by Roseanna White | Oct 1, 2018 | Word of the Week
This is one of the words I’d just never paused to think about. Auditorium. It was always just the place we went to in school when the whole school needed to meet.
But last week my husband went, “Oh! I’d never looked at auditorium this way before. As in, auditory. Plus um. Latin.”
To which I went, “Ooooh! Of course. Auditory. Like, a place you go to hear things.”
That is, in fact, the exact definition, directly from the Latin word for “lecture-hall.”
It’s interesting to note, however, that auditorium only dates to 1727. Before that (from the 1300s), the room/building was, in fact, called an auditory! That ranks as something I didn’t know. How about you?
by Roseanna White | Sep 24, 2018 | Word of the Week
I know, I know. This seems like a strange choice of word for me to look up. 😉 But I had a moment last week when I was wondering how long the garden-hose type of thing had been in use, so I looked it up. As I do. And then was kind of amazed by the answer!
Hose first meant “a covering for the legs.” As early as the 13th century, hose were a common article of clothing, especially for men. They could be woven or of leather, have feet or not. We know them today as tights or leggings, but those hose of old would have been much thicker than the nylons some women still wear (though I usually eschew them, LOL).
In the Middle Ages, the word began to be applied to other things that resembled a stocking, like a sheath or a husk of a grain. So where did the garden-hose sense of things come in? And why?
The etymology site doesn’t explain the “why” clearly, but it did mention that one of the roots of the word–the Dutch hoos–not only meant “leg covering” but “waterspout.” I wonder if this dual meaning had something to do with the additional meaning the word gained in English.
Regardless a “flexible rubber tube used to convey liquid” has been around since the mid 1300s! I had no idea it was that old. Hence why I had to share. 😉
by Roseanna White | Sep 17, 2018 | Word of the Week
This one is yet again at the request of my kids, who asked why in the world we abbreviate “dollar” with $. (They also asked why they sometimes have one line through it and other times two.)
So…though it has been suggested by some historians that the $ is related to the 8, for the Spanish pieces of eight that were frequently used as currency in Ye Olde Days, the more accepted history is that it’s in fact from the peso, which we also used before the Revolution. Peso was abbreviated with a capital P and then a superscript S. In handwriting, people began to write the two letters overtop each other. And so it evolved as in the diagram below.
By why do some dollar signs have two lines? The theory is that it used to be to differentiate the US dollar. Given that $ was already in use by then, the two lines are thought to have once formed a U. Also in the diagram below.
These began to appear in handwriting in the 1770s and in print in the early 1800s.
So where did the word dollar itself come from? It’s from Flemish daler, which is short for Joachmistaler, which was a coin mined from the silver in Joachimstal, Bohemia. Daler was borrowed as a term for coins used in both Spanish and British colonies in the Americas during the Revolution and became the official US currency in the late 1700s.
by Bookworm Mama | Aug 27, 2018 | Word of the Week
The heat of summer is fully upon us, and we all know nothing tastes as good on those hot summer days as cool treats. Ice cream, Popsicles, frozen coffees and yogurts and you-name-it.
My assistant’s little boy asked where the word Popsicle comes from, so this Word of the Week is for Judah!
And it’s a pretty simple one. =) Despite becoming the only word really used for icy pops these days, Popsicle is, in fact, a trademarked name (so should always be written with a capital P). It was registered in 1923 by a fellow in California, and while he didn’t explain the name, it was assumed that it was a simple mash-up:
(lolly)pop + (ice)cicle = Popsicle
Interestingly, that was the same time period in which lollypop came to mean “candy on a stick.” Before the 1920s, the word was definitely in use for sweets, but it was “a soft candy made of treacle and sugar” when it was created in 1784. By the 1840s, it came to means “something sweet but insubstantial.” And then in the 1920s, we get that “on a stick” meaning that we all identify with today.
My family has become obsessed this summer with Outshine fruit pops. We love that they’re real fruit and SO GOOD. What’s your favorite frozen treat for a hot summer day?
by Roseanna White | Aug 20, 2018 | Word of the Week
It has been a rainy, rainy summer here in West Virginia. The result? Critters everywhere they shouldn’t be. We live in the woods, and the rodents and spiders inside this year have been terrible.
Then…then…there’s the copperheads. These venomous snakes usually prefer the tops of the mountains, not down where we are. But rainy seasons tend to wash them down (or so is the prevailing theory). My mother-in-law, who lives up the driveway, has been on this property for 30 years, and she’s spotted copperheads maybe 3 times in years prior. But last week we saw our second of the season (and quickly dispatched it with a shovel). (And no, that photo is not mine!)
I shudder at the proximity of that most recent one to our house (it was right behind our car) and thank God above that my daughter spotted it while out of striking range. But this being me, I’m also thinking, “I know the term was used during the Civil War for those with secret allegiances…I wonder why they chose that snake in particular?”
In
Circle of Spies, final book in the Culper Ring Series, I focus on secret groups–in addition to my Culpers, we have the undercover Pinkerton agents, and the Knights of the Golden Circle, which are the ones called Copperheads.
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Upon looking it up, I found an interesting explanation! In the parts of the South where the groups originated (including where I live), there are 2 main types of venomous snakes: rattlesnakes and copperheads. Rattlesnakes are easily spotted and warn you from a fair distance away that they’re there. With the shake of their tail, they’re saying, “Get back, now. I don’t want to have to hurt you.” This, according to an 1854 historian, is what an honorable Southern man would do most of the time. He would lay out his complaint against you in a forthright manner.
But unlike the rattler, the copperhead is sneaky. Stealthy. And aggressive, often biting before people even realize they’re there. This is what the secret societies began to do. They abandoned the overt and went for the silent strikes. Well before war broke out, these societies had been dubbed “Copperheads.”
By the time the war was in full swing, the term had come to be applied especially to Northerners with Southern sympathies. That terrifying “fourth column” that Lincoln himself mentioned, and which comes up in my book. =)
So there we go. A quick lesson in terms inspired by a too-close call with a nasty little snake in my driveway!
by Roseanna White | Aug 13, 2018 | Word of the Week
Last Wednesday, I was invited to speak at retailers event near Lancaster, PA. As my husband and I were driving through Pennsylvania, also known in our family as “the land of oh-so-helpful road signs,” we saw first the “Don’t Tailgate” sign. And then one that said “Beware of Aggressive Drivers.”
My husband, who had only caught of glimpse of that one, said, “Did that say ‘beware aggressive drivers’ or ‘beware of aggressive drivers’? Because it would be funnier if there were no of. Then we wouldn’t know if it was warning us to beware of them, or just warning them.”
Naturally, this led to the next question of, “So is beware just be + aware?”
“Probably,” I said. “Or be + wary. In fact, I bet aware and wary are variations of the same word.”
And so, it turns out, they are.
Beware is from around 1200, a contraction of “be wary” or “be on one’s guard.” It’s from the Old English wær, which means “prudent, wary, aware, alert.” Aware is also directly from the Old English, from gawær, which is obviously just a slight variation, meaning “wary, cautious.”
So there we go. Our musings were correct. And Pennsylvania will forever remain the Land of Oh-So-Helpful Road Signs.
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.