Wordorigins.org

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)

To escape by the skin of one’s teeth is to narrowly avoid some hazard. It’s an odd phrase because, of course, teeth don’t have skin; it makes no literal sense.

The phrase comes from the Bible, specifically Job 19:20. It’s a direct translation of the original Hebrew. The first English translation to render it thus is the Geneva Bible of 1560:

I haue escaped with the skinne of my tethe.

Earlier translations from the Hebrew translated it differently in an attempt to make literal sense. The Vulgate, for example, renders it as “labia circa dentes meos” or lips around my teeth.

The Hebrew text could have been poetic way of saying the teeth’s enamel. Or, and perhaps more likely, it was intended as hyperbole. The skin of the teeth is so narrow as to be almost nonexistent, nothing more than a film of saliva. So to escape by it is a narrow escape indeed.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; Internet Sacred Text Archive)

Separated By A Common Language

A blog about the differences between American and British English, by Lynne Murphy, an American linguist living in England.

L’esprit de l’escalier, or staircase wit, is that frightfully witty, worthy of Oscar Wilde comeback that occurs to you hours after the opportunity to make it is lost.

The phrase was coined by Denis Diderot (1713-84) in Paradoxe sur le Comédien, written 1773-78. In 18th century French l’esprit meant wit, not the current sense of mind or spirit. So a modern translation might be spirit of the staircase, indicating that there was some sort of staircase dryad that whispers the comeback to you as you ascend to your bedroom after the party is over. But this would not be an accurate interpretation of Diderot’s original thought.

The earliest English language citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Fowler’s 1906 The King’s English:

The French have had the wit to pack into the words esprit d’escalier the common experience that one’s happiest retorts occur to one only when the chance of uttering them is gone, the door is closed, and one’s feet are on the staircase. That is well worth introducing to an English audience; the only question is whether it is of any use to translate it without explanation. No one will know what spirit of the staircase is who is not already familiar with esprit d’escalier; and even he who is may not recognize it in disguise, seeing that esprit does not mean spirit (which suggests a goblin lurking in the hall clock), but wit.

(Sources: Yale Book of Quotations; Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; The King’s English at www.bartleby.com)

See l’esprit de l’escalier.

"If anything can go wrong, it will.” That is Murphy’s Law. But who was Murphy?

The standard story is that the term was coined in 1949. The Murphy in question is Captain Ed Murphy, a development engineer assigned to Colonel J.P. Stapp’s research on the rocket sleds that tested the limits of human endurance to acceleration and deceleration at Muroc Field, California (later renamed Edwards AFB). Murphy was referring to a particular technician, whose name has been lost to history, who had wired a piece of equipment incorrectly when he remarked, “if there is any way to do things wrong, he will.” A few weeks later in a press conference, Stapp allegedly credited his program’s safety record to planning for Murphy’s Law. The rest was history.