Did you know that the word ingenious is related to engine? That vermilion is spelled with only one “L” and thus not tied to million — but rather to worm and vermicelli? Or that a saucer is so named because it once commonly held — well, sauce!
We’re in the realm of etymology, or “word origins” — a field that sounds boring but is actually intriguing if you approach it right.
As the first instance in this week’s “Weird Words” column, let’s take buff, whose origin is certainly one of the weirdest.
As laid out in the wonderful Online Etymology Dictionary, the word has many meanings; but even the more recent sense of fan or enthusiast ultimately comes from buffalo — in a fairly convoluted fashion:
Buff was originally a thick, soft leather, with the term being a shortened form of the animal from which it was obtained. The word then came to indicate the color of this material — a light brown-yellow, which many decades ago was the hue of uniforms worn by New York City’s volunteer firemen. This group was in turn so fond of attending and combating conflagrations that they got the nickname “Buffs” — and so the word eventually came to mean anyone who was especially devoted to something.
Whew!
Engine, by contrast, is somewhat simpler: Again, calling on the Online Etymology Dictionary, this originally referred to skill or craft in warfare, particularly as embodied by any device used for combat (something as simple as a battering ram, for example).
Its ultimate source is the common Latin base gen, meaning to be born and thus related to anything innate, essential or “possessed from birth” (genetic, for example). An “engine” shows skill and craft the moment it appears — and that goes double, I guess, for someone who’s ingenious. (Middle English also had enginous and even engineful — which we’re probably now better off without!)
Even simpler is nausea: As covered recently on Jeopardy!, it is related to seagoing words like nautical, naval and even astronaut (literally, “star-sailor”). Since ocean travel often makes folks queasy, we call that nausea.
Seasickness is likewise known as mal de mer, a French phrase employing the common base mal, meaning “bad,” and mer, meaning “sea” (as in mermaid and marine).
And pen is among this week’s clearest etymologies. It is, quite simply, an adaptation of the French word pene, meaning quill or feather — from which pens were once made. It is distantly related to the feather-shaped pennant and, keeping in mind the long, thin, pointy shape, possibly also connected to pin.
As for vermilion, that’s a bit more counterintuitive: The word itself describes a red or “cinnabar” color, especially when used as a dye; but in olden days, such bright dyes were hard to come by — often obtained by crushing some naturally occurring object or substance. Purple, for instance, originally came from ground-up sea urchins or crushed Mediterranean murex shells. (In this way, its relative rarity led to the use of that color for indicating royalty in ancient times.)
Vermilion, as you may have guessed, was once derived by crushing insect larvae; these in turn resembled worms — or, in Latin, vermis, from which we also get vermicelli (worm-like pasta), vermicide and even vermin.
And on a final note: Since I mentioned the Mediterranean Sea — that’s another of my favorite etymologies. Medi is an extremely common Latin base meaning “middle” (as in median, medium, mediocre and dozens of other words). And as mentioned in last week’s column, terr is a similarly popular Latin base; meaning earth, it is found in such terms as terrain, subterranean, extraterrestrial and, yes, Mediterranean — which, being largely landlocked, literally means “sea in the middle of the earth.”
More soon.
