Wordorigins.org

Today is February 29th, a day that appears on the calendar once every four years (or close enough). 2008 is a leap year.

The necessity for adding a day to the calendar every four years is due to the fact that the Earth’s orbit of the sun is not exactly 365 days; it’s closer to 365.25 days. Therefore, about every four years we add one day to the calendar to keep the seasons aligned with the calendar. (For an excellent technical discussion--it’s not this simple--see Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog entries on the subject here and here.)

But we’re concerned with the word here. The use of leap to denote calendrical shifts like this dates to Old English, c.993 to be more exact. It appears in AElfric’s De Temporibus Anni. AElfric of Eynsham was a Benedictine monk who is probably the chief prose stylist of the late Old English period. De Temporibus Anni is his attempt to provide monks and priests with a text on astronomy and the calendar that they could use in the education of themselves and the laity and in combating superstition and myth. AElfric wrote in reference to the moon (which needs a leap day added to its orbit of the earth about every 19 years):

se dæg is gehâten Saltus lune • þæt is ðæs monan hlyp
(the day is called Saltus lune, that is the leap of the moon)

The leap comes from the idea that the calendar jumps and does not proceed in an orderly fashion.

The term leap year isn’t cited in English until 1387, when it appears in John de Trevisa’s translation of Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden:

That tyme Iulius amended the kalender, and fonde the cause of the lepe yere.
(That time Julius amended the calendar and established the cause of the leap year.)

While the term leap year isn’t recorded until the Middle English period, it probably was in use in Old English. The term hlaup-ár, or leap year, is recorded in Old Norse and most Norse calendrical terms were borrowed from Old English. So it seems likely that Norse acquired this one from Old English too.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

Cancer, both the disease and the astronomical constellation, derive from the Latin cancer or cancrum, meaning crab. The astrological sign, of course, is said to resemble a crab and the disease was so named by the ancient Greek physician Galen (129-200 A.D.) who noted the similarity between a certain type of tumor with a crab as well—the swollen veins around the tumor resembling the legs of a crab.

Old English adopted cancer directly from Latin and used it for a variety of spreading sores and ulcers. From c.1000 in a manuscript called Læce Boc (Leech Book), collected in Oswald Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, Vol. II, 1865:

Gemeng wið þam dustum, clæm on ðone cancer.
(Mix with the dust, smear on the cancer.)

Ale and beer are both words that go back to Old English. Today, we distinguish the two as different beverages, but this distinction did not exist in Old English. Rather, ale was the commonly used word and beer was much rarer, being reserved for poetic language. But even in poetry its use was rare. Chaucer did not use the word, nor did William Langland in his Piers Ploughman.

Of the two words, ale is attested to slightly earlier. It appears c.940 in a manuscript called Læce Boc (Leech Book) in a recipe for an emetic, collected in Oswald Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, Vol. II, 1865::

Do healfne bollan ealoð to [...] and gehæte þæt ealu.
(Add a half bowl of ale [...] and heat the ale.)

The word beer appears c.1000 in a translation of the Gospel of Luke:

He ne drincð win ne béor
(He drinks neither wine nor beer)

In the 15th century, brewers began adding hops to their product and by the 16th century, the word beer was being applied to this new style of brew. The modern distinction between ale and beer arose and the word beer became much more commonly used.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

To launder money is to pass money from an illegal source through a legitimate business so that the illegal origin of the funds cannot be traced. The phrase can be traced back to the Watergate scandal of 1973, as evidenced from this citation from the Guardian newspaper of 19 April of that year:

Suitcases stuffed with 200,000 dollars of Republican campaign funds; money being “laundered” in Mexico.

But while the phrase can only be found in print from 1973, the metaphor of “washing” money is much older. There is this from the San Francisco Call-Bulletin of 3 June 1935:

There is not a hot money passer in America who will “wash” this money exchanging it for “cool” currency—unless it is offered him at such a tremendous discount that he can afford to hold it for years, if necessary, before attempting to pass it.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; Safire’s New Political Dictionary

The phrase to play fast and loose is rather common in modern speech, but relatively few who use or understand the phrase know where it comes from. The origin is the name of a con game, along the lines of three-card monte (in spirit, not in actual structure of the game). From George Whetstone’s 1578 The Right Excellent Historye of Promos and Cassandra:

At fast or loose, with my Giptian, I meane to haue a cast.

The game is undoubtedly somewhat older than this, as the metaphorical sense predates this citation by some decades. From Tottel’s Miscellany of 1557:

Of a new maried studient that plaied fast or loose.

The game is described in this quote from James O. Halliwell’s 1847 A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century:

Fast-and-loose, a cheating game played with a stick and a belt or string, so arranged that a spectator would think he could make the latter fast by placing a stick through its intricate folds, whereas the operator could detach it at once.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)