What's in a word? (Part 3)

If you've already read part 1 and part 2 of this series, you'll already be familiar with my love of word history. This week, I’m going to continue with ten more words with really interesting stories behind them! As before, information is taken from the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Bottle

Source: Latin > Vulgar Latin > Old French | First recorded: mid-14th century

The origin of the word "bottle" takes the same route as the development of the item itself. It started out as the Latin "buttis", meaning a cask, which became diminuitivised as "butticula" before making its way into various Romance languages, from Spanish to French to Italian.

At the point in the medieval period where the French "boteille" migrated into English as "bottle", vessels for carrying liquids were more likely to be made of leather than of glass, which was an expensive material at the time. Our bottles may have changed a lot in appearance and makeup, but they still have the same fundamental purpose that they always did—the same purpose as a cask.

Herald

Source: Proto-Germanic > Frankish? > Old French > Anglo-French | First recorded: late 13th century

When we think of heralds nowadays, we tend to envision servants or followers of a commander displaying his banner, or announcing his arrival. What we may not expect, however, is that the word "herald" actually comes out of Germanic terms designating the commander of an army. Quite how the meaning changed as it moved into French and then English is unclear, but it's possible that the journey relates to the spread of tournaments, where the MC and referee duties would be performed by the herald.

Jeopardy

Source: Latin > Old French | First recorded: late 14th century

Jeopardy can be a pretty serious state to be in, giving implications of great danger and risk; the fact that a famous trivia game show uses the word as its title can feel like a bit of an overstatement. If the contestants' lives aren't being threatened, they are at most in a state of mental distress, though that's less snappy as a show title.

If we follow the meaning of the word jeopardy back along its history, we find that it comes from the Old French "jeu parti", meaning a lost or uncertain game. Huh. And if we go further back with each of those two words, we'll discover that "jeu" is derived from the Latin "iocus"—which means "jest" and is also the root of our English word "joke"—and "pars", meaning a part or share. So, in the end, perhaps Jeopardy! is the perfect name for a game show after all.

Sneak

Source: Proto-Germanic > Old English > Middle English

What sorts of animals would you describe as sneaky? A fox, perhaps? An owl? A mouse? The cat that you swear wasn't under your feet a moment ago? Well, how about a snail? No?

Well, our word "sneak" comes out of Middle English's "sniken" and Old English's "snican", meaning to creep or crawl. "Snican" was in turn derived from the Proto-Germanic term "sneikanan", which is closely related to the words for snakes and snails, some of our favourite creepers and crawlers. The fact that "sneak" and "snake" are anagrams of each other is coincidental, but it makes me happy anyway.

Javelin

Source: Proto-Indo-European > Celtic > Old French | First recorded: late 15th century

If you watched this year's Olympic and Paralympic Games, you may have watched a spot of javelin throwing. The javelin itself is essentially a sort of short throwing spear, which we use mostly for sport nowadays but used to be a common weapon.

When we took the word from French, it had the same meaning that it does today, but if we go back further into the mists of time it looks like this was not always the case. The Old French word "javelot" has Celtic roots, likely due to the fact that France was populated with Celtic Gauls, and those roots are connected to a Proto-Indo-European term that refers to a forked tree branch. Presumably this is a description of where the item of the javelin originated?

Person

Source: Latin > Old French | First recorded: circa 1200

We spend a lot of time figuring out a satisfactory answer to "who am I as a person, really?" Our identity and personhood is often seen as something that ought to be authentic, and we are frequently encouraged to avoid being fake or putting on a mask. But has that always been the case?

The word "person" came into English from the Old French "persone", which had the same meaning of a human being. By the time the Latin "persona" had entered French, it had taken on that meaning as well, but its original use was as a reference to theatre masks. We can still see this in the way that we still use "persona" in English today to describe a false identity. So perhaps the real trick to establishing identity is less about throwing away the masks and more about picking which one we want to polish up.

Swipe

Source: Old English | First recorded: 1807

The word "swipe" first came into being as a noun; it may have originated as a dialectic version of the word "sweep" (specifically meaning a strike or blow). Alternatively, it may have been derived from the Old English "swapan", which is related to the word for a whip or chastisement.

Within the next couple of decades, it developed as a verb as well. First, in Scotland, it meant to deal a sweeping blow—much like the original noun form. A more familiar meaning, to steal or pilfer, didn't emerge in writing until 1885, in an American magazine as an example of prison slang.

Silly

Source: Proto-Germanic > Old English > Middle English | First recorded: pre-1200

The word "silly" has gone through a number of significant changes over the centuries. Its earliest definition was to be prosperous and fortuitous, which made a natural shift into meaning blessed. From there, the meaning moved to piety, and then to innocence. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the concept of innocence developed additional negative connotations, and so "silly" was attached to those connotations in turn: harmlessness, piteousness, and weakness. By the time the 16th century came to a close, "silly" had come to mean feeble-minded or foolish—quite a jump from its fortunate beginnings. This is still more or less how we use the word, though it has also reclaimed some of its earlier implications of harmless innocence.

League

Source: Latin > Italian > French, but also directly from Latin | First recorded: mid-15th century, but also late 14th century

The word "league" isn't used terribly much these days outside of the context of sports, but despite being slightly outmoded it has two meanings, both of which developed completely independently of each other. The definition you might be more familiar with, a league as an alliance, was brought over from the French "ligue" and the Italian "lega", which was ultimately derived from the Latin "ligare", which means to bind. Metaphorically, very apt.

But "league" is also a unit of measurement (albeit a vague, mostly literary unit). It developed from the late Latin word "leuga", which might have Gaulish roots. Maybe. It seems to have always been a nonspecific measure of distance, possibly indicating an hour's worth of travel. So we may never know for sure just how deep Jules Verne sent the crew of the Nautilus...

Cardinal

Source: Latin | First recorded: Early 12th century

The word "cardinal" first entered the English language as a linguistic shortcut. It referred to the clerics of the Catholic church we know as cardinals today, but their original (official, Latin) title was as the "cardinalis ecclesiae Romanae", roughly translated as the principal churchmen of Rome, with "cardinalis" being the Latin for principal or essential. This, naturally, was too much of a mouthful and got shortened to "cardinal".

A couple of centuries after this, "cardinal" started to be used as an adjective as well, taken directly from "cardinalis"—you may be familiar with cardinal numbers and directions, or the cardinal sins and virtues.

The bird, as you may be able to guess, was named for the clerics with the trademark red robes and hats.