Did you know that meat didn’t always mean “the flesh of warm-blooded animals used for food”?

Nope. The word meat actually comes from the Old English mete, which was used for ANY food or sustenance, including what was fed to animals, and could even mean “a meal.” It came from Proto-Geremanic meti, which then influenced many Germanic languages through the ages in their words for food.

But by around the 1300, the meaning quoted above began to edge out the broader sense, basically as a shortening of “flesh-meat,” which was used before that. By even into the 1400s, vegetables were still called “grene-mete,” and dairy was “white-mete.” We still see that earlier meaning preserved in a few random dishes/items, like sweetmeat and mincemeat.

Dark meat and light/white meat became popular distinctions when talking about fowl in the 19th century. Meatloaf is first recorded in 1876.

Word Nerds Merch!

It’s kind of funny, isn’t it. When we say the word awe, we know that it means “an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime.“

And yet, what do we think when we saw awful? Or awesome? We can see at a glance that both words are from that root–and indeed, both once meant the same thing.

Yet in modern vernacular, both of these words have drifted from their root word…and they’ve drifted in opposite directions. It’s fascinating to look at how and when and why. And to realize that awe, in its own definition, carries the potential for both positive and negative feelings, right? Dread is bad. Wonder is good.

Awful, at the start, could be either. It was simply “full of awe.” And it wasn’t until 1809 that it laid claim to all the negative parts of awe and came to used strictly for “exceedingly bad.”

Awesome actually came on the scene nearly 300 years later, and first was mostly positive, focused on “profoundly reverential” since the 1590s. In the next hundred years that dread worked its way back in. And it wasn’t until 1960 that it veered from all things reverential and simply began to mean “impressive, very good.”

Word Nerds Merch!

Cloud.

You think you know what it means. I did too. But what if I told you that it originally meant, “mass of rock, a hill.”

Um…huh?

Yep. Cloud is from Old English clud, which was used for rocks and heaps of soil. You know, like clod. No one looks at the sky and says there are clods up there, right? We know that means dirt. But clod and cloud are in fact different spellings of the same word. Why?

Well, round about 1300, people in the south of England began to use cloud metaphorically, upon noting that cumulous clouds often look like mountains, hills, and rock formations up in the sky. Until then, the usual Old English word for clouds was weolcan, but apparently the new metaphor stuck and spread. By the year 1475, cloud had completely usurped weolcan, and in fact was no longer used at all for clods of dirt or rock.

Word Nerds Merch!