husband / husbandry

Goats! A photo from a 1920 book on animal husbandry showing five girls standing next to four Angora goats.

17 August 2022

A husband is a male partner in a marriage or long-term relationship, but it can also be a verb meaning to judiciously manage resources, and husbandry is just such judicious management. Today, these two senses seem unrelated, but the history of the word makes the relationship clear.

Our present-day husband comes from the Old English husbonda. That word was modeled on the Old Norse husbondi but formed from common Germanic roots already present in English, hus + bonda. And in Old English the most common meaning of husbonda was that of a householder, a landowner. We see this sense in an Old English translation of the Gospels. It appears in a bit of commentary that follows Matthew 20:28 and the parable of the workers in the vineyard:

Witodlice þon[ne] ge to gereorde gelaþode beoð ne sitte ge on þam fyrmestan setlu[m] þe læs þe arwurðre wer æfter þe cume & se husbonda hate þe arisan & ryman þam oðron & þu beo gescynd

(Certainly, when you are invited to a feast, you do not sit in the first place lest a more honored man arrives later, and the husband says to rise and make room for the other, and you are embarrassed.)

But bonda itself carried the sense of householder and even that of a male partner in marriage in Old English, particularly in legal texts. From the second law code of Cnut in a section regarding the probate of wills:

& þær se bonda sæt uncwydd & unbecrafod, sitte þ[æt] wif & þa cild on þa[m] ylcan unbesacen.

(And where the bonda sat uncontested and not subject to claims, the wife and the child sit similarly uncontested.)

The Quadripartitus, a twelfth-century Latin translation of pre-Conquest English laws, translates this passage as:

Et ubi bonda (id est paterfamilias) mansit […]

(As a rule, the Quadripartitus is an unreliable guide to translation; the translator was not fluent in English, but here the translator appears to have gotten it right.)

In the early Middle English period, a husband could also be someone who manages resources, such as an estate or forest, a specification of the duties of a householder. We see the English word inserted into Anglo-Latin texts starting in the early twelfth century. And the Middle English verb husbonden emerges in the early fifteenth century, meaning to manage resources thriftily. For instance, the verb appears in Thomas Hoccleve’s Balade to the Virgin and Christ:

Wolde god, by my speeche and my sawe,
I mighte him and his modir do plesance,
And, to my meryt, folwe goddes lawe,
And of mercy, housbonde a purueance!

(Would God, by my speech and my words,
I might do satisfaction to him and his mother.
And to my merit, follow God’s law,
And of mercy, husband a supply.)

And this verb sense of husband continues on to the present day.

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Sources:

2 Cnut § 72. In Felix Liebermann. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1 of 3. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903, 358, 359.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. hus-bonda, n., bonda, n.

Hoccleve, Thomas. “Ceste Balade Ensuyante Feust Translatee au Commandement de Mon Meistre Robert Chichele.” (a.k.a., “Balade to the Virgin and Christ”). Hoccleve’s Works I. The Minor Poems in the Phillipps MS 8151 (Cheltenham) and the Durham MS 3.9. Frederick Furnivall, ed. London: 1892, 67–68. ProQuest.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. hous-bond(e, n., hus-bonden, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2016, s.v. husband, n.

Skeat, Walter W. The Gospel According to Saint Matthew in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian Versions, new edition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1887, 164. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, 1920. In Tormay, John L. and Rolla C. Lawry. Animal Husbandry. New York: American Book Company, 1920, 148. Public domain image.

head over heels

Still from the 1922 comedy film Head Over Heels, starring Mabel Normand. A woman sitting on a bookcase with her legs raised so her heels are above her head. A painting hangs askew in the background.

15 August 2022

To be head over heels is to tumble, to fall, or to be topsy-turvy, hopelessly out of control, especially in reference to one who is in love. The phrase is odd because one’s normal state is for one’s head to be above one’s heels. If the phrase were to make literal sense, it would be heels over head.

And indeed, that was the original wording of the phrase, and one you still see occasionally, although it is now rare. The phrase, in its original wording, dates to the late fourteenth century, where it is found in the alliterative poem Patience. The passage in question is about Jonah being swallowed by the whale:

He glydes in by þe giles þurȝ glaym ande glette,
Relande in by a rop, a rode þat hym þoȝt,
Ay hele ouer hed hourlande aboute,
Til he blunt in a blok as brod as a halle.

(He glides in by the gills through slime and filth,
Rolling in via an intestine, that he thought was a road,
Always head over heel, hurtling about,
Til he landed in a place as broad as a hall.

We start to see the modern phrasing in the late seventeenth century. Why the switch happened is a mystery. It just did. We see the transition in Daniel Manly’s 1678 edition of Henry Hexham’s Dutch-English dictionary:

Rol-bollen, Tumble over head & heels.

And the 1694 edition of The French Rogue has this passage about a man who catches another in bed with his wife. The husband beats the man until he is supine on the floor, at which point the wife reveals that she knows the husband has been cheating on her as well. Surprised that she knows of his indiscretion, the husband allows the man to slip away, whereupon he tumbles down the stairs and escapes:

Upon this Discovery, he suppos’d his Wife had been a Witch, standing confounded and amaz’d in himself, to consider how otherwise such a Secret should come to her Knowledge; and (to be brief) whilst he a little suspended his Fury, my Spark crawl’d from under his unmerciful Clutches, on all Four; and getting to the Stair-head, made, for haste, but one leap to the bottom, and tumbl'd Head over Heels down the other, and ran out of Doors, with a Resolution of never returning.

We start seeing the figurative use of the idiom at the beginning of the eighteenth century. From a 1710 translation of the Pseudo-Lucian’s Philopatris:

What’s the matter, Critias? you seem to have metamorphosed your self into another Shape, contracting your Eyebrows backward; you seem to be wholy lost in Thought, and retir’d into the inmost Cabinet of your Breast, reeling and tumbling Head over Heels, as if, as the Poet terms it, you were playing Christmas Gambols, while a Paleness overspreads your Face.

(The original Greek is κάτω περιπολῶν (kato peripolon), roughly translated as “wandering up and down.”)

Head over heels doesn’t make sense, but that’s the defining characteristic of an idiom, a phrase that does not make literal sense. Besides, being nonsensical is somehow fitting for this phrase.

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Sources:

The French Rogue. London: N. Boddington, 1694, 112–13. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Lucian of Samosata (Pseudo-Lucian). “Philopatris.” J. Drake, trans. The Works of Lucian, vol. 2 of 3.  London: Samuel Briscoe, 1710, 2.23. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Lucian. Lucian Volume 8. M.D. Macleod, trans. Loeb Classical Library 432. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967, 416–17. Loeb Classical Library Online.

Manly, Daniel and Henry Hexham. Dictionarium Ofte Woordboeck. Rotterdam: Byde Weduve van Arnout Leers, 1678, sig. Ggg1r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2013, s.v. head, n.1.; June 2017, heal, n.1 and int.

“Patience.” The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, fourth edition. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds. University of Exeter Press, 2002, lines 269–72, 197.

Image credit: Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, 1922. Public domain image.

French fries / pommes frites

A cardboard sleeve of French fries with a side of ketchup.

12 August 2022

French fries are, of course, deep-fried potato slices. The name comes from association of the dish with France, and indeed, French cooks were the first to prepare potatoes in this fashion. Pommes de terre frites is attested in French by 1808, and in subsequent decades it was clipped to Pommes frites. The French name appears in English, although not nearly as often as its English counterpart, and pommes frites is attested to in English by September 1872, when it appears in London’s Frasier’s Magazine in a travelogue about a journey through France:

We have come for hospitality; what can he do? His house is full. Yet he will not hear of our walking on to la Chevreuse in the dark. Il s’adresse á madame, and the result is, that in ten minutes we are sitting down to a very good supper: soup, cutlets, delightful pommes frites, an omelette of course, goat’s milk cheese, and wine which they have sent for to the mill.

The following quotation is from a theater review in London’s Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News from 16 February 1878. It shows that the term pommes frites was common enough to be recognized by a general audience, even if they did not grasp the niceties of French grammar. The “(sic)” is in the original:

Pythias, oft consulting a tattered edition of Joe Miller, constructs new arrangements of venerable puns, while Damon invents the “funny” incidents, such for instance as that of the canary bird crushed to death, purposely, under the heel of M. “Pommefrite,” who has been annoyed by its singing. Their imperfect knowledge of French is shown in the designation of the café keeper as “Pommer frites” (sic). If they wished to call him (in French of Paris, unto them unknown) “fried potatoes,” they should have used the compound term “pommes-frites,” but they have kept the noun in the singular (“pomme”) and the adjective (“frites”) in the plural! Damon and Pythias no doubt have plenty of French dictionaries, but apparently no French grammar.

But the association of the dish with France is older than the French term’s appearance in English. We see French fried potatoes appear in English before pommes frites. From Eliza Warren’s 1856 Cookery for Maids of All Work:

FRENCH FRIED POTATOES.—Cut new potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, and a little salt; fry both sides of a light golden brown colour; drain dry from fat, and serve hot.

And French fries is an American coinage that is in place by 12 October 1886, when it appears in an advertisement in Massachusetts’s Springfield Republican:

REMEMBER, that the place to buy Saratoga Potatoes is at No 4 Dwight street (near State), also French fries Wednesdays and Saturdays; also choice fruit and confectionery. Orders for parties, sociable, etc., a specialty. Home-made bread and pastry will soon be sold there.

A decade later, there is this ad in Boston’s Sunday Herald of 16 February 1896:

Potato Chip Fryers · · 49c
A Sheet Steel Fry Pan, with wire basket, with supports for draining; for crullers, potato chips, French fries, etc. Pan and basket only 49c.

Finally, the clipping to simply fries, or the singular fry, is in place shortly after World War II. From an ad it the Vidette Messenger of Valparaiso, Indiana, on 4 April 1947:

Try Our Delicious
HAMBURGERS
“They Hit The Spot”

Small Hamburger 15c

LARGE HAMBURGER, with Fries . . 25c

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Sources:

Advertisement, Vidette Messenger (Indiana), 4 April 1947, 5. NewspaperArchive.com.

Classified advertisement. Springfield Republican (Massachusetts), 12 October 1886, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“General House Supplies” (advertisement). Sunday Herald (Boston, Massachusetts), 16 February 1896, 3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2009, s.v. French, adj. and n., December 2006, s.v. pommes frites, n.; second edition, 1989, fry, n.2.

“A Pilgrimage to Port-Royal.” Frasier’s Magazine (London), September 1872, 283. ProQuest Historical Periodicals.

“Royalty Theatre.” The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (London), 16 February 1878, 526. ProQuest Historical Periodicals.

Warren, Eliza. Cookery for Maids of All Work. London: Groombridge and Sons, 1856. Google Books.

Photo credit: Santeri Viinamäki, 2018. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

fortnight

10 August 2022

[11 August 2022: added comment about sennight]

A line from Ine’s law code from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383 regarding the value of sheep

A fortnight is fourteen days, or two weeks. At first blush, the etymology may not be apparent, but a few moments’ thought should puzzle it out. Fortnight is a condensed form of fourteen nights. The word sennight, a blend of seven night, was also in common use in the medieval period, but has since faded from use, driven out by week, and now found only in deliberately archaic formulations.

It goes back to the Old English feorwertyne niht, as can be seen in this line from Ine’s law code. The code dates to c.694 but is only found in later manuscripts. This one is from the late eleventh or early twelfth century and relates the value of sheep:

Eowu bið hire geonge sceape scill weorð oðþ[æt] feorwertyne niht ofer eastron.

(A ewe with her lamb is worth a shilling, until fourteen nights after Easter.)

But in Old English, feorwertyne niht was distinctly written as two words. The blending would happen in the early Middle English period, as can be seen in the poem Layamon’s Brut, line 12815, found in British Library, Cotton MS Otho C.13, c. 1300. The line is in reference to news being brought to King Arthur about a fiend or monster who has kidnapped a maiden:

Nou his folle fourteniht þat he hire haueþ iholde.

(Now a full fortnight had he held her.)

The manuscript British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A.ix, written about the same time and which contains a more complete version of the poem reads feowertene niht. So, it was about this point that the transition from the two-word phrase to the single blend occurred.

Fortnight is a good example of how, if one takes care in consulting a variety of sources, one can see language change underway.

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Sources:

Ine § 55. In Felix Liebermann. Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, vol. 1 of 3. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1903, 114. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383, fol. 28v.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. fourte-night, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. fortnight, n.; third edition, March 2021, s.v. sennight, n.

Image credit: Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383, fol. 28v. Stanford University, Parker Library on the Web. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.

eureka

The Great Seal of California bearing the word eureka, referring to the discovery of gold there in 1848. A round seal depicting the goddess Athena/Minerva, a grizzly bear, ships sailing into San Francisco Bay, and a miner digging for gold.

8 August 2022

Eureka is a cry made upon discovering something or coming to a sudden realization. It is from the Greek εὕρηκα (I have found it).

Vitruvius (c.75–15 BCE), in his De archtectura, says that the cry originated with the mathematician Archimedes (c.287–c.212 BCE). King Heiro II of Syracuse had donated an amount of gold to be made into a votive crown for one of the temples in the city, but Hiero wanted to be sure the finished crown had not been adulterated by replacing some of the gold with silver. With the mathematics of the day incapable of calculating the volume of an irregularly shaped object like the crown, Archimedes puzzled over how to measure its volume. Then one day when in the bath, so the story goes, Archimedes realized that that he could indirectly measure the volume of the crown by measuring the amount of water it displaced when submerged. He supposedly leaped out of the bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting, “Eureka! Eureka!” The crown, it turns out, had indeed been adulterated with silver.

The incident probably never occurred, at least not this way and especially not this dramatically. Archimedes makes no mention of it in any of his surviving works. And just as the mathematics of the day was not capable of calculating the volume of the crown, the precision required to measure the difference in water displacement between gold and silver was also not possible in Archimedes’s day. But Archimedes does outline the principle of a hydrostatic balance in his work On Floating Bodies, and he may have used such a balance to make the determination. But the bit about running through the streets naked and screaming is almost certainly mythical.

Still, a story need not be true to inspire a word’s use. And Vitruvius, and the others who repeated the tale, were widely read over the ensuing centuries. References to the tale and Archimedes’s alleged cry of Eureka! start appearing in English by the sixteenth century. A preface, written by John Dee, proto-scientist and mystic, to a 1570 translation of Euclid’s Geometry contains the following lines:

For this, may I (with ioy) say, EYPHKA, EYPHKA, EYPHKA: thanking the holy and glorious Trinity: hauing greater cause therto, then Archimedes had (for finding the fraude vsed in the Kinges Crowne, of Gold).

But Dee is using the Greek alphabet. We see it in Latin letters, with the spelling heureca, in Philemon Holland’s 1603 translation of Plutarch’s Morals:

As for Archimedes, he was so intentive and busie in drawing his Geometricall figures, that his servants were faine by force to pull him away to be washed and anointed; and even then he would from the strigil or bathcombe (which served to currie and rub his skin) draw figures even upon his very bellie: and one day above the rest, having found out whiles he was bathing, the way to know, how much golde the gold-smith had robbed in the fashion of that crowne which king Hiero had put forth to making, he ran foorth suddenly out the baine, as if he had beene frantike, or inspired with some fanaticall spirit, crying out; Heureca, Heureca, that is to say, I have found it, I have found it, iterating the same many times all the way as he went.

And by the mid eighteenth century, eureka was being used in English writing with the present-day spelling and without explicit allusion to Archimedes. The various editions of Henry Fielding’s satirical novel Joseph Andrews show the word in transition and anglicization. A passage from the 1742 second edition of the novel reads as follows:

They stood silent some few Minutes, staring at each other, when Adams whipt out on his Toes, and asked the Hostess “if there was no Clergyman in that Parish?” She answered, “there was.” “Is he wealthy?” replied he; to which she likewise answered in the Affirmative. Adams then snapping his Fingers returned overjoyed to his Companions, crying out, “Eureka, Eureka;” which not being understood, he told them in plain English “they give themselves no trouble; for he had a Brother in the Parish who would defray the Reckoning, and that he would just step to his House and fetch the Money, and return to them instantly.

The first edition, printed a earlier in 1742, uses the Greek letters, reading Ευρηκα, Ευρηκα. And the 1743 third edition reads, Heureka, Heureka. At this point, the word had not yet standardized or become fully anglicized, rapidly moving from being printed in Greek letters to different spellings in the Latin alphabet. Since then, the eureka spelling has become the standard, and heureka fell by the wayside.

Some claim that Eureka! is the greatest word in the history of science, but others have pointed out that most scientific discoveries are not heralded by Eureka! but rather by that’s weird.

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Sources:

Dee, John. Elements of Geometrie (preface). H. Billingsley, trans. London: John Daye, 1570, sig. c.ii.v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, vol.1 of 2. A. Millar, 1742, 266. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

———. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, second edition, vol.1 of 2. London: A. Millar, 1742, 267. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

———. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, third edition, vol.1 of 2. A. Millar, 1743, 266. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Eureka, int. (and n.).

Plutarch. The Philosophie Commonlie Called, the Morals. Philemon Holland, trans. London: Arnold Hatfield, 1603, 590. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: State of California, 1937. Public domain image as the copyright was not renewed.