As of the moment when I’m writing this, we’re awaiting a few fun deliveries at our house–a new bed frame and desk for Rowyn, who has been asking for about a year to update his room. We decided that starting high school was a pretty good time to get rid of the loft-bed-with-sliding-board he got when he was 5 (it was SO COOL then…but, yeah, not so useful or cool for a 14.5-year-old!) and trade out the desk he and David cobbled together from a broken bookcase into a desk (upon Rowyn’s request, mind you) for something a little sturdier.

Of course, this being me, I can’t look at desks without wondering about the word desk. So now you get to wonder too. 😉

Upon looking it up, the first thing I learned is that desk and disk are actually very closely related, from the same root: the Greek diskos, which turned into the Latin discus. Both of these mean exactly what you would expect when you consider that root: a round, flat surface, a platter.

A…platter? We write on a platter?

Yup. I personally never think of a desk as round, but the earliest desks were in fact … wait for it … a table. (DUH.) And tables being round is no surprise at all. So the evolution of the word begins to make sense. From “platter” we moved into “flat, round surface,” and from “flat, ROUND surface” we moved into “flat surface suitable for writing” by the mid-1300s, courtesy of Medieval Latin. (Which is to say, those doing the writing were likely church clerics who still used Latin.)

By 1797, it was used figuratively to mean “office or clerical work.” Desk-work (exactly what it sounds like) joined the language in the 1820s. The term desk job began being used by 1900. By 1918 it was being applied to departments within a large organization responsible for a particular thing–think help desk. A reception desk has been noted from about 1960.

Do you have a desk in your house? Do you use it often? (I spend most of my life at my desk, it seems, LOL.)

Anyone who has read The Odyssey has “met” the original Sirens … the mythological creatures in Greek history who lure sailors to their destruction on rocks with their sweet singing. But I daresay most of us haven’t looked too closely at the word.

The Greek seirenes is from seira, which means “cord, rope.” The idea, then, is that these women bind or entangle their pray–with song, in the case of the Sirens. It’s interesting to note that in Greek, the same word was used metaphorically for any deceitful woman.

As English developed, they preserved the word as it appeared in Greek from the 14th century, keeping that metaphorical sense too.

So…what about the modern day sirens? As in, devices that make a loud noise? Those date from around 1879 and were first used on steamboats. Why that word? I couldn’t find written evidence of the reason, but my own reason suggests that it was a bit of linguistical irony. Sirens, which once were said to lure sailors to their death with a sweet song, will now warn people of danger with a loud, unpleasant noise.

I learned way back in my school days that two of our summer months are named for Roman emperors–July (for Julius Caesar) and August (for Augustus Caesar). I imagine you knew that too. Similarly, you probably know that august as an adjective means “solemnly grand, inspiring reverence,” as it has since the 1660s.

It’s no surprise that our word comes directly from the Latin augustus, which means “venerable, majestic, magnificent, noble.” But did you know that Augustus Caesar wasn’t the man’s name … it was his title? I knew that this particular Caesar hadn’t been born with the name Augustus (his name was actually Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus), but back when I first learned about him in high school, I think I assumed he just changed his name when he became emperor…you know, like they do sometimes.

Nope. In actuality, “Augustus” is a title like “Your Highness” or “Your Majesty.” When Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus was styled Augustus Caesar, he was literally being called “Venerable Emperor.”

Funny side note … when we were learning about these emperors in my tenth grade history class, cue Roseanna going, “OH!! I get it!” My history teacher looked over at me, clearly interested in my great epiphany. I, of course, enlightened him with: “In Disney’s Cinderella! She names the mouse Octavius, but for short, called him Gus. For Augustus. Because Octavius is Augustus!”

Yyyyyeeeppp. These are the sort of epiphanies I will treasure always. 😉

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. 😉