Thereby Hangs a Tale - Stories of Curious Word Origins

By Charles Earle Funk

THIS book is the outcome of a collection of material that has been slowly accumulating over the past thirty years or so, since the time when, under the guidance of the late Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly, I began to work as his associate in the editorial department of the Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary. The ancestry of most of the words that we now use glibly or find in books or other current literature, is prosaic. We can trace their lines of descent back to Old English, or Old French, or Latin, or Greek, or other ancient source, but beyond the bare bones supplied by etymologists, which indicate those sources, and the steps by which they became English words, the dictionaries tell us little—for there is little more that can be told. The ancient Roman or Greek, say, who may have been the first to use a word that has strayed on to us, perhaps could have told the story of its origin. It may have been picturesque, based upon some historic episode, like the word anecdote; it may have come from a tale in some older language, for the languages that we consider ancient were themselves based upon still more ancient sources, but that story, if any, cannot now be determined. Thus what we know about the origins of the great majority of the words in our present language can be found in an unabridged dictionary or in a work dealing with etymologies, such as that compiled by W. W. Skeat about seventy years ago, or the one more recently prepared by Ernest Weekley.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Dec 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447495857

Book preview

dedicated.

PREFACE

THIS book is the outcome of a collection of material that has been slowly accumulating over the past thirty years or so, since the time when, under the guidance of the late Dr. Frank H. Vizetelly, I began to work as his associate in the editorial department of the Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary. The ancestry of most of the words that we now use glibly or find in books or other current literature, is prosaic. We can trace their lines of descent back to Old English, or Old French, or Latin, or Greek, or other ancient source, but beyond the bare bones supplied by etymologists, which indicate those sources, and the steps by which they became English words, the dictionaries tell us little—for there is little more that can be told. The ancient Roman or Greek, say, who may have been the first to use a word that has strayed on to us, perhaps could have told the story of its origin. It may have been picturesque, based upon some historic episode, like the word anecdote; it may have come from a tale in some older language, for the languages that we consider ancient were themselves based upon still more ancient sources, but that story, if any, cannot now be determined. Thus what we know about the origins of the great majority of the words in our present language can be found in an unabridged dictionary or in a work dealing with etymologies, such as that compiled by W. W. Skeat about seventy years ago, or the one more recently prepared by Ernest Weekley.

But there are in our current language a number of fairly common words—some old, some new—which were born, or grew, or acquired their meanings in an unusual manner. They came, as our language has, from all sources—sources of which the dictionaries, for lack of space, can rarely supply more than a clue. These are the tales that I have been collecting and which are offered here. A number of them may be already familiar to some readers, such as the origin of tantalize, from the Greek legend of the punishment meted out to Tantalus by the wrathful Zeus, or echo, from the fate of the perfidious nymph of that name. Such tales, though familiar to some, are included here for the benefit of those to whom they may be new. But I have found that few but scholars in the language know how the word clue, which was just used, acquired its present meaning; that the Portuguese gave us coconut because, to their sailors in the sixteenth century, the nut resembled a coco, a grinning face; that sylph was a coinage of that master charlatan or genius, depending upon the point of view, the sixteenth-century alchemist, Paracelsus; that we owe our terms chapel and chaplain to the cloak or cape worn by the fourth-century monk, St. Martin; that the name Easter was taken from a pagan goddess, and that the names of the days of the week denote dedication to ancient pagan gods.

Whenever it has been possible, the stories are historical; that is, for example, facts in the life of St. Martin are briefly stated to explain why his cloak was venerated; the occasion for the coinage of sylph by Paracelsus is summarized; a brief account tells why magenta commemorated a battle; short sketches of the invasions of the Vandals and Tatars account for such words as vandal, tartar, and horde; highly abridged biographies of such persons as the Scottish engineer, John L. McAdam, the Scottish chemist, Charles Macintosh, and others, tell why their names were adopted into the language; an explanation is deduced why the French general, Martinet, became a byword in English, but not in French; the historical circumstances that introduced the word nepotism are related, and so on, and so on.

To the best of my knowledge, no similar collection of tales accounting for such a number of English words has yet appeared. The facts have been drawn from numerous sources and have been carefully checked. It would be impossible to list all the authorities that have been consulted during the years through which the material has been collected; they have been numerous, embracing many languages. Murray’s A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, usually referred to as the Oxford English Dictionary, has been an invaluable aid and has supplied clues to many older references; the various encyclopedias, not only English, but also French, German, and Italian, brought other information to light; considerable source material was obtained from Sir William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, checked against later findings, which sometimes gave occasion for variant stories; the files of the British Notes Queries, as well as the American Notes Queries, were frequently consulted, as well as a number of volumes dealing with medieval life and customs. With few exceptions, the stories as written are entirely my own, and those exceptions have been duly accredited to their authors. I am indebted to Robert (Bob) Burns for the account, by letter, of his creation of the term bazooka; to Mr. R. W. Henderson, also by letter, for his findings on the word tennis, and to Mr. H. L. Mencken, and his publisher, for permission to reprint his conclusions, in which I concur, on the origin of yankee.

Sometimes, because of the relationship existing between some of our words, it has seemed advisable to group several words together to avoid repetition. Thus, for example, augur and inaugurate are related, and a common story suffices for each; so are money and mint, eliminate and preliminary, and various others. Similarly, though in different manner, is there relationship between such divergent words as grotesque and antic, matinee and noon, monster and prodigy, foreign and denizen, and others. These also have usually been grouped into common stories. Hence, although the book is alphabetical in general arrangement and no index is therefore essential for the main list of words, an index is provided at the end of the book to show under what heading other words may be found. Thus: augur, see inaugurate; mint, see money; grotesque, see antic, and so on. The index also includes the names of the persons, mythological characters, and places directly associated with a word-story, as well as those persons to whom the author is indebted for material. Thus: David, see under Abigail; Mencken, H. L., see under Yankee; Theseus, see under clue, etc.

Rarely, in this work, has an attempt been made to follow the various alterations in the form of a word from its ancient source. Although that has sometimes been done for the purpose of clarification, such lines of development have been left generally to etymologists. It may be well, however, to review with extreme brevity the general outlines of the main sources of our language for the benefit of those to whom the subject is new. With few exceptions, our commonest words—the prepositions, the pronouns, the conjunctions, the auxiliary verbs (do, may, can, have, be, etc., and their derivatives), and the common objects pertaining to domestic and agricultural life—have descended to us from the period known as Old English, sometimes referred to as Anglo-Saxon. Such words are usually of Teutonic origin, surviving from the early centuries of the Christian Era when England was conquered, overrun, and settled, its earlier occupants wiped out, by Angle, Saxon, and Danish invaders from regions now embraced by Germany and Denmark. The language introduced by these invaders, intermixed with each other and absorbing some of the older tongue, became standard speech until the eleventh century. It was chiefly a spoken language and there were few scholars to preserve its integrity. Consequently, through the centuries, the forms of the original words often became greatly altered and corrupted in common speech. Spelling in this period was usually phonetic, according to the values placed upon the alphabet that was then in use.

In the year 1066, William, duke of Normandy, with a well-armed force of sixty thousand followers, entered England, defeated Harold II, the Saxon king, at Hastings, seized the throne and became the lord of the country. During the next two centuries, the English, or Saxons as they were called, were reduced almost to servitude by their conquerors. Norman-French became the language spoken by all except the common folk, and even they were driven to become somewhat familiar with it to understand the speech of their masters. All royal proclamations and the proceedings of all law courts were also in that language. Thus, through that period, many Old French words were grafted upon the language. And again, through the general illiteracy of the people, these in turn were corrupted in the common speech of a folk unaccustomed to French speech—like the French naperon, being first a napron, and then further corrupted to an apron.

But Old French was itself, to a considerable extent, an outgrowth of Latin. That is, just as William the Conqueror imposed his language upon the people of England, so, in the days of the emperors of Rome, had Latin been imposed upon the people of the conquered country that later became France. But it was largely the Latin of the Roman soldier quartered upon the country—a debased Latin—that became further corrupted when adopted into the native speech. Many of our words thus trace back through Old French to a former Latin source.

Preceding the flood of Old French after the Norman Conquest by several centuries, and continuing steadily side by side through it and until at least the sixteenth century, our language was being enriched through another channel. That increment came through the form of Latin that we call Low or Medieval Latin and Late Latin, used by the fathers of the Christian Church and by the later priests and monks in their devotions and intercourse with one another. It was a development from classical Latin and formed a language common to all Europe, enabling the clergy to travel anywhere. It was also used in the church services of England. Hence, though some of the words became incorporated into our language without much change, others were sadly misunderstood by the illiterate listeners and were altered into strange meanings. Thus, for example, we have patter from pater noster, dirge from the funeral chant with the opening word, dirige, direct, anthem from antiphon, and so on.

This stage in the development of the language, in which Old French and Medieval Latin were mingled with the corrupted remnants of Old English, is referred to as Middle English. The works of Geoffrey Chaucer furnish an example of its later form. Spelling was, in a measure, phonetic, employing the Roman alphabet. But the sounds of words were often unlike those we now give to the same words, thus accounting for many of our modern spellings, such as thought, eight, once. There were no rules to guide one in spelling; each man spelled according to the way words sounded to him. Hence, any uniformity that may have existed was accidental.

Finally, without considering here the immense number of words that we have constantly borrowed from every language with which English-speaking people have been in contact, we owe a large volume of our words to the period that we call Modern English, beginning, roughly, with the sixteenth century. Scholarship, previously limited largely to the clergy, was opened to all, and the study of classical learning became a fetish. Writers and thinkers sprang up from every walk of life, and did not hesitate to cull their words from the Latin of Cicero, or Horace, or Ovid, or Seneca. Many also went to the Greek of Æschylus, or Plato, or Plutarch to derive their words. It is thus chiefly through these writers and their unceasing stream of successors that the great bulk of words derived directly from Latin and Greek ancestry and meanings have entered our language. From this practice also has descended our present custom of looking to one or another of those languages for the formation of new words, especially those of scientific nature.

At the beginning of this last period, the old dialectal pronunciations continued to influence the spellings of the older language. Many of those pronunciations, in fact, were carried along in cultured speech until the seventeenth century or later, and continued in the common speech for at least another hundred years. With the advance of learning, our spelling, though continuously subjected to fads and mistaken notions, has gradually assumed a certain degree of uniformity. Because it still retains many of the sixteenth-century forms, however, it cannot be called phonetic. But it is highly probable that the unwieldy forms that we have inherited will disappear one by one in course of time, as the people find it more convenient to drop them.

CHARLES EARLE FUNK

September, 1949

THEREBY HANGS A TALE

abet

The so-called sport of bear-baiting was widely known among the Teutonic countries a thousand years ago, but it became nowhere more popular than in England, especially after the fourteenth century. For the pleasure of the spectators, a bear, freshly caught and starved enough to make it vicious, was fastened to a stake by a short chain or, it might be, was turned loose in a small arena. Then dogs were set upon it, fresh dogs being supplied if the first were maimed or killed. In the end, of course, after perhaps hours of sport, one of the dogs would succeed in seizing the exhausted bear by the throat and worry it to death. The man or boy who urged his dog to attack was said to abet it, using a contracted Old French word—abeter, meaning to bait, or hound on. The early French, in turn, had taken a Norse word, beita, which meant to cause to bite. So, though we now use abet in speaking of persons—chiefly of persons who encourage others in wrongful deeds—the word traces back to an Old Norse command to a dog, an order to attack, equivalent, perhaps, to the modern Sic ’em!

abeyance

When anything is in abeyance now we mean that it is in a state of inaction, that the matter, whatever it was, is dormant, although some action is expected to occur eventually. It was that expectancy that gave us the word, for it came as a law term, after the Norman Conquest, from the Old French abeance, a state of expectancy. The term referred especially to the condition of a property or title while, after the death of the former possessor, often by foul means in those days, his successor could be determined from among various claimants. The Old French word was derived from the verb beer (modern bayer), to gape, to expect, perhaps because of the gaping expectancy with which the settlement of an estate was awaited either by the rightful heir or by a hopeful usurper, none too certain that his claim would pass scrutiny.

abhor

When the hair stands up from fright or dread, we have the literal meaning of abhor. The Latin source of our verb was abhorreo, from ab, away from, and horreo, to stand on end, to bristle. Thus the literal meaning was to shrink back from with horror, but, though the verb still expresses great repugnance, it no longer conveys the notion of shuddering dread or fear that its use indicated to the Romans.

abigail

We must turn to the Bible to see why this feminine proper name started to become a synonym for servant. In the First Book of Samuel, the twenty-fifth chapter tells how David, in return for past favors, made a peaceful request to the wealthy Nabal for food for his followers. Nabal rejected the request and David was about to take by force what had been denied. But Abigail, Nabal’s wife, heard of the affair. She learned, first, that the request was reasonable, then taking more food with her than had been requested, she went to David to turn away his wrath. She was just in time. Her abject apologies for the churlishness of her husband fill the next eight verses of the chapter; in them, to show her great humility, she refers to herself six times as David’s handmaid. The association of name and occupation was further fixed in men’s minds by the dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher. When writing the play, The Scornful Lady, in 1609, they gave the name Abigail to the very spirited lady’s maid who had one of the leading parts. This character, or the actress who played the part, made so great an impression on the audiences that the later writers, Congreve, Swift, Fielding, Smollett, and others began to use the name as that of any lady’s maid.

abominable

The Romans were intensely superstitious. Any chance event or chance remark that occurred on the eve of an undertaking was carefully examined to determine whether it might indicate good luck or bad luck. Thus Cicero tells us that Crassus, when about to embark upon his ill-fated expedition against the Parthians, should have turned back. At the harbor, a man selling dried figs from Caunus, gave the cry, Cauneas! to signify the source of his wares. This to the Romans sounded like "Cave ne eas, meaning, Beware of going," which Crassus should have taken to be a sign of bad luck, an evil omen. Crassus had not heeded the warning, however, and was treacherously slain by the Parthians. Any such omen as that was considered to have been a clear portent of doom, amply warning one to avoid whatever undertaking he had in mind. For that reason it was described as abominabilis, from ab, away from, and omen. The early sense of the term, direful, inspiring dread, ominous, came through association of ideas to mean loathsome, disgusting, because it was usually loathsome things that were taken as omens of evil.

abound, abundant

When things are in such profusion as to be like the waves of the sea overflowing the land, we may properly say that they abound. Literally, that is what the word means. It comes to us from the Latin, abundo, to overflow, from ab, from, and unda, wave, billow, surge. Our words abundant and abundance have the same poetic source.

aboveboard

Card-playing has been known in Europe since about the middle of the thirteenth century, but it is not known how soon thereafter the players discovered ways to cheat their opponents. But by the late sixteenth century, at least, the players had learned that cheating was more difficult, more easily detected, if the cards around the table were all kept in open sight—literally, above the board. This expression was used so frequently among card-players that it became contracted in the early seventeenth century to aboveboard.

academy

Helen, who later became noted as the owner of the face that launched a thousand ships, was the fabled Grecian queen whose abduction by Paris brought on the Trojan War described by Homer almost three thousand years ago. As a little girl in Sparta her beauty was even then so remarkable that, according to legend, the Athenian prince, Theseus, was so affected by it when he saw her dancing that he seized and hid her, intending to hold her until she was old enough to become his wife. But her mother, Leda, sent her sons, the twins Castor and Pollux, to find their sister. When they reached Athens, the story goes, they found someone who could help them, an Athenian named Academus. It was through his assistance that Helen was recovered and returned to Sparta. The Spartans were so grateful, according to one account, that they purchased a grove on the outskirts of Athens and presented it to their benefactor. In later years, this spot became a public garden, known as the Grove of Academus.

About the year 387 B.C., the Athenian philosopher, Plato, took up his residence upon a plot of ground that he owned, which directly adjoined this grove. It then became his habit, when the young men of Athens came to pursue their studies under him, to walk and talk with them along the paths of this peaceful spot. Plato continued this mode of instruction during the rest of his life, or for about forty years, as he was about eighty when he died, so it is not surprising that among the Athenians the school that he conducted was called the Academia, after the name of the grove. And when he died, it was found that he had made arrangements, according to the customs of that day, for his own estate to be converted into a religious foundation sacred to the Muses, for in that way his school could be perpetuated as an institution of learning. Thus, through Plato’s chance use of a grove that had been the legendary property of an obscure Athenian countryman, we have obtained our word academy.

accost

The early sense was nautical, so much so that it was often written accoast, as if the meaning were to lie along the coast of. The original meaning was not far from that, because the word was derived from the Latin prefix ad, to, plus costa, which, though actually meaning rib, was extended to side. So the nautical meaning was to lie alongside, almost, as it were, rib to rib. Later the meaning became less exact, to approach for the purpose of addressing, and now we use it most frequently just in the sense of to address.

acre

The Old English word was œcer. In the Middle Ages, however, it was adapted to the Latin of the period and became acra, which gave rise to our present spelling. The word originally meant unoccupied country, whether field or woodland. But through increased interest in agriculture, the meaning became limited to land that could be cultivated. And by the time of the Norman Conquest, the extent of that land had become limited to the area that a yoke of oxen could plow in one day. Through the course of the next two centuries that method of measurement was seen to be unfair, the land allotted to a tenant depended not only upon the condition of his oxen, but upon the kind and condition of the soil to be plowed. A good yoke of oxen on level ground and rich light soil could plow twice as much as an ill-conditioned yoke on hilly, stony ground. In the reign of Edward I, therefore, the acre was fixed as a piece of land 40 rods in length by four rods in width. (A rod measures 16 1/2 feet.) The practical farmer of those days took this to be thirty-two furrows of the plow, a furlong in length. But it has been many centuries since the acre was necessarily rectangular; now it may be of any shape, though its area is still fixed at 160 square rods or 4,840 square yards, as in the days of King Edward. (See also FURLONG.)

acrobat

From time immemorial, perhaps as proof of our relationship with the ape, man has amused himself by performing feats of daring upon ropes—ropes hanging from trees or high structures, or ropes tautly or loosely stretched high between two trees or other supports. In ancient Greece, skill in such feats became highly developed, though, like most paid entertainers of that era, the reputation of the performers was not above suspicion. Any such performer was known as an acrobat, one who walks aloft, from Greek akros, aloft, and batos, climbing or walking. (The full Greek term, akrobatos, is translated by some to mean walking on tiptoe.) Today we would call such a man a rope-walker or rope-dancer. But, although all the performers were classed as acrobats, among themselves or other well-informed persons they were separated into their several skills. The neurobat was at the top of the profession; considered among them as the true acrobat, for, as the name signified—neuron, sinew—this aerial dancer exercised his skill upon tautly stretched cords the thickness of catgut. So slender was the cord that, from a slight distance, he appeared to be dancing lightly upon air, sometimes playing the flute as he danced. The schœnobat—from schoinion, rope twisted of rushes—performed upon a thick rope, suspended from aloft, climbing it to dizzy heights, as a sailor does, tumbling about it held by a foot or knee, and showing his great strength and agility.

admiral

Abu-Bekr, the first successor to Mahomet, who died in A.D. 632, had been his faithful follower for many years. Upon taking the new title, Caliph, or successor, he relinquished his former title, The Faithful. This latter title was then taken by Omar, the man appointed to succeed him, who announced himself to be Commander of the Faithful, or Amir-al-muninin. The title, Commander, or Amir became increasingly popular after that. The Caliph himself was Amir-al-Umara, Ruler of Rulers; the minister of finance became Amir-al-Ahgal, and finally there came Amir-al-Alam, Commander of Banners, and Amir-al-Hajj, Commander of Caravans to Mecca.

Christian writers of the period naturally assumed that Amir-al was a single word, amiral. Later English writers then assumed that this word beginning with am was just another queer foreign way of spelling Latin words that began with adm. But, though they now changed the spelling of the Moslem expression to admiral, they retained the original meaning, ruler, or prince, or commander. Italy, France, and Spain, however, began to follow the Saracen lead with a Commander of the Sea (Amir-al-Bahr). England also, not to be outdone, appointed such an officer for the British fleet in the late fourteenth century, and gave him the title Admiral. Thus when we say Admiral Smith, we are using an Arabic expression which, if the literal meaning were observed, would be Commander of the Smith, Amir-al-Smith.

afraid

Scarcely known nowadays, except in stories laid in olden times, is the verb affray. Its ancient meaning was to startle out of one’s rest, as by a clap of thunder or other sharp noise. That is, one who was affrayed was one who was alarmed. From alarm to fright was a natural development in meaning, so affrayed, in the sense of frightened, had come to be common usage in the fourteenth century. Thanks to lack of uniform spelling before the eighteenth century, it has come down to us in the form afraid.

agony (antagonist)

Although we have since extended the meaning of this word to include intense physical suffering, such as we experience when in great pain, its original meaning in English referred to intense mental suffering or anguish, specifically that experienced by Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, for it was in the English translation of the Bible in the fourteenth century that our word first appeared. This meaning was taken from the Greek agonia, but the way in which the Greek word developed that meaning is peculiar.

As far back as the days of Homer, agon denoted an assembly, a meeting of the people, usually for the discussion of public affairs. Hence, as time went by, any meeting of the Grecian people for any purpose came to be called an agon, especially one of the meetings devoted to games or contests. These contests might be athletic, such as the Olympic games, comprising foot races, wrestling, jumping, throwing the discus and the spear, or they might be musical, or for poetic competition, or for other competition in which one man or group might vie with another. From the place of the assembly, the agon, any such contest was an agonia.

Each agonia was, of course, a struggle between competitors, whether a physical combat between wrestlers or a mental combat between two dramatists. It was from the mental struggles of the latter group that agonia acquired its figurative sense of mental anguish, thus giving rise to our term, agony.

Incidentally, since it is derived from the same source, it might be noted that one of the rivals in the Greek agonia was an agonistes. His opponent was therefore called an antagonistes, from anti, against, thus giving us the word antagonist.

aisle

One wonders how we acquired such a curiously formed word. By way of answer, we shouldn’t have it. The spelling is the result of confusion; its present common meaning—a passageway, as in a church or theater—arose from still another confusion. The English word was originally ele, borrowed from the French in the fourteenth century; and that, in turn, came from the Latin ala, a wing, the original meaning of the word. It applied to the part on either side of the nave of a church, usually separated from the nave by a row of columns. But, as with many other words, ele had many spellings during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of which ile was the most common. But ile was also the common spelling for a body of land surrounded by water; so when the latter word was given the spelling isle in the seventeenth century, the term relating to church architecture followed suit and also became isle. Changes in the French spelling of ele were taking place as well, and the French term had become aile in the meantime. English writers of the eighteenth century, in desperation, unwilling to have their readers think they were writing of islands in a church, threw the French and English spellings together into our present anomaly, aisle.

The French aile, however, had become confused through the centuries with allée, alley. So along with the union of isle and aile into aisle, the English word acquired, as well, an additional meaning, passageway, and it is this meaning that has become the more common.

alarm

The Norman-French military call when, for example, a sentinel spied an enemy force approaching, was "As armes! as armes! That summons was introduced into England where it was used for a while, but eventually it was translated into the equivalent English, at arms! which became the modern to arms! Similar calls were employed at the same period elsewhere in Europe. That used in Italian armies was all’ arme! (to arms!)" This became the popular call among other armies; but in every case the words that were called soon became the name of the cry or the name of any kind of signal to indicate danger. Italian all’ arme! (to arms!) became allarme, French alarme, and English alarm, meaning a warning sound, and lost its strictly military use. The word alarum arose from mispronunciation of alarm, for the same reason that causes many people to sound film as if it were spelled fillum.

alcohol

From very early times the women of Oriental countries, desiring to enhance their beauty, have stained their eyelids with a very fine dark powder. This they call koh’l. The cosmetic is usually obtained from antimony. English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in describing this cosmetic, thinking the definite article to be part of the word (al-koh’l), wrote it as alcohol. Early chemists then took this name and applied it to any extremely fine powder, so fine that one could not feel the separate grains. Thus, as one example, powdered sulfur was known as "alcohol of sulfur," a name that it retained into the nineteenth century. In the next step, the notion of similarly complete refinement began to require the name alcohol for liquids which seemed to have reached the superlative of refining. Such, in the late seventeenth century, seemed to have been attained by a wine which chemists and distillers spoke of as "alcohol of wine," and the term alcohol has since applied to liquids partly or wholly of the composition of that wine.

alert

Literally, alert means on the watchtower. It came from an Italian military expression of the sixteenth century, all’ erta, in which all’ is a common contraction of alia, on. The original phrase was stare all’ erta, to stand on the watchtower. As conditions changed, the phrase merely meant to stand watch. Ultimately, with the omission of the verb, it came into English in the seventeenth century further contracted to alert, and with its meaning altered to signify on watch; vigilant.

alimony, aliment

Someone has said that alimony is no more than a telescoping of all the money. It may seem so to a man who has little left after his former wife has received the monthly allowance awarded to her. Actually, however, the Latin alimonia was just a new-fangled spelling, two thousand years ago, of the older alimentum. Both of them, in those days, had the same meaning—nourishment, sustenance, provisions. From the first has come alimony, from the other, aliment. Thus the real intent of the word alimony is an allowance that will provide aliment, or a means of living.

alkali

Like our mathematics, we owe much of the early study of chemistry to Arabic scholars of the so-called Dark Ages. Thus the word alkali is but a transliteration of the Arabic al-qalīy, which means the ashes of saltwort. Saltwort is a marine plant used in the production of sodium carbonate, formerly called soda ash. As chemists learned that other salts than sodium carbonate possessed some properties in common with it, alkali became a term common for all.

alligator

English writers of the sixteenth century correctly called this American creature a lagarto, for that was the Spanish name for this huge saurian—lizard. But because Spaniards, like Arabs, are accustomed to put the definite article al before a noun—al lagarto, the lizard—careless English writers assumed that this was a single word—allagarto. This became further corrupted in the seventeenth century to allegator, and the present spelling became established in the early eighteenth century.

alone

One who is alone is distinctly one, not two or more. And that was the original intent and use of the word. It was formed from all one, wholly one, and was used as two words until the fourteenth century. In those days and until about the end of the seventeenth century the word one was pronounced just as we pronounce own today. This pronunciation survives in only, (See also ATONE.)

amazon

Before the days of the Trojan War, according to the legendary tales of Homer, there was a tribe of fierce warriors living near the Caucasus Mountains. They were ruled by a queen, it was said, and they had waged war against other tribes in Asia Minor and had even invaded Greece. But the peculiar thing about this tribe was that all its members were women; there were no men among them. Once each year they met a neighboring tribe of men, but any boys that might be born from such a union were either killed or sent over the hills to their fathers. The girls were kept and were trained

Reviews for Thereby Hangs a Tale - Stories of Curious Word Origins

[steven_burgauer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Curious is an understatement. What about delightful? Great book.