Samuel Beckett said, "Words are all we have." The latest studies suggest that men and women use close to 16,000 words every day, but do we always know what the words mean or where they came from?
We toss out comments containing words that most of us would be hard-pressed to define, let alone identify the origin of. Now you can wow your friends the next time you play Trivial Pursuit with this small collection of recondite information.
"It doesn't make an iota of difference." Do we have any idea what an iota is?
Iota is the ninth letter in the Greek alphabet. It also means small, speck, scintilla or smidgen, because the letter iota is the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet.
Other oddities in our language include:
"He's a blithering idiot." Blither is a derivative of blather, a Middle English verb originating with the Scots and northern Brits, meaning to "talk nonsense."
"He's a left-wing liberal." You may have guessed I would like this one. It means one who is left of center, progressive or, in the vernacular of the conservatives, a radical. It finds its genesis in the 1789 French National Assembly: When that body met on the eve of the French Revolution, the Third Estate - the commoners who were considerably more radical than the clergy and nobles of the First and Second Estates - were seated on the left side of the chamber.
"They screwed up." We hear this constantly in modern language, but how did this come to mean what it does? The word screw goes back to Latin, scrofa, literally meaning sow, and then later screw. The early use of screw as a verb traces back again to Middle English in the late 16th century, when it was used to mean contort (the features) or to twist around.
"He or she is a cyber freak." Cyber was first used in 1948 by American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) when he coined the term cybernetics in his book of that title. Its roots are in the Greek word, kubernetes, or steersman. Kubernetes is also the root word for govern. Cybernetics is now the common term referring to the entire field of control and communication theory for either machines or animals.
To be caught "red-handed" comes from a 15th-century Scottish legal term red hand, meaning clear evidence of guilt, and refers to having blood on one's hands.
"It's his own fault for egging her on." Egg has nothing to do with eggs. The verb egg dates to 1200 and is from the Old Norse eggia - to goad or urge on. In the 16th century, Thomas Drant wrote, "Db, Ile egge them on to speake some thyng, whiche spoken may repent them."
Some words remain a mystery so far as their origin is concerned. Lollygagging, as in "He keeps lollygagging around," is one that comes from the mid-19th century of unknown origin. It could be related to "loll" or "loiter," but no one knows for sure.
Other unknown sayings:
"I don't know what got her in a snit." Snit appears to have originated in the 1930s, meaning a state of mind, temper or foul mood, but no one knows where it came from.
"It's a lead-pipe cinch." The cinch part is easy, taken from the Mexican Spanish, cincha, referring to the leather strap that secures the saddle to a horse's back, but how or why the superlative lead-pipe was added seems lost to history.
"He's an old curmudgeon" is another odd one showing up in the late 16th century. It appears as early as 1577 in Richard Stanyhurst's "A Treatise Contayning a Playne and Perfect Description of Irelande," but no one knows who first coined the term or if it has roots in another word.
For the golfers, the term 'Mulligan' is of unknown origin, though it is suspected that some poor soul named Mulligan was such a terrible golfer that his playing partners frequently allowed him to repeat bad shots.
So amaze, or perhaps daze, your friends with your new-found knowledge of our language, and I'll leave you with the words of my late brother Bill, whom I assume did not plagiarize this one: "Build better skizovacs, and the world will beat a path to your stemdormer."
Mike Davis is a freelance columnist and writer living in Magnolia. He can be reached at rtjameson@nwlink.com.
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