Heather (etymology)

I'm going back to my roots with this post! I've really slacked off on my word posts over the past few months since I've been reading so much and have found many fun themes to fill them up with...but I figured Sundays I would leave to word and language posts, one of my many loves.

So I'll start with my name, Heather.

It's a noun meaning: low, evergreen shrub. Appeared in 1725 in the compound heather-bell with a spelling alteration influenced by heath of hathir (1335). Also in the place name of Faghadre (1600-35) and found in Old English haeddre of unknown origin.

Etymology is pretty fascinating!

I'm a Scottish shrub!

Forgotten English: Eye-bite

Eye-bite: To bewitch an animal with the evil eye. Northern England.
--James Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1855

Scotland's Last Witch

September 22, 1944 Scottish medium Helen Duncan was released from incarceration after serving nine months for a trumped up vagrancy charge. She had apparently foretold of the sinking of the HMS Barham and predicted it to an audience in 1943, which was several months before the announcement of the loss. British officials feared she had knowledge of the D-Day invasion and, therefore, decided to imprison her before she could reveal it.

She was convicted under the all-but-forgotten 18th century Witchcraft Act, but was later repealed in 1953 due to this result. Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited Duncan in prison and it was he who decided to repeal the out-dated law. Helen Duncan was the last person publicly persecuted for sorcery.

Forgotten English: Under the Rose

Under the rose: In strict confidence.
-J.B. Lippincott's Everyday Phrases Explained, 1913

According to Jeffrey Kacirk: "The rose has long been employed as an antidote to gossip."

And Wallace's Popular Sayings Dissected (1895) explained:

In the banqueting rooms of the mansions of preceding centuries it was a common custom to introduce into the decoration of the ceiling a sculptured rose to remind guests that what had been said sub vino should remain sub rosa, the idea of secrecy surrounding this flower being due to the legend the Cupid gave Harpocrates, teh God of Silence, a rose to bribe him not to betray the amours of Venus.

In Dictionary of Dates (1841) it also says that

The rose, the symbol of silence, gave rise to the phrase, 'under the rose,' from the pope's presenting consecrated roses, which were placed over confessionals, to denote secrecy, in 1526.

Merrily, merrily, fuddle thy nose,
until it right rosy shall be;
For a jolly red nose, I speak under the rose,
Is a sign of good company.

(anonymous Glossary of North Country Words (1825)

I've heard this phrase before, but I wasn't quite sure of its meaning...oh, how language fascinates me!

Forgotten English: Chequer

Chequer: Chess; or perhaps the chessboard.
-Herbert Coleridge's Dictionary of the Oldest Words in the English Language, 1863

So I'm thinking that this is where we get our checkerboard from and checkers!

Some chess history:

Today is the birthday of Francois Philidor (1726-1795). He was a French chessmaster known for his astounding feat of playing three challengers while simultaneously blindfolded!

Chess was first played in the 1400s, although a few of the names and movements have changed over time. Such as, the king or rex, originally had a "trailing minister." This eventually evolved into the "dame" and finally the "queen." The bishop was once called the "fool." The pawn is derived from Latin pedo, a foot soldier, and is related to the Anglo-Saxon word peon as well as pioneer. The rook wasn't originally associated with the crow; it was derived from the Persian word rukh, a warrior. Another Persian word shag-mat was eventually changed to checkmate.

According to W.C. Hazlitt's Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles (1870): "Chessboards were made of wood, bone, or even ivory, the last being valued at three cows." The Catholic Church also condemned this wonderful game of chess for centuries and many chessboards were burned at the stake! Ok, maybe not the stake...

Dummocks and Baseball

Legitimate blows given in certain games.

-G.F. Northall's Warwickshire Word-Book, 1896

Abner Doubleday, according to legend, on June 12, 1839 formalized his rules of baseball. At that time it was called "knickerbocker rules," since he developed them in Elihu Phinney's cow pasture near Cooperstown, New York.

The rules have definitely changed since then. At first the number of players was not specified, and there was no outfield wall to hit a home run over. The game was to go til the first team reached 21 runs no matter the number of innings. There was no overhand pitching either until 1884.
Here are some old terms that referred to baseball:

• can of corn- a high fly that's easily caught.
• ukulele hitter- a player who makes short hits
• sold out- bases full
• carry a safe- to run slowly

The actual baseball was also called a cantaloupe, potato, tomato, punkin, horsehide, pellet, pill, and an apple and onion.

I love baseball! I thought this was some interesting trivia! My church team is also on our way to Regionals this weekend so wish us luck!

Zombie Challenge: Zombie and Its Origins Part II

According to Gary Rhodes in his book White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film common usage of the word zombie only really took off after the release of the highly successful movie White Zombie in 1932. There was even a court case over the use of the word zombie when the Halperins (the makers of the White Zombie film) wanted to make an unlicensed sequel (Revolt of the Zombies) to the original. According to More Word Histories and Mysteries the company that was suing them "successfully argued that most Americans knew the world only from the original film, even if it had been used previously in bestselling books and had already appeared in dictionaries." They also were able to force a witness for the Halperins to admit that "zombie had no general meaning in the English language and that not one person in a hundred knew what it meant before White Zombie."

And with the movie Night of the Living Dead in 1968 the association of zombies and Haitian Vodou was almost gone. From then on zombies were flesh-eating villains who could infect others and could only be killed by violent blows to the head! (Check out Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for this exact rendering of zombies)!

But there is also plenty of scholarly interest in Vodou and zombies. Ethnobotantist Wade Davis offered a scientific explanation for zombification: "Vodou sorcerers first induced a deathlike state in their victims and then woke them into a zombie trance by administering powerful drugs obtained from local plants and animals."

There's no doubt about it, there are plenty of resources on anything zombie, whether it's watching a movie, reading a book, or looking online! Go zombies!

Zombie Challenge: Zombie and Its Origins Part I

Zombies have origins in the Haitian religion of Vodou. The actual word zombie was borrowed into English from Haitian Creole (which comes from French and various African languages). It also comes from the Bantu language family of Africa and was brought from West Africa with slaves that were sent to French plantations before 1804. Various word origins include: zumbi "object with supernatural powers," and zambi "ghost, departed spirit," from the language Kikongo and nzambi "god" in Kimbundu.

According to More Word Histories and Mysteries:

...zombies are believed to possess only the part of the soul that animates the body, for they have been deprived of the aspect of the soul that gives them their individual personality and the ability to make moral judgments.

Zombie didn't appear in English til the 19th century in various historical works, but entered popular speech in the early 20th century. William Seabrook wrote a sensationalized memoir of his time in Haiti called The Magic Island and subsequently introduced the American public to zombies in 1929.

So fascinating. All of this information was taken from More Word Histories and Mysteries from the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries. I'll be adding more for another day!

By The Villages

By the villages: If you come home by the villages you are drunk, whereas if you come home by the fields you have no opportunity to drink.

-Albert Hyamson's Dictionary of English Phrases, 1922

Benjamin Franklin printed two hundred euphemisms for being drunk in 1736 in the Pennsylvania Gazette. Here are a few of them:

• pidgeon-ey'd
• moon-ey'd
• drunk as a wheelbarrow
• half-way to Concord
• crump-footed
• double-tongu'd
• dizzy as a goose
• jambled
• going to Jerusalem
• contending with Pharoah
• had been to free with Sir John Strawberry

Pretty funny that none of these are still around today!

Quackered

Quackered: Almost choked or stifled. -T. Ellwood Zell's Popular Encyclopedia, 1871

June 23, is the Feast Day of St. Audrey, 7th century Kentish protector of throat disorders. Many thought that chewing gum was a way of prevention against these disorders of the throat and the chin.

According to Margery Wilison in New Etiquette (1937):

...(chewing gum)...since it is offensive to most people, it should never be used in public. A foreigner seeing Americans chewing fum for the first time couldn't imagine what caused them to make those strange movements with their faces, and concluded that there was a general facial affliction over here. 'I thought it was a sickness of the face...'

We're such an evil people, so ill-mannered and chewing that gum in public! Oh how times have changed!

Faleste

Faleste: A capital punishment inflicted on a malefactor on the seashore by laying him bound on the sands till the next full tide carried him away. From Norman falese, sands, rocks, cliffs.

--John Bouvier's Law Dictionary, 1839

In Britain, in 1810, more than 220 crimes could carry the death penalty. During this time those who were poor, including children, could be executed for "petty theft, livestock rustling, forgery, sacrilege, sodomy, postal theft, adopting a disguise, and even begging." Around 72,000 people were hanged during Henry VIII's thirty-seven-year reign (more than five a day when their population was fewer than five million! But it looks like one could avoid death if they joined up for the navy! Maybe they had it right back then...death for any offense...I think that would take care of the over-population problem. Speeding=Death, Jay-walking=Death!

Steganography

The art of secret writing, characters, or ciphers known only to persons that correspond with one another.

This is from the June 2 calendar page in Forgotten English by Jeffrey Kacirk:

Crossword Coincidence

On June 2, 1944, "as the Allies prepared Operation Overload ("D-Day" invasion of Normandy's Omaha and Utah beaches, among others, on June 6), a bit of newspaper minutia raised red flags among the military brass. During the preceding month, it seemed that crossword puzzle's in London's Daily Telegraph were disseminating secret code words to those who knew where to look. Strangely, the names Overload, Omaha, Utah, and mulberry (the nickname of an English-made portable harbor built for D-Day) were all included. Then, on June 2, the name of the naval portion of the assault itself, Neptune, appeared as a solution to "eleven across" from the previous day. British intelligence quickly moved to arrest Leonard Dawe, amild-mannered physics teacher who had written thse newspaper puzzles for the last two decades. But the authorities soon determined that these word choices were simply an incredible coincidence rather than espionage."

I love learning about these little tidbits in history!

Gullatine

Gullatine: To kill or destroy. Taken from guillotine.

Last Thursday, May 28th, was the birthday Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin (1734-1814). According to Forgotten English Dr. Guillotin felt that capital punishment should be administered fairly among all citizens, whether they were rich or poor. His efforts developed what came to be known as the "philanthropic decapitation machine." Though, the machine was originally called a louisette, after Antoine Louis. Guillotin assured those doomed to die would only feel a "refreshing coolness."

His relatives eventually tried to get the French government to change the name of the decapitating machine, but to no avail, so they changed their own names instead!

Abraham's Eye

I got a desk calendar for the new year called "Forgotten English" by Jeffrey Kacirk. It has old phrases and words from English for each day. Some are pretty funny. So I though I would share a few along the way for your pleasure.

Abraham's eye: A magical charm, the application which was supposed to deprive a thief a who refused to confess his crime of eyesight; from a 16th-century manuscript on magic.
--Edward Lloyd's Encyclopaedic Dictionary, 1896

The entry also comes with a little tidbit on some historical significance of the day and/or the word.

Today is 150th birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes series. It goes on to say that even though the movies have Sherlock saying "Elementary, my dear Watson" he never actually said that in the books, though he did use "Exactly, my dear Watson" three times.

Love

Love. We all know what it means....or at least we should! But where does our English word love actually come from?? I thought that would be the topic of my little entry today.

English is a part of the language family called Indo-European. We don't actually have any written record of this language, but linguists can reconstruct what possible words were in this language. Indo-European breaks down into other categories such as the romance languages, which includes Spanish and French, and Germanic languages such as English and German. We know they are related because there are many words in across languages that are similar and love just happens to be one of those many words. Love in Russian is l'ubov, in Sanskrit lobha- and historical linguists have reconstructed the word in Indo-European to be leubh-

It dates from Old English lufu and is also the root of the word believe! From Indo-European to Latin the u became an i and so from Latin we get roots of love in our words like libido!

It's crazy how love works!! I find word histories or etymology fascinating and I hope you do too! The book I used was More Word Histories and Mysteries from the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries.