A couple weeks ago, I had a message from a reader asking me to do a feature on arctic and antarctic, because he heard they meant “near the bear” and “away from the bear” and thought, “Nah, that can’t be right!”

I love that I’m the word nerd that people turn to for these questions. =D

And if you look strictly at the modern definition of arctic or antarctic, knowing that they refer to the areas around the poles of the planet, you may indeed scratch your head at the idea of bears. I mean, there are polar bears in the north, sure, but…is that really enough to call a whole area after them?

No…but. But it really is after “the bear.” That is THE bear, however, not just a bear. “The Bear” in the constellations–Ursa Major!

Ursa Major, you see, is seen in the northerly sector of the sky and is in fact the best known constellation that goes around the pole. And the Ancient Greek word for bear and for this constellation was arktikos. From ancient days on up, the “region of the north” was called for this constellation, and hence the far-southerly region on the opposite pole was named for being opposite. The word traveled from Ancient Greek to Latin to French and from there into English by the 1300s.

It’s interesting to note that while that “k” sound is present in the original word, it had dropped out of the Latin and French versions and hence the English version too, for centuries. The “c” was inserted for that “k” in the 1550s, though it isn’t always pronounced even today. By the 1600s, it had taken on a metaphorical meaning of “cold, frigid.”

You probably know the definition of tedious: “tiresome because of length or dullness : boring.”

But the etymology of tedious is actually a bit more interesting and made me snort-laugh when I saw it. Tedious and tedium are from the Late Latin taediosus and taedium (respectively–obviously the same root there), which didn’t just mean boring and long. They meant “wearisome, irksome.” Not just boring, annoying.

Right?? 😉 This is why I get annoyed with those long, detailed, boring tasks. I do indeed find them irksome, LOL.

Tedious has been in English since the 1400s, and tedium since the 1660s. Interestingly, tedium at that time not only carried the meaning of “boring and irksome,” but even more, “disgust.” (I personally wouldn’t go that far, ha ha.)

Are you a details person who thrives in those long tasks others may find boring or tedious?

Last week I took a look at the uses of second … which led me straight to minute. I did mention in that post that the divisions of time were once “prime minute” and “second minute” … well, along the way, “prime minute” got shortened to minute and “second minute” to second. But let’s take a look at that base minute, shall we?

It’s no great surprise that minute, which comes directly from the Latin, just means “small portion.” We do, after all, still have the adjective minute (my-noot) that means just that. Interestingly, the original Latin is actually a past participle of minuere, which means “to lessen or diminish.” Makes sense, but I’d never really thought of those small things as being a diminishing, which implies shrinking from something greater…why, I have to wonder, could it not be the seed from which the greater thing grew? But I digress, LOL.

Minute has been around in English pretty much as long as English has been around. Not a big surprise there.

Thought minutes–as in, the notes taken at a meeting–are rather interesting. They come, not from being a record of the way the minutes of a meeting were spent, which is what I would have guessed had I paused to ask where it came from, but in fact from the Latin minuta scriptura, literally “small writing” but used to mean “rough notes.”

The other day as my daughter and I were watching her pre-cal lesson, the presenter (talking about the velocity of falling objects) said, “Now, in the second second, the object will be moving at…”

Xoe looked over at me and said, “Why is it called that, anyway? Why is second the word for a measure of time?”

Being the word nerd that I am, I immediately jotted it down and looked it up as soon as the lesson was over, to see why these two very different words–one and ordinal number (first, second, third) and one a measure of time–were the same.

Sometimes things like this come from different roots or very different meanings of the same root, but in this case, the relationship is very deliberate!

Second comes from the Latin secondus, meaning “following, next in time or order.”

Well, that explains the ordinal number…but what about the measure of time? Well, as it turns out, it’s because it’s “the second division of an hour into a sixtieth.” The minute is the first division (originally called the “prime minute”), and the second is the second minute (as in, small part…come back next week for a closer look at minute)!

I had no idea. So simple, but…I had no idea, LOL.

We all know what reveal and revelation mean, of course…and they have been in the English language for a LONG time. Like, since the early 1400s. The meaning has never really changed either–it’s always been “to disclose, to divulge, to make known.”

What’s interesting is actually the Latin root. The Latin revelare also carries the same meaning, but it is literally “to unveil.” Velare is the “to veil” part (no surprise, right?) and the re here isn’t the usual “again” but the rarer use of “opposite of.” We don’t see the re- prefix used like that very often!

And I love this imagery, don’t you? That something being revealed isn’t just shown or made known, it’s literally unveiled. Because that’s how it always feels when we discover something–that a mask or curtain has been pulled away, leaving us with that beautiful “Ta da!” moment of discovery.

Today’s word comes courtesy of the reading my daughter and I have been doing in our Greek New Testament. We came across the word for treasure (thesauros), we both went, “Hey! That sounds like ‘thesaurus’!” To which I of course said, “Well, maybe we use it as ‘a treasury of words.'” Which I thought would be pretty cute, but I wasn’t convinced I was right.

As it happens, though…I was!

Thesaurus has been in English since the 1820s as “a treasury, a storehouse,” and from the 1840s as “an encyclopedia.” Interestingly, though, an alternate spelling of thesaurie has been used by dictionary compilers since the 1590s! Roget was the first to create a version of “words arranged by order of sense” rather than alphabetic, definitional listings, which he first compiled in 1852.

Some other old versions of this word include thesaurer as “treasurer” and thesaur as “treasure” in the 1400-1500s. I’m not certain how we came to replace that H with an R, but the words are certainly close even in spelling, aren’t they?

Are you a fan of a thesaurus? I use them frequently in my writing (digital versions) and always had a paperback version on hand when I was a teen!