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Although he lived more than 2000 years ago Horace seems to capture my dilemma with communicating in the internet age.

He said brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio, which means “I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.”

The balance is increasingly difficult to achieve don’t you think?

Twitter limits your message to 140 characters. A recipe for obscurity you’d think, but no, it’s wildly successful.

Long emails don’t get read, they get skimmed. If you take the time to lay out your message in full it risks not being read at all.

Thus Shakespeare’s “brevity is the soul of wit.” You have to think carefully about how to make your point and keep it short.

The word brief first appeared in English with a meaning of “a letter of authority” around 700 years ago from French.

That’s at least what the written evidence shows.

This meaning would have evolved out of the shortness of a letter or note compared with some longer legal document and have come from the Latin brevis meaning “short” which in turn likely related to a Greek word brachys with the same sense.

But the influence of the Romans plus their use of written instructions meant that the Latin word had actually been adopted into most Germanic languages early on and so quite possibly was in use in Old English.

It may be that it just never got written down or spawned any descendant words of its own, so we don’t know that it was ever part of English before the French influence that came after William the Conqueror.

Because lawyers gather their documents for a case into collections they call briefs we have begun to brief each other and lawyers themselves are sometimes called briefs.

It wasn’t until 1934 that a reference to brief referring to “underpants” entered the written record as found by The Oxford English Dictionary.

Although we might think of briefs as what are now sometimes called tighty whities they must have referred to something else at first because this style of underpants is said to have originated also in 1934 only being marketed in 1935.

Since we don’t know if brief referred to an earlier style or what that style was, brief continues to be obscure.

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Energy saving and a move to reduce climate change emissions have made compact florescent bulbs quite popular. Their coiled image is even becoming some kind of a symbol of responsible energy use.

But etymologically they aren’t bulbs at all.

Our word bulb comes from a Greek root.

In fact a literal “root.”

It was the roots of plants that were swollen that were called bolbos in Greek.

As the word came down to English in the 16^th century through Latin it narrowed its meaning from including things like garlic to mostly referring to onions.

So the spiral of a compact florescent bulb isn’t bulbous at all.

The next question is why the glass casing surrounding an electric light might be compared to an onion. The reason is that there was an intervening step in the analogous reference.

The technology of lightbulbs was preceded by the technology of thermometers.

A thermometer often now, and more often back in the early 1800s, consists of a glass tube up which a column of mercury or alcohol can travel from a reservoir at the base. The glass tube is long and thin, the reservoir at the base is a little fatter and rounder.

A thermometer has a passing resemblance in shape to an onion with its greens on. Thus the reservoir got called the bulb and from there any rounded glass thingamajig such as the one containing a filament for illumination.

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In 1601 Philemon Holland came out with an English translation from Latin, of the now 2000 year old Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder.

Here’s what Pliny had to say about the word prevarication:

“The ploughman, unlesse he bend and stoupe forward..must..leave much undone as it ought to be; a fault which in Latine we call Prevarication  and this tearme appropriate unto Husbandrie, is borrowed from thence by Lawyers.”

These days when someone is asked a question and they skate around the answer they are said to prevaricate.

They are avoiding the question.

The word prevaricate was built on an earlier word varicare that meant “to straddle” which in turn came from varus meaning “crooked.”

It may seem obvious how a word that meant “crooked” grew into a word that means “avoiding the question” but how did the farmer get involved?

The “crooked” meaning of varus was also applied in classical Latin to the crooked legs of people who were knock-kneed.

The pre part of prevaricate might be thought of as “before” or “going forward” so that prevaricate comes to mean “going forward crookedly” or “walking crookedly.”

Thus the reason a negligent plowman was said to prevaricate was that the furrow he cut wasn’t straight. Hence a lawyer or politician who isn’t giving you a straight line is prevaricating.

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When I hear the word chauvinist I think of a person—male—who takes a superior view of the capabilities of his gender. I guess I’m influenced by the 1970s phrase male chauvinist pig that evolved out of the woman’s lib movement.

Dictionaries take a wider perspective and offer examples of chauvinists who think it is their country that is innately superior.

Chauvinist and chauvinism are words that demonstrate the power of the entertainment industry.

Chauvinist is a word that arose because of the over-the-top antics of Nicholas Chauvin.

The story goes that Nicholas Chauvin was a soldier in Napoleon’s army and was mad-crazy enthusiastic about fighting for his country and his leader. He sustained war wounds on 17 different occasions, lost fingers, had his face disfigured and still kept up his rah-rah attitude. Napoleon was so happy to have such a keen supporter that Nicholas Chauvin was given a ceremonial sword and a cash prize.

But eventually Napoleon himself fell out of favor and Nicholas Chauvin’s excessive enthusiasm began to earn him only ridicule.

At least two plays were written in the early 1800s that featured him as an over-zealous wing-nut. Through these plays people in France and then elsewhere began using his name to describe people who had an unreasonable superiority complex about their own social group—with particular emphasis on nationalism and militarism.

His name became so famous through theses plays and the adoption of the term chauvinism that people actually began to believe that he had been a real person.

I say this because in 1993 Gerard de Puymège went looking for authentic military records about Nicholas Chauvin and wrote a book about the fact that the guy had never really existed; he was just a creation of the theatre.

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A midwife is called a midwife not because the midwife is in the middle of anything, nor because during the birth of children the midwife is helping the wife as opposed to the husband.

It is pretty uncommon to find men who are midwives but I guess they do exist. The etymology of the word midwife reflects the fact that assisting in bringing a new little person into this world has long been a gender role and almost completely dominated by women.

The wife part of midwife has nothing to do with the marital state of the parents of the baby being delivered, nor that of the midwife herself.

The word wife predates an association with being married or unmarried and in our earliest records just meant “woman.”

If we paste that meaning on midwife we get midwoman.

Unfortunately this doesn’t get us much further along the way toward understanding why these deliverers of babies might be called midwives.

We have to take another step and examine the mid part of midwife.

In this case mid does not mean middle.

There don’t seem to be too many examples of words other than midwife that retain an old meaning of mid but what it is believed to have mean was “with.”

Thus midwife literally means “with woman” and refers to the fact that this woman called a midwife has the job of being with the mother during her labor and delivery.

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Once upon a time my mother was knitting a style of sweater that had many open holes in the weave. My father looked at it and said “no wonder it’s going so fast, it’s mostly air.”

That’s the thing about nets too, they’re mostly air; but it’s what’s around the air that does the job.

I was looking at the web based dictionary wordnik and one of the features they have is a little graphic representing frequency of a word’s appearance over time. It’s interesting that their plot for the word net falls off during the 1920s to 1950s and then pops back up again in the 1990s.

It seems obvious to me that the frequency of the word net over the past decade would have increased as an abbreviation for the word internet.

I wonder what made the word less frequent after 1950; perhaps more grocery store shopping and less small-scale fishing? I don’t picture small-scale fishermen as being terribly prolific writers who’d have bulked up the word-stock before that.

If you have any ideas let me know.

Of course it could be that the wordnik stats feature has a kink in it.

Clearly the internet is so called because it is full of links between nodes, just like other networks; streets, train tracks, groups of friends.

All of these networks are so called because a real net is strands linking knots.

But it turns out that a real net is called a net not because of the strands but because of the knots.

I mentioned knitting and nodes as well as net and knot and all of these words go back to a knotty origin. They have a granular kind of Old English taste to them don’t they?

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Glass is an example of a word that has shattered into lots of meanings we currently recognize but also with many earlier and forgotten etymological branches.

In English the word shows up well over 1100 years ago in the works attributed to King Alfred the Great.

Then, as now, the word meant the substance glass.

Since people make lots of useful things out of glass these too began adopt the word as their name:

• windows,
• drinking vessels,
• bottles,
• hourglasses,
• telescopes,
• spectacles,
• mirrors,
• barometers,
• magnifying glasses, and
• microscopes

have all at some time in the last 600 years or so been called a glass.

Today, apart from the material itself, spectacles and drinking vessels are the things that come to mind when someone refers to their glasses without which they can’t find their glass.

The word glass arrived with the oldest of Old English, because the manufacture of glass is one of the oldest of technologies.

According to John Ayto’s book Word Origins, glass manufacture historically produced colored glass, not clear glass, and so ghel, the Indo-European ancestor of glass, was actually a color word that also gave Greek a word meaning “green” and English the word yellow.

The American Heritage Dictionary assigns this same Indo-European root ghel the meaning “to shine,” and so associates the root with the word gold.

Glass is sometimes said to be a super-cooled fluid as opposed to a solid.

The reason people say this is that unlike many minerals glass isn’t formed into crystals but made up of its constituent molecules all jumbled together at random as they would be in a liquid.

This is what makes glass so useful because unlike H₂O which turns from ice to water all in a rush, glass just becomes oozier and oozier as it warms up and thus can be formed into all the useful objects that people want to refer to as a glass.

This too is why the windows in ancient buildings are made up of panes that are thin at the top and thicker at the bottom. Over the centuries they too have oozed; just very, very slowly.

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There’s no other kinds once you’ve tasted the brine of pickled fish.

That seems to have been the feeling of sailors who’d been exposed to a tasty kind of sauce during their voyages to Malaysia.

According to most dictionaries the Malaysians appear to have adopted the word for this brine of pickled fish from Amoy, a Chinese dialect.

Since adding the brine of pickled fish to hamburgers and hotdogs is not currently standard procedure something has obviously changed about the meaning of the word ketchup.

According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America the prime ingredient in what in the Far East had been called ketchup wasn’t fish but soybeans. As explained there Europeans couldn’t make the stuff themselves because they didn’t grow soybeans and so tried instead to produce ketchup using such things as mushrooms, walnuts, anchovies and oysters.

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for ketchup hasn’t yet been updated for the third edition and has as its most recent citation an item dated 1874. Sure enough the prime ingredient listed throughout this entry is mushrooms.

Tomatoes are mentioned in the OED entry but it was the year before that, in 1873 that the H. J. Heinz company began selling tomato ketchup.

So somewhere in there tomatoes came to dominate. And so it is that what we call ketchup is red and has a consistency of applesauce instead of more closely resembling soysauce.

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This is a special podictionary episode in which I interview Philip Durkin, the Principal Etymologist for The Oxford English Dictionary.

I contacted Dr. Durkin because his book The Oxford Guide to Etymology was recently released in North America and he was kind enough to spend a comfortable 20 minutes talking with me.

Podictionary often concentrates on the changes in meaning that a word goes through over time so when we talked we discussed the other side of etymology—changes in word form.

Dr. Durkin explained some of the tools of etymology as well as talked specifically about the etymologies of the words friar and penguin.

At the moment there is no transcript available of this interview but I encourage you to listen either by clicking the “download” link above or via the website audio player.

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A lot of the dictionaries I looked at don’t even include the word hobbit.

Most of the ones that do credit JRR Tolkien as having dreamt up hobbits for his books The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

This is both understandable and believable.

But when I looked at Brewers Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable I got a hint of something more.  While most of the other sources say that hobbits were created by Tolkien, Brewers slyly says that they feature in his stories.

To get the deeper truth we need to burrow deeper into the hobbit hole and The Oxford English Dictionary is the place to do that.

The OED is in a unique position of authority because Tolkien actually worked there for a few years early in his career. Plus a later editor had studied under Tolkien’s professorship.

So in the late ‘60s when The Lord of the Rings was making its first rise to popularity the OED added hobbit as an entry.

How better to check out the etymology of the word than to ask its creator?

Except that JRR Tolkien denied having created the word.

He helped them define it as an imaginary people, small but human, whose name means ‘hole-dweller’ but did not claim credit for their invention.

No citations were found that predated Tolkien’s 1937 use in the book of the same name, so that’s what’s given as hobbit’s earliest usage in OED.

But since that time, as reported in an OED newsletter, the word has been found in a 19th century folklore journal.

So even though JRR couldn’t remember where he’d first heard of hobbits, it turns out his denial of inventing them was justified.

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The word frolic seems to me forever associated with Newfoundland.

Long before my brother-in-law (a Newfie) even met my sister I heard a comedy skit where Newfoundlanders were rendered as loving to sing and frolic, moving to Ontario and turning into alcoholics.

This depiction was based on the economics of the time when the cod fishery was collapsing and Ontario was the economic engine of Canada.

Now Ontario is becoming the rusting industrial heartland of Canada while Newfoundland is gaining oil and energy aspirations just like Alberta.

Etymologically the word frolic has nothing to do with Newfoundland except perhaps in a sort of metaphorical sense that the economy tends to bounce up and down.

For the word frolic is suspected to go back to a root that relates to jumping up.

Frolic first appeared in English in the 16^th century and came from Germanic roots.

The word at first wasn’t a verb but an adjective and meant “joyful.” But it’s suspected that the “joyful” meaning was applied based on an even older root that meant “to jump” as you would when you’re feeling particularly joyful.

Thus the activity and motion that we might associate with frolicking points right back through the meaning of “high spirits” to a leaping source for the etymology.