mine / undermine

Illumination of a medieval manuscript depicting the undermining of walls during the Siege of Jerusalem in 1187 C.E.; London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 12, fol. 40v.

26 March 2025

To undermine something is to destroy it through some surreptitious means, to subvert it, and undermine is one of those words whose etymology is readily apparent by examining its constituent elements, under + mine, originally a reference to the military tactic of digging under the walls of a fortification in order to collapse them.

The verb to mine dates to the early fourteenth century and comes from the Anglo-Norman verb miner, meaning to dig under something, such as a wall, in order to make it collapse. In English it quickly acquired an additional, more general sense of to dig, especially for minerals.

Here we see the verb phrase to mine under in the poem King Richard, which was probably written sometime before 1300 with a manuscript witness from c. 1330. The bulk of the poem appears in the Auchinleck Manuscript but is incomplete there. This portion is from a fragment in a manuscript in the Edinburgh University library:

Wiþ þat þe galeyes com to þe cite
& hadde neyȝe won entre
Þai hadde so mined vnder þe walle
Þat mani a griffoun gan doun falle.

(With that the galleys came to the city
& had nearly won entry
They had so mined under the walls
That many a siege tower began to fall down.)

But the verb to undermine itself is first recorded in its figurative sense in an account of the Passion of Christ in the South English Legendary, a medieval collection of saint’s lives. The manuscript in which it appears was copied prior to 1325 and the particular version was written around 1280:

Þat ȝif þe hosebonde wiste    þe tyme & þe stounde
Whanne þe þeof wolde come    wake he wolde ffor to him ffounde
And nolde him soffry nou3t    his hous to vndermyne.

(If the husband knew the time and the moment when the thief would come, he would wake to find him. And he would not suffer his house to be undermined.)

The literal sense of digging under a fortification is recorded in a pre-1382 Wyclifite translation of the Bible, specifically Jeremiah 51:58:

These thingus seith the Lord God of ostus, The wal of babilon he the heist with vndermynyng shal ben vndermyned, and his heȝe ȝatus shul be brend with fyr.

(These things say the Lord God of hosts: the wall of Babylon, it is the highest, with undermining shall be undermined, and its high gates shall be burned with fire.)

The Vulgate version of this passage uses the verb suffodere, to dig under, to pierce from below. The fact that the figurative sense predates the literal means little. We just don’t have a surviving example of the literal usage that is older—when it comes to dating words from medieval manuscripts, differences of a few decades usually aren’t significant.

In English, the military senses of both undermine and mine existed throughout the medieval period, but in the early seventeenth century the verb to mine ceased being used in the military sense and came to only mean to dig, to excavate.

Modern landmines and sea-mines are also from the same linguistic root. Often, once a tunnel was dug underneath a castle’s walls, explosives, or mines, would be placed in it and detonated, bringing the walls down. The “breach” in the walls of Harfleur that Shakespeare’s Henry V charged “once more into” was created by just such a mine. This sense of mine eventually evolved into any buried or submerged explosive.

Knowing the etymology of this word has one additional advantage. If you’ve ever played the old board game Stratego and wondered what the miner was doing on the battlefield, now you know.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2012, s.v. miner1, v.

The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wychiffe and His Followers, vol. 3 of 4. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1901, Jeremiah 51:58, 467. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

King Richard, lines 309–12. Edinburgh University Library MS 218, E fol. 3vb.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. minen, v., underminen, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. mine, v.; second edition, 1989, s.v. undermine, v.

The Southern Passion. Beatrice Daw Brown, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 169. London: Oxford University Press, 1927, 525–27, 19. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 12, fol. 40 v. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

groove / in the groove / groovy

24 March 2025

Most of us probably associate the slang word groovy with 1960s counterculture, but it’s considerably older than that, with the slang sense arising in 1930s jazz jargon. And the metaphorical sense of groove is even older.

Groove was borrowed from the Dutch groeve in the fifteenth century. It is cognate with the noun grave, as a place of burial, which traces back to Old English and on to a common Germanic root. Groove originally meant a mine shaft or pit, but by the mid seventeenth century, the meaning of groove had widened to refer to a channel through which something could flow or slide. And by the turn of the twentieth century, the spiral cuts in a phonograph cylinder or record were being called grooves, a development that probably influenced the jazz senses of the word.

Groove acquired the figurative sense of a routine action, a way of life, a “rut” by the mid nineteenth century. We see this figurative use in Alfred Tennyson’s 1842 poem Locksley Hall in a passage extolling the virtues of progress in the Victorian Age:

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon!

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range.
Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

This sense of a figurative groove by which something can travel appears in the world of sports writing by the 1920s. Here is an example of a baseball pitch being in the groove from the 9 March 1927 issue of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota Daily Argus-Leader:

When Babe Ruth comes to bat at a critical time in a tight baseball game what does the opposing pitcher do? Does he send one right “in the groove” where the famous slugger can put in his healthiest wallop? Assuredly not. He either walks Ruth, or tries to put one across where it is hardest for the home run king to swing.

Or this one from the world of golf in the 25 August 1927 issue of the Atlanta Journal by golf writer O. B. Keeler:

Big Bob Jones said later that in his opinion that putt was the best shot he ever had seen Bobby play. Certainly he has played few, if any, of greater importance. He had even more of a sidehill track than his opponent. He borrowed approximately three feet from the slope, and the ball, struck with exemplary firmness and crispness, took the curve as if in a groove and went into the middle of the cup as if drawn by a magnet.

The phrase in the groove moved from sports to other human endeavors, as is witnessed by this 5 March 1928 advertisement in Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch for a bank:

In a Groove

When a golfer; a tennis player, a trapshooter, or any other sportsman gets into his stride—in a streak of winning—he says he is “in a groove.” He just feels as if he cannot fail. Peculiar, isn’t it?

And then he gets into a groove of losing. He just feels he cannot win. Peculiar, isn’t it?

Some people are like that in money matters. Some are in a groove of spending—and some are in a groove of saving. Many are in a groove of depositing with us at 6%. There’s nothing peculiar about that.

The Brunson Bank & Trust Co.

And Keeler returns on 24 June 1932 with this use of the verb to groove:

Gene put in a good many hours, split up into thirty-minute periods, swinging that double-weight driver.

“You can’t hit with it,” he said. “You have to swing it, I think it tends to groove my swing, and to give me control of the wallop, when I’m using my regular club. Of course I may be wrong.

In a groove is attested to in a musical context in October 1932 by this quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary from the magazine Melody Maker:

Having such a wonderful time which puts me in a groove.

Four years later, in the 28 November 1936 issue of Melody Maker, this advertisement for Buescher trumpets and cornets ran:

EVERY TONE RIGHT “IN THE GROOVE”

Buescher “centered intonation” means exactly what it says. There is no cutting the corners—every tone is right “down the middle,” responds perfectly and accurately without favoring or forcing.

And the verb to groove, in a musical context, appeared in the November 1935 issue of Vanity Fair. This snippet is from a “sample” of jazz jargon, created by the article’s authors to show off various slang terms:

That’s the third date we’ve grooved half a dozen schmaltzy tunes for that wand-waver with never a swing item on the list.

And groovey is recorded in the journal American Speech in February 1937:

GROOVEY. Name applied to state of mind which is conducive to good playing.

The musical in the groove hit the big time in a profile of bandleader Benny Goodman in the 17 April 1937 issue of the New Yorker:

With the resurrection of true jazz, a new, richly expressive jargon has been developed which helps to explain just what swing is. The musical phrases which constitute a swing style are called licks, riffs, or get-offs. They are what a sender (hot star) or rideman (super-sender, creator of a style) gives when, feeling his stuff, he is in the groove and goes to town, or out of the world, or gets off on it.

And in October of the year, an article in American Speech defined the term as it was used in the New Yorker piece:

IN THE GROOVE. Play which is finished and of such quality as to be suitable for recording. A hot man is said to be in the groove if he is playing in his best style and ability. A band is in the groove if it is playing smoothly and in a well practiced fashion. This phrase applies to play anywhere, not only in the studio.

From there, in the groove and groovy persisted in musician slang until it blossomed in the counterculture of the 1960s. That’s how a fifteenth century borrowing from Dutch made its way to Woodstock.

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Sources:

“The Battle Is On.” Daily Argus-Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), 9 March 1927, 6/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Buescher True Tone Trumpets & Cornets” (advertisement). Melody Maker, 28 November 1936, 12/1. Worldradiohistory.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., groove, n.2, groove, v., groovy, adj.2.

Keeler, O. B. “This Game of Golf.” Daily Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi), 24 June 1932, 15/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Sudden Death Events Over with Von Elm a Casualty.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia), 25 August 1927, 12/1–2, Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“In a Groove” (advertisement). Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), 5 March 1928, 10/7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Nichols, E. J. and W. L. Werner. “Hot Jazz Jargon.” Vanity Fair, 45.3, November 1935, 38. Vanity Fair Archive.

Nye, Russel B. “A Muscian’s Word List.” American Speech, 12.1, February 1937, 45–48 at 46/2. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. groove, n., groove, v., groovy, adj.

Steig, Henry Anton. “Profiles: Alligators’ Idol.” New Yorker, 17 April 1937. 31–38 at 31/3. New Yorker Archive.

Tennyson, Alfred. “Locksley Hall.” In Poems, vol. 2 of 2. Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1842, 2:110. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Webb, H. Brook. “The Slang of Jazz.” American Speech, 12.3, October 1937, 179–184 at 184/1. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Gina B., 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

truthiness

21 March 2025

In today’s usage, truthiness is inextricably linked with comedian/talk-show host Stephen Colbert, who used the word on the premiere, 17 October 2005 episode of his television show The Colbert Report (2005–14). Truthiness, as used by Colbert, is the truth as we wish it to be, what we know in our gut as opposed to what we know in our brain. In the show, Colbert parodied television pundits who invent facts to support their opinions and ignore evidence that doesn’t. In the very segment in which he introduced the word, Colbert went on to give an example of how truthiness works:

And on this show, on this show your voice will be heard . . . in the form of my voice. 'Cause you're looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I will speak to you in plain simple English.

And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

Now I’m sure some of the word police, the wordinistas over at Webster’s are gonna say, “hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anybody who knows me knows I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.

Like the show on which it appeared, the word became a big hit. Most uses of truthiness have been in discussion of Colbert’s show, but there have been enough uses outside the context of the program to consider this sense of truthiness to be something more than a mere stunt word. The American Dialect Society named truthiness as the Word of the Year for 2005, as did Merriam-Webster for 2006.

Colbert, while clearly the source for the current definition and popularity of the word, is not the first to ever use truthiness. The word appears in John Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae #60, originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in February 1832, one of a long series of imaginary dialogues between a set of characters, both imaginary and based on real people, conducted in Ambrose’s Tavern in Edinburgh. But Wilson uses truthiness to mean truthfulness, faithfulness, not at all the same thing as Colbert’s usage:

I did not come here to hear you speak truth during the rest of the evening. You do not speak truth well, North; at the same time, I do not deny that you may possess very considerable natural powers of veracity—of truth-telling; but then, you have not cultivated them, having been too much occupied with the ordinary affairs of life. Truthiness is a habit, like every other virtue.

The word in this older sense also appears twice in the memoirs of Joseph John Gurney. The first, apparently penned in 1837, reads:

Truly may it be said, that her valuable qualities have been sanctified; whilst her play of character has not been lost, but has been rendered more interesting than before. Every one who knows her is aware of her truthiness, and appreciates her kindness.

And there is this from 5 August 1844, where he notes the irony that the contradictions in the Bible demonstrate the authenticity of the writing:

How delightful have the Scriptures been to me of late season! I have been struck with the truthiness which is so evident in their apparent contradictions. These are generally capable of being reconciled; they do indeed mark the genuineness and authenticity of the whole.

The word has undoubtedly been independently coined several times over the decades and centuries, but finding actual uses in print is a rare occurrence. So while truthiness, meaning the quality of being truthful, has been in occasional use of the last couple of centuries, Stephen Colbert can lay fair claim to coining the twenty-first century sense of the word.

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Sources:

Glowka, Wayne, et al. “Among the New Words.” American Speech, 81.2, Summer 2006, 180–202 at 199–200. DOI: 10.1215/00031283-2006-012.

Gurney, Joseph John. Memoirs of Joseph John Gurney, with Selections from His Journal and Correspondence, 2 vols. Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, ed. Philadelphia: Lippencott, Grambo, 1854, 1.252 and 2.443. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2015, s.v. truthiness, n.

Wilson, John. “Noctes Ambrosianae, No. LX.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 31.190, February 1832, 255–88 at 272. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Zimmer, Benjamin. “Truthiness or Trustiness?” Language Log, 26 October 2005.

Image credit: The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, 2005. Fair use of a low-resolution still image from the television to illustrate the topic under discussion.

triumph

The Triumph of Titus and Vespasian, Giulio Romano, c. 1540

19 March 2025

The word triumph comes to us from Latin, but its usual meaning in that language is not the one we commonly give to it in English. To the ancient Romans, a triumphus was a parade celebrating a great military victory. The victorious general would ride a chariot through the streets of Rome to the steps of the Senate, a slave standing beside him holding a crown of laurels over his head. The general’s army would follow, leading the defeated enemy commander, captured slaves, and great wagons of spoils from the victory. The day was a holiday, and the entire city would turn out to cheer, to feast, and to drink. Roman poets also used the word triumphus to refer to the victory itself, as did later prose writers in Imperial Rome. But this second sense was relatively rare in Latin, and the word usually referred only to the procession and accompanying celebrations.

But in medieval Anglo-Latin we see the sense of triumph meaning the victory itself, not just its celebration. Here is an example from Bede’s c. 731 Ecclesiastical History of the English People, in a hymn that uses victory in battle as a metaphor for virginity, 4.20, 398.

Multus in orbe uiget per sobria corda triumphus, sobrietatis amor multus in orbe uiget.

(Much triumph flourishes in the world through sober hearts; much love of sobriety flourishes in the world.)

But triumph was not borrowed into English during the pre-Conquest period. I know of one example of the word in an English text, but it is an example of the Latin word appearing in an English text, not an anglicization of the Latin. That text is the translation of the history of the world written by Orosius, a late Roman historian. The translator uses triumphan—the Latin root with an Old English accusative suffix—and adds a lengthy note not contained in the Latin original on the meaning of the word, thus indicating that it was not familiar to his audience:

Þæt hy triumphan heton, þæt wæs þonne hy hwylc folc mid gefeohte ofercumen hæfdon, þonne wæs heora þeaw þæt sceoldon ealle hyra senatus cuman ongean hyra consulas æfter þæm gefeohte, syx mila from ðære byrig, mid crætwæne, mid golde & mid gimstanum gefrætwedum, and hi sceoldon bringan feowerfetes twa hwite. Þonne hi hamweard foran, þonne sceoldon hyra senatus ridan on crætwænum wiðæftan þam consulum, and þa menn beforan him dryfan gebundene þe þær gefangene wæron, ðæt heora mærþa sceoldon þe þrymlicran beon.

(They called that a triumph, that was when they had overcome a nation in battle, then it was their custom that all the senators should come out to meet their consuls after the battle, six miles from the city with a chariot adorned with gold and gemstones, and they should bring two white four-footed animals. Then as they went homeward, the senators would ride in chariots behind the consuls and the men who had been captured would be driven bound before them, so that their glory should be more magnificent.)

Triumph really makes its English appearance in the late fourteenth century, when it is used both to mean a victory celebration and the victory iteself. Geoffrey Chaucer uses the word in his poem Anelida and Arcite, written c. 1375, which opens with a description of a triumph given for Theseus following his conquest of the Scythians. Yes, the context is Athenian, not Roman, but medieval poets aren’t known for being scrupulous about historical accuracy, and the change of venue shows that Chaucer is using the word in a context a bit broader than Roman history:

With his tryumphe and laurer-corouned thus,
In al the flour of Fortunes yevynge
Let I this noble prince Theseus
Toward Athenes in his wey rydinge,
And founde I wol in shortly for to bringe
The slye wey of that I gan to write,
Of quene Anelida and fals Arcite.

(With his triumph and thus laurel-crowned in all the flower of Fortune’s bounty, I leave this noble prince Theseus riding on his way toward Athens, and I will soon try to bring about the sly way in which I began to to write of Queen Anelida and the false Arcite.)

Chaucer is still using the word in the sense of a victory processional, but at around the same time John Trevisa uses triumph to refer to a victory itself in his translation of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon:

Atte laste Maxencius was overcome atte brydge Pount Milenum, and Constantine went to Rome, and made peynte the signe and tokene of þe crosse in þe riȝt hondes of þe ymages þat senatoures hadde arered in worschippe of his triumphis and of his victorie, and he made write underneþe, “Þis is þe signe and tokene of þat God of lyf þat may nouȝt be overcome.”

(At last Maxentius was defeated at the Milvian Bridge, and Constantine when to Rome and had the sign and token of the cross painted onto the right hands of the images that the senators had erected to honor his triumph and victory, and he caused to have written underneath, “This is the sign and token of the God of life that may not be defeated.”)

Since the late fourteenth century, both senses, the historical sense referring to a Roman victory celebration and a more general one referring a victory or great achievement have been in common use in English.

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Sources:

Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 4.20, 398.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Anelida and Arcite.” The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 43–49, 377.

Higden, Ranulf. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis: Together with English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century (1874), vol. 5. John Trevisa, trans. Joseph Rawson Lumby, ed. London: Kraus Reprint, 1964, 121–23. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. triumphus, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. triumphe, n.

Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcolm R. Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2016, 2.4, 112–15.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, triumph, n., triumph, v.

Image credit: Giulio Romano, c. 1540. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

spendthrift / dingthrift

17 March 2025

Etymologically, spendthrift is rather unremarkable. It is a simple compound of the verb to spend and the noun thrift, meaning savings. A spendthrift, therefore, is someone who spends their savings, one who wastes money.

The earliest use of the word that I’m aware of is in Stephen Batman’s 1582 translation of Bartholomæus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things). Batman adds the following commentary to Bartholomæus’s section on gold:

Golde maketh wise men glad: and spendthrifts mad.

Preceding spendthrift by a couple decades is dingthrift, that is someone who dings or smashes their savings. Ding has ameliorated over the centuries; now it means a minor blow or strike, while in the past it was more forceful. We see dingthrift in Thomas Drant’s 1566 translation of one of Horace’s satires:

I woulde the not a nipfarthinge,
nor yet a niggarde haue,
Wilte thou therefore, a drunkard be,
a dingthrifte, and a knaue?

And a nipfarthing is a miser (as is a niggard, a word which is etymologically unrelated to the n-word but whose use in present-day discourse should be avoided for obvious reasons). This is the earliest known use of nipfarthing, too.

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Sources:

Bartholomæus Anglicus. Batman vppon Bartholme His Booke De proprietatibus rerum. Stephen Batman, trans. London: Thomas East, 1582, 16.4, 254. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Horace. “The Fyrst Satyre.” In A Medicinable Morall, that Is, the Two Bookes of Horace His Satyres. Thomas Drant, trans. London: Thomas Marshe, 1566, sig. A6v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. spendthrift, n. & adj., spend, v.1, thrift, v.1; third edition, March 2021, dingthrift, n., ding, v.1.; September 2003, nipfarthing, n.

Image credit: Jiří Bubeníček, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.