warlock

I think Cordelia Chase once shorthanded warlocks as “whatever the boy of witch is,” and that’s basically how we use the term today, should we have reason to. That strikes me as weird because witch has a certain usage regardless of gender — “all of them witches,” for example, from Rosemary’s Baby, even if the coven has a lot of male members — and meanwhile warlock cannot transcend gender in that way. Unlike with witch, a warlock specifically a male spellcaster. According to Etymonline, the word comes from the Old English wærloga, “traitor, liar, enemy, devil,” with wær meaning “faith, a compact, agreement, covenant,” and loga being related to the Old English verb leogan, “to lie.” It’s noted that the original sense might have been something like “oath breaker,” and I suppose that would make sense in that a man who practices sorcery would have violated some kind of Christian oath not to do that.

Witch, by the way, is the feminine form of a different word for a male spellcaster, it seems. It comes from the Old English wicce, “female magician, sorceress,” and the female form of wicca, “sorcerer, wizard, man who practices witchcraft or magic.” And both come from the verb wiccian, “to practice witchcraft,” but that’s as far back as anyone can take it with certainty. It’s of uncertain origin beyond this point.

I looked this up because on my podcast we just covered the episode of Bewitched that introduces Paul Lynde as Uncle Arthur, and the show specifies that he’s a warlock, not a witch. I wonder if it’s like widow and widower, where it’s one of the few words where the default form is female and the male form is the exception?

swallow

Sometimes you’re in the garden and you notice a swallowtail butterfly and you’re suddenly beset with the curiosity of why swallow refers to both a bird and a physical act. Could there possibly be a connection?

There could be, but there’s not. The verb swallow goes back to the Old English swelgan, “swallow, imbibe, absorb,” likely descending from the Proto-Indo European root *swel-, meaning “to eat or drink,” which also gives us words like swell and swelter. The bird swallow referred to the same forked-tail animal going back to Proto-Germanic, hence cognates in Swedish, Danish and German It probably descends from the Proto-Indo European *swol-wi-, which also gives Russian, Polish and Slovak their words for “nightingale.”

And if you’re curious, it’s the swallow’s forked tail that makes the connection to butterflies with similarly forked wings. I’m not sure if it actually exists in real life or what its proper name would be, but in the video game Chrono Chross, the main hero fights with a weapon called a swallow. It’s basically two blades attached to opposite ends of a pole, so the reference is obviously to the forked tail again, but googling around only got me results for sword-swallowing.

I wonder what this oar-shaped weapon is actually called? I looked it up and in the Japanese version of the game, it’s just called スワロー or suwarō — basically the English name rendered in katakana.

schwa

I can’t remember if the scene from The Simpsons overwrote the time in elementary school when I actually learned what a schwa was, but this is nonetheless how I remember it today: “No, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you.” 

But looking today for a way to use the schwa character in some text, I had to google it, which meant I had to remember how to spell schwa, which allowed me to realize I had no idea where this word comes from. From Etymonline: from the German word Schwa, where much like in English it represented a “mid-central vowel sound.” And that word comes from the Hebrew shewa, “a neutral vowel quality” but also “emptiness.” Wiktionary mostly agrees, but transliterates the Hebrew word שווא / שְׁוָא as sh'va and šəwā and also translates it as “nought.” It also says the Hebrew word comes from the Classic Syriac ܫ̈ܘܰܝܳܐ (š'wayyā, literally “even, equal”), meaning “a term for a sign consisting of two vertical dots used to separate parts of a sentence.”

lanai

Because I host a podcast about LGBTQ episodes of old sitcoms, The Golden Girls is something I end up talking about not infrequently. As a result, I also end up using the word lanai. As an architectural term, lanai was popularized by the show, which is set in Miami. If you don’t live in a climate where you’d benefit from a roofed-over outdoor area, it’s just not a term you’d use.

So what is a lanai, exactly? Both Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com define the word as a covered porch, more or less synonymous with veranda. And although the term seems to be Hawaaian, sometimes written as lānai, there doesn’t seem to be a clear etymology. A good guess, I suppose, would be the Hawaiian island Lanai — more properly written as Lana'i — but there’s not a clear reason I could find what the geographic name would have to do with this style of porch. According to Wiktionary, the geographic name comes from the Hawaiian lā (“day”) and naʻi (“conquest”), supposedly in reference to the Mauian prince Kauluāʻau, who “brought order to the island by expelling its ghosts and demons.” And while I suppose there could be a symbolic extension of this etymology that could explain the architectural feature — a covered porch is another way of conquering the light and heat of the day — I just did not see any proof. Besides, this Reddit thread discusses why they’re probably not related.

Now, precise definitions for what constitutes a veranda vary, but according to the stricter ones, what we see on The Golden Girls may not actually be a true lanai — and that is ironic, considering how many people know the term because of the show and specifically associate the term with the show. According to this site, “a lanai is a private space attached to an apartment, house, or hotel and typically features at least one wall open to the elements [and] can act as a second living room and is typically found in warmer climates.” The Wikipedia entry for lanai, for example, points out that the Golden Girls example may not actually be a lanai. Based on what we see on the show, it’s hard to see how far the roofline extends over the backyard area, but the same Wikipedia page also notes that in Hawaii, the term gets used colloquially to mean any sort of outdoor gathering area. 

This picture sure makes it look like Sophia and Dorothy are getting sun on their heads, but then again, the actresses aren’t really outside. This is just a set, after all.

So what is the difference, then, between a veranda and a lanai? I honestly couldn’t tell you, at least by using the broader interpretation for the latter term. Most examples of real-life lanais and verandas look almost indistinguishable, and the dictionaries aren’t much help. According to Merriam-Webster, a veranda is “a usually roofed open gallery or portico attached to the exterior of a building,” but the presence of that word usually in there makes me think this is also a term that gets used freely — colloquially, in the way lanai gets used. According to Etymonline, veranda most likely comes from a Portuguese term — varanda, “long balcony or terrace” — which in turn probably comes from the Spanish baranda, “railing,” which goes back to the Vulgar Latin barra, “barrier or bar.” Merriam-Webster’s etymology for veranda says that the Hindi and Urgo barandā, “roofed gallery,” may also be related.

mimosa

The first item I looked up in 2023 was mimosa, because I was shown the following recipe.

I had a lot of questions, the first being what the author thinks the word mimosa means, especially because the only reference I have for this is cocktail. The drink, which is yellow, takes its name from the similarly colored flower of mimosa plant, which gets its name because some species fold their leaves when you touch them, seemingly mimicking animal behavior, according to Etymonline. You see, mimosa comes from the Latin mimus, “mime,” plus an adjectival ending. This was a surprise to learn.

The other puzzlement in this recipe is the direction “place under salamander until golden brown,” which apparently is telling you to put the dish in the broiler. I’d never heard this turn of phrase before, though a simple search shows that it’s one people still use today, though it can also be a similar but more specific cooking device as well. It can also refer to various other tools or machines that get hot. So what’s the connection to the animal? Back in the day, there was a belief that salamanders were either immune to fire or created in fire. This an old association that goes back to at least ancient Rome, and Wikipedia theorizes that people made the connection because salamanders sometimes live in rotted logs. When those logs were burned, the salamander would run out.. (No, I don’t think this makes too much sense, but people have believed sillier things about the natural world.) The sixteenth-century philosopher Paracelsus described elemental beings representing the four natural elements — earth, air, fire and water — and named the fire one Salamander, though I’m not clear if he imagined them to be just literal salamanders or something more fantastic. 

According to Etymonline, salamander goes back to the Greek salamandra, “a kind of lizard supposed to be an extinguisher of fire,” which itself comes from an unknown source, either “eastern origin” or something pre-Greek. Curiously, it seems that it also meant “cricket” in Old French.

cyprine

I promise not every post will be Sailor Moon-related, but this show happens to be where I’m lately encountering words I don’t know. Bear with me.

On Sailor Moon, many characters are named after minerals, and Cyprine is a blue-haired villain who debuts late in the third season, presumably taking her name from a sky blue-colored variety of the mineral vesuvianite. When I looked up this word, however, I was surprised to find that not only could it be defined as “of or pertaining to the cypress” but also in French it can mean “vaginal lubrication or vaginal fluid.” That seems like a lot of meaning for one word to contain, and I wasn’t clear if these were two different words with identical spellings or if all the meanings are related.

Regarding the sense of this word referring to a type of mineral, it seems to come from the Latin cyprium, “copper.” According to Etymonline, Latin at one point used the word aes to mean “copper,” but when that word began to be associated also with bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin, a new word had to be coined to refer specifically to pure copper, and that word was cuprum, a contraction of the cyprium aes, literally “metal from Cypress,” the island where copper was mined.

The island of Cyprus, in turn, takes its name from a Latinized form of the Greek Kypros, literally “land of the cypress tree.” And cypress comes from the Old French cipres, which comes from the Late Latin cypressus, which comes from the Latin cupressus — and all of them seem like they might be related to the other words previously discussed in this post, but alas, it seems they are not, because the Greek kyparissos is presumed to come from an unknown pre-Greek Mediterranean language. 

So where does vaginal fluid come into this, so to speak? Well, Wiktionary traces the etymology of this sense of cyprine back to the Ancient Greek kupris, that being an epithet for Aphrodite. In Latin, cyprinus refers to a type of carp, and it’s alleged that Aristotle himself tied the fish to Aphrodite because the fish is known for being super fertile and the name is a reference to the fact that Aphrodite was allegedly born on Cyprus. In case you’re looking at all these c-words and wondering if carp itself might share an etymology with anything else I’ve mentioned, it apparently doesn’t; it entered the Romance languages via Latin from a Germanic source.

I think the most common story for how Aphrodite was “born” involves Cronus cutting off the testicles of Uranus and one fluid or another dripping into the ocean, causing Aphrodite to spring forth from the water. Some explanations for her name link her to the Greek aphros, “foam,” but Etymonline implies that this may be a folk etymology and that it may instead come from the names of older religious figures, such as the Phoenician deity Ashtaroth or the Assyrian deity Ishtar. However, there is another story of Aphrodite’s origin, saying that she was born more conventionally in Paphos, a city in Cyprus, and it’s for this reason that, for example, Sappho sometimes just refers to Aphrodite with the epithet Cyprian. But the fact that Cyprus is known for both Aphrodite and copper seems like enough to link Aphrodite to copper.

This all ties very nicely back to Sailor Moon, however, because the character most associated with Aphrodite — Sailor Venus, because Venus is the Roman counterpart to Aphrodite — is also associated with metal. In the context of the show, I think it’s specifically supposed to be gold, as in the kind of metal that might be given as a token of love, like you’d find in jewelry. But Sailor Venus is also color-coded with a shade of yellow that’s closer to orange — coppery, if you will.

This concludes my discussion of etymology as it relates to Sailor Moon, or at least until I encounter a new word I don’t know.

serene

Because I have a podcast about TV, I end up going down some rabbit holes relating to series that have a lot of episodes or just have a strong following. One show that we covered recently was the anime Sailor Moon. When the show originally broadcast in the U.S., the English dub replaced a lot of Japanese names with ones someone thought would be friendlier for western audiences, and included among those was the main character: Usagi Tsukino became Serena Tsukino in that first American dub. The name makes sense, more or less, because in the show this character eventually discovers that she is the reincarnation of one Queen Serenity, but what’s interesting about this choice is that it has a double meaning in Japanese that doesn’t exactly carry over into English.

You see, Usagi/Serena is also the superhero Sailor Moon, and Serenity is queen of the moon. Moon-themed names abound with characters related to her, and because Japanese has just the one liquid consonant, English’s two liquid consonants — represented by the letters R and L — get conflated. This results in some bad stereotypes about people from certain Asian countries speaking English as a second language, but it also results in wordplay that works in Japan but is slightly less successful in an English-speaking region.

Among the various moon deities namechecked by characters in the Sailor Moon’s orbit are Luna, Artemis, Diana and Selene — the last of which is the Greek equivalent of Luna. Selena, Selina and Selene are all related feminine names that exist today, but the name the dub of Sailor Moon doesn’t use any of those. In Japanese, Serena (and by extension, Serenity) could work as just another variation on the moon goddess’s name but in English it doesn’t work nearly as well: The name Serena, like the English adjective serene, come from the Latin serenus, meaning “peaceful, calm, clear, unclouded,” and by extension also “cheerful, glad, tranquil” — which is to say nothing explicitly moon-related. The Latin word in turn comes from the Proto Indo-European root *ksero-, “dry,” which is also the source of the Greek xeros, “dry,” from which we get words such as xeriscaping, which is the practice of growing plants without irrigation.

Selene, meanwhile, comes from the Greek selas, “light, brightness, bright flame, flash of an eye,” going back to the Proto Indo-European root *swel-, “to shine, beam,” which is related to the English words swelter and sultry. Etymonline also notes that this particular moon goddess name also gives English the term selenian, “of or pertaining to the moon as a world,” as well as the element name selenium and selenographer, “student of the moon.”

Anyway, I think there’s a tendency to look at the way Japanese processes English’s R and L sounds as either bad or funny or both, but I thought this was a nice instance in which the phenomenon actually gave added depth and meaning. If you’re processing those sounds the way a Japanese speaker would, there’s an implied wordplay that just doesn’t work as well in English — or maybe does make sense so long as you don’t look up the etymologies, in which case… I’m sorry?

wallop

If you look up the word wallop in a dictionary, the definitions that come first may be surprising. They sure surprised me. Merriam-Webster defines it as an intransitive verb meaning “to boil noisily” or “to wallow, flounder” before getting to the transitive senses of “to thrash soundly” and “to beat by a wide margin,” and only then does it finally to the definition I think of when I hear this word: “to hit with force.

The sense of a wallop being a powerful hit comes first for its definitions as a noun, but it’s maybe most surprising to learn that none of these uses of the word directly correspond to its etymology. It entered English in the 1300s, meaning “to gallop,” and it may even come from a Frankish compound meaning “to run well,” which you can suss out if you think of the first syllable meaning “well” and the second “leap” or “lope.” Etymonline actually points out that the way wallop is used in English might have arisen entirely separately from the “gallop” sense and may even be imitative in origin.

What’s especially interesting about the wallop-gallop connection is it’s an example of a doublet — and specifically one resulting from English borrowing words more than once from the same language, in this case Norman French and then Old or Modern French, where the spot occupied by a “w” in the former becomes a “g” in the latter. In these examples, the two words are often not used exactly the same but are nonetheless still related:

ward and warden / guard and guardian

wardrobe / garderobe

warranty / guarantee 

wile / guile

wage / gage

wise / guise

reward / regard

You can also spot the connection in war and the French guerre, William and the French Guillaume.

centaur

There may be no etymological connection between centaur and minotaur despite the fact it seems like a given that there would be, seeing as how they’re both animal-human hybrids. The etymology of minotaur is pretty straightforward: from Minos, the king of Crete in the story of how the minotaur came to be, and tauros, “bull.” But centaur isn’t so easy. It’s been in use in English to mean “horse on bottom, man on top” since the 1300s, from the Latin centaurus, which in turn comes from a word of unknown origin: Kentauros, which first referred to horse-riding warriors and later a race of half-horse, half-man creatures. Wikipedia points out that there is a popular but false etymology stating that centaur comes from ken + tauros, “piercing bull.”

I’d wondered if maybe the word part -taur had come to refer to animal-human hybrids, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, aside from Motaur, from the Progressive Insurance commercials, and the onocentaur, a donkey-human hybrid from Greek mythology that I’d never heard of before and which happens to be one of the more pathetic mythological creatures I’ve ever heard of. It only has two legs, as opposed to four legs like centaurs have, which just seems impractical and unbalanced, if maybe more anatomically sensible. 

gravy

Apparently gravy came to English as a result of a misspelling: the word goes back to the Latin granum, “grain, seed,” which made its way into Old French initially as grané, “sauce or stew,” possibly in the sense of being “properly grained, seasoned” with grain being used to mean “spice” in this instance. According to Etymonline, not only was the n misread as a u but also u was “used for v in medial positions in medieval manuscripts.” And the Old French grave, graue made its way into English under its current meaning as gravy in the 1300s. Wiktionary specifies that the word entered Middle English as gravy, greavie and gravy, “possibly from greaves, graves, “the sediment of melted tallow.”

serendipity

I’m not sure how well known it is that the word serendipity comes from an alternate name for the country currently known as Sri Lanka and previously known as Ceylon. Persians and Arabs at one point called it Sarandib, and Horace Walpole coined serendipity in 1754 based on a Persian fairy tale in which questing heroes discover things that they were not actually looking for. And that makes for a cute story that’s notable enough on its own, but I’m actually more curious about the origins of Sarandib and its connection to more modern names for this place.

This is a matter that is probably easier to research if you’re able to read (and search online) in Persian, Arabic or Sinhalese, that last one being the name of the language spoken by people in Sri Lanka. So I’m going to have to bring in some sources that aren’t necessarily official, but they’re just what I’m able to turn up reading (and searching online) in English. According to this site, Sarandib is a mutation of the Sanskrit name Sinhaladvipa, literally “island of lions” and also the source of the word Sinhalese. This would seem to check out, based on the Wiktionary entries for the Sanskrit words सिंह (“simhá”) and द्वीप (“dvīpa”), both of which are associated with similar words in modern Hindi. Wiktionary says that Ceylon is, in fact, also related to the old Sanskrit name, that “L” getting in there in the Ancient Greek Seledíba and continuing into the Portguese Ceilão. Is it just the “lion” portion of Sinhaladvipa, then? I’m not sure. But I’m posting this here to see if anyone else knows one way or the other. Regardless, Sri Lanka apparently has a different origin, coming instead from the Sanskrit श्री लङ्का (śrī lankā, “holy island”). Get lost, you stupid lions!

I have no proof of this, but I am supposing that if the first two syllables in Sinhaladvipa could become Ceylon, the change to and “R” in Sarandib and serendipity could be the same kind of charge that happens a lot with “L” and “R” in when translating from one language to another, like with coriander and cilantro and like with the English pilgrim and miracle and their Spanish counterparts, peregrino and milagro. Again, I’d love to hear from someone who knows the languages better if this is wrong.

vinegar

This may be a “no duh” to a lot of people, but I didn’t realize the etymology of vinegar until I looked it up, and it immediately seemed obvious in retrospect: It comes to English in the 1300s from Old French, which put together vin, “wine,” and aigre, “sour.” That aigre is also where we get the word eager, which when it entered English in the 1200s originally meant “strenuous, ardent, fierce, angry” and then underwent a positive transformation in the 1300s. In Latin, vinegar was called vinum acetum, “wine turned sour,” and acetum is also the source of acetic, which is related to the Latin acer, “sharp to the senses, pungent, bitter, eager, fierce,” which is also the source of our word acrid.

pudding

Looking up the history of the word pudding reminded me that most people don’t use it the way I do. This will be a particularly unappetizing entry.

To me, an American, pudding is a dessert that tastes like chocolate or butterscotch. The term first arrived in English in the fourteenth century, meaning “a kind of sausage: the stomach or one of the entrails of a pig, sheep. Etc., stuffed with minced meat, suet, blood and seasoning, boiled and kept till needed.” Etymonline surmises that it could come from the West Germanic word part *pud-, meaning “to swell” and the source of the Old English puduc, meaning “wen,” which I had to look up to learn is a type of boil or cyst. (I told you this wasn’t an appetizing adventure.) It also connects *pud- with the English dialectical pod, “belly,” and perhaps pudgy.

However, pudding might also be related to the Old French boudin, “sausage,” a similarity I’ve never thought of before. Today, boudin can refer either a blood sausage prepared in France and thereabouts or a Louisiana sausage made from rice and ground pork or crawfish. According to some sources, boudin goes back to the Latin botellus, “sausage.” Wikipedia, for what it’s worth, says that the history of boudin is less clear but also that the connection between boudin and pudding is probable, citing the OED. Merriam-Webster just leaves the etymology at two simple words, “Middle English,” and nothing more.

So how did sausage boiled in intestines come to share a name with a desert? Etymonline sums up that use of the term as “dish consisting of flour, milk, eggs, etc., originally boiled in a bag until semi-hard, often enriched with raisins or other fruit,” and said it was in use by 1670, “from extension to other foods boiled or steamed in a bag or sack,” and that pudding-pie “as a type of pastry, especially one with meat baked in it” goes back to the 1590s.

fillet

English-speakers use the words fillet and flay in somewhat similar ways, maybe more so when speaking figuratively, to the point that you could imagine that they might a shared history. They don’t. Fillet came into English in the 1300s initially meaning “little headband,” which came from the Old French filet, “threat, filament; strip, ligament,” itself a diminutive of fil,”thread.” (Compare our world file, which comes from the French verb filer, “string documents on a thread or wire for preservation or reference.”) The connection between string and butchery, apparently, is that the process of fileting a piece of meat involved tying it up with string. Flay — “to remove the skin of,” which is a different sense of causing harm to flesh — goes back to the Old English flean, “to skin, to flay.” (The past tense of this word was flog, but it’s apparently not related to our word flog, which seems surprising since whipping someone could remove their skin.) That verb flean traces back to the Proto-Germanic *flahan, which goes back to the Proto Indo-European *pleik-, “to tear, rend.”

garlic

Coming from the Middle English garlek, garlic breaks down into two roots that might be surprising. The latter part — lec in West Saxon, leac in Mercian — is of the same origin as our word leek, and which back in the day could mean “onion, leek or garlic.” The former part means “spear,” presumably because the leaves of the plant are shaped like a spear, and is the same source from which we get the name of the fish — it used to be garfish, literally “spearfish” — as well as the name Edgar, literally “prosperity spear” or “wealthy spear” — and yes, because I happened to have mentioned Final Fantasy in the previous entry, I am wondering if it’s a coincidence that Final Fantasy VI features a spear-wielding character named Edgar who is a wealthy king. Merriam-Webster even puts the gar root closer to gore but in the sense of “a triangular piece of land,” related because a speartip is also triangular in shape, I’m guessing.

diamond

This weekend I watched Diamonds Are Forever for podcast reasons and was reminded that diamond has some surprising etymological connections. The word came into English in the 1300s, apparently spelled either as we spell it now or as diamaunt and used even back then to refer to the hard sparklies. It comes to English from the Old French diamont, which comes from the Medieval Latin diamantem, which comes from the Vulgar Latin adiamanetm, which comes from the Latin adamentem, meaning “the hardest metal” initially but just “diamond” later. That Latin word comes from the Greek adamas, which referred to “a hypothetical hardest material,” itself a noun form of the adjective meaning “unbreakable, inflexible” according to Etymonline and “unconquerable, untamable” according to Wikipedia.

If you are an X-Men fan, however, you may have already realized the connection to adamantium, a fictional manmade steel alloy that exists in the Marvel universe and that is the substance with which Wolverine’s skeleton was augmented, making him harder-hitting and turning retractable bone claws into his trademark metal ones. In creating adamantium for Marvel, the writers were presumably drawing on the history of adamant (or adamantine) in folklore and mythology. Some versions of Ezekiel 3:9 have God referring to adamant, while others instead use diamond. And the sword that Cronus uses to castrate his father, Uranus, in Greek mythology is said in some tellings to be adamantine. I had been under the impression that Excalibur itself was made of adamant, but apparently that exists in my brain as a result of an invention of the video game Final Fantasy IV, where adamant is the core material you need before a blacksmith can forge you the sword. I’d like to think that this version of it, at least, is a diamond sword, because that would look cool.

Etymonline offers a slightly different history for adamant, as the mythical metal but also an adjective meaning “hard,” noting that adamant comes from the Old English aðamans, meaning “a very hard stone,” which comes from the Old French adamant, meaning “diamond” but also “magnet.” (Apparently at some point people thought magnets could be blocked by adamant or diamonds or both.) Whereas the etymology for diamond stops with the Greek adamas, the one for adamant goes on to conjecture that perhaps the word at one point meant “invincible, indomitable,” with the a- meaning “not” and daman meaning “to conquer, to tame,” from the Proto Indo-European root that actually gives English the word tame. Or then again maybe it’s something else:

“But semantically, the etymology is rather strange,” according to Beekes, who suggests it might be a foreign word altered in Greek by folk etymology, and compares Akkadian (Semitic) adamu.

The entry does define adamu. Wiktionary says it can mean “blood” or “red earth” but also links it to the name Adam, which Wiktionary says can mean “red soil” specifically, though Etymonline just says “ground,” without mentioning color. Finally, Etymonline says that it’s Ovid who may have linked adamant with magnets, perhaps “through confusion with Latin adamare ‘to love passionately,’” and little bits of metal who love each other passionately is maybe the cutest way to think about magnets ever. Good one, Ovid.

fairy

A heterosexual acquaintance texted me asking the difference between fairy and faerie and if the latter could be used as a slur for a gay man the way the former can be. I didn’t know. Despite having played RPGs for the better part of my life, I didn’t know the distinction between fairies and faeries. 

The word fairy came into English around the 1300s, when it initially referred to the places where these supernatural beings resided and not the beings themselves. It could also mean “something incredible or fictitious.” That word fairy comes from the Old French faerie, which goes back to the 1200s and could mean “land of fairies, meeting of fairies; enchantment, magic, witchcraft, sorcery.” That word comes from the Latin fata, “the Fates” — as in the three women who are the personification of fate — and that word in turn is the plural of fatum, “that which is ordained; destiny, fate.”

Citing the Century Dictionary, first published in 1889, Etymonline says that fairies are differentiated from elves by virtue of the latter “seeming younger and being more often mischievous.” But fairies weren’t always little humanoids who may or may not have wings, however. For example, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene features fairy folk who are human-sized and who are essentially just supernatural or magical humans. (The book was published in 1509, when the word fairy would have been in use in England, but Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene to be deliberately archaic.) Etymonline notes this and then also says that in the 1700s the term came to only refer to to the little people, often with wings, but it doesn’t say why. It says that J.R.R.Tolkien may have had something to do with it, but the passage by Tolkien that’s cited, “On Fairy-Stories,” comes from 1947.

Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of "rationalization," which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood.

Etymonline continues after this excerpt saying, “Hence, figurative adjective use in reference to lightness, fineness, delicacy. Slang meaning "effeminate male homosexual" is recorded by 1895.”

The entry doesn’t go into it at all, but both Wikipedia and Wiktionary simply note that faerie is for people who, like Edmund Spenser with his florid epic poem, are being deliberately archaic, I presume in the sense of using magick to seem extra old or shoppe to seem extra quaint when anyone who speaks English recognizes that magic and shop are the standard forms of the world. So to answer the original question, I would guess that faerie generally is not used as a disparaging term for gay people — and yes, according to Merriam-Webster, apparently it can be used for gay people in general, not just men, though I’ve never heard it used for anyone but men. But if anyone called a gay person a faerie, I think they’d still get the message.

In addition to fairy, English has fay, also meaning “fairy,” which takes a slightly different route back to the Latin fatum. However, English also has fey — “doomed, marked by foreboding” but also “able to see the future” but also just “otherworldly” — which has a completely different etymology. It comes from old English faege, “doomed to die, fated, destined” but also “timid, feeble,” from a proto-Germanic word. Here’s the weird part, though: the “otherworldly” sense of fey resulted in other meanings such as “excessively refined” and “quaintly unconventional, campy,” both of which link this separate word back with fairy and fay. I would assume that the words sounding so similar led to their meanings converging, but it doesn’t say that anywhere that I have read, so I suppose it’s just a coincidence, implausible though that seems.

fuchsia

Fuchsia blossoms dangle elegantly, in a way that suggests the kind of impossible plant you might see on some alien world. (Go on, take a look in case you don’t know what I’m talking about.) I’ve always thought this, and I’ve also always thought the word itself was beautiful. I couldn’t tell you if I think this just because I like the flowers so much or if, separate from the flowers themselves, the word itself is inherently beautiful, in the way some people think the phrase cellar door is. Whatever the story there, the word fuchsia names both this plant and high-octane magenta you see in the flowers. But I would guess that most people would be surprised to learn how we got this word: In 1703, French botanist Charles Plumier “discovered” the plant on Hispaniola and named it after the German botanist Leonhard Fuchs — whose name isn’t pronounced “fucks,” exactly, but the vowel is allegedly close the vowel in the English word push, so somewhere between “fucks” and “fooks,” I guess? Fuchs’ last name is also the German word for “fox,” so I suppose the fuchsia is as much the fox flower as it is the fucks flower. 

Two extra little bits here. First, the Fox Broadcasting Company is named for William Fox, a Hungarian-American man who changed his name from Wilhelm Fuchs. Second, fuchsia is unrelated to another inherently funny color word, fucus, a red pigment derived from algae of the same name. Because it was sometimes used as rogue or in other forms of make-up, it gave English the adjective fucate, “artificially colored” and, by extension, “false, counterfeit.” The word is now obsolete, though the mode of thinking that would link cosmetics with fraud is unfortunately not.

umbrella

For today’s trick, I will attempt to connect umbrella with the term throwing shade.

The etymology for umbrella itself is fairly straightforward. It entered English around 1600, meaning what it means today, from Italian and going back to a Latin word meaning what it means today. That word is just a diminutive of umbra, “shade, shadow,” and that is essentially what an umbrella is: a little portable shade. 

It is maybe surprising that the etymology links this item with protection from the sun and not protection from the rain. I feel like most Americans associate umbrellas with rain, and if we’re trying to describe the thing we use to protect ourselves from the sun, we call it a parasol. That word, by the way, means exactly that: coming into English around the same time as umbrella did, from Italian via French, with para- meaning “protection against” (as in parachute and parapet) and sol meaning “sun.”

What is very interesting about the Latin word umbra is that it also gives English the word umbrage, “suspicion that one has been slighted.” This sense goes back to the 1610s, and while Etymonline can’t explain exactly how this sense developed, it does note that whatever did happen shares a lot in common with the term throwing shade, which is sort of the obverse of taking umbrage. When you throw shade, at least in the strict sense of the term, you insult someone without them realizing. When you take umbrage, you are the receiving party, and you infer that you may have been insulted. Both have to do with a situation where someone is not fully clearly whether they have been dunked upon. 

The word shade lends itself to all kinds of metaphorical extensions. It can mean “ghost,” “lamp cover,” “window blind,” “variation of color,” “degree of darkness in a color,” “a small degree” and as verb “to protect the eyes.” As far as the pejorative sense of shady, however, all Etymonline offers is that the “of questionable merit” sense goes back to 1848.

In case you have ever wondered where the hell bumbershoot came from, you may be surprised to learn that it’s predominantly an American term. I know British people use brolly, but for whatever reason I kind of assumed bumbershoot came from there as well. It didn’t. Etymonline does not have an entry for bumbershoot, but Merriam-Webster does, and it explains that the. bumber- part is just a “whimsical, slightly irreverent” alteration of the first two syllables of umbrella. The -shoot part comes from parachute, on account of the one looking like the other.

cocktail

Apparently neither cocktails nor cocks have much to do with roosters.

First, cocktail is a bit of a mystery. That may seem surprising because roosters are cocks and roosters have tails, but that combination of facts doesn’t exactly make a straight line to beverages. Etymonline credits H.L. Mencken with seven different origins for the term, which has been in use since 1806, but the only one cited as being worth consideration is the French coquetier, “egg-cup,” which would have been rendered in English in the fifteenth century as cocktay. According to the entry: “In New Orleans, c. 1795, Antoine Amédée Peychaud, an apothecary (and inventor of Peychaud bitters) held Masonic social gatherings at his pharmacy, where he mixed brandy toddies with his own bitters and served them in an egg-cup. On this theory, the drink took the name of the cup.” There is actually a precedence for this, where the consumed thing takes its name from the dish it’s either prepared in or served in: casserole originally meant “stew pan,” for example, and barbecue today refers to both the meat and the device we cook it on.

Etymonline also gives an alternate possibility, however, noting how the Diner’s Dictionary points to cocktail previously meaning “horse with a docked tail,” which in turn derives from the fact that a horse’s shortened tail cut would stand up like a cock’s comb. Because this would be done to non-pedigreed, non-thoroughbred horses, it allegedly took on the sense of “adulteration, mixture” that carried over to mixed drinks.

There is a third one that Etymonline either doesn’t endorse or didn’t know about, and I’m including it here just because it’s wild. The food website Chowhound, citing a now vanished liquor.com article titled “The Origin of Cocktail Is Not What You Think,” says that because perky tails were a sign of a horse’s health, a less-than-strapping horse would sometimes be induced to perk up its tail so as to seem more appealing to prospective buyers… and this was done specifically by putting either ginger or pepper up its butt. 

I know.

This seems like something that is not true. And the fact that this legend’s source seems to have been pulled from the internet certainly doesn’t make it seem more likely to be true. But as the Chowhound article goes on to explain, the fact that ginger and pepper were also ingredients used to add a kick to alcoholic drinks, the term went from horse’s butts to drinking glasses in bars across the United States. 

But what about cock? It would seem sensible that the version of the word we use to mean “penis” would have something to do with roosters, since roosters tend to act in an especially virile fashion. But no, as I learned today listening to the linguistics podcast Lexicon Valley, the term doesn’t have anything to do with male chickens. Etymonline supports this, giving this definition of cock its own entry separate from the bird one. It says English has used cock to mean “penis” going back to as early as the fourteenth century, but it also points out the term pilicock, also meaning “penis,” that goes back to the twelfth century and that was also sometimes a surname. On Lexicon Valley, John McWhorter connects cock and pilicock more directly and also points out that pilicock could also mean “a guy” — and Merriam-Webster basically agrees, defining pilicock as either “penis” or “a fine lad.” And that connection is also interesting, because the more common slang term we have for penis today, at least in the U.S., is dick, which can also mean “a guy,” at least in the sense of “Tom, Dick and Harry.”

In closing and in summary, I will point out that Etymonline also flatly states “the cock actually has no penis,” which out of context is confusing but is a valid point nonetheless.