Man and Woman

This interesting pair of words raises a few questions: Why does woman end with man? What does the wo mean? Does woman mean “man with a womb”?

In Old English (OE), man referred to both adult sexes and is of Germanic origin. Old Icelandic uses the word mathr in the same way, to refer to adults of both sexes, making konamathr (man) and kvennamathr (woman). In OE a female adult was wīfman (wife + man) and a male adult wǽpnedman (weaponed + man). Wife is OE meaning woman, origin unknown. “Weaponed-man” likely refers to a warrior and by extension adult males.

Following established rules for word changes, wifman morphed over the centuries to woman. The plural women was added later, likely to match the plural for man. Man itself was shortened from wǽpnedman by dropping the prefix, a common trend in most languages.

Strait and Narrow

In church this morning, before the service began, I was flipping randomly through my old King James and read Matthew 7:13-14 “…strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life…” The word strait caught my eye as I was familiar with the phrase “straight and narrow”, and I wondered if this was an old way of spelling straight or if the meaning was other than I had assumed.

This evening I opened one of my new books, POSH (see previous post), and found an entry on this very phrase. It turns out that strait is used in the narrow and constricted sense in this and two other verses in the New Testament. In all three cases the word describes a gate, not a pathway, so strait makes more sense than straight. There are, however, other verses which refer to “straight paths”: for example John the Baptist’s message “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” is recorded in Mathew 3:3 and in the other three gospels as well.

These two words – strait and narrow – were later used together (earliest recorded use 1834 “…strait and narrow path of duty”). The phrase quickly became straight and narrow (earliest recorded use 1842 “…straight and narrow way”).

It’s easy to see how this error occurred. First, the two words strait and narrow were associated with each other from the Matthew 7 verses, and were assumed to be describing the same thing – pathway. Then confusion with other verses describing straight paths led to the assumption that the word was straight. It makes sense too that the pathway to life would not only be narrow but also straight and direct – wandering neither to the right nor the left. A profound thought, but not what Matthew was saying in this particular verse.

The time – 8 years – between the first records of the two spellings of the phrase is amazingly short. Keep in mind that a word or phrase can be in use for decades before it is found in written form.

That the phrase strait and narrow (or straight and narrow) is so commonly known, although never appearing in the Bible, reminds me of two similar examples. Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson” and Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick Blaine in the 1942 film Casablanca never uttered the complete phrase “Play it again, Sam”.

Three New Books

Three more books (among a few others) arrived in the mail yesterday from Hampstead House Books http://www.hampsteadhousebooks.com/ to add to my language library. HHB is a Canadian company "selling great books at great prices". They deal in publishers' overruns and I often make great finds in their catalogues -- sometimes it pays to have an unusual taste in books.

• Canadian Thesaurus, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2010
• POSH and other language myths, Michael Quinion, 2004
• The Story of English – How the English Language Conquered the World, Philip Gooden, 2009.

POSH is a book for the layman, busting word and phrase origin myths. Sometimes these books just replace one myth with another, but Quinion is a researcher for OED (Oxford English Dictionary) so should be reliable.

The Story of English is a large size hardcover lavishly illustrated, again aimed at the layperson rather than the scholar. I look forward to delving into this one.

The Canadian Thesaurus should be a useful addition to my reference library. I often struggle to come up with a word that I know is there, but can't quite define let alone remember its name.

I've added these to my original book list post.

Etymology vs Entomology

Anatoly Liberman in his book Word Origins…and how we know them expressed surprise that his profession was frequently confused with entomology. He thought it must be a local quirk of the Midwestern mentality (he lived in Minnesota) until he discovered an article by a Professor of English at a Boston university. The professor related that a 1958 television lecture of his on “Folk Etymology” appeared on the printed program as “Folk Entomology”.

This mental switching of etymology to entomology is an illustration of the first definition of folk etymology (see previous post) where an unfamiliar word is converted to one with which we are more comfortable.

By the way, the root of entomology is Greek entomos referring to insects. The word means “cut in” and refers to the segmented bodies of some insects.

This inspired me to write the following poem, in the style of Ogden Nash.

            Professions

            An Etymologist studies the meaning of words;

            An Entomologist studies ants and ladybirds;

            But something that's even more absurd’s…

            A Scatologist studies animal turds.

Etymology & Folk Etymology

Here are my definitions:

• Etymology is the science of word origins.
• Folk Etymology is the art of guessing word origins.

This is what Merriam-Webster Online has to say:

Definition of ETYMOLOGY

1 : the history of a linguistic form (as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language

2 : a branch of linguistics concerned with etymologies

Definition of FOLK ETYMOLOGY

1 : the transformation of words so as to give them an apparent relationship to other better-known or better-understood words (as in the change of Spanish cucaracha to English cockroach)

First Known Use of FOLK ETYMOLOGY

1882 [folk etymology was in practice for millennia before the word was coined]

My Canadian Oxford gives a 2^nd definition: “a commonly held but false explanation of the origin of a word”. This is the meaning I’m using in this essay (I’ll write about the first meaning another time).

The Greek root of etymology means “true”. Etymologists attempt, as accurately as possible, to determine the true or actual source of a word. Folk Etymologists on the other hand can make up anything as long as it sounds plausible.

There must be something inherent in human genes to make us want to know the origins of things – words, phrases, objects… Or is it just me? No – I must have many fellow origin-seekers judging by the number of books written on the subject (I own 10 or 12 myself).

Most of early writing on word origins (and a significant amount of contemporary writing) was what would now be considered folk etymology. And much of it was wrong. For example Samuel Johnson’s first dictionary gave the origin of bonfire to be from the French for “good fire”; it actually comes from “bone fire”.

An etymologist knows you can’t determine the origin of a modern word just by looking at it. Here are some other examples of similar sounding (and similar meaning) words having completely different origins:

• Pan (the cooking utensil): from Old English panne, possibly from Latin patina meaning “dish” [question for you etymologists – how do you know it’s not from Latin panis, making “bread pan” almost as redundant as “pizza pie”?]
• Pantry: from Old French paneterie, ultimately from Latin panis therefore “a cupboard to store bread”. 

• Minimum: from Latin minimus meaning “least”
• Miniature: from Latin minium meaning “red lead” which was used to make (among other things) small illustrations in manuscripts called in Italian miniatura. By the time it reached English it had lost its original meaning of “red drawing” and become “small drawing” probably under the influence of minimum. 

• Isle: comes from Old French ile
• Island: from Old English igland, a compound of ig (island) + land. The spelling was modified to resemble Isle because of an assumed relationship. 

• Man: from Old English mann, plural menn, of Germanic origin.
• Human: from Middle English humaine from Old French from Latin humanus and ultimately from Latin homo (human being) 

This last pair I will expand on in a future post.

Source: 

Word Origins…and how we know them, Anatoly Liberman, 2005.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2001

Mean Ol' Schoolmarm

Mean Ol' Schoolmarm

The Mean Ol' Schoolmarm has her switch in hand and is ready to point out common grammatical errors she hears every day. Beware her wrath.

My wife follows a website called The Pioneer Woman  mostly for the photo-illustrated recipes. The author Ree homeschools her 4 kids and has a section of the website dedicated to homeschooling. One of the features in this section is the Mean Ol' Schoolmarm where she gets after people for common grammatical errors, usually words that are confused like "your" and "you're". It's wonderful -  except that the model in the photo doesn't look very "Ol'" nor near stern enough. Anyway if you have a pet grammatical peeve, the Mean Ol' Schoolmarm may have already addressed it.

One of my favorite peeves that is addressed by the Mean Ol' Schoolmarm is complimentary vs complementary [18 January 2011]. I own a health food store and a common name for natural medicine like vitamins and herbs is "Complementary Medicine". This term is used in reaction to an older term "Alternative Medicine", to suggest that both natural and conventional medicine can work together. Whenever I see all too frequent references to "Complimentary Medicine", I imagine a doctor making his/her hospital rounds saying things like "My you are looking good this morning, Mr. Jones" or "That green hospital gown really suits your auburn hair, Miss Smith." I suppose such compliments might make the patients feel a little better and to some extent actually improve their health. Perhaps Complimentary Medicine 101 should be a required course in all medical schools.

Canada is Unofficially Bimetric

 I wrote the following 2 years ago in response to a question from my 3rd cousin who was raised in South Africa and is now living in Western Australia. His wife had purchased some patterns made in Canada and was surprised to find them measured in inches. So he asked me if we still used the old inches, feet and yards system. He also asked if we used Fahrenheit or Celsius for temperature. This was my reply:

Just as Canada is officially bilingual (English and French) though few outside Quebec are fluent in both, we are unofficially bimetric (I just made up that word).

Canada half-heartedly made the official switch to metric about 30 years ago but we never completely let go of the old system. I think they even still use inches and pounds in grade school. For decades we have had both systems overlapping. The intention was for the confusion to last for just 1 generation but we haven't been disciplined enough to learn the new system well enough to let go of the old, which just prolongs the agony.

We think of distance in either miles or kilometers. Both work efficiently for different distances -- for short distances miles approximates minutes of travel at 60 miles per hour (e.g. 35 miles will take 35 minutes) while for longer distances 100 km approximates hours and fractions thereof at 100 km per hour (e.g. 250 km is 2.5 hours). Metric fuel consumption never caught on at all - only in auto ads do you hear liters per 100km; everyone on the street still thinks in miles per gallon (20 used to be standard, newer efficient cars can brag 35-40 mpg). Gasoline pumps did switch to litres years ago just as the price reached $1 per gallon, so they could list it as $.22 (or whatever it was then) instead. However over the years the price of gas has climbed until it surpassed the $1.00 per L mark (and was heading for $2 before the recession brought it back below $1 again).

Grocers sell produce with the price listed "per 100g" but also list in small print the "per pound" price; fabric stores will measure centimeters or inches, whatever the customer asks for, and calculate the price accordingly. Older patterns would be in inches; more recent ones (unless from the USA) in cm. Grain is sold officially by the tonne (1000kg) but the price of grain is still discussed among farmers as $/bushel, or yield as bushels per acre instead of the official tonnes per hectare. Few farmers here could tell you how big a hectare is but they all know what an acre is. For one thing the land in western Canada was surveyed into 160 acre Quarter Sections (a Section is 1 mile x 1 mile so a Quarter Section is 1/2 mile x 1/2 mile), so for that reason it still makes some sense to work land area in acres and sections.

The other reason for the resistance to change is our biggest trading partner and neighbor to the south - the USA. They do not have a strong enough government to enforce a switch - the people wouldn't stand for it. Besides they think they are important enough that everyone else who wants to do business with them can speak their language including their measurement system. Products imported into Canada from the USA  have some interesting measurements like 946ml (USA 32 oz or 1 quart) or 454g (USA 1 pound). It's easier to just use the American bottle and change the label.

To return to your first question, temperature is a little better than half converted. The weather reports all use C but some people still talk in F. Thermostats can be set to read either and most thermometers have both, one on each side of the red line. Everyone knows the significant temps in both systems - water freezes at 32F or 0C; comfortable room temperatures is 70F or 20C; and -40 is just as cold in both!

There, ended up writing an essay to answer a simple question.