Wordorigins.org

For those of you in the UK, the second season of Balderdash and Piffle starts this evening at 10 pm on BBC2. The show is a cooperative venture between the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary and explores the histories of interesting words. It also invites the public to help contribute in filling in the gaps in words’ histories. The first episode, One Sandwich Short of a Picnic, explores words for madness. The eight-part series airs Fridays at 10 pm and repeats on Mondays at 11:20 pm, also on BBC2.

The appeal list for words to be used on the show is here.

The name French fries comes from the association of the dish with France; occasionally the dish is even called by the French name, pommes frites.

French-fried potatoes first appears in the O. Henry’s weekly magazine The Rolling Stone in 1894:

Our countries are great friends. We have given you Lafayette and French fried potatoes.

French fries is in use by 1903. From the Los Angeles Times of 20 April of that year:

“Hello, Rex M!” he called in that jolly good-natured style of his which he always affects just after he has filled his artificial stomach with porterhouse and French fries.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; ADS-L)

Place-names of the world; Adrian Room; Rowman & Littlefield; 1974.

A source for the origins of place names. Global coverage, but only the more prominent names are covered.

The word chili comes to English from Mexican Spanish. It’s originally a Nahuatl word for the capsicum or red pepper.

It appears in Mexican Spanish in the 16th century and by 1662 appeared in Henry Stubbe’s The Indian nectar, or a Discourse Concerning Chocolata:

Some Pepper called Chille...was put in.

The idea that the word is somehow related to the country of Chile is very old and very false. In 1631, botanist Jacobus Bontius was the first to confuse the two. The name of the country Chile is probably from the Araucanian chili, meaning cold or winter. The Araucanian word is unrelated to the English word chilly.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition; Room’s Place-Names of the World)

It should be no surprise that the word bagel comes from the Yiddish beygel. Ultimately, it’s a diminutive of the Middle High German boug-, meaning ring or bracelet. So a bagel is a “little ring.”

The following translation of Sholom Aleichem’s The Immigrant in America was published in the 2 January 1916 Fort Wayne, Indiana Journal-Gazette:

Once, when I was visiting my brother Elihu, he caught me treating myself to a bagel, which is a kind of pretzel.  The bagel was a fresh one, warm, just out of the oven.

There is this from Shmarya Levin’s 1929 Childhood in Exile:

It was a difficult and thankless profession, but Cherneh could not raise the price for fear of competition on the part of the bakers of beigle, or doughnuts.  It was generally conceded that though the pancake was heavier and more satisfying, the beigle was daintier and sweeter: it was therefore impossible to give either of them the advantage of price.

The word seems to have become fully Anglicized by the 1930s. From the New York Times of 14 September 1930:

NEW INCORPORATIONS...Hollywood Bagel Baking Co., Newark, general bakery—Herman B. J. Weckstein, Newark.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; ADS-L)

Besides its usual sense as a noun for the plant used to make cloth, cotton is also a verb meaning to get along with, to like. You see it in phrases like take a cotton to. How did the word for the plant acquire this verb sense?

The verb to cotton originally carried a meaning, now archaic, of to take on a nap, to acquire a smooth, glossy surface. From the 1488 entry in the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland:

Elne of cotonyt quhit clath to lyne the saim hos.
(An ell of cottoned white cloth to lie on the same horse.)

Did you know that the scanty, two-piece swimsuit is named for a nuclear weapons test?

On 1 July 1946, the United States conducted the first post-war test of an atomic weapon at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Bikini was the site for numerous nuclear weapons tests through 1958. Four days after this first test, fashion designer Jacques Heim exhibited a two-piece swimsuit which he dubbed the bikini in an attempt to ride the publicity wave created by the well-publicized detonation. Months earlier, Heim had marketed another two-piece swimsuit that he named the Atome, because it was so small. Heim did not invent the style of suit, however; skimpy two-piece bathing suits had been in existence since at least the 1930s.

The term had caught on by the following year. From the Syracuse Herald Journal (New York) of 22 June 1947:

First came the famous Bikini model, consisting of three small triangles of cloth.

Le Monde Illustré of August 1947 glosses bikini thusly:

Bikini, ce mot cinglant comme l’explosion même...correspondait au niveau du vêtement de plage à un anéantissement de la surface vêtue; à une minimisation extrême de la pudeur.
(Bikini, this headword as explosion...likened the level of the clothes at the beach to an annihilation of the dressed surface; an extreme minimization of modesty.)

And from the Nevada State Journal, 23 November 1947:

Nobody knows why the word Bikini has become the synonym for small and little...The French double-piece bathing suits, consisting of a G-string and another tiny piece for the upper part of the body, are called Bikini. If you want a demi-tasse of ersatz coffee you ask for a Bikini...When the piece of meat you get in a restaurant is exceptionally small you complain that it “is too Bikini.”

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; Newspaperarchive.com)

Every Friday, pilot Patrick Smith writes a column for Salon.com on commercial aviation. It’s a fascinating, insider’s look into the world of airlines. This week (and continuing next week) he is presenting a glossary of airline terms. If you’ve ever wondered the heck “cross check” was, click and find out.

Pumpernickel, the name for the dark-brown, rye bread, comes to us from the German. The German name has been around since at least 1663. The origin is not certain, but it most likely comes from the dialectal German verb pumpern, meaning to fart, and nickel, meaning demon or imp. (Which is from the name Nicholas, a common appellation for evil spirits, as in the English Old Nick; the name of the metal is from the German Kupfernickel, or demon copper, so-called because its color or the ore is deceptive and resembles that of copper.) Evidently the bread is so named because it gives one gas.

Pumpernickel first appears in English in Thomas Nugent’s 1756 travelogue The Grand Tour. Nugent, however, gets the etymology wrong, repeating a story that is retold to this day:

Their bread is of the very coarsest kind, ill baked, and as black as a coal, for they never sift their flour. The people of the country call it Pompernickel, which is only a corruption of a French name given it by a gentleman of that nation, who passed through this country. It is reported, that when this coarse bread was brought to table, hye looked at it and said, Qu’il etoit bon pour Nickel, That it was good for Nickel, which was the name of his horse.

Later versions make out the unnamed Frenchman to be Napoleon—an obvious anachronism—and change the French phrase to pain pour Nicol, bread for Nichole. It’s a fun story, but quite untrue.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition; ADS-L)

The word mate comes to us from the Middle Low German māt, meaning comrade or fellow. It is of Germanic origin, but unlike many words for basic relationships between people it does not date back to Old English. Rather it was introduced in the Middle English period, first appearing c.1380 in the manuscript Sir Firumbras:

Maumecet, my mate, y-blessed mot þou be, For aled þow hast muche debate.
(Maumecet, my mate, blessed may you be, For you have laid aside much dissension.)

Use as a form of address appears by the turn of the 16th century. From the c.1500 Pilgrims Sea-Voyage which appears in F.J. Furnivall’s Stations of Rome:

“What, howe! mate, thow stondyst to ny, Thy felow may nat hale the by;” Thus they begyn to crake.

Mate has been used as a naval rank for centuries. From the 1485-86 Cely Papers:

To the bottswhayn and hys matte.

Surprisingly, the sense of the word meaning a spouse or lover appears relatively late. It only dates from the mid-16th century. From Hugh Latimer’s 1549 1st Sermon before Edward VI

For to graunt oure kynges grace suche a mate as maye knyt hys hert and heres.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition)