The Multinational Word History of April, and Easter

Hello and Happy April Fool’s Day!

Naturally on a blog called Wordfoolery I celebrate this day as a special one for fools, especially word fools. I thought I take a look at the word April this year and discovered its roots have grown into several different countries and languages.

Happy April Fool’s Day from my mini Wordfoolery doll

Month names have various roots and have changed over time with thanks to Roman emperors, French revolutions, and dictators of all sorts but April joined the English dictionary with a little help from a Greek goddess and replaced one named for an Anglo-Saxon goddess. Either way it seems appropriate that April, or Avril, are still used as names for girls today.

April became the name of the fourth month in the English calendar around 1300, but it was originally spelled aueril. This was borrowed from Old French Avril which is still the name used in modern French. Although April was briefly called Germinal (strictly speaking this ran from 21 March to 21 April) in honour of seed germination. Those month name changes didn’t stick, but personally I liked they way they linked the months to what was happening in nature.

The French month of Avril was borrowed from Latin Aprilis. Aprilis was the second month in the ancient Roman calendar which started in March. This is how we end up with December (dec meaning ten) being the tenth month rather than the twelfth. Don’t worry about it, it will make your brain melt.

Back to April. The roots of Aprilis are murky. One theory is that it’s drawn from Apru, the Etruscan version of the Greek goddess Aphrodite. It’s not surprising that in a time when people lived in close proximity to nature that springtime, when species mate and plants rebound into life, the name of this perfect spring month would be connected to a goddess of love and fertility. Old folk etymology (note – this means it may be fake) link Aprilis to the Latin word aperire (to open) again linking to buds opening on trees and other fertile ideas.

Aprilis could simply be named “the following” or “next”, in relation to its position following the first month (March) in the Roman calendar as we had apero and the root word apo meaning “away” or “off”. These roots also give us aparah (second) in Sanskrit and afar (after) in Gothic. It is impossible to know for sure. April is either named after “next month” or after the Greek goddess of love in a nod towards spring fertility. I know which story I would choose.

It can be fun to look back and see what word April replaced in the English language. In this case the Old English name for the month was Eastermonað and this was named for a fertility goddess too. As you might guess the month was named Easter month. Although the date of Easter moves thanks to the phases of the moon, it is nearly always celebrated in April. The last March-time Easter was in 1997 and the next one will be in 2059 so don’t hold your breath.

Easter itself, in English, was named for the goddess Eostre. Her name comes from Proto Germanic austron (dawn) this is because aust (east) faced towards the rising sun. She was worshipped by the Angol-Saxons in pre-Christian times and with the coming of the new faith her name was used for the feast of Easter in much the same way Roman Saturnalia was transformed into Christmas. It’s worth noting that most other languages around English use some form of Latin’s Pascha for this feast which presumably links to Passover in the Jewish tradition and the timing of the the Easter story. Easter is called Pâcques in French, Cásca in Irish, Pascua in Spanish, Pasg in Welsh, and Pasen in Dutch. The only language I checked which has a similar East > Eostre > Easter linkage is Germany where it’s called Ostern (Ost means East in German) and lo and behold the Anglo-Saxons originated in Northern Germany.

In case you’re curious the association of eggs with Easter started early (pace eggs in 1610s) but the Easter Bunny turned up in 1904. Rabbits, or more probably hares which are particularly visible at this time of year, were associated with the goddess Eostre.

Now you know the story of April and Easter. Happy April Fool’s Day and (slightly belated) Happy Easter!

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

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The Explosive Origins of Pumpernickel

Hello,

I’m always intrigued by the sheer variety of different breads around the world, often influenced by the local climate and what grains do best in their region. Irish soda bread worked well in the past because you’d struggle to get yeast bread to rise in a draughty Irish cottage on a damp day, whereas Italian and French yeast breads like baguette and ciabatta had perfect conditions. Then you have quick non-risen breads like naan and flatbreads in other cultures.

my rosemary focaccia

My late cousin always claimed our family motto should have been “I never met a carbohydrate I didn’t like”, and I love making my own bread, but I do make one exception. Rye breads are not for me and that includes the wonderfully named pumpernickel.

Pumpernickel entered the English language in the 1700s to describe a coarse, dark rye bread. It was a direct import from Low German, the Westphalian dialect to be precise. The region of Westphalia is now part of modern Germany and includes the cities of Cologne and Düsseldorf, but at the time it was independent and spoke its own language. Clearly they grew rye and loved loaves of pumpernickel.

The loaf’s name came from a slang name for a stupid person. The word compounded pumpern (to break wind) and Nickel (goblin, lout, or rascal) which was drawn from the name Niklaus (Nicholas in English). This means that if you called somebody a pumpernickel you were calling them a farting goblin.

I hope the bread doesn’t produce such explosive effects but it is suggestive that the original name for the bread was krankbrot which translates literally as sick bread. I hope that’s because patients liked to eat it when unwell, as opposed to eating it causing them to be unwell. Either way probably not a great brand name.

All this makes me wish some enterprising bakery will rename their pumpernickel bread as Farting Goblin. It sounds like a craft beer, doesn’t it? I wrote about German goblins before when I explored the etymology of cobalt – check it out.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

Want more Wordfoolery? Subscribe to the monthly newsletter “Wordfoolery Whispers”.

p.s. It’s day 6 of NaNoWriMo 2023 today. I’m on 12,165 words and enjoying writing “The Librarian’s Secret Diary”.

The Fugger Family and the History of Pettifogging

Hello,

Despite writing this blog since 2009 I still find words I want to write about and am stunned to discover I haven’t already covered them. Such a one is pettifogging. Collins Dictionary tells me “You can describe an action or situation as pettifogging when you think that unnecessary attention is being paid to unimportant, boring details.”

Pettifogging is not a word I use everyday but sometimes it’s just perfect.

Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with fog.

Pettifogging pettifoggers have been with use since the dawn of time, I suspect, but the word for them arrived in the 1560s when it described an inferior lawyer (attorney). In the 1580s there was also a pettifactor who was a legal agent who undertook small cases. As both are so close in meaning and spelling their origins may be entangled.

The word is formed from two words (and in the past was sometimes hyphenated) – petty and fogger.

Petty had been in English since the late 1300s (original spelling peti) to mean small or minor. It had been borrowed from the Old French adjective petit (small) which is still used in Modern French. Petty wasn’t originally a negative adjective as we can see in petty cash (small sums of money) since the 1800s and petty officer (a minor military officer since the 1500s). However the use of petty evolved in the 1500s. By the 1520s petty could mean of small importance and by the 1580s it described somebody as being small-minded. Both of these extra meanings feed into pettifogging.

A fogger is a term used nowadays in specific trades – disinfection and pest control – but a fogger in the 1500s was a very different thing. A fogger was a cheat. It may have arrived in English from the now obsolete Dutch word focker (from the Flemish verb to cheat) or the Middle English word fugger.

Both the Dutch and the Middle English terms are believed to come from a famous merchant and banking family of the 1400 and 1500s in Augsburg, Germany. Books have been written about their family history and there’s a dedicated website if you want to dive deeper. For the purposes of language history it’s enough to know that in German, Flemish, and Dutch their name became a term for a money-lending monopolist.

To be a fogger then was to be a financial trader. To be a pettifogger was to be the small version of that – somebody who would try sharp moves on a smaller scale to turn a profit. The association with lawyers, well I wouldn’t want to cast shade on a noble profession. Presumably the more recent association with attention to tiny details was because lawyers do like to attend to details in their contracts and often turn a good profit along the way.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

A Precise History of a Hair’s Breadth Escape

Hello,

Ever had a narrow escape from danger? A moment when your fate hung in the balance and a second either way could have had disastrous consequences? This, by definition, is a hair-breadth escape. Although I always thought it was hair’s breath and didn’t understand how a hair could breathe, but hey, that’s what happens when you always hear a phrase rather than seeing it written down.

The phrase has been with us for some time. Shakespeare uses it in “Othello” and in measurement terms you can be pretty precise about how close a shave you just had – a hair-breadth is defined as the forty-eighth part of an inch.

Annoyingly that measurement concept isn’t accurate. According to a Harvard report I found online, human hair, whose width varies by colour, is more like 1/1500-1/140 of an inch in diameter. Flaxen hair is finest, in case you’re curious, and black hair is thickest but there’s a quite a range even then. Flaxen ranges from 1/1500 to 1/500, for example.

My favourite phrase origin site doesn’t have an entry for the origin of this phrase but I’m guessing that the hair-breadth measurement was the smallest available at the time and hence became an idiom for narrow escapes. However Etymology Online (great site) does have it and dates it to the late 1400s, a bit before “Othello” then. They also provide three variant spellings – hairsbreadth, hairs-breadth, and hair’s breadth – so that made me feel better about my own mistaken spelling.

Now for the component parts of the phrase. Hair was haer in Old English and it came from a Proto Germanic root word hēran which provides similar words in Saxon, Norse, Frisian, Dutch, and German. The spelling in English was influenced by Old Norse har and Old French haire (haircloth). A fascinating side note is that the idea of the hair of the dog that bit you (to drink more booze to cure a hangover) dates back to Pliny (who died in A.D. 79) and reached English in the 1540s.

Breadth (the distance between the sides) joins English in the late 1300s as an evolution of the Old English word braedu (breadth, width) presumably connecting to something being broad. They also had terms for wide and width at the same time and these are more commonly used now.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

From Combs to Hecklers – a Word History

Hello,

This week’s word is heckler with thanks to Susie Dent’s “Modern Tribes” which mentioned the original hecklers and set me on the etymological trail. The two areas where hecklers are most common today are at comedy gigs and political performances. In both cases the general public feel they have the right to yell out their disagreement. It can be witty, or simply angry, but either way it’s not easy to deal with the heckler if you’re the focus of their attention.

The origins of the heckler surprised me. It started with a comb and a woman.

The first use of heckle in English dates to 1300 when it was a flax comb and was spelled hechel. It either came from hecel in Old English or from a Germanic source. Middle High German had hechel and Middle Dutch had hekel, both of which come from a root word for a hook or tooth.

My favourite linen scarf (after heckling!)

Flax, in case you were wondering, is a plant also known as linseed, which is grown for food and fibres. Flax fibres give us linen yarn and fabric. Like other yarns, such as wool, the flax fibres need to be combed out before spinning, hence the heckle comb.

Shortly after the arrival of the comb we were using heckle as a verb, meaning to comb flax or hemp with a heckle. By the mid 1400s we had heckler as a noun for somebody who uses a heckle, although apparently it appeared as a surname a century earlier. It’s common for early surnames to relate to the work the person did – Smith, Baker, and more. There was even a feminine form of heckler, a hekelstere. The work was done by men and women.

It wasn’t easy work and according to Dent’s book the Scottish town of Dundee became known for their hecklers who dictated wages and working conditions through strength of numbers and plenty of shouting. When others in the industry followed their example the heckling shop became known as a centre for activism and the term moved into the world of politics and later comedy stand-up. By the late 1800s the Oxford English Dictionary mentions that heckling is applied in Scotland to the public questioning of a parliamentary candidate.

I found an excellent blog post here of a visit to a flax mill museum in Dundee which even includes a photo of a heckle tool and the extra information that the Dundee hecklers were mostly female and also led the charge in the suffragette movement later. I love that the first heckler was a Dundee woman sticking up for her employment rights.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace

Ever Wonder Where Doomscrolling Came From?

Hello,

This week’s word is a modern one with old roots – doomscrolling. You may be immune to this online habit, if so here’s the definition – “the tendency to continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening, or depressing.” (Merriam Webster)

While the term is particularly associated with the compulsion to read all the Covid news while stuck at home, it was in use around social media from about 2015. Perhaps in earlier times our ancestors doom-read with printed newspapers as it certainly appears to be a natural inclination for humans.

As you might guess, doomscrolling is compounded from doom and scroll, both of which are words with old roots.

Doom entered Old English as dom (a law, judgement, etc.) from the ProtoGermanic root word domaz. The same root provides similar words to Old Saxon, Frisian, and Norse. A book of laws in Old English was a dombec. By Middle English, doom had acquired extra letters and was spelled doome.

The association of doom with fate or destruction began in the early 1300s and was widespread by the 1600s. Doom was, by then, associated with the term doomsday – the day of judgement in Christian faiths and the end of the world as we know it. The link between laws and judgement is pretty clear.

You may recall the Doomsday Book – commissioned by William the Conqueror, it was completed in 1086, is held in the UK National Archives and can be accessed online so if you really want to doomscroll you could try that as a source. In this case it’s not filled with bad news, or laws as it’s a listing of land and assets throughout England. Its contents were as undeniable as laws, hence the name, and it was useful to the king so he knew what he owned and what he was owed in taxes.

Scrolling to show part of the information on a computer/phone screen has been in use since the 1980s but originally that verb meant to write information down in a scroll, so just how old is scrolling?

Scroll the noun entered English around 1400 spelled as scroule or scrowell (a roll of parchment or paper) with links to the word rolle (roll) as the paper was rolled up for safe storage and transport. It arrived via Anglo-French from Old French escroe (roll of parchment), which came from Frankish, and ultimately from a ProtoGermanic root word.

The Dead Sea Scrolls (dating to the third century B.C.) are probably the most famous old scrolls but as parchment doesn’t always survive the centuries it’s hard to be sure of how far back in time scrolls go. Old roots indeed for doomscrolling.

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)

Clam, Clammy, Close – Their Word History

Hello,

This week’s investigation is with thanks to friend of the blog, Rick Ellrod, who asked me one day if clammy weather is related to clams. Summer seems the right time to investigate and I threw in close too as I’ve always wondered about that.

Let’s start with the clam. It’s a bivalve mollusk and the word for it arose around 1500 in English but it was an earlier word in Middle English where it described a vice or clamp in the late 1300s and came from an even earlier variant clamm (to grip) in Old English. All of these arose from variations of klam (to squeeze together, constrict, or embrace) in German, Old High German, and Proto-Germanic which suggests that all the words relate back to the mollusk itself which was known for tightly closing its shell.

A clam shell in my Valhalla ladder

I was listening to a podcast last night (“No Such Thing as a Fish” by the Qi Elves) which mentioned clams and that they are used in some cities to check water quality. The clams and scallops are filter feeders and they shut their shells if they detect pollutants in the water. Clever clams.

Now for clammy weather. Clammy, meaning soft and sticky (how you feel in such weather) dates to the late 1300s but it comes from clay rather than the mollusk. Middle English had clam (sticky, muddy), Old English had claem (sticky clay), Flemish had klammig and Low German had klamig (sticky, damp). Old English also used claemen – to plaster so it appears that clay was used to plaster buildings and walls. It suggests the association with stickiness is what gave us clammy weather, rather than the clam shellfish.

Clammy, humid, weather is often referred to as close. While Ireland isn’t even close (pun intended) to the Caribbean in terms of humidity we have plenty of moisture in the air during all seasons so it’s common to hear people complaining about being unable to sleep during a close night. In researching this one I discovered the word is used in the USA too to describe hot, humid, airless conditions (thanks, Word Detective!)

The verb to close is one of the oldest in English, appearing around 1200 from Old French and Latin where claudere meant to shut or surround with walls. Like many verbs it evolved into an adjective with time to describe being closed in or secret, initially and later for things which are near each other.

It wasn’t until the late 1500s that close was used to describe the stuffiness of a closed room without fresh air circulating. Around the same time it was used for similar weather conditions outside that closed room.

Word Detective has also unearthed a charming list of other words for close – muggy, sulky, sticky, soggy, and pothery (definitely one for me to discuss another day).

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,
Grace (@Wordfoolery)

Exploring the Word History of Love

Hello,

As explained last time, I’m currently working through the list of words donated to me by the Academy Books Teen Book Club. This week’s word is the shortest on the list but definitely worthy of investigation – love.

I’ve dabbled in these waters before as I ended up with an entire chapter devoted to Norse Romance in my book “Words the Vikings Gave Us”, but sadly this one can’t be tracked back to the Vikings.

In Old English if you were talking about love you would have used the word lufu. I’m relieved the spelling has changed since then. Lufu described a wide variety of loves – romantic attraction, lust, affection, love of God, and love as an abstract concept. Lufu came to Old English from a ProtoGermanic root word – lubo and ultimately from an earlier root word leubh (to care, love, or desire). Lubo also gave cousin words to Old High German (liubi for joy), German (Liebe), Old Norse (Vikings always ready for some romance!), Old Norse, Dutch, Saxon, Frisian etc. Clearly Northern Europeans were a loving lot.

Love has given us a variety of phrases over the centuries which isn’t surprising as it’s so fundamental to the human experience. Calling somebody your love dates back to the early 1200s. By the early 1400s you could “fall in love” with somebody or “be in love with” them. By the late 1500s you might say “for love or money” and if you were “making love” you were flirting with them (nothing stronger for that one until the 1950s apparently).

The phrase “no love lost” is one of those ones with two opposing meanings. There are examples of it being used in the 1600s to mean two people who hate each other and also two people who love each other. Perhaps the whole love-hate relationships trope goes back further than you might think?

One which always bemused me as a tennis-loving teen was the scoring in tennis games where love means you haven’t scored any points yet. That dates back to the late 1600s and the widely accepted theory is that somebody with no score was playing for the love of the game but I find that hard to believe. Anybody have any other ideas?

Until next time, happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

Glimmer and the Glimmerman

Hello,

There’s something about dark December nights that lend themselves well to candles. The flickering glimmer of a flame brings something special to a room, doesn’t it?

Glimmer is one of those words whose meaning has changed completely over time. I always find them fascinating. A glimmer has been noun since the late 1500s and it means a faint, wavering light. However it is drawn from glimmer, the verb, which is older. In the early 1500s to glimmer was to shine dimly but in the late 1400s, when it first arrived in English, it meant to shine brightly. I’ve no idea how the meaning became so confused but at least it means you can definitely apply it to a candle’s flame as sometimes they are bright and sometimes they are not.

Glimmer arrived in English with thanks to either the Middle Dutch verb glimmen or the Middle Low German verb glimmern both of which have roots in the the Proto-Germanic term glim. Glim also gives us the roots of gleam and gleaming in English.

Glimmerman is not listed in either Merriam Webster or the Collins dictionary but I did find it in “The Dictionary of Hiberno-English” which I’m enjoying reading at the moment. Hiberno-English, in case you’re curious, is the particular variety of English spoken in Ireland. It has adopted many words and grammatical structures directly from Irish (Gaelic) and merged them with English over the centuries. It also retains a few Old English words which have fallen out of use in British English.

As it turned out I have a faint (glimmering?) personal link to the glimmerman “(colloquial) a Dublin Gas Company inspector during the war years who investigated contraventions of the rationing regulations (the “glimmer” was the minimal flame that could be obtained – illegally and dangerously – from the residual gas in the system when it was turned off)” (with thanks to the dictionary mentioned above). This is a reference to World War II, by the way, when the two or three glimmermen employed to cover Dublin city could enter a premises and disconnect them from the supply if they were cheating the gas supply rationing in this fashion. There’s additional information about them over on Wikipedia if you’re curious.

Several members of my father’s family across three generations worked in the Dublin Gas Company (1824-2006) during the 1900s, although none of them were glimmermen. I’m surprised not to find the word in British dictionaries, but perhaps gas wasn’t rationed in the same way there? If any British readers know more, please let me know in the comments.

Until next time happy reading, writing, wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)

Mistletoe – an Unromantic History

Hello and Happy Christmas,

With only a few days to go until Christmas 2020, it feels like the right time to chat about the rather unromantic history of the classic Christmas evergreen, mistletoe. You probably know the tradition of kissing underneath it, but trust me there’s more to it than that when you dive into its word history.

The word mistletoe comes from mister (the name of the shrub) plus an Old English word for twig. The origin of mistle isn’t very romantic though. It was German originally and either comes from mist (dung) or mash (the malt and water mix using in brewing). These are for earthy reasons. The dung connection is because the plant spreads its seeds via bird droppings and the mash connection is because the berries are so sticky.

The origins of the mistletoe tradition springs more from Viking and yuletide celebrations than Christmas and it involves a touch of murder.

Odin, as you may recall, was the head of the Viking gods. His wife Frigg had a son called Baldur, known as Baldur the brave and the beautiful. He was beloved by all but as a result his half-sibling Loki, yes the one from Avengers, was jealous. When Baldur began having nightmares about his own death his doting mother made every animal, vegetable, and mineral in the universe swear never to hurt him. The only thing she didn’t bother with was mistletoe which grew close to the ground and looked weak.

Afterwards the other gods enjoyed throwing spears, arrows, rocks, and other items at Baldur and watching them fall away at the last moment thanks to their vow. When Loki discovered the mistletoe exception he made a short javelin of the mistletoe and tricked one of the other gods into throwing it and it killed Baldur. Since that day the plant is banished to grow high in the branches of trees and always to be hung high in our homes when used as a decoration at this time of year.

If you’re still keen on kissing under the mistletoe after the stories of bird droppings and murder you should be aware of the most important rule. With each kiss a berry is removed from the bunch and when they are all gone, no more kisses may be stolen beneath it.

Until next time happy reading, writing, and wordfooling,

Grace (@Wordfoolery)