The term “blimp” is supposedly onomatopoetic, the sound the airship makes when one taps the envelope (balloon) with a finger. Although there’s quite a bit of disagreement among historians, credit for coining the term is usually given to Lt. A. D. Conningham of the British Royal Navy in 1915.
Several other once-promising theories still circulate, but most have been discredited. Perhaps this word will never really be cracked.
- Source: “Etymology of ‘Blimp’” (1967) – AAHS Journal
Some old dictionaries include the expression “eliminate: to put out of doors,” meaning to eject someone proved undesirable. Latin eliminatus combines e (“out”) with limen (“threshold, doorstep”), so to eliminate anything you put it past the threshold of your home, or your body.
And where does threshold come from? Old English, of course – trescold (“treading place”); this word evokes the link between treading and threshing. One does not typically think of the doorstep as the place where threshing is held, but where else more convenient, with all the chaff kept outside for the wind to blow away?
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Source: Paul West – The Secret Lives of Words
For those familiar with French, manger is the verb “to eat.” Today’s word is actually the other manger – you know, away in a manger – but the two are related. Manger – a place where animals feed, or the feeding trough itself – comes from Old French mangeoire by way of Vulgar Latin (manducatoria) and Latin (manducare – “to chew”). The above photo is of a Bronze Age manger, much like the one referred to in the Jesus story. (That’s right: they were made of stone, not wood.)
The skin disease mange emanates from this etymology in the fourteenth century and the adjective mangy (as of a dog) two hundred years later.
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Source: Paul West – The Secret Lives of Words
Not surprisingly, the name of this reddish-pink, leggy wading bird belongs to flame – a combination of Germanic -ing, suffix for “belonging to,” and the Latin flamma, “flaming.” The word can be traced from Provençal through Portuguese, flamenco to flamengo.
Flamingo, by the way, has nothing to do with flamenco, which comes from the Spanish word for “Flemish,” natives of Flanders. During the Middle Ages, the Flemish were noted for their flashy, exuberant dress; this is why the Spanish word for “Flemish” meant “gypsy-like.”
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Source: Paul West – The Secret Lives of Words
Coined by the Polish-American jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1944 at the Nuremberg trials, this word is a combination of the Greek root génos (“family, tribe, or race”) and the Latin suffix -cide (“to massacre, kill”). At the trials, Lemkin looked back especially to the slaughter in 1915 of one and a half million Armenians by Turks. On August 22, 1939, Adolf Hitler asked in a speech on the eve of his invading Poland, “Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?” Lemkin diagnosed genocide as not only an abomination but a recurring human habit.
Oddly, the United States, which had taken a leading role in creating Lemkin’s International Convention Against Genocide, took forty years to ratify it. This doesn’t say much for the Senate of a man who lost seventy-two of his seventy-four family members in the Holocaust.
Despite the Human Rights Council calling the current situation in Darfur, Sudan, an “unequivocal case of genocide,” the United States government has balked at coming to such a conclusion. Although former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell did come to that conclusion back in 2004 when testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, most of the current members of the United Nations Security Council have shied away from giving their support.
- Sources: Paul West – The Secret Lives of Words; Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-General
When the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann discovered a certain particle, he at first thought of calling it a quork, but then switched the name to quark, a word he’d found in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (1939): “Three quarks for Muster Mark.” It should be noted that Gell-Mann’s quark rhymes with cork, not bark (as in Joyce’s novel).
For those dying to know, quarks make up protons and electrons. They have mass and spin, and defy Wolfgang Pauli’s exclusion principle: No two particles having half-integral spin can exist in the same state. Quarks have no evident structure and cannot be resolved into anything smaller. Like some humans, quarks are compulsively social and cannot be found alone. Gell-Mann’s model posited various “flavors” of quarks: up, down, charmed, strange, and so on – each an indication of one quark’s attraction to another.
Additionally, quarks cannot be stripped away from the structures they make up. They behave as though they are free, but something familial holds them back, and this is the gluon, the loss or acquisition of which changes a quark’s flavor. The gluon is also the force that binds them: The more you try to pull a quark away from its fellow quarks, the stronger the force that binds them becomes. The quark’s way of moving creates an energy that gluons feed on to create new gluons. While quarks are close together, gluons are weak, and quarks seem fairly able to get away from one another; but, as the quarks draw further and further apart, the gluons get stronger, and the more gluons there are (being swapped about by quarks) the stronger the gluon force. Thus, the more energy that is expended to free a quark, the stronger becomes its bond with its siblings.
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Source: Paul West – The Secret Lives of Words
Coined in 1754 by English writer Horace Walpole (1717-1797), who had read a popular romance entitled The Three Princes of Serendip, whose leading characters, as Walpole put it, “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” (Serendip, by the way, is an old name for Ceylon, now called Sri Lanka.)
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Source: Paul West – The Secret Lives of Words
This word goes back to 1781, when the English-German astronomer Sir William Herschel designated Uranus a planet (“a wandering star”) and chose for it the name of the Greek sky god Ouranos. Eight years later, Martin Klaproth, a German chemist, discovered element 92, which he named uranium, in honor of Herschel and his planet. Some dictionaries still describe this basis for the atom bomb as “a rare, heavy, white metallic element, having no important uses.” Actually, during the nineteenth century, uranium – which yields the isotope U 238 from which plutonium can emerge – was used to treat ringworm and birthmarks. It was even laced into exquisitely tinted glassware. (Queen Victoria had a beautiful, albeit radioactive, set of her own, which she used often.)
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Source: Paul West – The Secret Lives of Words
Literally meaning “flesh-eater, ” this word is a combination of the Greek words sarx (“flesh”) and phagein (“eat”). It refers to a Greek coffin supposedly made of a “carnivorous” limestone (thought to accelerate the decomposition process).
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Source: Paul West – The Secret Lives of Words
In Latin, muscle was a diminutive of mus (“mouse”). To the Romans, when someone flexed his or her musculus, it appeared as though a mouse were loose beneath the skin.
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Source: Paul West – The Secret Lives of Words
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