measles

2 July 2019

The measles is a potentially fatal disease caused by a Morbillivirus, and it is one of the most highly contagious diseases that infect humans. The disease, once rendered rare in the industrialized world, has made a comeback in recent years, largely due to low rates of vaccination. But the name measles is an odd one with an innocuous connotation that belies how dangerous the disease really is. Where does the name measles come from?

Measles comes from a Germanic root, but its exact route into English is uncertain. It appears by the early fourteenth century and is either a borrowing of the Middle Dutch masels or the Middle Low German maselen. Both of these Germanic etymons are plural, just like the English word. The Old Saxon masala is a blood blister, and the disease’s name comes from the red pustules that appear on the skin during the course of the disease.

The first known use of the word in English is from before 1325 in Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz. Bibbesworth, an Essex knight, wrote the treatise to instruct English speakers in Anglo-Norman French vocabulary. He glosses the Anglo-Norman word rugeroles with maseles (or maselinges depending on which manuscript you consult). Rugerole literally means “red poppy” and was used to refer to the red rash caused by a variety of diseases. Here, Bibbesworth is referring not to the disease we now refer to as measles, but to a sexually transmitted one. And in early use the word was used to refer to any disease that caused red spots.

The form maselinges in one copy of Bibbesworth’s treatise can still be found in the form measlings in certain regions of Britain. This form comes to English via Scandinavia (compare the Swedish mässlingen, the Danish mæslinger, and the Icelandic mislingar—all plural forms), but this Scandinavian form comes from the Dutch/Low German word, just like the more common measles.

There is also the now obsolete mesel, originally referring to leprosy or other skin diseases and later extended to repellent individuals in general. This word also first appears in English around the year 1300, but it is of a very different origin, coming from the Anglo-Norman mesel, meaning “leprous, leper, repellent person” and ultimately from the Latin misellus, meaning “poor, wretched.” This word undoubtedly had and influence on the spelling and pronunciation of measles, but it’s not of the same origin.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 1977–92, s. v. rugerole.

Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s. v. masel, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2001, s. v. measles, n., measlings, n., mesel, adj. and n. n.

Sayers, William, “A Popular View of Sexually Transmitted Disease in Late Thirteenth-Century Britain.” Mediaevistik, vol. 23, 2010, 187–96.

livelong

8 July 2015

Livelong is not a common adjective. Its use, for the most part, is restricted to one expression, all the livelong day, although as late as the nineteenth century the livelong night was also common. In these expressions the word is simply an intensified version of the adjective long. But why live-? We don’t use that word to intensify anything else.

Well, the word goes back to the first half of the fifteenth century. Livelong is first recorded in Henry Lovelich’s poem The History of the Holy Grail, found in the manuscript Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 80:

And thus vppon the yl stood Nasciens there Al the live long day In this Manere.
(And thus upon the hill stood the nations there all the livelong day in this manere.

And

Al that leve longe Nyht Into the Se he loked forth Ryht
(All that livelong night he looked directly into the sea.)

Lovelich probably penned the poem around 1410. The manuscript dates from before 1450. And the date provides us with a clue for why live- is used in the word.

The live- in livelong does not refer to living. Instead, it’s from the Old English leof, meaning dear, beloved. It shares a common Germanic root with the Old English lufu, or love.

There is a less common use of livelong to mean for a lifetime or lifelong. This sense appears in the late eighteenth century and would appear to be the result of a misanalysis of the word’s origin.

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Sources:

“livelong, adj.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edition, September 2009.

“leve-long (adj.).” Middle English Dictionary, University of Michigan, 2001.

“love, n1.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 3rd edition, March 2008.

laneway

29 June 2017

Image of a Toronto laneway, by Old York Guy, 2015, licensed under Creative Commons license

Sometimes you don’t notice dialectal terms until you move away from the region. After having lived in Toronto for six years and then having moved on to Texas, I have just noticed the term laneway. In current use it refers to a back alley running behind urban homes and is found chiefly in Ireland, Canada, and Australia.

The redundant term appears to have originated in Ireland, where it is attested to as early as 1858. A reprint of a Dublin newspaper article appears in a Montreal paper in 1873, but the earliest known fully Canadian citation is from 1888. In Irish and early Canadian use, laneway simply denoted a narrow road or street—a lane—but in twentieth-century Canada the term narrowed in meaning to refer to a back alley. From the Toronto Star, 2 November 1923:

Juryman: “Do you know if this is a laneway or a street?” Mr Murphy: “It is a laneway, and has not been opened as a street. Application has been made.”

There are also the terms laneway house or laneway housing, which are chiefly found in Toronto and Vancouver. Laneway houses are smaller homes built on back alleys in an effort to provide more housing and alleviate a shortage of rental units in those cities. The first laneway house was built in 1989, but the term isn’t attested until 1997. From The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 23 August 1997:

BUILDING a house with the front door on the back lane may not be up everyone’s alley. But for those hardy souls who want to build affordable yet unique dwellings in Toronto’s saturated core, a coach house or laneway house may be the only practical option.

Sources:

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, second edition, October 2016, s. v. laneway, laneway house.

lam, on the

29 August 2007

This phrase meaning to be on the run from something is U.S. criminal slang from the turn of the 20th century. From Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly of April 1897:

To do a lam, meaning to run.

And from 1904 we have this from Life in Sing Sing by “Number 1500”:

He plugged the main guy for keeps and I took it on a lam for mine.

The verb to lam, meaning to escape, to run away is somewhat older. From Allan Pinkerton’s 1886 Thirty Years A Detective:

After he has secured the wallet he will…utter the word “lam!” This means to let the man go, and to get out of the way as soon as possible.

This slang usage probably comes from the English dialectical verb lam meaning to thrash or to strike and was used in parallel to beat it. This verb lam may ultimately be of Scandinavian origin; the Old Norse lemja means to lame, but the connection cannot be conclusively established.

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Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1989.

Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

keener

18 December 2013

A recent episode of the radio show and podcast A Way With Words made mention of the slang term keener, citing it as a Canadianism for someone who is enthusiastic about something. I had noticed the word since coming to the University of Toronto three years ago, where my fellow graduate students use it to describe the enthusiastic, and usually top-performing, undergraduate students in their classes. Phrases like “I assigned extra reading, knowing that only the keeners would actually do it” are common in our discussions among ourselves. We graduate students are ambivalent about the keeners here at U of T. On the one hand, we appreciate their enthusiasm, but on the other that same enthusiasm can become tiresome, and their behavior sometimes verges on the sycophantic. (The joy of having a bright, motivated student who is destined to get an A wears off after the seventh frantic email on the night before an essay is due.)

Keener, or at least this particular usage of the word, is not well attested in the standard reference sources. It does, however, appear in the Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English, which defines it as: “Can. informal a person, esp. a student, who is extremely eager.”

Urban Dictionary (hardly authoritative, but still a useful resource for tracking current slang if taken with a grain of salt) provides several definitions, including this one from 2007:

(Canadian slang, noun) Individual eager to demonstrate knowledge or participate enthusiastically in school, church, seminars, etc. Like nerd, geek, brown-noser, smartypants, etc. but with more emphasis on willingness and enthusiasm, and less on social inadequacy, sycophancy, or natural ability.

And this one from 2005:

a person who is obsessed with school work. doesnt [sic] have much of a social life.

Other definitions from that source emphasize the sycophancy that keeners exhibit.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang traces keener back to 2001 defining it as: “(Can. juv.) a toady, a sycophant.” Given that most graduate students are in their late twenties, I would have to disagree with the label “juvenile.”

Dalzell’s and Victor’s New Partridge Dictionary of Slang push the usage back to 1984 and place it in the U.K., but provide no citations for these conclusions.

There is an older, better attested slang sense of keener meaning a sharp, alert individual, one who drives a hard bargain. This is an Americanism that dates to at least 1839. Citations of this sense in slang dictionaries tend to stop around the turn of the twentieth century, but given that keener is formed from a standard root, keen, and derived with the common suffix -er, there is no reason to think that people stopped using it, and the term was undoubtedly independently re-coined on many occasions. The current Canadian usage probably is a continuation of this older sense.

The slang term is unrelated to the word, from Irish, meaning one who sings a lament for the dead. English use of that keener dates to the eighteenth century and is from the verb to keen, caoin- in Irish, meaning to wail or lament.

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Sources:

“keener,” Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Chambers Harrap, 2010.

“keener, n.,” Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Random House, 1997, 2:338.

“keener, noun,” New Partridge Dictionary of Slang, Routledge, 2006, 2:1139.

“keener, n.,” Oxford Canadian Dictionary of Current English, OUP, 447.

“keener, n.2,” “keener, n.1,” “keen, v.2,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

“keener,” Urban Dictionary, 2012.