Word for the wise ©
Is there anything to be gained by churning all these words day after day? The jury's still out on that one, but regardless of the bottom line, blogging is certainly good for the vocabulary as one is constantly forced to search for synonyms and this keeps the cognitive apparatus fit. Thinking about all this in bed last night, I resolved to get up today at dawn and share my vocabulary with Rainy Day readers from now on in the form of a regular "Word for the wise" © posting. We're kicking off today with the letter "A" and it's dedicated to our favourite football blog.
arse: in the Winchester manuscript of Malory's Morte d'Arthur we can read of the dramatic effects of a cudgel being drawn out of Sir Lancelot's side, "And he gave a great shriek and a grisly groan, so that the blood burst out, night a pint at once, that at last he sank down upon his arse and so swooned down, pale and deadly." However, when William Caxton, (c.1422-1491), the merchant and diplomat who set up the first printing press in England, came to publish this work, the word arse was replaced with "buttocks". Too "lewd" perhaps. Still, when Caxton published Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in 1476 he didn't hesitate to print the Wife of Bath's "queynte".Anyway, Caxton's successor at the press, the marvellously named Wynkyn de Worde, was less embarrassed by "broad" or "coarse" language and so in The Demaundes Joyous, a collection of riddles de Worde published in 1511, we get this:
Question: What beast is it that hath her tail between her eyes?
Answer: It is a cat when she licketh her arse.
Next week's useful and entertaining "Word for the wise" © will feature the letter "B". Candidate words so far include "banal" and "bribe".
Comments
A very good source for interesting words is Michael Quinion's World Wide Words. There is a free wekly emailed newsletter. http://www.worldwidewords.org/
For "bribery," the above web site offers, with no mention of Charlie Haughey:
BRIBERY
It was reported recently that Dutch archaeologists had found an administrative centre of the ancient Assyrian empire, 3400 years old, in which an archive listed the names of “employees accepting bribes”. After a wry thought about how nothing changes, it seemed appropriate to look up the history of bribery. And what a convoluted story it turns out to be.
It starts in medieval French, where bribe meant “a piece of bread”. A linguistic game of consequences led the sense from this to “a piece of bread given to a beggar”, then more generally to “alms” and “living upon alms”, to “begging” and so to associations with mendicancy and vagabondage. By a further very short step the meaning arrived at “theft; stealing”.
It was with the last of these senses that the word first appeared in English in the fourteenth century, in the works of Chaucer and his contemporaries. It soon evolved further to take in the idea of extortion, or demanding money with menaces. Only in this usage did bribe finally come to mean a sum of money, though at this time briber meant the person doing the menacing and so getting the money. The worst offenders were often judges and public officials, who extorted money from claimants in order to pass down a favourable outcome.
It was in the sixteenth century that the meaning flipped completely over so that briber meant instead the person handing over the money. Nobody seems to know quite how this happened. In the process bribe changed to mean a supposedly voluntary inducement instead of something extracted by force, so arriving at the sense which it has retained ever since.
Posted by: Larry May | June 23, 2005 3:34 AM