Word of the Week – Cliché

Word of the Week – Cliché

by | Apr 17, 2023 | Word of the Week

I don’t know about you, but I love onomatopoeia words. (In case you don’t remember your primary school grammar, LOL, those are words that sound like what they represent–like boom, bang, snap, pop, and so on.) You know what’s even more fun? International onomatopoeia words!

And that, believe it or not, is what cliché is–it’s French onomatopoeia! Technically speaking, cliché is simply French for “click.” That makes sense when you look at it, right? And click is certainly an onomatopoeia in English. The same holds true in French too, where it’s a past participle form of the verb clicher…and was used as a word by printers to indicate a particular printing block, so named because of the sound of a mold striking metal.

So…how did it come to mean “a trite and worn-out phrase”?

Because one of the wonders of the printing press is that you can make the same word or phrase or page or book over and over and over again. This is an example, then, of printing jargon entering into common usage.

But it took quite a while for that to happen. The first recorded use of cliché in English was in 1888, but it didn’t actually catch on and become popular until the 1920s!

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Word of the Week – Helicopter

Word of the Week – Helicopter

by | Apr 12, 2023 | Word of the Week

The word helicopter dates, not surprisingly, only from 1861. When the word was coined, it was meant to be a “device that enabled airplanes to rise perpendicularly.” How? Using spiral airfoils. This didn’t work, so the word was put to use in 1918 for the modern idea of a helicopter instead…but not before everyone from the Wright brothers to Jules Verne had used it.

The interesting bit is how the word was created. In our minds it’s usually heli + copter. But in fact it’s helico from the Latinized form of the Greek helicos, meaning “spiral thing” and pteron, “wing” or “winged thing”–think pterodactyl.

So really, a helicopter is just a spiral winged thing. 😉

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Word of the Week – Holy

Word of the Week – Holy

by | Apr 3, 2023 | Word of the Week

Holy. It’s a word we know, but also one with enough homophones that it leaves plenty of room for jokes. Holy? Holey? Wholly? What I find fascinating is that at least two of those words are in fact from the same root!

Holy comes from Old English halig, which is in turn from old Germanic sources, and has always meant “consecrated, sacred.” It’s the word used to translate Latin sanctus, “sacred.” What I didn’t realize is that those Germanic roots trace, in turn, from a word that means “whole, uninjured.” So holy really does mean whole. Who knew? The idea is that it came from the concept of something that “must remain whole, intact. Something that cannot be violated.”

As of the date when I’m posting this, Holy Week has just begun. May our reflections on our Lord remain whole, intact, and unviolated.

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Word of the Week – Cue

Word of the Week – Cue

by | Mar 27, 2023 | Word of the Week

In English, we have two main meanings of the word cue. The first is the billiards stick; and the second is the signal to begin an action. Cue is also how we spell the letter Q. Which is important. Remember that. 😉

So our word for the billiards stick or other sporting equipment that bears the same name is actually an anglicized spelling of the French queue. We know that word, of course, because we still use it for “a list” or “a line,” especially in British English. In French the word means “tail,” but you can see the similarity there.

Alright then, what about the second meaning of cue, which we today use far more often? This one is fun. It’s actually where that spelling of the letter comes in–because we in fact, when we use cue for “a signal to begin” mean Q. Short for quando, the Latin word for “when.” That Latin direction was written in the scripts given to individual actors’ partial copies of plays. They didn’t copy the whole things out for everyone, just the line before their own, and then their parts. That line before was marked with quando at first and then abbreviated Q. So the line before your own is your Q … or cue … to begin. We can see this written in original copies of Shakespeare!

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Word of the Week – Nightmare

Word of the Week – Nightmare

by | Mar 20, 2023 | Word of the Week

Nightmare.

We all know what it is. A bad dream that leaves you breathless. Or any situation that conjured up those horrible feelings. Right?

Well, today…sure. But in fact, nightmare didn’t mean “any bad dream” until 1829! What did it mean before then, you ask?

Well, it was actually a mythological creature’s name. The nightmare was thought to be a goblin or incubus who preyed on both people and horses in their sleep, pressing on their chests and trying to suffocate them.

That “horse” connection made me wonder if it’s still a solid equestrian word, if this particular incubus resembled a horse or something…I’m not entirely certain, but I can tell you that the spellings aren’t identical in the root Old English they come from. Not to say they’re not related somehow.

An interesting note is that the idea of a goblin nightmare stems from the same mythology that ascribed a demonic identity to echo as well. Echo was a goblin that mocked humans it heard out of doors…Nightmare was one that oppressed us in our sleep.

Nightmare became metaporical for any bad situation in 1831, an nightmarish came along in 1834.

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Word of the Week – Ye

Word of the Week – Ye

by | Mar 13, 2023 | Word of the Week

We’ve probably all come across those cutesy, old-timey signs, right? “Ye Olde Sweets Shoppe” or the like. Cutsey and old-timey because they’re using spellings no longer in use, which our modern eyes immediately recognize as coming from the 18th century or earlier.

What most of us don’t realize is that in this case, “Ye” is not pronounced like yee, the also-old-timey word for you. Nope. Wanna guess how it’s pronounced?

Like “the.”

Cue the lightbulbs…and the questions. Why, you ask, would we pronounce it in the familiar way but spell it with a Y?

Answer: it’s not actually a Y. It’s a combination-letter called Thorn. Way back in the days of Old English, this letter, which came from Scandinavia and to English by way of Scotland, was used for the “th” sound. It looked a bit like a p with a tall staff.

Writing cursive forms of the letter 'thorn'

As Old English turned into Middle English, using this digraph became more and more popular, especially with short words like “the” and “that.” But at the same time, the writing of the letter became less and less distinct. That p-looking thing became more of a y-looking thing. And rather than take up horizontal space with the whole word, people started using a superscript e to write “the.”

This persisted for a good long time…but during that time, printers became more and more popular. Only, printers didn’t like creating separate type for all the combo letters that were around. So instead, they used a “standard” letter to represent the digraph. In this case, they used a Y for the “th”-sounding thorn.

And that, my friends, is why so many things say “ye” when they really meant “the.” It never would have been pronounced with a y-sound…it was just a typesetting shortcut for what everone knew was a th-sound.

Fun tidbit: Icelandic is the only surviving language that still has the letter thorn!

 

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