Take Our Word For It Blog

Breaking the Silence

2009-10-31T17:34:00.000-07:00

Yes, we've been absent a long time. We apologize for that. We simply got too busy with our "day jobs" and didn't have enough time to pursue our love of etymology. And we've been suffering because of it!

However, we want you to know that we are working on Take Our Word For It behind the scenes. Mike, the programmer in the family, is changing the design of the site. He's planning to seriously revamp it! We are also combing through all word requests submitted by readers over the last couple of years, looking for the best ones to address in Words to the Wise. Further, we have been keeping notes over the last couple of years regarding good topics for Spotlight. So we have been working on TOWFI - we simply haven't been able to show you the fruits of our work. And it will be a bit longer before we can do so.

In the meantime, we wanted to mention a couple of examples of word confusion we came across recently. They both come from the "storm chaser" world - if you haven't noticed, there are quite a few storm chaser programs on television these days, on the National Geographic Channel, the Weather Channel, and the Discovery family of channels. One of the storm chasers (he's actually a scientist) mentioned having to drive through a "maelstORm". Sure, it's easy to see whence the confusion arises, especially when speaking of storms, but the word is actually maelstrom. Edgar Allen Poe introduced the word to English from Norwegian in 1841. The strom element in the word does not mean "storm" but instead means "current". With mael meaning "grinding," the combined meaning of the word is "grinding current". In general, the word refers specifically to a whirlpool, but it is often used figuratively to mean "chaos".

The other bit of storm chasing word confusion we encountered was the use of the word transverse instead of traverse - one of the storm chasers, this one an engineer, was speaking of a supercell thunderstorm that was going to "transverse the countryside". The word transverse is technically not a verb. It's an adjective or a noun that refers to something that crosses or is at right angles to something else. It's understandable that a storm chaser with an engineering background might switch the two words inadvertently in speech, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Until next time,
Take Our Word For It!

Unfortunate Error

2008-09-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

We were watching The Weather Channel while Hurricane Ike (sans Tina) came ashore in Galveston, Texas last weekend. There was lots of live video from Galveston and Houston, plus lots of glitzy graphics. We were surprised, however, to see The Weather Channel use the graphic above.

OK, if you can't hear us, move up to the front of the class -- AFFECT is most often a verb meaning "have an impact on". EFFECT is most often a noun, as in "sound effects." This means that The Weather Channel picked the wrong spelling - it should have been "Feeling the EFFECTS of Ike."

Don't get us wrong, we love The Weather Channel (Melanie does have a degree in meteorology, after all, AND The Weather Channel created a commercial out of a letter she wrote back in the 1980s). We just want them to take a little more care and check their word choice in graphics before airing those graphics.

We wish those AFFECTED by Hurricane Ike a quick recovery from the damage and hardship inflicted by the storm.

Elevens and Twelves

2008-08-19T21:50:00.000-07:00

After having awakened in the middle of the night, one of us (who shall remain nameless) started thinking about etymology while trying to get to sleep. We have some great ideas in that state, but we never want to turn on the light and write them down as we're afraid it will awaken us even more and we'll never get back to sleep. So these brilliant ideas are usually gone by the next morning. However, for some reason, the question of the etymology of eleven and twelve stuck. Why those words decided to present themselves at that early hour of the morning, though, is a mystery! It was nowhere near 11:00 or 12:00 when the words were occupying the mind of the one of us who was awake (it was closer to 3:00 or 4:00 am!).

What's up with eleven and twelve? They bear little resemblance to their brothers and sisters thirteen through nineteen. The etymological constructions of the latter are pretty obvious: a single digit number (excluding zero, one or two) plus ten. So thirteen is "three [and] ten". Nineteen is "nine [and] ten". If we look at twelve, we can see the two component in the tw-. But what is the rest of it? -Elve? Are we talking the Sylvan Folk here? No. And look at eleven. It is quite similar to -elve, eh?

We should not be surprised that most English number words come from Germanic roots. The Germanic numbers share similarities with Romance numbers as both German and Romance languages have a common ancestor, called Indo-European. As regular readers of TOWFI know, Indo-European is a collection of hypothetical root words reconstructed, simply speaking, from the commonalities among the Indo-European languages. English one and Spanish uno, both meaning "one," are similar because they both derive from the hypothetical Indo-European oino- "one".

Oino- turns up in eleven, believe it or not. It is thought that eleven is composed of oino- plus the element -lif-. Etymologists are not quite sure where the latter comes from. It is found in most of the Germanic languages as part of their words for eleven. Some derive -lif- from a hypothetical Germanic root leiq or leip which mean "to leave, to remain". Huh? Well, if you put the two elements, oino- and -lif- together, you have "one left" or "one remaining". If you've got eleven walnuts, when you've counted ten of them, you have one left. We all know that many human societies use base-ten counting systems because humans have ten fingers. In fact, all of the English number words between and including thirteen and twenty contain references to "ten" (the -teen element, of course, which is -ty in the case of twenty). So it should not be surprising to find that eleven contains a reference to ten, even if it is an unspoken one.

Twelve's etymology is similar. It is composed of the Germanic elements twa- "two" and lib- or lif-, thought to be related to the leiq and leip elements mentioned above, and all likely being related to the Germanic liban "to leave". Bs and Vs get substituted for one another now and again in the Germanic languages, so keeping that in mind, you should be able to see how similar liban and leave are. Anyhow, this means that twelve is, etymologically, "two left [after counting to ten]".

Speaking of elevens and twelves, it's between 11:00 pm and 12:00 am here, so it's time to sign off!

Content from the Old Blog and Some New Etymologies - August 3 2008

2008-08-03T11:52:00.001-07:00

Well, it looks like it's going to be easier to save the old blog's content as a web page (or several) at TOWFI. There is no easy way to import the old material into this blog. So that means the old blog material won't be available for a while. We have re-indexed our site through our search engine so that those blog entries have been removed (for now). Once we get those entries into the site, we'll re-index so that they'll turn up in search results again.

Meantime, we have been wondering about the word elbow. Melanie's got an irritated ulnar nerve, making her elbow tender and her hand tingly. The source of el- in ellbow is English ell, which is cognate with Greek ulna, both meaning "arm". The -bow element in elbow means "bend". Just as when you bow, you bend at the waist, and a bow-legged person has slightly bent legs, the ell bow is the "arm bend". An oxbow was originally a bowed piece of wood used to form a collar for draught oxen, and so in America, the oxbow-shaped, cut-off loops of rivers became known as oxbows.

In looking at quotations containing early instances of elbow, we came upon the word handwyrste (from about 1000 AD). Huh? Yes, they did sometimes call the wrist a handwrist, and looking into the etymology of wrist helps explain why the word wrist did not always suffice on its own. Wrist comes ultimately from a Germanic root which means "to writhe". So the handwrist was the "hand writhing" or the thing that allowed the hand as a whole to move and "writhe". Eventually, since no other body parts were called "writhings", the "hand" element was dropped.

For some reason wrist reminded us of the word wick. Not the thing in the center of candles, or related words. No, we mean wick as in "alive". If you are familiar with the musical The Secret Garden, you may remember the song from it that contains the line, "If a thing is wick it will grow." Well, the setting of that musical is Yorkshire, and we find that wick in this sense is indeed a Yorkshire word. Where did it come from? It is a variant of quick! As in the quick of your fingernail, or the quick and the dead, or quicksilver. See our discussion of quick in Issue 47 of TOWFI.

By the way, elbow dates from about 1000 AD in English (in the form elbo#a, where the # represents the old English character yogh, which Blogspot doesn't seem to recognize, but there's a lovely image of it at left. You can also read about Old English characters in Issue 142 of TOWFI. Oxbow dates from 1797 in the U.S. Wrist appears a bit earlier in the written record than elbow, about 940 AD, in the form wriste. And wick in our sense dates only from about 1760 in the form whick.

NEW Take Our Word For It Blog - July 26 2008

2008-07-26T15:35:00.001-07:00

Greetings, TOWFI Readers,

As you may have seen, our previous blog was hacked! The nerve! Our domain host offered an old version of WordPress blog software (we learned this tidbit when it was too late to be of any good to us!). That old version has lots of security holes, so some Russian hackers got in and hid lots of code in our blog, linking to sites about Viagra and similar subjects. If we deleted everything and started over with that old version of WordPress, we'd be open to re-attack. Therefore, we decided to move to Blogspot, which already hosted a blog for us (unrelated to TOWFI).

We were able to save all of our entries, and comments to them, from the old blog, and we will load them here soon.

As far as the features of this new blog, check out the etymology news at right! This and other cool options from Blogspot tell us we picked the right blog host!

We are truly planning to publish TOWFI again soon. Mike was involved in a time-intensive contract job which is now winding down. Looking forward to the extra free-time, he wants to completely revamp the site, in addition to creating new issues, so stay tuned! Etymology is on the way!

Best wishes,
Melanie and Mike
Take Our Word For It
http://www.takeourword.com