourselves warned.)
My father is from Kentucky, and his grandmother, Ida, spoke with a strong Appalachian accent, like the people in the video below (please watch this video, it is AMAZING). She passed when I was 14, but before that she would call me every year on my birthday and sing me Happy Birthday and at the end she would say “Jesus loves you, Emily.” in her sweet accent. I miss that. My father’s mother Ruth lived in southern Ohio longer than in Kentucky so she spoke with a stronger Midwestern accent than Appalachian. She said the word wash as worsh, for example. It makes me sad that I can barely remember her voice. She died when I was 7. My father speaks with a blend of those two accents, with hints of a Boston accent and a South Shore accent. It’s very unique and very endearing.
My sister, Abby, and I had so many different accents in our world as kids that we ended up having a bit of trouble saying L and R sounds correctly. I can still recall our family poking fun of us for how we said the word owl as owah, for example. Eventually we sort of gave up and unconsciously decided to speak like all the people on TV and in old movies. People are often surprised when they hear that I’m from the South Shore of MA since I don’t have a South Shore accent. On a recent trip abroad, everyone in Scandinavia thought that I was British, though I would not describe my accent as British at all. It’s also not a typical American accent either though. My sister and I actually speak differently from each other at this point in our lives. For a few years, Abby has been working with and around people who are 10-15 years younger than her and their accent has rubbed off on her (though this may be news to her). Millennials have developed their own dialect and accent. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, it’s not just vocal fry and up-speak. It sounds casual, flirty, fun, and completely lacks any trace of the regional dialect from where the speaker grew up. The R sounds are hard, the vowels sort of whine their way out, and I have noticed that with Millennials, particularly the younger ones, there is less of a gender binary separation between how people of different genders speak this dialect. Everyone tends to speak the same no matter their gender identity. Check out this video of Jonathan Van Ness (I love him and also kittens!) for a good example of this accent, though keep in mind that his is VERY pronounced.
What got me thinking about dialects and accents today is this video that my friend Patty posted by Voices of Color by Insider about linguistic profiling. We all unconsciously profile people when we hear them speak, and it can have some dramatic consequences. Do you change your voice when you speak on the phone?
What dialect do you speak? What accents did you grow up hearing? How did they influence how you speak today? Have you ever consciously worked to change your own accent? Does your accent change when you feel certain emotions?
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.
The etymology of the word great is that it comes from an old Germanic word, grautaz, which meant ,”coarse.” In Old English, the word great meant, “big, tall, stout, thick, or massive” and didn’t come to mean, “excellent or wonderful” until 1848 in America.
So if we take the original meaning of the word, I think we can all agree that Trump is indeed making America great again, in that it is definitely becoming more coarse and thick.
The etymology of atonement comes from the Latin adunare. Ad, meaning, “to or at,” and unum, meaning, “one,” or in other words, the roots of the word atone mean, “united.” With adunare is -ment, from the Latin mentum which was added to verbs to represent the product of the action of that verb.
Thus, the literal translation of the word atonement is, “the result of unity.”
From Old English, hopa meaning, “wish, expectation.”
There are theories that it is related to the word hop, as in, “leaping forward in expectation.” In the myth of Pandora’s Box, the last evil to escape the box is Hope. Some say hope is what saves the world, some say there is a reason it was locked inside the box with all the other evils. Hope is a dangerous siren, luring us to believe in things that will never be. Tempting us to betray our instincts and abandon our better intellect, blindly trusting that things will turn out the way we wish them to, instead of accepting the truth of what they are.
Today’s Etymology Lesson comes from my friend Seth, with his selection of the word saeculum, recently featured in the Sandman graphic novel.
From proto-indo-european, sey, meaning “to bind or tie together,” the word can be found in the Latin phrase saecula saeculorum, meaning, “a lifetime of lifetimes,” or “eternity.”
The saeculum is a measure of time, generally springing from a singular event (a war, catastrophe, etc) which encapsulates the time that any human could have personally experienced the event. For example, we are approaching a time in which anyone who personally experienced WWI would be deceased, the war began over 100 years ago in 1914, and ended in 1918. There are likely babies who were born at that time who are over 100 years old, but the saeculum of WWI is nearly over.
Pictured is Sergeant Stubby, decorated war hero of the 102nd Infantry, survivor of 17 battles on the Western Front, and member of the saeculum of WWI, who died peacefully in his sleep in 1926 at the age of 10.
This is the last one of the year! Maybe I’ll start up again in the New Year with a blog or something (oh hey look, I did!).
As the Winter Solstice is on Sunday, today’s word is solstice. From Latin, sol meaning, “sun,” and sistere meaning, “to make stand still,” solstice literally means “the point at which the sun is made to stand still.” The ancient Celts called it Yule, from the Norse word Jul, meaning, “wheel.” They believed the goddess Frigga wove the fate of the world at her spinning wheel, and she labored long through the darkest night to birth the light.
The Egyptians believed Isis labored and birthed Horus at the solstice. In Persian myth, the warrior god Mithras was born at the winter solstice, as was Jesus of Nazareth, Saturn, Quetzalcoatl, and Sarasvati, the Hindu queen of heaven.
The light of the rising sun on the winter solstice inside the prehistoric monument Newgrange in County Meath Ireland.
This one goes out to my cousin Andy and his new bride Elisa, who got surprise married yesterday! Congrats! Today’s word is betrothed, which literally means, “be truthful to each other.” The word truth has roots (pun intended) way back to the Proto-Indo-European words drū, meaning, “tree”, and deru, meaning, “firm, solid.” We are so happy to add you to our family tree, Elisa!
Today’s word is inspired by all of the lovely holiday decorations up around the city. Splendid, from the Latin splendidus, meaning, “to shine brilliantly and magnificently.” From Proto-Indo-European splend, which meant, “to be manifest, to be undeniably evident to the senses.” Pictured is the Resplendent Quetzal, native to Central America, considered divine by both the Aztecs and Maya, revered as a symbol of goodness and light, and associated with their creator god, Quetzalcoatl. Splendid, no?
Word Nerd 