THEREBY HANGS A TALE Stories of Curious Word Origins Charles Earle
Funk, Litt. D. PERENNIAL LIBRARY Harper Row, Publishers New York,
Cambridge, Philadelphia, San Francisco London, Mexico City, Sao
Paulo, Singapore, Sydney To B. M. F. Who patiently and often has
listened to many of these tales, this book is lovingly dedicated.
PREFACE THIS book Is the outcome of a collection of material that
has been slowly accumulating over the past thirty years or so,
since the time when, under the guidance of the late Dr. Frank H.
Vizetelly, I began to work as his associate in the editorial
department of the Funk Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary. The
ancestry of most of the words that we now use glibly or find in
books or other cur rent literature, is prosaic. We can trace their
lines of descent back to Old English, or Old French, or Latin, or
Greek, or other ancient source, but beyond the bare bones supplied
by etymologists, which indicate those sources, and the steps by
which they became English words, the dictionaries tell us little f
or there is little more that can be told. The ancient Roman or
Greek, say, who may have been the first to use a word that has
strayed on to us, perhaps could have told the story of its origin.
It may have been picturesque, based upon some historic episode,
like the word anecdote, it may have come from a tale in some older
language, for the languages that we consider ancient were
themselves based upon still more ancient sources, but that story,
if any, cannot now be determined. Thus what we know about the
origins of the great majority of the words In our present language
can be found in an unabridged dictionary or in a work dealing with
etymologies, such as thatcompiled by W. W. Skeat about seventy
years ago, or the one more recently prepared by Ernest Weekley. But
there are in our current language a number of fairly common words
some old, some new which were born, or grew, or ac quired their
meanings in an unusual manner. They came, as our language has, from
all sources sources of which the dictionaries, for lack of space,
can rarely supply more than a clue. These are the tales that I have
been collecting and which are offered here. A number of them may be
already familiar to some readers, such as the origin of tantalize,
from the Greek legend of the punishment vm - meted out to Tantalus
by the wrathful Zeus, or echo, from the fate of the perfidious
nymph of that name. Such tales, though familiar to some, are
included here for the benefit of those to whom they may be new. But
I have found that few but scholars in the language know how the
word clue, which was just used, acquired its present meaning that
the Portuguese gave us coconut because, to their sailors in the
sixteenth century, the nut resembled a coco, a grinning face that
sylph was a coinage of that master charlatan or genius, depending
upon the point of view, the sixteenth-century alchemist, Paracelsus
that we owe our terms chapel and chaplain to the cloak or cape worn
by the fourth-century monk, St. Martin that the name Easter was
taken from a pagan goddess, and that the names of the days of the
week denote dedication to ancient pagan gods. Whenever it has been
possible, the stories are historical that is, for example, facts in
the life of St. Martin are briefly stated to explain why his cloak
was venerated the occasion for the coinage of sylph by Paracelsus
is summarized a briefaccount tells why magenta commemorated a
battle short sketches of the invasions of the Vandals and Tatars
account for such words as vandal, tartar, and horde-, highly
abridged biographies of such persons as the Scottish engineer, John
L. McAdam, the Scottish chemist, Charles Macintosh, and others,
tell why their names were adopted into the language an explanation
is deduced why the French general, Martinet, became a byword in
English, but not in French the historical circumstances that
introduced the word nepotism are related, and so on, and so on...
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