Quick One

Hello, and happy Tuesday. I apologize for giving yesterday a miss and being late today, but it’s been busy here in my academic cage.  A couple of months ago, back before I decided I have no spare time, I had started to try to find books or documents on the different stages of English, and as part of that, I had purchased two books, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and the Barnes and Noble-published Canterbury Tales, that contained both the original, written language, and a translation into modern English.  I had hoped to learn Old English while reading Beowulf, but, as per usual, I have over-estimated my abilities.  Luckily, the translation is wonderful and worth reading even if you’re not interested in Old English.  I can’t say the same of Barnes and Nobles’ house translator, but that version of the Canterbury Tales is well worth it if you’re interested in Middle English.

“Silly” is used extensively in the book to describe various characters, but with a different meaning than it has today.  In modern usage, it means something along the lines of trivial, harmlessly deficient or simpleness.  It has evolved from West Germanic and Old English seli, ultimately from OTeut. type *sligo- f. *sli-z luck, happiness.  In its earliest use, this was the meaning of silly (written seely at that time), and is the sense that was intended by Chaucer.  It also meant pious, holy, and harmless.  Over time, it came to mean helpless or deserving of pity, which was a primary meaning at the time when the spelling switched from seely to silly.  From there, it developed the sense of helpless, defenseless, weak, or feeble, and then, feeble of mind.  Interestingly, according to the OED, it is also a conventional poetic epithet of sheep.  The fact that sheep are involved in poetry enough to have a conventional epithet is surprising to me.

Don’t forget to send suggestions/requests in!

Introductions

If you’re anything like me–which presumably you aren’t–you first became intensely interested in words, etymology, and the history of language when you were 16 years old on a transatlantic flight, a flight that would change your life, due both to your reading material and the destination of the flight. It was Bill Bryson’s rather eloquently named book, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, a Christmas present reluctantly given to me by my parents, that changed my life. And it is a book that I would highly recommend to anyone (but most likely only to myself) who even suspects that they might be interested in language as a humorous, easy-to-read introduction to the topic.

In any case, the purpose of this blog is to force (read, allow) myself to spend more time investigating word origins and grammatical questions simple enough that they don’t require too much background research (given that I have a completely unrelated dissertation to write). The goal is to address one question each (week) day; in the eventuality that there are any readers, I would be happy to take suggestions on words. I’d also be happy to receive gifts, bribes, or voluntary tribute (though I’m working on making that involuntary); happier, actually.

So, enough with the pleasantries. In honor of one of my favorite musicians and fellow self-proclaimed lingua-phile, Tom Waits, I thought I would look into a word that came up in a story he told while discussing his love of language during a recent concert (which is available here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92916923, via NPR).  While I’ll leave the story–which isn’t actually relevant in the least to the purpose of this blog–to Tom Waits, it involved the word condiment, which is the word I’m going to discuss today, as it was a word I had idly hypothesized/wondered about in the past.

Specifically, I wondered whether “condiment” had a shared root with the Italian “nascondere”, Spanish and Portuguese “esconder,” and English-via-Latin “abscond”, the latter group having the meaning, generally, of “to hide or conceal.”  All three of these words are derived from the same Latin root, ab – meaning away, or far from, + condre – meaning to put together, to stow, and to hide (condere is itself a compound form, combining con - with + dare - to put).  The thought, or more accurately, hope that I had was that condiment would have originated from the condiment’s role in hiding or masking the flavors of the underlying food.  In fact, condiment comes to us from the Latin word condimentum, past participle of condire, meaning to preserve or pickle.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth, OED):

condre: to season, pickle, preserve, an accessory form of condre to put or lay together, lay or store up, preserve, pickle, etc.

So, ultimately, there is a common root, but the linkages that I hoped for between condiment and abscond are not as apparent as I would have liked (at least not in my primary sources: the OED and the Garzanti Linguistica dictionary of Italian).  While investigating I made one other interesting discovery.  The German equivalent of condiment is Gewurz (with the concurrent meaning of spice).  For anyone interested in wine, this ought to be recognizable as a part of the name of the Gewurztraminer grape, which, as it turns out, means “spicy traminer.”

Other words related to some of those discussed today include recondite – meaning removed or hidden from view, or removed from ordinary apprehension, understanding, or knowledge; as well as, potentially, ensconce, from the Old French word esconce, with the meaning of hiding place or place of shelter.  However, the origin of ensconce is not entirely clear, as some uses relate to the employment of small earthworks or fortifications, which seem to derive from the Dutch schans of the same meaning.

If anyone has suggestions for words that need some investigating, please submit them.

Thanks.