–James Baldwin
James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American writer and civil rights activist. He garnered acclaim for his work across several forms, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. Wikipedia
“The meaning of every word also reflects the person who utters it, the situation in which it is uttered, and the reason for its utterance. The selfsame word can, at one moment, radiate great hopes, at another, it can emit lethal rays.”
–Vaclav Havel
Václav Havel (October 5, 1936 – December 18, 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright and former dissident. Havel served as the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia on 31 December, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003. Wikipedia
Image credit: miss_j / iStock / Getty Images Plus.
English has changed a lot in the last several hundred years, and there are many words once used that we would no longer recognize today. For whatever reason, we started pronouncing them differently, or stopped using them entirely, and they became obsolete. There are some old words, however, that are nearly obsolete, but we still recognize them because they were lucky enough to get stuck in set phrases that have lasted across the centuries. Here are 12 words that survived by getting fossilized in idioms.
You rarely see a wend without a way. You can wend your way through a crowd or down a hill, but no one wends to bed or to school. However, there was a time when English speakers would wend to all kinds of places. Wend was just another word for go in Old English. The past tense of wend was went and the past tense of go was gaed. People used both until the 15th century, when go became the preferred verb, except in the past tense where went hung on, leaving us with an outrageously irregular verb.
The desert from the phrase “just deserts” is not the dry and sandy kind, nor the sweet post-dinner kind. It comes from an Old French word for deserve, and it was used in English from the 13th century to mean “that which is deserved.” When you get your just deserts, you get your due. In some cases, that may mean you also get dessert, a word that comes from a later French borrowing.
If we see eke at all these days, it’s when we “eke out” a living, but it comes from an old verb meaning to add, supplement, or grow. It’s the same word that gave us eke-name for “additional name,” which later, through misanalysis of “an eke-name” became nickname.
“Sleight of hand” is one tricky phrase. Sleight is often miswritten as slight and for good reason. Not only does the expression convey an image of light, nimble fingers, which fits well with the smallness implied by slight, but an alternate expression for the concept is legerdemain, from the French léger de main,” literally, “light of hand.” Sleight comes from a different source, a Middle English word meaning “cunning” or “trickery.” It’s a wily little word that lives up to its name.
Dint comes from the oldest of Old English, where it originally referred to a blow struck with a sword or other weapon. It came to stand for the whole idea of subduing by force, and is now fossilized in our expression “by dint of X” where X can stand for your charisma, hard work, smarts, or anything you can use to accomplish something else.
Nowadays we see this word in the expression “to run/ride roughshod” over somebody or something, meaning to tyrannize or treat harshly. It came about as a way to describe the 17th century version of snow tires. A “rough-shod” horse had its shoes attached with protruding nail heads in order to get a better grip on slippery roads. It was great for keeping the horse on its feet, but not so great for anyone the horse might step on.
The fro in “to and fro” is a fossilized remnant of a Northern English or Scottish way of pronouncing from. It was also part of other expressions that didn’t stick around, like “fro and till,” “to do fro” (to remove), and “of or fro” (for or against).
The hue of “hue and cry,” the expression for the noisy clamor of a crowd, is not the same hue as the term we use for color. The color one comes from the Old English word híew, for “appearance.” This hue comes from the Old French hu or heu, which was basically an onomatopoeia, like hoot.
The kith part of “kith and kin” came from an Old English word referring to knowledge or acquaintance. It also stood for native land or country, the place you were most familiar with. The expression “kith and kin” originally meant your country and your family, but later came to have the wider sense of friends and family.
When you leave someone “in the lurch,” you leave them in a jam, in a difficult position. But while getting left in the lurch may leave you staggering around and feeling off-balance, the lurch in this expression has a different origin than the staggery one. The balance-related lurch comes from nautical vocabulary, while the lurch you get left in comes from an old French backgammon-style game called lourche. Lurch became a general term for the situation of beating your opponent by a huge score. By extension, it came to stand for the state of getting the better of someone or cheating them.
Umbrage comes from the Old French ombrage (shade, shadow), and it was once used to talk about actual shade from the sun. It took on various figurative meanings having to do with doubt and suspicion or the giving and taking of offense. To give umbrage was to offend someone, to “throw shade.” However, these days when we see the term umbrage at all, it is more likely to be because someone is taking, rather than giving it.
We might not know what a shrift is anymore, but we know we don’t want to get a short one. Shrift was a word for a confession, something it seems we might want to keep short, or a penance imposed by a priest, something we would definitely want to keep short. But the phrase “short shrift” came from the practice of allowing a little time for the condemned to make a confession before being executed. So in that context, shorter was not better.
Arika Okrent is a Linguist and author of “In the Land of Invented Languages.” She is living in Chicago, doing her part to fight off the cot-caught merger and keep “gym shoes” alive.
)Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
We live in a strange time for definitions. Questions of what it means to have a self, with its apparent elements of gender, race, sex, and all the other varieties of baggage that we spend so much time arguing over seem to be up in the air. How are we the same? How are we different? What does it mean that we are alive, with this brilliant inwardness and fire that is you, and us. This article attempts to take three related words and let them shine a light on how we understand ourselves.
c. 1200, from Old English cynn “family; race; kind, sort, rank; nature” — of Germanic origin; related to Dutch kunne, from an Indo-European root meaning ‘give birth to’.
You have an experience that is unique, a background, a geography, a family, a religion, a set of encounters and experiences that are only yours. Much of this uniqueness is given- it comes before your choice to decide, you are born somewhere with a family not of your choosing and much of what comes across your path is not what you choose. Even much of your own personality comes before you decide it.
We also love in particulars – you love your family because they are yours, not someone else’s. This is significant, universal love takes individual shapes and is borne out in your choice to love someone. Yet this also means we are dependant. The word ‘Kin’ is related to the word ‘child’ in origin, and the period of absolute dependence we have as children mean we only become anything by somebody caring for us. In the words of Professor Cornel West “I am only who I am because somebody loved me, because somebody attended to me.” We learn what it means to love by example, sometimes bad, sometimes good, and those examples we carry through life, they are our own unique torches along the pilgrims path we all must walk.
This means that whatever we might believe, universal and moral first begins with particular love, firstly through the ways it is shown to us, positively and through its absence, and secondly in the ways we choose to love in return. I am only who I am because somebody loved me
From Old English gecynd “kind, nature, race,” related to cynn “family” — Old English cynd(e), gecynd(e), of Germanic origin; related to kin. The original sense was ‘nature, the natural order’, also ‘innate character, form, or condition’ (compare with kind2); hence ‘a class or race distinguished by innate characteristics’.
What these particulars of experience also mean, is that we are not the same. We can be categorised into classes ‘kinds’, of gender, race, nationalities, ethnicities, religious backgrounds, disabilities, and on and on. All of these intersectionalities provide useful ways of understanding the kinds of experiences we share.
It also means these things matter. While these experiences are subjective and culturally contingent they also reflect that differences are always passed on to us and shape our experience, and that knowledge and awareness of these things can contextualise and help us understand how history and culture form individual experience.
It is popular on the political right to belittle such ideas, yet without them we lose sight of how others possess kinds of experience we cannot understand unless their voice is raised. It is a meaningful political aim that on issues of race or gender, disability or marginalised people that those whose voice is heard are those voices who are most often not heard. Speaking on behalf of people will not do. To recognise our differences is to take the first step in the raising of every voice in the places where it matters, and the cultivating the genuine ability to humbly listen.
“Friendly, deliberately doing good to others,” Middle English kinde, from Old English (ge)cynde “natural, native, innate,” originally “with the feeling of relatives for each other,” from Proto-Germanic *kundi- “natural, native,” from *kunjam “family”
It is essential to remember, or to learn to observe, that while experiences are individual, experience is not. All experience is simply experience, behind all your particulars is your consciousness, your you-ness, your awareness that transcends the boundaries of your particular-ness. Psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher, Dr Iain McGilchrist has suggested that our brains ‘receive’ consciousness rather like how our voice boxes create our unique voices, that it is not the characteristics of the air but the way it is restricted that shapes it. The sound is particular and unique, the quality or substance is universal. Our minds and our experiences are unique, but the fact that you are aware is universal.
This also relates to the observation of givenness. The fact that you are you and not somebody else, that one person is born in the gutter and one in the palace, one with certain gifts and others without seems strangely as if it could be otherwise. One of the great dangers contemporary politics poses, as social media drives us into polarised camps, is that of tribalism. Tribalism is the seeing those outside of our circle as ‘other’, acting to them as if they possess some inherent quality of outside-ness, that restricts our ability to have empathy, that emotion that enables us to see in others the simple quality of experience we also possess, and so to have compassion for others experiences.
To do this is to treat those of another kind as kin. Our separation and particular-ness meets at the other side of a circle. We first come apart, are unique and individual, then turn the realisations that this gives us towards others and know that though we are different, we are not. You are everyone, and everyone is kindred.