The Universe of Discourse

Etymology roundup 2024-02

The Recurse Center Zulip chat now has an Etymology channel, courtesy of Jesse Chen, so I have been posting whenever I run into something interesting. This is a summary of some of my recent discoveries. Everything in this article is, to the best of my knowledge, accurate. That is, there are no intentional falsehoods.

Baba ghanouj

I tracked down the meaning of (Arabic) baba ghanouj. It was not what I would have guessed.

Well, sort of. Baba is “father” just like in every language. I had thought of this and dismissed it as unlikely. (What is the connection with eggplants?) But that is what it is.

And ghanouj is …
“coquetry”.

So it's the father of coquetry.

Very mysterious.

Eggnog

Toph asked me if “nog” appeared in any word other than “eggnog”. Is there lemonnog or baconnog? I had looked this up before but couldn't remember what it was except that it was some obsolete word for some sort of drink.

“Nog” is an old Norfolk (England) term for a kind of strong beer which was an ingredient in the original recipe, sometime in the late 17th or early 18th century.

I think modern recipes don't usually include beer.

Wow

“Wow!” appears to be an 18th-century borrowing from an indigenous American language, because most of its early appearances are quotes from indigenous Americans. It is attested in standard English from 1766, spelled “waugh!”, and in Scots English from 1788, spelled “vow!”

Riddles

Katara asked me for examples of words in English like “bear” where there are two completely unrelated meanings. (The word bear like to bear fruit, bear children, or bear a burden is not in any way related to the big brown animal with claws.)

There are a zillion examples of this. They're easy to find in a paper dictionary: you just go down the margin looking for a superscript. When you see “bear¹” and “bear²”, you know you've found an example.

The example I always think of first is “venery” because long, long ago Jed Hartman pointed it out to me: venery can mean stuff pertaining to hunting (it is akin to “venison”) and it can also mean stuff pertaining to sex (akin to “venereal”) and the fact that these two words are spelled the same is a complete coincidence.

Jed said “I bet this is a really rare phenomenon” so I harassed him for the next several years by emailing him examples whenever I happened to think of it.

Anyway, I found an excellent example for Katara that is less obscure than “venery”: “riddle” (like a puzzling question) has nothing to do with when things are riddled with errors. It's a complete coincidence.

The “bear” / “bear” example is a nice simple one, everyone understands it right away. When I was studying Korean I asked my tutor an etymology question, something like whether the “eun” in eunhaeng 은행, “bank”, was the same word as “eun” 은 which means “silver”. He didn't understand the question at first: what did I mean, “is it the same word”?

I gave the bear / bear example, and said that to bear fruit and to bear children are the same word, but the animal with claws is a different word, and just a coincidence that it is spelled the same way. Then he understood what I meant.

(Korean eunhaeng 은행 is a Chinese loanword, from 銀行. 銀 is indeed the word for silver, and 行 is a business-happening-place.)

Right and left

The right arm is the "right" arm because, being the one that is (normally) stronger and more adept, it is the right one to use for most jobs.

But if you ignore the right arm, there is only one left, so that is the "left" arm.

This sounds like a joke, but I looked it up and it isn't.

Leave and left

"Left" is the past tense passive of "leave". As in, I leave the room, I left the room, when I left the room I left my wallet there, my wallet was left, etc.

(As noted above, this is also where we get the left side.)

There are two other words "leave" in English. Leaves like the green things on trees are not related to leaving a room.

(Except I was once at a talk by J.H. Conway in which he was explaining some sort of tree algorithm in which certain nodes were deleted and he called the remaining ones "leaves" because they were the ones that were left. Conway was like that.)

The other "leave" is the one that means "permission" as in "by your leave…". This is the leave we find in "sick leave" or "shore leave". They are not related to the fact that you have left on leave, that is a coincidence.

Normal norms

Latin norma is a carpenter's square, for making sure that things are at right angles to one another.

So something that is normal is something that is aligned the way things are supposed to be aligned, that is to say at right angles. And a norm is a rule or convention or standard that says how things ought to line up.

In mathematics and physics we have terms like “normal vector”, “normal forces” and the like, which means that vectors or forces are at right angles to something. This is puzzling if you think of “normal” as “conventional” or “ordinary” but becomes obvious if you remember the carpenter's square.

In contrast, mathematical “normal forms” have nothing to do with right angles, they are conventional or standard forms. “Normal subgroups” are subgroups that behave properly, the way subgroups ought to.

The names Norman and Norma are not related to this. They are related to the surname Norman which means a person from Normandy. Normandy is so-called because it was inhabited by Vikings (‘northmen’) starting from the 9th century.

Hydrogen and oxygen

Jesse Chen observed that hydrogen means “water-forming”, because when you burn it you get water.

A lot of element names are like this. Oxygen is oxy- (“sharp” or “sour”) because it makes acids, or was thought to make acids. In German the analogous calque is “sauerstoff”.

Nitrogen makes nitre, which is an old name for saltpetre (potassium nitrate). German for nitre seems to be salpeter which doesn't work as well with -stoff.

The halogen gases are ‘salt-making’. (Greek for salt is hals.) Chlorine, for example, is a component of table salt, which is sodium chloride.

In Zulip I added that The capital of Denmark, Copenha-gen, is so-called because in the 11th century is was a major site for the production of koepenha, a Germanic term for a lye compound, used in leather tanning processes, produced from bull dung. I was somewhat ashamed when someone believed this lie despite my mention of bull dung.

Spas, baths, and coaches

Spas (like wellness spa or day spa) are named for the town of Spa, Belgium, which has been famous for its cold mineral springs for thousands of years!

(The town of Bath England is named for its baths, not the other way around.)

The coach is named for the town of Kocs (pronounced “coach”), Hungary, where it was invented. This sounds like something I would make up to prank the kids, but it is not.

Spanish churches

“Iglesia” is Spanish for “church”, and you see it as a surname in Spanish as in English. (I guess, like “Church”, originally the name of someone who lived near a church).

Thinking on this, I realized: “iglesia” is akin to English “ecclesiastic”.

They're both from ἐκκλησία which is an assembly or congregation.

The mysterious Swedish hedgehog

In German, a hedgehog is “Igel”. This is a very ancient word, and several other Germanic languages have similar words. For example, in Frisian it's “ychel”.

In Swedish, “igel” means leech. The hedgehog is “igelkott”.

I tried to find out what -kott was about. “kotte” is a pinecone and may be so-called because “kott” originally meant some rounded object, so igelkott would mean the round igel rather than the blood igel, which is sometimes called blodigel in Swedish.

I was not able to find any other words in Swedish with this sense of -kott. There were some obviously unrelated words like bojkott (“boycott”). And there are a great many Swedish words that end in -skott, which is also unrelated. It means “tail”. For example, the grip of a handgun is revolverskott.

[ Addendum: Gustaf Erikson advises me that I have misunderstood ‑skott; see below. ]

Bonus hedgehog weirdness: In Michael Moorcock's Elric books, Elric's brother is named “Yyrkoon”. The Middle English for a hedgehog is “yrchoun” (variously spelled). Was Moorcock thinking of this? The -ch- in “yrchoun” is /t͡ʃ/ though, which doesn't match the stop consonant in “Yyrkoon”. Also which makes clear that “yrchoun” is just a variant spelling of “urchin”. (Compare “sea urchin”, which is a sea hedgehog. Or compare “street urchin”, a small round bristly person who scuttles about in the gutter.)

In Italian a hedgehog is riccio, which I think is also used as a nickname for a curly-haired or bristly-haired person.

Slobs and schlubs

These are not related. Schlub is originally Polish, coming to English via (obviously!) Yiddish. But slob is Irish.

-euse vs. -ice

I tried to guess the French word for a female chiropractor. I guessed “chiropracteuse" by analogy with masseur, masseuse, but I was wrong. It is chiropractrice.

The '‑ice' suffix was clearly descended from the Latin '‑ix' suffix, but I had to look up ‘‑euse’. It's also from a Latin suffix, this time from ‘‑osa’.

Jot

When you jot something down on a notepad, the “jot” is from Greek iota, which is the name of the small, simple letter ι that is easily jotted.

Bonus: This is also the jot that is meant by someone who says “not a jot or a tittle”, for example Matthew 5:18 (KJV):

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

A tittle is the dot above the lowercase ‘i’ or ‘j’. The NIV translates this as “not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen”, which I award an A-plus for translation.

Vilifying villains

I read something that suggested that these were cognate, but they are not.

“Vilify” is from Latin vīlificō which means to vilify. It is a compound of vīlis (of low value or worthless, I suppose the source of “vile”) and faciō (to make, as in “factory” and “manufacture”.)

A villain, on the other hand, was originally just a peasant or serf; that is, a person who lives in a village. “Village” is akin to Latin villa, which originally meant a plantation.

Döner kebab

I had always assumed that “Döner” and its “ö” were German, but they are not, at least not originally. “Döner kebab” is the original Turkish name of the dish, right down to the diaresis on the ‘ö’, which is the normal Turkish spelling; Turkish has an ‘ö’ also. Döner is the Turkish word for a turning-around-thing, because döner kebab meat roasts on a vertical spit from which it is sliced off as needed.

“Döner” was also used in Greek as a loanword but at some point the Greeks decided to use the native Greek word gyro, also a turning-around-thing, instead. Greek is full of Turkish loanwords. (Ottoman Empire, yo.)

“Shawarma”, another variation on the turning-around-vertical-spit dish, is from a different Ottoman Turkish word for a turning-around thing, this time چویرمه (çevirme).

The Armenian word for shawarma is also shawarma, but despite Armenian being full of Turkish loanwords, this isn't one. They got it from Russian.

Everyone loves that turning-on-a-vertical-spit dish. Lebanese immigrants brought it to Mexico, where it is served in tacos with pineapple and called tacos al pastor (“shepherd style”). I do not know why the Mexicans think that Lebanese turning-around-meat plus pineapples adds up to shepherds. I suppose it must be because the meat is traditionally lamb.

Roll call

To roll is to turn over with a circular motion. This motion might wind a long strip of paper into a roll, or it might roll something into a flat sheet, as with a rolling pin. After rolling out the flat sheet you could then roll it up into a roll.

Dinner rolls are made by rolling up a wad of bread dough.

When you call the roll, it is because you are reading a list of names off a roll of paper.

Theatrical roles are from French rôle which seems to have something to do with rolls but I am not sure what. Maybe because the cast list is a roll (as in roll call).

Wombats and numbats

Both of these are Australian animals. Today it occurred to me to wonder: are the words related? Is -bat a productive morpheme, maybe a generic animal suffix in some Australian language?

The answer is no! The two words are from different (although distantly related) languages. Wombat is from Dharug, a language of the Sydney area. Numbat is from the Nyungar language, spoken on the other end of the continent.

Addendum

Gustaf Erikson advises me that I have misunderstood ‑skott. It is akin to English shoot, and means something that springs forth suddenly, like little green shoots in springtime, or like the shooting of an arrow. In the former sense, it can mean a tail or a sticking-out thing more generally. But in revolverskott is it the latter sense, the firing of a revolver.

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Compass points in Czech

Over the weekend a Gentle Reader sent me an anecdote about getting lost in a Czech zoo. He had a map with a compass rose, and the points of the compass were labeled SVZJ. Gentle Reader expected that S and V were south and west, as they are in many European languages. (For example, Danish has syd and vest; English has “south” and “vvest” — sorry, “west”.

Unfortunately in Czech, S and V are sever, “north”, and východ, “east”. Oops.

A while back I was thinking about the names of the cardinal directions in Catalán because I was looking at a Catalán map of the Sagrada Família, and observed that the Catalán word for east, llevant is a form of _llevar, which literally means “to rise”, because the east is where the sun rises. (Llevar is from Latin levāre and is akin to words like “levity” and “levitate”.) Similarly the Latin word for “east” is oriēns, from orior, to get up or to arise.

I looked into the Czech a little more and learned that východ, “east”, is also the Czech word for “exit”:

“Aha,” I said. “They use východ for “east” not because that's where the sun comes up but because that's where it enters…”

“…”

“Uh…”

No. Entrance is not exit. Východ is exit. Entrance is vchod.

I dunno, man. I love the Czechs, but this is a little messed up.

Addenda

• I think I recall that sever, “north”, is thought to be maybe akin to “shower”, since the north is whence the cold rains come, but maybe I made that up.

  • Late update: Nope, I just found that I mentioned the same thing in this earlier article about compass directions. ]

• An earlier version of this article had an error about the Catalán. Thanks to Alex Corcoles for pointing this out.

• I never mentioned the other Czech compass points. They are: sever, north; východ, east, západ, west, jih, south. Východ seems to be related to Russian восто́к (/vostók/) but I'm not sure how.

• 20231220: A Gentle Reader asked about the pronunciation of vchod as compared with východ. Is it some unpronounceable Czechism? Nope! I was very pleased with the analogous example I found: the difference is no harder to hear or to say than the difference between “climb” and “keylime”.

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Cats in Romance languages

We used to have a cat named Chase. To be respectful we would sometimes refer to him as “Mr. Cat”. And sometimes I amused myself by calling him “Señor Gato”.

Yesterday I got to wondering: Where did Spanish get “gato”, which certainly sounds like “cat”, when the Latin is fēles or fēlis (like in “feline’)? And similarly French has chat.

Well, the real question is, where did Latin get fēles? Because Latin also has cattus, which I think sounds like a joke. You're in Latin class, and you're asked to translate cat, but you haven't done your homework, so what do you say? “Uhhhh… ‘cattus’?”

But cattus is postclassical Latin, replacing the original word fēles no more than about 1500 years ago. The word seems to have wandered all over Europe and Western Asia and maybe North Africa, borrowed from one language into another, and its history is thoroughly mixed up. Nobody is sure where it came from originally, beyond “something Germanic”. The OED description of cat runs to 600 words and shrugs its shoulders.

I learned recently that such words (like brinjal, the eggplant) are called Wanderworts, wandering words.

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Portuguese food words in Asia

The other day I was looking into vindaloo curry and was surprised to learn that the word “vindaloo” is originally Portuguese vin d'alho, a wine and garlic sauce. Amazing.

In Japanese, squashes are called kabocha. (In English this refers to a specific type of squash associated with Japan, but in Japanese it's more generic.) Kabocha is from Portuguese again. The Portuguese introduced squashes to Japan via Cambodia, which in Portuguese is Camboja.

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Water, polo, and water polo in Russian

I recently learned January First-of-May's favorite Russian anagrams:

• австралопитек (/avstralopitek/, “Australopithecus”)
• ватерполистка (/vaterpolistka/. ”Female water-polo player”)

Looking into this further, I learned that there appear to be two words in Russian for water polo. Ватерполо (/vaterpolo/) is obviously an English loanword. But Во́дное по́ло (/vódnoye pólo/) is native Russian; вода́ /vodá/ is water.

(Incidentally во́дка /vódka/ is the diminutive of вода́, it's the smaller and more adorable version of water. I feel like this one etymology encapsulates a great deal of the Russian national character.)

I am not sure where Russian got the word по́ло for polo. The English word is borrowed from Tibetan པོ་ལོ /polo/, meaning “ball”. Russian might have gotten it directly from Tibetan, or (more likely) via English. But here's a twist: The Tibetan word is itself a borrowing of the English word “ball”!

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Compass directions in Catalan

Looking over a plan of the Sagrada Família Sunday, I discovered that the names of the cardinal directions are interesting.

• Nord (north). Okay, this is straightforward. It's borrowed from French, which for some reason seems to have borrowed from English.

• Llevant (east). This one is fun. As in Spanish, llevar is “to rise”, from Latin levāre which also gives us “levity” and “levitate”. Llevant is the east, where the sun rises.

  This is also the source of the English name “Levant” for the lands to the east, in the Eastern Mediterranean. I enjoy the way this is analogous to the use of the word “Orient” for the lands even farther to the east: Latin orior is “to rise” or “to get up”. To orient a map is to turn it so that the correct (east) side is at the top, and to orient yourself is (originally) to figure out which way is east.

• Migdia (south). The sun again. Migdia is analogous to “midday”. (Mig is “mid” and dia is “day”.) And indeed, the south is where the sun is at midday.

• Ponent (west). This is ultimately from Latin ponens, which means putting down or setting down. It's where the sun sets.

Bonus unrelated trivia: The Russian word for ‘north’ is се́вер (/séver/), which refers to the cold north wind, and is also the source of the English word “shower”.

[ Addendum 20231203: Compass directions in Czech ]

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Den goede of den kwade?

Recently I encountered the Dutch phrase den goede of den kwade, which means something like "the good [things] or the bad [ones]”, something like the English phrase “for better or for worse”.

Goede is obviously akin to “good”, but what is kwade? It turns out it is the plural of kwaad, which does mean “bad”. But are there any English cognates? I couldn't think of any, which is surprising, because Dutch words usually have one. (English is closely related to Frisian, which is still spoken in the northern Netherlands.)

I rummaged the dictionary and learned that it kwaad is akin to “cud”, the yucky stuff that cows regurgitate. And “cud” is also akin to “quid”, which is a chunk of chewing tobacco that people chew on like a cow's cud. (It is not related to the other quids.)

I was not expecting any of that.

[ Addendum: this article, which I wrote at 3:00 in the morning, is filled with many errors, including some that I would not have made if it had been daytime. Please disbelieve what you have read, and await a correction. ]

[ Addendum 20221229: Although I wrote that attendum the same day, I forgot to publish it. I am now so annoyed that I can't bring myself to write the corrections. I will do it next year. Thanks to all the very patient Dutch people who wrote to correct my many errors. ]

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Minor etymological victory

A few days ago I was thinking about Rosneft (Росне́фть), the Russian national oil company. The “Ros” is obviously short for Rossiya, the Russian word for Russia, but what is neft?

“Hmm,” I wondered. “Maybe it is akin to naphtha?”

Yes! Ultimately both words are from Persian naft, which is the Old Persian word for petroleum. Then the Greeks borrowed it as νάφθα (naphtha) and the Russians, via Turkish. Petroleum is neft in many other languages, not just the ones you would expect like Azeri, Dari, and Turkmen, but also Finnish, French, Hebrew, and Japanese.

Sometimes I guess this stuff and it's just wrong, but it's fun when I get it right. I love puzzles!

[ Addendum 20230208: Tod McQuillin informs me that the Japanese word for petroleum is not related to naphtha; he says it is 石油 /sekiyu/ (literally "rock oil") or オイル /oiru/. The word I was thinking of was ナフサ /nafusa/ which M. McQuillin says means naphtha, not petroleum. (M. McQuillin also supposed that the word is borrowed from English, which I agree seems likely.)

I think my source for the original claim was this list of translations on Wiktionary. It is labeled as a list of words meaning “naturally occurring liquid petroleum”, and includes ナフサ and also entries purporting to be Finish, French, and Hebrew. I did not verify any of the the claims in Wiktionary, which could be many varieties of incorrect. ]

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Stethoscope

Today I realized I'm annoyed by the word "stethoscope". "Scope" is Greek for "look at". The telescope is for looking at far things (τῆλε). The microscope is for looking at small things (μικρός). The endoscope is for looking inside things (ἔνδον). The periscope is for looking around things (περί). The stethoscope is for looking at chests (στῆθος).

Excuse me? The hell it is! Have you ever tried looking through a stethoscope? You can't see for shit.

It should obviously have been called the stethophone.

(It turns out that “stethophone” was adopted as the name for a later elaboration of the stethoscope, shown at right, that can listen to two parts of the chest at the same time, and deliver the sounds to different ears.)

Stethophone illustration is in the public domain, via Wikipedia.

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“Llaves” and other vanishing consonants

Lately I asked:

Where did the ‘c’ go in llave (“key”)? It's from Latin clavīs…

Several readers wrote in with additional examples, and I spent a little while scouring Wiktionary for more. I don't claim that this list is at all complete; I got bored partway through the Wiktionary search results.

I had asked:

Is this the only Latin word that changed ‘cl’ → ‘ll’ as it turned into Spanish, or is there a whole family of them?

and the answer is no, not exactly. It appears that llave and llamar are the only two common examples. But there are many examples of the more general phenomenon that

(consonant) + ‘l’ → ‘ll’

including quite a few examples where the consonant is a ‘p’.

Spanish-related notes

• Eric Roode directed me to this discussion of “Latin CL to Spanish LL” on the WordReference.com language forums. It also contains discussion of analogous transformations in Italian. For example, instead of plānus → llano, Italian has → piano.

• Alex Corcoles advises me that Fundéu often discusses this sort of issue on the Fundéu web site, and also responds to this sort of question on their Twitter account. Fundéu is the Foundation of Emerging Spanish, a collaboration with the Royal Spanish Academy that controls the official Spanish language standard.

• Several readers pointed out that although llave is the key that opens your door, the word for musical keys and for encryption keys is still clave. There is also a musical instrument called the claves, and an associated technical term for the rhythmic role they play. Clavícula (‘clavicle’) has also kept its ‘c’.

• The connection between plicāre and llegar is not at all clear to me. Plicāre means “to fold”; English cognates include ‘complicated’, ‘complex’, ‘duplicate’, ‘two-ply’, and, farther back, ‘plait’. What this has to do with llegar (‘to arrive’) I do not understand. Wiktionary has a long explanation that I did not find convincing.

• The levāre → llevar example is a little weird. Wiktionary says "The shift of an initial 'l' to 'll' is not normal".

• Llaves also appears to be the Spanish name for the curly brace characters { and }. (The square brackets are corchetes.)

Not related to Spanish

• The llover example is a favorite of the Universe of Discourse, because Latin pluere is the source of the English word plover.

• French parler (‘to talk’) and its English descendants ‘parley’ and ‘parlor’ are from Latin parabola.

• Latin plōrāre (‘to cry out’) is obviously the source of English ‘implore’ and ‘deplore’. But less obviously, it is the source of ‘explore’. The original meaning of ‘explore’ was to walk around a hunting ground, yelling to flush out the hidden game.

• English ‘autoclave’ is also derived from clavis, but I do not know why.

• Wiktionary's advanced search has options to order results by “relevance” and last-edited date, but not alphabetically!

Thanks

• Thanks to readers Michael Lugo, Matt Hellige, Leonardo Herrera, Leah Neukirchen, Eric Roode, Brent Yorgey, and Alex Corcoles for hints clues, and references.

[ Addendum: Andrew Rodland informs me that an autoclave is so-called because the steam pressure inside it forces the door lock closed, so that you can't scald yourself when you open it. ]

[ Addendum 20230319: llevar, to rise, is akin to the English place name Levant which refers to the region around Syria, Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine: the “East”. (The Catalán word llevant simply means “east”.) The connection here is that the east is where the sun (and everything else in the sky) rises. We can see the same connection in the way the word “orient”, which also means an eastern region, is from Latin orior, “to rise”. ]

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Quick Spanish etymology question

Where did the ‘c’ go in llave (“key”)? It's from Latin clavīs, like in “clavicle”, “clavichord”, “clavier” and “clef”.

Is this the only Latin word that changed ‘cl’ → ‘ll’ as it turned into Spanish, or is there a whole family of them?

[ Addendum 20220528: There are more examples. ]

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Cathedrals of various sorts

A while back I wrote a shitpost about octahedral cathedrals and in reply Daniel Wagner sent me this shitpost of a cat-hedron:

But that got me thinking: the ‘hedr-’ in “octahedron” (and other -hedrons) is actually the Greek word ἕδρα (/hédra/) for “seat”, and an octahedron is a solid with eight “seats”. The ἕδρα (/hédra/) is akin to Latin sedēs (like in “sedentary”, or “sedate”) by the same process that turned Greek ἡμι- (/hémi/, like in “hemisphere”) into Latin semi- (like in “semicircle”) and Greek ἕξ (/héx/, like in “hexagon”) into Latin sex (like in “sextet”).

So a cat-hedron should be a seat for cats. Such seats do of course exist:

But I couldn't stop there because the ‘hedr-’ in “cathedral” is the same word as the one in “octahedron”. A “cathedral” is literally a bishop's throne, and cathedral churches are named metonymically for the literal throne they contain or the metaphorical one represent. A cathedral is where a bishop has his “seat” of power.

So a true cathedral should look like this:

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U.S. surnames with no vowels

While writing the recent article about Devika Icecreamwala (born Patel) I acquired the list of most common U.S. surnames. (“Patel” is 95th most common; there are about 230,000 of them.) Once I had the data I did many various queries on it, and one of the things I looked for was names with no vowels. Here are the results:

It is no surprise that Ng is by far the most common. It's an English transcription of the Cantonese pronunciation of 吳, which is one of the most common names in the world. 吳 belongs to at least twenty-seven million people. Its Mandarin pronunciation is Wu, which itself is twice as common in the U.S. as Ng.

I suspect the others are all Czech. Vlk definitely is; it's Czech for “wolf”. (Check out the footer of the Vlk page for eighty other common names that all mean “wolf”, including Farkas, López, Lovato, Lowell, Ochoa, Phelan, and Vuković.)

Similarly Smrz is common enough that Wikipedia has a page about it. In Czech it was originally Smrž, and Wikipedia mentions Jakub Smrž, a Czech motorcycle racer. In the U.S. the confusing háček is dropped from the z and one is left with just Smrz.

The next two are Srp and Srb. Here it's a little harder to guess. Srb means a Serbian person in several Slavic languages, including Czech and it's not hard to imagine that it is a Czech toponym for a family from Serbia. (Srb is also the Serbian word for a Serbian person, but an immigrant to the U.S. named Srb, coming from Czechia, might fill out the immigration form with “Srb” and might end up with their name spelled that way, whereas a Serbian with that name would write the unintelligible Срб and would probably end up with something more like Serb.) There's also a town in Croatia with the name Srb and the surname could mean someone from that town.

I'm not sure whether Srp is similar. The Serbian-language word for the Serbian language itself is Srpski (српски), but srp is also Slavic for “sickle” and appears in quite a few Slavic agricultural-related names such as Sierpiński. (It's also the name for the harvest month of August.)

Next is Krc. I guessed maybe this was Czech for “church” but it seems that that is kostel. There is a town south of Prague named Krč and maybe Krc is the háčekless American spelling of the name of a person whose ancestors came from there.

Last is Smrt. Wikipedia has an article about Thomas J. Smrt but it doesn't say whether his ancestry was Czech. I had a brief fantasy that maybe some of the many people named Smart came from Czech families originally named Smrt, but I didn't find any evidence that this ever happened; all the Smarts seem to be British. Oh well.

[ Bonus trivia: smrt is the Czech word for “death”, which we also meet in the name of James Bond's antagonist SMERSH. SMERSH was a real organization, its name a combination of смерть (/smiert/, “death”) and шпио́нам (/shpiónam/, “to spies”). Шпио́нам, incidentally, is borrowed from the French espion, and ultimately akin to English spy itself. ]

[ Addenda 20220327: Thanks to several readers who wrote to mention that Smrž is a morel and Krč is (or was) a stump or a block of wood, I suppose analogous to the common German name Stock. Petr Mánek corrected my spelling of háček and also directed me to KdeJsme.cz, a web site providing information about Czech surnames. Finally, although Smrt is not actually a shortened form of Smart I leave you with this consolation prize. ]

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“Forensic” doesn't mean what I thought it did

Last week at work we released bad code, which had somehow survived multiple reviews. I was very interested in finding out how this happened, dug into the Git history to find out, and wrote a report. Originally I titled the report something like “Forensic analysis of Git history” (and one of my co-workers independently referred to the investigation as forensic) but then I realized I wasn't sure what “forensic” meant. I looked it up, and learned it was the wrong word.

A forensic analysis is one performed in the service of a court or court case. “Forensic” itself is from Latin forum, which is a public assembly place where markets were held and court cases were heard.

Forensic medicine is medicine in service of a court case, for example to determine a cause of death. For this reason it often refers to a postmortem examination, and I thought that “forensic” meant a postmortem or other retrospective analysis. That was the sense I intended it. But no. I had written a postmortem analysis, but not a forensic one.

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Duckface in German

In English, this is called duckface:

In German, I've learned, it's Schlauchbootlippen.

Schlauch is “tube”. A Schlauchboot is a tube-boat — an inflatable rubber dingy. Schlauchbootlippen means dinghy-lips.

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Dogs that look like board games

In Korean, “바둑이” (/badugi/) is a common name for a spotted dog, especially a black-spotted dog. This is because “바둑” (/baduk/) is the native Korean name for the game of go, in which round black and white stones are placed on a board.

In English, black-and-white spotted dogs are sometimes named “Checkers” for essentially the same reason.

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Canon in Euopean languages and Arabic

Today I was reading about Avicenna's work The Canon of Medicine and learned that the original Arabic title

القانون في الطب

is rendered in Latin script as al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb with al-Qānun (“the law”) being translated into English as “Canon” (“rule” or “law”). The English word comes via French and Latin, ultimately from Greek κανών, “rule”.

Is the resemblance between Qānūn and κανών a coincidence, or is the Arabic word originally borrowed from Greek?

I was about to write the next sentence “and where could I have looked this up?” but then I remembered that this kind of thing can be looked up in English Wiktionary. English Wiktionary is not a dictionary of English, but a universal dictionary in English. It not only defines English words, but also words in many other languages, with the descriptions and etmologies written in English.

So I looked it up, and it is a Greek loanword!

The Internet is amazing and wonderful. Truly, we live in an age of marvels.

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Basterma

This tweet from Raffi Melkonian describes the appetizer plate at his house on Christmas. One item jumped out at me:

basterma (err, spicy beef prosciutto)

I wondered what that was like, and then I realized I do have some idea, because I recognized the word. Basterma is not an originally Armenian word, it's a Turkish loanword, I think canonically spelled pastırma. And from Turkish it made a long journey through Romanian and Yiddish to arrive in English as… pastrami…

For which “spicy beef prosciutto” isn't a bad description at all.

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Historical diffusion of words for “eggplant”

In reply to my recent article about the history of words for “eggplant”, a reader, Lydia, sent me this incredible map they had made that depicts the history and the diffusion of the terms:

Lydia kindly gave me permission to share their map with you. You can see the early Dravidian term vaḻutanaṅṅa in India, and then the arrows show it travelling westward across Persia and, Arabia, from there to East Africa and Europe, and from there to the rest of the world, eventually making its way back to India as brinjal before setting out again on yet more voyages.

Thank you very much, Lydia! And Happy Diada Nacional de Catalunya, everyone!

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Zucchinis and Eggplants

This morning Katara asked me why we call these vegetables “zucchini” and “eggplant” but the British call them “courgette” and “aubergine”.

I have only partial answers, and the more I look, the more complicated they get.

Zucchini

The zucchini is a kind of squash, which means that in Europe it is a post-Columbian import from the Americas.

“Squash” itself is from Narragansett, and is not related to the verb “to squash”. So I speculate that what happened here was:

• American colonists had some name for the zucchini, perhaps derived from an Narragansett or another Algonquian language, or perhaps just “green squash” or “little gourd” or something like that. A squash is not exactly a gourd, but it's not exactly not a gourd either, and the Europeans seem to have accepted it as a gourd (see below).

• When the vegetable arrived in France, the French named it courgette, which means “little gourd”. (Courge = “gourd”.) Then the Brits borrowed “courgette” from the French.

• Sometime much later, the Americans changed the name to “zucchini”, which also means “little gourd”, this time in Italian. (Zucca = “gourd”.)

The Big Dictionary has citations for “zucchini” only back to 1929, and “courgette” to 1931. What was this vegetable called before that? Why did the Americans start calling it “zucchini” instead of whatever they called it before, and why “zucchini” and not “courgette”? If it was brought in by Italian immigrants, one might expect to the word to have appeared earlier; the mass immigration of Italians into the U.S. was over by 1920.

Following up on this thought, I found a mention of it in Cuniberti, J. Lovejoy., Herndon, J. B. (1918). Practical Italian recipes for American kitchens, p. 18: “Zucchini are a kind of small squash for sale in groceries and markets of the Italian neighborhoods of our large cities.” Note that Cuniberti explains what a zucchini is, rather than saying something like “the zucchini is sometimes known as a green summer squash” or whatever, which suggests that she thinks it will not already be familiar to the readers. It looks as though the story is: Colonial Europeans in North America stopped eating the zucchini at some point, and forgot about it, until it was re-introduced in the early 20th century by Italian immigrants.

When did the French start calling it courgette? When did the Italians start calling it zucchini? Is the Italian term a calque of the French, or vice versa? Or neither? And since courge (and gourd) are evidently descended from Latin cucurbita, where did the Italians get zucca?

So many mysteries.

Eggplant

Here I was able to get better answers. Unlike squash, the eggplant is native to Eurasia and has been cultivated in western Asia for thousands of years.

The puzzling name “eggplant” is because the fruit, in some varieties, is round, white, and egg-sized.

The term “eggplant” was then adopted for other varieties of the same plant where the fruit is entirely un-egglike.

“Eggplant” in English goes back only to 1767. What was it called before that? Here the OED was more help. It gives this quotation, from 1785:

When this [sc. its fruit] is white, it has the name of Egg-Plant.

I inferred that the preceding text described it under a better-known name, so, thanks to the Wonders of the Internet, I looked up the original source:

Melongena or Mad Apple is also of this genus [solanum]; it is cultivated as a curiosity for the largeness and shape of its fruit; and when this is white, it has the name of Egg Plant; and indeed it then perfectly resembles a hen's egg in size, shape, and colour.

(Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Letters on the Elements of Botany, tr. Thos. Martyn 1785. Page 202. (Wikipedia))

The most common term I've found that was used before “egg-plant” itself is “mad apple”. The OED has cites from the late 1500s that also refer to it as a “rage apple”, which is a calque of French pomme de rage. I don't know how long it was called that in French. I also found “Malum Insanam” in the 1736 Lexicon technicum of John Harris, entry “Bacciferous Plants”.

Melongena was used as a scientific genus name around 1700 and later adopted by Linnaeus in 1753. I can't find any sign that it was used in English colloquial, non-scientific writing. Its etymology is a whirlwind trip across the globe. Here's what the OED says about it:

• The neo-Latin scientific term is from medieval Latin melongena

• Latin melongena is from medieval Greek μελιντζάνα (/melintzána/), a variant of Byzantine Greek ματιζάνιον (/matizánion/) probably inspired by the common Greek prefix μελανο- (/melano-/) “dark-colored”. (Akin to “melanin” for example.)

• Greek ματιζάνιον is from Arabic bāḏinjān (بَاذِنْجَان). (The -ιον suffix is a diminutive.)

• Arabic bāḏinjān is from Persian bādingān (بادنگان)

• Persian bādingān is from Sanskrit and Pali vātiṅgaṇa (भण्टाकी)

• Sanskrit vātiṅgaṇa is from Dravidian (for example, Malayalam is vaḻutana (വഴുതന); the OED says “compare… Tamil vaṟutuṇai”, which I could not verify.)

Wowzers.

Okay, now how do we get to “aubergine”? The list above includes Arabic bāḏinjān, and this, like many Arabic words was borrowed into Spanish, as berengena or alberingena. (The “al-” prefix is Arabic for “the” and is attached to many such borrowings, for example “alcohol” and “alcove”.)

From alberingena it's a short step to French aubergine. The OED entry for aubergine doesn't mention this. It claims that aubergine is from “Spanish alberchigo, alverchiga, ‘an apricocke’”. I think it's clear that the OED blew it here, and I think this must be the first time I've ever been confident enough to say that. Even the OED itself supports me on this: the note at the entry for brinjal says: “cognate with the Spanish alberengena is the French aubergine”. Okay then. (Brinjal, of course, is a contraction of berengena, via Portuguese bringella.)

Sanskrit vātiṅgaṇa is also the ultimate source of modern Hindi baingan, as in baingan bharta.

(Wasn't there a classical Latin word for eggplant? If so, what was it? Didn't the Romans eat eggplant? How do you conquer the world without any eggplants?)

[ Addendum: My search for antedatings of “zucchini” turned up some surprises. For example, I found what seemed to be many mentions in an 1896 history of Sicily. These turned out not to be about zucchini at all, but rather the computer's pathetic attempts at recognizing the word Σικελίαν. ]

[ Addendum 20200831: Another surprise: Google Books and Hathi Trust report that “zucchini” appears in the 1905 Collier Modern Eclectic Dictionary of the English Langauge, but it's an incredible OCR failure for the word “acclamation”. ]

[ Addendum 20200911: A reader, Lydia, sent me a beautiful map showing the evolution of the many words for ‘eggplant’. Check it out. ]

[ Addendum 20231021: The Japanese kabocha squash (カボチャ) is probably so-called because it was brought by the Portuguese from Camboja, Cambodia. ]

[ Addendum 20231127: A while back I looked into the question of whether the Romans had eggplants, and it seems that consensus was that they did not! Incredible. How much longer their empire would have lasted if they had been able to draw in the power of the eggplant? This probably goes some way to explaining why the Byzantine Empire lasted so much longer than the Western Empire. ]

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Caricatures of Nazis and the number four in Russian

[ Warning: this article is kinda all over the place. ]

I was looking at this awesome poster of D. Moor (Д. Моор), one of Russia's most famous political poster artists:

(original source at Artchive.RU)

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, in Russian, “Himmler”, “Göring”, “Hitler”, and “Goebbels” all begin with the same letter, ‘Г’, which is homologous to ‘G’. (Similarly, Harry Potter in Russian is Га́рри, ‘Garri’.)

I also love the pictures, and especially Goebbels. These four men were so ugly, each in his own distinctively loathsome way. The artist has done such a marvelous job of depicting them, highlighting their various hideousness. It's exaggerated, and yet not unfair, these are really good likenesses! It's as if D. Moor had drawn a map of all the ways in which these men were ugly.

My all-time favorite depiction of Goebbels is this one, by Boris Yefimov (Бори́с Ефи́мов):

For comparison, here's the actual Goebbels:

Looking at pictures of Goebbels, I had often thought “That is one ugly guy,” but never been able to put my finger on what specifically was wrong with his face. But since seeing the Yefimov picture, I have never been able to look at a picture of Goebbels without thinking of a rat. D. Moor has also drawn Goebbels as a tiny rat, scurrying around the baseboards of his poster.

Anyway, that was not what I had planned to write about. The right-hand side of D. Moor's poster imagines the initial ‘Г’ of the four Nazis’ names as the four bent arms of the swastika. The captions underneath mean “first Г”, “second Г” and so on.

[ Addendum: Darrin Edwards explains the meaning here that had escaped me:

One of the Russian words for shit is "govno" (говно). A euphemism for this is to just use the initial g; so "something na g" is roughly equivalent to saying "a crappy something". So the title "vse na g" (all on g) is literally "they all start with g" but pretty blatantly means "they're all crap" or "what a bunch of crap". I believe the trick of constructing the swastika out of four g's is meant to extend this association from the four men to the entire movement…

Thank you, M. Edwards! ]

Looking at the fourth one, четвертое /chetvyertoye/, I had a sudden brainwave. “Aha,” I thought, “I bet this is akin to Greek “tetra”, and the /t/ turned into /ch/ in Russian.”

Well, now that I'm writing it down it doesn't seem that exciting. I now remember that all the other Russian number words are clearly derived from PIE just as Greek, Latin, and German are:

In Latin that /t/ turned into a /k/ and we get /quadra/ instead of /tetra/. The Russian Ч /ch/ is more like a /t/ than it is like a /k/.

The change from /t/ to /f/ in English and /v/ in German is a bit weird. (The Big Dictionary says it “presents anomalies of which the explanation is still disputed”.) The change from the /p/ of ‘pente’ to the /f/ of ‘five’ is much more typical. (Consider Latin ‘pater’, ‘piscum’, ‘ped’ and the corresponding English ‘father’, ‘fish’, ‘foot’.) This is called Grimm's Law, yeah, after that Grimm.

The change from /q/ in quinque to /p/ in pente is also not unusual. (The ancestral form in PIE is believed to have been more like the /q/.) There's a classification of Celtic lanugages into P-Celtic and Q-Celtic that's similar, exemplified by the change from the Irish patronymic prefix Mac- into the Welsh patronymic map or ap.

I could probably write a whole article comparing the numbers from one to ten in these languages. (And Sanskrit. Wouldn't want to leave out Sanskrit.) The line for ‘two’ would be a great place to begin because all those words are basically the same, with only minor and typical variations in the spelling and pronunciation. Maybe someday.

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Benefits

Many ‘bene-’ words do have ‘male-’ opposites. For example, the opposite of a benefactor is a malefactor, the opposite of a benediction is a malediction, and the opposite of benevolence is malevolence. But strangely there is no ‘malefit’ that is opposite to ‘benefit’.

Or so I wrote, and then I thought I had better look it up.

The Big Dictionary has six examples, one as recent as 1989 and one as early as 1755:

I took it into my head to try for a benefit, and to that end printed some bills… but… instead of five and twenty pounds, I had barely four…. The morning after my malefit, I was obliged to strip my friend of the ownly decent gown she had, and pledged it to pay the players.

(Charlotte Charke, A narrative of the life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (youngest daughter of Colley Cibber, Esq.), 1755.)

(I think the “benefit” here is short for “benefit performance”, an abbreviation we still use today.)

Mrs. Charke seems to be engaging in intentional wordplay. All but one of the other citations similarly suggest intentional wordplay; for example:

Malefactors used to commit malefactions. Why could they not still be said to do so, rather than disbenefits, or, perhaps, stretching a point, commit malefits?

(P. Howard, Word in Your Ear, 1983.)

The one exception is from no less a person than J.R.R. Tolkien:

Some very potent fiction is specially composed to be inspected by others and to deceive, to pass as record; but it is made for the malefit of Men.

(Around 1973, Quoted in C. Tolkien, History of Middle-earth: Sauron Defeated, 1992.)

Incidentally, J.R.R. is quoted 362 times in the Big Dictionary.

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Chalupas

A chalupa is a fried tortilla that has been filled with meat, shredded cheese, or whatever. But it is also the name of the mayor of Prague from 2002–2011.

	=
Tortilla		Tomáš

The boat-shaped food item is named after a kind of boat called a chalupa; I think the name is akin to English sloop. But in Czech a chalupa is neither a boat nor a comestible, but a cottage.

[ Other people whose names are accidentally boats ]

[ Addendum 20191201: I should probably mention that the two words are not pronounced the same; in Spanish, the “ch” is like in English “church”, and in Czech it is pronounced like in English “challah” or “loch”. To get the Spanish pronunciation in Czech you need to write “čalupa”, and this is indeed the way they spell the name of the fried-tortilla dish in Czech. ]

[ Addendum 20220115: Other people whose names are accidentally foods ]

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Gringos and gringas

Wikipedia's article on the etymology of gringo is quite good, well-cited, and I did not detect any fishy smells. I had previously tried to look up gringo in the Big Dictionary, but it only informed me that it was from Mexican Spanish, which is not really helpful. (I know that's because their jurisdiction stops at the English border, and they aren't responsible for anything outside, but really, OED folks? Nothing else?)

Anyway Wikipedia helped me out. I had gotten onto this gringos thing because yesterday I learned about gringas, which are white flour tortillas. I immediately wondered: are they called gringas because (like gringos) they're made of white paste? Or is it because they're eaten by gringos, who don't care for corn tortillas? The answer seems to be: both explanations are current, but nobody knows if either is correct.

On the way to gringo I spent a while reading about yanqui, which Latin Americans use to refer to northerners.

So do people in the USA for that matter. Southerners will angrily deny being “yanqui”. They reserve that term to mean anyone from the north, such as myself. But folks like me from the Mid-Atlantic states also deny being Yankees and will tell you that it only means people from New England. Many New Englanders will disclaim being truly Yankee and say that to meet true Yankees you need to go to Maine or maybe New Hampshire. And I suppose people in Maine use it to mean one particular old Yankee farmer who lives up near the Canadian border.

Anyway, I wonder: in Latin America, does “yanqui” always mean specifically USA-ians, or would it also include Canadians? Would a typical Mexican or Guatemalan person refer casually to Canadians as yanquis? Or, if they were drinking beer with a Canadian, and the Canadian refered to themselves as yanqui, would they correct them? (“You're not a yanqui, you're Canadian! Not the same thing at all!”)

If Mexicans do consider Canadians to be a species of yanqui, what do they make of the Québécois? Also yanqui? Or do Francophones get a pass? (What about the Cajuns for that matter?)

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Watersheds?

What is the shed in “watershed”? Is it a garden shed? No.

I guessed that it meant a piece of land that sheds water into some stream or river. Wrong!

The Big Dictionary says that this shed is:

The parting made in the hair by combing along the top of the head.

This meaning of “shed” fell out of use after the end of the 17th century.

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Corax

Katara just read me the story she wrote in Latin, which concerns two men who chase after a corax. “What kind of animal is corax?” I asked.

“It's a raven.”

“Awesome,” I said. “I bet it's onomatopoeic.”

So I looked into it, and yup! It's from Greek κόραξ. Liddell and Scott's Greek-English lexicon says (p. 832):

The Root is to be found in the onomatop. words κράζω, κρώζω, croak, etc.

κράζω (krazo) and κρώζω (krozo) mean “to croak”. “Croak” itself is also onomatopoeic. And it hadn't occurred to me before that English “crow” is also onomatopoeic. Looking into it further, Wikipedia also tells me that the rook is also named from the sound it makes.

(J.R.R. Tolkien was certainly aware of all of this. In The Hobbit has a giant raven named Roäc, the son of Carc.)

Liddell and Scott continues:

The same Root often appears in the sense of curved, cf. κορ-ώνη … Karin cur-vus, etc.

κορώνίς (koronis) means “curved”, and in particular a “corona” or crown. Curvus of course means curved, and is akin to Latin corvus, which again means a crow.

The raven's beak does not look so curved to me, but the Greeks must have found it striking.

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Bryan and his posse
Today upon the arrival of a coworker and his associates, I said "Oh, here comes Bryan and his posse". My use of "posse" here drew some comment. I realized I was not completely sure what "posse" meant. I mostly knew it from old West contexts: the Big Dictionary has quotes like this one, from 1901:

A pitched battle was fought..at Rockhill, Missouri, between the Sheriff's posse and the miners on strike.

Buy Me and My Little Brain from Bookshop.org (with kickback) (without kickback)

From the context and orthography, I guessed that it was from Spanish. But no, it's not. It's Latin! "Posse" is the Latin verb "to be able", akin to English "possible" and ultimately to "potent" and related words. I'd guessed something like this, supposing English "posse" was akin to some Spanish derivative of the Latin. But it isn't; it's direct from Latin: "posse" in English is short for posse comitatus, "force of the county".

The Big Dictionary has citations for "posse comitatus" back to 1576:

Mr. Sheryve meaneth in person to repayre thither & with force to bryng hym from Aylesham, Whomsoever he fyndeth to denye the samet & suerly will with Posse Comitatus fetch hym from this new erected pryson to morrow.

"Sheryve" is "Sheriff". (If you have trouble understanding this, try reading it aloud. English spelling changed more than its pronunciation since 1576.)

I had heard the phrase before in connection with the Posse Comitatus Act of U.S. law. This law, passed in 1878, is intended to prohibit the use of the U.S. armed forces as Posse Comitatus—that is, as civilian law enforcement. Here the use is obviously Latin, and I hadn't connected it before with the sheriff's posse. But they are one and the same.

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Etymological oddity
Sometimes you find words that seem like they must be related, and then it turns out to be a complete coincidence.

Consider pen and pencil.

Pen is from French penne, a long feather or quill pen, akin to Italian penne (the hollow, ribbed pasta), and ultimately to the word feather itself.

Pencil is from French pincel, a paintbrush, from Latin peniculus, also a brush, from penis, a tail, which is also the source of the English word penis.

A couple of weeks ago someone edited the Wikipedia article on "false cognates" to point out that day and diary are not cognate. "No way," I said, "it's some dumbass putting dumbassery into Wikipedia again." But when I checked the big dictionary, I found that it was true. They are totally unrelated. Diary is akin to Spanish dia, Latin dies, and other similar words, as one would expect. Day, however, is "In no way related to L. dies..." and is akin to Sanskrit dah = "to burn", Lithuania sagas = "hot season", and so forth.

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Bone names
Names of bones are usually Latin. They come in two types. One type is descriptive. The auditory ossicles (that's Latin for "little bones for hearing") are named in English the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, and their formal, Latin names are the malleus ("hammer"), incus ("anvil"), and stapes ("stirrup")

The fibula is the small bone in the lower leg; it's named for the Latin fibula, which is a kind of Roman safety pin. The other leg bone, the tibia, is much bigger; that's the frame of the pin, and the fibula makes the thin sharp part.

The kneecap is the patella, which is a "little pan". The big, flat parietal bone in the skull is from paries, which is a wall or partition. The clavicle, or collarbone, is a little key.

"Pelvis" is Latin for "basin". The pelvis is made of four bones: the sacrum, the coccyx, and the left and right os innominata. Sacrum is short for os sacrum, "the sacred bone", but I don't know why it was called that. Coccyx is a cuckoo bird, because it looks like a cuckoo's beak. Os innominatum means "nameless bone": they gave up on the name because it doesn't look like anything. (See illustration to right.)

On the other hand, some names are not descriptive: they're just the Latin words for the part of the body that they are. For example, the thighbone is called the femur, which is Latin for "thigh". The big lower arm bone is the ulna, Latin for "elbow". The upper arm bone is the humerus, which is Latin for "shoulder". (Actually, Latin is umerus, but classical words beginning in "u" often acquire an initial "h" when they come into English.) The leg bone corresponding to the ulna is the tibia, which is Latin for "tibia". It also means "flute", but I think the flute meaning is secondary—they made flutes out of hollowed-out tibias.

Some of the nondescriptive names are descriptive in Latin, but not in English. The vertebra in English are so called after Latin vertebra, which means the vertebra. But the Latin word is ultimately from the verb vertere, which means to turn. (Like in "avert" ("turn away") and "revert" ("turn back").) The jawbone, or "mandible", is so-called after mandibula, which means "mandible". But the Latin word is ultimately from mandere, which means to chew.

The cranium is Greek, not Latin; kranion (or κρανιον, I suppose) is Greek for "skull". Sternum, the breastbone, is Greek for "chest"; carpus, the wrist, is Greek for "wrist"; tarsus, the ankle, is Greek for "instep". The zygomatic bone of the face is yoke-shaped; ζυγος ("zugos") is Greek for "yoke".

The hyoid bone is the only bone that is not attached to any other bone. (It's located in the throat, and supports the base of the tongue.) It's called the "hyoid" bone because it's shaped like the letter "U". This used to puzzle me, but the way to understand this is to think of it as the "U-oid" bone, which makes sense, and then to remember two things. First, that classical words beginning in "u" often acquire an initial "h" when they come into English, as "humerus". And second, classical Greek "u" always turns into "y" in Latin. You can see this if you look at the shape of the Greek letter capital upsilon, which looks like this: Υ. Greek αβυσσος ("abussos" = "without a bottom") becomes English "abyss"; Greek ανωνυμος ("anonumos") becomes English "anonymous"; Greek υπος ("hupos"; there's supposed to be a diacritical mark on the υ indicating the "h-" sound, but I don't know how to type it) becomes "hypo-" in words like "hypothermia" and "hypodermic". So "U-oid" becomes "hy-oid".

(Other parts of the body named for letters of the alphabet are the sigmoid ("S-shaped") flexure of the colon and the deltoid ("Δ-shaped") muscle in the arm. The optic chiasm is the place in the head where the optic nerves cross; "chiasm" is Greek for a crossing-place, and is so-called after the Greek letter Χ.)

The German word for "auditory ossicles" is Gehörknöchelchen. Gehör is "for hearing". Knöchen is "bones"; Knöchelchen is "little bones". So the German word, like the Latin phrase "auditory ossicles", means "little bones for hearing".

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Naomi Wolf and Big Ethel
Aaron Swartz has done a text search of The Beauty Myth and concluded that Wolf never intended Big Ethel to serve as an example of intelligence, contrary to what I asserted in my previous article. M. Swartz says:

Judging from a search on Amazon, the only time Ethel is mentioned is in the context of noting that an attractive woman is often paired with an unattractive one: "... Veronica and Ethel in Riverdale; ... and so forth. Male culture seems happiest to imagine two women together when they are defined as being one winner and one loser in the beauty myth." (59f)

The most serious error here is mine: I should have considered and discussed the possibility that my friend was misquoting Wolf. That I didn't do this was unfair to Wolf and entirely my fault. Since I haven't read the book myself, I should have realized what shaky ground I was on, and taken pains to point this out. And yet other possibilities are:

• That my friend didn't misquote Wolf at all, and I misunderstood her at the time, or
• that my friend correctly quoted Wolf and I understood her at the time, but my memory of the episode (which occurred around 1993) is faulty.

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On saying too much, or, bad things come in threes
Long ago, I had a conversation with a woman who had recently read Naomi Wolf's book The Beauty Myth. She was extolling the book, which I had not read, and mentioned that Wolf had an extensive discussion of the popular dichotomy between beauty and intelligence. She told me that Wolf had cited Archie comics as containing an example of this dichotomy, in the characters of Veronica and Big Ethel.

I had been nodding and agreeing up to that point. But at the mention of Big Ethel I was quite startled, and said that that spoiled the argument for me, and made me doubt the conclusion. I now had doubts about what had seemed so plausible a moment before.

Veronica is indeed one half of a contrasting pair in Archie comics. But Veronica and Big Ethel? No. Veronica is not complementary to Big Ethel. The counterpart of Veronica is Betty. The contrast is not between beauty and brains but between rich and poor, and between their derived properties, spoiled and sweet. A good point could be made about Veronica and Betty, but it was not the point that Wolf wanted to make; her citation of Veronica and Big Ethel as exemplifying the opposition of beauty and intelligence was just bizarre. Big Ethel, to my knowledge, has never been portrayed as unusually intelligent. She is characterized by homeliness and by her embarrassing and unrequited attraction to Jughead, not by intelligence.

Why would this make me doubt the conclusion of Wolf's argument? Because I had been fully ready to believe the conclusion, that our culture manufactures a division between attractiveness and intelligence for women, and makes them choose one or the other. I had imagined that it would be easy to produce examples demonstrating the point. But the example Wolf chose was completely inept. And, as I said at the time, "Naomi Wolf is very smart, and has studied this closely and thought about it for a long time. If that is the best example that she can come up with, then perhaps I'm wrong, and there really aren't as many examples as I thought there would be." Without the example, I would have agreed with the conclusion. With the example, intended to support the conclusion, I wasn't so sure.

Now, I come to the real point of this note. Paul Vallely has written an article for The Independent on "How Islamic inventors changed the world". He lists twenty of the most influential contributions of the Muslim world, including the discovery of coffee, inoculation, and the fountain pen. I am not so clear on the history of the technology here. Some of it I know is correct; some is plausible; some is extremely dubious. (The crank, not invented before 1206? Please.) But the whole article is spoiled for me, except as a topic of derision, because of three errors.

Item #1 concerns the discovery of the coffee bean. One might expect this to have been discovered in prehistoric times by local Ethiopians, long before the founding of Islam. But I'm in no position to argue with it, and I was ready to give Vallely the benefit of the doubt.

Item #2 on Vallely's list was more worrying. It says "Ibn al-Haitham....set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room)." It may or may not be true that "qamara" is an "Arab word" (by which I suppose Vallely means an "Arabic word") for "chamber", but it is certainly true that this word, if it exists, is not the source of the English word "camera". I don't know from "qamara", but "camera obscura" is Latin for "dark chamber". "Camera" means "chamber" in Latin and has for thousands of years. The two words, in fact, are etymologically the same, which is why they have almost the same spelling. It is for this reason that the part of a legal hearing held in the judge's private chambers is said to be "in camera".

There might be an Arabic word "qamara", for all I know. If there is, it might be derived from the Latin. (The Latin word is not derived from Arabic, either; it is from Greek καμαρα, which refers to anything with an arched cover.) Two things are sure: The English word "camera" is not derived from Arabic, and Vallely did not bother to pick up a dictionary before he said that it was.

Anyone can make a mistake. But I started to get excited when I read item 3, which is about the game of chess. Vallely says "The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot." This is true, sort of, but it is off in a subtle way. The rooks or castles of modern chess did start out as chariots. (Moving castles around never did make much sense.) And "rook" is indeed from Persian rukh. But rukh doesn't exactly mean a chariot. It means a chariot in the game of chess. The Persian word for a chariot outside of chess was different. (I don't remember what it was.) Saying that rukh is the Persian word for chariot is like saying that "rook" is the English word for castle.

I was only on item 3 and had already encountered one serious error of etymology and one other item which although it wasn't exactly an error, was peculiar. I considered that I wouldn't really have enough material for a blog post, unless Vallely made at least one more serious mistake. But there were still 17 of 20 items left. So I read on. Would Vallely escape?

No, or I would not have written this article. Item 17 says "The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to pay for goods when they were delivered...". But no. The correct etymology is fascinating and bizarre. "Cheque" is derived from Norman French "exchequer", which was roughly the equivalent of the treasury and internal revenue department in England starting around 1300. Why was the internal revenue department called the exchequer? Because it was named after the chessboard, which was also called "exchequer".

What do chessboards have to do with internal revenue? Ah, I am glad you wondered. Hindu-Arabic numerals had not yet become popular in Europe; numbers were still recorded using Roman numerals. It is extremely difficult to calculate efficiently with Roman numerals. How, then did the internal revenue department calculate taxes owed and amounts payable?

They used an abacus. But it wasn't an abacus like modern Chinese or Japanese abacuses, with beads strung on wires. A medieval European abacus was a table with a raised edge and a grid of squares ruled on it. The columns of squares represented ones, tens, hundreds, and so on. You would put metal counters, called jettons, on the squares to represent numbers. Three jettons on a "hundred" square represented three hundred; four jettons on the square to its right represented forty. Each row of squares recorded a separate numeral. To add two numerals together, just take the jettons from one row, move them to the other row, and then resolve the carrying appropriately: Ten jettons on a square can be removed and replaced with a single jetton on the square to the left.

The internal revenue department, the "exchequer", got its name from these counting-boards covered with ruled squares like chessboards.

(The word "exchequer" meaning a chessboard was derived directly from the name of the game: Old French eschecs, Medieval Latin scacci, and so on, all from shah, which means "king" in Persian. The word "checkered" is also closely related.)

So, in summary: the game is "chess", or eschek in French; the board is therefore exchequer, and since the counting-tables of the treasury department look like chessboards, the treasury department itself becomes known as the exchequer. The treasury department, like all treasury departments, issues notes promising to pay certain sums at certain times, and these notes are called "exchequer notes" or just "exchequers", later shortened (by the English) to "cheques" or (by Americans) to "checks". Arabic saqq, if there is such a word, does not come into it. Once again, it is clear that Vallely's research was shoddy.

While I was writing up this article, yet another serious error came to light. Item 11 says "The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph...". Now, I am not very knowledgeable about history, and my historical education is very poor. But that was so peculiar that it startled even me. 634 seemed to me much too early for any clever inventions to be attributed to Muslims. Then I looked it up, and so it was. Muhammad himself had only died in 632.

As for the Persian caliph Vallely mentions, he did not exist. The caliphs are the successors of Muhammad, so of course there was one in 634---the first one, in fact. Abu Bakr reigned from the death of the Prophet in 632 until his own death in 634; he was succeeded by `Umar. Neither was Persian. They were both Arabs, as you would expect of Muslim leaders in 634. There were no Persian caliphs in 634.

My own ignorance of Islam and its history is vast and deep, but at least I had a vague idea that 634 was extremely early. Vallely could have looked up the date of the founding of the caliphate as easily as I did. Why didn't he? Well, perhaps it was just a typo, and should have said 834 or 934. In that case it's just poor editing and inattention. But perhaps it was a genuine factual error, in which case Vallely was not only not paying attention, but is apparently even less familiar with Islamic history than I am, difficult as that is to achieve. In which case we have this article about the twenty greatest contributions of Islam written by a guy who literally does not know the first thing about Islam.

And so this article, which I hoped to enjoy, was spoiled by a series of errors. I am very sympathetic to the idea that the brilliant history of Islamic science and engineering has been neglected by European scholarship. One of my very first blog posts was about the Islamic use of algebra to solve complex probate problems. Just last week I was reading about al-Biruni's invention, around 1000 years ago, of an improved method for measuring the size of the earth, a topic that Vallely treats as item 18. But after reading Vallely's article, I worried a bit that the case might have been overstated. Perhaps the contributions of Muslims are not as large as I had thought?

Fortunately, there was an alternative: the conclusion is correct, and the inept support from the author speaks only to the author's ineptness, not to the validity of the conclusion. I did not have that alternative with Naomi Wolf, who is not inept. (Also, see this addendum.)

With only cursory attention, I found three major errors of fact in this one short article. How many more did I miss, I wonder? Did Abbas ibn Firnas really invent a working parachute, as Vallely says? Maybe it was someone else. Maybe there was no parachute. Maybe there was, but it didn't work. Maybe the whole thing is a propaganda invention by someone who wants to promote Islam, and has suckered Vallely into repeating fiction. Maybe all of these. Someone knows the truth, but it isn't me, and I can't trust Vallely.

Were the Turks vaccinating people eighty years before the Europeans, or did Vallely swallow a tall tale? I don't know, and I can't trust Vallely.

People sometimes joke "I am stupider for having read this," but I really believe this was the case here. The article is worse than useless, because it has polluted my brain with a lot of unreliable non-information. I will have to be careful not to think that quilted fabrics were first brought to Europe by the crusaders, who got them from the Muslims. My real fear is that the "fact" will remain in my brain for years, long after I have forgotten how unreliable Vallely is, and that I will bring it out again as real information, which it is not. True or not, it is too unreliable to be information.

The best I can hope for now is that I will forget everything Vallely says, and meet the true parts again somewhere else in the future. In the meantime, I am worse off for having read it.

[ Addendum 20200204: Thirteen years later, it occurred to me to wonder: Why does Arabic chess have chariots anyway? ]

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Petard corrections
Eric Cholet has written in to mention that he is familiar with the fried choux pastry that I mentioned yesterday, but under the name pets de nonne, not pets de soeurs, as I said. (Nonne, of course, is "nun". The word soeur is literally "sister", but in this context means "nun". ) I had cited On Food and Cooking as mentioning pets de soeurs, but it agrees with Eric, not with me.

It appears, though, that many people do use the name pets de soeurs to refer to these fritters, and some people also use it to refer to a kind of soda-raised cinnamon roll. Citations to various cookbooks are available through the usual searches.

Eric also points out that petard is the current word for a firecracker, and also now refers to a doobie. I was already aware of this because pictures of those things appeared when I did Google image seach for petard. Thank you, Eric.

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Petard
A petard is a Renaissance-era bomb, basically a big firecracker: a box or small barrel of gunpowder with a fuse attached. Those hissing black exploding spheres that you see in Daffy Duck cartoons are petards. Outside of cartoons, you are most likely to encounter the petard in the phrase "hoist with his own petard", which is from Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are being sent to England with the warrant for Hamlet's death; Hamlet alters the warrant to contain R&G's names instead of his own. "Hoist", of course, means "raised", and Hamlet is saying that it is amusing to see someone screw up his own petard and blow himself sky-high with it.

Buy On Food and Cooking from Bookshop.org (with kickback) (without kickback)

Another fart-related word is "partridge", so named because its call sounds like a fart.

[ Update 20260202: Some corrections ]

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