duck

Because I am actually that big of a nerd when it comes to all things verbal, a game I sometimes play (with myself because I am also lonely) is wondering whether two homophones are related. For example, English has prune, which can be a verb meaning “to trim a tree” but also the fruit that one such tree might grow. They’re not related, however: the latter goes back to a very old word for “plum,” while the former comes from the French proignier, “to cut back,” which in turn comes from origins unknown (though perhaps both preen and the Latin verb retundiare, “to round off,” figure into it).

See? Barrels of fun!

I was very surprised to look up duck and find that its two senses — the bird that says “quack” but also the action of lowering your body — are probably related. In Old English, the duck was known as the ened until it was replaced by duce, “a duck,” but also “a ducker,” presumably from ducan, meaning “to duck, dive” because the birds have that habit of plunging deep into water. According to Etymonline, the sense of “to lower or bend down suddenly” has been in use in English since the 1520s. 

The fun does not end there, however. As is so often the case, looking up one thing leads to another, and I ended up on the entry for canard, which is the French word for “duck” but which in English means “a false or unfounded story.” Apparently the latter sense of this word exists in French as well, as a result of the expression vendre un canard à moitié, “to half-sell a duck,” a reference to something that no one remembers anymore. (No, really: Merriam-Webster supports this. It’s apparently a situation where we still have the punchline but we lost the joke.) Etymonline conjectures that quanart, the old French word that canard comes from, may have come into use as a result of humans imitating the the noise a duck makes — “echoic” in the way other words are, like woof, chickadee, zip, cricket, gurgle and even barbarian. But that connection between canard and falseness is super interesting because English’s quack also has that, where a quack can be a “a medical charlatan, impudent and fraudulent pretender to medical skill.” In this case, it’s just a coincidental parallel thing. The “bad doctor” sense of quack comes from an obsolete Dutch word quacksalver,” “hawker of salve,” with the first part coming from the Middle Dutch quacken, “to brag, boast.”

coleslaw

One day I made an etymological connection that was both surprising and very obvious: that the first syllable of coleslaw was clearly related to our word kale, as kale is a variety of cabbage and coleslaw is made from cabbage. The connections did not end there: a variation of that same syllable also appears in the words cauliflower, kohlrabi and collard greens, although curiously the middle syllable in broccoli is unrelated, even if the broccoli plant itself belongs to the same family. (Broccoli is a diminutive of the Italian brocco, “shoot, nail or tooth,” which in turn comes from the Latin broccus, which also gives us brooch.)

On its own, cole just means cabbage, and it comes through Middle English from the Latin caulis, “stem, stalk,” which Etymonline notes became the Vulgar Latin word for “cabbage,” replacing brassica, which still exists as in various biological names for cabbages. (Brassica oleracea is the species that includes all the edible plants I mention in the previous paragraph, plus Brussels sprouts, savoy cabbage, and gai lan. There is also the family Brassicaceae, which includes rocket, arugula, cresses, radishes, horseradish wasabi and mustards.) And caulis goes back to the Proto Indo-European root *(s)kehuli-, “stem of a plant, stalk,” which also gives us the Old Irish cual “faggot, bundle of sticks,” the Greek kaulos, “stem, stalk, pole,” the Armenian c’awl, “stalk, straw,” and the Lithuanian káulas, “bone.”

What’s interesting about cauliflower is that it goes back to the Italian cavolo fiori, “flowered cabbage,” with cavolo being the singular Italian word for “cabbage.” And cavolo and cabbage are close enough — and often when moving through history from one language to the next, Bs become Ps, and Ps become Fs, and Fs, become Vs, to the point that you could imagine that cavolo and cabbage were themselves related, but again that’s apparently no the case: cabbage comes to English from an Old French word for “head,” for obvious reasons.

The second part of kohlrabi comes from the Old French rape, which in turn goes back to the Latin rapa, rapum, “turnip.” The species Brassica rapa includes not only turnips but also napa cabbage (a.k.a. Chinese cabbage), bomdong, bokchoy and rapini. Confusingly, the similarly named Brassica napus is rapeseed, a different but related plant, from which we get rapeseed oil and, from one cultivar, canola oil. According to Wikipedia, the first syllable in canola comes from Canada, where it was first trademarked, and then the -ola ending in this case specifically stands for “oil, low acid,” Shinola similarities notwithstanding.

mushroom

Way back in grade school, when we were first learning about compound nouns, I remember an assignment that had us take one of them and make a sentence using both of the component words individually. I’m not sure what the point of this exercise was, exactly, other than to reaffirm that sometimes some words are two words and we children should not be scared of that fact, but I clearly remember one kid picking the word mushroom, with the resulting sentence being something like “I threw up and then there was mush in the room.” Our teacher said this did not actually qualify for the assignment, not as a result of featuring vomit as a central plot point but because mushroom was not actually a compound noun, even if it looked like it was. This kid was not a good student but was a fairly competent arguer, and he challenged our teacher to explain where the word mushroom came from if not from putting mush and room together. The teacher could not explain the etymology, and this ended with her basically saying “I don’t know what is correct but I am certain you are just wrong.” And that’s how it ended. That is actually a fairly good snapshot of how my lower-school education went, really.

More than thirty years later, this incident popped into my head and I suddenly realized that I did not know where the word mushroom comes from, so here it is: no one is completely sure.

To start with, Etymonline traces it to the 1400s with muscheron and musseroun coming into English from French, and the French coming perhaps from the Late Latin mussirionem, though it is noted that this Latin word might have actually come from French and not the other way around.

The OED theorizes that it could have a connection to the French mousse, “moss,” but other sources disagree, saying there is no proven connection between mousse and any lineage leading to English’s mushroom. 

The Wiktionary etymology connects the French mousse to Frankish mosa (“moss”), Old High German mos (“moss, bog”), Old High German mios (“moss, mire”), Old English mēos (“moss”), Old English mōs (“bog, marsh”), Old Norse mosi (“moss”), Old Norse myrr (“bog, mire”) and the Proto-Indo-European *mews- (“mosses, mold, mildew”). It also claims that mushroom displaced the Old English word for these things, swamm, which is related to both the words swamp and sponge. But at the end suggests that it may go back to a mysterious, pre-Roman word altogether.

The French mousse meaning “moss” made me wonder how that word came to be associated with both desserts and hair products. Again, according to Etymonline, it’s been used in English to refer to frothy dishes since 1892, but this entry defines that French word mousse ass “froth, scum,” from the Late Latin mulsa, “mead,” which in turn comes from the Latin mulsum, “honey wine, mead,” which is in turn the neuter form of  the adjective mulsus, meaning “mixed with honey, which is related to mel, “honey.” The Proto Indo-European root meilt- is as far back as we can apparently take it, and that root is present also in the English words caramel, marmalade, melissa, mellifluous, mildew and molasses.

Which is to say that it does not offer a clear connection between mousse as moss and mousse as sweet frothy substance. So then we go to the Etymonline entry for moss, which apparently can mean both the organism itself — the “moss plant,” even if moss is not a plant — and “bog, peat-bog,” which is a use of the word I am not familiar with. “The Germanic languages have the word in both senses, which is natural because moss is the characteristic plant of boggy places. It is impossible to say which sense is original.”

So I suppose the French words mousse and mousse might be homonyms? But given how both refer to soft, wet things, it seems unlikely that they wouldn’t have some connection. I just couldn’t find it.

So what of mush? I am certain you are dying to know. Etymonline has it being a variant of mash, which in this context just means “a soft mixture.” Mash, in turn, comes from the Old English masc — as in masc-wyrt, “mash-wort,” an infused malt — and connects that to the Swedish mäsk “grains for pigs,” the German Maisch, “crushed grapes” and another infused malt, and the Old English meox “dung, filth.” And that word goes back to the Proto Indo-European root meik-, which also gives us everything from medley to melee to mustang to promiscuous.

Thirty years later, I still do not know where this word mushroom comes from, but as is often the case, the journey to this anticlimactic destination taught me a lot of other things I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

nightshade

For the last few months, the corner of the internet that focuses on the creative endeavors of director David Lynch has been speculating about what might be his next big project: a new TV series that may or may not be a successor or spiritual sequel to Twin Peaks, and that may be titled either Unrecorded Night or Wisteria. Or both. It might be two projects, which would be very on-brand for David Lynch, given his history of twinning. 

We really don’t know anything about it for certain, but the one thing that has surfaced again and again in articles about the project is that the first potential title, Unrecorded Night, comes from a translation of an Old English word for nightshade. As it is explained, “unrecorded night” is a literal translation of the Old English nihtscada, apparently with the first part, niht, meaning “night” and the second part meaning something like “forgotten” or “unrecorded.” This is not the case. According to every dictionary I could find, nihtscada translates into modern English simply as “night” and “shade.” That’s it. No evocative poetry there.

Whether you want to call his a folk etymology or simply a false etymology, the “unrecorded night” thing does seem to predate this project: a 2013 Huffington Post article by Tara Heibel also offers the “unrecorded night” translation, explaining it only with this: “This supposedly refers to the effects of the poisonous substances like belladonna and henbane if ingested by people.” I’m not sure what that means, exactly, but given that belladonna can cause blurred vision, irritated skin, fever, fast heartbeat, inability to urinate or sweat, hallucinations, spasms, mental problems, convulsions, and coma, I feel like the night a person would spend contending with belladonna poisoning would be both recorded and remembered. 

There are some other Google hits for pages referring to this etymology separate from any mention of David Lynch. And it does make for an evocative title, in the style of Lost Highway and Blue Velvet, but it simply doesn’t seem to have a basis in any etymology I have seen. I do wonder if it was a mistake that found its way to Lynch and may now be realized in a big way in this forthcoming project.

In case you’re wondering how a poisonous berry like belladonna got its name — and I was, because it literally means “beautiful lady” — it apparently comes from the practice of women using an extract of the plant as eyedrops to dilate their pupils and consequently look more aesthetically pleasing. I’m less clear why we ended up calling these plants nightshades. Some have speculated that the nightshade family of plants, which includes toxic ones like belladonna but also potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, might get its name because certain species bloom at night or because the dark purple berries that belladonnas grow.

Since we’re on the subject, wisteria is a fairly new word, having been coined by English botanist Thomas Nuttall in 1819 in honor of the American physician and anatomist Caspar Wistar, who died in 1818. The wisteria is also a legume and not a tree, though I feel like most people who grow them treat them as if they were a tree. 

I do go back to the idea of twinning and these two prospective titles for a David Lynch project. Both nightshade and wisteria are famous for their purples — the former the poisonous berries, the latter the blossoms that dangle like grapes. One will kill you. One is simply nice to look at (if super attractive to bees). I wonder if in David Lynch’s mind nightshade and wisteria are similar looking but with reverse polarities, like Laura Palmer and Maddie Ferguson. Hmm.

impeach

Watching the second impeachment of the president today, I wondered why we have this verb impeach and this adjective impeccable that seem to be at odds with each other. Presumably, you cannot impeach a person who is impeccable, so what caused these words to diverge? The answer is that they’re not actually related, in the way that religion and sacrilege seem like they should share a history but don’t. Impeach comes to English via French through Latin, going back to the verb impedicare, “to fetter, catch or entangle,” which ultimately comes from pes, “foot.” The legal and political senses of impeach, which is mostly the way it gets used today, has been in use in English since the 1560s, and Etymonline theorizes that the shift may have resulted from association with the Latin verb impetere, “to attack or accuse.”

But impeccable is completely different, coming from the im- prefix meaning “not” and the Latin verb peccare, “to sin.”

Peach, meanwhile, goes back to Persia, with Persikon malon, “Persian apple” being the Greek name for the fruit.

squash

Ever since I was a kid, I wondered why squash could refer to the sport, the fruit or the act of squishing — and even then, why should we have both squish and squash and what is the difference between the two? It turns out only two of the three are related: the verb sense, “to crush or to squeeze,” goes back to the Latin verb exquassare, the prefix ex- plus quassare, “to shatter,” which also gives English the word quash. The verb sense of squash eventually generated a noun sense, “the act of squashing,” but I feel like it doesn’t get used all that much except in the name of the sport, although that itself isn’t spelled out all that explicitly. The Wikipedia page notes, without citation, that the name comes from the fact that people playing the game eventually noticed that puncturing the ball caused it to squash upon impact, thereby offering “more variety to the game.” Also, at one point, the ball itself was the squash. And the blog Grammar Phobia says that in some contexts, the game is still called its old name, squash rackets. The fruit — and yeah, apparently gourds are fruits and not vegetables — gets is name from the Algonquian word askutasquash, which literally means “the things that may be eaten raw,” and therefore has no relation to the other squash, though notably you can still squash a squash. Squish, by the way, is probably just a variant of squash, though I haven’t seen any guesses as to why it should exist.

cantaloupe

If you know a little about romance languages, you could maybe look at the word cantaloupe and guess that it means something like “wolf song” or “singing wolf” or something thereabouts. The canta part looks like the Spanish, Italian and Latin words for the bern “to sing,” while the loupe part looks like a lot of those languages’ word for “wolf” — lupo in Italian and Spanish, lupus in Latin, loupe in French. But why the hell would a melon be named after singing wolves? Apparently the melon takes its western name from the Italian town of Cantalupo di Sabina, which was allegedly the first place in western Europe where the cantaloupe was grown after being brought over from Armenia. It’s supposed that the town got its name because it was near where wolves could be heard at some point in time, but it’s also conjectured that that might be a folk etymology. If it is, I didn’t find anyone else’s guesses on the English internet for how else it might have gotten that name, though there is more than one city in Italy named Cantalupo and even a Cantaloup in France. Also apparently one time a pope died from eating two whole cantaloupes in one sitting.

Whatever the case, “singing wolf” is still a pretty boss association for a melon you eat at brunch.