Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Jess Zafaras.
You may know her as the co-host of Words Unraveled, the podcast, or author of the book Words From Hell, which we actually talked about when it came out a couple of years ago.
But today we're talking about her new book, Useless Etymology.
Jess, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Thank you so much.
I'm so excited to be here again.
So grateful that you're having me back and that I didn't scare you too much with the Words From Hell content.
Oh, no, no, not at all.
That was great for Halloween.
Great Halloween book.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Before we start, I have to challenge you to give me three uses for etymology, because I reject the idea that it's useless.
Yes.
And in fact, that is not what I think.
I do run a blog called Useless Etymology and my entire career is largely based on etymology.
So clearly, I do not think it is useless.
Rather, that's a dig at folks who tend to think it is.
They're like, why would I ever need to know this?
But Truly, etymology gives you superpowers, as I write in the book.
It grants you the ability to infer definitions like come across a complicated word you don't know, break it down into its parts to reveal its meanings.
I think a good example that comes to the top of my head is archaeo-pharaoh equestrianology.
Super long word but you break it down into archaeo, which means old pharaoh, which means iron, equestrian horse related, and ology is the study of something.
So the study of old iron horses gives us the study of old trains.
So an archaeo pharaoh equestrianologist is someone who studies old trains.
Oh my gosh, that's great.
Right.
Or I've also heard it as archaeoferroequinologist, depending on your preferences there.
Another usage is that it's a doorway into any discipline.
So if I want to learn about astronomy or astrology or molecular biology, then suddenly the vocabulary and the origins of that vocabulary is my doorway into that discipline.
I can learn about it at a surface level and I can dig deeper from there.
Another one is you can build your own words.
You can make portmanteaus.
You can invent fictional names or create a clever business name, for example.
So those are my top three.
But I would also say that you can be more inventive with the words you already know.
Knowing your roots and stems helps you wield your words with precision and imagination and joy, especially when things sound a little cliche and inhuman in the age of AI.
Yeah, I love a well-used word.
One of my favorites is maudlin, which is a reference to Mary Magdalene, who was crying at the tomb.
And so if you're talking about someone being maudlin and they're crying, and if nuns are crying and you describe them as maudlin, that was like the perfect use of that word.
It absolutely is, 100%.
And to know that Anton Mesmer is the namesake of the word mesmerizing can add depth in context.
Absolutely.
I love that.
And also, etymology is entertaining, and I think we're going to be heavily entertained today.
There are a lot of misconceptions about etymology, so let's start with some debunking.
Can we talk about debunking?
Yes.
And specifically the word debunk.
I love that you brought that up, because it's you know we'll get into this later, but this might be what you call an unpaired word or a loss positive or an orphan negative, though you don't hear, because you don't hear quite as many people saying like that's bunk anymore.
But bunk was for a long time a term for nonsense.
So debunk is an intensification of that.
We do that sometimes with that term.
D-E prefix, even though it often creates negative words.
But the bunk in the word debunk and the word bunk in general is short for Buncombe, which is a misspelling of North Carolina's Buncombe County.
And in 1820...
A politician from North Carolina gave this long and boring and nonsensical speech to Congress that he addressed to his home county of Buncombe.
And so the idea is removing the bunk from a false claim.
So you could also say that that prefix is not an intensification, but it is in fact removing the nonsense from it, in the same way that that bunk was this nonsensical speech.
That's amazing.
So it's bunk.
So the man is immortalized because his speech was so long and boring that it gave us bunk.
Boring and nonsensical, I think, is the key there.
The other thing that made this word more popular, bunk in particular, was a 1923 novel called Bunk by William E Woodward.
That sort of cemented it in the popular lexicon.
Oh, nice, nice.
So what are some things we can debunk?
I know I've heard that the word girl used to be used as a child of any sex.
But you say in the book the book Useless Etymology that it isn't always true.
Yeah, this is a little bit bendy.
It's not completely untrue, but the way you see it phrased this goes around TikTok pretty regularly is that male babies were called knave girls and female babies were called gay girls.
That's the one that I've seen a lot.
And the word girl referred to a child of either sex.
Now there is a grain of truth to this, mostly incorrect though.
And at the very least, it's a vast oversimplification of what actually happened.
The part about girl referring to either sex was true, but very briefly, starting in the early 1300s.
And it was around the time that the word girl came into existence.
The root is unknown, but the L-E ending might be a diminutive.
It was originally G-Y-L-R-E.
But the word boy also dates back to the same period, even slightly before girl, and is recorded referring to a male child.
And even during that period, when girl was used as a word for any young child, it was primarily used for female children.
Now, the notion of gay girls and knave girls, that's silly.
Gay was not specifically used a word connected to girl at any point, though because it meant happy, it could have been applied to happy children of any gender.
And originally the most common use of the word boy was for a young male servant or a commoner, and for the most part it wasn't used very nicely.
You know boy, has in recent American history been used as a a way to divide, to create a class divide and sometimes a racist divide, or to put someone down.
That was the original meaning, but over time it was ameliorated.
It became less pejorative and less negative over time and simply became the word for In Old English, though before this the more common word for a young boy was knichtchild, or night child, which I love.
Yeah, Old English loves its compound words.
And that was something that I learned in your book.
So it was night child, like the knights of King Arthur.
But I was surprised to learn that that wasn't always a noble thing.
Yeah.
Similarly, it just meant a young man, especially a male servant or attendant.
And then it became the male servant or attendant to a lord or someone in power over time.
Yeah, that's great.
Okay, so my favorite debunking in the book is sophomore.
So sophomore doesn't mean wise fool.
Right right see, a lot of people will say this one and they're they're not wrong to think that, because it has been, that has been a notion that's been joked about for centuries now.
So if you're a sophomore in high school or college, you may have heard that the word is derived from sophos, meaning wise, and moros, meaning foolish, which those words do mean those things, And it is very apt and it's very entertaining because as a sophomore you know your brain is still developing.
You think you're so smart, but you're not, you know.
But really, it's more related to the notion of sophism.
Sophism was an ancient Greek school of thought that predated philosophers like Socrates but continued into their era.
And sophists were.
These became known as these traveling intellectuals or teachers known for their skill at oratory rhetoric or persuasive arguments.
They were some of the world's first lawyers.
And in the late 1600s, at schools like Oxford and Cambridge, second and third year students were taught the arts of rhetoric, reasoning and debate.
They were called sophisters first after the sophists in there because that was their field of study.
And all we have to do to get to sophomore from there is add a little bit of French influence.
If you add French influence to this, you get souffle, which evolved into the modern French word sophomore.
And Moros, unfortunately, never had any role in the development of that word.
It wasn't involved in the French word at all.
But it is fun to think about.
And it's also a little bit funny.
And one of the reasons it works well to think that they're wise fools though, is that Plato wasn't super fond of sophists.
Other philosophers at the time weren't because they attached high prices to their skills and their knowledge.
So sophism has also been used in a negative way.
Someone who argues in bad faith or uses logical fallacies, even in the recent era.
Is that where sophistry comes from?
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, another thing, you know, we recently had someone on who talked about the alphabet.
And we learned that if a word has a K in it, it often comes from Old Norse, like sky and skirt.
And then I learned another little trick I can use like that from your book about acronyms.
So that if an acronym like it can't be older than I think it was the 1850s or the 1830s, because people didn't use acronyms way back when.
So like, why did acronyms come to be?
And then we'll talk about some fun acronyms.
Really, the birth of the acronym was thanks to two factors technology and innovation, and the Industrial Revolution, and then the business development that came from it.
Because I mean, even today, the most frequent instances where we see acronyms, that is, initialisms that spell words, even though we use those terms a little flexibly, was in business environments and still is in business environments and in technology.
So scuba, laser, radar, all of these are acronyms.
And then any business name that spells a word, I'm blanking.
Like Texaco is a syllable acronym.
We talked about that.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
We have these syllabic acronyms.
Another real one is, I believe Adidas, which unfortunately is named after Adi Dassler, but same notion.
And then Jeep as well is short for GP.
Yeah.
It's a spelling of the American military slang GP.
Oh, how fun.
So who is Adidas named after?
Adi Dassler, who was the, sorry, Adolf Adi Dassler was his name.
It's a contraction of his name.
Sometimes it's re-explained as meaning all day I dream about sport, but that is not the case, historically speaking.
And they tend to downplay the fact that it's based on his name because he was a Nazi sympathizer.
Oh, no.
Oh, well, yeah, you definitely don't want to talk about that.
Right.
So and what about I was surprised Pakistan is an acronym.
That really surprised me.
And it was like made by it was coined by students.
Yeah, it's both.
It's both an acronym and a little bit of a portmanteau.
It was created by Muslim students at Cambridge in the 1930s who combined the names of the regions Punjab, Afghanistan.
Afghan province and Kashmir, which were meant to form the new country.
And the P-A-K PAK element is also a little bit of a maybe not a pun, but a reference to an Iranian word for pure.
And then stan, of course, means country or literally a place that stands or is established.
Amazing.
And so these were just so.
Why, why did these students?
Why were the students the ones who who came up with the country name?
It appears to be sort of a think tank situation.
Okay.
Okay.
That makes sense.
And then and so then there are a bunch of acronyms that words that actually aren't acronyms that people think are so.
So posh is, when you hear about a lot, not an acronym, right?
Right.
The, the argument there is that it stands for port outward starboard home.
And the way it was explained is if you traveled to India from Europe or a peninsular country And on a steamship in the 1800s, the port side cabins remained out of the sun and therefore were considered fancier, and vice versa on the way back, or they would put the higher end cabins on that side.
But it's existed for quite some time and is probably based on Romani slang and maybe a word originally for like money or coins.
So someone who is posh is wealthy.
And that makes a lot more sense because more people would know someone who's wealthy and want to talk about them than were going on ships at that time.
Exactly.
And what about TAG?
I was surprised that some people think that's an acronym.
It is.
This one, like, it makes perfect sense that it could be short for touch and go, but it isn't.
TAG is a very old word.
It became the name of the children's game in 1730s, before acronyms were a thing that happened frequently.
The word TAG itself is probably a variation on the Scottish word tig, meaning touch or tap, or maybe the Middle English tech or tick.
It's simply an echoic or imitative adaptation of the notion of tapping on someone or touching them.
Yeah, yeah.
And one of my favorites is news, because it's just stuff that's new.
Yeah, it's just that.
But apparently some people think it's an acronym.
Periodically, this one goes around the web and I'm like, why really?
It's like it just means new things.
It's the.
The idea is that it stands for notable events, weather and sports, or northeast, south and west.
And then I even heard someone argue that newspaper is an acronym for northeast west south, past and present event report, which of course is insane.
Oh no, yeah, no, that makes no sense at all.
That's very elaborate.
But we have plenty of evidence showing that the word news, the English word news, is simply an adaptation of the French word nouvelle, which was also used in the same way as a word for new things you read about in the local paper or around the streets and things like that.
And also the first recorded instance of the word newspaper is like way back in the 1600s and it was spelled differently than it is now.
Nothing to do with directionality.
Right.
But this one surprised me because SOS.
So I don't think I ever had an idea in my mind of what it might stand for, but I always imagined it stood for something.
Right.
It looks and sounds like an initialism.
Since you don't pronounce it SOS, it's not an acronym exactly, but it is an initialism.
And it's logical to want to ascribe words to SOS, but sadly it doesn't stand for anything other than the letters themselves and the dots and dashes that are used to transmit them into Morse code.
It's a universal distress call.
So it's not specific to English.
It was selected by the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in 1906 because the Morse code for those letters is really tough to mistake for anything else.
It's three dots, then three dashes, then three dots.
So it's pretty easy to hear and recognize.
And the fact that it often implies a ship or souls in need of saving certainly made it easy for English speakers to look for words to correspond to it.
Yeah, that reminds me of the NATO phonetic alphabet, where also the chosen, because they're hard to misunderstand over, even like bad radio signals.
Precisely.
Yeah, perfect.
Well, we talked about Mr. Buncombe and we talked about Adidas coming from someone's name.
And there are a lot of other interesting words that come from names, too.
And fedora was one.
I loved this story.
This is one of my favorites.
The hat, although you often see more men wearing it these days and it's kind of associated with like the Internet trope of the neck beard, you might say, although often like people will say, but those people are wearing trilby hats.
That's a whole other thing.
And also, curiously, has an interesting connection here.
But it's named after a woman.
It's named after a fictional woman.
If you're a theater aficionado, you've probably heard of Sarah Bernhardt.
She took the world by storm.
French stage actress from the late 1800s and early 1900s.
She played Hamlet famously and in a gender bendy way that people hadn't seen before, frequently before, and she was one of the first big-name actresses to appear in motion pictures.
But the name of this hat comes from Fedora, which was a French play by Victorien Sardou, which is about the Russian princess, Fedora Romazov.
And thanks to the popularity of Bernhardt's performance, the hat was named after the character she played.
Amazing.
And so how did it get to be something that men were more likely to wear?
Interestingly, that one came from Prince Edward in 1924.
He started wearing the hat.
He was very fashion forward.
So he would be more likely to break out of gender norms ever so slightly with his hat choice just occurred to me.
Oh my god, was he a dude?
That's a good question.
He would be from a similar era, but dudes were typically from like the northeast they were.
That's why they ended up being associated with dude ranches.
So these high society gents from the northeast, who were very fashionable, would want to go get the authentic western experience, and they would stay at high-end western resorts and basically cosplay as cowboys.
So that's where we get the, the dude.
But um.
So let's see, first recorded in the late 1800s is where we get it.
So he is in.
He is in the right period, around 1924, so a few decades later.
But a dude dates back a little bit earlier than that.
Okay, so maybe not um.
So fedora was um, a fictional person, and so was the person who gave us pants.
That's right.
All pants are named after a weird little Italian guy from Italian Commedia dell'arte.
And he wore these distinctive, usually red, single leg pants that appeared throughout many different plays as a character trope.
And eventually his name was Pantalone.
And Pantalone's pants were, became the inspiration for the word pantaloons, which could refer to men's knee breeches and women's baggy under trousers.
And then that gave us the word for pants, which of course is an undergarment in British English and then an outerwear in American English.
Do you know what they were called before pants?
Were they trousers?
Probably so.
So also like this era of performance was, at this time hose was more common as legwear than pants.
So trousers certainly, I believe, did exist.
Gonna double check my timeline on that one, too.
You're challenging me with all these additional... No, no, I want this.
I like this.
Yes, trousers dates back to the, at least the 1500s.
So they were around and the word was around for them for quite some time.
But hose were also worn just as frequently.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, we don't use that much anymore.
Well, except for pantyhose, you know for right.
That's a different thing.
Women's clothing now, which i never will wear again, i love.
Oh yeah, i love that in my life i never have to wear those.
So okay, here's another fun one.
How about Mr. Burnside's?
Yes, this is a good one.
It sounds made up, but it's true.
Sideburns are named after the resplendent and voluminous whiskers of Union Civil War General Ambrose E Burnside.
The whiskers looked like maybe a burn, if you say, if you had dark hair on the side of your face.
He included sideburns on a blacklist of words to never use in his 1909 book Write It Right, insisting that Burnside's is correct because it's named after Ambrose Burnside.
So he felt protective of Ambrose Burnside?
Presumably.
And perhaps A.
He was a little bit of a pedant but he was also a Union Civil War veteran, just like General Burnside and also a fellow Ambrose.
So maybe that was a dash of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know like war themes did pervade his work now that I think about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So one of the, I think the last eponym we have maybe is Guy.
And my dad's name was Guy.
And so I always knew that the name came from French and that it meant a guide or a leader.
So you know I had to like positive connotations in my family, but there's a reason that is slightly less honorable that it now we use it to refer to a man or a dude.
That's true.
It also has an Italian correspondent too.
Guido means the same thing and comes from the same source and also means leader or guide.
And this is related to that word too.
But every sense of the word guy we use today is more directly from Guy Fawkes which, if you've seen V for Vendetta, you're probably familiar with this person.
If you're British, you're probably familiar with this person.
If you haven't seen that, if you are unfamiliar with the history behind it, he was one of the main orchestrators of the gunpowder plot, which was an attempt to bomb the House of Lords and assassinate Protestant King James in 1605 by English Catholic dissidents.
This whole misadventure became the basis of Guy Fawkes Day, which is still celebrated.
And during that time, effigies of him were burned and it became a celebration of the fact that the assassination attempt was unsuccessful and the bombing was unsuccessful.
So in the 1600s and 1700s, Guy became a pejorative, meaning a grotesque or poorly dressed person.
And of course its derogatory sense faded with popular usage, especially after American English got a hold of it and perhaps lost its connection to the history that isn't celebrated here as much.
Right.
Yeah.
So there's a lot of outrage toward Guy Fawkes.
And outrage is a surprising word in your book because it has nothing to do with rage, which is such a surprise.
I adore this one.
It's one of my favorite examples of folk etymology, when the presumed origins or structure of a word influence the way it's spelled or pronounced.
So The word outrage was originally pronounced, it's a French word that was pronounced outrage.
And that word is ultimately from the vulgar Latin ultraticum, meaning excess.
It's like extraness, basically.
And it became the old French outrage O-L-T-R-A-G-E, which was misunderstood as outrage and then further misunderstood in English as out plus rage, because it looks like that.
It was spelled exactly the same, but the A-G-E ending on the end of it is a noun forming ending.
It's not the word rage.
Such a good little tidbit.
Another surprising one is hangnail.
Has nothing to do with hanging or nails?
Right.
It's from the Middle English agnail or angnail, which was a corn on your foot.
And then later, the sort of hangnail that's at the corner of your foot.
And the literal meaning of it was a painful spike.
So it is related ultimately to your fingernails, but the original intent was an iron nail.
So when you're walking around on a corn it kind of feels like you're walking around on a painful nail iron nail.
And then, over time, it was understandably misunderstood, as the little painful spike became the word for the thing that's hanging onto your nail.
And of course, it is hanging onto your nail.
Both are true.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Well, you know, I love gingerbread.
So another one.
I was really surprised to learn that that has nothing to do with ginger or bread.
Right.
This is from the, well, it does have to do with ginger, but not with bread.
Oh, okay.
No bread.
It's from the medieval Latin gingembratus, meaning gingered.
It was an adjective.
And that B-R-A-T, was ported over into Old French and then shifted over into Middle English.
And as it did, the B-R elements in it, that ending part of it was misinterpreted as bread.
In Old English, a word for a similar dish would probably be called a gingerloaf. instead.
And over time gingerbread took over because the word was affiliated with.
But even the earliest recorded instances of the word gingerbread didn't contain anything we would call bread today.
It was mostly candied ginger or preserved ginger.
And over time, the ginger loaf adopted the name of the ginger bit.
Nice.
Nice, nice.
Well, escalate is a fascinating word.
It covers a couple of different things, I think.
Let's talk about escalate.
This one's staggering.
Like this is one of the most interesting chronology hiccups that I've ever encountered.
It's the word, the verb escalate is very recent.
It didn't come around in English.
It wasn't a regular recurring word in English until after the invention of the escalator.
So if you were say you're writing like a historical novel about you know a battle or something, no one would say tensions were escalating because that word didn't exist, Which is amazing.
It sounds like an old word.
It really does.
It does.
And it does have an older variation.
There was the word escalade, but it was specifically spelled just like the Cadillac Escalade actually.
But it was specifically a word for climbing a wall with siege ladders.
And it wasn't very common.
It didn't come up a lot.
So, like tensions didn't escalade, they you would.
You would climb over a a wall and that would be your intent there.
But the root here is scala, which meant both scale and uh was a word for a ladder.
So this is this.
All comes back to ladders, and so that's an example of a back formation, because we had escalator first and then we got the verb escalate.
So what are some other back formations?
Oh, there are so many of these.
A lot of them have the Latin T-I-O-N ending on them, because many of these words, many verbs that end in A-T-E and have a corresponding T-I-O-N noun were introduced directly from Latin and Old French as the noun and then later needed an English verb form.
For instance evaluate regurgitate, exploit and destruct.
Entered English after evaluation regurgitation, exploitation and destruction, even though they feel simpler right.
Yeah, yeah.
So resurrection was adopted into English directly from Old French in the 1300s, but the verb form resurrect isn't recorded until the 1700s.
And in fact as recently as the early 1900s resurrect you'll find in writing guides was considered to be incorrect because the Latin root verb of resurrect is resurgere.
So resurge should be the, according to these writing guides, the verb form of resurrection, right?
Oh, amazing.
And there's something similar with destroy and destruction, right?
Exactly.
That's a good question.
So destroy is ultimately from the Latin destruere, meaning to tear down or demolish.
So it means to unbuild.
The verb struere is also the root of words like structure construct obstruct destruction, obstruction and construction.
So why does destroy have a different ending?
It's all because of the way it traveled through old French from Latin into English.
So destroy is the oldest word of the ones that I've just mentioned entering in the 1200s in English.
And while it's originally from that Latin source, its spelling was influenced by its Norman French form, which is destroyer.
And as the, as it is usually the case, the nouns entered English first before these verbs destruction obstruction construction structure, construct and obstruct with influence from their Latin noun forms destruction and things like that, but they all share structus right um.
The verb destruct ends up being a back formation of destruction, but because we already had destroy, we usually say destroyed rather than destructed.
So destruct didn't appear in english as a verb until like 1958 and the phrase self-destruct didn't show up in until 1966 in the voiceover at the beginning of the tv show mission impossible.
Oh amazing.
Oh, that's a great little tidbit.
And that is so much more recent than I would have imagined.
Right?
Wow.
And it's all because we already had destroy, so we had no necessary reason to have destruct as its own noun.
And it even sounds a little funny to say you destructed something, right?
True, true.
Yeah.
And I think the one that will be a favorite among listeners is edit.
You know so many editors in the audience talk about edit.
Editor came to English before the word edit.
And it is a back formation of it.
And it's simply because the role was adopted as the word first before the action.
Amazing.
Love it.
So I think I want to end with, again, one of the most surprising... don't know there's so many surprising things in the book but this one really surprised me is that every meaning of the word check like c-h-e-c-k comes from the game chess the board game that is right that's crazy that's writing a check that's checking a box that's even the word words like x checker things like that every sense if you're double checking something all of these are ultimately from the game of chess and earlier versions of the game of chess and curiously They appear to be from the Arabic and Persian phrases for the king died or the king is routed, the king is unable to move, like shahmat is the origin of all of these words.
And this shahmat came into Arabic from Persian with a twist.
Mat meant Persian meant to be astonished and mata meant to die, so it could be one or the other there.
Either way, this became the word checkmate.
Shahmat became checkmate.
And then, like checkmate, the word check dates back to the old French adaptation of these words éché, which was a word for chessmen.
But they also come from shah, ultimately, too.
So they are also related.
And then exchequer was introduced.
The word échéquier was old French for check.
In chess when you would say échéquier to check the king, which was adopted into English as exchequer, which was originally a word for a chessboard.
And then it became a piece of paper or a cloth with a check pattern on it that you could use to do accounting or you could use to demonstrate the way money is moved around.
And thus an exchequer became someone who oversees money.
Amazing.
Language is so much fun.
Isn't it?
Yeah.
So the book, the wonderful book is called Useless Etymology.
Jess, where can people find you?
Basically anywhere you get your books.
I usually recommend that people get their books from bookshoporg, if you're not going to go buy it from a bookstore in person, because you can route that purchase through your website local indie bookstore and they get a little cut of the sales too.
They can find me on YouTube, where I host a show called Words Unraveled.
I'm also on TikTok.
I'm quite active over there at Jess Zafaris, and you can find my blog, uselessetymology.com.
Wonderful.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you.
And for the listeners.
If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend, or at least share some of these fascinating tidbits we learned today.
And don't forget to follow or subscribe wherever you're listening.
If you are a Grammarpalooza supporter, we're going to have a bonus episode with the surprising origins of the word mini-.
Factoid, Hello, and Gasoline.
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