In one recent session of the adult Sunday school class I teach at a local church, I made the mistake of asserting that “few things in life are more interesting than etymology.”
Now I meant to say “few things in language”; but I was distracted and misspoke while looking up a Bible-word online to aid our discussion. After I tried to walk this back by saying I hadn’t meant to seem like a geek or a nerd, at least one church-member was heard to suggest that I did not merely “seem” like that; I actually was one. And probably always had been.
Ouch.
So I will herewith attempt to wear that with honor. For this column (and likely others in the future), Webb’s “Weird Words” enters the realm of etymology. A field that seeks the origin of words, it is sometimes confused with “entomology,” the study of bugs — which I suppose is only a bit less nerdy and geeky.
As a preliminary, I should point out that spelling, pronunciation and meaning can all change radically over hundreds of years, and it’s often fascinating to trace how we got from the one-time origin to our modern usage.
Here are five examples:
Bikini – Possibly my all-time favorite derivation, this does not come from the Latin prefix “bi,” meaning “two” — though that would make sense, since it’s exactly what the garment did with female swim apparel. Nope: This word is actually an atoll in the South Pacific (similarly named isles include Fiji and Tahiti, for example). On the remote and uninhabited Bikini, the American military conducted numerous atomic-bomb tests around the same time the two-piece bathing-suit appeared. According to more than one dictionary, the latter was named for the former because of its “explosive effect on the viewer.”
Boom!
Disaster “Aster,” with its related form “astr(o),” is a Greek prefix meaning “star.” From these we get such words as astronaut, asteroid, asterisk, astronomy, the star-shaped flower called an “aster” — and yes, “disaster.” Adding the negative prefix “dis” (as in “disagree,” “dissent,” etc.), it reflects a still-widespread belief that the heavens affect our daily lives; hence that other “astr” word, “astrology.”
So “disaster” literally means: “bad stars.” As a famous instance, see Hamlet, Act 1, where Horatio cites grim heavenly omens — including “disasters in the sun.”
Curfew – From the Old French “couvrefew,” literally “cover the fire” — which is, of course, exactly what folks used to do at the end of the day.
Galaxy – This common English term contains the well-known Latin base “lac(t),” as in lactose and lactation. (Like many age-old words, it is slightly re-spelled; but note how the “x” changes to a “ct” in the adjective “galactic.”) Of course the original unit means “milk,” and reflects the appearance of these celestial phenomena. So “Milky Way Galaxy” is actually redundant!
Goodbye – Ever wonder why this word has an “e” on the end? Or maybe you assumed it’s related to “good” — as in “Have a good day”? In truth, “goodbye” is a shortening of the still-familiar “God be with you,” which once ended with the old-style “ye” instead of “you.” Again, see Hamlet, Act 2: “God b’ wi’ ye.”
And just to finish up by owning my new labels:
The first documented occurrence of nerd occurs in Dr. Seuss’s 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, where it describes another of that author’s oddball creatures. Its informal use for a boring, awkward or obsessive person dates to a year later and is probably a slang coinage unrelated to the good Doctor’s critter.
The original and rather gross meaning of geek — a circus performer who bites off the heads of live animals — has now all but disappeared, though some will recognize it from the recent period movie Nightmare Alley. In an instance of what dictionary.com identifies as “semantic drift,” it now means a similarly marginalized group — though not always in a bad way…
Right?
