Word Histories and Mysteries Pa by Editors Of The American Heritage Dictionaries

Author:Editors Of The American Heritage Dictionaries [Dictionaries, Editors Of The American Heritage]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education & Reference, Foreign Language Study & Reference, Trivia & Fun Facts, Words; Language & Grammar, Etymology, Reference, ISBN-13: 9780618454501
ISBN: 9780618454501
Amazon: 0618454500
Barnesnoble: 0618454500
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2004-10-12T18:30:00+00:00

259

“what is prescribed.” Theologians and confessors

viewed the sacrament of penance as a prescription

that cured a moral illness. In early medieval times

penances were long and arduous—lengthy pilgrimages

and even lifelong exile were not uncommon—and had

to be performed before absolution, not after as today.

However, less demanding penances could be given in

extreme situations; short shrift was a brief penance

given to a person condemned to death so that absolu-

tion could be granted before execution.

skirt

The relationship between a skirt and a shirt is not

just a matter of fashion but also a matter of ety-

mology. The connections between England and Scan-

dinavia in peace and war during the Middle Ages were

always close, and the interaction between them added

greatly to the vocabulary of English. Some words bor-

rowed from Scandinavian did not completely supplant

the native words with which they shared a common

Germanic ancestor, but existed alongside them. Shirt

and skirt are one such pair. Both are descended from

the Germanic word * skurtaz, which became scyrte in Old English and skyrta in Old Icelandic, a dialect of

Old Norse. Skyrta meant “a shirt or kind of knee-

length tunic.” Our word skirt, borrowed from Old

Norse, came to denote the lower part of a garment or a

lower garment by itself. Old English scyrte denoted a

short garment of some sort, and its descendant shirt

referred in Middle English to an undergarment worn

on the upper part of the body. The downward drift of

skirt and the upward hike of shirt fits with the fact that the original Germanic word denoted a short

undergarment (wearable by itself in warm weather)

that covered both parts of the body.

260

Wor d H i stor i e s a n d Myst e r i e s

slave

The derivation of the word slave encapsulates a bit

of European history and explains why the two

words slave and Slav are so similar; they are, in fact, historically identical. The word slave first appeared in

English around 1290, spelled sclave. The spelling was

based on Old French esclave from Medieval Latin

sclavus, “Slav, slave,” first recorded around 800.

Sclavus came from Byzantine Greek sklabos, pro-

nounced (skläh-vos) and meaning “Slav,” which

appeared around 580. Sklavos approximated the

Slavs’ own name for themselves, the Sloveňci, surviv-

ing in English Slovene and Slovenian. The spelling of English slave, closer to its original Slavic form, first

appears in English in 1538. Slavs became slaves

around the beginning of the ninth century when the

Holy Roman Empire tried to stabilize a German-Slav

frontier. By the twelfth century stabilization had giv-

en way to wars of expansion and extermination that

did not end until the Poles crushed the Teutonic

Knights at Grunwald in 1410.

As far as the Slavs’ own self-designation goes, its

meaning is, understandably, better than “slave”; it

comes from the Indo-European root * kleu–, whose

basic meaning is “to hear” and which occurs in many

derivatives meaning “renown, fame.” The Slavs are

thus “the famous people.” Slavic names ending in

–slav incorporate the same word, such as Czech

Bohuslav , “God’s fame,” Russian Mstislav , “vengeful

fame,” and Polish Stanislaw , “famous for withstand-

ing (enemies).”

Wor d H i stor i e s a n d Myst e r i e s

261

sleuth

Tracking down the history of the word sleuth

requires a bit of etymological sleuthing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.