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Fun Facts About English #62 – The Language of Anatomy

07/17/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 62 Kinney Brothers Publishing

There are thousands of anatomical parts that have special names, sometimes named after an individual, and some in reference to historical myths. Like the Scottish word gowpen, some are only regionally known. Here are six body parts with colorful names along with a bit of their histories.

Achilles Tendon

The Achilles Tendon at the back of the lower leg is the thickest tendon in the human body and serves to attach the calf muscles to the heel. The oldest known record of the tendon being named for Achilles is 1693 and was called “the cord of Achilles.”

According to the Greek myth, Achilles was the son of the mortal, Peleus, and the sea nymph, Thetis. When Achilles was an infant, his mother held him by the heel and dipped him in the River Styx to render his body invulnerable. As the heel by which she held him was not immersed in the water, it was his one vulnerable spot. He was eventually killed by a poison arrow to the heel.

Adam’s Apple

The Adam’s Apple is the lump or protrusion formed by the angle of the thyroid cartilage surrounding the larynx seen especially in males.

The name goes back to the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. As the tale goes, Adam ate a piece of forbidden fruit and a part of it got stuck in his throat. The idea that the forbidden fruit was an apple appeared around the 12th century. Some researchers suggest that the apple got the raw deal from an unfortunate pun: the Latin word malus means both “apple” and “evil.”

Anatomical Snuff Box

The Anatomical Snuff Box is a triangular deepening on the dorsal radial aspect of the hand. Make a thumbs-up sign and a hollow will form under the base of your thumb between the two tendons.

It gets its name from the 18th and 19th-century practice of inhaling through the nose or “snorting” powdered tobacco, known as snuff, from this convenient receptacle.

Dimples of Venus

The dimples on the lower back are known as the Dimples of Venus. They’re created by a short ligament that attaches your superior iliac spine and your skin.

They have long been considered an attractive feature, hence being named after the Roman goddess of beauty. Though lower body fat and better muscle definition might make them more likely to appear, they’re thought to be genetic and seem to be more common in women.

Funny Bone

Running down the inside part of your elbow is a nerve called the ulnar nerve. This nerve lets your brain know about feelings and sensations in your fourth and fifth fingers. It’s also one of the nerves that control movement in your hand.

When you bump the nerve against the humerus, the long bone that starts at your elbow and up to your shoulder, you get a strange jolt or sensation in your elbow known as your funny bone.

Morton’s Toe

Morton’s Toe is a condition in which your second toe is longer than your hallux, or big toe. The name derives from the surname of American orthopedic surgeon, Dudley Joy Morton (1884–1960). The condition has been referred to with a variety of names: Greek foot, royal toe, turkey toe, shepherd’s toe, coup d’etoe, and Viking toe.

This foot shape was considered to be a beauty ideal by the Ancient Greeks and can be seen in many ancient paintings and statues. Arguably the most famous and probably longest Morton’s Toe ever is found on the Statue of Liberty.

Read about how science changed our lives, our language, and the landscape! Learn about the history of collective nouns such as, “A murder of crows.” No matter where you travel in the world, these are the words everybody knows!

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Fun Facts About English #60 – Rebracketing

07/03/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 60 Kinney Brothers Publishing

“A napron” becoming “an apron” wasn’t an anomaly. This kind of rebracketing has happened again and again in our language history. Here are five similar examples:

an ewt (salamander) / a newt
an ekename (additional name) / a nickname
an otch / a notch
a naranj / an orange
a naddre (type of snake) / an adder

These may seem like quaint misinterpretations from long ago. In reality, this kind of rebracketing is happening before our very eyes and ears, in spite of the fact that we rely less on an oral transfer of language. Our higher literacy rates seem to accelerate how we (sometimes intentionally) manipulate our language and, in turn, create strings of new words in the process.

Take for example the Middle English words all one or alone, meaning “one only” or “on one’s own.” When the word rebracketed to a-lone, a profusion of new vocabulary entered the English language, such as lone, lonely, and lonesome.

Consider the word helicopter. To most English speakers’ thinking, the two parts of the word are heli and copter. This is not correct. Coined in 1861, the etymology of the word originates from the Greek helico (spiral) and pter (with wings, as in pterodactyl). Nonetheless, we now have derivatives of this rebracketing, like helipad, heliport, and helidome. Copter, which wasn’t a word, suffix, or even slang before helicopter, gives us new combinations like gyrocopter, jetcopter, and quadcopter.

A more recent arrival is blog. The internet-era word came from the clever rebracketing of “weblog.” Its cousin, vlog, came from the words “video log.” From these newly-coined terms we get blogger, blogging, vlogger, and vlogging.

A popular rebracketing has occurred with the word alcoholic. The two parts of the word are alcohol (booze) and -ic (related to). Though –holic has no etymological history, per se, it is now a suffix with the definition of “being addicted to something,” such as shopaholic, chocoholic, and workaholic.

Finally, our beloved American hamburgers are a linguistic carnival of misinterpretations and rebracketing. If asked, many Americans would probably think the breakdown of the word hamburger (ignoring any cognitive dissonance) would be ham (meaning “not really ham”) and burger (a patty of meat or meat sandwich). From these misinterpretations, we get new words and food like a cheeseburger, double burger, and veggieburger.

The real meaning of hamburger is “a resident of the German town of Hamburg;” Hamburg + -er (resident of). Denizens of this burg gave us our meat sandwich progenitor, the Hamburg steak. When Germans arrived in America, their spicy Hamburg steaks were sold in restaurants, state fairs, and on food carts to industrial workers. Difficult to eat while standing or walking, the beef patty was sandwiched between two pieces of bread, and the hamburger was born. While there are numerous competing stories, it’s said that Louis’ Lunch, a small lunch wagon in New Haven, Connecticut, sold the first Hamburg steak sandwich around 1900.

And the rest is global history.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in how we unconsciously stack our adjectives, the anomaly of “The Big Bad Wolf,” or how Lewis Carroll gave us the first literary portmanteaux!

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Fun Facts About English #58 – Why is it called that?

06/19/2020 by admin

Fun Fact About English 58 Kinney Brothers Publishing

Here are ten more words with surprising origins! A few of these words appeared in previous Fun Facts About English posts, but I thought them such swell words, they deserved a second showing!

Ampersand (&)

The ampersand (&) was included in schoolbooks as the 27th character of the English alphabet until the mid 19th century. It was understood not as a vowel or consonant, but as a useful symbol, added to the hind end of the Latin alphabet, and simply known as and. Today, when we recite the ABCs, we often say “X, Y, and Z.” Two centuries ago, children’s alphabet chants included and (&) as the last “letter.” To say “X, Y, Z, and and” was a bit awkward, so the Latin phrase per se – meaning “by or in itself “- was inserted. In recitations, it sounded like this: X, Y, Z, and per se and (&). Over time, and-per-se-and slurred into ampersand, a mondegreen that we use today.

…To Boot

There are many idiomatic phrases and words that include the word boot: to be pulled up by one’s bootstraps, to get the boot, boot camp, etc. None of these has any relationship to the “extra bit of something” when we say “…to boot.”

The boot in “to boot” goes all the way back to the Old English word bōt. It means “advantage, help,” and “to making something good or better.” Over time, it also came to mean “something extra added to a trade.” Ex. “We got a great deal on the hotel room and concert tickets to boot!”

In finance, boot is something you add to a deal to make the exchange equal. For example, if you buy a car with a trade-in and also give the dealer some money, that extra money you add is called “the boot.”

Checkmate

The history of chess goes back almost 15 centuries. The game originated in northern India in the 6th century AD and spread to Persia. When the Arabs conquered Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently, through the Moorish conquest of Spain, spread to Southern Europe.

“Sheikh” (شيخ‎) is the Arabic word for “chief or head of a tribe.” Players would announce “Sheikh” when the king was in check. “Māt” (مات‎) is an Arabic adjective for “dead, helpless, or defeated.” So the king is in mate when he is ambushed, at a loss, or defeated.

Fall

English Timeline Kinney Brothers Publishing

In Old English, harvest was the season when farmers gathered their crops and prepared them for storage. The word is a derivative of hærfest, an Old Norse word that means “to gather or pluck.”

By the sixteenth century, fall, a shortened version of the phrase “fall of the leaf” was used to describe the third season of the year. During this time, autumn, a word derived from Latin and Old French, was also in common use. Fall and autumn were the preferred words as more people began leaving rural farmlands to move into larger, metropolitan cities. Without farming, the term harvest became less relevant to their lives.

Today, there is a clear preference for autumn in British English and for fall in American English, though both words can be used interchangeably in both places.

Hello

As hard as it is to imagine, before the invention of the telephone in 1876, “hello” wasn’t a proper or even casual greeting whatsoever!

In his laboratories, Thomas Alva Edison would shout “Halloo!” into the mouthpiece of his newly invented strip phonograph to test the device. “Halloo” was a word commonly used to incite hounds to the chase, or as a “call” to attract the attention of someone at a great distance, similar to “Hey!”

Alexander Graham Bell's early telephone Kinney Brothers Publishing — Alexander Graham Bell’s early telephone

Mr. Edison also equipped and supplied Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone invention, a gadget that was (basically) a permanently open line without even a bell. Mr. Edison preferred “Hello” be put in the instruction manual for “calling” the other party to the line, along with “That is all” for ending the exchange. Edison reasoned that “Hello” could be heard from a distance of 10-20 feet and was better than Bell’s nautical recommendation, “Ahoy.”

G.I.

G.I. has been interpreted as standing for garrison issue, government issue, and general infantry. The true progenitor of the abbreviation is galvanized iron.

G.I. appears in Army inventories of galvanized-iron trash cans (G.I. can) and buckets from the early twentieth century. During World War I, the meaning of G.I. was extended to include heavy artillery shells and large bombs. Around this time, G.I. was applied in the “general issue” sense with G.I. shoes, G.I. soap, and G.I. brushes. During or shortly after the war, soldiers began referring to themselves as G.I.s when the abbreviation was recorded as slang for an enlisted man.

In June 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, commonly known as the G.I. Bill. The bill provided benefits for returning World War II veterans, including funding for college, home loans, and unemployment insurance.

Cartoonist Dave Breger is credited with coining the name G.I. Joe in his weekly comic strip published in Yank magazine beginning in 1942. In 1964, U.S. toy company Hasbro debuted the military-themed G.I. Joe action figure for boys.

John Doe & Richard Roe

“John Doe” and “Richard Roe” originated during the Middle Ages! The fake names were regularly invoked in English legal instruments beginning as early as the reign of England’s King Edward III (1327–1377).

As well as legal instruments, the U.S. courts also use such names to refer to a corpse whose identity is unknown or unconfirmed. There are many variants to the names, including “John Roe,” “Jane Doe,” and “Baby Doe.”

Individuals whose real name is John or Jane Doe report difficulties and unwanted attention, such as being accused of using a pseudonym, being questioned repeatedly by airport security, or suspected of being an incognito celebrity.

Paddywhack

During the Victorian era, paddywhack came to mean “a slap or a sharp blow,” in part because of its mistaken association with the word whack, an etymologically different word altogether. The original meaning of paddywhack refers to the tough neck ligament found in many four-legged animals such as sheep and cattle. Even today, this chewy and protein-rich ligament is often sold as a dried dog treat.

Red Tape

The idiom means “excessive bureaucracy or adherence to rules” that make conducting one’s affairs slower or more difficult. They include filling out paperwork, obtaining licenses, or having multiple people or committees approve a decision.

It’s generally believed the term originated with the Spanish administration of Charles V, King of Spain. In the early 16th century, the monarch began binding important dossiers with red twine or ribbon in an effort to give priority to particular issues and modernize the administration of his vast empire. The practice was quickly adopted by other European monarchs.

The idiom was popularized after the American Civil War when veterans’ records were tied up in pink or red binding and difficult to access.

Pipe Dream

Pipe dream originates from the 19th century and indicates the dreams experienced by opium users and the instrument they use to smoke it. Today, it refers to a fantastic hope or plan that is impossible to achieve.

The earliest known use of the idiom appeared in an 1890 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune, referring to aerial navigation: “It has been regarded as a pipe-dream for a good many years.”

If you found this post interesting, you might also be interested in common words that were coined after notorious personalities, body parts that have unusual names, or the origins of collective nouns, such as “A murder of crows.”

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Fun Facts About English #57 – Gender-specific Nouns

06/09/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 57 Kinney Brothers Publishing

Gender-specific nouns, especially titles in professional spheres, have been losing favor in the past few decades. While the effort to be inclusive and gender-neutral is an honorable one, it’s a linguistic one-way street in many cases, a compromise in others, and nearly impossible when moving from originally feminine to masculine-inclusive nouns. With nouns like widow/widower, there appears to be no path to neutrality at all!

Feminine terms like actress, usherette, and comedienne are marked, or divergent, in relation to their masculine forms. Only the masculine forms can serve as gender-neutral terms. For example, ushers can be inclusive of males and females, whereas usherette is exclusively female.

Similar to widow and widower, policeman and policewoman are categorically separate with neither being able to serve as gender-neutral terms. In such cases, proponents of neutralism have opted for officers to reduce and replace the terms to a manageable and inclusive definition.

With the loss of feminine nouns of agency, understood by their suffixes -tress, -trix, -ette, and -enne, it might seem we’re losing lingual diversity; opting for language that does its best to embrace inclusiveness and discard difference for the sake of economy.

On the binary flip side, an interesting thing happens when men move into occupations that have been traditionally female. Solutions for gender neutrality are not so easy, in part, because of the entrenched notions of their feminine exclusivity. Consider the professions of nursing, sewing, childbirth, childcare, housekeeping, or even the role of a lover taken outside of marriage.

Historically, a nurse and seamstress are occupations held by women that excluded men. Though nurse is becoming widely recognized as a gender-neutral title, and the awful murse didn’t stick, it’s still quite common to hear “male nurse” as a distinction. To most people’s way of thinking, a female nurse is redundant. In the clothing industry, seamstress has already been replaced with stitcher or sewer, whereas the masculine tailor is the gender-neutral term for a man or the feminine tailoress.

Consider the word housewife. A male housewife sounds as ridiculous as the 1980s comedy, Mr. Mom. Though “stay-at-home dad” is commonly used, what if he’s not a dad but just a “stay-at-home guy?” Housedude? By definition, “stay-at-home husband” is an oxymoron. Homemaker still has a feminine ring and caregiver, though inclusive, only sits in relation to a dependent. The culture can be quite critical of a male relying on his female partner or parent for support. Bum, lazy, and mooch are some of the colorful words that come to mind for a husband or son who opts not to work outside the home — or work at all. The culture has yet to define a term to address men in such partnerships and points to the idea that traditional marriage brings a man’s labor to the fore (husband) and keeps a woman in her place (housewife).

Husband – from hús ‘house’ + bóndi ‘occupier and tiller of the soil’. The original sense of the verb was ‘till, cultivate’.

What about the male equivalent of a mistress? Is he a kept man? A mister? “He is her mister” sounds like they’re married. A kept man seems too restricting for a dashing gentleman moving among the shadows. Neither of these terms has that mysterious and provocative air of extra-marital naughtiness. While the French paramour is inclusive and neutral, should I find myself in such circumstances, I fancy the Italian term cavalier servente.

Now let’s look at the word midwife. On its surface, the occupation seems to indicate the feminine and it’s a cultural given that the person performing the task will be a woman. The Old English word simply means “with the woman (wife).” Today, a man can be defined as a midwife, though “man midwife” has been used in centuries past. In ancient Greece, any person who had not given birth themselves was restricted from becoming a midwife. In the U.K., the Royal College of Midwives barred men from the profession until 1983. Because of the social and sometimes legal barriers to men, pediatrics emerged in the 1930s as a “modern” medical field and women’s traditional role and knowledge as midwives increasingly came under attack.

Finally, to bring this back to the beginning, because widower is divergent from the feminine, it’s unlikely that widow will become the gender-neutral term for both men and women who have lost a partner. In legal terms, “surviving spouse” seems to be the closest we have to neutrality. Interestingly, whether a heterosexual or homosexual coupling, the gender-specific terms maintain their lingual integrity. For those who object to binary terms, there is the simple and inclusive phrase, “I am widowed.”

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in reading about the amazing legacy of the word dude, what jaywalker actually means, or the surprising history of Hello!

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Fun Facts About English #52 – Fossilized Words

05/08/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 52 Kinney Brothers Publishing

Most would recognize the Middle English verb beckon, as in “I beckoned the waiter to my table.” The noun beck means “a gesture used to signal, summon, or direct someone.” Though the noun has fallen out of use, it is preserved in the phrase “be at someone’s beck and call.”

Fossilized words are linguistic artifacts of another era preserved only in certain idioms or phrases. We may recognize such words from their set phrases, but we often don’t understand their true meaning or history. Below are ten fossilized words with definitions and the idiomatic phrases in which they appear.

Bated

The word abate means “reduced or lessened in force.” The word bate is simply a-bate after losing its unstressed first vowel in a linguistic process called aphesis, like around and round. Though abate and bate were both in use from the 14th century, the latter lost its steam by the 19th century. The adjective bated was fossilized in Shakespeare’s familiar “with bated breath,” where one’s breathing is reduced from awe, terror, or excitement.

Shall I bend low and, in a bondman’s key, / With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness, / Say this …
The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare

Deserts

When we say, “He got his just deserts,” it’s usually with a bit of schadenfreude for justice served. The deserts in this case is the Old French word for deserve and was used from the 13th century to mean “that which is deserved.”

Dint

This Old English word has been preserved in our language in the phrase “by dint of…” Dint originally referred to “a blow struck with a sword or other weapon” or “subduing something by force.” Today, “by dint of” charisma, hard work, luck, or intelligence, one’s efforts are applied to accomplish something.

Eke

The word eke is from the Middle English word ēac and means to “add, supplement, or grow.” It’s meaning has idiomatically evolved to include “to make a living or support one’s existence,” as well as “to scrimp, stretch, or squeeze,” e.g., “They managed to eke out a living” or “I eked three meals out of a five-dollar bill.”

Keeping in mind its original meaning, the word eke–name means an additional name or alias. The word changed over time by way of linguistic re-bracketing. The misdivision of the syllables of the phrase “an ekename” led to its rephrasing as “a nekename” or “nickname” as we know it today.

Hue

Like “hoot and holler,” the phrase “hue and cry” conveys the image of a rowdy or incensed mass of people. Hue is from the Old French heu, and like hoot, is an onomatopoeia for a crowd’s noisy clamor. The phrase “hue and cry” is also an Anglo-Norman French legal phrase hu e cri, and former English common law where bystanders are summoned to assist in the apprehension of a criminal witnessed in the act of committing a crime. The word has been fossilized in such phrases as, “A hue and cry was raised against the new tax proposals.”

Kith

Kith is an Old English word referring to knowledge or acquaintance and also stood for one’s native land or country. Kith includes persons who are known or familiar and taken collectively, such as one’s friends, neighbors, or fellow countrymen. The phrase is used in such examples as “She became a widow without kith or kin” or “Is this the way we treat our kith and kin?”

Lurch

Lurch, as in “leave someone in the lurch,” means to leave them in a jam or difficult position. Lurch comes from an old French backgammon-style game called Lourche. The name of the game became a general expression for beating your opponent by a large score and, by extension, getting the better of someone, if even by cheating. Though the rules of the game have been lost, it’s memory is preserved in this common phrase.

Pale

Pale is derived by way of Anglo-French from the Latin word palus, meaning “stake.” The verb impale is still in common use and means “to torture or kill by fixing on a sharp stake.” In it’s literal uses, pale referred to stakes, fences, and boundaries made of stakes. This extended to geographical areas with defined limits. Historically, the areas of Ireland, Scotland, and areas of France that were dominated by the English were referred to as “the English Pale” and anything outside to be “beyond the pale.”

Over time, pale took on a metaphorical sense, meaning “the limits within which one is privileged or protected.” To be “beyond the pale” is to be outside such protective limits. Today, the phrase is most often used to describe behavior that is regarded as shocking, outlandish, or uncivilized — going beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable.

Roughshod & Slipshod

The word shod simply means “wearing shoes” and is from the past tense Middle English verb shoen, “to shoe.” Shod feet referred to anything wearing a shoe though today it usually alludes to shoeing horses. In the 16th century slipshod meant loosely fitting “slip-shoes” or “slippers.” By the 19th century the word came to mean something loose and shabby.

Roughshod specifically referred to a method of shoeing a horse with protruding nails to help the animal on icy roads. By the 1700s, “riding roughshod over something” came to mean a lack of concern for or treating someone abusively, as in “He ran roughshod over anyone standing in his way.”

Wend

In Middle English, go and wenden were two words which meant “to proceed on one’s way.” The past tense of go was gaed and the past tense of wend was went. By the 15th century, went had replaced the past tense forms of go giving us an inexplicably irregular verb. Robbed of its past form, wend developed a new past tense — wended. Though wend is rarely used today without the object way, we see the fossilized form of the word in the phrase, “to wend one’s way.”

Supperless to bed, the plunderers wend, And feast upon the pleasant dreams which on deceit attend.
— Thomas Park, Sonnets, 1797

Learn more about the rich history of English! The History of English 1 & 2 begins with the Celts on the prehistoric British Isles up through Late Modern English. The Future of English looks at English as the global lingua franca and the role of foreign speakers of the language in shaping its future.

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Fishing games are a classic children’s activity and always a hit in my classes! Check out all the fishy fun in Donald’s English Classroom!

Fun Facts About English #51 – Friend

05/01/2020 by admin

Fun Facts About English 51 Kinney Brothers Publishing

So, when did friend become a verb? Actually, it’s always been a verb! The Old English word frēond is a derivative and the present participle of the verb frēogan which means “to love or set free (in the slave sense).”

As it sometimes happens with language, the culture had a falling out with the verb until recently. While many bemoan its social media context, it’s at least intriguing that friend as a verb possesses a lingual impulse to resurface like a colorful bauble in social waters.

The verb wasn’t the only friend to be lost over time. Old English had freondsped “an abundance of friends;” freondleast “a want of friends;” and freondspedig “rich in friends.” Today, though the word friendless is common enough, saying someone is friend-ful may bring a conversation to a pause.

“Friend they any, that flatter many?” — John Heywood, Proverbs and Epigrams, 1562

If friending isn’t up for re-adoption in your book, there’s always befriend and acquaint; both perfectly good words though a bit stuffy. I have to admit, the patty-cake feel of making friends or having a bestie doesn’t click with what I consider to be a complex and nuanced act of human bonding. But, I’m older.

Nevertheless, I’m going to expand my idea of friending and see if I can re-acquaint myself with an old book or take a walk down a friendly road. Unlike fickle Facebook friends who will befoe one for the smallest difference, a familiar pathway has never un-friended me and a tree still offers its shade without a password.

“There the street is narrow, and may friend our purpose well.” — Thomas Southerne, The Spartan Dame, 1721

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in reading about the history of the word hello, dude, paddywhack, rooster, or jaywalking! You’ll ROTFL!

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