Word of the day: pilgrim.

Posted by Marc Bailes

We’ve all heard the story of the first Thanksgiving. Settlers landed at Plymouth Rock, but in this story we call them pilgrims. But the word pilgrim predates the first Thanksgiving by four hundred years. Even before Columbus sailed across the Atlantic, the word pilgrim was used for anyone who moved around a lot, kind of like a nomad.

But pilgrim has always had a special meaning -- a trip with great importance attached to it. In ancient times, pilgrimages to sacred and historical sites were well established. Ancient Greeks traveled to the Sacred Court in Eleusis. Jews made pilgrimages to the Temple in Jerusalem. Muslims still make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives. That pilgrimage, known as Hajj, is the largest gathering of human beings in the world, as 2.5 million Muslims descend on the small town in western Saudi Arabia beginning today. As for the pioneers in Massachusetts, we call them Pilgrims with a capital P, and for good reason. It’s believed that the English Puritans were alluding to the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament, in which the ancient Israelites were called pilgrims. The word is rooted in the Latin peregrinus, meaning “foreigner.” Like the peregrine falcons, which were captured in flight -- as opposed to those caught in their nests.

Image courtesy of Midtown Miscreant

Word of the day: meal.

Posted by Marc Bailes

On Thanksgiving we reacquaint with friends and family, get a day off work, and maybe even watch some football. But Thanksgiving will also likely be one of your biggest meals of the year. In this context, it’s apparent that a meal is a portion of food or the collective act of eating that portion with others. But meal is even more interesting that. In Old English the word had two completely different meanings-- neither of which was our current one. In one usage, meal was the part of the grain that we can eat, preserved in oatmeal and cornmeal. Because it described something very fine, meal was powdery food that looks like flour. Meal was also used in the garden, for a powdery substance on some flowers. This meal even lived as a verb, meaning to grind something very finely.

Interestingly, it’s also the source of our adjective mealy, for someone pale or even mealy-mouthed. Because the root of this meal was grinding, you can see how mill was a relative. Separately, a meal was a measurement. Specifically, it was a fixed amount of time, alternatively spelled mele. In this sense, meal is related to meter. This meal measurement was soon applied in a more specific way, for the amount time spent eating. From there it became the food that one was eating, making the transformation complete. Today, using meal as a measurement exists only in combined forms, like the word piecemeal, which means to do something piece by meal.

Word of the day: wing.

Posted by Marc Bailes

What’s your favorite part of the holiday bird? Is it the white meat of the breast or the dark meat of the thigh or leg? Most break it down to those basics. But there’s one more part those often neglected: the wing. No wonder why, because wings don’t have much meat on them. They’re the long, relatively flat strips on either end of the breast, tucked underneath the turkey before cooking. But don’t cast the smaller wings aside. Their white meat make for a healthful part of the dinner. We use wing as a noun. Birds use them to fly in the air, so that may explain why wing and wind are similar in origin.

Turkeys, of course, don’t fly. That’s the reason why wings (like the breast) have white meat: because neither is used. The more active parts, like the legs and thighs, have more blood vessels and therefore retain much more oxygen. But that oxygen is what turns the meat dark. Insects also have wings, as do flying squirrels and flying fish. But it’s not only creatures; airplanes have them, too. From there a wing was used for other mechanisms used to steer against the wind, like the wing of a boat. Wings are on the ends of an airplane, and so we’ve extended the usage for the extremities of many things, from the wing of a building to a position in hockey. The British even use wing for a car’s fender. The area of the theater where actors await their stage time is called the wing. That’s where we get the phrase in the wings. That’s where actors would practice their lines in a rough manner, hence the idiom winging it. Some people act on a wing and prayer. We prefer to earn our wings.

Word of the day: gobble.

Posted by Marc Bailes

Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Who among us won’t be making the holiday bird’s onomatopoeic sound at least once? While the word gobble is certainly related to the turkey’s sound, it’s also likely influenced by the verb gobble, which means “to eat quickly.” The word gobble stems from the word gob. Gob, a descriptive word that refers to a clump or a disorderly pile, can be traced to the French words for “mouthful” and “swallow.” So the sound from the famously plump turkey comes from the French word for “a mouthful.” Surely, this can’t be coincidence, since turkeys have substantial eating habits of their own. So don’t be too ashamed in asking for an extra helping of turkey. Even the turkey might approve.

On the other hand is the idea of quickly consuming your food, which gobble connotes. Eating quickly is hardly something we want to encourage on Thanksgiving. But we don’t make the word history; we just report on it. From those big gobs of food we have one more tasty word: gobbledegook. This newish word refers not to a mouthful of food but of words. Gobbledegook is speech that’s extraneous, muddled, and a bit confusing. Gobble tells us that turkeys are big eaters, while gobbledegook speaks to them as big talkers.

 

Word of the day: mammoth.

Posted by Marc Bailes

American English speakers love hyperbole. So it’s little wonder we have any number of adjectives for large things. Why say big when we can say enormous or gigantic? Still not big enough? Then try profuse or staggering. Or for something a little more colorful, there’s mammoth, which is pretty much anything of extreme size. How mammoth is distinguished from enormous, we’re not sure. But as a word, mammoth is a little more interesting. Mammoth is credited to Russian. But because the animal hails from northwestern Siberia, it’s strongly believed that mammoth comes from Ostyak, the language spoken there. Though today, perhaps only ten thousand or so speakers of this obscure language remain.

Language aside, there’s ample evidence that these creatures lived on five of the world’s continents. The original mammoth was actually called mammuthus, a long-extinct mammal--and a pretty enormous one, too. The one thing we know about Siberia is the region’s extremely frigid weather. Because of that weather, fossils of the mammoth have held up remarkably well considering the last of them died more than 10,000 years ago. Remains tell us that the mammoths were an integral part of early life on earth, going back well over 2 million years. Genetically, the mammoth is a member of the elephant family, and bears much resemblance to its successor. The largest were 14 feet from foot to shoulder, with a thick, rough skin. They had very large heads with two long tusks pointing downward. The mammoth clearly resembles elephants, but the word itself is unlikely any other.

Image courtesy of Live Science.

Word of the day: madeleine.

Posted by Marc Bailes

Yes, it’s a personal name for women. But it’s also the name of a delicious cake. What kind of cake? Well, it’s like a mini sponge cake that’s just a bit too big to be called a cookie. Usually a dozen are cooked together in special pans--kind of like muffins or popovers. The pans have indentations that give the cake a seashell appearance on one side when removed and flipped over.

The name in French is rendered as Magdalena, but can be traced to Mary Magdalene, one of the early leaders of Christianity. As for the individual-size cakes, the ingredients couldn’t be simpler: flour, eggs, sugar, and lots of butter. The origin of the cake is uncertain, but it definitely comes from France. Some credit it to the personal chef for Talleyrand, Napoleon’s celebrated diplomat. A few say it bears the name of a nineteenth-century pastry chef. Others say it comes from Commercy, in northeastern France, where a peasant made them in the mid-eighteenth century. The duke discovered it, and had them made in Versailles. But the novelist Marcel Proust is the one who popularized them. Toward the end of his life, Proust published his celebrated seven-volume autobiography, Remembrance of Things Past. In it he vividly spoke about how the crumbs of a madeleine reminded him of his first taste of one, as a child. It was also the last published work for Proust, who died on this date in 1922.

 

Words of the day: staunch and stanch.

Posted by Marc Bailes

If you have undying loyalty to someone, your support is staunch. Though since this word is an adjective, the more natural way of phrasing this adjective is to say, for example, that you’re a staunch supporter of Martha Stewart. The word can also apply to principles, like being a staunch environmentalist. Staunch is an adjective. While using it as a verb is far more common in British English, even there it’s still not formal English. Just as well. The word causes enough problems. A common spelling mistake occurs when we confuse staunch with its natural verbal form, stanch. This verb is much narrower in scope, meaning to stop the flow of something. Stanching blood was once the primary and most common usage, but that has changed. A dam will stanch the flow of water. A good joke might stanch the flow of tears. In recent years, we’ve started to stanch things other than liquids. But this runs into an etymological problem. The Latin stagnum means “pool” or “pond.” This body of water is the same source of stagnant, for something that doesn’t flow. If nothing but a pool of cars in sight where you’re driving right now, traffic has is stagnant. All these can be traced even further back to the Latin root stare, meaning “to stand”--just like the way staring means that one’s eyes are, well, stagnant.

Image courtesy of All American Patriots.

Words of the day: assure, ensure, and insure.

Posted by Marc Bailes

Your Thanksgiving dinner is going to be amazing. Undoubtedly you’ll receive plenty of assurance afterward. To assure means to give confidence to, as a kind of calming technique. It also means to say something resolutely. Like if assure you that we’ll finish on time. Assure is rooted in the Latin securus, meaning “safe” or “secure.”

There are a small handful of English words of similar origin and even pronunciation. But there is a distinction, however slightly, in their meanings. Increasingly, the word assure is being used to mean “guarantee.” Be on the lookout for it, because the correct word in this context would be ensure. While some people use ensure when they mean assure, a more common confusion is using insure to mean ensure. The word basically applies only to insurance. In most general uses, ensure with an E is the correct choice. It’s a common mistake, because insure was created as an alternate to ensure; they both share the prefix E-N, meaning “make.” But assure has a different prefix, A-D, meaning “to.” Thus the distinct meaning.

A fourth word is the one most closely derived from Latin, secure. As an adjective, secure meaning “without risk.” As a verb, secure can mean “to make safe” but also “to control something”-- like securing a lock to a door.

Word of the day: grocer.

Posted by Marc Bailes

A grocer is a store, and really meets only one criterion must be met to qualify as one. Food must be sold. Could be any combination of foods: cans and baked goods, frozen foods and fresh produce, meats and dairy products. Originally, grocers were not restricted to food. Actually, they sold pretty much anything. The only hitch was that a grocer sold things in bulk.

Today it’s quite common to buy things in bulk, especially at the supermarket and other big-box stores. But this is a modern invention. When stores were significantly smaller, only the rare one sold in large quantity, and that was the grocer. Now if we return to the word grocer, we’ll hear gross. Don’t jump to conclusions. Gross isn’t as unpleasant as you may think. Gross originally referred to anything excessively large. In French, it still has this meaning. Strangely, there is a connection between the two disparate uses of gross. A large collection of things seemingly doesn’t discriminate. Well, compared with the more typical small store, a grocer’s large inventory is bound to have a few unpleasant things in stock.

Perhaps the word has come full circle, since gross in Latin referred to coarse things as well as large ones. Grocery, on the other hand, came to life with self-service stores in twentieth-century America.

Image courtesy of National Archives of Australia.

Word of the day: menagerie.

Posted by Marc Bailes

If you have a wide variety of things and need to bring them all together with just one word, try menagerie. It applies to a collection, but only a very diverse one. Seashells in general might not fit the bill. Unless you’re talking about a large collection that has large ones and small ones, old and new, gathered from beaches near and far.

Originally, the only things being collected were animals. And a menagerie wasn’t much of a mixture at all. In fact, it was a bunch of animals of one particular type, gathered for a specific purpose, like an exhibit.

Consider the same word in modern French, where it’s occasionally used to mean “zoo,” though in a figurative sense. The convenience of a menagerie was that they could be eat and sleep together and be trained on the same schedule. This was all a convenient way of housing a group of animals. Housing is the key part, and it’s the root of menagerie. Even in modern French, ménage means housework or a household. Listen carefully and you’ll hear that ménage is related to mansion, another household word. So the focus shifted from people to animals, from animals of one type to a zoo, from a zoo to diverse collection of anything. 

Photo courtesy of Animated Picturebook.com