A week or two ago, that familiar chime of “Word of the Week!” sang out through the house. I looked up–ever eager for a new word to add to the list–and said, “Oo! What?”

My husband replied with, “Cult and culture. They’re clearly related, but I’d never stopped to wonder how.”

Neither had I! But it’s definitely one of those things that you immediately go, “Of course they are!” Right? And indeed they are…but I hadn’t paused to think about how until I looked it up.

Both cult and culture come from the past participle of the Latin colere, which means “to tend; to guard; to till; to cultivate” and which developed into the Latin cultus, which means “care, labor; cultivation, culture; worship, reverence.”

Wait…what? Are you (like me) wondering why tilling the ground is related to worship and reverence? Hmm. The etymologists don’t actually offer any explanation of that, but anthropology may. If we look back to the early societies, they were all agricultural and it’s easy to see where that act of bringing life out of the ground became linked to worshiping the bringer of that life, whether one’s society was mono- or polytheistic. It may also have to do with the time, care, and ritual that go into both tilling the soil and serving one’s God.

It certainly explains why our word for farming the land is agriculture, right? I’d never paused to notice that before either!

Culture made its way into English first, in the farming sense, in the 1400s. The figurative sense of “cultivation of the mind through education” was noted occasionally, as early as 1500 but didn’t really become a common usage until the 1800s. It was then further extended to mean “the collective achievements of a group of people” around 1867.

Cult joined the language in the 1600s, meaning “a form or system of worship.” It’s worth noting that there were no negative connotations on the word until the mid 1800s, when it began to be used more frequently, and generally in reference to primitive peoples and their worship.  By 1829, it meant “devoted attention to a particular person or thing,” which is where our modern sense comes from.

Both, however, still retain that tie to the root, and to words like cultivate and agriculture. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Cappuccino. The mere word conjures up images of beautiful coffee, and the mere thought gets my tastebuds dancing. I am a coffee lover, so all kinds of coffee earn this reaction. Latte, mocha…mmm. Yep.

I’ve always loved cappuccinos too, since I was a kid, even before I drank coffee daily. Now, granted, the kind I acquired the taste of were sugar-laden, creamy things, heavy on the vanilla. That may not be the kind made famous in Italy, per se…but the roots are still there!

Cappuccino is in fact espresso served with steamed-milk foam. So very dark coffee lightened a bit with milk. Where, though, did it get its name? That’s the fascinating part! Cappuccino actually comes directly from a religious order! There’s an order of Fransiscan friars called Capuchins who have always worn a brown hooded habit; a brown not quite as dark as undiluted espresso, but just the color you get when you add a bit of frothed milk foam. 😉 Yep, that’s right. The creators of the coffee drink looked at it, were reminded of the Friars, and named the beverage after them!

Now I want to inspire a coffee drink to be named after me…wonder if I can make one purple. 😉

Do you know where the word trivia comes from? If not, it’s definitely a fun bit of trivia that you’ll want to know! (LOL–couldn’t resist!)

The official meaning of trivia is “bits of information of little consequence.” It became a common word in 1932 but has been around at least since 1902, when a book was published by that name, featuring essays on little-known facts and commonplace moments.

Where, though, did author Logan Pearsall Smith come up with that title? Directly from Latin! Trivia is literally just tri + via. Three … roads. Um … why, you may ask? Well, because at crossroads in the Roman empire–especially where more than 2 roads met up–there would spring up inns and roadhouses and other public, common areas. It was a place where anyone could be and where information was shared. Because in Latin trivialis (the adjective form) meant “public,” it also came to mean “common, commonplace.”

Trivia became a game made popular among college students in the US in the 1960s, and Trivial Pursuit, the board game, became wildly popular after its release in 1982.

Happy Independence Day, to all my American readers! I hope everyone has a day of fun planned. =) In honor of the day, I thought I’d revisit a Word of the Week post that I first published in 2015…but I had totally forgotten ever looking this one up, so I figure some of you likely had too, LOL.

Yankee.

We all probably know some of the history. That people around the world often use the word to refer to Americans in general–or the shortened version of “Yank.” We know that the South called the Northerners Yankees during the Civil War. We know that the British called the Americans Yankees during the Revolution. We all learned how to sing “Yankee Doodle” in primary school.

But…why?

Well, that’s a good question. I didn’t have the answer to that one off the top of my head, so I popped over to my beloved www.EtymOnline.com.

According to them, the word was first applied disparagingly to the Dutch. There are a couple guesses as to which Dutch words it imitates, though “John” (Jan, pronounced Yan) is obviously a part of it. It’s the “kees” part that we’re not entirely sure of. It might be from “Janke,” which means “Little John” or it might be “John Cornelius” or “John Cheese.” (Naming people John + Food being a typical way to refer to a common bloke at the time.)

Yankee started appearing in the late 1600s, and the New Amsterdam Dutch were quick to turn around and slap the word on their neighboring English colonists in Connecticut. It was a disparaging word for them, and one the British adopted to apply to Americans in general during the time of the Revolution.

Of course, Americans being what we’ve always been, those Yankees decided they’d take the word and embrace it. They were proud to be Yankees, thank you very much. And the word was shortened to “Yank” by 1778. The Northern/Southern distinction didn’t come about until about 1828. Some etymologists claim one would only ever use the word to refer to someone from the north of them, but that doesn’t exactly track with the across-the-pond version. 😉

Regardless of whether you ever think of yourself (or others) as a Yankee, it seems we ultimately have the Dutch to thank for the term.