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Sunday, September 16, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #113

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself about the curious origins of interesting words:

1. FRANK, which means abrupt honesty, comes from the Germanic tribe the Romans called Franci, which was the Latin word for the kind of javelin that the tribe carried. The Romans had conquered the Franks and set them up as allies to control the various tribes of Gaul. When the power of Rome ebbed about 550AD, the Franci became their own bosses but continued to control the Gauls to the extent that Gaul eventually became known as France. British writers a thousand years later translated the Franci, or Francs, into Franks. The abrupt honesty part comes from the Frankish tribal tradition of open and honest dealing among themselves. A Frank did not break his word once it was freely given.

2. FRIDAY, the sixth day of the week, comes from two Nordic goddesses, Frigga, wife of Odin, and Freya, the goddess of love. (Freya comes from a separate Germanic series of myths and gods that is often intermixed with the Viking bunch led by Odin and Frigga.) Frigga and Freya were often confused and conflated by non-Norse/Germanics. Anyway, the seven-day week was created by Egyptian astronomers, who named Friday after the planet Venus which they presumed to be the goddess Isis, the goddess of love. The Romans adopted the seven-day week under Constantine and renamed the day Venusday. The Franks, Germans, Angles, Saxons, and Vikings then adopted the seven-day week and collectively renamed Isisday/Venusday as Friggaday or Freyeday. It's arguable if we're honoring the German goddess of love or the Viking queen of the sky.

3. FUDGE, which means (besides a delicious chocolate confection) a lie or twist of the truth, may come from Captain Fudge, a notorious liar from the 1600s. While he was a real person, stories of his legendary lies, excuses, and tall tales cannot all be true or originate from him. He was known as Lying Fudge, but in a day when sea voyages were dangerous and a seasoned captain was needed to bring the ship home, even Lying Fudge was one of the most successful. How the name was linked to the candy is unclear.

4. FUN, a general expression of merriment, was originally spelled fon and was the root-word of fondle (to feel up) and fond (warm feelings toward). The original use of fon, however, was fool (someone who is silly or not entirely sane), not merriment.

5. FURLONG, an eighth of a mile, comes from furh (furrow) and lang (long). It happened like this. The Romans introduced the only standard measure in England, the Stadium Mile, which was 1618 yards or 0.92 of a current mile. (Until a few centuries ago, a yard, a mile, and an acre were whatever the local lord said they were.) Fields were laid out in stadium miles, and each was divided into 64 squares (one eighth of a mile on a side) because a tenant farmer or serf was expected to handle that much land in each day with his plow and oxen. Later confusion over just now long a stadium mile was resulted in a king issuing a statute, resulting in the current "statute mile" of 1760 yards. Napoleon invented the metric system partly to standardize the non-standard measurements used in various parts of France.

6. GALVANIZE, to coat steel with zinc by an electrical process, celebrates the name of Luigi Galvani, an Italian professor of anatomy. He accidentally discovered that if a scalpel carrying a static electric chart touched the nerve of a severed frog's leg, the leg would twitch. Twenty years of research later, Galvani published a paper claiming that nerves generated electricity. This was later proved wrong by Volta, but the paper did open up lines of research followed by many scientists.

7. GAMUT, meaning the full range of something, comes from the Greek word gamma and the Latin word ut (note). When the first musical scale was invented about 1040 by Guido of Arezzo, he named the lowest note gamma.

8. GAUNTLET, an armored glove or a form of punishment in which the guilty man runs between two lines of soldiers who each strike him with a rod or lash, has a double origin. The name of the glove came to English through French from the Latin. The punishment originated in Sweden (those inventive Swedes!) where it was known as gatloppe (running the lane). The Germans saw the Swedes use this punishment and called it gantlope. The English copied the idea and simply changed the name to be the name as the name for an armored glove.

9. GARDENIA, a type of flower, was named by the British Royal Society after Alexander Garden (a young doctor and noted botanist from South Carolina). The word garden had meant a small area used to grow herbs or flowers for centuries before that time.

10. GARGANTUAN, meaning really big, was a character in a series of stories written in the 1500s by Francois Rabelais. Gargantuan was a giant (sort of the French version of Paul Bunyan) who rode a horse the size of six elephants and needed 1100 cow hides to make a pair of shoes. The stories were popular all over Europe as they were a satire of the ridiculous excesses of the French royal family. The name became used for anything really, really big. It originated as the name of a giant in unrelated stores from the Middle Ages.