Driving home tonight, there was a thunderstorm with rain falling at a rate of an inch an hour. Pretty intense, even with my wipers going full bore.
After the storm, it was a lovely evening, if a bit wet. So that will be tonight's topic.
Water: The entry for the noun takes up five of six columns in my OED. The OED's etymology goes Old English wæter = Old Frisian weter, Old Saxon watar, Old High German wazzar (Dutch water, German Wasser), from West Germanic (Old Norse vatn, Gothic wato, gen. watins, from Indo-European base repr. also by Old Church Slavonic, Russian voda (cf. vodka). My Merriam-Webster Webster's does an attributed to OHG wazzar, Gk hydor, L unda wave. Finally, my World Webster's includes the proto-Indo-European *wodor < base *wed-, to wet; cf. wet, wash.
Nothing too sexy here, but I do like that Russian calls vodka "little water," while little or small when used in English usually means weak. An example would be small beer which is the second running of a batch of malt when most of the sugars (fuel for yeast to yield alcohol) are in the first wort. Or maybe the Russians call it little water because it is a distillation and there is less liquid after the process.
One idiom I like, but never use, is "That really waters me." to mean something pisses you off.
Moist: This word is Kate Hudson and Drew Barrymore's least favorite word according to their Inside the Actor's Studio Pivot questionnaire from James Lipton. OED Old French moiste (mod. moite), perhaps from Proto-Romance from Latin mucidus mouldy, alt. by assoc. with musteus new, fresh, from mustum must noun¹. Here's where it gets fun. Must noun¹ is new wine; grape juice before or during fermentation. And mustard is originally the condiment prepared with grape must.
As for moist originating in mouldy, and musty now meaning mouldy after having such a "fresh" start, OED says it is perhaps an alt. of moisty after must. Which works according to their Late Middle English dating of moisty and Early 16th century for musty.
M-W Webster's adds from assumed Vulgar Latin muscidus, alter. of L mucidus slimy, from mucus.
Damp: from OHG dampf steam. While the history isn't too exciting, the definition was a surprise to me. All three dictionaries included, or had as the first def. a noxious exhalation; especially a harmful vapour or gas occurring in a coalmine, firedamp, chokedamp. That really does put a damper on things.
So that is pretty close to what these entries will be. I'm happy to take any suggestions; if it isn't working for you, I can lay in bed and look at my dictionaries alone, but I want to share.
Music to blog by: Broken Bells. And as chance would have it their album is right before Burl Ives in my iTunes playlist, and his first song is . . . you guessed it: Cool, Clear Water. Which is neat because I titled this post before the song came on.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
Me and Maryanne
A cursory Google search shows that Maryanne Wolf is the first to use "the examined word" in the context of Socrates' ideas and quote, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
I understand the impracticality of vetting each word before you put it in a sentence for consumption. However, I think the more you know about your materials, the more you can appreciate the craft and finished product. I love the light a word's history can shed on its use. I probably enjoy it even more when a word's history and current use are more disparate.
Most of the words I'll feature here are words that piqued my curiosity through everyday usage. I jotted them down, and maybe I looked them up in my bedside dictionary later, maybe not. Sometimes there's a striking revelation in their etymology, sometimes not, but either way I know, and I've been told that that's half the battle. Other words might come from a word of the day email that struck me and was forwarded to my other account.
The dictionaries I have at home, and will go to first, are a Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Fifth Edition, a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Fifth Edition from Merriam-Webster from 1947, another Merriam-Webster--Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary from 1965, and Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language College Edition by World Publishing from 1960.
Tomorrow we begin.
I understand the impracticality of vetting each word before you put it in a sentence for consumption. However, I think the more you know about your materials, the more you can appreciate the craft and finished product. I love the light a word's history can shed on its use. I probably enjoy it even more when a word's history and current use are more disparate.
Most of the words I'll feature here are words that piqued my curiosity through everyday usage. I jotted them down, and maybe I looked them up in my bedside dictionary later, maybe not. Sometimes there's a striking revelation in their etymology, sometimes not, but either way I know, and I've been told that that's half the battle. Other words might come from a word of the day email that struck me and was forwarded to my other account.
The dictionaries I have at home, and will go to first, are a Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Fifth Edition, a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Fifth Edition from Merriam-Webster from 1947, another Merriam-Webster--Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary from 1965, and Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language College Edition by World Publishing from 1960.
Tomorrow we begin.
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