by Roseanna White | Feb 3, 2020 | Word of the Week
This one was a question my son asked the other day. Why do we use the same word for the two different meanings of stable–the adjective and then the noun? Are they from the same root?
(Why yes, my children do ask questions like this regularly, LOL.)
The short answer is yes, they’re from the same Latin word. The longer answer is that both adjective and noun came to English through Old French, the adjective–meaning, at the time, “trustworthy, reliable”–predating the noun by a few decades, though both were in the English language from the 12th or 13th centuries. The meanings really haven’t changed that much over the years, either. The noun has always been a building or stall where domestic animals are kept. The adjective shifted ever so slightly from “trustworthy” to “steadfast, constant, secure.” (And was applied to isotopes in 1902!)
The Latin root from which both meanings come is sta– (with different suffixes applied for noun and adjective), meaning, not surprisingly, “to stand.” Hence why it applies both to a building and to an upstanding character.
So there we have it, O son of mine. 😉
by Roseanna White | Jan 27, 2020 | Word of the Week
Originally published 5/12/12
I thought it would be fun to revisit this old Word of the Week when I saw the pretty photo I put in here of a strip of our flowers at our old house. Ah, spring, how I long for thee. 😉 So here you go–a(nother) glimpse at the word plant:
Every time we go to my mom’s we see the power plant across the river–and every time, my kids ask, “Why’s it called a ‘plant’?” And every time, I go, “Uh . . . ” At one point I made up an answer–and what do you know, I was right! LOL
Plant is from the Latin planta, meaning “sprout, shoot, cutting” which may be from plantare, “to drive in with the feet, push into the ground with the feet.” Which is in turn from planta, “sole of the foot.” By 1550 it moved from its first English meaning of “shrub or newly-planted herb” to any vegetation. The verb “to plant” has been around since Old English, just like the noun.
Now, the building–it is fact from the same idea, meaning a building planted in a particular area for industrial purposes. That usage came into meaning in 1789. And interestingly, the meaning of “a spy” is from 1812. =)
by Roseanna White | Jan 20, 2020 | Word of the Week
Okay, I just did this one not-quite-three-years ago…but it was when I was brainstorming
On Wings of Devotion, so it seemed like a fun revisit!
~*~
This might seem like an odd word of the week until you consider I’m a writer, LOL. One who, as it happens, is indeed brainstorming a plot that involves a kidnapping. [Modern insert: that would, of course, be Camden kidnapping Arabelle.]
And yet, I actually read about this word from pure happenstance. 😉 Go figure!
Anyway. It’s kinda of interesting, so let’s take a look.
First of all, though sometimes moderns think kid, as applied to a child, is terrible slang that was never used in historical days, that’s simply not true. The word for “a young goat” since 1200, it was extended to children in the 1500s–first written record is the 1590s, but no doubt it was used it speech before that. It was slang at first, yes, but had lost that “slang” stigma by the 1840s (though it was still considered an informal word).
So then kidnap comes to us by the 1680s–part of thieves’ language. It was originally used for when they stole children to ship them to the American colonies as servants or laborers! Who knew? The kid part is therefore obvious. Nap is a variant of nab. But interesting is that kidnapper was in use at least a decade before kidnap, leading experts to believe the verb is a back-formation of the noun.
Now off I go plot out a story in which my hero kidnaps my heroine and gets way more than he bargained for, LOL.
by Roseanna White | Jan 6, 2020 | Word of the Week
Nimrod. In Genesis, he’s recorded as being a hunter of legendary renown and expertise. But I remember the first time I read that for myself thinking, “Really? I thought it meant ‘idiot.'”
The etymologists can’t document exactly how this change in meaning happened, but they do know that it happened within the last 30-40 years, taking on the connotation of “klutz, geek” etc.
Popular opinion is that the change is actually thanks to a misunderstanding of–get this–a Bugs Bunny cartoon. 🐰See, Bugs would occasionally sarcastically call Elmer Fudd “a regular Nimrod.” Meaning, of course, that he’s not living up to the famous hunter’s name. But people unfamiliar both with hunting and with the biblical figure assumed he was just insulting Fudd in a straight-up, not-sarcastic way. So Nimrod became a way to insult anyone as unskilled as Fudd…rather than a way to point to an expert hunter.🐰
Who knew that misunderstood sarcasm could change the whole meaning of a word?
by Roseanna White | Dec 30, 2019 | Word of the Week
Special request from Bev today, and an appropriate one for the 6th Day of Christmas. 😀
Figgy Pudding. If you’re like me, you’ve really only heard of it in that oft-forgotten verse of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” But what in the world is it?
First, let’s get this out of the way: there are no figs in traditional figgy pudding. Rather, fig was just used to represent any dried fruit, especially plums…which also weren’t in the original dish, LOL. No, that honor went to raisins and currents. These fruits were mixed with meats and grains and spices and made into something like a sausage in the earliest days of the dish in 1300s England (“pudding” originally meant anything boiled or, later, steamed in some sort of bag or casing). Over the next two hundred years, fruit became more plentiful, and the dish went from savory to sweet. It became a traditional Christmas dish–often called “Christmas pudding” as a matter of fact…which led to it being outlawed by the Puritans, who didn’t celebrate Christmas.
So why do carolers demand it? Well, back in ye olden days, the poor would sing Christmas songs at the homes of the wealthy with the expectation that they’d get something in response, either a treat or a monetary tip–it was a way to ask for alms that didn’t wound anyone’s pride. The “now bring us some figgy pudding” and “we won’t go until we get some” lines of the song are considered to be a bit of poking fun at this arrangement.
Most Christmas puddings today are baked in loaf pans, laced with alcohol to bring out the flavors, and are filled with fruits and spices.
What’s your favorite traditional Christmas dish?
by Roseanna White | Dec 23, 2019 | Word of the Week
(Originally published in 2015)
I am sometimes baffled by how things come into our cultural consciousness…and change over the centuries. Cue the elves.
Elf comes from Germanic folklore, with equivalents in Norse and Saxon mythology. The word itself hasn’t changed much since Old English in spelling, sound, etc.
The meaning, however…
Back then, an elf was considered to be a mean-spirited goblin-like creature with quite a bit of power. Descriptions range from creatures who are merely mischievous to “evil incubus.” Since the mid-1500s, it’s been used figuratively for a mischievous person. They were thought to create knots in hair (oooookay) and hiccups.
Over the centuries, they gradually took on new roles in people’s minds. They were occasionally referred to as “house gnomes,” and while they would act with traditional mischief if not treated properly, they were thought to scare off true evil spirits from your house if you treated them properly–people were known to leave out gifts of food and baubles to appease them.
It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that Scandinavian writers took this ancient tradition and decided it would be fun to apply it to Christmas. Popular writers of the day began crafting stories that assigned elves the new role of being Santa Claus‘s helpers. By this time traditional belief in elves had pretty much fallen away, so people seized this new thought that sort of revived an old belief, but in a nice, cute way. Visual artists joined this new movement and began painting pictures of what we now identify as elves–cute, small, sprite-like creatures who are all goodwill…at least unless a child in naughty, in which case some old mischief might sneak out and cause them to replace goodies in a stocking with switches or lumps of coal.
So there we have it. Elves. 😉
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.