Word of the Week – Tennis Bracelet

Word of the Week – Tennis Bracelet

We recently celebrated my daughter’s 16th birthday, and one of her requests was to get her ears pierced. I got mine done when I was five, but I actually stopped wearing earrings after high school and just never picked the habit back up…so I thought, “Oh, I’ll go through my jewelry box” on her birthday and pull out any pairs I still had lying around to pass along to her. Well, while I was digging, I found some other jewelry I had put in there when the kids were small and grabby, LOL, including…the diamond tennis bracelet that my husband gave me on our wedding day. I was a bit appalled at myself for having left this beautiful gift hidden in the bottom of my jewelry box drawer for YEARS! I got it out and put it on and delivered the earrings to my daughter, who then asked (of course) “Why is it called a tennis bracelet?”

I had no idea, so looked it up.

As it turns out, the phrase is quite new. It all started with a tennis player named Chris Evert, who played professionally from 1972 – 1989. She wore a diamond in-line bracelet created by George Bedewi, not even taking it off for matches. In one heated match, the bracelet broke–and they actually halted the game to recover it. This put both the bracelet design and the jeweler who created it into the spotlight and brought instant fame to this new bracelet of design…which came to be termed the “tennis” bracelet because of the tennis match that gave it such attention.

I’m quite happy to have rediscovered mine and have it on even as I type this. 😉 Do you like tennis bracelets, diamond or otherwise, or do you prefer another design?

Word of the Week – Doggie Bag

Word of the Week – Doggie Bag

This one comes a special request from a regular reader (Hi, Bev!), who was wondering about the phrase “doggie bag.”

It’s pretty straightforward, really, but interesting nonetheless!

The phrase is first recorded in the 1960s, for a take-home container of leftovers from a restaurant. Why is it called that, though? Because it was assumed you’d be taking the food home for your doggie! 😉

(For the record, my family usually takes those leftovers home for ourselves…but my mother-in-law is a TOTAL “for the dog” person! We always laugh because she wants to take everything home to her pup, and we sometimes have to fight her for the right to eat it ourselves, LOL.)

Are you a fan of leftovers, or do they go to the doggie in your world?

Word of the Week – Ghost

Word of the Week – Ghost

It’s October! So I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the words you’re going to be encountering in this season. Whether you celebrate Halloween or just the harvest (or nothing at all), I think you’ll agree that the etymologies this month are interesting!

Ghost…Our modern English word comes from Old English gast, which meant “breath; good or bad spirit, angel, demon; person, man, human being.” Though the origins are a bit murky, it’s thought that gast, along with similar words in other Germanic languages, is from the ancient root gheis, which is used to form all sorts of words that convey excitement, fear, or amazement.

Early English translations of the Bible chose to use the word Ghost to render spiritus, the Latin word used to describe not only the soul but the Holy Spirit. So Holy Ghost is one of the few surviving phrases that use ghost in that particular way. Otherwise, the notion of “the disembodied spirit of a deceased person” is the more original sense of the word and has been its primary meaning since the 14th century. It’s certainly interesting to note in that Old English gast, though, that it could be used to describe so many things that go beyond the corporeal.

It’s also interesting to note that in most Indo-European languages, the same words are used to describe both the human spirit and supernatural elements. So whether or not you believe in ghosts that haunt a place, the word is actually linked firmly to the human soul or spirit…and I daresay you DO believe in that! Which I will be considering more fully the next time someone asks if I believe in ghosts. 😉 How about you? Where do you come down on the question?

Word of the Week – Demon

Word of the Week – Demon

We’re continuing our October look into spooky words today…with demon. I don’t know about you, but for me, this word conjures up a WHOLE different level of fear. Ghosts and spooks are words assigned to human spirits, but demon…that’s a whole different supernatural level, and one that invokes evil.

Right?

Um…well…if we’re looking at the history of the word, it actually isn’t so cut and dry!

The English word demon, which dates from 1200 as “an evil spirit, a malignant supernatural being, a devil” is taken directly from the Latin and Greek daemon, which means ANY spirit, good or bad, and sometimes used to describe human souls as well. So how did the English come to associate it solely with the evil side?

It’s because the Greek daemon is the word used in the Bible for “unclean spirits,” and Jewish authors also used it in Greek versions of the Old Testament books for “false gods.” Though Greek speakers never would have ONLY used it in this sense…we weren’t Greek speakers, LOL. So demon came to be applied solely to the evil side of the supernatural.

Occasionally writers or academics will want to use the word in the original Greek or Latin sense, especially when translating, so will interject that extra ‘a’ into the word and make it daemon to differentiate.

Word of the Week – Spooky

Word of the Week – Spooky

It’s October! So I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the words you’re going to be encountering in this season. Whether you celebrate Halloween or just the harvest (or nothing at all), I think you’ll agree that the etymologies this month are interesting!

Today we’re taking a look at spooky . . . which means really, we’re taking a look at spook, since that’s what it’s a form of. Spook dates from 1801 and is taken from the Germanic. The fun thing is that pretty much all Germanic languages have a work very similar to spook, but the meanings include not only the primary “ghost,” but also, “scarecrow” and “joke.”

In 1942 it began to be applied to spies–presumably because of their abilities to appear and vanish again.

Word of the Week – Galaxy

Word of the Week – Galaxy

Did you know that galaxy is from the Greek word for milk? I didn’t! Given that our galaxy is the Milky Way though, I wasn’t terribly surprised. The original Greek phrase was in fact galaxias kyklos, meaning “milky circle.” The term made its way into Latin, and from Latin to French, and from French to English by the 14th century.

By the mid 1800s, the term had become a bit more technical, meaning “the discrete stellar aggregate including the sun and all visible stars” rather than just “that milky white conglomerate up in the sky.” Around that same time, astronomers began to wonder if some of the things they could see through telescopes were in fact other galaxies…but it wasn’t until the 1920s that telescopes became powerful enough for them to be certain of it. So galaxy and Milky Way were interchangeable pretty much up until then.

I’ve always loved studying the night sky, though I am faaaarrrr from an expert. How about you? Do you enjoy astronomy?