Word Stories

The following are some etymologies of words that have come up in this and previous years.

2007 eponyms: silhouette, guillotine, malapropism

2005 alligator A new-world Spanish loan, from el lagarto 'the lizard'. The definite article el was not understood as a morpheme, but taken as an unanalyzed part of a monomorphemic root. Oddly, a similar process happened in loans from Arabic to Spanish during the Islamic period in Spain. Words like alcoba 'alcove, bedroom' and azucar 'sugar' which had the Arabic definite article al or a- were taken as monomorphemic and borrowed whole. English has a number of such Arabic words too, most of them via Spanish and/or the other Romance languages (algebra, admiral, alcohol, azimuth...)

2007 amygdala One of a pair of brain structures on the underside of the temporal lobe of the human brain. From Greek amygdala 'almond', a metaphor based on resemblance of size and shape. (To find the amygdala, hover your mouse around the brain on Whalen Amygdala Site until you see it and can click to enter the lab site.)

2005 anaconda Probably a modification of Sinhalese henakandaya 'a slender green snake' (WNC)

2004 armadillo from Spanish armadillo, 'little armored thing'. So called after its protective shell which looks something like a coat of mail.

2007 brainwash Although now associated mainly with spy movies, to brainwash originated as a military term during the Korean War. The word is a literal translation of the Chinese phrase HSI NAO, 'to wash the brain.' We call such cases of native word forms put together with a borrowed meaning "loan translations" or "calques". Another pair of loan translations is to save face/ lose face, both of which literally translate Chinese expressions.

2005 cappuccino 'milky coffee drink, originating in Italy'
Named after the color of the robes of the Capuchin monks, which, like the drink, are light chocolaty brown. The word is from Italian Cappuccino, which is the Italian name for the monks' order. The Capuchins themselves got their name from the hooded robe they wear; cappuccio means 'hood' (a diminutive form of Late Latin cappa 'head covering, cloak')

2005 catalyze 'to induce a chemical reaction; to engender a change'
Comes from cata 'down' + lyze 'loosen, break'. A catalyst (the noun form of the word) causes things to break down chemically; this breaking down causes further chemical reactions, and this aspect of the process is represented by the modern meaning.

cathedral

catholic 'universal'; when capitalized, the name of the church of Rome.
From cata 'down, entirely'' + hol 'whole' + ic 'ADJ'. The church, emphasizing the all-embracing nature of the religion, called itself catholic in the sense of entirely universal. Something of this sense survives in the phrase catholic tastes, meaning eclectic or non-parochial tastes. But the word stuck to the church most strongly, and became essentially its proper name, distinguishing the Catholic religion from other religions.

2003 cloak From Middle English cloke, from Old French cloque 'bell'. This is a case of a metaphorical extension: the garment was named after the word for 'bell', because of the bell-like shape of the garment around the body.

2003 clock From Middle Dutch clocke, meaning 'bell, clock', from Old French cloche or cloque 'bell', from Late Latin clocca (imitative of the sound of a bell).

It was apparently in Dutch that the crucial semantic shift occurred in the history of this borrowed word: the word that was used to describe the time-keeping noisemaker in the churchtower (bong, bong) began to be applied to the newfangled timekeeper with hands and numbers, located in the same tower (tick, tick). When the English imported these new timekeepers, often made in Holland and Germany, they imported the word for them: clock. But they had their own word for the more traditional bell (namely bell), so the word clock was never polysemous like in Dutch.

The semantic extension from 'bell' to 'clock' is a classic example of metonymy.

derrick

2005 gamut This word comes from the history of music. Guido d'Arezzo, an 11th century musician and former monk, devised a system of musical notation that was a precursor to our modern system of notes and staffs.

D'Arezzo's system had a six-note scale, represented on a higher and lower staff. The first line on the lower staff he called by the Greek letter 'gamma'. The lowest note in the scale was called 'ut' and was placed on gamma. This first note was soon called 'gamma ut', which contracted to 'gamut'. At some point, French musicians began referring to the whole scale (by then an octave) as the 'gamut', a typical example of metonymy. The term was next extended to refer to the musical range of an instrument or voice. By the seventeenth century 'gamut' was further generalized to mean an entire range of any kind.

The story of GAMUT also relates to the syllables commonly sung to the tones of the musical scale (do, re, mi...). D'Arezzo named the six notes in his scale after the first syllables of six lines of a hymn sung to John the Baptist: