about the universe forum commander Shop Now Commanders Circle
Product List FAQs home Links Contact Us

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #115

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

1. GARRET, a room on the top floor of a house, was originally the French word guerite, which was the sentry platform at the top of a castle or watch tower.
     

2. GAS, a form of matter (e.g., solid, liquid, gas, plasma) was invented from whole cloth as a new word by Belgian doctor Jean Baptiste van Helmont. Until 1600, everyone believed that there were four elements (fire, earth, water, air) and that everything was a mix of these. But the first real scientists (including van Helmont) were unable to make sense of the results of their experiments. Working in his lab about 1600, van Helmont boiled water in a glass bottle and observed a vapor form above it. He reasoned that this vapor must be a rarefied form of water itself. Writing a scientific letter to other experimentalists, he said he had invented the word "gas" for this vapor because it was similar to "chaos."
       

3. GAZETTE is now taken to mean virtually the same thing as magazine or newspaper, but is properly a formal scientific or government report which becomes part of the general store of knowledge for future reference. It comes from a 1500s Venetian coin (the gazetta) which was made of tin and worth perhaps half a cent. About 1550, the Venetian government began to issue leaflets with important information, either government decrees or news from foreign ports that arrived by ship. (Most of it was, frankly, rumor.) Each of these early newspapers cost one gazetta and they quickly came to be called by that name.
     

4. GERRYMANDER means to rearrange the political subdivisions of a region in order to produce more elected officials from your party. (This is done by concentrating all of your political enemies in a few areas while making sure other areas have a solid majority of your political friends. In some cases, it may mean a minority party arranging to connect a lot of their friends into one subdivisions so that at least somebody gets into the legislature.) It comes from Elbridge Gerry, who did just that in Massachusetts while running for his third term as governor. One district was so convoluted that a political cartoonist added a head, claws, and wings and called it a salamander (then a term similar to dragon). Others called it a Gerrymander, and Elbridge (who had a distinguished career including a term as Vice President of the US) is now remembered only for one episode (which every governor did all the time).
     

5. GIN, a form of liquor, is a contraction of the French word genevre, which means juniper. In the 1500s, the Count de Morret was the first to add juniper juice to wine, which produced a pleasing and popular liquor. The English penchant for contraction quickly turned this into gin.
      

6. GLAMOUR, which is today taken to mean the kind of splendorous beauty used in advertising, began as the Scottish word glammer, meaning someone who understood Latin grammar. Before 1600, all learned people knew Latin and anyone who knew how to read and write was held in high regard (and suspected of knowing magic). Sir Walter Scott brought the word to England as glorified enchantment.
    

7. GORGON, which most people think is just some kind of monster, was the term for the three hideous sisters who lived far to the west of ancient Greece. One of these was Medusa, who began as a mortal woman but who so enraged Athena that she was transformed into an immortal being. All three gorgons had snakes for hair and were so frightful in appearance that anyone beholding them was paralyzed. (Later, but still in ancient times, the myth evolved and these victims were literally turned to stone.) Today, the term gorgon (though uncommon) is used to refer to someone in a minor position of power who has such a forbidding manner that no one wants to deal with them.
    

8. GORILLA, the largest of the great apes, was the name invented for that animal by Hanno, a Cathegenian explorer who first explored the coast of west Africa about 550BC. The word was his transliteration of the local term. As there are no gorillas in the areas he explored, he probably saw a baboon or chimpanzee.
        
9. GOSPEL, a word which means both the Holy Bible and whatever form of a business document is considered to be the definitive and correct version. Roman missionaries arriving in England called themselves evangeliums and this term was corrupted into the local language as Goad Spell, or good tidings. Locals sloppily recorded this as the single word godspell, and moving the s from Spell to Goad turned "good tidings" into "god's story."
    

10. GOSSAMER, a thin filament (or a see-through cloth, or a spiderweb) has an interesting history. In old pagan German there was a holiday in November called Vinalia because that was when the harvest of grapes had turned into wine. Because goose was in season, the whole month of November was known as Gansemonat or goose month. It was, basically, the last big party before the winter, when everyone celebrated a good crop and the end of the hard work. (The Pilgrims didn't invent it; the holiday had been celebrated for well over a thousand years before 1624.) Christian missionaries knew they could get pagans to convert if they allowed them to keep their old holidays, so Vinalia became the feast of Saint Martin (the patron saint of France, famous for his "chappel" or cloak that today gives us the words "chapel" and the military its "chaplains"). The term Saint Martin's Summer then appeared, referring to a period of warmer weather after the first frost (in October). When the term arrived in England it became Goose Summer (and it is now Indian Summer in the US). But Goose Summer is where the word gossamer comes from. You see, during this period, the spiderwebs from the summer and fall were torn loose from the trees and bushes and blew on the wind. Thus, the Goose Summer Wind brought the free-blowing spiderwebs.