WordHumper

Wordhumper is dead...

2008-09-03T09:29:00.003-04:00

Long live Wordhumper Redux!

You're reading the wrong site. Please go to Wordhumper Redux and update your bookmark accordingly.

For just over half a million you can own...

2008-07-14T20:50:00.002-04:00

A Chocolate Factory! A well established specialty business offering homemade chocolates & candies. Unique offering with Real Estate, complete 1 BR apartment above retail business space. Handsome Bavarian style bldg. All equip & training included. Partial Owner Financing Available
-Badger Realty

Sleep now

2008-06-18T17:28:00.001-04:00

How to nap [Boston.com] via Boingboing.

Marfa my dear

2008-06-18T09:21:00.001-04:00

For context, originally uploaded by Claire L. Evans.

I need to travel to Marfa, TX. Like the Faroes, Bequia, Grimsey, or my upcoming trip to L'Anse Aux Meadows, it's just one of those places I feel like I must see.

Here's a nice house in Woodstock, VT

2008-06-13T10:56:00.001-04:00

Homes & Land

Reminiscing

2008-06-13T08:01:00.001-04:00

A Youtube video I made of a trip a few years back.

Water

2008-06-10T14:17:00.001-04:00

The Falls Guy [NYMag]

China Drains Lake Into Ruined Town

2008-06-10T12:49:00.002-04:00

NYTimes.com : BEIJING — A torrent coursed through a ruined and abandoned Chinese town Tuesday after soldiers blasted away debris holding back millions of gallons of water in one of the 30 so-called “quake lakes” created in the devastating earthquake last month.

See the BBC video here

All hail Bowie

2008-06-03T13:12:00.001-04:00

Amazing

2008-05-30T12:53:00.001-04:00

Isolated tribe spotted in Brazil [BBC News]

Ancient

2008-05-29T15:43:00.001-04:00

From NYTimes.com:

In other recent findings at Stonehenge and adjacent sites, archaeologists uncovered a piece of a red deer antler that was apparently used as a pick for digging. It was found in what is known as the Stonehenge Greater Cursus, a cigar-shaped ditched enclosure nearly two miles long, and is thought to have a sacred significance.

Julian Thomas, an archaeologist at the University of Manchester who led this investigation, said the antler was dated at 3630 to 3375 B.C. That puts the cursus about 1,000 years before the large stones were erected, meaning, he said, that “this landscape maintains its significance over a long period of time.”

Witty NYPost Headline

2008-05-17T10:22:00.001-04:00

Click to enlarge

Masters in Robin Hoodology

2008-05-11T22:35:00.002-04:00

The Robin Hood Studies Pathway

"This new and exciting multi-disciplinary pathway provides an opportunity for in-depth exploration of the origins and development of one of England’s most enduring legendary figures."

The Robin Hood Studies Pathway [The University of Nottingham]

Similar

2008-05-06T14:10:00.004-04:00

Sinai Peninsula
==
Nimbus III

Hands of Glory

2008-05-05T12:23:00.003-04:00

Via Wikipedia: "The Hand of Glory is the dried and pickled hand of a man who has been hanged, often specified as being the left (Latin: sinister) hand, or else, if the man were hanged for murder, the hand that "did the deed."

According to old European beliefs, a candle made of the fat from a malefactor who died on the gallows, virgin wax, and Lapland sesame oil (the candle could only be put out with milk), and the hand having come from the said hanged criminal, lighted and placed in the Hand of Glory (as in a candlestick) would have rendered motionless all persons to whom it was presented. (In another version the hair of the dead man is used as a wick, also the candle is said to give light only to the holder.) The Hand of Glory also purportedly had the power to unlock any door it came across.

The legend is traceable to about 1440, but the name only dates from 1707. It was originally a name for the mandrake root...that became conflated with the earlier legend. The confusion may have occurred because mandrakes are said to grow beneath the bodies of hanged criminals."

AT Europe: Paris - Court Circuit Salon at Espace Blancs Manteaux [Apartment Therapy]
Mandrake [Wordhumper]

This place looks nice

2008-04-27T23:20:00.003-04:00

Not that I want to end up living on Long Island but not a bad place if I did.

Northport, NY [Daniel Gale]

The coconut crab...

2008-04-25T11:20:00.003-04:00

...scariest animal ever!

It's time to admit it. [Rifftrax]

Ghost in the New Paltz library

2008-04-21T14:43:00.002-04:00

"We’re logical people — we’re library people..."

The Librarians Call It an Anomaly (It Wasn’t Rattling Chains) [NYTimes.com]

How do I get this job?

2008-04-08T17:24:00.003-04:00

State and federal environmental officials approved the use of the Redbirds and other cars for artificial reefs...

Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars [NYTimes.com]

This looks like a nice place to live

2008-04-07T15:26:00.003-04:00

Impeccable 1920s Manor House [BerkshirePropertyAgents.com]

"The market for prospective philologists is miserable."

2008-04-06T19:38:00.005-04:00

The title to this post is a quote given to me by University of Minnesota's Professor Anatoly Liberman. Professor Roberta Frank at Yale also affirmed that there is a dearth of available opportunities for the budding historical linguist. Despite the dour outlook I still sometimes fantasize about a life of academia especially when I read the interests of the two following professors (Professor Liberman being one) whose areas of study mirror my own interests:

Professor Eric Stanley at Pembroke College, Oxford -

Interests: History of the English Language from Old English onwards; history of the study of Germanic philology and especially English philology, from the beginning of the study of Anglo-Saxon onwards

Professor Anatoly Liberman at the University of Minnesota -

Professor Liberman's areas of teaching and research include the languages and literature of the Middle Ages. In linguistics, he is mainly interested in historical phonology and the origin of words and is working on a new etymological dictionary of English. In literature, his publications deal with Germanic poetry and Scandinavian myths. He teaches courses on the history of German, Old Icelandic, Gothic, Scandinavian mythology, and German folklore.

In some parallel universe I'm sitting in a library studying Norn right now.

Graduate Studies in Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics [University of Oxford]
Anatoly Liberman [University of Minnesota: GSD]

Hauntological video games

2008-04-05T09:33:00.007-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about "hauntology" lately. To use Derrida's definition at the end of history the present becomes oriented towards ideas of the past, creating a sort of murky reflection of what we imagine "once was." There's a natural inclination towards things "rustic, bizarre or 'old-timey'."

...in his Specters of Marx during which he reflects on the persistance of the concept of (utopian) revolution despite its apparent eradication from the scene of politics and history (the book is 'work of mourning' published in the early 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the inaugeration of the 'end of history'). As such the concept of social and political revolution takes on a ghostly aspect - present and not present, eluding the categorical definition of western metaphysics, apparently erased yet still palpable in traces and echoes and uncanny visitations.

In this sense I came to realize that many of my favorite video games growing up shared hauntological qualities by sheer fact of relying on a mythological past while existing in the medium of 2-d electronic entertainment. These games, such as King's Quest IV, Dragon Warrior III & IV, A Link to the Past, Final Fantasy III & IV, ChronoTrigger and Secret of Mana are deeply dependent, both visually and by way of content, upon northern European and (it seems to a much lesser extent) Asian folklore. And this folklore was now being re-communicated via a full-on video game where one could visually immerse themselves in this world completely. Thus, these forgotten worlds that never truly existed "return" to life via the corrupted collective memory of late 20th-century video game designers.*

*I should note that it's doubtful any of these games would exist if it weren't for the popular works of Tolkien and his desire to "recreate" the Anglo-Saxon mythology he imagined was lost due to the Norman invasion.

What is hauntology? [Jahsonic]
Hauntology [Wikipedia]

30

2008-04-02T11:31:00.004-04:00

Mar 28 [Garfield Minus Garfield]

The SOCOTOA of Socotra

2008-03-28T14:37:00.009-04:00

I've decided--I must go to Socotra.

Socotra or Soqotra (Arabic سقطرى ; Suquṭra) is a small archipelago of four islands and islets in the Indian Ocean off the coast of the Horn of Africa some 350 km south of the Arabian peninsula. It is a part of the 'Adan Governorate of the Republic of Yemen. The island is also claimed by Somalia.

Socotra appears as Dioskouridou ("of the Dioscurides") in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a 1st century A.D. Greek navigation aid. In the notes to his translation of the Periplus, G.W.B. Huntingford remarks that the name Socotra is not Greek in origin, but derives from the Sanskrit dvipa sukhadhara ("island of bliss").

A local tradition holds that the inhabitants were converted to Christianity by Thomas in AD 52. In the 10th century the Arab geographer Abu Mohammed Al-Hassan Al-Hamdani stated that in his time most of the inhabitants were Christians. Socotra is also mentioned in The Travels of Marco Polo according to which "the inhabitants are baptized Christians and have an archbishop" who, it is further explained, "has nothing to do with the Pope at Rome, but is subject to an archbishop who lives at Baghdad". They were Nestorians but they also practised ancient magic rituals despite the warnings of their archbishop.

And to boot, the island is home to dragon's blood trees.

Socotra [Wikipedia]
Socotra [Flickr]
The Wonder Land of Socotra, Yemen [NYTimes.com]

The Phonautogram

2008-03-27T08:35:00.003-04:00

Majorly hauntological:

On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, “Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit” in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk.

Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison [NYTimes.com]

This is Crystal Palace. Are you still on?

2008-03-25T20:20:00.007-04:00

I am the proud owner to the uber-rare promotional-use-only/not-for-sale soundtrack to one of the most awesome Cold War films ever made, WarGames.

WarGames easily tops the list of movies that most influenced my childhood (along with Raiders of the Lost Ark, Last Crusade (sorry Temple of Doom) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen).

The soundtrack is fairly exhaustive with about 72 minutes of music and dialogue (44 tracks). For a full review check out Nathan Strum's piece.

If you can find a copy it's well worth the price if not for just the tracks by The Beepers.

Boston Dynamics Big Dog

2008-03-17T16:37:00.002-04:00

The future is here and it scares the bejeezus out of me

Freaky deaky gnome terrorizes Argentines

2008-03-12T10:47:00.003-04:00

"The midget - which wears a pointy hat and has a distinctive sideways walk - was caught on video last week by a terrified group of youngsters."

'Creepy gnome' terrorises town [The Sun]

The Crookes Radiometer

2008-03-08T16:21:00.003-05:00

From Wikipedia:

The Crookes radiometer, also known as the light mill or solar engine, consists of an airtight glass bulb, containing a partial vacuum. Inside are a set of vanes which are mounted on a spindle. The vanes rotate when exposed to light, with faster rotation for more intense light, providing a quantitative measurement of electromagnetic radiation intensity. The reason for the rotation has been the cause of much scientific debate.

It was invented in 1873 by the chemist Sir William Crookes as the by-product of some chemical research. In the course of very accurate quantitative chemical work, he was weighing samples in a partially evacuated chamber to reduce the effect of air currents, and noticed the weighings were disturbed when sunlight shone on the balance. Investigating this effect, he created the device named after him. It is still manufactured and sold as a novelty item.

Hauntology

2008-03-01T18:12:00.010-05:00

Lately I've been immersing myself in hauntological music. The genre, best described in the Arthur Blog and K-Punk's "Music is dead! Long live hauntology!", often recalls imagery reminiscent of Edwardian-era occultism, The Wicker Man soundtrack, HP Lovecraft stories and Hammer films (most notably Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit).

One of the best pieces I've been listening to is Mount Vernon Arts Lab's 1999 release Warminster (which was recorded with Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley). The CD is so good that I decided to make a t-shirt for myself using the image on the back cover of the digipak (plus, it's just a cool image--a giant bear holding an antenna).

Other albums I recommend include:
Moon Wiring Club - An Audience of Art Deco Eyes
The Advisory Circle - Mind How You Go
Eric Zann - Ouroborinda
Belbury Poly - The Owl's Map, The Willows
Mount Vernon Arts Lab - Séance At Hobs Lane
The Focus Group - We Are All Pan's People
Cyclobe - The Visitors
Boards of Canada - tracks like Skimming Stones, Statue of Liberty and Alpha Rainbow from A Few Old Tunes volumes 1 & 2
Delia Derbyshire - Electrosonic (this predates the genre by a few decades but the influence can't be ignored)

The Advisory Circle, Eric Zann, Belbury Poly, Mount Vernon Arts Lab and The Focus Group can all be found on the amazing Ghost Box label out of the UK.

And, finally, in the spirit of haunted creepiness I present this short film I made while in Hudson, New York:

Norwegian Seed Vault

2008-02-26T09:32:00.001-05:00

Yet another reason to go to Svalbard (like I needed one!)

Buried Seed Vault Opens in Arctic [NYTimes.com]

Cordyceps

2007-12-16T18:19:00.000-05:00

Fungus is awesome. Especially when accompanied by eerie music.

Oh brother, where art thou?

2007-11-20T13:12:00.000-05:00

"South Brother may have been a base for Union soldiers during the Civil War, and in about 1894, it was purchased by Jacob Ruppert Jr., a brewing magnate who bought the Yankees with Col. Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston in 1915...Mr. Ruppert built a yacht house on South Brother, and amateur baseball games were held on an adjacent field. Legend has it that Ruth would occasionally show up to practice his swing, swatting balls far into the East River.

After Mr. Ruppert’s summer home burned down in 1909, South Brother went through another long fallow period."

City Claims Final Private Island in East River [NYTimes.com]

2007-09-27T11:43:00.000-04:00

Ginormous news? Hardly.

2007-07-11T07:57:00.001-04:00

The AP reports Merriam-Webster is adding ginormous to the dictionary (incidentally, the Blogger software considers ginormous misspelled).

What's peculiar is the inclusion of ginormous should not be news-worthy--it's been in the OED forever where it is marked as slang. That makes sense; I think of my own usage of the word and up until today it's something I think I've only used in informal conversation, generally jokingly, and never in written communication.

Apparently, inclusion in the M-W dictionary means ginormous has grown beyond the boundaries of slang-dom, but I don't buy it; can you imagine if the President used ginormous in a State of the Union speech? He'd look awfully foolish.

2007-05-25T12:08:00.001-04:00

Breaking: Lexicographer Chooses Words for Dictionary

2007-04-13T11:24:00.000-04:00

Yesterday BusinessWeek.com introduced us to Tom Pitoniak, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster.

...Pitoniak must distinguish between words that legitimately should be in the dictionary and all that other matter sloshing around the English language: slang, industry jargon, onomatopoeic fillers, brand names, buzzwords, abbreviations, and the like. The new Web—flooded as it is with blogs, message boards, and Web pages containing the computer literati's conversations—is awash with such words. "It's kind of dizzying," says Pitoniak.

Is it just me or isn't this what lexicographers are supposed to do? What's the big story here?

Keeping Up With the Web's New Lingo [BusinessWeek.com]

Where's the Hump?

2007-04-09T18:37:00.000-04:00

WordHumper is on a bit of a spring hiatus as we take care of some real-work craziness. Stay tuned...

The Daily Hump: Amaranth

2007-03-30T08:23:00.000-04:00

Amaranth Advisors was an American hedge fund that imploded a few months back by betting that 2006 would be the year of another Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately for their investors, this didn't happen and they proceeded to lose $6.5 BILLION (see DealBreaker for more info).

Amaranth is a genus of annuals (also know by the romantic name pigweed) which consists of clusters of red flowers. In Greek mythology it was the flower that never faded (irony alert) and generally typified immortality in everything from Aesop's Fables to Milton's Paradise Lost. The flower/weed was sacred to the cult of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, which is funny because the surname of the trader who ultimately sank the Amaranth hedge fund was Hunter. Go figure.

In Greek amaranth literally means "everlasting", a- being the common prefix meaning "not" and marainein meaning "to wither". The ending -th was undoubtedly influenced by Greek flower names which generally end in -anthos, "flower".

amaranth [AHD]
amaranth [Online Etymology Dictionary]
amaranth [OED]
amaranth [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Cauldron

2007-03-29T08:21:00.000-04:00

So, yesterday I scored tickets to the May 2 Bjork concert at Radio City. I'm totally psyched a) because it's Bjork, b) because I got amazing seats and c) Radio City is supposedly a great venue. Although I've been living in NYC for about 8 years not once in that time have I been to Radio City. In fact, even though I grew up on the geographically propinquant Long Island I've only been to Radio City once in my entire life and that was in 1985 to see Disney's The Black Cauldron.

The word cauldron is from the Latin calidus meaning "warm, hot" and from this root we also get the term caldera which refers to the cavity on the summit of a volcano.

The Black Cauldron was based on Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles which themselves are said to be loosely based on the collection of medieval Welsh prose stories known as the Mabinogion. Professor Eric Hamp has suggested that mabinogi derives from the name of the Celtic god Maponos who was equated with Apollo in Roman times; this is a shame because this hump would have been far more interesting if everything circulated back to Vulcan, the Roman volcano god. Some humps just don't work out.

The Black Cauldron [IMDB]
caldera [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Maponos [Wikipedia]
Mabinogion [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Words of a Feather

2007-03-28T08:03:00.000-04:00

The English word petition originally had a chiefly religious sense, meaning a supplication or prayer. The word comes from the Latin verb petere "to require, seek, go forward, to aim at" and ultimately we can trace its origin to the Proto-Indo-European base *pet-/*pte-, "to rush, to fly". From this base we've gotten words like pterodactyl, the Old English feðer (feather) and fearn (fern--for its feather-like fronds), and the Latin penna, meaning "feather, wing" which survives in modern ornithology to mean the contour feather of a bird (as opposed to a down feather or plume). From the Italian plural of penna we get penne, as in the pasta, whose diagonally cut ends likely reminded people of writing utensils, pens, whose name also comes from penna because pens were made from quills, the main shafts of feathers.

petition [Online Etymology Dictionary]
pen [Online Etymology Dictionary]
fern [Online Etymology Dictionary]
penne [AHD]

Looks like I've got some competition...

2007-03-27T10:35:00.000-04:00

The Wall Street Journal gets into the wordhumping business with this front page (!) article on bucket.

"Bucket" is pushing aside other business-speak such as silo and basket as the favorite term for describing categories or organizational units.

Check out the image on the right--they even used one of those classic WSJ sketches. Dow Jones, don't bogart the crazy pills! All of this reminds me of that Wayne's World sketch with Bruce Willis from back in the day:

Wayne:...Well, if you don't mean my being so bold, Rick, are you ready to unveil the new cool word for the school year? [ to camera ] I should explain something, alright? Last year, Rick's new cool word was "pail", or "bucket".. as in, "So what did you think of the new substitute teacher?" "I think he's 'pail', he's 'bucket'!" And, Rick? Rick, this year the new cool word is..? Go, Garth, go!

[ Garth pounds on the couch as though it were a drum ]

Rick: The word is.. [ thinking ] ..Sphincter.

Business Types Get a New Kick Out of the 'Bucket' [WSJ.com] (login required)
SNL: Bruce Willis 09/30/89 [Saturday Night Live Transcripts]

The Daily Hump: Chortle

2007-03-27T08:01:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, my friend CH and I were reminiscing of when we used to work together and our boss at the time, a very petite woman, put on an inordinate amount of weight--so much so that her laugh (but not her voice) went from a sort of cackle to a full-on chortle.

Chortle has two interesting qualities; first, it's one of those rare words whose origin can be traced back to a single person, in this case, Lewis Carroll. Second, the word is a portmanteau, which is itself another Carroll creation meaning, as Humpty Dumpty describes in Through the Looking Glass, "two meanings packed up into one word." In the case of chortle the combined meanings are chuckle and snort:

'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

But when I imagine chortling it's not Jabberwocky I think of, but rather another monster whose name begins with Jabb-. No, not this one. This one..

chortle [Online Etymology Dictionary]
chortle [AHD]
Jabberwocky [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Burgle

2007-03-26T08:54:00.000-04:00

I was watching the highly underrated 1966 spy flick Funeral in Berlin last night. Harry Palmer, played by Michael Caine, and Israeli secret agent Samantha Steel enter her apartment to find that it's been ransacked*. Harry's exact words are "You've been burgled."

Burgled is a back-formation of burglar; etymologically speaking a back-formation is created when you remove all the bits and pieces (affixes) of an earlier word to derive, falsely, an "orginal" form. Burglar was from Medieval Latin via Old French. The Latin verb burgare, meaning "to break open, commit burglary" comes from the Latin burgus meaning "fortress, castle" (which is a Germanic loan-word similar akin to borough, bourgeois, etc...). While burglar appeared in English (via Middle English) as early as the 1540s burgled didn't show up until the late 19th c.

*Ransacked is from the Old Norse rannsaka, meaning "to pillage" and literally comes from "to search the house". The second element saka, "to search", is related to the Old Norse soekja, which is the root of our word seek.

burglar [Online Etymology Dictionary]
ransack [Online Etymology Dictionary]
burgle [OED]
back-formation [Wikipedia]
Funeral in Berlin [IMDB]

The Daily Hump: Zorro

2007-03-23T08:03:00.000-04:00

When I was 5 years old my father brought home a Commodore 64 for my sister and me. Over time we accumulated hundreds of ~~pirated~~ games, one of them being the 1985 Datasoft classic Zorro. Of course, the Commodore was dead by about 1988 and Zorro, like all my other games, faded into memory...or did it? See, for some reason the Zorro theme still haunts me. Twenty years after last playing the game I can still hum the music. So, in some way, today's hump is my chance to excise the Zorro demon for good.

Zorro is the masculine form of the Spanish zorra "fox". It first made its appearance in English in 1838, but it wasn't until 1919 that Johnston McCulley created the Robin Hood-like character who went on to disrobe Catherine Zeta Jones to her skivvies in the 1998 movie The Mask of Zorro. Interestingly, Cathy Z appeared in 2001's America's Sweethearts with Hank Azaria, azaria being the original Basque root of zarra.

A question to the audience: Does anyone know if Hank Azaria voices the character of Zorro in "The Poke of Zorro" from The Simpsons episode "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)" (season 11, episode 5)? I haven't seen the show in awhile so I forget, but if there's any karmic balance of etymology in the universe then I know the answer is yes.

I can still hum that damn song.

zorro [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Zorro [Wikipedia]
Zorro [Lemon 64]
E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt) [The Simpsons Archive]

The Daily Hump: The Gnomic Gnome

2007-03-22T08:01:00.000-04:00

I just discovered that gnomic, an adjective meaning "marked by aphorisms or maxims", has no relation to the small race of men who live underground and are known for their pointy hats. Gnomic shares a root with gnostic, the Greek gignoskein, which means "to learn, to come to know" (the Proto-Indo-European base of "to know" is *gno-, the g becoming a k in Proto-Germanic, hence our word know).

Gnome, which was used in a 16th c. treatise by Paracelsus to mean "elemental earth beings", is from the Latin gnomus. This may come from the Greek *genomos "earth-dweller." The garden-variety gnome started appearing in English gardens around the mid 19th c. when they were imported from Germany.

For a great gnome resource check out Gnome and Garden.*

*Obligatory disclosure: I date the author's sister.

gnome [Online Etymology Dictionary]
gnomic [Online Etymology Dictionary]
gnomic [AHD]
gnome [Wikipedia]
gnosticism [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Goo

2007-03-21T08:03:00.000-04:00

I always assumed goo had some sort of onomatopoeic quality. Goo! But, in fact, it seems to be short for burgoo which is a thick stew (originally porridge) native to both New England and, oddly, Kentucky and southern Illinois. It's believe that burgoo is an alteration of ragout, also a stew, which is from the French ragoûter "to revive the taste". Goût is from the Latin gustus "taste", which gives us words such as gusto and disgust.

Gustus is from the Proto-Indo-European base *geus-. Interestingly, although this formed the root for "taste" in Greek and Latin in Germanic and Celtic words the root mostly took on the meaning "try" or "choose". Thus we find the Proto-Germanic *keusan leading to the Old Norse kjosa "to choose" and the word kyrja "chooser". Hence, in Norse mythology, the Valkyries are literally "choosers of the slain (valr, as in Valhalla)".

goo [Online Etymology Dictionary]
ragout [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Valkyrie [Online Etymology Dictionary]
burgoo [AHD]
ragout [AHD]

The Daily Hump: A Warm Beltane

2007-03-20T08:03:00.000-04:00

Continuing with yesterday's theme (I'm still thinking about the creepy goodness of The Wicker Man), today I'm looking at the holiday being celebrated by the Summerisle residents, Beltane. Beltane is Lowland Scot coming from the Gaelic bealltainn, corresponding to our May 1, which marked the start of summer in the Celtic calendar.

The related Old Irish beltene is from belo-te(p)niâ

where the first element belo- is a cognate with the English word bale (as in bale-fire), the Anglo-Saxon bael, and also the Lithuanian baltas, meaning 'white' or 'shining' and from which the Baltic Sea takes its name.

The second element may be from the Old Irish ten "fire" (thus Beltene would be "bright fire"). This element is from Proto-Indo-European *tepnos, which is related to Latin tepidus "warm".

Beltane [OED]
Beltane [Wikipedia]
Beltane [Online Etymology Dictionary]

Cave Bond

2007-03-19T22:12:00.000-04:00

The Daily Hump: Dinghy

2007-03-19T08:19:00.000-04:00

This weekend I watched The Wicker Man...the original, extended version, not the supposedly crap-assed Nicolas Cage debacle. Sergeant Howie flies a seaplane to Summerisle and then is rowed ashore via a dinghy. That got me thinking about dinghy, it's a funny word.

Dinghy is from the Hindi dingi (the h in the English spelling is to indicate a hard g), meaning "small boat" and is perhaps related to the Sanskrit drona-m, "wooden trough", which is related to dru-s, "wood, tree". My guess is that dru-s must be related to the Indo-European root derew(o)-, also meaning "tree, wood". From this root we get the Greek drus "oak" and dryas "wood nymph", which is of course the root of our word dryad.

The Wicker Man [Amazon]
dinghy [Online Etymology Dictionary]
dryad [Online Etymology Dictionary]
dinghy [OED]
dryad [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Schooner

2007-03-16T08:03:00.000-04:00

I just booked a trip for the last week of May when I'll be heading down to Bequia, the largest island in the Grenadine chain. While there I've reserved space on The Friendship Rose, a large schooner which makes regular daytrips to the Tobago Cays. Schooner is an odd word--no one is really sure where it came from. Supposedly the style was originated in a Gloucester, MA shipyard in the early 18th c. and it's thought that schooner may come from a since-forgotten New England verb similar to the Scottish scon, meaning "to send over water, to skip stones." Per the OED,

When the first schooner was being launched, a bystander exclaimed ‘Oh, how she scoons!’ The builder, Capt. Andrew Robinson, replied, ‘A scooner let her be!’ and the word at once came into use as the name of the new type of vessel. The anecdote, first recorded, on the authority of tradition, in a letter of 1790 (quoted in Babson Hist. Gloucester, p. 252), looks like an invention.

schooner [Online Etymology Dictionary]
schooner [OED]

The Daily Hump: Sooth

2007-03-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

The ides of March, a date that will live in infamy (at least for members of the gens Julia). For it's on this day that Gaius Julius Caesar, from the Caesarian section of Rome, was slain by a gaggle of senators which included among them supposed bff Brutus. Of course, Caesar got a pretty good heads up from one Titus Vestricius Spurinna whose name may not be well known but job title surely is: soothsayer. Alas, Titus's warnings were not heeded and the world took receipt of one very dead emperor 2,051 years ago today.

Sooth comes from the Old English soð meaning "truth". Soð is the noun form of the adjective soþ, "true", which was originally *sonþ- and from the Proto-Germanic *santhaz (not to be confused with the Proto-Germanic sexual practice known as dirty *santhaz), a cognate with Old English synn "sin" and Latin sontis "guilty". Ultimately, we go back to the Proto-Indo-European *es-ont meaning "being, existence". This also is the root of today's s-forms of the verb "to be" such as the Latin sunt, German sind and French sont.

Sooth is also a linguistic cousin of soothe, which came from the Old English soðian "show to be true". How this came to mean "to quiet, mollify" beats me. Any ideas?

sooth [Online Etymology Dictionary]
soothe [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Ides of March [Wikipedia]
Julius Caesar [Wikipedia]
Titus Vestricius Spurinna [Wikipedia]

ILfDT: Tocharian Languages

2007-03-14T08:03:00.000-04:00

I Live for Dead Tongues: Tocharian Languages - the easternmost Indo-European language group

Language family: Indo-European

Where it was spoken: Tarim basin in what is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwestern People's Republic of China.

Origins:

There is evidence both from the mummies and Chinese writings that many [Tocharians] had blonde or red hair and blue eyes, characteristics also found in present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Central Asia, due to the populations' high genetic diversity. This suggests the possibility that they were part of an early migration of speakers of Indo-European languages that ended in what is now the Tarim Basin in western China.

What did it in: Assimilated by Uyghur Turks in the 9th century

Living linguistic relatives: None

Tocharians [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Jaded

2007-03-13T08:01:00.000-04:00

I began today pondering whether jade, the gemstone, has any relation to the sensation of being jaded caused from over-indulgence. As I discovered the words are not only unrelated but one exists purely because of French gender confusion.

In the 17th c., when the gemstone was still rather unfamiliar, the feminine l'ejade became the masculine le jade via a simple error and hence our modern word jade is not ejade. L'ejade comes from the Spanish piedra de (la) ijada (stone of colic) because of the gem's supposed ability to cure this ailment. Ijada goes back to the Latin ilia meaning flanks or kidney areas (see ilium, one of the pelvic bones).

The blah kind of jade is a figurative sense coming from a noun meaning "a beaten down horse". This may be related to the Old Norse jalda, meaning "mare", which is itself from Finno-Ugric. The OED says there's no evidence to support any of this but it's as good a guess as any.

jade [Online Etymology Dictionary]
jade [OED]

TWiEL: Ket

2007-03-12T08:01:00.000-04:00

This Week in Endangered Languages: Ket (formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak)
Language family: Paleosiberian, Yeniseian
Where you'll hear it: Mostly to the east of the middle reaches of the Yenisei River

The origins:

Attempts have been made by Soviet scholars to establish a relationship with either Burushaski or the Sino-Tibetan languages, and it frequently forms part of the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis. However, genetic research rather points to possible relationship with the Amerind languages of American Indians...

And today:

The language is threatened with extinction—the number of ethnic Kets that are native speakers of the language has dropped from 1,225 in 1926 to 537 in 1989. Another Yeniseian language, Yugh, is believed to have recently gone extinct.

The Ket Language [Endangered Languages of Siberia]

The Daily Hump: Varnish

2007-03-09T08:03:00.000-05:00

When not huffing varnish I'm humping it. Varnish comes from an Old French word of the same meaning, vernis. In Medieval Latin vernix meant an "odorous resin" and this is likely from the late Greek verenike, which is from the Macedonian Greek Berenike (literally "bringer of victory"). Berenike was an ancient city in Libya (now known as Benghazi) named for Berenike II, queen of Egypt, who lived during the 3rd c. CE and was murdered by her son Ptolemy IV. The story goes that Berenike (the city) was one of the first to experiment with the wide usage of varnishes.

varnish [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Berenice [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Berenice II [Wikipedia]
Benghazi [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Z

2007-03-08T08:03:00.000-05:00

I was talking to my gf the other day about British versus American spellings, particularly with regards to the American's much more abundant use of the letter Z. Rather quickly, the subject turned away from spelling to the pronunciation of the letter itself: zee versus zed. It seems natural to me that we'd call Z zee, afterall we call B bee, D dee, G jee, K kay, etc...basically you don't need more than two consonants to spell any letters in our alphabet minus the wily W. But much to my surprise we Americans are all alone because the British (including everyone, excluding the Americans, who were once under the empire's yoke) and the French are all zedophiles.

Z was not native to Old English. English inherited the letter from the Anglo-Normans and Z ultimately harkens back to the Greek zeta, which itself goes back to the Hebrew zayin. It's easy to understand the relationship between zed and zeta and it wasn't until the end of the 17th c. that people started hearing zee. However, as Randomhouse's Maven notes, it could be that we Americans have one man to thank for our pronunciation

...Noah Webster--lexicographer, spelling reformer, and advocate for a unique, distinctive American English--must have exerted considerable influence. The pronunciation of Z in his great two-volume American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) was unequivocal: "Z . . . It is pronounced zee."

Interestingly, other dialectal names for the letter exist beyond zee and zed: izzard, ezod, uzzard (all from the mid-18th c. and likely derived from the French et zède) and zod.

zed [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Z [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Z [Wikipedia]

ILfDT: Martha's Vineyard Sign Language

2007-03-07T08:01:00.000-05:00

I Live for Dead Tongues: Martha's Vineyard Sign Language

A number of families from a puritan community in the Kentish Weald emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony area of the United States in the early 17th century, many of their descendents later settling on Martha's Vineyard. The first deaf person known to have settled there was a carpenter and farmer Jonathan Lambert, who moved there with his hearing wife in 1694. By 1710, the migration had virtually ceased, and the endogamous community that was created contained a high incidence of hereditary deafness that would persist for over 200 years.

Language family: developed from Old Kent Sign Language, influenced by French Sign Language
Where it was spoken: Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts

When did it die: with the death of Katie West (1952)
What did it in: "As the 20th century came to a turn, the previously isolated community of fishers and farmers began to see the influx of tourists that would become a mainstay in the island economy. The jobs in tourism were not as deaf-friendly as fishing and farming had been. Further, as intermarriage and further migration further joined the people of Martha's Vineyard to the mainland, the island community more and more resembled the wider community there."

Living linguistic relatives: "Martha's Vineyard Sign Language is...notable for the role it played in the development of American Sign Language."

The Daily Hump: Falafel

2007-03-06T08:01:00.000-05:00

I love chickpeas. I love hummus. I love falafel. Falafel comes from the Arabic falāfil, which is the plural of filfil, meaning "pepper". It's likely that this word is related to the Sanskrit pippalī (long pepper), which comes from the Sanskrit pippalam, and referred to the pipal, a fig tree native to India. Incidentally, this is the same species of tree Siddhartha Gautama was sitting underneath when he became enlightened. That's one spicy Buddha.

Our word pepper is from this same root via the Old English pipor, Latin piper and Greek peperi.

pepper [AHD]
falafel [AHD]
pipal [AHD]
pepper [Online Etymology Dictionary]
sacred fig [Wikipedia]

TWiEL: Texas German

2007-03-05T08:17:00.000-05:00

This Week in Endangered Languages: Texas German
Language family: Indo-European, Germanic, West Germanic, High German, German (dialect)
Writing system: Latin alphabet

Where you'll hear it: Texas Hill Country

The origins: "Texas German is a dialect of the German language that is spoken by descendants of German immigrants who settled in the Texas Hill Country region in the mid-19th century. These immigrants founded the towns of New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Boerne, Sisterdale, Schulenburg, Weimar, and Comfort. German immigrants began arriving over a period of two years, quickly raising the population of the town to over 1,000."

The beginning of the end: "Most German Texans continued to speak German in their homes and communities, but were required to learn English when Texas education rules mandated English-only instruction during and after World War I. Due to the growth of these communities and cultural bias during World War I and World War II, Texas German speakers drifted towards English, and few passed the language to their descendants. The dialect is near extinction, as it is now only spoken by a few elderly people."

Hump This: Squirrel

2007-03-01T12:57:00.000-05:00

Hump This is a (quasi-)weekly Friday feature where you, the WordHumper reader, choose which lucky word gets humped back to the stoneage (or at least to Proto-Indo-Europa). Today's request comes from RM in California who writes:

Dear Wordhumper,

Like so many in my close knit family, I have an affinity for rodents and in particular, squirrels. Once, I saw a show on some cable channel I no longer get that said the word 'squirrel' comes from a greek word meaning something along the lines of, 'covers head with his tail for shade'. I could be totally wrong because this was awhile ago. So, where does the word 'squirrel' come from?

RM, thanks for the question--our word squirrel comes to us via the Anglo-Norman esquirel circa 1327. Is it a coincidence that the word appears a mere twenty years before the black death ravaged Europe and just one decade before the launch of the Hundred Years' War? I don't think so. That being said, the squirrel made it into Old French (escurel) via the Latin sciurus, which came from the Greek skiouros, literally meaning "shadow-tailed." The notion is squirrels have large bushy tails which allow them to easily shade themselves. Fascinating.

If you have a word you'd like humped please email it along with your city or state to wordhumper@gmail.com. To paraphrase Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest, the ladies sweat my Wordhump style like the squirrels sweat the nuts.

squirrel [Online Etymology Dictionary]

The Daily Hump: If The Brogue Fits...

2007-03-01T08:01:00.000-05:00

Ah, the storied brogue, that singsong lullaby of the Irish, brogue being another name for the strong dialectal accent common to Irish and Scottish speakers of English. Before we begin, let's look at one of OED's alternate definitions for brogue:

A rude kind of shoe, generally made of untanned hide, worn by the inhabitants of the wilder parts of Ireland and the Scotch Highlands.

This is important because brogue in the dialectal sense probably originated from "speech of those who call a shoe a brogue." Or, if you believe Wikipedia,

The term has been said to have been coined by an Englishman who met an Irishman whose accent was so thick that he spoke "as though he had a shoe in his mouth".

Of course, English has other examples of words that were influenced by footwear: ciabatta (from Italian) and sabotage (from French) being the two most obvious. However, shoes are not always the namesake; in the case of clodhopper (clod being from Old English via Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European base *gel- "to make round") the word originally referred to a plowman (literally "one who goes around fields") but then later it became the heavy shoes worn by such an unsophisticated rustic. Likewise plimsolls are so named because the band around the shoe that holds the two parts together reminded people of the mark on the hull of a ship that shows how heavy it can be loaded (the Plimsoll line--Samuel Plimsoll was a 19th c. M.P. keen on shipping reforms).

brogue [Online Etymology Dictionary]
ciabatta [OED]
sabotage [OED]
clodhopper [OED]
clod [Online Etymology Dictionary]
brogue [Wikipedia]
clodhopper [AHD]
plimsoll [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Samuel Plimsoll [Wikipedia]

ILfDT: Norn

2007-02-28T08:01:00.000-05:00

Congratulations! You're reading the first entry in the weekly series I Live for Dead Tongues where I take a look at the languages that have long since shuffled off this mortal coil. Today we're looking at Norn which is not only dead but one of my favorite words...Norn. Norn!

Norn
Language family: Indo-European, Germanic, North Germanic, West Scandinavian
Where it was spoken: Shetland, Orkney, Caithness

When did it die: by the 18th c. (possibly early 19th c.)
What did it in: "Norn is an extinct North Germanic language that was spoken on Shetland and Orkney, off the north coast of mainland Scotland, and in Caithness. After the islands were returned to Scotland by Norway in the 15th century, its use was discouraged by the Scottish government and the Church of Scotland (the national church), and it was gradually replaced by Scots over time."

Living linguistic relatives: "Norn is generally considered to have been fairly similar to Faroese, sharing many phonological and grammatical traits with this language, and might even have been mutually intelligible with it."
Influence on English: "Fragments of the language and loan-words adopted into the local Lowland Scots and Scottish English survived the death of the main language and remain to this day."

Old Norse Language Map [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Of Kilts, Tartans and Tartars*

2007-02-27T08:01:00.000-05:00

Kilt first makes an appearance in the English language as a type of tartaned skirt in the early 18th c. Our noun actually came from a now little-used verb form meaning "to tuck up." This word came to us via the Middle English kilten, meaning "to tuck up" (is "to tuck up" a Britishism for "to tuck in"? Anyone? Bueller?) Going back further kilt seems to be from a Scandinavian source as witnessed by the Old Norse kilting and kjalta meaning skirt or lap.

The word tartan likely comes to us via the Middle French tiretaine which referred to a "strong, coarse fabric." This can be traced back to Old French and then to the Medieval Latin tyrius meaning "cloth from Tyre." It's also possible the word was influenced by the Middle English tartaryn, also a type of cloth, which comes from Old French but is ultimately rooted in the word Tartar.

And speaking of Tartars, the tartar on your teeth is from the Greek tartaron which referred to the gunk settled to the side of casks. The Greek term is believed to be of Arabic origin unlike the proper noun Tartar which is said to be from Tata, a name the Mongols gave themselves, with some spicy influence from the Latin Tartarus, aka hell.

kilt [OED]
kilt [Online Etymology Dictionary]
tartar [OED]
Tartar [OED]
tartan [OED]
tartan [AHD]
Tartar [Online Etymology Dictionary]

*The Daily Hump is not really daily anymore--it'll now only be published on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so it really should be The Semiweekly Hump, but that name is dumb and plus I'd have to eat those rebranding costs, etc...thus, The Daily Hump it is. That being said, daily or not, there is still a new WordHumper post every weekday and thus you always have a good reason to come back now, y'hear?

TWiEL: Wymysorys

2007-02-26T08:03:00.000-05:00

You're familiar with the quasi-weekly Hump This and of course you know The Daily Hump, that weekday feature that's been more regular than a sixty-five year old full of prune juice. Well, this week I'm happy to introduce two new features: Mondays' This Week in Endangered Languages (TWiEL) and Wednesdays' I Live for Dead Tongues (ILfDT).

Endangered languages make me sad. Like endangered animals they're just steps away from disappearing from this earth forever. As Wikipedia notes

While there are somewhere around six or seven thousand languages on Earth today, about half of them have fewer than about 3,000 speakers. Experts predict that even in a good scenario, about half of today's languages will go extinct within the next fifty to one hundred years.

Sure, unlike extinct animals, we can occassionally resurrect an extinct language but it hasn't happened to often (Wikipedia shows only 13 examples). Some people even argue that language extinction is good

...fewer languages means better and clearer communications among the majority of speakers. The economic cost of maintaining myriad separate languages, and their translator caretakers, is enormous.

Humbug. Languages are invaluable; they are unique and hold within their grammar, lexicon and oral traditions thousands of clues about the identities of the speakers and how they live. To delete a language is to permanently destroy windows into these cultures. This line of thinking condones abuse of the minority by the majority and is nothing more than a form of cultural whitewashing.

TWiEL will be relying a lot on Wikipedia's List of endangered languages so I'll be using their definition for determining whether a language is endangered: it must have less than 1,000 speakers and be in rapid decline. I maintain this column as an appreciation for the shrinking universe which these languages describe. Today we're going to start with the waning Wymysorys.

Wymysorys
Language family: Indo-European, Germanic, West Germanic, High German
Writing system: Latin alphabet

Where you'll hear it: Wilamowice, Poland

The origins: "Wymysorys appears to derive from 12th century Middle High German, with a strong influence from Low German, Dutch, Frisian, Polish and Old English. The inhabitants of Wilamowice are thought to be descendants of Dutch, German and Scottish settlers who arrived in Poland in the 13th century. However, the inhabitants of Wilamowice always refused any connections with Germany and proclaimed their Dutch origins."
Famous speakers: poet Florian Biesik

The beginning of the end: "After World War II, local communist authorities forbade the use of the language. Despite the fact that the ban was lifted after 1956, Wymysorys has been gradually replaced by Polish, especially amongst the younger generations."
And today: 70 speakers

Example:

Śłöf duy buwła fest!
Skumma frmdy gest,
Skumma muma ana fettyn,
Z' brennia nysła ana epułn,
Śłöf duy Jasiu fest!

Sleep, my boy, soundly!
Foreign guests are coming,
Aunts and uncles are coming,
Bringing nuts and apples,
Sleep Johnny sound

The Daily Hump: Pate

2007-02-23T16:01:00.000-05:00

Every once in awhile I stumble upon a word I've never heard before but really probably should know. Yesterday, while reading At Goldman, bald pate == big bucks I stopped and thought "Pate? Is that a typo? And if so, what should the word be?" Of course, it turns out pate is not a typo--it's a real word referring to the top of one's head and is believed to be a shortened form of the Old French patene which comes from the Medieval Latin patena, ultimately from the Latin patina meaning "pan, dish."

You loyal WordHumper readers will likely remember that we've seen pantina before, in regards to the knee; patina is the root for the kneecap's scientific name patella.

pate (1) [Online Etymology Dictionary]

The Daily Hump: Darn!

2007-02-22T08:03:00.000-05:00

Today I was wondering; does the lame exclamation darn have anything to do with mending socks? Answer: no.

Darn, in the quasi-curse sense, is an American creation that was said to have originated in Puritanical New England where it was a punishable offense to say the word damn. It's thought that darn was likely influenced by 'tarnal (supposedly a favorite exclamation of Andrew Jackson), which is short for eternal, as in By the Eternal.

Darn, in the mending sense, is likely from the Middle French darner, meaning "to mend." This goes back to the Breton "piece, fragment, part," which ultimately traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root *der-, meaning "tear" (as in "rip"). And *der- also happens to be the root for our word tear, which came to modern English via Proto-Germanic then Old English.

darn [Online Etymology Dictionary]
tear (v) [Online Etymology Dictionary]

The Daily Hump: Pith Helmets and Pythons

2007-02-21T08:01:00.000-05:00

The pith helmet is often associated with the British Empire; we imagine the English gentry, soon to be dead from cholera, tramping through the tropical jungle while shaded by hats made from the dried pith of the Bengal spongewood. Pith is from the Old English piþa and like its modern counterpart referred to the core of a plant or, more generally, the essential part (thus our word pithy). Ultimately, piþa is from the West Germanic root *pithan-, which is also the source of our word pit, as in a hard seed or kernel.

And, no, *pithan- is not related to python, which is a Greek word named after the fabled serpent slain by Apollo near Delphi. Delphi's original name was Pytho, so named (possibly) because this is where the serpent rotted (the Greek verb meaning "to rot" is pythein). Per the OED

According to one form of the [Python] legend, the oracle originally belonged to or was guarded by the serpent, and, on the extermination of the latter, became the oracle of Apollo.

pith [Online Etymology Dictionary]
pith helmet [Wikipedia]
West Germanic languages [Wikipedia]
python [OED]
python [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Python [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Torpedo

2007-02-20T09:03:00.000-05:00

The Latin word torpedo, coming from the verb torpere, meaning "to be numbed," entered the English language in the 16th c. as a name for the electric ray, so called for its ability to shock. The weaponized version of the torpedo was invented by Robert Fulton for use with his Nautilus submarine; but rather than a self-propelled underwater missile, these torpedoes were stationary mines that floated in the water (these are what Union naval officer David Farragut was referring to when he apocryphally exclaimed "Damn the torpedoes!"). It wasn't until World War I that our modern concept of the torpedo came into fruition. Related, we find the word torpor, meaning a lethargic state.

The Latin torpere can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *ster-, meaning stiff, and is the source of our word sterile (which originally had the sense of rigidity--kind of funny).

torpedo [Online Etymology Dictionary]
torpor [Online Etymology Dictionary]
sterile [Online Etymology Dictionary]
torpedo [OED]
torpedo [Wikipedia]
electric ray [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Umpteenth

2007-02-16T08:23:00.000-05:00

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

I've recently been rereading Through the Looking Glass and this quote in particular got me thinking, not so much of its deeper meaning but rather the name Humpty, and by association, umpty. No, Humpty and umpty are not related but umpty is the root of our word umpteenth. In Morse code umpty is the slang term for the dash. In military slang this somehow also came to mean an indefinite number, usually large. Analagously, a dot is referred to as an iddy, thus the OED defines a strange-looking term iddy-umpty as a "conventional verbal representation...of Morse code."

Interestingly, Humpty Dumpty did not begin life as an egg. Rather it's an alcoholic drink we find in the later 17th c. made from ale boiled with brandy. But perhaps it's Digital Underground who best sums up the relationship between Humpty and umpty:

My name is Humpty, pronounced with a Umpty. Yo ladies, oh how I like to hump thee...The Humpty Dance is your chance to do the hump

Word.

Humpty Dumpty [Online Etymology Dictionary]
umpty [Online Etymology Dictionary]
umpteenth [AHD]
The Humpty Dance [LyricsDepot.com]

The Daily Hump: Henge

2007-02-15T08:01:00.000-05:00

I used the word henge yesterday to describe the structure of books I erected (heh) on my desk. One of my coworkers looked at me quizzically, obviously not understanding what I meant. When disambiguated from its usual primary element, stone-, I suppose henge looks pretty odd.

As I began my research I started to doubt whether henge is really a word; for one, it's not in the American Heritage Dictionary. The oft-cribbed (by me) Online Etymology Dictionary simply states henge, from 1740, is noted as a Yorkshire term for Stonehenge-like structures. I needed more hump fodder than that. Finally, the site English Heritage came through defining henge as

...a roughly circular or oval-shaped flat area over 20m in diameter which is enclosed and delimited by a boundary earthwork that usually comprises a ditch with an external bank. Access to the interior is obtained by way of one, two, or four entrances through the earthwork. Internal components may include portal settings, timber circles, post rings, stone circles, four-stone settings, monoliths, standing posts, pits, coves, post alignments, stone alignments, burials, central mounds, and stakeholes.

Ah, but what of the etymology? Thankfully we have the OED, which defines henge as "In particular reference to the name Stonehenge; something 'hanging' or in suspense." Notice the OED puts hanging in quotes; that's because henge, first coined with the use of the name Stonehenge in the 12th c., likely comes from the same Old English root as our modern word hang.

henge [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Where's Valentinius?

2007-02-14T08:04:00.000-05:00

Humping and Valentine's Day go together like wine and stinky cheese: Accoding to the Catholic Encyclopedia, via Wikipedia,

...the saint whose feast was celebrated on the day now known as St. Valentine's Day was possibly one of three martyred men named Valentinus who lived in the late third century...The name was a popular one in Late Antiquity, with its connotations of valens, "being strong". Several emperors and a pope bore the name, not to mention a powerful gnostic teacher of the second century, Valentinius, for a time drawing a threateningly large following.

You (al)chemists in the crowd probably noticed that valens looks a lot like valence, as in the electronic shell that encases an atom. Valence electrons are the negatively-charged particles that orbit in this shell; the more of these (max 8), the less likely the atom will react with anything.

Another form of valens, valere (be strong), is the root of our word valiant. These words all come from Proto-Indo-European base *wal-, likewise meaning "be strong," which happens to also be the roots of the Germanic names Walter and Waldo.

Saint Valentine [Wikipedia]
valence electrons [Wikipedia]
Valentine [Online Etymology Dictionary]
valence [Online Etymology Dictionary]
valiant [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Waldo and Walter [Behind the Name]

The Daily Hump: (Sea) Hag

2007-02-13T08:01:00.000-05:00

As the title of this post suggests my particular interest in hags is with the sea variety. Anyone who has ever watched a Popeye cartoon is familiar with the Sea Hag; she's the tall witchy woman with a vulture for a familiar who suffers an unrequited crush on the our favorite roid-raged sailor. It's kind of pathetic, really. But I experienced no such empathy as a child; I just thought the Sea Hag was creepy and awesome in the way only nautical rapscallions can be (evidence: a, b and c).

Hag is a shortened form of the Old English hægtesse meaning "witch, fury." The word can be traced further back to the Proto-Germanic *hagatusjon-. The Middle Dutch cognate, haghetisse, was also shorted to form the German Hexe, meaning "witch;" and it's via the Amish we got our English hex. Now, here's where things get crazy:

[Hag's first] element is probably cognate with [Old English] haga "enclosure" [which is related to our modern hedge]...Or second element may be connected with [Norwegian} tysja "fairy, crippled woman"...from PIE *dhewes- "to fly about, smoke, be scattered, vanish."...Haga is also the haw- in hawthorn, which is a central plant in northern European pagan religion. There may be several layers of folk-etymology here. If the hægtesse was once a powerful supernatural woman..., it may have originally carried the hawthorn sense. Later, when the pagan magic was reduced to local scatterings, it might have had the sense of "hedge-rider," or "she who straddles the hedge," because the hedge was the boundary between the "civilized" world of the village and the wild world beyond. The hægtesse would have a foot in each reality...

Sea hag [TV Acres]
hag [Online Etymology Dictionary]
hex [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Häxan [IMDB.com]
The Dreams in the Witch House [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Scythe

2007-02-12T08:32:00.000-05:00

You may notice the humps this week are shorter; I've got a lot of work to do. Now that that's out of the way today we're going to (very gingerly) hump the scythe: whether reaping barley or souls it's the go-to tool. First things first, however; that initial sc- that we've come to know and love didn't show up until around the 15th c., likely influenced by the Latin verb scindere (to cut: think scissors). Before this time the we had the Middle English sithe and before that the Old English sigði. We can trace the word further back to the Proto-Germanic *segithoz and the Proto-Indo-European base *sek-, meaning "cut".

The base *sek- also happens to be the root of our modern words section, a "cutting off or division," and scythe's close relative, sickle.

scythe [Online Etymology Dictionary]
scythe [OED]
sickle [Online Etymology Dictionary]

The Daily Hump: Venison

2007-02-09T08:55:00.000-05:00

In yesterday's hump commenter Auntie Sarah pondered why the meat that we eat doesn't often share a name with the animal that it came from: examples being cow-->beef, pig-->pork and deer-->venison. Beef and pork are direct decendants of the Latin names for these animals, so the name change does not reflect another instance of the hunting taboo described in the last post. Venison is a bit more interesting, however.

Venison, too, comes from Latin, but does not follow the beef/pork pattern because venison's root had nothing to do with deer. Rather, venison is from the past participle of the Latin verb venari, meaning to hunt or pursue. When English first took the word from the Old French back at the end of the 13th c., venison actual referred to the flesh of any animal killed in a hunt. It's only in later centuries that the definition became restricted to deer meat.

The Latin venari is likely from the Proto-Indo-European base *wen-, which has been translated as "to strive after, wish, desire, be satisfied." This also happens to form the base for that goddess on a mountain top burning like a silver flame, on the summit of beauty and love; I believe Venus was her name.

Shocking Blue [Wikipedia]
venison [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Venus [Online Etymology Dictionary]
venison [AHD]
venison [OED]

The Daily Hump: Bears

2007-02-08T09:09:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we discovered that the Arctic is named after the Greek root for bear, arktikos. Today we're going to look at the word bear itself and why the English and Latin are so incredibly unrelated.

Our word bear comes from the Old English bera. This comes from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic *beron, meaning "the brown one" (think bruin). Apparently, a large chunk of the northern branches (the Germanic, Baltic, Celtic and Slavic branches) of our linguistic ancestors had a taboo associated with the names of wild animals being hunted and either deformed or replaced the PIE term. As Wikipedia notes examples include

...the Irish word for "bear" translated means "the good calf", in Welsh it translates as "honey-pig", in Lithuanian it means "the licker" and Russian "медведь" literally means "one who leads to honey".

As my Persian teacher explained to me yesterday this substitution also occurs in many of the languages of northern Central Asia, in lands once populated by the Scythians. Given the Slavs' propinquity to Scythia it's not surprising that the Russians would also adopt this taboo as we see in the above Wikipedia quote. (Interestingly, Scythia was the first state north of the Black Sea to collapse to the Goths in the 2nd c. CE, but more on the Goths later.)

The Daily Hump: Arctic

2007-02-07T08:37:00.000-05:00

For you non-New Yorkers in the crowd, we're in the midst of a pretty nasty cold snap. Perhaps this is why I've spent the week so far humping reindeer and narwhals. Well, it's still freezing here, so why ruin a good pattern? Today we're going to look at the Arctic and hump the whole damn thing.

I've travelled beyond the Arctic Circle; it's an incredible place and I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, I didn't see any polar bears and that's a real etymological disappointment. See, Arctic comes from Latin arcticus, which comes from the Greek arktikos, meaning "of the bear." Bears? Yes. The Greeks were referring to the constellation Ursa Major which sits in the north. The Greek arktikos recalls the Proto-Indo-European root *rtko, which we also come upon in the Welsh word for bear, arth; this is a probable source for the name Arthur.

Interestingly, in Middle English the word was not Arctic, but rather Artic. This is because in Medieval Latin that first c sound ceased to be pronounced so the Old French, the source of the Middle English, dropped the letter completely. The c was restored in 1601 after the word was refashioned to adhere to the original Latin spelling.

Not surprisingly Antarctic comes from anti + Arctic; that is, "the opposite of the Arctic." And no, despite my graphic there are no polar bears in the southern hemisphere...I was simply trying to draw a connection between the word Arctic and bears. Nevermind. My genius is wasted on you.

arctic [AHD]
Arctic [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Antarctic [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Arctic [OED]
Arthur [Behind the Name]
Ursa Major [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Narwhal

2007-02-06T08:12:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we humped reindeer and today we're going to hump another animal with an affinity for the cold, the arctic narwhal. The narwhal is a type of whale most notable for the extremely long tusk that juts from the left jaw of the male. These tusks can grow up to 10 feet long which is pretty impressive when you consider the whale itself is no longer than 16 feet.

In Inuit legend the narwhal was created when a woman holding onto a harpoon was dragged into the sea by a beluga and became twisted upon the weapon. In Medieval folklore many Europeans equated the narwhal tusk to the unicorn horn. Vikings and other northern traders sold the tusks for large sums of gold as cups fashioned from the ivory were believed to negate the effect of any poison which they held inside.

The word narwhal comes to us from the Danish and Norwegian narhval, which itself is from the Old Norse nāhvalr. It is generally assumed that the Old Norse name is derived from nār, corpse (from its whitish color) + hvalr, whale, although this is not known for sure. Another suggestion is that the narwhal was named "the corpse whale" for its ability to lie belly up and motionless for a few minutes at a time. Or, alternatively, nā- could be short for the Old Norse nál, meaning needle, an obvious reference to the male's tusk.

Here's a fun bit of mental masturbation: If we assume the first element nā- is from nār (corpse) this is a cognate with the Old English ne, neo, which is an element associated with things that are dead. Examples in Old English include neobedd (death bed), the root of our modern word need (surprisingly enough) and orcneas (evil spirits); orcneas is the likely source of our word orc and shares a Latin root with orca, another species of whale.

narwhal [Wikipedia]
narwhal [AHD]
narwhal [Online Etymology Dictionary]
narwhal [OED]
orca [Online Etymology Dictionary]
need [OED]
orc [OED]
orc [Online Etymology Dictionary]

The Daily Hump: Reindeer

2007-02-05T09:09:00.000-05:00

Loyal WH readers undoubtedly noticed there was no post on Friday. This is because I was spending a relaxing vacation up in southern Vermont where the gf and I made a brief excursion to visit some reindeer. Apparently unbeknownst to some people, reindeer are not fictional animals--they're quite real--and quite adorable as this video demonstrates.The question is, of course, what does rein- mean? The word reindeer is from the Old Norse hreindyri where dyr means "animal" and hreinn refers to the type of animal. Per the Online Etymology Dictionary, this first element is from the Proto-Germanic *khrainaz and not rennen (to run) as folk etymology often associates it. The Online Etymology Dictionary doesn't define *khrainaz specifically, however it does point to similarities with the Old English hran, meaning "reindeer", and the German renn. As well, it suggests a cognate with the Greek krios, meaning "ram".

The Daily Hump: Anger

2007-02-01T08:41:00.000-05:00

I'm worried that some of my more loyal WH readers read into the words I choose to hump. Sometimes this is okay, but you shouldn't make a habit of it; case in point, today's word, anger. I'm not angry, mildly frustrated maybe, but not angry.

But before we begin I need to get something off my chest. In elementary school I remember being told that there are three words in the English language that end in -gry. Two of them are angry and hungry; what's the third? Well, praise be unto thy Internet, as the Online Etymology Dictionary reports

...there is no third (except some extremely obscure ones). Richard Lederer calls this "one of the most outrageous and time-wasting linguistic hoaxes in our nation's history" and traces it to a New York TV quiz show from early 1975.

It's stupid questions like that that make me angry. Anyway, we trace our anger back to Middle English. Their anger, in turn, came from Old Norse (which is not surprising since I'm sure the Vikings made a lot of people angry). In Old Norse angr referred to strife or trouble and was from the root word ang which also meant "troubled" but could also mean "strait" or "narrow." We can trace this word even further back to the Proto-Germanic *angus, meaning "narrow" or "painful" and to the Proto-Indo-European *angh- meaning "tight" or "painful."

We have a word agnail which is originally from Middle English and refers to a corn on your foot. This is from the Old English angnægl which is nothing more than a compound: ang- + nægl. In this word ang- has the sense of painful and nægl translates to "nail;" hence, our word hangnail, a painful nail.

PS. I'm on vacation tomorrow, so no hump for you. Happy Groundhog Day!

hangnail [AHD]
agnail [AHD]
anger [Online Etymology Dictionary]
agnail [OED]
anger [OED]

The Daily Hump: Caterpillar

2007-01-31T08:59:00.000-05:00

I've always been a firm believer in never airing one's fears out in public. Perhaps it's unwarranted paranoia but putting this information out there opens one up to mental torture on a colossal scale. But a few years ago my grandmother, after surprising me by suddenly speaking German, told me that one should always know the language of one's enemy. By extension, I've come to realize we should also understand the language we use to identify our enemy, which is what brings me to today's hump, one of the banes of my existence, the caterpillar.

It's not so much I have a fear of caterpillars as much as they simply give me the willies. And I'm an animal person--I don't mind snakes, I like mice and rats, even most insects don't bother me. No, caterpillars (and millipedes and centipedes) hold a special place in my gut. I'm so acutely aware of caterpillars that I'm convinced I can smell their presence; I know this from the series of unscientific experiments I ran while mowing the lawn. I'd get a whiff of larva and shawnuff on a nearby plant would be a thick nasty green tomato caterpillar. Or above my head a colony of tent caterpillars would be weaving their hellish web of arboreal misery. And there, on the driveway, was a woolly bear caterpillar, least offensive of the lot simply because it had the misfortune of being run over by the car. My keen sense of smell protects me from these monsters.

Caterpillar ultimately comes to us from the Old French chatepelose, which literally translates to "hairy cat." You may remember cat from a previous hump but the second element is from the Latin pilosus, meaning "hair." The Italian surname Pelosi comes from this same Latin root. Has the House of Representatives been taken over by a caterpillar masquerading as a San Francisco liberal? Given the facts it seems plausible.

Judge caterpillars for yourself, but remember this;

Our word caterpillar is first recorded in English in 1440 in the form catyrpel. Catyr, the first part of catyrpel, may indicate the existence of an English word *cater, meaning "tomcat," otherwise attested only in caterwaul. Cater would be cognate with Middle High German kater and Dutch kater. The latter part of catyrpel seems to have become associated with the word piller, "plunderer"...[from AHD: emphasis mine]

See? Even our modern day spelling hints to the caterpillar's intrinsic malevolence. Madame Speaker (if that is your real name), I rest my case.

caterpillar [AHD]
caterpillar [Online Etymology Dictionary]
caterpillar [OED]
caterpillar [Wikipedia]
Italian surnames [Italy World Club]

The Daily Hump: Sibyl Disobedience

2007-01-30T08:05:00.000-05:00

Before I get on the humpbus this morning I want to rave about the amazing Peter, Bjorn & John concert last night at Mercury Lounge. PB&J played an extra-long set with tons of energy and were totally channeling The Kinks. I definitely recommend checking them out while they're not yet completely huge.

My name is Humpty, pronounced with a Umpty.
Yo ladies, oh how I like to hump thee.

A Sibyl (note the capital S) is a member of a group of women who the Greeks and Romans regarded as having powers of divination and prophecy. In common noun form the word has come to mean a witch or, as used in the quote below from Network, a fortune-teller. Our word sibyl comes to us from the Greek Sibulla by way of Latin (Sibylla), Old French and Middle English (sibile). The word's origin is not fully understood but it is thought to come from the Doric Siobolla and from Attic Theoboule, meaning "divine wish."

Diana: Did you know there are a number of psychics working as licensed brokers on Wall Street? Some of them counsel their clients by use of Tarot cards. They're all pretty successful, even in a bear market and selling short. I met one of them a couple of weeks ago and thought of doing a show around her -- The Wayward Witch of Wall Street, something like that...Her name, aptly enough, is Sibyl. Sybil the Soothsayer.

sibyl [AHD]
sibyl [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Sibyl [OED]
Cybill Shepherd [IMDB]

The Daily Hump: Don't Mind the Praying Mantis

2007-01-29T09:07:00.000-05:00

Growing up it was a rare treat when we'd find a praying mantis in the yard. At most we'd spot one once per summer; the mantis would usually be found sitting on a tree limb curiously observing whoever happened to be mowing the lawn that day. I remember often hearing there was a $50 fine for killing one of the creatures. That turns out to be false, but regardless the graceful animals are certainly not pests so who would want to do them harm anyway?

Moving on...mantis is Greek for "seer" and as the AHD notes

the Greeks, who made the connection between the upraised front legs of a mantis waiting for its prey and the hands of a prophet in prayer, used the name mantis to mean “the praying mantis.” This word and sense were picked up in Modern Latin and from there came into English, being first recorded in 1658. Once we know the origin of the term mantis, we realize that the species names praying mantis and Mantis religiosa are a bit redundant.

In addition, the word is directly related to the suffix -mancy (as in necromancy). The Greek mantis is from the verb mainesthai, meaning "to be inspired", which is in turn related to menos, "passion, spirit." This is the source of our word mania. All of these forms derive from the Proto-Indo-European *men-, "to think, to have one's mind aroused, rage, be furious", which is the root of our English word mind.

mantis [Online Etymology Dictionary]
praying mantis [Wikipedia]

Hump This: Maelstrom

2007-01-26T09:27:00.000-05:00

I'm a Viking princess and am leading a fleet of longships on an RPP* raid of an idyllic Christian village of peasant farmers. However, my friend Thorvald the Berserker warned me of some nasty maelstrom action off the coast of Norway. What's up with maelstrom? Sounds Dutch.

AM, how right you are! Maelstrom, which has become a generic term for a large whirlpool or turbulent situation, started off life as a proper noun on Dutch maps of the 17th (or possibly 16th) century and referred to a massive whirlpool in the Arctic Ocean off the Lofoten Islands of Norway**. The first definitive use of maelstrom is from a 1673 book written by a pastor living in the Faroes, but despite what those tricky Faroese would have you believe the word is of Dutch origin, literally meaning "grinding-stream." The first element mael, comes from the Dutch verb malen, meaning "to grind" and is the root of our modern English word meal.

Have fun storming the village!

If you have a word you'd like humped please email it, along with your location, to wordhumper.

*RPP: Rape, pillage, plunder - a favorite Viking pasttime

**The Lofotens also happen to be home of the village of Å, which is my favorite name for a town anywhere in the world.

maelstrom [OED]

Language Family Map

2007-01-25T16:35:00.000-05:00

I thought I'd share this awesome language family map I just found on Wikipedia. It reminds me of the Mappa Linguarum I hypothesized a few months back, only sans dimension of time.

The Daily Hump: Sneeze

2007-01-25T09:01:00.000-05:00

My original idea was to hump patsy this morning but some asshole over at Wikipedia already humped the word every which way to Sunday. Fear not! The consolation prize is nothing to sneeze at (sorry).*

The lowly sneeze, known scientifically as a sternutatory reflex,

is a semi-autonomous, convulsive expulsion of air from the nose and mouth. This air can reach speeds of 70 m/s (250 km/h or 155 MPH). Sneezes spread disease by producing infectious droplets that are 0.5 to 5 µm in diameter, about 40,000 such droplets can be produced by a single sneeze.

The word traces back to the Old English fneosan, which is from the proto-Germanic *fneusanan (which is likely of imitative origin). From this base we see similarities in Middle Dutch, Dutch (fniezen - "to sneeze"), Old Norse (fnysa - "to snort"), and Swedish (nysa - "to sneeze"). As the Online Etymology Dictionary notes

the [English] forms in sn- appear 1490s; change may be due to a misreading of fn-, or from [an Old Norse] influence. But OED suggests [the Middle English] fnese had been reduced to simple nese by early 15c., and sneeze is a "strengthened form" of this, "assisted by its phonetic appropriateness."

Regardless up until around 1400 c. English had the words fnese (sneeze), fnast (breathe) and neeze, which is still used to mean sneeze in a number of Scandinavian, northern Irish English and north England regional dialects. You may find it interesting to note that fnese and fnast make up the OED's entire contingent of words beginning with fn-.

*"To sneeze at" first attested to in 1806.

Sneezing [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Cinch

2007-01-24T13:27:00.001-05:00

My friend Bob Wexler and I were having an IM discussion this morning regarding another one of our kooky, get-rich-quick, harebrained business ideas (actually, I'm not going to discuss it here because it just may be viable...). His final declaration was our plan is "a cynch." Obvious spelling errors aside (and most likely the observation would ultimately prove patently false), it got me thinking: Why is something that's easy a "cinch"?

The idea comes from one of cinch's many definitions: "A firm or secure hold" (OED). Cinch's sense of facility is an American invention, and a relatively recent one at that, first making an appearance around 1898. The word cinch originally referred to the girth of a saddle and came from the Spanish cincha, also meaning "girdle." The Spanish came from the Latin cingulum ("girdle" again) which came from the Latin verb cingere, meaning "to surround, encircle." And this can be traced back even further to the Proto-Indo-European base *kenk- meaning "to gird, encircle." Related words include precinct, succinct and, interestingly, shingles ("The inflammation often extends around the middle of the body, like a girdle.").

cinch [AHD]
cinch [Online Etymology Dictionary]
cinch [OED]

The Daily Hump: Humping Quasimodo

2007-01-23T13:52:00.000-05:00

Homer: (running into the church) Sanctuary! Sanctuary!
Reverend Lovejoy: Why did I teach him that word?

Now that it's lunch I have some time to take my daily hump. If you checked in earlier you may have noticed this morning's post is titled Humpback Flashback. Naturally, humpback got me thinking of Quasimodo, best known as the lovable cripple from the 1996 animated film The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Go Fighting Irish!) (and, no, there's no difference between humpbacks, hunchbacks and crookbacks says WordNet). For those of you like me who have better things to do [i.e. anything] than slug through Victor Hugo Boss's 1831 tome or Disney's piss-poor hatchet job it's interesting to observe

Quasimodo's name is a pun. Frollo finds him on the cathedrals doorsteps on Quasimodo Sunday, and names him after the holiday, inadvertedly calling him "half-formed."

Quasimodo Sunday is the first Sunday after Easter, recently designated in 2000 as Divine Mercy Sunday by Pope John Paul II. As Wikipedia notes

The name Quasimodo came from the Latin text of the traditional Introit (opening blessing) for this day, which begins "Quasi modo geniti infantes..." ("As newborn babes...", from the First Epistle of Peter 2:2). Literally, quasi modo means "in the manner of [i.e. newborn babes]".

Quasi modo Wordhumper hump.

Quasimodo [Wikipedia]
Quasimodo Sunday [Wikipedia]
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) [IMDB]
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) [IMDB]
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame [Amazon]

Humpback Flashback

2007-01-23T09:07:00.000-05:00

It's a super busy day over at the real job (this just in: WH is *not* my real job), so instead of a Daily Hump I invite you to read this juicy tidbit from the oft ribald, always poignant DealBreaker.com:

Which former head of Global Wealth Management at a major New York bank is leaving his wife and two kids for a talking head on a major financial news network?

In the spirit of this juicy blind item why don't you revisit one of WH's more popular entries: cuckold.

The Daily Hump: Schwa

2007-01-22T08:30:00.000-05:00

Even if you don't know the word schwa you've likely seen one. It's the inverted letter "e" used to represent neutral the vowel sound in generally weakly stressed syllables. Examples include the "i" in pencil or the "u" in circus. The word schwa comes to us from Hebrew via German. In Rabbinic Hebrew, schwa (שְׁוָא) literally means "emptiness" or "vanity". For you folks in the audience who had to suffer through years of Hebrew school I guarantee you encountered the schwa fairly regularly: Remember those dots that appeared under the Hebrew letters that signified the vowel sounds? Well, they are collectively called "niqqud marks" and schwa originally referred to the vowel that looks like a vertical pair of dots, :. The Hebrew word itself likely comes from the Syriac šwayyā, meaning "even", which I'm guessing describes the identical nature of the two points.

Today, however, the : vowel mark is more commonly called a sheva in English in order to differentiate it from Ə. Sheva is simply an arbitrarily constructed alteration of schwa.

schwa [Wikipedia]
niqqud [Wikipedia]
schwa [AHD]
sheva [OED]

The Daily Hump: Minx

2007-01-19T08:43:00.001-05:00

Hump This, a quasi-regular Friday feature where you, the WordHumper reader, decide which words gets humped back to Proto-Indo-Europa, is taking a hiatus this week for lack of any good requests. We'll hopefully return next week. But in the meantime, please enjoy the following hump.

The OED describes a minx as "A pert, sly, or boldly flirtatious young woman" noting that in recent years the word has taken on a more playful connotation. The word's origin is uncertain but it's generally assumed minx is a shortened form of minikin which is a fairly rare word that the AHD defines as "A very small delicate creature." In its original sense minikin referred to a young girl or woman. The word comes from the Middle Dutch minnekijn which meant "darling" and is itself a compound of minne (love) + -kijn, which is a diminutive suffix.

Minikin should not be confused with the Jewish surname Minkin. Minkin is likely an alteration of Mencken or Menken which themselves are likely alterations of Menahem who you may remember from the Hebrew Bible as one of the more colorful kings of Israel who, per II Kings 15:16, had a fondness for giving abortions: "He sacked Tiphsah and ripped open all the pregnant women."

Wow...I just humped myself. Word.

UPDATE: Interestingly, Minkin is also an extinct Australian Aboriginal language. Ooga booga.

minx [Online Etymology Dictionary]
minx [AHD]
minikin [AHD]
minikin [OED]
minx [OED]
Menahem [Wikipedia]
List of Jewish surnames [Wikipedia]
II Kings 15:16 [Biblegateway.com]
Minkin (language) [Wikipedia]

WordHumper EXCLUSIVE!!!

2007-01-18T18:28:00.001-05:00

WordHumper is first to report that DealBreaker.com's esteemed editor John Carney is out of the hospital!

MUST SOURCE WORDHUMPER. MUST SOURCE WORDHUMPER.

The Daily Hump: Bleach

2007-01-18T08:50:00.001-05:00

I know some of my more loyal readers may read into the fact that yesterday I humped witch hazel and today I'm humping bleach. Yes, I have a thing for cleanliness. Yes, you could even say I'm kind of OCD. But really, I swear, this hullaballoo is unwarranted as this whole occurrence is a freak coincidence.

Do ya know what I'm doin', doin' the Humpty Hump.

Bleach isn't just the name of Nirvana's totally excellent first album (which, granted, pales is comparison to their later efforts) so-named because Kurt appreciated the chemical's effectiveness for cleaning needles. Bleach is better known as that noxious agent that keeps your brights bright and your tile floor sparkly. The word comes down to us from the Old English blǣcan, which is from the Proto-Germanic *blaikos "white," which is from the Proto-Indo-European *bhleg- "to gleam." Other related words include blanche, blank, bleak and blink; and curiously, quite unexpectedly, black.

Yes, folks, bleach and black are likely from the same root. As the Online Etymology Dictionary notes the connection between blanche, blank, bleak and blink seems to be "burning, blazing, shining, whiteness." The burning and blazing aspect is what's important because that's also the likely link between bleach and black. "That the same root yielded words for 'black' and 'white' is probably because both are colorless, and perhaps because both are associated with burning." Okay then.

Before you go some more fodder for your noggin: according to the AHD bleachers (like those ass-hurting things you used to sit on at high school pep rallies) were so named because it's a comparison of "a person's exposure to the sun when sitting on them with the exposure of linens bleaching on a clothesline." The Online Etymology Dictionary disputes this etymology however saying bleachers "were so-named because the boards were bleached by the sun." The OED doesn't weigh in on the issue so I'm going to have to go with the Online Etymology Dictionary on this one. The AHD etymology is just stoopid.

The Daily Hump: Witch Hazel

2007-01-17T08:53:00.000-05:00

I've got a pimple living at the end of my nose and it makes me a sad WordHumper. It's one of those ones that's kind of under the skin, so it's just a sort of red splotch that hurts a lot. Anyway, I should be washing my face with witch hazel like I was back in the day, but I'm too lazy and the smell is kind of funky. Plus, this pimple got me thinking; what's so witchy about witch hazel? Is it a magical bush? Evil? Satanic perhaps?

Actually, no. Witch hazel has absolutely nothing to do with old crones flying around on broomsticks or reciting incantations and frolicking in an orgiastic circle around a bonfire in some sylvan glen. No, the "witch" in witch hazel is from the obsolete wych, which is a shortened form of the wych elm (see photo at left) whose name in turn comes from the Old English wice. Wice is from the proto-Germanic wik- meaning "to bend" and from this root we get oodles of other modern English words including: weak, wicker and wicket. Even the words week and vicarious share a proto-Indo-European root with wik-, the PIE base *weik-, *weig- "to bend, wind" (in regards to vicarious think of bending in the sense of changing, or a substitution. For week the sense comes more from the idea of "turning" or "succession").

So, there ya have it: for better or for worse there is nothing diabolical about the powers of witch hazel.

witch hazel [Online Etymology Dictionary]
vicarious [Online Etymology Dictionary]
witch, wych, n3 [OED]
witch hazel [AHD]
Wych elm [Wikipedia]

The Daily Hump: Hibernation in the Himalaya

2007-01-16T09:00:00.000-05:00

According to Wikipedia

Hibernation is a state of inactivity and metabolic depression in animals, characterized by lower body temperature, slower breathing, and lower metabolic rate.

This process most often occurs in animals during the winter months, thus it should be of little surprise that the English word comes from a verb meaning "to winter", the Latin hibenare.

The Latin form is from the Proto-Indo-European root *gheim- meaning "snow" or "winter". The Sanskrit hima, meaning "snow", is also from this PIE root and gives us the name of Earth's highest mountain range, the Himalaya, which literally translates to "abode of snow". As a point of trivia there are a few animals which hibernate in the Himalaya and thus doubly rely on the *gheim- root; these include the Himalayan marmot and both the brown and black bear.

hibernation [Online Etymology Dictionary]
Himalaya [Online Etmology Dictionary]

WordHumper EXCLUSIVE!!!

2007-01-15T08:26:00.000-05:00

WordHumper is first to report that DealBreaker.com's esteemed editor John Carney broke a freakin' leg thanks to some asshole hit and run driver. Here's wishin' John a fast and speedy recovery!

MUST SOURCE WORDHUMPER. MUST SOURCE WORDHUMPER.

Update: "EXCLUSIVE" is a joke, people! Cool your jets...

Hump This: Tampon

2007-01-12T09:45:00.000-05:00

Talk to me about tampons. Why aren't they called vagina plugs?

You'll need to thank the French that when Cap'n Bloodsnatch comes to town you're not rifling through your purse searching for a "vagina plug". But don't thank them too much because as it happens tampon actually means "plug" in Middle French. Similarly, we have a word in English tampion which is the plug or cover one uses for a muzzle of a gun or cannon to keep out the moisture.

And next time you saddle up to the bar for a pint keep this in mind: tampon can ultimately be traced back to the Proto-Germanic *tappon meaning "stopper, faucet", which happens to be the ancestor of our modern English word tap.

Hey, barkeep, I'll have a Red Stripe.

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tap [Online Etymology Dictionary]
tampion [Online Etymology Dictionary]
tampion [AHD]
tampon [AHD]
Tampontification Euphemisms [Seventh Generation]

The Daily Hump: Hey Taxi!

2007-01-11T09:26:00.000-05:00

Today we're going to find the connection between taxicabs and high school geometry.

Unbeknownst to many a New Yorker the word taxi is actually a shortened form of taximeter cab, which is a vehicle first introduced in London in 1907. Basically, a taxi is defined as a car-for-hire that charges based on a taximeter rate, the taximeter being an "automatic meter to record the distance and fare" invented in Germany in the late 19th century. Taximeter is simply tax + meter, tax coming from the Latin taxare meaning, among other things, to "evaluate, estimate, assess, handle."

Taxare is likely a frequentative form of the Latin tangere, meaning "to touch." And from tangere we get our English word tangent which describes a straight line that touches a curve at a single point where the curve's derivative equals the slope of the line.

tax [Online Etymology Dictionary]
taxi [Online Etymology Dictionary]
tangent [Wikipedia]

Guest Hump: Ait

2007-01-10T10:41:00.000-05:00

An ait, or an eyot as it is sometimes spelled, is a small island, especially one found in a river, but also in a lake. Ait is, in fact, derived from the Old English word for small island. As in: “On a bare ait at midcurrent, completely surrounded and only inches above that muddy roiling water, huddle the squealing pigs.” Not to be confused with: “Yo momma gave me a blowjob. Watchoo think about that. Ait!”

Check out: Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

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The Daily Hump: Cozy

2007-01-10T08:46:00.000-05:00

As warm-blooded mammals human beings seem to have a natural affinity towards snug, comfortable shelters. Perhaps this yearning for coziness is nothing more than a memory heldover from our time in the womb. The word cozy is most likely of Scandinavian origin (cf. the Norwegian kose seg, "be cozy") which is unsurprising given the cold Nordic climate.

English also has a word gemutlich (with or without umlaut) which is from zie Germans and is generally defined as "pleasant and friendly" (possibly first used as an adjective in English by Queen Victoria). In German a gemütlich person or place is one that obeys the philosphy of Gemütlichkeit, which goes beyond the English concept of coziness in its level of abstractness:

...rather than basically just describing a place as not too large, well-heated and nicely furnished (a cosy room, a cosy flat), Gemütlichkeit connotes, much more than cosiness, the notion of belonging, social acceptance, cheerfulness, the absence of anything hectic and the spending of quality time in a place as described above...A gemütlich person...is one that takes part in this lifestyle and knows about the tensions he/she is able to cause, and thus tries to avoid these things actively.

This idea of avoiding tension in one's enviroment suggests a similarity to Chinese feng shui, although I'd argue the Taoist-inspired art would likely be focused much more on passive rather than active avoidance. This being said, we do see fairly analagous ideas to Gemütlichkeit in other parts of northern Europe including the Dutch gezelligheid, the Danish hygge and the Russian уют.

From an anthropological perspective it'd be interesting to examine whether cultures from warmer climates maintain any sort of concept of cozy.

cozy [Online Etymology Dictionary]
cozy [OED]
gemütlich [OED]
Gemütlichkeit [Wikipedia]
Gezelligheid [Wikipedia]