You Can't Always Trust the National Geographic

      It is true, you cannot always trust what you read in magazines, even a magazine like National Geographic. I was sitting at a tire place, getting a nail removed from one of my tires, and reading an old magazine because they featured an article on Greenland. In the article was a tidbit that caught my eye: the expression 'on the lam' comes from the Vikings because it is derived from their verb 'lemja'. Being the word-nerd that I am, I look it up as soon as I get home.
      Whoever authored this is wrong. The Oxford Dictionary states that it is of 20th century coinage and origins are unknown. It follows 'lam' in the dictionary which does mean 'thrash, hit with a stick ' from the ON lemja which means to 'beat so as to lame' but there is an asterisk in front of the colloquialism which makes it seem to follow the 'beating' word. A quick check at the Zoega Old Norse dictionary reveals that lemja means 'beating' and not 'fleeing' or 'running'. A good and knowledgeable proof reader would have caught that. I am offering my services. :-) (for a fee, of course)

Another quick look in the Brewer's Guide to Phrase and Fable for thoroughness adds nothing because the expression is not even listed, leading me to think 'on the lam' might be an Americanism.

The 'N' Word

     I just heard that Mississippi has finally filed the paperwork to properly ratify the 13th Amendment which abolishes slavery. They ratified the amendment in 1995 but failed to file the proper paperwork making slavery no longer legal. In honour of that, I decided to write a blog entry I had been thinking about for a while.
      As a Latinist, there is no mystery to me where the 'n' word comes from: it comes from the Latin word 'niger' an adjective meaning 'black' but this word has become so powerful that, like the name of Voldemort or cancer, it cannot be spoken aloud. It is curious to me how it came to be used for African slaves when the world was becoming increasingly less fluent in Latin and it must be certain that the men engaged in slavery did not have a university education steeped in the Classics.

      However this is the adjective fully declined:

   singular       masculine           feminine      neuter
                     
  nominative    niger                   nigra           nigrum
  genitive         nigri                    nigrae         nigri
  dative            nigro                   nigrae         nigro
  objective       nigrum                nigram        nigrum
  ablative         nigro                   nigra           nigro

       Although this is an adjective, one did not have to attach a word meaning 'man' because Latin adjectives can stand alone and, because they decline, you can infer what the noun they are modifying is from the context. It is called a 'substantive'. What is fascinating to me is that only the masculine form was adopted, although clearly someone was using a Latin word, and female slaves were called using a feminized masculine word and it seems the nominative forms were preserved as well as the ablative/dative forms. Why not the objective form since it would be the object of the verb? And the masculine, genitive singular is the same form as the masculine nominative plural but it was never used for multiple slaves. Why was that never used? The answer must be that it was not Latin but rather Spanish that was applied to these poor souls.
       A quick glance at the Wikipedia article on Colonial slavery in America reveals that, indeed, the early slavers were Spanish. The article reveals the astonishing fact that only 5% of the slaves taken from Africa were taken to America. The majority went to Spanish colonies in Brazil and the Caribbean, where the mortality was so high, they needed constant replenishing of numbers. The first African slaves were brought to America as early as 1619 to Virginia by the Dutch, who had taken them from a captured Spanish ship. The Spanish had the slaves baptized before being shipped to make the enslavement 'legal' which seems rather odd since one of the good things about the Catholic Church is that it frowned upon slavery and Spain was very Catholic nation. Remember the Spanish Inquisition.
       At least these early slaves were treated as indentured servants in Virginia and were freed after a stated period of time. It appears the difficulty of finding labor to work the fields and plantations made this evil an attractive proposal and it was revisited later.
       One has to wonder why the English adopted the Spanish word rather than use the English words 'black man' but English does not decline and does not commonly substantiate adjectives. If you call someone a 'man' then you have to recognize that what you are doing is wrong by every code of ethics that you profess to believe in. So, you have to dehumanize them and call them something else.
       All this made me wonder where the word 'black' came from since it is clearly not related to the Latin word and the modern German word is 'schwartz'. The French word for black is 'noir' and is supposed to be related to Latin, having lost the 'g' by the 11th century. The Old English word for 'black'  is 'blæc' but I have no etymology for it but all this is an aside and does not solve the conundrum.
       In conclusion, it is always worth taking a look in the dictionary. The Oxford Concise states the nominative form came from the French, which is odd because they dropped the 'g' so long ago, but makes sense because the displaced Acadians in Louisiana were very enthusiastic slave owners. And the  ablative form came from the Spanish. There you have it: that is why there are two forms for the word.

Ashes to Ashes

...and dust to dust.... Most of you would be able to finish this line. Usually there is a little poem that I read on a bathroom wall which pops into my head. It tells what would happen to male appendages if there were no women.
      Sometimes, to practice my Latin, I read the Vulgate Bible. Last week my eye fell on Genesis 3:1:19 "In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.""By the sweat on your face you will eat bread, until you return to the earth from which you have been taken: because you are dust and you will return to dust." Indeed Adam means 'man' or 'humankind' but it is said to have derived from adameh, 'earth, dirt' or 'dust'. This fact was used to full effect by Phillip Pullman in his Golden Compass series as 'dust' was a creative and animating force that was draining away from the worlds into Chaos. In theory, we are made of stardust.
     It is times like these that I wish I had stuck to my Ancient Greek studies because I cannot read Greek (or Hebrew). It would be nice to see what the original phrase in the Old Testament had been. Obviously it had been translated into Greek from Hebrew and then into Latin and, often as we have seen in the telephone game, things get lost along the way. However the Hebrew word that has been translated as 'dust' is aphar, which means (from Strong's Hebrew) 'dry loose earth, material of human body, surface of ground, powder of anything pulverized, debris, earth of the grave, mortar, iron ore, material of earth'.
      I suppose many generations of very learned people have seen no reason to change the translation from dust but I have to wonder if 'iron ore' would be better because ore is transformed into the better and more useful iron and iron is such a strong component of our blood. However the choice reflects funerary practices of the time.
      We get 'pulverized' from 'pulvis', which means 'dust' but also specifically 'dust from a destruction (and applied esp. to the remains of a dead body or meton. to a departed spirit)'(Oxford Latin Dictionary). Already in classical Roman times, there was a verb pulvo derived from the noun. Ancient peoples often sprinkled ashes and/or dust over the dead. Antigone was buried alive as punishment for defying her king in sprinkling a handful of dust over her dead brother so that his spirit could depart. Many pre-Christian cultures practiced cremation, hence the ashes, although I suspect cremation occurred primarily where wood was plentiful.
     Most modern English words are derived from French and therefore Latin, as French displaced English as the language of the kings following 1066 a.d., but some few common English words survived and 'dust' is one of them, unchanged by time. 'Dust' it was in the tenth century and 'dust' it is in medieval Icelandic, Old Frisian, Middle High German, according to Bosworth-Toller. 'Pulverized' does sound better for utter destruction than 'having being dusted'.

The End of Days

The Apocalypse:

It's not what you think

         When people are not talking about Christmas, they have been talking about

the Mayan apocalypse or 'end of days'. Apocalypse does not actually mean some large catastrophic doomsday scenario.

         Apocalypsis is the last book in the Catholic canon, the Biblia Sacra Vulgata. It is a loan word from the Greek since the New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek, the language that was commonly spoken around the Mediterranean in the early centuries of the Common Era. It is the name of book containing the revelations attributed to Saint John the Apostle (if that is indeed his name), during his exile by Domitian on the island of Patmos. It is accurately translated in the King James version of the Bible as Revelations because that is what apocalypse means: revelations or an 'uncovering'.

         Doomsday could be a suitable substitute as a term because it is derived from the Anglo-Saxon 'domes dæg' or 'day of judgement'. The Mayan end of days should really be called Judgement Day because that is the day in which all the guilty will be judged and time will end in the Bible. So......, the Terminator got it right and, this time, he won't be back.

         Finally, the calendar most likely ends on December 21 because that is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the Mayans were in Mexico. I wonder how short their days can possibly be or how cold but they are definitely in the north. Most pre-Christian cultures had some kind of winter solstice celebration to mourn the death of the sun and to hopefully bring it back. Therefore, the calendar ends on this day because it is 'year's end' for a culture that worshipped a solar deity. There is no mystery but some kind of revelation would be awesome. 

The Other 'F' Word: Fart

     One thing that people often find more fascinating than where common phrases and words come is where the naughty words or 'not polite' words come from. After all, 'passing wind' can be referred to by its medical name (another 'f' word) flatulence, which comes from the Latin (as do many medical terms when they are not derived from Greek) flatulentus(a slow wind?) by way of the French or by its common name 'fart'.
      Flatus, the Roman word , is a masculine noun meaning blowing or wind and flatus emittere means sending out wind or farting (which appears in Suetonius as a synonym to crepitus ventris.). However the Romans also had another name for farting: the verb pedo, pedere, pepedi and the part participle, which also could be used as a noun for the thing, peditum. (which the French use commonly, peter)  Clearly the word 'fart' did not come from the Romans.
     As modern German has a similar sounding equivalent 'furz' which sounds like 'farts', our word must be derived from the Germanic Old English. Indeed, one glance at the Oxford English Dictionary shows the OE equivalent is 'feortan' and the earliest reference to it is as 'feorþing' in Aelfric's Glossary, which is very difficult to find in its entirety. I have been unable to find out why Aelfric included it in his glossary which he glossed as 'pedatio' but Bosworth Toller defined as 'crepitus ventris', due to Suetonius, which is idiomatic as 'fart' for the Romans, according to the Oxford Latin Dictionary (and Suetonius). My, they had a lot of words for this! Crepitus ventris is loosely 'a clattering, groaning or noise of the belly'. I would really love to see Aelfric's Glossary to see if he really wrote 'pedatio' because Lewis and Short does not contain this word and the Oxford Latin Dictionary does not either. So, it was not a Roman word, they used peditum, but it could have been a regional Medieval variant.
     The Cleasby-Vigfussun Old Icelandic Dictionary has a related word in it because you know the Vikings would have a word for fart and it is 'fretr' a masculine noun and a verb 'freta'. It also includes a nice compound for a vagabond: fret-karl, fart-man.
     I have wind on my mind since I am sitting here awaiting the arrival or effects of Hurricane Sandy.

Vomitrocious

I can't let the entire month of August go by without one post so here it is:

I was watching old Seinfeld episodes and, in one of these, the question was asked 'Where does the word 'puke' come from?' Clearly I am not the only one who has idle wonderings about such things. The word appears in print as a verb at the earliest in 1601 in P. Holland's translation of Pliny's World History but the noun appears in print in 1612. Judging by the numerous 17th century citations, it was in common use. So the question is - What is the Middle English or Old English, Norman French or even Old Norse word that preceded it? Or is it a loanword from some other language? The OED conjectures that it may be related to the Dutch verb spugen or to spit or vomit or possibly German spucken to spew.

Other etymologies list Shakespeare as the inventor of the word since it appears in As You Like It and I like the idea since he did invent many words. (Rather like Dr. Seuss) However, it is uncertain when he wrote the play (estimated circa 1600) and it made its way into too many diverse publications around that for it to have been his recent coinage.

There is a supposedly unrelated other noun 'puke' (now obsolete) for a type of cloth and is related to a Middle Dutch word puuc, puyc, puc. It is also a color used on woollen goods- a very deep bluish black or dark brown color. It is not related to puce. I am not a PhD so my opinion probably means nothing to the sort of people who have one but I am thinking the color may be where the name for vomit came from. I have seen some dark brown stuff and bluish black. Puke comes in many colors and textures but I think the bumpiness of woolens rather suits it for texture. Just a thought.

The Honey Moon

I was watching a television show called "Museum Secrets" that showed some of the permanent collection from the Neues Museum in Berlin. My interest was piqued by the 'Berlin Gold Hat' pictured here, courtesy of Wiki Commons. The commentator stated that the hat was a solar/lunar calendar and was used in honey production to know when the solstice in June was near. It was stated that bees were affected by the full moon in June, this was when the hive would have maximum honey and this is why marriages are followed by the 'honey-moon' - maximum sweetness.

This put several questions in my mind which are challenging to resolve in a few hours of casual research.

Is the June full moon actually called the 'honey moon'? In some cultures, yes.

The solstice celebration is also the feast of St. John the Baptist. In spite of what some websites say, he is not the patron saint of bees. St. Ambrose is because of a story in the Legenda Aurea about a swarm of bees and that he also compared the church to a hive of bees.

When did people start having honeymoon trips? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of 'honeymoon' as the post marriage bliss was in 1546 in J. Heywood's book on proverbs in the English tongue and refers to the moon that is full but it doomed to wane like people's affections. The honeymoon did not come into style until the late 18th or early 19th century. Wikipedia is my source for saying that, as the British moved into India, the Indian custom of a post-marriage bridal tour became the fashion. There are no references to a honeymoon tour before 1821 in the OED.

The word 'honey' comes from the Germanic languages and is hunig or hunæg in Old English. There is no honey-month or honey-moon in the Anglo Saxon dictionaries. June was called Liða by the Venerable Bede.

From Bulletin 489, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, "It is possible that the custom of killing the bees and taking the honey in the full moon in June may result in a smaller amount being secured that if the killing were left until gathering had ceased in the fall."

When did it become the custom to have marriages in June? I am not sure. It is likely a modern invention because people got married any old time although, in the Middle Ages, high feasts seemed like a favorite time. As well, many people did not actually get formally married by a priest because many of the small villages lacked priests.

So you see, it is complicated. And so, I shall leave this with a quote from Brewer's Guide to Phrase and Fable: "a holiday spent together by a newly married couple. The word was originally used for the first month of marriage, although 'moon' does not mean the 'month' here, as sometimes supposed. The reference is to the moon as sweetness and is ironic, for no sooner is it full than it begins to wane." Indeed.

Greek Squirrels

I took a trip to the library and found that the entries in the Dictionary of Old English do not contain etymologies. Darn and double darn. But, I spoke to someone from the project who said that Cleasby and Vigfusson were wrong about the Germanic squirrel being a corruption of the Greek term.

Then I decided to see if the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for the Middle English 'aquerne', which it does. It was last used in print in 1200 C.E.. The entry also states that the first element of the word is identified with 'oak' but that the origin of the word is uncertain. So that is that - our best guess is Anatoly Liberman's - and there were no Greek squirrels running around in migration period Germany.