The random etymology of the day

[Dobie]

When Catholics fast there is only one full meal, and a maximum of two partial meals, a day; no in-between meal snacks at all!

[Tante Shvester]

If that's the case, then I'm fasting every day, Catholic-style.

I'm some kind of ascetic.

[pooka]

According to wikipedia, fasting is pretty complicated.

[Marianne Dashwood]

According to wikipedia your MOM is pretty complicated.

[rivka]

My mom doesn't have a wikipage.

But my dad does.

[Tante Shvester]

Spruce is an evergreen tree.  How did that particular tree get associated with "sprucing up" -- making things neat and tidy and attractive.  There are other evergreen trees that are equally as tidy as the spruce.

[Jonathon]

Apparently both the tree and the verb come from an alteration of "Pruce", meaning "Prussia". In the fourteen and fifteen hundreds, lots of fancy stuff was imported from Prussia, particularly high-quality leather goods, which gave rise to the modern verb.

Word Detective

Online Etymology Dictionary

[Porter]

Is there any connection between a bride and groom (wedding) and a bridle and groomsman (horses)?

[Jonathon]

There's no connection between bride and bridle, but there is a connection between (bride)groom and groom(sman). Bridegroom was originally bridegome, from an Old English word guma meaning "man" (which is cognate with the Latin homo). Groom originally meant "boy" or "serving man", and over the years it narrowed to a particular kind of servant who deals with horses. When gome became rare in Middle English, people started reanalyzing bridegome as bridegroom. So the connection isn't even really etymological, just folk etymological.

[Tante Shvester]

I was wondering about the etymology of "brouhaha", and read that it may come from the Hebrew "barukh habba".  That seems pretty farfetched to me.  Do you have any insight? It's a weird word.

[Jonathon]

I have no insight, but all the sources I can find say the same thing, though it's admittedly speculative.

[rivka]

Farfetched is not strong enough. It seems highly improbable to me, although some etymologies are pretty improbable.

[Jonathon]

That's the tricky thing about etymologies—it's often hard to tell whether something is plausible just at first glance. But there are some serious problems here with both the semantics and the phonology. You somehow have to explain the deletion of several sounds and a very radical change in meaning. It's possible, but like you said, it seems improbable.

[BlackBlade]

I learned honcho as in 'head honcho' comes from Japanese. It was borrowed by American servicemen and brought back here. There see? We all know some Japanese.

[rivka]

You somehow have to explain the deletion of several sounds and a very radical change in meaning.

Yeah, exactly.

[Tante Shvester]

I have no insight, but all the sources I can find say the same thing, though it's admittedly speculative.

That's because the sources crib off each other.  Plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!  But please, remember always to call it "research".

[rivka]

I am nebore forget . . .

[Annie Subjunctive]

I learned honcho as in 'head honcho' comes from Japanese. It was borrowed by American servicemen and brought back here. There see? We all know some Japanese.

Yep. And you would probably enjoy knowing that hancho is written 班長.

Also, one time I was telling my English class in Japan a bunch of synonyms for "a little bit" and I mentioned "skosh." I had always thought it was Norwegian or something but as soon as I said it aloud, I had an instant realization that it's just a phonetic spelling of how sukoshi sounds. (少し) So there you go. Japanese all over the place.

[Jonathon]

I think I had assumed that skosh was Yiddish or German or something before I learned that it's Japanese.

Is that really how it sounds in Japanese? I had heard that /u/'s are often super short or deleted or something, but Wikipedia seems to say that they're devoiced.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Wikipedia is pretty accurate. When I was learning, I had no idea what was going on linguistically so I just learned on a case-by-case basis. Suki, desu and shukufuku sounded like ski, dess and shkufku. Uta, fuku and getsu kept their /ɯᵝ/ (which I didn't know wasn't a /u/ but knew was kind of funky) for the most part. I occasionally heard it disappear in words like getsu, though that was typically by males or in very casual speech.

As Wikipedia points out, people trying to sound super formal/feminine, keep the /ɯᵝ/ and even emphasize it.

[Annie Subjunctive]

As far as the /i/ being devoiced, I mainly heard that in men's speech. They would say yosh for yoshi. These are the same kind of guys who turn final dipthong -ai, -ui and -oi into -ei, but I still don't know if that's linguistic or just intentional.

[Jonathon]

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[BlackBlade]

I learned honcho as in 'head honcho' comes from Japanese. It was borrowed by American servicemen and brought back here. There see? We all know some Japanese.

Yep. And you would probably enjoy knowing that hancho is written 班長.

Sure do! It makes complete sense in terms of the literal meaning.

[BlackBlade]

Shebang, an older word than I was expecting. I just wish we knew exactly where it came from.

[Tante Shvester]

I thought it was an Irish thing, meaning dwelling.  Unless I'm mixed up with something else.