The Amateur Etymologist

A double heart

From the Bible, we have inherited a few interesting phrases with the word double in it. Two examples are a double heart and a double mind. Merely hearing the phrase leads one to think that a double heart refers to a person whose heart is moving in two different directions. And that would be quite close to its meaning as it appears in the Bible.

Psalm 12:2—"Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak."

In Hebrew, the literal expression is "a heart and a heart". It means someone who is capable of double-crossing and lying. I find that expression very interesting. Likewise, when the Bible speaks of differing weights in Deuteronomy in 25:13, the Hebrew phrase is literally "a stone and a stone".

Deuteronomy in 25:13—"You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, a large and a small..."

Which leads me to wonder about the phrase "double-minded man" found in James 1:8.

James 1:8—"He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways."

The book of James was written in Greek, but perhaps the Hebrew style of using the word twice when a contradiction or contrast was needed was carried over. I'll need someone with more expertise in Koine Greek to confirm this.

Yo-yo

The yo-yo is an all-American toy that is familiar to just about everyone. It seems with every generation, it pops up and is extremely popular for a season then fades away, only to reappear again (often with a new marketing campaign and new technology). This is called the yo-yo effect. (Kidding!)

Since my kids are now into yo-yos, I thought I'd do a little digging into the etymology of the word. Turns out the word is from the Philippines. In fact, it's from Ilocano, in northern Luzon. Were yo-yos invented by the Filipinos?

A little more digging around and I discovered that yo-yos have been around for a long, long time. The oldest surviving yo-yo dates from 550B.C. and was made of terra cotta. It's from Greece and there is a painting on a vase that shows a boy playing with a yo-yo. Naturally, it wasn't called a yo-yo then.

In the 1800s, the French referred to the toy as a bandalore while the English referred to it as a quiz. Then in 1916, Scientific American publishes an article about Filipino toys and makes mention of the yo-yo. But the watershed year for the modern yo-yo was 1923 when Pedro Flores, a Filipino living in the US, makes a yo-yo in the tradition of his forefathers. In 1928, he opens his first yo-yo factory in Santa Barbara. The yo-yo craze takes off, helped along by Flores's yo-yo contests.

Then along comes Donald Duncan who sees the potential and buys out the factory and the brand name from Flores. Duncan renames the product as a Duncan yo-yo. And with clever marketing, the yo-yo phenomenon really took off. That's the story of the yo-yo. I like the idea that such an "American toy" actually has roots going back to the Philippines and further back into ancient Greece.

Find out more about yo-yo history from the Duncan website.

Limelight

As I was in the car today, travelling through the streets of Jakarta, I saw a sign that had the word limelight on it. It's commonly understand that to be in the limelight means to be in the center of attention. But what does that have to do with the fruit?

As it turns out, not much. The reference to lime is actually calcium oxide. Limelight was a type of stage lighting used theatres and music halls in the 1860s and 1870s. An oxyhydrogen flame is directed at a cylinder of lime (calcium oxide) and through the combined effects of incandescence and candoluminescence, it produces a bright, intense light. The beam of light is then directed at a performer on stage. The original limelight has since been replaced by modern spotlights but the term still endures.

Plural of genius

Here's another odd plural. The plural of genius is... genii. Yes, most people use geniuses but it's more accurate to use genii. (It's pronounced gee-nee-i). Unusual plurals like genii tend to get abandoned over time as people assign more common plural forms to these words. I can understand the desire to make plurals more standaradised. It also makes English easier to learn. But then again, having quirky words like genii makes the language interesting and helps to reveal the history of the word.

Genius has Latin roots and hence the unusual plural. We can tell a word probably has Latin roots when you study their plurals. Other Latin words with unusual plurals include

Stadium (plural: stadia)
Gymnasium (plural: gymnasia)
Formula (plural: formulae)
Antenna (plural: antennae)

The list goes on. You get the idea.

Humble pie

To eat humble pie means to eat a figurative serving of humiliation, usually accompanied by forced submission, an apology or a retraction. But why is this figurative food a pie?

This goes back the 17th century when poor English folks are a pie made up of the innards of a deer (heart, liver, kidney and other offal.) These inexpensive innards were combined with apples, currants, sugar and spices. Servants often dined on this while their masters dined on the venison.

Some etymologists claim this pie was called "numble pie". Others claim it stemmed from "umble", a reference to umbilical cord, yet another part of the offal. Whichever the case, the pie eventually became "umble pie". And since after the Middle Ages, many English words were pronounced without the initial "h" (e.g., hotel), the dish began to be spelt as "humble pie". This was a fitting spelling as it was a poor man's dish.

To add colour to the discussion, the word humble comes from the Latin word for earth, humus. We usually think of humble folks as being "down to earth" so it's not hard to imagine a pie filled with dirt that you have to eat when you are humiliated.

The skin of my teeth

I've used this expression countless times before and never realised it had its roots in the Hebrew language. I discovered that while reading, The Origin of the Bible. The expression is a Hebrew one that first appeared in this form in the Geneva Bible (1560). In Job 19:20, it reads:

My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.

This was a change from an earlier translation by Miles Coverdale (1535) which reads:

My bone hangeth to my skin, and the flesh is away, only there is left me the skin about my teeth.

Though the Geneva Bible is more succinct in its expression, when I saw Coverdale's translation, I suddenly understood what the Hebrew expression was getting at. Obviously we have no skin on our teeth, but Job is actually referring to his gums, the "skin" around his teeth. At this point in Job's lament, he was saying that he had so little flesh left that the only visible flesh on him were his gums.

That expression has evolved in meaning and has come to mean narrowly escaping a situation by the thinnest margin imaginable. For what can be thinner than the non-existent skin on our teeth?

Writers have been using the expression with this meaning for the longest time. Mark Twain remarked in his book Roughing It, "I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth." And Thorton Wilder wrote a Pulitzer-Prize winning play entitled, you guessed it, The Skin of Our Teeth.

In today's English Bibles, the sense of having narrowly escape is now in the verse. The ESV version of Job 19:20 reads:

My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh,
and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth.

The footnotes in the ESV Study Bible do note that modern readers think of the phrase as an idiomatic expression for just barely accomplishing or avoiding something. That meaning certainly fits the verse but readers get a deeper dimension when they realise the original meaning.

How interesting that the Hebrew language has contributed such a quaint expression to the English language.

Typhoon and its Cantonese origins

I had always thought typhoon was a Japanese word. But my father-in-law corrected me today. He said that the word was actually Chinese in origin. Specifically, its roots are from the Cantonese words for "big wind", i.e., dai fung. I was pretty impressed with that. I checked the Merriam-Webster and it also adds that there are etymological roots with a similar Arabic word tūfān (which means hurricane) and also from the Greek word typhōn (which means violent storm). Somehow, I think that's a stretch because typhoons are used only in reference to storms on Asia Pacfic's coast.

Allan Metcalf, in his book, "The World in so Many Words", points out that because of the British presence in Hong Kong for 150 years, the English language has absorbed a number of Cantonese words (the dominant Chinese dialect spoken in Hong Kong). He records 1771 as the year that typhoon entered the Engish lexicon. Other Cantonese words that entered the English language include sampan (boat, 1620), tong (secret society, 1883), cheongsam (dress with slit skirt, 1952), and shar-pei (dog, 1975).

Cold shoulder

All of us at one time or another have been given the cold shoulder. This means we've been snubbed by someone or have received intentionally cold or unsympathetic treatment. I've always thought that the phrase literally meant someone's shoulder. But as I learnt today, the shoulder actually refers to the shoulder of an animal.

During the Middle Ages, the shoulder of an animal was the least desirable part for food. This meant that the shoulder was often the piece of meat left over that no one really wanted. Often, beggars would received shoulders of meat that were cold. And among the rich, if you as a guest overstayed your welcome, at the next meal, you would very likely receive a cold shoulder of meat which was a polite hint telling you that it's time for you to hit the road. What an amazing history for such a hurtful phrase.

Sandwich

As one of my kids had a sandwich snack, I asked if they wanted to know the origin of the word sandwich. Loving words like their father, they were eager to hear the story. I told them what I had read a long time ago in a book I had as a kid called Don't You Believe It! by Gyles Brandreth.

According to the author, the story goes that a certain earl was very fond of gambling and he loved it so much that he would often skip meals so he could continue playing cards. Once when he was starving, he ordered his servants to prepare him snack by putting meat between two slices of bread. He wasn't the first person to do this; commoners had been doing to for a long time. But because he was infamous, his name somehow got attached to this form of food. He was the fourth Earl of Sandwich and so the food item became known as a sandwich.

My kids laughed at the story. "You mean if he had been from another town, our food would have had a different name?" one of them quipped.

"Yup," I told them. They laughed harder.

Later, I checked online and managed to find a fascinating article that covered in greater detail about the fourth Earl of Sandwich. I commend that to your reading. You might want to enjoy that article with a tasty snack—a sandwich perhaps?

Scapegoat

I'm always amazed how the Bible, especially the King James Version, has influenced the English language. There are so many phrases, words and idioms who have their direct roots from the KJV. Scapegoat is one such word.

We know scapegoat to mean the person who bears the blame for others. But few of us realise that its primary meaning is a goat upon whose head are symbolically placed the sins of the people after which he is sent into the wilderness in the biblical ceremony for Yom Kippur. (From the Merriam-Webster.)

The idea of the scapegoat is from Atonement ceremony in Leviticus 16:7-10 (KJV):
And he [Aaron, the high priest] shall take the two goats, and present them before the LORD at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat. And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the LORD's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering. But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

The goat that gets away (the escape goat or scapegoat) is a visual aid for the people of Israel that their sin will cut them off from God. So the scapegoat, bearing the people's sin had to be driven away, outside the camp.

From this act, we get out modern scapegoat, someone who takes the blame for others.