The other day, my husband looked up from his Bible reading and went, “Well this is interesting. The word used to describe the Israelites crossing the Jordan on dry ground is transgress. The same word used for sinning.”

I believe my response was something like “Huh.” Immediately followed by “Well, that makes sense.”

Transgress, which joined the English language in the 1400s as “to sin,” came to us via French from the Latin transgredi, which is literally (trans-) “across, beyond” + (gradi) “to walk, go.” So the literal use, the group crossing the river, is logical…yet rarely used in English, because we’ve instead embraced the metaphorical sense, to “pass beyond a limit” or “overpass a rule or law.”

In other words, “you’ve crossed a line” or “gone too far.”

Fascinating, isn’t it?

Word Nerds Merch!

This week, the Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt will once more take to the web to bring you a weekend of fun and discovery! I’ll be participating again, giving away a copy of The Collector of Burned Books (or any of my books, your choice), as well as participating in the Grand Prize. Keep an eye out for it to go live on Thursday afternoon!

And of course, thinking of the Hunt inspired me to look up the word scavenger, and wow! I had no idea where this one came from!

So scavenger dates from the late 1300s, when it was–get this–an official title for a London tax collector, specifically one charged with collecting tax on goods sold by foreign merchants. Its root word means “to inspect.”

Around 1540, the word had, er, gotten a downgrade. Instead of a tax collector, a scavenger was instead charged with collecting refuse from those London streets (ewwww). Though in the 1600s, it took on a bit more dignity again–it was the person in charge of inspection and maintenance of the streets. But it is definitely this idea of “the one who collects rubbish” that led to the current meaning of “someone who collects (and consumes, in the animal sense) what’s been scattered or discarded.”

The verb, scavenge, is actually a back-formation of the noun.

Word Nerds Merch!

I’ve run into words like this many times. Words like wow, that are SUCH a part of modern life that we think of them as modern. New. Definitely not used by people in eras past. (Wow, in case you missed my post about it way back in 2012 or my revisit in 2020, dates from the 1510s.)

Hey is another word that might sound modern to your ears. It is, after all, almost treated as a slang greeting these days, informal in the extreme, right?

That may be true…but in fact, hey is an incredibly old word, tracing its roots all the way back to Latin! Various spellings of this same word are in evidence in England as early as 1200. It was often used as an interjection meant to get someone’s attention, a shout of encouragement for hunting dogs, and also a challenge or rebuttal. (Like when someone bumps into you, and you say, “Hey! Watch it!”

Many languages have very similar one-syllable sounds that do this work, often very similar to our sound and spelling. Icelandic, for instance, uses this as their primary casual greeting (spelled differently), so you’ll see it in The Christmas Book Flood, which releases tomorrow. 😉

Now, a quick peek at that Latin root. Latin actually had two versions of the word to denote two different feelings. Hei was an interjection that had a sorrowful tone, while heia was used to express joy. I kinda love that.

Word Nerds Merch!

When we say something is in shambles, we probably have no idea what we’re actually likening it to. Where does this word come from?

Well, shamble began its life in Old English as scamol, meaning a bench or stool. From there,  it began to be used as a table in a marketplace stall (by the 1300s), and then (by the 1400s) particularly one that sold meat or fish, which was when the current spelling began to appear as well.

So for a while, it meant “a place where meat or fish is sold.” Then by the mid-1500s, it evolved into “slaughterhouse.” By the 1590s, it was used metaphorically as “a place of butchery.” But it wasn’t until 1901 that the “butchery” meaning, which was often invoked when things were bloody and gross, began to take on the less-bloody and more-metaphorical meaning of “confusion, mess.” That’s also the point where we began pluralizing it.

Word Nerds Merch!

When we think of shampoo, we have one thing in mind–soap, mostly for the hair. Maybe, if pressed, for other fibrous or shaggy things, like carpet.

But as it turns out, the original meaning has nothing at all to do with hair. Shampoo first began to be used in English in 1760, but it wasn’t a noun at all. It was a verb, meaning “to massage.” It came from the Hindi word champi that meants “to press, to knead the muscles.”

It took until the 1830s for the word to become a noun–but even so, it meant “a massage.” It wasn’t until the 1860s that it began to be associated with hair, for the massaging motion used to wash it. It wasn’t until the 1860s that the word began to be used for “the soap used to wash one’s hair.”

As for carpets, upholstery, etc? That extended meaning of shampooing other things didn’t come around until the 1950s!

Word Nerds Merch!