Every word has a story to tell By Monazza Anwar

I admit that I’m a very disorganized person. A look at my writing desk will tell you what I mean. It seems as if a tornado hit it. And sometime or the other, I find myself rummaging through the monstrous muddle and finding year-old writings, pieces, articles and what not — like I did just the other day.

This time, I stumbled upon a treasure — a notebook in which I had started collecting words and their background. I remember reading about a ‘logophile’ sometime back in Sunday Magazine. So here are some bits from my collection.

‘Tawdry’ originates from a saint, originally used in the phrase ‘tawdry lace’. This necklace or scarf, made of silk or lace, was sold at fairs honouring St Audrey. Audrey, (her Saxon name being Ethelreda) was a 17th Century princess. She developed a throat infection or disease probably, which eventually caused her death. She viewed her disease as a God-sent punishment for her worldliness and vanity in being impartial to costly necklaces. Tawdry laces might have initially been of high quality, but with time, they became a paradigm of gaudiness, and so the adjective ‘tawdry’ was used for anything cheap or garish.

Primitive motor cars emitted a lot of steam and smoke, often enfolding the driver. As a result, the French, in those early times, jocosely compared the driver with the stoker of a steam engine. This gave the word ‘chafe’ and the French word ‘chauffeur’, meaning ‘to warm’. The original chauffeur was not a smart driver, but just a plain ‘stoker of a furnace’.

Here’s one related to Greek mythology. Typhon was a mythical Greek monster who declared war on the king of gods, Zeus. Typhon had 100 heads, each with a terrible voice. This monster seems to be a suitable personification for ‘typhoon’ coming from two Chinese words meaning ‘great wind’. In English, it would have been spelt as ‘dy fung’, but its resemblance to the monster Typhon made it to be the violent, noisy and terrifying windstorm that it is today.

Writers and poets have frequently used sleep as a perfect metaphor for death. Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest says:

‘We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.’

And Hamlet, in his ‘to be or not to be’ speech, compared ‘to die’ with ‘to sleep’. The death-sleep association dates back far beyond Shakespeare — to the ancient Greeks who used the word ‘koimetrion’ meaning ‘sleeping room’. Through Latin, the word ‘cemetery’ has come to mean a burial ground...arousing creepy thoughts of ghosts.

‘Take flak’, is sometimes used informally for ‘criticism’. But a German would know better. For the word is actually an acronym of the German word ‘Flieger Abwehr Kanone’, literally meaning ‘aircraft defense gun’. Try pronouncing the word!

Spellings, through evolution, give rise to misconceived words such as ‘auburn’, for example. Believe it or not, in mediaeval England, auburn meant ‘blond’! The word originates from old French and Mediaeval Latin ‘albumins’ or ‘whitish’. In the 16th-17th centuries, auburn was spelt ‘abron’ and later as ‘abourne’ and soon ‘abrown’, thus mistakenly associated with the colour brown.

In a bad twist of fate, Agassi might lose a set six-love. Inzamam might be out for a duck. Possibly, ‘love’ and ‘cluck’ are associated through origin. An egg represents a zero (0) for its rounded shape. Hence, to be bowled out for a ‘duck’ is in fact out for a duck’s egg. Similarly, ‘love’, in tennis, may be a score of ‘I’oeuf’, which is French for egg. However, a 17th Century gambler would have played cards ‘for love’ — i.e., without stakes, just for fun, for nothing.

Jewish scholars in the Middle Ages developed an occult philosophy by the name of ‘cabals’. The Jewish and non-Jewish mystics studied cabals, perhaps in small, secretive groups and caches — fearing that they might be mistaken for witchcraft. Consequently, it gave rise to the English word ‘cabal’ — a group of political conspirators. This is further reinforced by the fact that King Charles II had ministers whose surnames began with the letters C-A-B-A-L. As history has it, they belonged to various rival groups and were not united in their political views.

Hippocrates and other ancient Greek doctors and philosophers believed that the human body had four vital fluids or humour — blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, which determined health and personality. This belief lasted into the Middle Ages, when humour took different meanings: general personality (of odd humour), temporary mood (in ill humour) and finally, a cheery mood, encouraging jokes (in good humour).

English language has many words incorporated from other languages. Each word has an origin, a history, a story of it being the way it is now. Be it French, Greek mythology, Latin, or any historical event, every word has a story to tell.
 

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