Before bed one night, while we were waiting for his sister to finish washing her face and brushing her teeth, my son and I were coming up with silly reasons for each season’s name.

It began with the easy-to-determine fall. “Hey!” Rowyn said, “I bet it’s because of when the leaves fall.” I assured him that was, indeed, the reason. “Then what about winter?” he asked.

I thought for a moment, and then said, “Because that’s when all the leaves already wint.”

He laughed at my deliberate mispronunciation of went and said, “So how about spring?”

Another real answer. “It’s when new life springs forth. But for summer…?”

Rowyn thought for a little while then said, “I know! It’s when the school year is all summed up.”

Aren’t we just the cleverest things. 😉 I’ve already looked into the real etymologies of pretty much all those season words, but it occurs to me that I’ve never looked up season itself! So a quick lesson.

The English word (which has been in use since English itself originated, in the 13th century) comes directly from the French saison, which means exactly what the English does–“a period of the year; the appropriate time.” But if you trace saison back, it comes in fact from the Latin sationem, which literally means, “to sow, to plant.” In the days of Vulgar Latin, the word was used most often to indicate spring, when said sowing and planting was done. It was the French who broadened it to mean any season, and we of course borrowed that from them.

Slang. Something we all know. And probably use. “Informal language.” Those words not accepted as proper but not bad. That informal language is in fact usually “characterized by vividness and novelty.”

Mostly, the word hasn’t changed that much…but it’s broadened. And is, in fact, itself nearly impossible to trace the etymology of. Various experts have posited various theories, but none can be proven and said experts can’t seem to agree with each other. It might have Scandinavian roots…or French ones…or something else entirely.

What we know is that its first uses were very specific. In 1756 we have a record of it appearing to mean “the specific vocabulary that thieves use.” By 1801 it was the terminology specific to any particular field. But the definition we know now was only a few years behind, having been firmly established by 1818.

So we might not know where it comes from. But we certainly know where it’s been. 😉 And because I have a strange household, my children will occasionally actually argue about whether a word is slang or “accepted.”

It’s summer. And so, as I was casting around looking for words to feature, my daughter said, “Do something summery! Like, you know…a carnival, or the fair.”

When I’m writing this, our County Fair has just finished up, and the neighboring county’s is scheduled for a few weeks from now. But I have to confess, I’ve never researched the history of these traditional events.

I started, of course, by looking up the word. First of all, I discovered that fair, the adjective, and fair the noun aren’t related at all. The adjective dates back to the Old English fæger, meaning “pleasing to the sight, beautiful, morally good.” Similar words can be found in other Germanic languages.

The noun, however–“a regular meeting in a city or town for buying and selling”–is from the 1300s, Anglo-French, from the Old French feire or faire. I had no idea these were totally different words, from different languages!

Back in the day, a fair was much like a market. But centuries ago, big events (often city- or county-wide) began to be scheduled for once a year, where people didn’t just buy and sell, they came to see the latest innovations, enter their food and livestock into contests, and basically stay up-to-date with the rest of the world. 

The earliest county fair in America is recorded in 1641, in New Amsterdam. By the 1800s, they could be found in just about every county. They were still primarily agricultural expos. This was where new farm equipment was demonstrated and new techniques discussed. But by this time, a bit of the carnival atmosphere had also come in. Games, contests, and competitions offered something for everyone. 

I love that these events are still a part of our culture! I admit that my family mostly likes to go for the rides…and maybe the food, LOL. But I love that horse-pulling competitions have just morphed into mud-bogging and demolition derbies. That people still enter their livestock into competitions, and people still bring baked goods to pit against their neighbors’.

Do you go to your County or State Fair? If so, what’s your favorite part? 

I love that www.etymonline.com has a list of trending words. Sometimes I click on them solely out of curiosity…like when I saw circus on there today.

Last May my family journeyed to Charleston, WV to attend one of the final shows of the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and it was frankly amazing. So amazing that we really wished we’d given it a try way earlier so we could have attended more and caught all their different shows. Up until then, I’d never gone to a circus, be it large or small, though a tiny little one set up once on my high school’s grounds. I saw the elephants from the road, but we had something else going on that weekend and I couldn’t go. Kinda wish I had. 

But anyway! Did you ever notice that circus looks an awful lot like circle? And circumference? And all those other circ- words that denote something round? This isn’t a coincidence. The word comes directly from Latin, where it meant “a ring, a circular line.” It was used in Ancient Rome for the open-roofed enclosures used for races and so on. The Latin word had been borrowed from the Ancient Greek kirkos, which meant the same thing.

In the early 1700s, the word was applied in English to buildings arranged in a circular pattern, hence Picadilly Circus, and also to a ring road. By the end of the 1700s, it had also been applied to the arenas used to showcase feats of horsemanship, acrobatics, etc.–but at first, it was just for the tent. It took about 40 years for it to come to mean the company or traveling show itself by 1838 or so. Another twenty years, and it had taken on the metaphorical sense of “a lively uproar, a hubbub.” And finally, during WWI, it was used to describe a squadron of aircraft.

Have you ever gone to a circus? What did you think of it?

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary–17 years since I first said “I do” to the love of my life. 😀 So naturally, today I thought I’d take a look at the words!

Wed is from Old English weddian, which means “to pledge oneself, vow; to betroth, to marry.” This is similar to other Germanic languages’ words, and while those other languages still reflect the original in their words today, English is a bit unique. While we retained wed in wedding, most often people today don’t say they hope to wed so-and-so–it sounds archaic.

English has instead adopted the French marier as well, giving us two options where other languages have stuck with one. Marry has pretty much the same meaning as wed, and it joined the English language in the 1300s, so it’s certainly been around a while.

Kind of interesting to think, though, of how the two have been assigned certain typical functions, right? Like we never ask for a piece of marriage cake. Nor do we look for our marriage gown. And yet we don’t exchange wedding vows on the day. We’ve come to view wedding as the specific event in which we bind ourselves, and marriage as the ongoing state (there’s the old-fashioned sounded wedlock for that too, but we don’t hear that much anymore, do we?). Which is rather interesting, since its early uses were also just for the ceremony, the initial pledging.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to another year with my husband. If you’re married, in what month is your anniversary? I’d never imagined I would be a June bride–I always wanted a December wedding, but the allure of a beach wedding instead drew me away from all my childhood plans, LOL, and I have no regrets! How about you?

This one is a special request from my daughter, who came across it in a book. 😃

So, tootles. Being a 90s tween/teen, I grew up hearing this word as “goodbye” (or maybe it was toodles? Hard to say, as apparently it never appeared in writing, and it has no entry in any dictionary I can find…And my kids, being children of the 2000-10s, think of Toodles as a character on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, so…)

But in fact, tootles is from the 1820s as “a frequentative of toot.” Now, first of all, I’ve never noticed another word described as “a frequentative of.” Spellcheck doesn’t even think “frequentative” is a word, LOL. But it just means exactly what you’d think–“when it happens frequently.” So tootle is when you toot frequently upon a horn or flute, for example.

Interestingly, and the use that grabbed my daughter’s attention, is that it later came to mean “to drive or move along in a leisurely fashion.” I can’t find a particular date on when that came into use, but she had encountered a sentence where the characters were tootling along in their car, which apparently struck her as hilarious.

So there we have it! Happy Monday!