Word of the Week – Audition

Word of the Week – Audition

by | May 27, 2024 | Word of the Week

I’ve never really paused to think about the word audition before…but it turns out, its modern meaning is not where it began.

When you look at the word and note the audi- root, you’ll realize that it’s linked to the act of hearing or listening, like audio. So it makes sense that the original meaning of the word, from the 1590s, was “a hearing.” But it carried more of a legal sense–a court hearing, or some other event where the act of listening was the crucial thing.

The sense we most associate with the word today, of a performer doing a trial run for judges, didn’t come around the 1880s! And even then, it was only a noun. You would go to an audition…but audition as a verb only dates from the 1930s!

Have you ever gone on an audition? I have, for both music and theater, in my middle and high school days. Happy to say I always landed a part, though the nerves, man…the nerves! 😉

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Word of the Week – Meme

Word of the Week – Meme

by | May 20, 2024 | Word of the Week

Did you know that meme was coined as a scientific word in the 1970s?

Yep. Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, wanted a word to describe ideas or behaviors that quickly spread from person to person within a culture, so he came up with meme, from the Greek mimesthai. His own thought-process is thus:

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’. [Richard Dawkins, “The Selfish Gene,” 1976]

By 1997, popular computer culture had picked up the word and used it to mean “images or snippets of video, audio, or text that spread rapidly from one internet user to another.”

Bet you didn’t know that the meme you just shared is part of the study of biology, did you? 😉

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Word of the Week – Prestigious

Word of the Week – Prestigious

by | May 13, 2024 | Word of the Week

I imagine that, like me, you think prestigious means “honored.” And it does…today. But it started life in a very different place!

Prestigious actually comes from the Latin praestigious, meaning “full of tricks.” Think magician shows and jugglers and sword-swallowers, etc. It’s thought that the Latin word is closely related to praestringere, which means “to blindfold, to dazzle.” Anything that was a trick of the eyes–or which perhaps would make you doubt what you were seeing, it was so spectacular, was called prestigious.

That’s where it began in English too, meaning “practicing illusion or magic, deception.” Up until the 1800s, this was a word that was most often used in a derogatory fashion, much like trick today. And then, by the 1890s, it was actually considered an obsolete word, no longer in use. (Fascinating, isn’t it?)

But around 1913, it was given new life, with all illusory implications removed, just as prestige was as well. The dazzle without the deception, so to speak. Which is what it still means today.

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Word of the Week – Fathom

Word of the Week – Fathom

by | May 6, 2024 | Word of the Week

If you’re anything like me, you’re aware that fathom is a unit of measurement (though fuzzy on the details of what it equals, perhaps) but use it most often as a synonym for “understand” or “comprehend.” Ever wonder how these meanings are related? Because they totally are.

Fathom comes all the way from Old English as both a noun and a verb, both coming from the same meaning. The verb was “to embrace or surround” and the noun was “the length of outstretched arms,” so about 5-6 feet on average.

By about 1600 it was used as a verb in the sense of “to take soundings,” which is to figure out the depth of water. That, in turn, led to “get to the bottom of something” in a metaphorical sense by about 1600. Which led directly to today’s current meaning. Because once you’ve gotten to the bottom of something, you understand it and comprehend it.

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Word of the Week – Cheat

Word of the Week – Cheat

by | Apr 29, 2024 | Word of the Week

Back in the days of absolute monarchy in Europe, property wasn’t quite what we think of it as today. Oh, you could own things…but the Crown could confiscate it at any moment. For that matter, if you died without an heir, guess where your holdings went? Yep–back to the Crown. Ultimately, everything in a country belonged to its monarch.

And they didn’t forget it. In fact, they had someone whose sole job was to reclaim land or possessions for the Crown (lower lords had these too) in certain cases. This person was called an escheater, because they handled the echeat–this reversion of property to the monarch or lord. The word came from French echete, which means “inheritance,” which in turn comes from the Latin excadere. Both of these are legal terms and legal offices.

But here’s the thing…the people who held those offices? Yeah, they were notoriously corrupt, just like tax collectors were infamous for being. They would seize property they had no business seizing and keep it for themselves. They would skim off the top of what they handed over to the king or lord.

So though cheater was a legal term for that office from the mid-1400s onward, by the late 1500, it had come to mean “someone who deprives unfairly” and cheat had become a verb that meant “trick, deceive, impose upon.”

The idea of someone being unfaithful in a relationship didn’t come along as a meaning of cheat and cheater until the 1930s. Not that the concept was new, of course, but that was the first this word had been used for it. 😉

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Word of the Week – Fizzle

Word of the Week – Fizzle

by | Apr 22, 2024 | Word of the Week

Fizzle. You’ve used the word, I’m sure. I have. Heard it countless times. And we all know what it means.

But I bet you have no idea where it comes from–I sure didn’t!

Fizzle, as it happens, has the same Middle English origins as feisty, from the now-obsolete use of fist that meant…gas. You may or may not recall my post years ago on feisty, and how I will never ever use it for a historical heroine, knowing that it literally meant “stinking and gassy” and was used for dogs, LOL. Turns out, fizzle is indeed related.

From the 1500s all the way up into the 1800s, fizzle meant–brace for it–“to pass gas without a sound.”

Hoo, boy. This is a little boy’s dream word, isn’t it? LOL.

In the mid-1800s, scientists began to use it to describe the noise that air or gas makes when forced from a small aperture…which, as we all know from playing with balloons, bears a certain resemblance to a bodily noise. It was used particularly for the stopping of that sound…you know, when it fizzled out. From there, especially among American college students, it began to take on its metaphorical meaning of “to come to a sudden failure or stop after a good start.” Said college students would use it when their fellows didn’t answer a professor’s questions correctly.

Another word I’m going to have to be mindful of now in my historicals, LOL.

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