Boldness | podictionary - for word lovers - dictionary etymology, trivia & history

a word root every day
7 million downloads and counting
Subscribe for Free

headline – podictionary 525

Jun 4th, 2007 |

podcasts |

Comments (0)

Standard Podcast [3:38m]: Play Now | Download

Transcript:

When I checked just now Urbandictionary didn’t even have an entry for headline. They had headliner so I’ll go with that. Before I do, the piece they have on headliner has a certain double entendre to it that I don’t think the author intended. It’s too rude for me to repeat here, but you can probably imagine it, and if not there might be a smile in it for you if you go look it up.

The fact that Urbandictionary describes a headliner as a momentous occasion in someone’s life reflects the sort of 360 degree turn that the word has taken. A headline is that large font at the top of the newspaper front page. Important stories make headlines. Ergo if it is a headline it must be important.

The word headline is a compound word. The head part just means it’s on top. The line in this case means it’s a line of text. But the first citation for the word headline was for a class of rope that was used up on top of the mast in a ship’s rigging. That’s from 1626.

Fifty years later headline appeared related to printing, but it still didn’t refer to what we would call a headline. In this case it was a sort of dividing line across the page along the top. It wasn’t until 1890 that we see a citation for newspaper headlines that we’d recognize today. This was after it had already been cited as a word referring to a line on the palm of your hand that was supposed to somehow relate to your intellect and so was called the headline.

But a newspaper headline is first described as such by one Charles Dilke. He was a British noble and visiting America made remark on the boldness of New York headlines. He was subject to a few headlines himself. At one point he was touted as the next Prime Minister, but a young woman who wanted a divorce from her husband claimed that Dilke and she had been lovers and his political aspirations went down the toilet.

It seems that the accusations weren’t true and naturally Dilke objected to this tawdry dragging of his name through the mud. In order to clear his name and restore his reputation he took her to court. Problem was, that although he didn’t seem to have had an affair with her, he had in fact been carrying on an affair with her mother for a good long time so the name clearing effort was all for naught.

Since old Charles Dilke’s time the word headline has changed again. Now you can get radio and television headlines, media that don’t even use print. The metaphor is of course that the art of the headline is to condense the nugget of an entire story into just a few words, enticing the reader or listener to want more.

There are of course funny headlines too, although I’m never sure about their authenticity because I can’t seem to find actual citations. Here are a few:

Police begin campaign to run down jaywalkers
Prostitutes appeal to Pope
Something went wrong in jet crash, experts say

gall – podictionary 414

Dec 29th, 2006 |

podcasts |

Comments (0)

Standard Podcast: Play Now | Download

The podictionary word for today is gall: It takes a lot of gall to submit an invoice to your lawyer for the time you sat in his waiting room. The meaning of this sense of the word gall is boldness or effrontery. The sense comes from the bitterness involved in such bold moves since the gall bladder contains a bitter yellow fluid.

The fluid is named gall because it is yellow and the root of its name goes back to Indo-European and was also the source of the name for that yellow metal we all covet so much, gold. But funnily enough there are two other types of gall. If something galls you, it means it gives you pain. In this case the word gall evolves from an Old English word for the places on a horse where a saddle or harness has rubbed the skin raw. A swollen knob on a tree is also called a gall and this is from Old French.

There is some suspicion that the swollen knob gall and the open sore gall might have the same roots, but maybe not. Gall the bitter yellow fluid is also known as bile and it is important in our digestive system. It would have been important to treat the galls on your horses if you expected to get much work out of them. But what kind of importance could the galls of trees have? In fact, for the purposes of English etymology tree galls had a fair amount of importance, particularly the galls of oak trees. What would happen you see is that a little wasp would come along and drill a hole into the bark of an oak tree and plant her eggs in there for safekeeping.

The tree did not like this, not one little bit. And so the tree grew a knob around the wasp eggs to protect itself. But when the monks and scholars of 1000 years ago saw one of these oak galls, they knew that inside was a little store of acid produced by the tree. They happily crushed the oak gall and used water or vinegar to draw out the acid, then added gums to make the mixture a little less runny, and then added their favorite mixture of rust and soot and other things to give the liquid whatever color they wanted. The result was something they called encaustum in Latin, we’d call it ink, but the word ink didn’t come into use until Middle English.

It was the acid from the oak gall that gave the ink the power to etch its way into the surface of the velum on which they wanted to write. The velum was made from animal skins, mostly sheep and it’s because these ancient scribes took the time to use such high quality methods and materials that we can still read today what they wrote way back then. If they had used paper it would have crumbled to dust or blacked with oxidization long before now. Encasutum is related to caustic and both words go back to a Greek for burn. So even though these different types of gall seem to come from different etymological sources, they all have a sting to them.

credits & thanks

Dec 20th, 2006 |

Comments (0)

credits

Special thanks for the guitar theme in each episode to Peter Sutcliffe, musician, audio engineer and architectural acoustician.

If you like the guitar work, you should know that it was inspired by the song urwibutso by The Mighty Popo, available on an award winning compilation called African Guitar Summit and available through iTunes.

Special thanks to Cheryl Clegg, Boston for the author photo.

thanks

Thanks to all who have helped spread the word about podictionary and Charles Hodgson’s books.

There is a secret agenda to this list. It’s called “link love.” When other websites link to podictionary it makes Google suspect that there may be something in that there podictionary site. So I want to thank all those who link to podictionary and a practical way to thank them is with a link back. Then Google suspects those other websites might be kinda cool too.

headline – podictionary 525

gall – podictionary 414

credits & thanks

host Charles Hodgson

podictionary.com

about podictionary

Grammar Girl

Charles’ other books

Blegburn Dickshonary

translate this website