From 2006

In fact I want to talk about both cement and concrete and explore what is different about them.

The word cement seems to have come into Middle English from Old French and ultimately from Latin.  The earliest ancestor word in Latin has a meaning of small stones that have been chipped off a larger piece.  This name fits with the technology of cement which required the mixing of ground stone of specific kinds, and later more refined processes included heating it until it almost fuses, then re-grinding it into powder.  The resulting material was then, and is now used to mix with water and forms a sort of stone glue to stick blocks of stone or bricks together.

This meaning of mortar was the one that stuck to cement when it entered English in 1300.  Since then it has come to mean other types of glue like rubber cement.

I never made much distinction between cement and concrete, but etymologically the have a different background and evidently they are technically different too.

Concrete is also from Latin but instead of meaning stone chips or dust, the parent word for concrete holds a meaning of growing together.  So in the construction industry concrete is the stuff that results when you mix cement with filler material like sand or gravel.

The cement, cements the gravel together, concretes it together.

When I hear the word concrete used in conversation for example in the phrase “concrete proposal” I always assumed that the proposal was solid, like concrete.  But historically the word concrete was used to apply to things that were blended together tightly, before it was ever poured onto a construction site.

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that in 1651 the voice sliding up the scale was referred to as an example of concrete sound—as opposed to discrete sounds—while the mixing with gravel and cement had to wait until 1834.

Concrete is given as a sort of antonym of discrete, and although both concrete and discrete are from Latin and one means grow together while the other means separate and distinct, they don’t seem to have been thought of as antonyms until they got into English.

In thinking of cement’s origins with chips from larger blocks of stone I kept thinking of the phrase “a chip off the old block” but I see that according to Michael Quinion of world-wide-words.org the allusion is to carpentry and a block of wood.  He puts the first instance as “chip of the same block” in 1637.

If you look back at the different spellings of kerfuffle over the years it makes for a bit of a kerfuffle itself. But it does tell a tale.

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To start with I’ll define kerfuffle.

The Oxford Dictionary of English says it’s an informal word meaning a “commotion” or “fuss.”

When I first went to look it up I wasn’t sure if it was gerfuffle or kerfuffle and it turns out that this “informal” nature of the word was what led me to this confusion.

According to Michael Quinion at World Wide Words it used to be spelled in all kinds of ways.  He offers curfuffle, carfuffle, cafuffle, cafoufle, and gefuffle.

He says that this range of spellings, used right up to the 1960s, is a sure sign that although many people might be saying the word kerfuffle, so few of them were writing it down it hadn’t had a chance to be documented and its spelling firmed-up in a dictionary.

Even today I see at Merriam Webster Unabridged the barest wisp of an entry. They point to the word stir.

At wordnik* the tally is zero-zero for the American Heritage Dictionary and the Century Dictionary. The word’s not even in those dictionaries.

Where does such a delicious word come from? Think haggis, whiskey, oatmeal, kilts, and golf.

Ach aye laddie, it’s Scots.

The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is only from 1946. But this may have to do with nailing the spelling down because an older word, spelled slightly differently dates from 1583.

It in turn is said to derive from a word first seen 50 years before that, not kerfuffle but simply fuffle; also meaning “to throw into disorder.” The leading ker might have come from Gaelic and would have meant “twisted.”

No one really knows where fuffle came from before that but the thinking is that it’s imitative; it’s reminiscent of ruffle.

But we do know who first wrote down the word fuffle, at least in so far as documents have survived.

Sir David Lyndsay was a poet who lived in Scotland almost a century before William Shakespeare.

At the time Scotland had its own king, separate from England.

That king was James V.

It was James VI who later brought the kingdom under one crown, confusingly becoming James I in England.

But it was James V that David Lyndsay was concerned about and it was in a poem he wrote criticising the king for his sexual exploits that the word fuffle first shows up.

According to Wikipedia James V had at least nine illegitimate children and three of those he fathered while still a teenager.

*John from wordnik commented.

Sometimes people get a cramp in a muscle and they call it a charley horse. But from what I see in my research in medical dictionaries a charley horse is more properly an injury to the quadriceps muscle—that’s the one on the front of your upper leg—resulting from some impact.

With all the exactness of this description you’d think there would be some exactness to the etymology too. But I have combed through correspondence on the subject from famous dictionary makers of decades past and although they certainly expended great efforts in trying to find out where the phrase came from, this is one of those places where etymology falls short. We don’t know why a charley horse is called a charley horse.

I’m not kidding when I say that serious effort was put into the research. The belief is that charley horse is a term that evolved somehow in baseball and I see that any number of lexicographers have used the excuse to search out and interview their old baseball heroes; but to no avail. There are stories about a horse used to tend the turf and about various ball players with limps, but most of the labors of the lexicographers have only succeeded in proving that this or that story is complete hokey.

The Oxford English Dictionary has its first citation as 1888 but according to Michael Quinion the American Dialect Society holds in its vaults evidence that antedates this citation by a whole two years.

The citation in the OED is of some interest though since it comes from an autobiography of one Michael Joseph Kelly known as King Kelly in the baseball world of the late 1800s. He claimed he used to be able to dance before he was bothered by charley horse. The guy was only 31 when this autobiography came out so you gotta figure he had some ego. Evidently he was quite a character and paraded around town with a monkey on his shoulder and what might now be termed an executive assistant at his side. His executive assistant was Japanese and one would guess based on Kelly’s desire to stand out in a crowd, this ethnicity was part of the reason the guy was hired. Kelly loved to drink and was once asked if he ever drank during a ballgame. He answered that it depended on how long the game went on.

It’s hard to imagine this kind of guy sitting down with pen in hand and documenting his life story. If you can’t imagine it then you have a good imagination because he didn’t; instead he hired a ghost writer.

No one religion has a lock on holy relics or holy figures in their history. This is fitting since the word holy predates English and Christianity too.

So much of what we know about the earliest emergence of what would become English is documented as glosses to Latin religious documents, and so little of what came before Old English is written down anywhere that it’s impossible for English scholars to probe very far back past those times when the scribes started scribbling on Latin bibles and monastic texts, translating them sometimes in part, sometimes in whole into Old English so more people could benefit from their valuable messages.

From Latin the word used would have been sanctus, which gave us sacrosanct and sanctified, but those didn’t pop into English until after the Norman Conquest. So when those monks did their translating they chose the word holy, since that was the closest one they knew in Old English.

The etymological sources aren’t completely sure, but they think that before this application of an old word to a new meaning, older Old English speakers had gotten their word from the same source as whole, as in “do you want half a cookie or a whole one.” The idea here was that something holy was so special that it couldn’t be broken, it needed to remain safe and protected.

A competing theory that also can’t be proven is that holy is related to healthy and in that is thematically related to well-being and good omens.

We have a host of expressions that use holy in them: holy cow, holy moly, holy smoke. For some reason holy cow appears to be a baseball expression. Phil Rizzuto the New York Yankees player and then announcer died recently and he was known to use the expression holy cow as almost a signature phrase. But he didn’t invent it. Michael Quinion of worldwidewords.org cites examples that touch the bases all the way back to 1913. A number of people speculate that holy cow is a play on the sacred status of cattle in India, but there’s not much proof of that.

Holy moly is another one, but it’s endurance is likely due to the fact that it is a kind of reduplicative phrase. It’s easy to remember because holy rhymes with moly. But no one knows what moly is. One possibility is a mythical plant with magical powers that is mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey. This is the stuff that turns men who’ve been turned into pigs, back into men. (Don’t you wish you had some of that around some days ladies?) Anyway this moly stuff has a white flower and a black root but can’t be picked by mortals, you have to be a god to do that. And evidently you have to be a god to figure out what plant it is too, because no people seem to have.

And I’ll close with holy smoke. There are references to holy smoke going back at least to the 1600s but it seems these were religious references that somehow tied the idea of smoke rising to the lifting of prayers up to heaven. It was 1892 when Rudyard Kipling used the phrase in the way we do today, and that’s the earliest date the OED lists. But it must still be a fairly cool phrase to use because in 1998 Ross Rebagliati won the first ever Olympic gold medal in snowboarding, only to have it temporarily revoked because traces of marijuana were found in his samples. Later, being interviewed by Jay Leno he was asked what he thought when he heard they’d found traces of marijuana. Apparently unscripted Rebagliati said that he’d thought “holy smoke.”

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In 1970 the group Santana released an album called Abraxas. One of the hit songs was Black Magic Woman. I didn’t know until I looked it up that the word abraxas is thought to be a particularly ancient word with magical powers. Evidently by some association of Greek letters with numbers the Greek form of abraxas adds up to 365, which is of course the number of days in a year and this somehow imparts mystical energies to the word. I couldn’t quite figure it out, but I guess it’s appropriate for an album with a song on it about magic.

However ancient it is abraxas only turned up in English in 1738, while our main magic word for the day appeared 42 years earlier in 1696. I only make the connection because Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says abracadabra is probably a related word to abraxas.

I’d always assumed that abracadabra was a kind of fabricated word used by magicians, but it turns out its pedigree is at least 1500 years older than our use of it in English. The first known citation was in Latin and it appeared in a kind of medical poem as an instruction for curing the sick magically. But instead of chanting this magic word the secret was in wearing it around your neck. The theory is that you wrote out the whole word, then below that you wrote out the word missing the final letter, and so on until the writing formed an inverted pyramid with an A at the bottom.

abracadabra
abracadabr
abracadab
abracada
abracad
abraca
abrac
abra
abr
ab
a

This caused your sickness to diminish and disappear just as the word did. Michael Quinion of worldwidewords.org pretty much agrees with my other sources on this, but also provides a few more theories as to where the word might have come from before that. He says it might be from an Aramaic phrase avra kehdabra, that meant “I will create as I speak”. Alternatively it could be from Hebrew ab ben ruach acadosch meaning “father-son-holy spirit” or from abrasax, another form of abraxas I mentioned earlier, which was evidently a name for God among an early Christian sect. And finally, one that seems to line up with the medical prescription, the possibility that it came from words in a language known as Chaldean abbada ke dabra that translates as “perish like the word.”

The podictionary word for today is shrift:  Here is one of those words that pretty well never appears on its own.  It is always in the company of short.  To give “short shrift” means to give “rapid and unsympathetic dismissal” according to the New Oxford American Dictionary.   Shrift is also one of those relatively rare words that has its roots in Latin but that was actually well established in Old English before the Norman Invasion brought French Latin roots as a norm for so many English words. 

Because Christianity arrived in England long before William the Conqueror a number of church words were well settled into Old English already.  Shrift was one of these.  The Latin roots connect shrift with scribe and scribble and shrift had to do with writing in that religious decrees were written down, so that shrift came to mean a decree of the church, and specifically a very personal decree.  When a penitent went to church for confession the church decreed that he or she must do some penance on order to be absolved of their sins. 

So this process of confession, penance and absolution—and particularly the assigning of penance—came to gain the name shrift.  That New Oxford American Dictionary definition says “dismissal” though.  That seems a long way from penance and absolution doesn’t it?  It was into the period of Modern English and the time Shakespeare when we begin to see this change in meaning.  In the play Richard III, Lord Hastings is to be beheaded.  He is told to make short shrift.  That is, make your peace with god and be quick about it, the king wants your head and he wants it now. 

According to Michael Quinion at World Wide Words our expression short shrift might have died there along with Lord Hastings if it hadn’t been for Sir Walter Scott.  Evidently Scott read the phrase in Shakespeare, liked it, and used it in his Lord of the Isles.  It is only after this that we see the phrase starting to be used regularly.  This still doesn’t quite explain that New Oxford American Dictionary definition though since in both Shakespeare and Scott’s usages the short shrift didn’t mean dismissal, but a short period of respite.  

But if the respite is from a death sentence as seems to have been the case with most of the usages including Shakespeare, then it’s easy to see how a meaning of forgiving ones sins, but lopping off their head anyway, might evolve to a meaning of perfunctory consideration.

The podictionary word for today is Monty Python:  I see that based on public submissions an organization in Britain has named “the icons of England” and have included the Oxford English Dictionary on their list.  I took a look at the list and decided to look into the etymology of another icon of England, Monty Python. 

Now no dictionaries that I consulted had an entry for Monty Python itself, although the OED does have an entry for Monty Pythonesque, meaning reminiscent of Monty Python.  There doesn’t seem to be much material either on why this famous comedy series was named Monty Python’s Flying Circus, although it is revealed that in choosing the name, other candidates were rejected including:

• Owl Stretching Time
• The Toad Elevating Moment
• A Horse, A Spoon and a Basin

So lacking much in the way of etymological material for Monty Python itself, I looked instead at the constituent words.  Evidently a monty was at one time a guy at the racetrack who gave good tips on which horse would win, and also a horse that was a safe bet was a monty.  In these cases monty certainly comes from “mount.” 

The film The Full Monty springs to mind and surprise surprise the OED does actually have an entry for full monty meaning the “whole shebang.”  Evidently the expression full monty has been in slang usage in England for decades, although the earliest citation the OED can wring out is 1985.  Michael Quinion at World Wide Words feels sure he was hearing it back in the ’50s. 

Although the OED doesn’t use it as a citation they do go so far as to refer to earlier occurrences in telephone books of fish and chip shops named Full Monty Chippy.  Theories abound on why the full monty might mean “the whole nine yards”, but the one that the experts suspect to be the real deal is that a certain tailor named Montague Maurice Burton is being honoured for his complete men’s suits—which is kind of ironic since the movie that made the phrase famous, and in fact the use of the phrase in the movie, had to do with no clothing at all.  So much for monty, on to python. 

Evidently at the end of the Second World War it was also a code name among British soldiers for leave.  More familiar to us is the fact that a python is a snake.  The original python was a Greek snake of mythic proportions.  Evidently before the god Apollo owned the place called the oracle, that is, the place where the gods speak, this place was either guarded or owned by a monstrous snake. 

Apollo killed the snake and it was left to rot. The place and the snake both took their names from this decomposition since the Greek word for rot or rotten is pytho.

The podictionary word for today is “kangaroo”:  Today let me begin with a quote from Urbandictionary:

“People went to Australia and saw these things that liked to bounce. They went to the aborigines and where like “what the fuck are those things? *points and fuzzy hopping thing with pouch”* and the aborigines said “kangaroo” so they thought they were called kangaroos but really, kangaroo means “I don’t understand your question.” in aborigine. ”
Now the reason I relate this seemingly juvenile little tale is that it’s true.  Well it isn’t true, but it’s not just something this Urbandictionary contributor made up.  Around 225 years ago Captain Cook and his botanist Joseph Banks were the ones who said “like what the fuck are those things.”  The answer they got was something like “kangaroo” and they wrote it down.  Fifty years later, another captain asked the same question but the answer he got was “mee-nah.” 

This put the lexicographers into a tizzy and somehow the rumor got started that the Captain Cook answer had been a mistake.  The rumor had enough legs that not only has it shown up at Urbandictionary, but the Oxford English Dictionary takes pains to throw cold water on it as does the American Heritage Dictionary and others. 

A kangaroo court is one that doles out justice without due regard for the law.  Brewer’s dictionary of phrase and fable seems to imply that it takes its name from a British parliamentary procedure where the speaker of the house chooses various amendments to be debated, instead of working through all of them, thereby hopping from one area to another.  But the dates don’t work on this one. 

The parliamentary procedure only shows up 100 years ago while Kangaroo courts were showing up in America 50 years earlier.  Michael Quinion at World Wide Words, wouldn’t swear by it, but the best explanation he’s heard of is that in California during the gold rush—in which a lot of Australians participated—non-official courts were set up to try claim-jumpers.  With all those ozzies around it wouldn’t have taken long to connect claim jumpers and kangaroos. 

So kangaroo or something like it really was what the aboriginals called a kangaroo.  Then what was a mee-nah?  One authority claims mee-nah translates as “edible animal.”

Today is boxing day.  Why is it boxing day?

I have to thank Michael Quinion for his explanation on his website World Wide Words.  The first record that we have that December 26th is called boxing day was 1833, that’s the year before the first Christmas card was sent.

The reason it was called boxing day was that at that time people went around looking for their Christmas tips by knocking on the doors of people for whom they had done some work indirectly—like a delivery boy who didn’t get paid by the householder, but instead by the grocer.

The money was collected in a sort of piggy bank.  It was ceramic and had to be broken open later to get at the loot, but instead of being shaped like a pig, it was shaped like a, you guessed it, box.

The preferred day for collecting was the holiday immediately after Christmas day, more religiously St. Stephen’s Day.

There are three English meanings of “box.”  The box in boxing day is one, something to put things in.  Many boxes are made of wood and the second meaning of box is a particular species of tree.  Actually we don’t know if this is the second meaning or the first.  It may well be that little square boxes were named because of the wood they were made from.

The third type of box is what happens in a boxing ring, it is a punch.  This box doesn’t much make itself heard except in the name of the sport of boxing and in the almost quaint expression “she boxed his ears.”  This violent box appeared later in English and is just over 600 years old.

Box the tree and box the receptacle are both older than 1000 years old.  Both of these meanings trace back into Latin and Greek.

No one knows why to throw a punch is called “to box” but one of the theories relates to the Greek words for box the tree and box the rectangular container which were quite close in spelling to the Greek word for “closed fist.”

Looking at my own fist now, it is a little box-shaped.

Still, the OED leans toward the fighting box having emerged spontaneously in English.

These days boxing day isn’t about begging for tips, but might be closer to the fighting boxing as shoppers hunt for bargains in overcrowded stores.