[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?

Dorothy Parker

 

Never fight an inanimate object.

P. J. O'Rourke

 

Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them.

Suzanne Necker

 

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the
experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination
to do so.

Douglas Adams

 

The God excuse: the last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument.

George Carlin

 

Politics, noun. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of
principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Ambrose Bierce

 

 

13 Fiendish Etymologies for Halloween Monsters

 

 

1. WITCH

The word witch flies in from Old English. The earliest record, according to
the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), refers to a male practitioner of
sorcery and magic-wicca, also the source of the neopagan religion of the
same name. Wicca is derived from wiccian, "to practice witchcraft." The
deeper roots of this verb are obscure, though etymologists have speculated
on its relationship to Germanic words meaning holy or awaken. Over the
centuries, witch's masculine applications melted away, thanks in no small
part to the historical persecution of many women believed to be witches.

 

2. WEREWOLF

Werewolf is another lexical beastie that prowled Old English. While the OED
can date it back to 1000, the dictionary also notes the word was never in
much use, except for among some Scottish speakers, until modern folklore
scholarship revived it. Werewolves, we know, are men that turn into
wolves-and that's exactly what the word means. Were comes from an Old
English word for man and is distantly related to the same Latin vir (man)
which gives us words like virile and virtue. It's not only wolves that could
wear were. Some have told tales of werebears, weretigers, werefoxes, and
even werehyenas.

 

3. FRANKENSTEIN

Yeah, yeah, Frankenstein isn't the name of the monster: It's the name of his
creator, Victor, in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel. Frankenstein is German
surname and place-name, roughly meaning "stone of the Franks." The Franks,
or "freemen," were a Germanic tribe whose name also survives in frank, and
French. Some believe Shelley was inspired by her travels in Germany, which
took her near Frankenstein Castle.

 

4. VAMPIRE

They say vampires can live forever, but the word is relatively young as far
as the English language is concerned. It doesn't come out of the dark until
the early 1700s, borrowed from the French vampire, itself taken from a
Slavonic source by way of Hungary. But the etymological flight of vampire
may not be over: One Eastern European linguist has argued vampire ultimately
comes from a northern Turkish word, uber, meaning witch. (Any connection to
the transportation company is coincidental.) And the name of that most
famous vampire, Dracula, is actually related to another mythical creature:
the dragon.

 

5. MUMMY

Back in the 1400s, mummy referred to a bituminous substance (think asphalt).
This sounds far from ghastly until you consider that the specific material
was used as a medicine prepared from mummified human flesh. Its French
(mommie) and Latin (mumia) sources also named a substance used to embalm
corpses. Latin directly borrowed (via Salerno, the leading medieval school
of medicine located in Italy) its mumia from the Arabic mumiya, "bitumen."
The Arabic is said to preserve a Persian root meaning wax. It wasn't until
the 1600s that mummy, used for Egyptian mummification, actually named those
de-organed, embalmed corpses. And it wasn't until 1930s Hollywood that Boris
Karloff gives us the monster, The Mummy.

 

6. GHOUL

It may not be too surprising that mummy comes from Arabic, what with Ancient
Egypt and all. But ghoul? Yes, this word also comes from the Middle East. In
Arabic mythology, a ghoul, or ghul, robbed graves and ate corpses. The root
is a verb that means, appropriately, "to seize." The word started marauding
English thanks to a 1780s translation of an Arabic tale.

 

7. GOBLIN

Where there are ghouls there are goblins, at least if the Halloween stock
phrase is any measure. This name of this mischievous, ugly folk creature
might come from the Greek kobalos, a kind of scoundrel. According to this
etymological theory, kobalos passed into Latin and then French, where
Gobelinus is documented as the name for a spirit haunting the city of Evreux
in the Middle Ages. Goblin enters English by the 1350s. A hobgoblin, a
related impish creature, features hob, which comes from a shortened nickname
for Robert, as it is for Robin Goodfellow, an English puck many will know
from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

 

8. DEMON

Demon is another word from Ancient Greek. In that tongue, a daimon variously
signified a god, divinity, attendant spirit, or even the force of fate
itself. The base of this daimon is a Greek verb meaning "to divide." The
ancients envisioned the Fates divvying out people's lots in life. Demon went
to the dark side when Greek authors used it to translate Hebrew terms for
baddies in the Old Testament.

 

9. DEVIL

Like daimon, the Greek diabolos was a biblical Greek translation of the
Hebrew word satan in the Old Testament. The Hebrew satan means an adversary,
literally an "obstructor" or "plotter-against." The Greek diabolos, a
slanderer or accuser, picks up on this idea, as it literally means "one who
throws something across the path of another." The words symbol and
ballistics share a root with it. Old English rendered diabolos a deofol.

 

10. ZOMBIE

Like mummies, zombies are also corpses brought back to life. But unlike
mummy, zombie was brought into English not from the Middle East but from
West Africa. The Kikongo language spoken around the Congo has nzambi (which,
according to zombie experts Hans-W. Ackermann and Jeanine Gauthier,
"designates the creator god of many Bantu peoples," as well as meaning
"spirit of a dead person") and zumbi (fetish) may have had an influence on
the word (though Ackermann and Gauthier note there are many words in West
and Central African langua-ges phonetically similar to zombie). Via the
slave trade, zombie made its way to Haiti, with the word popping up in
English as early as 1788 to describe "the spirits of dead wicked men, that
are permitted to wander, and torment the living." Only later would it become
explicitly corpses magically raised from the dead. Other scholars have
speculated, though, that zombie might be a Louisiana Creole word from the
Spanish sombra, a shade or ghost.

 

11. GHOST

Speaking of ghosts, they've been long haunting English. The Old English gast
meant spirit, including good ones, bad ones, and, well, holy ones. (The h
creeped in thanks to Dutch and Flemish cognates.) Forms of ghost are indeed
found throughout the Germanic languages, possibly all coming from an
Indo-European root referring to fear or amazement. Ghost settles into its
modern meaning-an apparition of a dead person-in the 14th century.

 

12. SASQUATCH

One place you can genuinely catch sight of this large, hairy hominid is out
on the streets during Halloween. Another name for Bigfoot, Sasquatch likely
comes from the Halkomelem language, spoken by many First Nations in the
Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. The word entered English thanks to a
1929 article in Maclean's that quoted an "old hunter" as saying "The strange
people, of whom there are but few now-rarely seen and seldom met ... are
known by the name of Sasquatch, or, 'the hairy mountain men.'"

 

13. YETI

Finally, the Sasquatch's snowy counterpart is the Yeti, said to trek the
Himalayas. According to Etymonline, even though the creature looms large in
our imaginations, it comes from the Sherpa yeh-teh, a "small manlike
animal," though it might more literally be rendered as "rocky bear." And
thanks to a 1921 journalist reporting on a Mt. Everest expedition, we have
the Abominable Snowman. The journalist translated the Tibetan metoh kangmi,
another name for the Yeti, as "abominable snowman." Later, he explained that
he had gotten it wrong, and it more closely meant "filthy snowman"-though
decades after that, an alternate explanation emerged that metoh and kangmi
were just two words for the same animal.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Queen Elizabeth I regarded herself as a paragon of cleanliness. She declared
that she bathed once every three months, whether she needed it or not

 

The 3 Musketeers bar was originally split into three pieces with three
different flavors: vanilla, chocolate and strawberry. When the other flavors
became harder to come by during World War II, Mars decided to go all
chocolate.

 

Fredric Baur invented the Pringles can. When he passed away in 2008, his
ashes were buried in one.

 

Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" was penned by beloved children's author Shel
Silverstein.

 

Ben & Jerry learned how to make ice cream by taking a $5 correspondence
course offered by Penn State. (They decided to split one course.)

 

M&M's actually stands for "Mars & Murrie's," the last names of the candy's
founders.

 

Reno is farther west than Los Angeles.