Quotes About Etymology

We can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense, that this ambitious term has. If there is a universe, its aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.

As I grow wiser and more skeptical, I realize that almost everything in nomenclature comes full circle. The question remains whether I can outlast the taxonomists.

Only assholes put a nickname on their business card.

In ancient Greece, the word for cook, butcher, and priest was the same -- mageiros -- and the word shares an etymological root with magic.

Words change over time. 'Condescending,' for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen's world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment.

It's spelled, like, S-E-R-G. I always thought it would be funny if I called my son 'Sir.' Like calling your daughter 'Ma'am,' or something like that.

The dandelion was long popularly known as the 'pissabed' because of its supposed diuretic properties, and other names in everyday use included 'mare's fart', 'naked ladies', 'twitch-ballock', 'hounds-piss', 'open arse', and 'bum-towel'.

Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless).

The confusion over the aluminum/aluminium spelling arose because of some uncharacteristic indecisiveness on Davy's part. When he first isolated the element in 1808, he called it alumium. For some reason he thought better of that and changed it to aluminum four years later. Americans dutifully adopted the new term, but many British users disliked aluminum, pointing out that it disrupted the -ium pattern established by sodium, calcium, and strontium, so they added a vowel and syllable.

The early colonists were among the first to use the new word goodbye, contracted from God be with you and still at that time often spelled Godbwye

Our word "salary" comes literally from the vulgar Latin salarium, "salt money"—the Roman soldier's ironic term for what it would buy.

Permian recalls the former Russian province of Perm in the Ural Mountains. For Cretaceous (from the Latin for chalk) we are indebted to a Belgian geologist with the perky name of J. J. d'Omalius d'Halloy.

Before the shift house was pronounced "hoose" (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced "mood," and home rhymed with "gloom," which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes- in domestic.)

Sometimes the pronunciation changed, as between bath and bathe and as with the "s" in house becoming a "z" in houses. And sometimes, to the eternal confusion of non-English speakers, these things happened all together, so that we have not only the spelling doublet life/lives but also the pronunciation doublet "l?ves" and "l?ves" as in "a cat with nine lives lives next door.

as in the Old English word burh (place), which became variously burgh as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and bury as in Canterbury.

The one word that Newfoundland has given the world is penguin. No one has any idea what inspired it.

Norfolk specializes in odd pronunciations. Hautbois is hobbiss, Wymondham is windum, Costessey is cozzy, Postwick is pozzik. People often ask why that is. I'm not sure, but I think it is just something that happens when you sleep with close relatives.

It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for 'Oll Korrect'. At

Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting? It has lasted half a millennium in English, was a common synonym for horrid until well into the last century, and can still be found tucked away forgotten at the back of most unabridged dictionaries. Isn't it a shame to let it slip away?

Smallpox was so called to distinguish it from the great pox, or syphilis.)

Sweetheart was originally sweetard

I like to introduce a few lost gems when I can to fellow word-lovers, and would genuinely love some of them to make a comeback.

Does a 'beefsteak' derive it's terminology name from the habit of complaining too often?

To understand a word, we need to learn where it was born, what paths it took to reach where it is today, and how it has changed along the way. The word 'nice' is a positive word today, but hundreds of years ago, it meant 'stupid.'