An amazing book linking words and their history together. Almost too many examples to quote.
Every weakness of human nature comes out in the history of etymology. Probably the most damning word is probably. Two thousand years ago the Romans had the word probablis. If something probablis then it could be proved by experiment, because the two words come from the same root: probare.
But probablis got overused. People are always more certain of things than they really should be, and that applied to the Romans just as much as to us. Roman lawyers would claim that their case probabilis, when it wasn't. Roman astrologers would say that their predictions were probabilis when they weren't. And absolutely any sane Roman would tell you that it was probabilis that the Sun went round the Earth. So by the time poor probably first turned up in English in 1387 it was already a poor, exhausted word whose best days were behind it, and only meant likely.
Sausages make taste lovely, but it's usually best not to ask what's actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body. In nineteenth-century America, the belief that sausages were usually made out of dog meat was so widespread that they started to be called hotdogs.
The funny thing about archery is that you don't usually aim at the target. Gravity decrees that if you aim straight at the blank your arrow will hit somewhere below. So you point the arrow somewhere above the blank, and hope that this cancels out the effects of Newton's troublesome invention. That's why aim high is another archer's term; it doesn't mean that you'll end up high, or it's not meant to. You aim high and hit on the level.
The Oxford Dictionary admits that 'In Middle English it is often doubtful whether blac, blak, blacke, means "black, dark" or "pale, colourless, wan, livid". [...] There are two good explanations. Unfortunately nobody is quite sure which one is true. [...]
Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for burnt, which was black, or as close to black as makes no differnce. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn't decide between black and white as to which colour burning was. Some old Germans said that when things were burning they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were burnt they turned black.
The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everyone got bored and rode off to sack Rome. The English were left holding black, which could mean either pale or dark, but slowly settled on one usage. The French also imported this useless black word. They then put an N in it and later sold it on to the English as blank, leaving us with black and blank as opposites.
The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word black which meant bare, void, and empty. What do you have if you don't have any colours?
Well, it's hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is black, but a blank piece of paper is, usually, white. Under this theory, blankness is the original sense and the two colours – black and white – are simply different interpretations of what blank means.
And, just to prove the point even more irritatingly, bleach comes from the same root and can mean to make pale, or any substance used for making things black. Moreover, bleak is probably just a variant of bleach and once meant white.
The Old English word for bread was hlaf, from which we get loaf; and the Old English division of labour was that women made bread and men guarded it. The woman was therefore the hlaf-dige and the man was the hlaf-ward.
Hlafward and Hlafdige
Hlaford and Hlafdi
Lavord and Lavedi
Lord and Lady
In 1898 a German pharmaceutical company called Bayer decided to develop an alternative to [addictive morphine]. [...] and worked out a new chemical: diacetylmorphone, which they marketed as a 'non-addictive morphine substitute'. [...]
Bayer's marketing chaps set to work. They asked the people who had taken diacetylmorphine how it made them feel, and the response was unanimous: it made you feel great. Like a hero. So the marketing chaps decided to call their new product heroin. Heroin remained a Bayer trademark until the First World War.
Anacreon's poems (anacreontics) are all about getting drunk. [...] In the eighteenth century an English gentleman's club was founded in Anacreon's memory. Two members wrote a society drinking song called 'To Anacreon in Heav'n'; a good song with a catchy tune. Because it was hard to sing, it became an ad hoc test of drunkenness used by the police in the eighteenth century.
Francis Scott Key was an American lawyer. During the war of 1812, he was sent to negotiate with the British fleet for the releaes of certain prisoners. He dined aboard HMS Tonnant, but when the time came for him to leave, the British got worried. Key was not familiar with the British battleships; if he went ashore he could and would pass all this information on to the American forces. They insisted he remained on board and he was forced to watch the bombardment from the wrong side. The American flag at Baltimore remained high and visible amid the smoke. Key decided to write a song about it. He stole the tune from the Anacreontic Society, but wrote new words that went:
O, say can you see by the dawn's early light...
Alcohol comes from [Arabic] al (the) kuhul, which was a kind of make-up. Indeed, some ladies still use kohl to line their eyes.
As kohl is an extract and a dye, alcohol started to mean the pure essence of anything (there's a 1661 reference to the alcohol of an ass's spleen), but it wasn't until 1672 that somebody at the Royal Society had the brgiht idea of finding the pure essence of wine. What was it in wine that made you drunk? What was the alcohol of wine? Soon wine-alcohol (or essence of wine) became the only alcohol anybody could remember.
= is an equal sign because the two lines are of equal length.
There's a small dot in the middle of the Pacific Ocean whose natives called their home Coconut Island, or Pikini, which was mangled into English as Bikini Atoll.
Bikini Atoll was put on the map by America in 1946 when they tested their new atomic bombs there. Atom is Greek for unsplittable, but the Americans had discovered that by breaking the laws of etymology, they were able to create vast explosions, and vast explosions were the best way of impressing the Soviets and winning the Cold War.
In 1954 the Americans tested their new hydrogen bomb. It turned out to be an awful lot more powerful and ended up accidentally irradiating the crew of a Japanese fishing boat. Japanese public opinion was outraged. Protests were made, hackles were raised, and a film was made about an irresponsible nuclear test that awoke a sea monster called Gorilla-whale or Gojira. The film was rushed through production and came out later in the same year. Gojira was, allegedly, simply the nickname of a particularly burly member of the film crew. Gojira was anglicised to Godzilla.
[...]
But where the Japanese saw a threatening monster, the French saw what the French always see: sex. A fashion designer called Jacques Heim had just come up with a design for a two-piece bathing costume that he believed would be the world's smallest swimsuit. He took it to a lingerie shop in Paris where the owner, Louis Réard, proved with a pair of scissors that it could be even more scandalously immodest. The result, Réard calimed, would cause an explosion of lust in the loins of every Frenchman so powerful that it could only be compared to the tests at Bikini Atoll, so he called the new swimwear the bikini.
Traders in North America: the native Americans didn't care for money. They used sea shells. At some point, traders started using tobacco, but it was large and cumbersome. They gave up on that, and started to use deerskin. Buckskins soon bcame the common barter of North America and a standard barter basically is money. So money became "bucks".
