One is a journalist interviewing some celebrity or politician or even doing what they call a streeter, talking to Jane Q Public.

The other situation is a job interview.

In both cases there is a sense of greater importance to the interview than there would be with a simple encounter.  People prepare for interviews, or they should.  There’s usually some kind of consequence or risk associated.

The thing is being recorded in the case of a journalists’ interview.

Whether or not various facts or answers are recorded in a job interview, the outcome holds importance; people remember their impression of you long enough to recommend hiring you or not.

This sense of importance seems to have been part of the character of the word interview ever since it appeared in English.  But the component parts of the word, if taken literally would disqualify some of the things we call interviews from being interviews.

The word comes from French and was once two words entre voir literally meaning “to see between” but more figuratively “to see each other.”

By that definition telephone interviews would be an impossibility.

The word shows up first in English in the time of King Henry VIII, the early 1500s.  As I said, from the start there was a heightened sense of importance to an interview.  The Oxford English Dictionary says:

In early times, especially a formal or ceremonial meeting of princes or great persons, such as that of Henry VIII and Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

What was the Field of the Cloth of Gold you ask?

Well as an example of how formal the formality of an interview might be it was a doozie doozy.

First of all, from almost 500 years distance we might think that King Henry VIII was kind of like an American president might be these days, first among equals, leader of the western world, that sort of thing.  Henry certainly had a reputation that survives to this day.

But in fact Henry was a second stringer.

The two European powers of the day were France and the Hapsburg Empire.  This Field of the Cloth of Gold interview was one of a series of meetings that Henry had as the two powers maneuvered to gain him as an ally.

But talk about taking things seriously.

Compare the Field of the Cloth of Gold to the recent G20 summit that was supposed to be talking about something pretty important, the world economy. That lasted less than a weekend.

The Field of the Cloth of Gold started out with the re-landscaping of an entire valley, a temporary castle was built and thousands of tents and pavilions were set up.  Then the event itself; not just a weekend, but a full 17 days were dedicated to “getting to know you” between the royals.

That’s an interview!

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

I didn’t feel I could do an episode on the word redingote.  For one thing I already did an episode just this past Monday on the word zaftig.

How many weird words can I do when my theme is supposed to be telling you something you didn’t know about a word you thought you did know?

So here’s something you didn’t know about the word coat, starting with the word redingote.

A redingote is described in the following terms by the Oxford English Dictionary:

In France a double-breasted outer coat for men, with long plain skirts not cut away in the front; or a similar garment worn by women, sometimes cut away in front.

So starting back in the 1790s the word redingote denoted a specific style of coat fashionable in Paris.  But redingote has a little more going for it in the etymology department. This is because redingote is a word English got from French, but that French had only just gotten from English before that.

The French word redingote is a mashing together of the words riding and coat.

And it’s a good thing that Ron Foreman asked me about this word because looking at the etymology of coat itself I can’t say there’s a very interesting history to relate.

Before I cracked open my dictionaries I expected that I’d find coat was related to coast since your coat covers your sides. But no, coat arrived with the French of 1066 and William the Conqueror and etymologists suspect it may have been a Germanic word before it got into Latin.

A German word suspected to be related is kotze that refers to a kind of shaggy fabric or a garment made with it.

When coat first came into English it was a tight fitting affair that didn’t hang down below the waist. That was for men at least.  Women started wearing coats in English within 100 years, but curiously their coats started at the waist; they were essentially skirts. The legacy of these naming conventions survives in waistcoat and petticoat.

People often quip “the media medium is the message.”  It’s such a wise thing to say, but I’ve never quite understood it.

I just spent a moment reading explanations of what it’s supposed to mean and although they make sense I still don’t get why “the media medium is the message” carries such weight as a phrase.

This famous phrase was written by Marshall McLuhen back in 1964 when media meant newspapers, TV, radio and magazines. All of these traditional media are now feeling the effects of the internet.

The podcast you are listening to or the blog you are reading is in the category sometimes called social media because not only can I talk at you, you can talk back at me, and to each other.

The Oxford English Dictionary released its draft revised entry for the word media in June 2008 and it didn’t include the combination social media, although they did include 25 other phrases such as media darling and media baron*.

So I turned instead to wordspy.com where the first citation that Paul Mcfedries could turn up shows its age by some of the words it uses.  It reads:

“What attracted librarians to the Internet? For some cybernauts, USENET, IRC, and the other social media of the net are the hooks.”

That’s from January 1994 by a reference librarian named Greg Notess; still an active internet observer from what I can see at his website.

But on to the roots of the words.

Both of them appeared in English just about the time Shakespeare was born.  Social came through the intermediary of French, ultimately from Latin. The Latin root socius meant “friend” or “companion.”

Perversely media—which is the plural of medium—didn’t have French as a medium between Latin and English but arrived directly.

In Classical Latin medium meant “middle” but it also had already taken on a sense of “intermediary.”

It’s this role as an intermediary between the source of the news and you the listener or reader that made media appropriate for TV and newspapers.

Similarly social media acts as an intermediary multilaterally between any number of internet users.

So in the spirit of social media I invite you to use the comment space in the blog post for this episode to tell me, and tell each other, why you think that phrase “the media medium is the message” is so memorable.

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

*The OED explained that they usually list entries like social media under social, not media.  Fair enough, but they haven’t gotten to revising social for V3 yet.

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

In Henry V two soldiers discussing gambling debts mention it.  Shakespeare wasn’t the first to use it but I mention him for a reason.  I’ll get to that in a moment.

During the same period the word cash held the meaning of a “box to keep money in.”  Both meanings had existed in French and Italian before coming into English. The “box” meaning was the original but has disappeared from English now.

So, someone referring to a cash box is being redundant if you look at it etymologically.

The Oxford English Dictionary draws on two sources for its etymology.

One of these thinks the word came into English from French.  That’s the thinking of Randle Cotgrave.  He wrote A dictionarie of the French and English tongues and I’ve mentioned him before a few times on podictionary.

The other theory is that cash came to English from Italian.  The guy who held this opinion was John or Giovanni Florio and he wrote an Italian-English dictionary that he called A World of Words.

It doesn’t much matter whether Cotgrave was right or Florio, since in either case the Latin root of cash would be caspa meaning “case” or “container.”

I mentioned Shakespeare and it just so happens that both of these bilingual dictionary makers lived during William Shakespeare’s lifetime.  Some people say Shakespeare and Florio must have been friends.

We don’t know that, but since they both enjoyed the patronage of the earls of Southampton and Pembroke it is very likely that they knew each other.

Shakespeare seems to have known Florio’s work too since in Love’s Labour’s Lost he quotes an Italian proverb verbatim from Florio’s work.

Those soldiers of Shakespeare’s from Henry V; they mentioned cash and they would have collected their weapons from a cache.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, if those two words cash and cache are related.

The dictionaries say it isn’t so.

Evidently cache the storage or hiding place is instead from the French word “to hide.”

I mean here I go again including a word that I might not get away with calling a common word.

I’d actually never heard of the word zaftig until I was looking for words for my book on words to do with the body.  There are a shortage of body words that start with Z.

In case you don’t know what zaftig means, as I didn’t, the most recent citation for zaftig in the Oxford English Dictionary calls Dolly Parton zaftig. Merriam-Webster defines zaftig as

“having a full rounded figure: pleasingly plump.”

Now I don’t know if Dolly Parton is exactly plump, but she certainly has a full, rounded figure.

The OED’s definition is “of a woman: plump, curvaceous, sexy.”

The word appeared first in print in a book from 1937 called The Old Bunch by Meyer Levin.  From the review in Time Magazine I can see not only that it sold for three dollars at the time and was a 964 page novel set in Chicago, but that it was reported to have contained “twice as many four-letter unprintables as [its] nearest competitor.”

The reviewer also warns readers that they may find themselves “oppressed at times by the heavy, strident Jewishness of the book’s atmosphere.”

That sort of explains why it was the first to out our word zaftig.

Zaftig is a word that came into English from Yiddish.

Yiddish is a bit of an unusual language.  It developed starting about 1000 years ago among Jews in what is now Germany.  It is based on Germanic but with generous dollops of Hebrew and other languages thrown in.  It’s written using Hebrew characters.  It developed in Jewish enclaves existing inside but largely separately from other European societies.

As reported by the OED there are only about 200 English words that have come to us from Yiddish; glitzy, schmooze, chutzpa and klutz are a few.

The parent of zaftig is ultimately Germanic therefore.

That parent was saftig meaning “juicy.” So there was certainly an attractive playfulness behind calling someone zaftig.

When Lynn asked me to do this word I’d already looked it up when researching my book and so the “juicy” meaning jumped to mind.  I playfully told her she was kind of zaftig herself.

I hope she didn’t think I was calling her plump.

This episode brought to you by my book on the words we use for our bodies: Carnal Knowledge - A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia available at bookstores or online. For more information please visit www.navelgazersdictionary.com

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

It is thought that cantaloupes originally were cultivated in Armenia before being brought and grown in a place near Rome, reputedly in the garden of the pope’s country villa. The place where the pope had this retreat is known as Cantalupo in Sabina and so when first the Italians, then the French and finally the English began growing and eating these melons they called them by the most famous place that they had set down roots.

I tried to find out why Cantalupo in Sabina  was called by this name and I found that there are several places in Italy called Cantalupo.

The scuttlebutt is that cantalupo is a name that means “howling of wolves” or “wolf song” but this etymology does not come from any recognized authoritative source so I’m treating it with a grain of salt.  Certainly canta does mean “song” in Latin and lupo means “wolf,” but it may just be coincidence.

The word melon has a history of its own.

Going way back, the what the Greeks thought of as a melon was what we would call an apple.  But when they added their word meaning “ripe” on the end making melopepon, it then became what we would call a melon.

The Romans grabbed this word but Latin speakers got lazy and dropped the pepon part so that by the time it got into French it was melon again, except it didn’t mean apple, now it meant melon.

This French word became an English word in 1398.

In truth some people say that melopepon didn’t mean “ripe apple,” but instead meant “apple gourd,” but it doesn’t much matter.

The first appearance of the word cantaloupe in English was in 1739 in Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary.

Miller was a highly respected horticulturist in his day and his dictionary went through many printings.  But the only place you can see a portrait of him is on a French edition of the dictionary printed in 1787 and there’s a problem with that.  The portrait is of the wrong Miller.

Somehow they got a hold of a portrait of a John Miller instead of Philip Miller, and pasted that on instead.

While I’m speaking of fruit, remember that I’ve set up poeticrecipe.com as a sort of celebration for thanksgiving.  Make up a poem, a recipe and send them in!

The Oxford English Dictionary reports that Robert John Lechmere Guppy was a clergyman.  Here’s a pic of old Lechmere, as he was known, and you can see that it would be easy to think he’s a clergyman based on his collar.

But deeper research tells me that he was actually an inspector of schools.

The reason that Lechmere Guppy is in the OED at all is that in 1860s he thought the little fish that bear his name were interesting and unique enough that he packed some up from his base in Trinidad and shipped them off to the British Museum in London.

“Very interestink” thought Dr. Albert Carl Ludwig Gotthilf Guenther, the zoology curator. “Ve haf never zeen vun off zeeze” he said and carefully penned the Latin name Girardinus guppii on his little paper card.

But Guenther was mistaken too because this little fish had already been described in the scientific literature.  So the little fish had its name changed to Lebistes reticulates.

But it was too late, people had already decided they liked the fish and they liked the name Guppy and so it stuck at least as a common name.

It made it out of the museum and into the vernacular in 1925.

Of course the fish had existed before 1925, or even 1860 and people liked it then too.  It had been called the millions fish and they had liked it especially because it gobbled down mosquito larvae.

Old Lechmere was described as white haired although from his picture I’d say there wasn’t much hair there to judge its color. He was tall and stern “rugged in speech, combative in his opinions” and a contemporary said a whiff of cold air seemed to go wherever he went.

While that description doesn’t sound to endearing another one does.

He had been born in England but had moved to Tasmania.  Or at least he tried to move to Tasmania.  His ship was wrecked off New Zealand and he spent two years living with the Maori before moving to Trinidad when he was 22.

He got on famously with his hosts and loved in his later years to tell stories and show off the tattoos he’d gotten on his back while there.  He said he got away just in time to avoid marrying the daughter of the chief.

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

I didn’t want to just recycle the same old stuff so I took a look to see if there had been any changes in the meaning or relevance of the word over the past three years.

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

I was a little surprised at what I found.  At Urbandictionary it looks to me like nothing much has changed.

When I posted the ghetto episode in 2005 it felt like a hip new use of an old word.  Come to think of it I haven’t heard my kids using the word so often lately. Could it be that the fashion in slang has moved on?

I took a look at Google trends where you can see the relative frequency of words used as search terms over time.

Here’s a screenshot.

The summer of 2005 looks to me like a time when the word ghetto was coolest; the big peak is right at the time I first did the episode.  Today there are only half as many searches.

So that’s a snapshot in the life of a word.

Here’s the old episode again.

Like so many superlatives the most recent meanings of the word ghetto are polar opposites.  Simultaneously meaning “of poor quality” or “shabby” and at the same time “hip” or “cool.”

Of course ghettos are neighborhoods, usually poor neighborhoods—although there are student ghettos near universities and these can’t really be called poor.

So “shabbiness” due to lack of funds, and “cool” due to the success of rap and hip-hop.

Before ghetto attained its elevated status, large, loud portable radios first called ghetto blasters were forced to change their names to boom boxes since ghetto wasn’t politically correct—or at least pointing out habits of the black ghetto anyway.

English takes the word ghetto from Italian where getto means “foundry.”

The reason is that in the 1500s Jews living in Venice were required to live on one particular island, which had previously been the site of a foundry.

By the early 1600s English had acquired the word as a generic for such enforced Jewish neighborhoods. Later by the late 1800s ghetto applied to any neighborhood that was a slum.

• it can mean to climb up a cliff
• it can mean a device for showing how much something weighs, or
• it can refer to the outside of a fish.

The short answer is polysemy.

Erin McKean defined polysemy as “the greedy habit that some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves.”

In the case of scale polysemy isn’t really the long answer because scale wasn’t a single word that adopted many meanings, it used to be several different words that came together in sound and spelling.  According to Merriam-Webster this is a homograph, a word with identical spelling and pronunciation that actually evolved from different sources and so holds more than one meaning.

So let’s explore the three meanings JD mentioned.

Scale “to climb” appeared in English in the 1400s from Italian (a refreshing change).

Since Italian used to be Latin we aren’t surprised that the ultimate etymology was scandere “to climb.”  When it first came into English it actually meant “a ladder” or “set of stairs.”

It’s easy to see how this word also got applied to various things that went up, like scales in music or the Richter scale that measures earthquakes.

It might make sense that if the Richter scale came from this ladder or climbing meaning, scales that measure weight could also have come from the same source.

But it seems that they don’t.

Weigh scales come instead from an Old Norse word skal that meant “a drinking bowl.”  This is also the source of our word skol that you might say when drinking a toast.

So weigh scales came about because they are made with two pans or bowls, one hanging on each side.

It seems to me though that the fact that the Richter scale measures, and weigh scales measure might have well influenced the evolution of these two different words into a homograph.

The “drinking bowl” meaning shows up first in 1205 in English and by 1375 the “weigh scale” had arrived.

Finally we turn to fish scales.

Here I can actually fall back on that polysemy word because in some ways fish scales did diverge from one of the words I’ve already covered.  But that was a very long time ago.

The American Heritage Dictionary points back to an Indo-European root skel meaning “to cut.” This is the root of shell.

You can imagine ancient people using shells to cut things.

What is a fish scale but a small shell-like plate?  Actually what is a drinking bowl but a large deep shell?

The fish scale etymology got to English around 1300 through French, but the French picked it up from Germanic.

The drinking bowl etymology shows the word also coming from Germanic but from the north with Old Norse instead of the south with French.  So these two meanings—fish scale and bathroom scale—started in the same place, diverged, then came together in spelling and pronunciation, but not in meaning.

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

It’s not often I want to suggest a new word, but I like this one.

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

A new word is a good word if it doesn’t need explaining.  You knew right away what resheveled meant didn’t you?  It’s recovered from being disheveled.

I’m not wholly original in this.  Depending on how you spell it Google brings up 3, 5 or 7 hits.

A new word is only really good if other people pick it up and start using it and I really don’t have any expectations of that so let’s move on from this is an aside.

The word disheveled is an even better word because, first of all people already use it, and second of all it has an unexpected etymology.

The American Heritage Dictionary says disheveled means

“being in loose disarray; unkempt…marked by disorder; untidy”

They give an example of “a disheveled pile of books.”

But the roots of the word disheveled are in Latin.  The Latin word for “head” is caput and the hair on the head is capillus in Latin.  This gave rise to the French word for hair cheveau.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

Geoffrey Chaucer used the word dishevley in The Canterbury Tales and by it he meant “bald.”  That’s because earlier in Latin and then in French decapullatus and then deschevele took the de- prefix to mean “without.”

So someone who was disheveled was without hair.

Somehow this changed over time and instead started to mean that someone who was disheveled was “without a hat” covering their hair.  Clearly someone without anything covering their hair is prone to having the wind and weather make a mess of their hair. That’s when the meaning started to mean “in disarray.”

For these reasons the word dishevel grew out of disheveled and not the other way around.

Unfortunately for my new word, there is already a word shevel and has been since 1725.

Instead of being the opposite of dishevel as I’d like it to be, shevel actually comes from a different etymology and means “distorted” so is almost a synonym.

It seems that in true legal jargon felony is still current terminology for Americans, but has been replaced by new legal jargon in other countries.

If the crime isn’t serious enough to be called a felony, then it is a misdemeanor.

It turns out that most fat dictionaries list two different words felon.  One of these is an old word meaning a “big zit” or “enflamed pustule.”

Having two different listings implies the dictionaries consider this to be a different word.  But looking at the etymology for the criminal felon I see that there is some suspicion that these villainous personalities were named because they were just as welcome as a big zit.  The etymologies say that the possible source lies in that both are full of bitterness and venom.

There are other possibilities, such as a Frankish word that meant “someone who beats or whips.”

Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary says that a felon is

“a person of greater enterprise than discretion…”

That sent me off looking for dumb criminal stories.  I found a bunch.  Like the guy who drove a stolen car to his court date for grand theft auto.  The counterfeiter who made a girl-guide’s day by ordering 10 boxes of cookies, then paid using a counterfeit $100 bill.  How about the crook that got caught trying to pass off a billion dollar bill?—caught because there is no such currency.

If you want more such tales check out clumsycrooks.com or dumbcriminals.com

When the word felon as “crook” first emerged in English it came from French with a first citation of about 700 years ago.  At first it didn’t mean strictly criminal, but just with a really bad attitude.  It is thought to be related to the word fell as in “cruel” and “ruthless.”  The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary gives an example sentence “a fell and barbarous enemy.”

I guess before I go I should also tell you the origin of misdemeanor.

Your demeanor is how you act, how you behave.  It comes from a Latin root minare that meant “to drive or conduct cattle.”  If you can manage cattle you can manage yourself.

Misdemeanor then is when you can’t conduct yourself as you should.

But it looks like the roots of these two severities of crime (felony and misdemeanor) are etymologically pretty close if felon meant a “violent person,” because the way the Latin word minare drove cattle early-on was by threat and intimidation.

Minare’s original Latin meaning was “to threaten.”

This episode brought to you by my book on the words we use for our bodies: Carnal Knowledge - A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia available at bookstores or online. For more information please visit www.navelgazersdictionary.com

Another was that he wasn’t just a soldier but also a scholar.

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

After 80 years or so of ongoing Viking pillaging the state of English literacy had sunk pretty low so Alfred actually himself sat down and translated Latin texts into the common tongue—what we now call Old English—so that his subjects could benefit.

One of these texts was Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care and it is in this Old English translation that the word clue makes its first appearance.  But it had quite a different meaning.

Today a detective looks for clues at a crime scene, but in King Alfred’s day 1100 years ago, and right up through the time of Shakespeare a clue was a bunch or ball of things.

In fact, the word ball didn’t show up for the first 300 years of clue’s existence.

Alternately spelled clew, this bunch or ball seems often to have been a ball of thread or twine.

Today we use the metaphor of the “thread of a conversation” and similarly our ancestors used the metaphor of a ball or clue of thread as an aid in finding their way through a maze or labyrinth.  Eventually the literal meaning of a ball of string was lost.

But most people haven’t got a clue.

I also wanted to let you know about an online spelling bee that Ben Zimmer at Thinkmap.com and The Visual Thesaurus alerted me to.  Evidently since the past summer 15,000 people have tested their wits against Thinkmap’s computers to the tune of half a million words spelled (and I suppose often misspelled). So that means that people who like it, like it a lot.

Most of us are more familiar with an incubation period being the amount of time it takes between when that guy sneezed on you in the bus, and when you actually get a cold yourself.

That usage first arose in 1835 and they were talking about something more serious than bad manners on the bus; they were discussing malaria.

As a kid I remember being taken to the science museum and seeing a bunch of eggs and cute little yellow chicks all under this clear plastic dome.  The thing was called an incubator.

It is this sense of incubation that relates best to the word’s etymology because the first appearance of incubate in English referred to hatching eggs.

That was in the century after Shakespeare, the 1600s when so many writers were borrowing from Latin.  The Latin root of the word is incubare which figuratively meant to “hatch” or “brood,” but literally means “to lie on.”

And this brings me to a less common word that I stumbled across the other day. An incubus is a problem that is weighing on one’s mind.

I thought, oh, it’s incubating there, waiting to hatch.

But no, it comes from the Latin root.  An incubus was a demon that came and lay on women in the night, sometimes causing them to be pregnant in the morning.

Evidently there were laws against these supernatural beings back in the Middle Ages.

The female variety that came to fool around with sleeping men were called succubus.

Imagine, passing a law against wet dreams.

I also came across (appropriately enough) an entry for incubus from Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary.

I can’t resist the temptation to quote him in full, in part because he himself does some quoting of others:

Incubus: One of a race of highly improper demons who, though probably not wholly extinct, may be said to have seen their best nights. For a complete account of incubi and succubi, including incubae and succubae, see the Liber Demonorum of Protassus* (Paris, 1328), which contains much curious information that would be out of place in a dictionary intended as a text-book for the public schools.

Victor Hugo relates that in the Channel Islands Satan himself — tempted more than elsewhere by the beauty of the women, doubtless — sometimes plays at incubus, greatly to the inconvenience and alarm of the good dames who wish to be loyal to their marriage vows, generally speaking. A certain lady applied to the parish priest to learn how they might, in the dark, distinguish the hardy intruder from their husbands. The holy man said they must feel his brown for horns; but Hugo is ungallant enough to hint a doubt of the efficacy of the test.

*Note: when I dropped “Liber Demonorum” or “Protassus” into Google all I got was the Devil’s Dictionary so I have my doubts as to the existence of such a book of demons.

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

Coincidence? I think not.

Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

While Memphis Tennessee may worship barbeque and delta blues, the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis worshiped the god Ptah.

Ptah was the god of creation.

There were other gods for war and other various necessities.  But the reason that Ptah is important to us in today’s podictionary episode is that Ptah was not only the god of creation, but through circumstances likely beyond his control he became the creator of the name of the land of which Memphis was capital, Egypt.

You can hear his godly name Ptah at the end of Egypt.

The name Memphis means “his beauty” and was a tribute to the supposedly lovely Pharaoh Pepi I.  But another name for the city was hut-ka-ptah which meant “the temple of the soul of Ptah.”

After the demise of the power of the pharaohs came the rise of the Greeks.  They learned of this wonderful city hut-ka-ptah and mispronounced it Aguptos. They also extended its meaning beyond city limits and applied Aguptos to the entire region.

As with the pharaohs before them the Greeks power faded and the next in line with their mispronunciations were the Romans. They took the Greek’s Aguptos and turned it into Aegyptus.

We English speakers took our cue from the Latin of the Bible where Egypt plays a fairly major part in the Old Testament.

All the while, the people who actually lived in Egypt were calling it something completely different.  They thought they were living in Kemet which means “black country.”

The two theories I’ve come across as to why they might have called their home black country are

1. that the soil of the delta was particularly dark and rich, and
2. since Egypt is part of the continent of Africa the inhabitants of old were actually dark skinned Africans

From my vantage point it’s hard to weigh these two theories.  Could one be influenced by Eurocentric bigotry?  Could the other be influenced by Afrocentric optimism?

Before I go I wanted to mention another website I’ve set up.

A respected etymologist once said to me

“etymology doesn’t get much respect.”

That’s why I set up www.etymolo.gy

It advocates for etymology.

Etymology is fun, it makes you smarter and since it shows how our language came from all over, in a way it promotes tolerance.

So if you go to the site and subscribe you’ll see my work along with that of other people and be able to follow along in our quest to give etymology a little more respect.

You can even find out how you can participate.  I’m hoping we’ll come up with a series of things that will move word histories just a little bit closer to the mainstream.