A couple weeks ago as Halloween stuff was everywhere, my family was talking one night about the word monster and where it might have come from. We were musing that since it ends in -ster, and -ster usually indicates “someone who does a particular task” (like spinster is one who spins, mobster is one who belongs to a mob, hipster is one who is hip), then clearly monster is someone who…er…mons. Whatever that might be. 😉 We decided it was someone who moans and proceeded to be moaning monsters…

Turns out this time we were WAY off, ha ha. In this case, that -ster ending is coincidental. Monster in fact comes from the Latin monstrum, which means “a bad omen, portend, or sign; something misshapen.”

See, in the ancient days, any time an animal or person was born with some deformity, it was believed that it was a sign of bad things to come. And in fact, after a bad thing happened, historians would search for the bad omen that should have warned them about it. The first chunk of Histories by Herodotus if full of all the evil portends, monsters, and abnormalities that had been found in the country in the decades leading up to the war. So a creature–whether human or animal–who displayed these visible signs would be called monstrous or a monster.

If you look at the root of that word itself, it’s actually from monere, “to remind or bring to mind.” Which is what an omen does, I suppose.

I’m sure we’ve all noticed that history and story look mighty similar. Well, for good reason–they’re both taken directly from the same French word, estoire or estorie,which came in turn from Latin and Greek. The literal meaning is “a chronicle of events,” and has been the meaning pretty much forever.

It took on its “fictional” connotation–a tale meant to entertain–around 1500. Even then, story and history were still used fairly interchangeably for quite a while. And it wasn’t until around 1690 that the word first appeared as a euphemism for a lie. It was first applied to “a newspaper article” around 1892.

Another interesting tidbit is the other definition of story–a floor of a building. This is from the same root word, and historians’ best guess as to why is that in the Middle Ages, the few buildings that had multiple stories with windows would have had stained glass or painted windows, which of course depicted…you guessed it! Stories. How fun is that?

Did you know that greg is Latin for “flock or herd”? Yeah, neither did I. 😉 But that then makes sense when we look at some of the words that have greg as their root:

Congregate – to come together as a group
Segregate – to separate from a group

And then the one that got my attention – gregarious. I wouldn’t have thought that one so closely related, I admit. Until we consider that it means “someone who enjoys being with a group of people, the company of others.”

So there we have it. And now you can start calling that Greg you know “flock” or “herd” and see what he says. 😉