The random etymology of the day

[Brinestone]

I learned that "Episcopal" comes from "having the characteristics of bishops", which strikes me as hilarious, because where I used to live there was an Episcopal church that was built diagonally on  a corner lot.

www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=Episcopal

I love how your brain works.

[Jonathon]

The OED and other sources are surprisingly vague. The original sense in Latin was a sprout, shoot, or cutting, and it then broadened to any kind of vegetation. There was also a verb form in Latin which meant to put something in the ground, and even in Latin there were metaphorical senses like 'establish, found, put in place'.

The OED says that the physical premises or factory sense developed from the verb, but it doesn't say which sense it derives from. I'm guessing it's from one of the senses like 'to establish' or 'to put down firmly'.

[Jonathon]

I learned that "Episcopal" comes from "having the characteristics of bishops", which strikes me as hilarious, because where I used to live there was an Episcopal church that was built diagonally on  a corner lot.

www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=Episcopal

Ha! I don't think I saw this post before.

[Jonathon]

Orchard is probably from Latin hortus 'garden' + English yard 'garden'. Hortus and yard both trace back to the Proto-Indo-European root *gher- 'to grasp, enclose' (because gardens/yards are enclosed). So if orchard really is just hortus + yard, then it's just two cognates mashed together. But it might actually be from wort 'vegetable, root' + yard, though the OED says this presents some formal difficulties.

[Kate Boots]

Forgive me if this is something you have already addressed.  (In fact, I may be curious about it because of you but can't find the column.)  How did the word "well" become an interjection or, well, a word to fill space?

[Jonathon]

I don't think I've looked at it before. Here's what the OED says:

Used to introduce a remark or statement, sometimes implying that the speaker or writer accepts a situation, etc., already expressed or indicated, or desires to qualify this in some way, but frequently used only as a preliminary or resumptive word.
Well functions as a discourse marker, often expressing an emotion such as surprise, indignation, resignation, or relief, but also used when pausing to consider one's next words, to introduce an explanation or amplification, to mark the resumption or end of a conversation, etc., or to indicate that one is waiting for an answer or explanation from someone.

So it sounds like it started out equivalent to expressions like "That is well" before sliding into a sort of "okay, but" and then developing into more of a pure filler word.

[Kate Boots]

Aw, come on!  I want detail!  History!  Anecdotes!   

(Or at least credit for coming up with the idea for your next column.)

[Jonathon]

That was actually all I could find on it. It can be surprisingly hard to track the development of discourse markers, and the OED seemed to lump a lot of it together. Also, even with example sentences, there's often not enough context to determine exactly what the writer meant.

But I can try to see if I can find some more details.

[Kate Boots]

That's the spirit!  Go get 'em, Detective.   

[Jonathon]

I think I might have mentioned a few words from this series before, but I don't know if I've ever dug into the whole thing.

In Proto-Germanic there was a suffix -itho that was used to form nouns from verbs or adjectives. In English it typically became -th, but it usually became -t after a fricative (like /f/, /s/, or /x/, the sound in words like loch or Bach). It's obvious that give and gift are related and that long/length, wide/width and others like them are related, but some other pairs may be less obvious, like drive/drift (the act of driving or a thing that has been driven), weave/weft, and slow/sloth. It also might not be obvious that the -t and the -th are the same suffix and that it was used so extensively, especially since it's not a productive suffix today.

Here are all the pairs I've found:

strong/strength
long/length
wide/width
high/height
weigh/weight
broad/breadth
deep/depth
warm/warmth
grow/growth
true/truth/troth
whole/health
bear/birth/berth
weal/wealth
foul/filth
rue/ruth (now only found in ruthless)
dear/dearth (because when something is scarce, it becomes dear, that is, expensive)
dry/drought
draw/draught/draft
mow/math (as in aftermath, literally the grass that grows after the first crop of hay is cut)
wroth/wrath (the -th in the suffix assimilated)
young/youth
die/death
see/sight
fly/flight
heave/heft
steal/stealth
thrive/thrift
slay/slaught (which has been displaced by slaughter, a doublet from Old Norse)
sly/sleight
thief/thieve/theft
shrive/shrift
freeze/frost (the OED says it belongs here, but Etymonline.com and Wiktionary don't seem to agree)
merry/mirth
may/might (in this case the noun meaning 'strength'; the verb might comes from the past participle)
think/thought (again, the noun, though the past tense and past participle of the verb look the same)
??/thirst (apparently it has the same suffix, but the original stem has not survived)
??/oath
??/bath (the OED says these last two also have the suffix, but Etymonline.com and Wiktionary don't seem to concur, and it looks like the stems haven't survived)

The vowel change in many of these suffixed words comes from the original form of the suffix, -itho. /i/ is a front vowel, and it often triggered umlaut (that is, vowel fronting) in vowels in preceding syllables in Germanic languages. The /i/ later disappeared (along with the final /o/), leaving only the umlaut as evidence that it existed.

But many of these words were formed later, after the umlaut had occurred and the /i/ dropped out, so some of them are modeled on existing pairs, while others just slapped the -th/-t on the end without regard to the vowel. But the suffix stopped being productive altogether (except for some jocular formations like coolth) sometime in Middle English, so we're just left with all these pairs that we might not even recognize as pairs, let alone as a regular pattern of word formation that goes back over two thousand years.

[rivka]

That's very interesting.

Also, if the "ch" a Hebrew chet makes is /x/, why is it so often written as a k with a dot under it in transliterations?

[Jonathon]

Probably because they're using something other than the International Phonetic Alphabet.

[rivka]

Fair enough.

[Tante Shvester]

I'd always thought that the word "babble" was from the bit in the Bible with the tower, but it turns out it is imitative of baby "ba ba ba" talk.

[Brinestone]

I just looked up the word camaraderie to see how it was spelled (I totally botched it, by the way). In the process, I found that comradery is apparently a less common but not exactly wrong variant.

And when I was in the process of googling to see which of the two was preferred, I found out that camarade is a French word for, well, comrade, derived from the Latin camera, meaning chamber. So a comrade is someone who shares a room with you, and a camera is a thing with a chamber for the light to be captured in.

[Jonathon]

I had no idea that's where comrade and camaraderie came from, though I did know about camera. It's a shortening of camera obscura, meaning 'dark room', because it comes from the phenomenon of projecting an image through a small aperture into a dark room.

[Tante Shvester]

Scaramucci, who had a notably short career as a White House Press Secretary, and who has lately been in the news, shares an etymology with "skirmish".

[Jonathon]

The science checks out.

[Jonathon]

The word rival comes from the same root as river. It probably originally referred to someone who is competing for the same water resources or the person who lives on the other side of the river.

link

[rivka]

Interesting!

[rivka]

https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/9919/how-did-nuts-and-bananas-come-to-mean-crazy/

[Tante Shvester]

What is the origin of "did a number on" for "messed up," as in, "I was lifting a heavy box and landed up doing a number on my back," or, "Oh boy, your mother sure did a number on you."

[Jonathon]

It appears to come from the theatrical slang sense of "routine, act, bit", as in "musical number". I'm not quite sure how it made the jump to "beat badly" or "mess up".

link

[Tante Shvester]

Thanks, Jonathon.

[Jonathon]

The word chair comes from the Latin cathedra, which was borrowed from the Greek kathedra. Kathedra comes from kata 'down' + hedra 'seat'.

Regular sound changes in French made the /t/ in the middle drop out, and the /dr/ cluster reduced to /r/. Then the initial /k/ palatalized before /a/ (which can also be seen in sets like canal/channel, candle/chandler/chandelier, and castle/chateau). It's actually pretty similar to the changes from the Latin catena 'chain' to the French chain, which is the source of the English word.

Cathedral comes from ecclesia cathedralis, meaning a church with a bishop's seat. The 'seat' sense is also still visible in the phrase ex cathedra, meaning 'from the chair' or 'from a position of authority'.