The random etymology of the day

[Tante Shvester]

syzygy

Are you sure you're not just trying to cheat at Scrabble?

[Jonathon]

It's a perfectly cromulent word! It's even in the dictionary!

[Porter]

I was doing some reading about clockmaking and discovered that there are horology nerds who differentiate between timepieces and clocks, where the latter have bells or chimes.

According to the online etymology dictionary, there is something to that.  Originally, the word clock meant a clock with bells, and is related to the Welch word cloch, meaning "bell".

[Jonathon]

Yup. I mentioned it in an Arrant Pedantry post a while back. According to the OED, it comes from Latin, from whence it spread to a lot of European languages. They also note:

For the original and general sense of this word in the other languages, English had the word bell n.1 in regular use; it is probable, therefore, that clock was introduced either with striking clocks, or at least with bells on which the hours were mechanically struck; it was probably never prevalent in Middle English in the mere sense ‘bell’.

Another cognate is glockenspiel, which literally means "bell play" in German.

[rivka]

So a cloche is a bell-shaped hat?

[Jonathon]

I didn't know what that was before now, but apparently, yes.

Edit: That is, I didn't know that that kind of hat was called a cloche.

[Porter]

Cool.  I had wondered of glockenspiel was a cognate, but hadn't bothered to look it up.

That was a good article that I hadn't read yet.  Thanks for pointing me to it.

I think that Ruth makes a good point about "10" being ambiguous in a way that "10:30" and "10 o'clock" are not.

While it's true that the original clocks only told the time by ringing bells, the first clocks with hands and faces only had hour hands.  It's just as well -- they were too inaccurate for anything smaller.

[rivka]

I didn't know what that was before now, but apparently, yes.

Edit: That is, I didn't know that that kind of hat was called a cloche.

Well, that's probably because you neither wear nor buy them, and I do both.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Wow, it's weird to me that Welsh is so close to French in this case. Maybe French took it from Breton or something weird in this case because the French cloche is nothing like the Spanish and Italian campana.

[Annie Subjunctive]

OK, just kidding about that, the French is still from Latin but maybe the Welsh is too.

[Jonathon]

Yup. The OED says it went from Latin to Celtic, Germanic, and some of the Romance languages (though not, as you noted, Spanish and Italian). But it looks like it comes from Medieval Latin and not Classical Latin, which would explain why it isn't found throughout the Romance languages.

[pooka]

That raises the question of where campana came from, and whether Romance languages have anything like our interest in etymology.  I'm guessing not, kind of like how they don't have spelling bees.

An etymology bee, now there's a kickburro idea.

[Jonathon]

As far as I know, they're just as interested in etymology as we are.

[BlackBlade]

That raises the question of where campana came from, and whether Romance languages have anything like our interest in etymology.  I'm guessing not, kind of like how they don't have spelling bees.

An etymology bee, now there's a kickburro idea.

Might I suggest catching the annual National Geographic Bee?  It's amazing the quality of children they get on that contest, and it's very enjoyable to watch.

[Tante Shvester]

Crowbar.  What does it have to do with crows?  Sounds like a place where black birds would go to drink.

[The Genuine]

The beak?

[Porter]

From Wikipedia:

Etymology

One accepted etymology[1][2] identifies the first component of the word crowbar with the bird-name "crow", perhaps due to the crowbar’s resemblance to the feet or beak of a crow. The first attestation of the word is circa 1400. They also were called simply crows, or iron crows; William Shakespeare used the term iron crow in many places[3], including his play Romeo and Juliet, Act 5, Scene 2:

    Get me an iron crow and bring it straight
    Unto my cell.

In the 1719 novel by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist uses crowbars as pickaxes but refers to these tools as iron crows:

    As for the pickaxe, I made use of the iron crows, which were proper enough, though heavy;


A second possibility is derived from the use of the crow bar to turn the jack screw on rail bending machines used in small gauage railway operations such as those commonly found in underground mining. The rail bending machine consisted of a jig used to hold the rail while a screw jack, turned with the leverage provided by the crowbar, applied a bending force to the rail. The rail bending jig resembled a crow whan viewed from above.

[Zalmoxis]

That Shakespeare reference is interesting to me. In some ways it makes more sense. An iron crow is something that is iron that is shaped like a crow's beak. A crowbar is a bar that is shaped like a crow's beak. But a bar could be made out of any kind of metal, right? Perhaps we should be calling crowbars steelcrows.

[BlackBlade]

I think the entire tool looks similar to a crow, in that one side is the head and beak, which curves into the body and tail of the other side.

[The Genuine]

[insert momma joke here]

[Jonathon]

I just learned that college and colleague are related, which I guess shouldn't be a surprise. One of my coworkers was confused by a reference to "cordial and collegial relations", thinking that "collegial" meant only "related to colleges" and not "related to colleagues".

College was borrowed from the French collége, which descends from the Latin collegium. It originally meant a body of colleagues, like a guild or other professional association. It eventually came to mean a group of scholars within or outside of a university, and because some universities only had one college, it became more or less interchangeable with university.

Colleague was borrowed from the French collègue, which comes from the Latin collēga, meaning literally 'chosen together'—that is, a partner or fellow in an association of some kind.

[sweet clementine]

We were just discussing the word "cleavage" because my roommate is writing a paper about social cleavages.  Needless to say, we mocked her for quite a while.  Anyway, the point is, we started wondering about how you can have cleavage and cleave that mean quite opposite things.  So i was wondering what the etymology is of those two words and how they're related and how they would have evolved to differently?

[Jonathon]

They're actually two unrelated words that just happen to have merged together in pronunciation in modern English. In Old English the "split" one was cleofan, and the "stick" one was clifian. As far as I can tell, it's just coincidence that the two have come to sound alike over the centuries. The former is apparently related to the word glyph, which comes from Greek. They ultimately come from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "cut" or "slice". A clove of garlic also comes from the same root in English. The only other word I can find that's related to the "stick" cleave is clay.

[BlackBlade]

The only other word I can find that's related to the "stick" cleave is clay.

What about cling?

[Jonathon]

Hmm. The OED and Etymonline.com are not being very helpful. They trace it back to a Proto-Germanic klingg- meaning "to freeze or congeal". It later came to mean "to stick" in a more generic sense. But neither traces the etymology further back than that, so I'm not sure if it's somehow related to clifian. I'd guess it's not related, though, based on the very different endings of the words. I think the f/v and ng are parts of the stems, not endings, which would mean they're different roots.

But it looks like clench is related to cling, coming from a causative form of the word. Basically, it would've originally meant "to cause to cling".