February 2009

  • Assassins

    By lisala on 2/24/09 5:33pm
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    The AHD offers this definition:

    1. One who murders by surprise attack, especially one who carries out a plot to kill a prominent person.

    2. Assassin A member of a secret order of Muslims who terrorized and killed Christian Crusaders and others.

    Assassin is an old word, and one that English borrowed in the Renaissance. The official etymology is that English borrowed it from French, who borrowed assassine from Medieval Latin assassnus, from Arabic hashshashin, pl. of the Arabic word for a hashish user, from the Arabic for hashish.

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  • Adders, Aprons, and Doves

    By lisala on 2/15/09 11:38am
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    One of my very favorite Bible verses is this one:

    Loke ye be prudent as neddris and symple as dowves

    It's from Matthew 10:16; the version above is in Middle English though. This version from the 1611 King James might be more familiar looking:

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  • Paradise and Eden

    By lisala on 2/13/09 4:02pm
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    Paradise is generally associated with pleasant garden-like areas, or the Garden of Eden; the formal Bosch's Paradise.definition has the Edenic association as the first definition:

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  • Window and Daisy

    By lisala on 2/12/09 7:14pm
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    Window is one of those words that is so very basic and common that we don't really even think about it. We tend to assume that it involves glass, though of course windows weren't always made of glass; earlier they were often simply holes in the wall, Image of a window cut into the stone of spys castle.designed to let in light and air, and, let smoke and odor out. In fact, windows are so very much taken for granted now, that we have forgotten that the word is a fossilized metaphor. Our modern English word window was borrowed in the middle ages from Old Norse. The Old Norse word for window is vindauga. Vindauga is a compound of vindr, "air, wind" and auga, "eye," or "wind eye," which, if you think about it, very much describes the function of a window. "Wind eye" is especially interesting as a metaphor because it's an example of a medieval Germanic poetic figure called a kenning.

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  • Lord and Lady

    By lisala on 2/11/09 1:47pm
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    Image of a loaf of bread.

    A fair number of the basic words we use everyday are from Old English. Some of them have especially interesting heritages or etymologies. Take the word lord. The AHD offers this definition (I'm truncating it):

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  • Red Letter Day

    By lisala on 2/10/09 5:28pm
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    This is one of those idioms we use all the time. Everyone knows that a "red letter day" is one that stands out as important, or "memorably happy," as the AHD puts it. Behind the idiom lies an actual medieval tradition. In the middle ages, the wealthy had very special hand-made, gorgeous prayer books that associated the calendar page for Decemberchurch calendar with specific images, and prayers. Each month of the year was represented, with a list of the important dates, and, typically, an image of a seasonal agricultural or aristocratic practice (hawking in May, for instance) and an image of the zodiac sign for that month. The list of dates, the actual calendar, used color-coding to indicate the really important dates from the less important dates.

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