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The first English bastard appeared in 1297, although you can be sure people were born out of wedlock before that.

Today people get called bastards all the time without reference to their parents’ state of marriage, and increasingly people are being born of non-married couples and find it offensive to be called bastards.

Around the time when bastard first appeared in English William the Conqueror was known also as William the Bastard.  This isn’t because he was a dirty rotten conqueror—the word bastard hadn’t taken on its insulting meaning yet—he was William the Bastard because his parents hadn’t been married.

Having babies out of wedlock has until very recently been something to be terribly ashamed of and downright impractical.  So it makes sense that bastard has been used as an insult for some time, but it only made it into print as an insult in 1830.

The root of the word is from Old French and grew out of bast,  the name for a packsaddle, which was the structure used to load packs onto a mule.  Travelers with romantic intention and opportunity may not have had a convenient bed nearby so the blankets and saddle would serve as bedding and pillow.

Thus children who were not conceived in the marriage bed, were said to be conceived “on the bast” and were therefore bastards.

At least that’s what the Oxford English Dictionary says.

But there, the entry for bastard is perhaps not the most up-to-date.  This word has not yet received the repeat scrutiny of the third edition now in progress.

As such the citations given there for bastard are mostly more than a century old.

Other fresher dictionary etymologies decry this pack-saddle theory, saying the chronology of appearance of the supposed source and resulting words are wrong.  A better guess (they say) might be a Germanic source word bost meaning “marriage” and that somehow bastards relate to offspring from polygamous marriages.

This is a case where accuracy and advancement of research has struck a blow against entertainment value.

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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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If you remember that slapstick comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, you may remember Ollie’s standard line

“another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”

Stan Laurel was the thin one and Oliver Hardy was the fat one.

This might bespeak a larger appetite on the part of Oliver Hardy and if so there might be an etymological explanation for Ollie’s quote.

Around the year 1300 the word mess made its first appearance in writing in English.  This date points to a possible source of the word from French since it’s within a few hundred years of the Norman Conquest and it would have taken a few centuries for a French word to have been first picked up and adopted into English, and then eventually to find its way onto paper.

Sure enough the Oxford English Dictionary traces mess back to Anglo-Norman and Old French before that.

But what a hungry Oliver Hardy might have found interesting about a mess of 700 years ago is that it didn’t mean “a spot of trouble” as he might have meant in reprimanding Stanley, at first a mess was a serving of food, a meal.

This connection between the word mess and food is preserved for us in the military where soldiers, sailors and pilots eat in the mess.

As with most French words mess actually goes back to Latin and the OED even takes it back further to Indo-European.

Back those five thousand years or more the Indo-European root mittere meant “to send” and the idea here is that the food was sent to the table.  So from Indo-European to Latin the meaning was “to send” but while in Latin a meaning of “food” evolved that was carried into languages including French and Italian.

English adopted the “food” meaning but English was the only language to mutate the meaning again into our current meaning of “disorderly,” “untidy,” “cluttered” or “dirty.”

Here’s how that worked:

After that first appearance in 1300 the word mess changed its meanings in English a little bit.  In one case it went from meaning “a meal” to meaning “a single portion.”

In another case it went from meaning “a meal” to meaning a specific kind of meal, something soft, liquid or goopy; porridge or soup would have been called mess by some people as early as 1330.

This is the meaning that matters to us because it is this mixed-up-stew kind of meal that gave rise to a meaning of mess by 1738 as feed for an animal and by 1828 as an unappetizing mixture of foods.  Somewhere about this time the undesirable state of “things mixed together” lent the word mess to applications outside of the world of food.

The OED’s first citation for mess meaning “a predicament” or “troubling state of affairs” is from 1812.  So by the time Stan and Ollie were getting into messes in the 1930s the principal meaning of “food” had been somewhat obsolete for a century or so.

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According to John Ayto’s A to Z of Food and Drink:

“These new-moon-shaped puff-pastry rolls seem first to have been introduced to British and American breakfast tables towards the end of the nineteenth century.”

He goes on to cast aspersions on the stories told about the invention of these yummy baked goods. Wikipedia disses the stories too.

I’ll tell that tale in a moment, but I want first to point out that Ayto accurately called croissants new-moon-shaped.

John Ayto has written several books about words and their origins and so I’m sure that he chose his words there very carefully.

Of course we call that shape of moon a crescent moon and of course the words crescent and croissant are really two flavors of the same word; crescent arriving in English from French in the 1300s and croissant along with the pastry in at the end of the 1800s, also from French.

But when I refer to a crescent moon I’m usually just intending to communicate its fingernail-clipping shape. It could just as easily be a waning moon as a waxing moon.

But new-moon-shaped refers only to waxing, or growing moons, and this is as is should be because the very word crescent has an etymology related to the growing moon.

A new moon begins with a very thin sliver of a crescent that grows and grows until it’s a full moon. It’s that growing we’re looking for.

I mentioned in the podictionary episode on recruit that an Indo-European root ker meant to grow. This same root turns up as crescere in Latin and was then applied to the growing moon. The shape thus took its name from this horned appearance of the moon.

This same shape is an Islamic symbol and the much discredited story of the invention of the edible croissant is tied to this Islamic crescent.

Supposedly the bakers in either Vienna or Budapest were up early one morning going at it with their bread dough and stoking up their ovens when they heard a digging noise.

They alerted the army who then prevented the Turks from entering the city by tunneling under the city walls. As a reward the bakers were allowed to, or asked to create celebratory goodies in the shape of the Islamic crescent.

Trouble is that these Turkish attacks happened back around the end of the 1600s and the first reference we have to the pastries doesn’t come until something like 170 years later. The first time the word was used in English was in 1899 according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The user was a small time author from Alabama named William Chambers Morrow. He used it pretty enthusiastically too since it appears three times in his book about how students lived in Paris 100 and some-odd years ago.

But this use of croissant for the delicacy didn’t mean that was the first time English speakers were experiencing them. Crescent rolls are cited as an Americanism 13 years before.

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Outside my window there stands an oak tree. I’d rather watch birds but sometimes I’m entertained by the antics of squirrels.

For some reason most of the squirrels here in my town are black. Head out of town and they are red or brown and smaller. Where I grew up they were all grey.

But they all have one thing in common, a big bushy tail. In fact the entire species in named for it’s tail.

As often as not these little rodents are using my oak tree for a highway moving from a garage nearby to a pine tree next door. In so doing they fearlessly fling themselves into the air and catch onto a branch of the tree they are landing in.

I had always assumed that the reason a squirrel had a big bushy tail was that as they careened through the space between branches they used it to wave around and keep from tumbling out of control. And they do, I’ve seen them enough times to know.

I did a little web searching and found one site that claimed a squirrel uses its tail to communicate. That makes sense, my dog uses her tail to communicate too and it’s certainly true that we humans have various body parts evolved for one purpose and used as communication tools as well.

Think of people who wave their hands around when the talk. More to the point think of your eyebrows designed to keep dust and rain out of your eyes but very useful in sending signals to other people.

But last year I heard of a study of squirrels using their tails in a completely different way.

Rattle snakes like to eat squirrels and because rattle snakes are equipped with heat sensing organs to help them hunt, squirrels that live in the same environment as rattle snakes have evolved an ability to heat up their tails when confronted by a snake so that when the snake strikes it tends to misfire toward the hotter tail and miss the main meal.

These are ground squirrels so their tails aren’t quite so bushy.

Squirrels in South Africa have also been studied and found to be using their tails in another temperature related way.

These guys hang their bushy bottle brushes overhead like some kind of parasol to keep the sun off. The study found that tail shading in sunny 40ºC heat allowed the little tree rats to drop their body temperatures to 35 ºC and extend their nut hiding to a full 7 hour day.

Overheated rodents knocked off after only 3 hours.

And believe it or not this is exactly why a squirrel is called a squirrel.

When the French invaders arrived in England in 1066 the Anglos were calling the things aquerne. But the French soon changed that to esquirel which they had gotten from Latin.

The Romans before them had chosen their word because the Greeks before them had used skiouros to describe these little rascals.

In Greek skiouros means “shade tail.” In fact the uros part is related to our English word arse.

It’s worth touching on that Old English word for squirrel aquerne.

It, as most Old English words, came from Germanic and like the modern German word for squirrel essentially means “oak horn.” No one knows why these little guys might be called horns, but the oak part is obvious enough, I can see it through my window.

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Tonight I made Pad Thai for dinner. A few months ago my friend Sunaree who is Thai and her husband had my husband and I over for dinner and she cooked Pad Thai for us. I have to tell you it was the most amazing and delicious experience. I didn't take a photo of dinner as it was the first time we had dinner together and I thought it would be rude. The food was incredible and the presentation so colorful. Her husband loves her cooking too and is her perfect match.

Yesterday Sunaree brought me some rice noodles and I tried my first hand at it. I bought a sauce mix ( I know, not very original) however I am going to try making the sauce on my own when I have more time. I only have about an hour in the evening during the week so cooking quickly is often a must. My husband and I had seconds and we'll both have some left over for work tomorrow. Yum!

This is the closest photo to what Sunaree served us for dinner that night (an exceptional photo of Pad Thai I might add!). Pim used a few different ingredients than Sunaree did and I used a packet of sauce picked up at the store which my husband and I both found quite good. I also substituted the shrimp for chicken and left out the egg as we are watching our cholesterol which is a good thing but fresh shrimp with this meal is incredible. I'll save the times to have it with shrimp when Sunaree is doing the cooking. Visually, hers looks so much more vibrant.

I can't say enough about Sunaree, she is an amazing cook and so sweet too, I can't wait until she cooks for us again. After all, why have a copy when you can have the real thing! :)

Okay - so I have spent way more time on that than I really wanted to. But my husband ripped our massive CD collection to better quality so we have both been reloading our music to our respective computers. Which hasn't been easy because while we have a nearly 100G of music, some of it is JUST his and some it is JUST mine and some of it works for both of us.

So now I have have a music folder of the nice new stuff and the music folder of the old stuff I had on my computer. Not all of it is in the new folder because I might have downloaded it or had it for years from wherever. I'm loading everything into iTunes so I can compare them and delete things but now I have iTunes questions. Like can I delete something from iTunes and have it deleted from the computer at the same time? (Which is what I want to do.) And if I move stuff from one folder to another, will iTunes still find it?

Argh.

In-between a bunch of other things my husband and I have been organizing our music library. I had played around with stuff on iTunes but now I have deleted all the stuff in the iTunes folder (on purpose.) Of course they all still show up in iTunes. In media player I used to be able to update a library and it would clean up all the missing links. Do I have to do that manually with iTunes?

Well howdy doody! This would be Maddy Gaiman. Dad did the last blog post… wasn’t it boring compared to me though? I sure thought so. With that said, I bet that there are people out there that think I’m weird and can’t wait for him to get back. How sad! Well yesterday, dad had some interviews with local people here at the hotel, and then we went out and had yummy food for lunch. For dinner we went to an Indian restaurant and were joined by the unit publicist for Hellboy 2, and the guy that does the bonus features and all that jazz on the DVD. (His name is Javier and he’s pretty much the coolest person I have ever heard of plus you will be hearing more of him tomorrow.)
Today we went out and walked around Budapest with Doug Jones and it was the first time I have seen him without all of his Abe make-up on! Like whoa, crazy talk! We walked from our hotel to Margaret Island (which my dad kept calling Madeleine Island on accident), and back, which was about a five mile walk. While on Margaret Island, I was thirsty, and we came upon this little table with a lot of random food and drinks on it. Dad noticed the cereal on it and figured out that it was a Craft service table like they have on movie sets. All of a sudden we saw this guy with his hair all slicked back in a suit and an overcoat, which was quite unusual since it was pretty hot out today. After looking at the man Doug realized it was Viggo Mortensen! Sure enough, right after he had figured that out we saw make-up people, and trailers with a lot of equipment in them so obviously he was there filming a movie! (To make sure I wasn’t telling you false information I checked on IMDB just now and apparently the movie they are filming is called “Good,” and down at the bottom it says Filming Location: Budapest, Hungary!) So after we got off Margaret Island we came across this little outdoor market thingie on the chain bridge, and Dad got me a pretty ring! Joy!

Madeleine looking thoughtful, so you can see her ring.

By Michelle Lana

By Michelle Lana

By Michelle Lana