by Roseanna White | Mar 30, 2020 | Word of the Week
I found this one on another trending list at Etymonline.com — and found it quite interesting! Did you know that curfew is literally “cover fire”? It’s from the Old French cuevrefeu — cuevre being “cover” and feu, of course, being “fire.” Why?
Well, it began in the Middle Ages, when a bell would ring at 8 or 9 p.m., signaling everyone to douse their fires…so that no one would fall asleep, leave the fires unattended, and so burn the whole village down. It came into English sometime in the 1300s as “a signal bell rung at a set time.”
This word took its time in evolving into “a period of restricted movement,” not taking on that meaning until the 1800s. But there we have it. When you give your kids a curfew, you’re really telling them to put out their fire and go to sleep. 😉
by Roseanna White | Mar 23, 2020 | Word of the Week
Talking about some secretive words today. 😉
In one of our family devotionals last week, there was a quote from a “mystic” of millennia past, and we found ourselves wondering where the word came from.
Mystic comes from the Greek mystikos, meaning “secret, connected to the mysteries.” Sometimes today I hear any ancient scholar deemed a mystic being occult . . . but that connotation didn’t come around until 1610, long after the word was applied to those who spoke or wrote about the mysteries of God–which surely we can’t claim aren’t mysterious!
What I found really interesting is that secretary actually has very similar roots–how did I never really notice that it has SECRET right there in the first part of the work? LOL. A secretary has pretty much always meant “one who is entrusted with secrets,” and it migrated quite naturally from these trusted officials who knew the innermost, most secretive things of kings and dignitaries to those in the closest, trusted positions of anyone in authority.
by Roseanna White | Mar 16, 2020 | Word of the Week
No, I’m not being morbid. 😏 But this was one of the trending words on Etymonline, and I found its etymology fascinating!
So quarantine entered English around 1660 with its somewhat-familiar meaning: “the length of time a ship suspected of carrying disease was kept in isolation.” Okay…so what is that amount of time? Forty days–the word is, in fact, from the Latin quaranta, meaning “forty.” This was how long ships were expected to wait before entering a port during the days of the plague, to make sure no latent cases were aboard.
Within a decade, it had been extended to mean “any period of forced isolation.”
But before that, the word was in English already with some very different meanings! In the 1400s, it was used still to mean a 40-day period, but it was the period of mourning for a widow in which she still had the right to live in her husband’s house before the property went to the heir (keeping in mind that women couldn’t own property at the time). And it was also the word used to refer to Jesus’ 40-day fast! Who knew?
by Roseanna White | Mar 9, 2020 | Word of the Week
When one looks up the etymology of mesmerize, one will find that it dates from 1819, when it was coined with the meaning of “to put into a hypnotic state.” What Etymonline doesn’t mention is that this comes directly from the name of the physician who developed the practice, Franz Mesmer.
When Mesmer developed hypnosis, he originally called it “animal magnetism.” But one of his pupils decided it would be more fun to name it after the inventor (discoverer?) so, called it mesmerize. By the 1860s, however, hypnotize had become the preferred word (from the Greek hypnotikos, “inclined to sleep”) for the procedure. At that point, mesmerize shifted slightly to mean “to enthrall or fascinate.”
Coming this weekend is the Spring 2020 Christian Fiction Scavenger Hunt! Mark your calendars!
by Roseanna White | Mar 2, 2020 | Word of the Week
Originally published November 2011
I like the word “kid.” I use it with my children (do you know how hard it was for me to write that sentence without using the word “kid”? LOL), I use it for jests. It’s a standard part of my vocabulary. But I’ll never forget the substitute teacher in high school who said something about how his children were not young goats,
so thank you not to use that word. And one of my critique partners recently caught me using it in the joking sense well before it would have been.
It seemed time to look it up. 😀
“Kid” entered English with the
meaning of “a young goat” round about 1200. It began being applied to
children in 1590, though it was still slang at that point. It was
accepted usage, however, by 1840 . . . and had in fact been a word used
to describe skillful young thieves for 30 years before that. (One I
didn’t know!)
The meaning of “playful tease”
is from 1839 (which proves that it was a well-accepted slang by then)
and comes from the idea of “making a kid of, treating as a child.”
Though those thieving youngsters used it to mean “coax, wheedle, hoax.”
So there you have it–a brief explanation of why we now kid our kids. 😉
by Roseanna White | Feb 24, 2020 | Word of the Week
I’m having so much fun going through my old Word of the Week entries and redoing some of the oldest ones. I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember all these tidbits I’ve looked up in the past! LOL. This one comes to you from 2011. Appropriate, again, since I’m editing the book I mention below, Dreams of Savannah, to release in the Winter 2020/21 season from Bethany House!
I can’t tell you how much time I spent
chasing rabbits down trails (literarily speaking) for a one-line
mention in my books. Like, did they have bells over the doors in 18th
century New York? Hard to discover.
This last week, one of my random
questions was, thankfully, easily answered. I wanted a character to
mention a cameo necklace, which I was pretty darn sure were around and
popular by the 1860s, but I’ve been wrong before. So I looked it up.
I was pleased to see that cameo,
by which I mean a carved stone with two layers of color, has been
around since the 16th century. Cameos maintained a steady popularity for
centuries–Elizabeth I had a sizable collection, as did Catherine the
Great. And since Queen Victoria favored them, they even stuck around
during the fast-changing fashion of the 19th century.
In 1851 the word was attributed
to “a short literary sketch or portrait.” Very much related to the
pendant, which commonly depict a bust or figure (though not always). And
so this sense was also transferred to the stage/film in 1928, when it
came to mean “a brief role that stands out from other minor parts in a
performance.”
I have a cameo necklace I
inherited from my great-grandmother, and I love it. =) There’s something
so very romantic about those treasures from times past . . .
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.