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I sometimes say that a common human experience breeds a word that is common across cultures and changes little over time.

There isn’t much in the world that’s more common to human experience than having a mother, nor anything that means quite as much to most people.  So it should come as no surprise that this word has come down to us almost unchanged for as far back as we can see into the history of words.

And also that it is one of the words that spans the entire width and breadth of Indo-European languages.

Evidently we only started writing the TH in mother back in the early 1500s but may have been pronouncing it that way for some time beforehand.

The Indo-European root was mater.

Not too different for five to seven thousand years.

Also, languages from Latin to Gaelic, and Greek to Russian share this maternal legacy.

This is a word we not only all have in common, it is also a word we all use with great regularity.  Words like that just can’t change because there are too many people around who know the word and will correct you if you start to pronounce it wrong or use it with a meaning that is just too far from their understanding of what it should mean.

So again it is no surprise that we didn’t get mother from Latin or French, but from the oldest Old English.

I mentioned Sir Robert Cotton yesterday in my episode on the word mildew at the Oxford University Press blog.  While the meaning of mildew has changed a lot, the word mother has its first citation in the same document set I mentioned yesterday from Sir Robert’s library.

The Cotton Library is an important resource for people studying Old English.

Unfortunately back in 1731almost a quarter of the ancient collection went up in smoke.  The documents had been brought together around the time of Shakespeare by Sir Robert Cotton and then had been moved in the early 1700s to the ironically named Ashburnham House.

The librarian was understandably an enthusiast when it came to ancient documents and he had quite a pile of them in his own house nearby when tragedy struck.  In the dead of night his house burned down and destroyed numerous irreplaceable old manuscripts.

An eyewitness—the headmaster of the school where this all took place—reported the panic stricken librarian stumbling out through the smoke in his nightshirt with bundles of old documents tucked under his arms.

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People have suffered the whining buzzing and itching biting of mosquitoes for time out of mind.  For this reason Old English had a name for these little blood sucking creatures.

But it wasn’t mosquito.

It was gnat.

Somehow the word gnat survived the arrival of mosquito although was displaced in meaning and now refers not specifically to mosquitoes, but to little hovering bugs in general.

In 1572 a geography enthusiast named Richard Hakluyt got a letter from one Henry Hawks.

Richard Hakluyt was in the midst of writing a whole bunch of books that told the tales of English exploration over the high seas and to foreign lands.

Richard himself didn’t do much traveling abroad but he read everything he could get his hands on in as many languages as he could manage, then reproduced the stories in English.

Henry Hawks was writing to Richard because Henry Hawks had firsthand experience living in Mexico.  In one passage Henry describes high mortality rates due to illness in the cities in Mexico based in part on the heat, and in part on these insects that bite both men and women in their sleep.

These he called muskitos.

Now you might at first think this was a Native American word to describe these annoying and evidently fatal flies, but in fact the word had arrived with the Spanish and had an Indo-European root.

In Latin musca meant fly so mosquito literally means “little fly.”

But this Latin word root appeared in the Americas in another unexpected guise as well, this time in the hands of early settlers.

One of the things Europeans brought with them that Native North Americans didn’t have was firearms.  These killed more rapidly than mosquitoes but their name had a familiar ring to it, they were called muskets.

A musket got its name from the same root as a mosquito.  Here’s how that worked.

Back in France before the Norman Conquest bird fanciers had a special name for the male sparrow hawk.  These bird fanciers weren’t bird watchers as you might think of today, instead they were hunters who used birds of prey to help them hunt.  It just so happens that the male sparrow hawk is quite small compared to the female.

For this reason he was called a fly, or musche.

Meanwhile other hunters used bow and arrow.

One day someone invented a crossbow.

The crossbow shoots a powerful arrow, the arrow itself is usually stocky but shorter than that used with a regular bow.

Some smart-aleck nicknamed these diminutive arrows after the diminutive birds since they both flew to their target.

Over time the name transferred to the crossbow itself. Then when technology replaced crossbows with guns, the name was applied there as musket.

Today’s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl’s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

Honey is a very old word but it is a bit of an unusual word in that most words that represent something very common to our human experience have a pretty wide usage across many languages.

This is only partly true of honey.

In most Indo-European languages the word for honey is not related to our word honey, but instead to an actual Indo-European root meaning “honey.”

This root does make its way into English in words like mellifluous and molasses.  But only Germanic based languages use the word honey or its relatives.

As logic would have it that means that honey shows up as an English word back in Old English.

As a basic word that so many people would have experience with it turned up early too; the Oxford English Dictionary first citation is from the year 875.

But Germanic languages are Indo-European languages too, so why did we end up with a different word for honey?

It seems that like many words the parent of honey spread in meaning and got applied to numerous things.

Etymologists think that perhaps the word root behind honey might originally not have meant this sweet sticky substance, but a yellow honey-like color instead.

So honey was an important enough article that in Germanic it overtook other meanings of the word, which in Sanskrit and Greek were retained as color words.

Honey from bees is certainly the oldest meaning of the word honey, but the word gets applied to lots of other things we like, especially our loved-ones.

The first citation someone calling their sweetheart honey is found in 1350 in a translation of a French story known as William of Palerne or Guillaume de Palerme.

This story has an unexpected etymological circularity.

I’m sure the honey as “sweetheart” reference was merely incidental in the translation but the main love interest in the story is daughter to the Roman Emperor, a girl named Melior.

Clearly Melior is a name chosen for its sweetness and etymological connection to mel the Latin word for “honey.”

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[audio clip] I’m Christopher Moore and the word I’m interested in is itinerary because I’m sometimes not sure if it should be itinery or itinerary.

Well, Christopher you’ve come up with a quandary for me.

I always maintain that if people use a word and recognize it, it’s a real word.

I plugged itinery into Google and more than 100,000 hits came up.  So people certainly use it.  I recognized it when you said it, and I’d have recognized it even if you hadn’t said it in the context of itinerary.

But none of the dictionaries recognize itinery and at first I’d have said it was a mistake people were making, spelling it in the abbreviated way that some people pronounce it.

But since I’ve given the benefit of the doubt to so many other words I guess I’ll concede that perhaps this is a word in transition.

Except that Google reports more than 24 million hits for itinerary so if less than half a percent of users use the new pronunciation and spelling, the word certainly hasn’t come very far in its transition and maybe never will catch on in wider usage.

That makes it a mistake again.

I think of an itinerary as a sort of plan.  I’ve even heard people referring to those little calendars sometimes kept in a pocket as an itinerary.  One web citation refers to a reading itinerary.

But the roots of itinerary relate more specifically to travel.  So when you hear about the itinerary of the pope’s visit or something, it’s called an itinerary not because it’s a plan, but because it’s a plan of his travels.

The American Heritage Dictionary tells me that there is an Indo-European root ei that means “to go.”  This made its way into Latin iter which is what the Romans called the routes they took, particularly when extending the reach of their empire into new and hostile territories.

Thus an itinerarium was a list of the places that the route passed through, and often included information such as how long it took to march the army there.

Roman itineraries were more than just travel plans though.

In some cases they were commemorative pillars and public monuments that actually reinforced the political control the Romans exerted over foreign lands by making visible and enduring proclamations of that control.

Since maps were pretty crude in those days itineraries were also a really important means of understanding geography.

The first time itinerary showed up in English was back in the middle 1400s and it was drawn directly from Latin.

The sense of travel embodied in itinerary shows up also in itinerant.  An itinerant salesman is a traveling salesman.

While the devout might pray to St. Christopher as the patron saint of travelers, the actual prayer has itself also been called an itinerary.

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Allow me to read you a little of the Wikipedia entry for trampoline:

According to circus folklore, the trampoline was supposedly first developed by an artiste called Du Trampolin who saw the possibility of using the trapeze safety net as a form of propulsion and landing device and experimented with different systems of suspension, eventually reducing the net to a practical size for separate performance.

It goes on

…the story of Du Trampolin is probably a myth and no documentary evidence has been found to support it.

I’m here to tell you that not only has no documentary evidence been found to support it, there is good evidence to refute it.  Every dictionary I checked gives an etymology for trampoline that does not derive from a personal name.

The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s from an Italian word trampoli but the American Heritage Dictionary says the Italian word came from Spanish.

On the other hand Merriam-Webster says Spanish got it from Italian, but at least they both agree that before either Spanish or Italian the word root was likely Germanic.

In Italian trampoli meant “stilts” and although none of the dictionaries go this far, it seems to me logical that the up-in-the-air function of a trampoline might well have adopted the “high walking” name from stilts.

The Germanic connection brings us back to a more familiar English word with a connection to walking; tramp.

Much is made in various internet articles of the invention of the modern trampoline in 1934 but the OED has as its first citation 1798 from the Times of London in what appears to have been an advertisement for a circus.  It reads

Equestrian Performances with Oranges, Forks, Skipping Rope, Hat, Handkerchief, and a curious Equilibrium with a Hoop and Glass. Wonderful Trampolin Tricks, by Messrs. Smith [etc.].

Though this is the first citation, people obviously must have known what a trampoline was, since there is no explanation contained in the advertising copy.

Forks, skipping ropes and hats as inducements to come to the circus may seem quaint but I note that oranges would have been an expensive and relatively rare food item in England in 1789, though perhaps not worth the price of admission if you only got to see it and not eat it.

Today’s episode brought to you by my audio-book Global Wording - The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English. Available in downloadable form from iTunes or Audible.com or as a CD from bookstores. For more information and a few samples, go to www.globalwording.com

Here’s a word with a lot of meanings and an unusual history.

You can canvass for votes—which means you want people to vote for your candidate;
or you can canvass public opinion—meaning you’re taking a survey; or canvassing can mean examining or discussing something thoroughly.

But canvas also means the fabric used for the sails of a boat.  It seems that the voting and surveying canvass grew out of the sailing canvas, although exactly how isn’t completely clear.

There are a few theories.

It was once a form of punishment to get someone onto a sheet of canvas so that a bunch of other people could hoist it up and bounce the victim around a bit.  Sort of like a trampoline that you have no control over.  Back in 1508 this lead to canvass as a verb meaning to inflict this treatment.

Over the next few centuries to canvass seemed to split in at least two directions, one with a meaning of shaking things out to examine them carefully; the other to criticize destructively.

One theory is that people canvass for votes by criticizing their opponent and so that’s how the word gained its new meaning.

A less likely theory is that a piece of canvas can be used sort of like a sieve through which the facts and arguments can be strained.

Although I don’t see it in any of the dictionaries it would seem logical to me that you’d use canvas to sort things out just as a broad clean surface upon which to work; you see it every day in markets where people spread their wares out on a tarpaulin.

The sense of punishing someone as relates to canvas does not come from the use of canvas as the flooring in a boxing ring since the sense of punishment is 500 years old while the first citation we have for canvas in boxing is from 1910.

So now we know that to canvass for votes is etymologically related to the canvas in a ship’s sail.  But the word goes quite a bit further back than that, and takes another unexpected turn.

The fabric that is called canvas got its English name back in 1260 from French and the word had originally been a Latin word referring to the plant from which this fabric was made.

That plant was hemp and it’s Latin name is cannabis.

So canvas is actually just a morphed pronunciation of cannabis.

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When I peer into the dictionaries they tell me that the word nefarious means “wicked” and “unlawful.”

This may be true but it seems to me that nefarious is sometimes used in a lighter tone.

I said to someone the other day that Google could use all the data that they are constantly gathering for nefarious purposes.

By that I didn’t mean I expected Google to become some master criminal corporation, but rather that they could use it in sneaky ways that were to their advantage.

The word nefarious appeared in English in writing 12 years before William Shakespeare died.  The work that nefarious appeared in is reputed to be the first monolingually English dictionary, written by a guy named Robert Cawdrey.

The word came from Latin and back in Latin had been one of those words that got squished together from two other words.  Both of those words trace back to Indo-European roots.

Ne is simple enough and it means “not.”  The Latin fas meant “according to divine law” so that nefas meant “against divine law.”

The Indo-European parent of fas meant “to set” so that the divine law would have been seen as set and fixed.

That Robert Cawdrey guy was an appropriate fellow to bring nefarious to English since he seemed to go against divine law himself to some extent.

First let me tell you about his dictionary.  The title alone is quite something:

A table alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latine, or French etc with the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons, whereby they may the more easilie and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in scriptures, sermons, or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the same aptly themselves

So at one stroke Cawdrey labels half the human population as unskillful.

That’s not why he was nefarious though.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells me that this Table Alphabetical was largely copied from other people’s work, though that wasn’t nefarious either since it was totally legal in those days.  Today we’d call it repurposing because the earlier works were intended to be used translating between languages such as Latin and English. The Table Alphabetical was the first dictionary of words in English, defined in English.

What was nefarious about Robert Cawdrey is that he stood up to the church.

He’d been a deacon and a priest but his thinking ran counter to his peers and he was charged, tried and booted out of the church before ever his dictionary came to print.

His crime?

He wouldn’t read certain official church missives from the pulpit.

He felt that a Christian was a Christian and the church fathers were acting as if they were more Christian than other people.

I guess they did feel that he was less Christian.

Today’s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl’s new book.  Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

There is definitely a churchyness to the word amen.

This is largely appropriate, but there is an irony too.  I’ll get to that later.

The word amen first appeared in English more than eleven hundred years ago.  It was one of those words that came with church-Latin to England before the arrival of French; that makes it Old English.

The Latin word was taken from Greek and the Greek was taken from Hebrew.

Hebrew is not an Indo-European language.  It along with Arabic and a number of other languages fall into a category now called Afro-Asiatic languages.

The Hebrew, Greek, Latin path of the word amen fits well with the path of Christianity.

Back in Hebrew the roots of amen meant “to be firm.”  So that a statement of amen was intended to add weight to what had already been said by agreeing with it—much like today.

The document in which amen is first found as an English word is a very important manuscript.  The Lindisfarne Gospel is a showpiece now in the hands of the British Library.  It is beautiful but it holds meaning beyond the religious meaning it was originally intended to portray.

Sometime around the year 700 a fellow named Eadfrith began to work on producing this book.  He wrote it in Latin and decorated it with all manner of gorgeous pieces of art with vivid colors that still sparkle today.

Later in about 970, a guy named Aldred felt that the messages contained in this valuable book were so important that they should be understandable by not only scholars of Latin, but also English speakers.  And so, between the lines of Latin on the page are written an English translation.

Instead of translating the Latin word amen into the English word truly, as can be seen in some other old documents, in this case the English translator borrowed the Latin word right into English and thus made it an English word.

We will never know how many old manuscripts have been lost over the centuries but the fact that this particular one has survived underlines its value.  At every stage along its path to us its owners knew it was something special and so kept it safe; that literally includes keeping it safe from Viking attack.

That original artist though lived in interesting times and how those times are reflected in his work give the Lindisfarne Gospel added meaning.

In the year 664, only a few decades before Eadfrith sat down with pen in hand, there had been a big meeting now known as the Synod of Whitby.  At that meeting various factions of the various churches then operating in England had agreed on most of their differences.

Their differences were based on the fact that Christianity had first arrived with the Romans just before the fall of the Roman Empire, and then been reintroduced by St Augustine after the Anglo-Saxons had moved in.  The result was that there were Celtic believers with their traditions and Anglo-Saxon believers with their traditions plus Roman church influences and others.

Looking at the amazing graphics in the Lindisfarne Gospel you can see elements from all of these traditions blended so skillfully they all fit peacefully together.

Clearly this manuscript is valuable and it is value that is also at the heart of the etymological irony I mentioned earlier.

One of the stories about Jesus is how he lost his cool over the money changers in the temple.

The Semitic root of the word amen means “to be firm” but also happens to be the root of the word mammon.

Mammon in English holds a meaning of “wealth” or “possessions” but with a negative undertone.

The Semitic root of “firmness” expressed itself through mammon as something that could be believed in, something that held its worth.

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Today enthusiasm is a good thing.

Employers want their workers to be enthusiastic, teachers want their students to enthusiastic, parents want their children to be enthusiastic about one thing while kids want their parents to be enthusiastic about something else.

I’m enthusiastic about etymology and I think that’s a good thing.

But enthusiasm hasn’t always been greeted with such enthusiasm.  That’s because enthusiasm when it first arrived in English had a bit of a different meaning.

The word enthusiasm comes from Greek and although you might not think so on the surface, it is a bit of a religious word.

Inside the word enthusiasm is the Greek theos which also figures in the word theology.

Theos means “god” so entheos means “god within.”

In 1603 when this word was hauled into English from Latin there were tensions in English religious life.  Both sides held a bit of a feeling of “my way or the highway” and as The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy puts it, the word enthusiasm was used as a putdown to

“Puritans, evangelicals, and low-church born-again zealots.”

This was the more figurative meaning: they were “possessed by a god.”

This derogatory meaning of enthusiasm persisted for a few centuries.  Scottish philosopher David Hume said that enthusiasts were “gloomy” and “hare-brained” and only got along with people who were as “delirious and dismal” as they were.

Gradually the meaning of enthusiasm softened by being applied to less annoying people.

Such is the way with words, they are sometimes applied to add strength to expression—like I’m a maniac for word histories—but when the strength isn’t actually there in the object, the word itself loses some of its edge.

Having lived his live in moderation and gladly moved into retirement David Hume himself became a bit of an enthusiast, although not for religion. He was only saved by the death of a French nobleman.

Hume was of moderately modest birth and rose to international fame on the strength of his writings.

He prided himself in being levelheaded.  But in the 1760s he started getting fan mail from Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Campet de Saujon.

Now Marie-Charlotte was one of the women of Paris who arranged salons where all the best and brightest French minds hung out, drank wine and had sparkling conversation.

She liked his philosophizing and so did her friends.

She also happened to be married to the Count of Boufflers and at the same time be the mistress of Louis François de Bourbon, prince de Conti.

David Hume eventually went to Paris and at first was overwhelmed by the reception he got there.

Everyone seemed to love him.

He got used to the adulation and after a while imagined that the charming Marie-Charlotte loved him; he certainly seemed head over heels for her.

His friends warned him he was acting the fool and he got offended, but before he could well and truly embarrass himself the count died and Marie-Charlotte set her cap to marry the prince de Conti.

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I always like it when I have a word to play with that does not have the standard French/Latin or Old English roots.  Pundit is one such word.

But it is a word that also presents a few angles of the challenge of etymology.

A pundit in this day and age is most often a commentator; some expert who is asked onto a news show to give his or her opinion.

The dictionaries give this definition but hidden within it is an earlier meaning: expert.

The word appeared first in English 1661 and the Oxford English Dictionary gives its source as Sanskrit.

The British began trading with India right at the beginning of the 1600s when Shakespeare was in his prime and the East India Company grew to be the defacto government of India over the following 250 years until the real British government took over officially in 1858.  To continue that little timeline it was 1947 when Britain finally handed India’s government back to Indians.

At the time that the British began their Indian adventures a pundit was someone who had studied Sanskrit history and tradition and was more or less considered a keeper of those traditions and pieces of traditional knowledge.

India was of tremendous value to England and so in trying to govern the place it didn’t just hammer down laws that had evolved over the centuries in England, since that wouldn’t have worked very well in India.

Instead the English government in India was forced to take into account the systems of laws and customs already on the ground.

To do this they needed local area experts.

In the local language these people were called pundits or pandita.

Hence the second meaning identified in the OED is an official court title appearing first in 1827, Pundit of the Supreme Court.  These were Indians who worked alongside the English and applied their specialized knowledge of the local legal landscape.

Even before this title was recognized however, in 1816, experts in this, that, and the other thing began being called pundits, at first satirically, and later seriously.

This word exposes for me how opaque our western understanding of other cultures is.

First in its etymology.  Here we have a word that clearly has a very long history but what do we know about it before some English guy wrote it down?

Almost nothing.

Somebody must know, but the information is beyond my reach, which means it’s beyond the reach of the vast majority of English speakers.

But pundit points to other tricky angles in crossing cultures.

Not only did those British legal experts find that their systems failed them in the new Indian environment, but the word pundit points to other stumbles and trip-ups.

The American Heritage Dictionary identifies the word pundit is by the as possibly of Dravidian origin.

Dravidian is a family of languages from India first identified to our western eyes as distinct by a guy named Robert Caldwell back about the time the British government officially got to running India.

To underline how complicated understanding the related cultures might be, I see that in Wikipedia it says there are 37 languages within the Dravidian group—most in southern India.

Dravidian as word itself was invented by Caldwell, based on the names of cultural groups that also gave us the word Tamil.

I’m skating on thin ice here because I of course don’t speak any of these languages and even for Caldwell who immersed himself and did speak several the subtleties were legion.

You have to be a true pundit to avoid getting into trouble.

And Caldwell did get into trouble.  He chose one unfortunate word to describe one cultural group he was writing about and it blew up in his face. People were writing angry letters not only to Caldwell’s boss but even to the Archbishop of Canterbury and he was never welcome in that part of India again.