Word of the Week – Prestigious

Word of the Week – Prestigious

by | May 13, 2024 | Word of the Week

I imagine that, like me, you think prestigious means “honored.” And it does…today. But it started life in a very different place!

Prestigious actually comes from the Latin praestigious, meaning “full of tricks.” Think magician shows and jugglers and sword-swallowers, etc. It’s thought that the Latin word is closely related to praestringere, which means “to blindfold, to dazzle.” Anything that was a trick of the eyes–or which perhaps would make you doubt what you were seeing, it was so spectacular, was called prestigious.

That’s where it began in English too, meaning “practicing illusion or magic, deception.” Up until the 1800s, this was a word that was most often used in a derogatory fashion, much like trick today. And then, by the 1890s, it was actually considered an obsolete word, no longer in use. (Fascinating, isn’t it?)

But around 1913, it was given new life, with all illusory implications removed, just as prestige was as well. The dazzle without the deception, so to speak. Which is what it still means today.

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Word of the Week – Fathom

Word of the Week – Fathom

by | May 6, 2024 | Word of the Week

If you’re anything like me, you’re aware that fathom is a unit of measurement (though fuzzy on the details of what it equals, perhaps) but use it most often as a synonym for “understand” or “comprehend.” Ever wonder how these meanings are related? Because they totally are.

Fathom comes all the way from Old English as both a noun and a verb, both coming from the same meaning. The verb was “to embrace or surround” and the noun was “the length of outstretched arms,” so about 5-6 feet on average.

By about 1600 it was used as a verb in the sense of “to take soundings,” which is to figure out the depth of water. That, in turn, led to “get to the bottom of something” in a metaphorical sense by about 1600. Which led directly to today’s current meaning. Because once you’ve gotten to the bottom of something, you understand it and comprehend it.

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Word of the Week – Cheat

Word of the Week – Cheat

by | Apr 29, 2024 | Word of the Week

Back in the days of absolute monarchy in Europe, property wasn’t quite what we think of it as today. Oh, you could own things…but the Crown could confiscate it at any moment. For that matter, if you died without an heir, guess where your holdings went? Yep–back to the Crown. Ultimately, everything in a country belonged to its monarch.

And they didn’t forget it. In fact, they had someone whose sole job was to reclaim land or possessions for the Crown (lower lords had these too) in certain cases. This person was called an escheater, because they handled the echeat–this reversion of property to the monarch or lord. The word came from French echete, which means “inheritance,” which in turn comes from the Latin excadere. Both of these are legal terms and legal offices.

But here’s the thing…the people who held those offices? Yeah, they were notoriously corrupt, just like tax collectors were infamous for being. They would seize property they had no business seizing and keep it for themselves. They would skim off the top of what they handed over to the king or lord.

So though cheater was a legal term for that office from the mid-1400s onward, by the late 1500, it had come to mean “someone who deprives unfairly” and cheat had become a verb that meant “trick, deceive, impose upon.”

The idea of someone being unfaithful in a relationship didn’t come along as a meaning of cheat and cheater until the 1930s. Not that the concept was new, of course, but that was the first this word had been used for it. 😉

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Word of the Week – Fizzle

Word of the Week – Fizzle

by | Apr 22, 2024 | Word of the Week

Fizzle. You’ve used the word, I’m sure. I have. Heard it countless times. And we all know what it means.

But I bet you have no idea where it comes from–I sure didn’t!

Fizzle, as it happens, has the same Middle English origins as feisty, from the now-obsolete use of fist that meant…gas. You may or may not recall my post years ago on feisty, and how I will never ever use it for a historical heroine, knowing that it literally meant “stinking and gassy” and was used for dogs, LOL. Turns out, fizzle is indeed related.

From the 1500s all the way up into the 1800s, fizzle meant–brace for it–“to pass gas without a sound.”

Hoo, boy. This is a little boy’s dream word, isn’t it? LOL.

In the mid-1800s, scientists began to use it to describe the noise that air or gas makes when forced from a small aperture…which, as we all know from playing with balloons, bears a certain resemblance to a bodily noise. It was used particularly for the stopping of that sound…you know, when it fizzled out. From there, especially among American college students, it began to take on its metaphorical meaning of “to come to a sudden failure or stop after a good start.” Said college students would use it when their fellows didn’t answer a professor’s questions correctly.

Another word I’m going to have to be mindful of now in my historicals, LOL.

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Word of the Week – Artificial

Word of the Week – Artificial

by | Apr 15, 2024 | Word of the Week

Have you ever paused to really look at the word artificial? If you had, you’d notice those first three letters: art.

And if you look at those first three letters and think about what art is, then you’ll likely go, “Well, huh.” It makes sense, right? Art is something mankind creates, something we make. So then, it should be no surprise that artificial, taken (via Old French) from the Latin artificialis, has its roots in craftsmanship, things made by human hands, skilled work.

Artificial entered the English language way back in the 1300s, and it still carried that meaning, but with a particular slant: “things that aren’t natural.” One of the first recorded uses of the word is artificial day–the time between sunrise and sunset, which is opposed to the natural day of 24-hours. Why? Because that’s the part of the 24-hours that man has contrived to be “day,” the part we use for our labor (generally speaking, and certainly back in the day before electricity!). By the 1400s, it had remembered a bit more of its Latin roots and had been extended to “things made my man’s labor,” rather than just “not natural.” Another hundred years, and it was applied to anything man made with the purpose of replacing something natural–hair, teeth, light, etc.

Which, of course, led to “not genuine, fictitious” as a meaning from about 1640 onward.

Artificial insemination dates from 1894 (?? REALLY ??). And of course today’s hot topic, artificial intelligence, was coined in the 1950s for “intelligent machines.”

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Word of the Week – Bully

Word of the Week – Bully

by | Apr 8, 2024 | Word of the Week

Bully is a word we all know, right? And it’s certainly not something we’d ever mean as a compliment. Which is why I was utterly confounded when I saw that the original meaning of bully was, in fact…sweetheart.

Say what?

Yep.

The word dates in English back to the 1530s, and it could be used for either gender. Etymologists aren’t entirely certain where it originated, but their best guess is that it came from the Dutch boel, which could mean either “romantic love interest” or “brother.” Boel is probably a dimunitive of broeder.

So what happened??

Well, the word followed a course that is strangely not unusual for words that are used as endearments, thanks to our propensity for mockery and sarcasm (way to go, humans). In the 1600s, bully could be used to mean “a fine fellow.” But you know, it just doesn’t take long for such a term to be applied with something less than sincerity. By the 1680s, it had gone through the meaning of “blusterer” and had begun to mean “harasser of the weak.” The best guess as to how this happened is that chaps would defend their sweethearts…even when others didn’t think those sweethearts were worthy of defense. So what you’d call your sweetheart, you begin to be called, and then are called it mockery, and then the mocking word gets applied to those who do the mocking.

A bit of the original happy connotation is still preserved in the adjective form that means “worthy, jolly, admirable,” which enjoyed a bit of a resurgance in populartiy in the 1800s. The expression “Bully for you!” as “Bravo!” is from 1864.

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