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By Anatoly Liberman

Where there is golf, there are clubs; hence this post.  But club is an intriguing word regardless of the association.  It surfaced only in Middle English.  Since the noun believed to be its etymon, namely klubba, has been attested in Old Icelandic, dictionaries say that club came to English with the Vikings or their descendants.  Perhaps it did.  In Icelandic, klubba coexists with its synonym klumba, and the opinion prevails that bb developed from mb, which later became mp.  (The near synonymous lump is not related.  Its cognates are Engl. limp and German Lump(en) “rag”; however, the history of the limp-lump group is even harder to trace than that of club and its evasive kin.)  Although Engl. clump surfaced only in the 17^th century, it has a respectable Old English antecedent and may, but need not be, of Scandinavian descent.  To wed clump to club, it is asserted that club emerged with the original sense “something pressed tightly together; clump.”  This sense will also haunt us next week.  At the moment, we can’t help wondering about the main thing:  Is a cudgel “a substance beaten into a mass, something pressed together”?  A cudgel is rather destined to beat its victim into such a mass.  Those who attempt to save the situation say that a club got its name from thickening toward the end; allegedly, it was visualized as having a knob (a lump).

When we turn to German, we find Kolben “butt of a rifle; piston; retort.”  Where English, or rather Scandinavian, has k-l-vowel-b, German has k-vowel-l-b.  Are club (from klumb?) and Kolben related?  Among the cognates of Kolben (which goes back to the older form kolbo), we find Old Icelandic kylfa “cudgel” and kolfr “bolt; metal bar; blunt spear; the tongue of a bell” (a later form is kólfr, but ó is simply o lengthened before lf).  German etymologists hedge and say that Kolben may be related to the club group and Keule, another word for “thick stick.”  Now, Keule appears to be related to German Kugel “bullet” and Engl. cudgel.  The sense “bullet” reinforced the conclusion that cudgels are things with knobs, bullet-like lumps, at their end.  The semantic bridge is shaky.  It rests on too many comparisons and hardly accounts for how klu-b is related to kol-b.  However, if these words are old, the situation can be rescued.  Compare the English verbs kn-ow (with kn pronounced as in acknowledge) and ken “to know.”  A root is often represented by a form with a vowel and a form without it.   A similar alternation can be seen in the reconstructed root gel- “to roll together; stick” and its variant gl-, as in Latin globus “globe”, literally “a round thing.”  It won’t do to say that in Kolben the vowel and l were simply “transposed,” for other languages also have words with the same order of sounds: compare Icelandic kolfr and kylfa, mentioned above.  Additionally, in German itself, alongside Kolben, with its reference to things thickening or widening toward the end, we find Kloben “log,” and the two may be related.

Dictionaries list numerous Germanic cognates of globe, including cleave “split” and the already familiar clump.  With regard to cleave I’ll quote a sta

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By Dr Sesh Kamal Sunkara

In vitro fertilization (IVF) involves the retrieval of an egg and fertilization with sperm in the laboratory (in vitro) as opposed to the process happening within the human body (in vivo), with a natural conception. IVF was first introduced to overcome tubal factor infertility but has since been used to alleviate all types of infertility and nearly four million babies have been born worldwide as a result of assisted reproductive technology.

The birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the world’s first IVF baby was from a natural menstrual cycle without the use of any stimulation drugs. As success rates were low with natural cycles in the early days of IVF, ovarian stimulation regimens were introduced into IVF to maximize success rates. The aim was to retrieve more eggs to overcome the attrition in numbers at fertilization, cleavage, and implantation. However, with the introduction of ovarian stimulation regimens the complication of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) arose.

There have been several discussions among IVF clinicians on what the ideal number of eggs should be to optimize IVF outcome and minimize risk of OHSS. We analysed a large database of over 400, 000 cycles provided by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in order to establish the association between egg number and live birth rate in IVF.

We found that live birth rate increased with increasing number of eggs retrieved up to 15 eggs and plateaued from 15 to 20 eggs with a decline in live birth rate beyond 20. The analysis of the data suggested that around 15 eggs may be the optimal number to aim for in a fresh IVF cycle in order to maximize treatment success whilst minimizing the risk of OHSS. We also established a nomogram which is the first of its kind that allows prediction of live birth for a given egg number and female age group. This is potentially valuable for patients and clinicians in planning IVF treatment protocols and counselling regarding the prognosis for a live birth occurrence, especially in women with either predicted or a previous poor ovarian response.

The full paper and supplementary data has been made publicly available here, as published in Human Reproduction by Sesh Kamal Sunkara, Vivian Rittenberg, Nick Raine-Fenning, Siladitya Bhattacharya, Javier Zamora and Arri Coomarasamy. Above table appears with full permission from Human Reproduction and Oxford Journals.

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I often use Urbandictionary to research slang uses of otherwise staid and respectable words.

Urbandictionary in turn tries to induce website visitors to browse the site further by including along the bottom each page seemingly randomly selected images that other Urbandictionary users have uploaded to complement their homegrown definitions of words.

An image portraying cleavage caught my eye.

Now cleavage is a very interesting word even without pictures so I thought I’d tell you a little about it.

Long before cleavage referred to the space between a woman’s breasts there were two words that both evolved out of Old English into two words in Modern English.  Both are cleave and strangely one means “stick together” while the other means “break apart.”

The “stick together” word is related to cling while the “break apart” word is related to cloven as in cloven hooves.

It wasn’t until 1946 that cleavage made an appearance as a word in English applying to the female form.

I don’t know for sure, but I think we can presume that it was the “break apart” meaning of cleave that lead to its use in reference to women’s chests.

That first citation for this use of cleavage appeared in Time Magazine.

Time was reporting on deliberations in the movie industry.  The Motion Picture Association of America had set up its own censorship board mostly so that the government wouldn’t step in and do the censoring for them.

The word cleavage had been adopted within the Association to refer to the shadowed area indicating the space between an actress’s breasts.

The censors had to decide if too much shadow was too much.

In the case of the Time Magazine story the film in question was called The Wicked Lady and originated in Britain.

The censors decided it was just too racy for American eyes and the English film makers re-shot the offending scenes cleaving the film into two slightly different editions, one for each side of the pond.

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