March 2009

  • Salary

    By lisala on 3/15/09 7:10am
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    We all know salary; a salary is the "Fixed compensation for services, paid to a person on a regular basis." Salary is another word for wages. The two words are almost direct synonyms, and the fact that English has both words is an artifact of the way Modern English was Image of a salt packet.formed—wages was the word used for a couple of hundred years until the late fourteenth century. But today I'm interested in salary. English borrowed salary, or rather salerie, from the Anglo-Normans who came to conquer England in 1066; the Anglo-Normans borrowed salerie from Latin salrium, a word the Romans used to refer to the money given to Roman soldiers specifically to buy salt. Latin salrium is based on the neuter form of salrius, "pertaining to salt," itself derived from the word for salt, sal.

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  • Feisty and Petard

    By lisala on 3/13/09 7:22am
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    Feisty is one of those words that we all know. It's used a lot in ordinary speech, and generally, with a positive implication. Here's the usual definition:

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  • Endeavor

    By lisala on 3/10/09 11:09am
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    Endeavor is one of those nifty words in English that functions as both a verb and a noun. The standard definition of endeavor as a noun:

    1. A conscientious or concerted effort toward an end; an earnest attempt.

    2. Purposeful or industrious activity; enterprise.

    The etymology is one of those sorts of interesting fossil word histories. Modern English endeavor is from Middle English endevour, from the Middle English verb endeveren, "to make an effort, from the Middle English (putten) in dever, "to put oneself" in duty, make it one's duty.

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  • Plagiarize

    By lisala on 3/8/09 1:50pm
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    That Roman association between theft of intellectual property is embedded in the word plagiarism. Etymologically, plagiary comes from the Latin plagirius, kidnapper, and plagiarist, from plagium, kidnapping. Latin plagium is from plaga. There's a metaphor there, in that for writers, quite often their books are (metaphorically speaking) their children. To steal their words (or images or sounds) is thus a form of kidnapping.

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  • Red Herring

    By lisala on 3/6/09 11:11am
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    I suspect that most of us are familiar with the phrase "red herring" in the context of books or films, and that we know it best from its second definition, to wit:

    2. Something that draws attention away from the central issue.

    Not only is this a narrative technique—particularly in mysteries and detective stories, involving a "false" but distracting clue—it's also a logical fallacy. In Dorothy Sayers' mystery Five Red Herrings, she sets up six suspects; only one is legitimate. The other five are red herrings. Red herring is also used to refer to a logical fallacy, better known to rhetoricians as ignoratio elenchi. It's when someone deliberately attempts to change the subject or divert the argument in a debate. In terms of logic, a red herring functions, as it does in narrative, as a distraction technique.

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  • Mad as a Hatter

    By lisala on 3/5/09 8:39am
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    We're most familiar with the phrase "mad as a hatter" from Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865), where the Hatter is indeed utterly insane, as is his colleague the March Hare—another proverbial expression for insane behavior. Carroll wasn't the first to use the phrase "mad as a hatter" though; at least two others used the phrase to suggest insanity before him. William Thackeray used the phrase in his otherwise forgettable 1849 Pendennis and Thomas. A few years earlier, in 1837 Chandler Haliburton used it in his The Clockmaker.

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