coach

Royal coach returning to Buckingham Palace from the 2008 opening of parliament

18 August 2025

(Revised 19 August 2025 to add Hungarian source)

Coach is a word with two very different primary meanings. Etymologically coach is probably a single word, connected through use in university slang, although it is possible that the two meanings have different origins.

The older of the two meanings is that of a means of conveyance, originally a horse-drawn carriage. It is borrowed from the French coche in the mid sixteenth century. The French word is borrowed from the Hungarian kocsi, which comes from Kocs, the name of a town in Hungary where the vehicles were made. We see English use of the word in a letter written by Philip Hoby to William Cecil, Lord Privy Seal to Elizabeth I, on 1 July 1556:

“I have bene often tolde of your coming to Bissham,” he says, “and what shulde staie youe I knowe not; but well am I assured that I have not heard one make so many promesses and performe so fewe. Peradventure my Lady staieth you, who, you will saie, cannot ride. Therto will I provide this remedy,—to sende her my coche: bicause she shall have the lesse travaile thither, and you, no excuse to make.”

As technology progressed, coach shifted from horse-drawn carriages to trains, then buses, and finally to airplanes. As it did so, it descended in social class, from conveyances for aristocrats to the common folk and riff raff.

The second sense of coach is that of an instructor, especially of a sports team. While on the surface there doesn’t seem to be a semantic connection with horse-drawn carriages, this sense probably comes out of that one via nineteenth-century university slang. We first see coach being used in university slang to mean a private tutor, hired to help a student pass his exams. We see it is an 1836 humorous set of fictional exam questions written by a certain Scriblerus Redivus (i.e., Edward Caswell). One question reads:

Trace analogically the application of the word coach, when it is said by a man, that he has “just taken such a coach to help him through his small.”

(Small here is student slang for the bachelor of arts exams.)

The underlying metaphor behind this slang sense is that of being carried through the exams. This same metaphor can be seen in various slang terms for crib sheets that were popular in the day: pony, horse, trot, and cab.

Within a decade coach was being used in sports contexts. We see it is a 13 May 1846 letter about Oxford University boat races printed in Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle:

Amongst the most prominent we must notice the two first boats, viz, B. N. C. [Brasenose College] and Ch. Ch. [Christ Church]; […] Next on the list is Merton, and then comes Trinity, whose crew, under the keen supervision of that excellent “coach,” Noulton, have been making daily progress, and for whom we predict a brilliant career.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that this instructive sense of coach is “perhaps a variant of couch,” referring to that word’s use to mean a bedroom, especially one on board a ship. But the semantic change can be explained perfectly well without the addition of this other word into the mix.

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Sources:

Aquaticus. “Oxford University Boat Races” (13 May 1846). Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 17 May 1846, 6/2. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals.

Hoby, Philip. Letter to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, 1 July 1556. In John William Burgon, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham, vol. 1 of 2. London: Effingham Wilson, 1839, 483. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2022, coach, n. & adv.; 1893, couch, n.1; December 2006, pony, n.1 & adj.; 1899, horse, n.; 1915, trot, n.2; December 2019, cab, n.4.

Redivivus, Scriblerus (pseud. Edward Caswell. Pluck Examination Papers for Candidates at Oxford and Cambridge in 1836. Oxford: Henry Slatter, 1836, 26. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Photo credit: Robert Sharp, 2008. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

world

The world, taken from Apollo 17, 1972

15 August 2025

The word world has a very straightforward etymology. It comes from the Old English woruld, and its basic meanings haven’t changed for over a thousand years.

World can refer to the realm of human existence or to various subdivisions of it, such as the world of sports or the world of model railroading. We can see this sense in the Old English translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s Cura pastoralis (Pastoral Care). It was translated in the late ninth century C.E. and is often attributed to King Alfred, although it is more likely that the book was translated at his request than actually by him:

Ond suaðeah monige underfoð heorde, ond ðeah wilniað ðæt hie beon freo ond æmtige synderlice him selfum to gæstlicum weorcum, ond noldon beon abisgode nane wuht on eorðlicum ðingum. Ða, ðonne hie eallinga agiemeleasiað ðone ymbhogan woruldcundra ðinga, ðonne ne gefultumað he nawuht to his hieremonna niedðearfe. Forðæm wyrð oft forsewen ðara monna lar, ðonne hie tælað ond hatigað hiera hieramonna unðeawas, ond ne dooð him nan oðer god ðisse weorolde.

(And neverthelsss many undertake pastoral office, and yet desire that they be free and particularly devote themselves to spiritual works, and would not occupy themselves at all in earthly things. Then, when they entirely neglect the cares of worldly things, then they do not at all fulfill the needs of their followers. Therefore, it often happens the instruction of these people is scorned, when they scold and disdain the faults of their followers, and do them no good in this world.)

And we can see the word’s use to mean the globe or planet in the poem by Cynewulf that is given the modern title of Christ II. This passage is about Christ’s ascension into heaven:

Ne meahtan þa þæs fugles    flyht gecnawan
þe þæs up-stiges    ondsæc fremedon,
ond þæt ne gelyfdon,    þætte lif-fruma
in monnes hiw    ofer mægna þrym,
halig from hrusan,    ahafen wurde.
Ða us geweorðaðe    se þas world gescop,
Godes gæst-sunu,    ond us giefe sealde.

(They could not know the flight of the bird, those who did deny the ascension, and did not believe that the creator of life became raised in the form of a man above the glory of the hosts, holy from the ground. Then he honored us, he who created the world, God’s spiritual son, and gave us gifts.)

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Sources:

Cynewulf. The Old English Poems of Cynewulf. Robert E. Bjork, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 23. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013, 16, lines 654–60.

Gregory the Great. The Old English Pastoral Care. R. D. Fulk, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 72. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2021, 2.18, 145.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, November 2010, s.v. world, n.

Photo credit: NASA, 1972. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

khaki

“Corps of Guides,” Richard Simkin, 1891

13 August 2025

Khaki is a light brown or tan cloth, usually of cotton or wool, or simply a designation of that color. In past decades it was associated with military uniforms but has become less so of late. This word, like many others, is a legacy of British colonialism. The word is borrowed from the Urdu khaki, meaning dusty, which has a root of khak, dust. And it was British troops occupying India that first adopted khaki uniforms.

The first “British” soldiers to do so were the Corps of Guides, a regiment of Indian soldiers, with British and Indian officers, formed in 1846. Secondary sources claim the Guides were nicknamed the Old Khakis prior to the Indian Insurrection of 1857, but I have not found any primary sources with that usage. For instance, there is this in a biography of General Harry Burnett Lumsden, who commanded the Guides, written by his younger brother Peter, who also served in India. But while this is in reference to the period around 1850, the passage was not written until 1899:

There used to be a good deal of rivalry between the Guides and the 1st Punjab Rifles in border expeditions. While the former were styled “Khákis” from their dust-coloured clothing, the latter went by the name of the “Siah posh”* owing to their being clothed in invisible green, like British Rifle Corps.

The note for Siah posh reads, “Black-coated.”

Other British regiments in India began to dye their uniforms khaki during the insurrection. We see this adoption of khaki uniforms by British soldiers in a letter written by Herbert Benjamin Edwardes to Harry Lumsden from Peshawar during the insurrection:

The whole of the troops here are dressed in khâkee.

There is a reference to Khakee Infantry in the London newspaper The People of 5 September 1857:

The 52nd and Khakee Infantry supported us as well, but the heat and long marches knocked the 52nd up very much.

The 52nd regiment was one that had adopted khaki uniforms during the insurrection, so it’s unclear exactly what the Khakee Infantry refers to here. It may have been the Guides or other British and Indian troops, perhaps inclusive of the 52nd, who had adopted khaki uniforms.

And we see a direct reference to khaki uniforms from 2 January 1858, again reported in The People:

We then rode to the artillery end of cantonments; in the artillery barracks we found four companies of Highlanders just arrived; actual Highlanders, the gallant 93rd, with broad shoulders, thick bare calves, actual tartan kilts, and very long, very loose open khakee jackets with red cuffs and collars.

Khaki was much better suited to the modern battlefield than the brightly colored uniforms of centuries past, and by the close of the nineteenth century, khaki had become the standard uniform of the British army so much so, that in the election of 1900, during the Boer War, the phrase to vote khaki became a catchphrase meaning to support the government and the war.

The US Army adopted khaki as a hot-weather uniform during the Spanish-American War of 1898 and phased it out from its uniforms in the early 1980s.

And today, khaki-colored trousers have lost most of their military association but have become an office-casual “uniform.”

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Sources:

Edwardes, Herbert Benjamin. Letter to Harry Burnett Lumsden, 21 July 1857. In Peter S. Lumsden and George R. Elsmie. Lumsden of the Guides. London: John Murray: 1899, 200. HathiTrust Digital Library.

“The Indian Revolt. The Relief of Lucknow.” People (London), 2 January 1858, 5/6. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

“The Indian Revolt. The Siege of Delhi.” People (London), 5 September 1857, 5/6. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1901, s.v. khaki, adj. and n.

Whitehorne, A. C. “Khaki and Service Dress.” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 15.59, Autumn 1936, 180–83. JSTOR.

Image credit: Richard Simkin, 1891. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

food desert / food swamp

New Orleans neighborhood grocery store, 2007, presumably closed following Hurricane Katrina in 2005

11 August 2025

A food desert is an area with poor access to food, especially nutritious food and fresh fruits and vegetables. Popularly associated with urban areas, food deserts are also a problem in rural regions. The term is a notable one because there is a shift in its meaning, or rather in the social class it refers to. Also, in later years it has been criticized as being inaccurate, with the term food swamp suggested as a replacement.

In early use, food desert did not so much signify a problem associated with poverty but rather one associated with affluence. A food desert was an area devoid of fine dining or “good” food, with more pedestrian options being the only ones available. In the earliest use I have found, the full phrase is good food desert, and it is applied to Scotland, a criticism leveled at that country by the English (as if the English in the 1970s could boast about their culinary options). From the London Times of 30 March 1973:

The final straw was the review of the new RAC Guide, which roundly pronounced Scotland part of the “good food desert.”

We also see a shift in the modifiers, where junk food or fast food are used, not to indicate what the desert lacks but rather what it contains. From Vancouver, British Columbia’s Province of 8 March 1981:

Let us munch at LETTUCEMANIA, 850 Thurlow. It’s a fresh idea in catering and a green oasis in the junk-food desert.

Or this from the Miami Herald of 22 July 1982:

Corn chowder should contain corn. Shrimp salad requires shrimp. And banana cream pie really needs bananas.

Once upon a time none of this would be news. But in these days of processed, artificial and unpronouncable [sic] ingredients, Fancy Pantry, 145 Westward Dr., Miami Springs is an oasis of real flavors in the fast food desert.

We see the unmodified food desert in this sense in the 2 October 1986 issue of London’s The Listener:

In Derbyshire the local-based cheesemakers have also gone and the only true Derby cheese is made in North Yorkshire. Buchinghamshire, which Defoe described as “eminent for the richest land and perhaps the richest graziers in England,” is now symbolised by [the city of] Milton Keynes: “not only the home of the Open University but a food desert. Affluence and convenience go hand-in-hand which means supermarkets on a vast scale, scores of fast-food takeaways, yet hardly a decent butcher or baker to be seen.”

And there is this one that is also cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, although the snipped form contained in that dictionary’s citation is misleading. One would think it relates to an impoverished area, rather than a tourist hub that happens to have bad food. From Melbourne, Australia’s Herald of 9 March 1988:

Such reflections always remind me of a holiday (actually it was our honeymoon, which for those keen on trivia is known as la lune de miel in French) to New Caledonia, surely more of a food desert than anything outside five kilometres from the centre of Melbourne. After eating very expensive rubbish for a week, we tried again at an outpost somewhere north of Noumea, a town not unlike Port Augusta for charm. Truite avec petits pois sounded pretty good to me. A steaming bowl of little peas certainly accompanied the fish, but there was a rub to the green. The peas came from a tin. The peas were the only decent meal we had in ten days on the island.

We see the shift in application to impoverished, inner-city areas in the late 1990s, and this quickly becomes the dominant sense of the phrase. From London’s Financial Times of 13 March 1997:

Some localities have also become “food deserts,” where independent shops and street markets have closed and poorer citizens without cars have difficulty reaching the “cathedrals of choice” on the edges of towns.

And from the Independent of 11 June 1997:

Tessa Jowell learnt a new phrase last week: the “food desert.” Food deserts, the minister of public health was told at a private seminar in London, are those areas of inner cities where cheap, nutritious food is virtually unobtainable. Car-less residents, unable to reach out-of-town supermarkets, depend on the corner shop where prices are high, the products are processed and fresh fruit and vegetables poor or non-existent.

But about a decade later, the term food desert came under criticism for painting an inaccurate picture of the problem. It wasn’t that food was unavailable in such areas, but rather that fresh and nutritious choices were swamped by fast-food restaurants and convenience stores. Hence, the term food swamp was coined as an alternative.

This alternative appears first in academic literature. The earliest use, and perhaps the coinage itself, can be found in a February 2009 conference paper by Donald Rose et al.:

Others have found that fast food restaurants also locate disproportionately in low-income areas. The caloric imbalance that leads to obesity is, of course, an issue about entire diets, not specific foods. But the extensive amount of energy-dense offerings available at these venues may in fact inundate, or swamp out, what relatively few healthy choice foods there are. Thus, we suggest that a more useful metaphor to be used is "food swamps" rather than food deserts.

While the authors of this paper say that the underlying metaphor is being “swamped out,” one cannot help but think the contrast between a desert and a swamp was not also in play.

We see food swamp again the following year in a PhD dissertation by Alison Gustafson of the University of North Carolina:

It is too simplistic to suggest that supercenters create obesity, it is more plausible that in rural and semi-rural communities, who already have high rates of obesity, rural landscapes are conducive to building large expansive type of stores which also may have higher density of fast food restaurants, less areas for recreation and physical activity, and represent a rural type of “food swamp.” This type of rural food swamp has easy access to less healthy food and more difficult access to resources for physical activity and thereby may increase the rates of obesity. Since our results did not find associations between neighborhoods with supermarkets and lower weights or higher consumption of fruits and vegetable servings, as previous studies have it is highly possible that in rural neighborhoods access to cheap energy dense foods outweighs any potential benefit of neighborhoods with supermarkets.

Gustafson cites Rose et al. as being the source for her use of the term.

But also in 2010, we see food swamp moving out of the confines of academia and into general public discourse. From the Michigan Citizen of 7 November 2010:

What is a “food desert?” It suggests an area lacking access to food for miles and miles, filled with unspeakable suffering and few prospects.

[…]

Cheap, low density, highcalorie [sic] “food” is available at every turn, so, if there is food everywhere, you can not portray Detroit as a “desert.”

[…]

As for what this is that we have here, let’s call it a “food swamp,” because there’s something of a problem here. We can agree that it is an [sic] very uncomfortable food environment, at the very least.

California’s Oakland Tribune picks up the term on 31 May 2011:

Depending on your perspective, Castlemont [a neighborhood of Oakland] is a food swamp or a food desert. It's definitely swamped by liquor stores and mini-marts—four on either side of campus, including one advertising itself as “Home of the Mighty Knights.”

The stores are nutrition deserts, offering chips, candy, liquor, and occasionally bananas. The stores that carry what a family dinner looks like—meat, poultry, milk, vegetables, fruit and bread—don't exist.

And a year later the term gets the imprimatur of the paper of record. From the New York Times of 18 April 2012 (17 April in the online edition):

Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert.”

Despite the critique of being inaccurate, food desert remains the overwhelming choice for this particular situation, with food swamp lagging far behind.

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Sources:

Cooper, Derek. “In Search of Local Variety.” Listener (London), 2 October 1986, 12/2. Gale Primary Sources: The Listener Historical Archive, 1929–1991.

“Dining with Cee Cee.” Province (Vancouver, British Columbia), 8 March 1981, Magazine 6/6. ProQuest Newspapers.

Gustafson, Alison. Food Environment as a Determinant of Weight and Diet Change in Low-Income North Carolina Women. PhD diss. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010, 89–90. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

Jones, Phil. “You Say Tomato…” Michigan Citizen (Highland Park), 7 November 2010, A10. ProQuest Newspapers.

Kolata, Gina. “Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity.” New York Times, 18 April 2012, A1/5–6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Laurance, Jeremy. “More Equality—Just What the Doctor Ordered.” Independent (London), 11 June 1997, 20/1. Gale Primary Sources: The Independent Historical Archive.

Maitland, Alison. “Multiples Have Ever-Widening Domain.” Financial Times (London), 13 March 1997, 14/5. Gale Primary Sources: Financial Times Historical Archive.

Motamedi, Beatrice. “Weathering Childhood: Stressors that Jeopardize Teen Health.” Oakland Tribune (California), 31 May 2011. ProQuest: Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2003, s.v. food desert, n.

Rose, Donald, et al. “Deserts in New Orleans? Illustrations of Urban Food Accesss and Implications for Policy.” University of Michigan National Poverty Center/USDA Economic Research Service Research, “Understanding the Economic Concepts and Characteristics of Food Access,” February 2009, 15–16. CiteSeerX.

Slattery, G. Herald (Melbourne, Australia), 9 March 1988, 8. Nexis Uni.

“The Times Diary.” Times (London), 30 March 1973, 18/6. Gale Primary Sources: The Times Digital Archive.

Weiss, Jeffrey. “Pantry May Not Be Fancy, but People Love the Food.” Miami Herald, 22 July 1982, 17/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Karen Apricot, 2007. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

cyclone

Hurricane Florence, 2018; photo from a camera on board the International Space Station

8 August 2025

Cyclone, a noun meaning a windstorm that revolves around a center of low pressure, has a somewhat interesting etymology in that it is a modern coinage using ancient roots. It is also one of those rare words that we can pinpoint its precise origin, a situation somewhat more common with scientific and technical terms.

Cyclone was coined in 1848 by Henry Piddington (1797–1858, an English ship captain turned scientist who had settled in India. Piddington is best known for his study of meteorology. In his Sailor’s Horn-book of that year, Piddington wrote:

CLASS II. Circular (or highly curved) winds.

Hurricane Storms. Some gales of high latitudes (?)
Whirlwinds—of wind, rain, dust, &c.—called in Spanish, French, Portuguese, &c. Turbo, Turbonado, Tourbillion, Tourmente.
African Tornado, (sometimes?)
Water spouts.
Bursting of Spouts water spouts, &c.
Samiel.
Simoom.

I am not altogether averse to new names, but I well know how sailors, and indeed many landsmen; dislike them; I suggest, however, that we might perhaps for all this last class, of circular or highly curved winds, adopt the term “Cyclone” from the Greek Κυκλως (which signifies amongst other things the coil of a snake) as neither affirming the circle to be a true one, though the circuit may be complete, yet expressing sufficiently the tendency to circular motion in these meteors. We should by the use of it be able to speak without confounding names which may express either straight or circular winds—such as “gale, storm, hurricane,” &c.—with those which are more frequently used (as hurricane) to designate merely their strength. This is what leads to confusion, for we say of, and we the authors ourselves write about, ships and places in the same “storm” having “the storm” commencing—"the gale increasing”—"the hurricane passing over”—and the like; merely because the ships or localities of which we speak had the wind of different degrees of strength, though the whole were experiencing parts of the same circular storm. Cycloidal is a known word, but it expresses relation to a defined geometrical curve and one not approaching our usual views, which are those of something nearly, though not perfectly, circular. Now if we used a single word and said The “Cyclone” commenced, increased, passed over, &c. we shall get rid of all this ambiguity, and use the same word to express the same thing in all cases.

Piddington makes an error with his Greek. Κυκλως (kuklos) means circle, not the “coil of a snake.” It the snake metaphor is what he had in mind, the Greek would be κύκλωμα (kukloma). Some nineteenth-century writers with better knowledge of Greek spelled the word cyclome.

While the term is used in a general sense for all circular storms, regardless of wind strength or size, it can also be used more specifically to refer to smaller circular storms, such as tornados. And, in fact, in the United States cyclone has often been used to mean tornado.

Of course, for New Yorkers cyclone has a very different association. It is the name of the famous Coney Island roller coaster that opened in 1927.

The “Cyclone” roller coaster, Coney Island, Brooklyn

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Sources:

Oxford English Dictionary Online, 1893, s.v. cyclone, n.

Piddington, Henry. The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms. New York: John Wiley, 1848, 8. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Photo credits:

Hurricane Florence: NASA, 2018. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

Cyclone Roller Coaster: Leonard J. DeFrancisci, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.