WordsWordsWords

The Professor is reading another book. Well, she’s always reading a book, but you know what I mean. An obscure book that she’s heard about somewhere and that she’s decided will make a good addition to her mental library of recondite information. And, as always, I’m the lucky recipient of a resulting etymology alert.

The current tome is Stealing the Mystic Lamb: The True Story of the World’s Most Coveted Masterpiece. I would have guessed that the title referred to a Van Gogh, maybe, or to a Picasso.¹ However, the definition of “most coveted,” in this case, is “most frequently stolen” (13 times since its creation in 1432). I suppose that’s an appropriate yardstick in the art world. The work in question is Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, a 12-panel oil painting² often referred to by the name of its central panel, “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.”

In the panel being discussed in the portion forwarded to me by The Professor, the Angel Gabriel is approaching Mary: “The Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, descends upon her, signaling her impregnation with the future Christ. Her hands are crossed on her chest in a gesture of humility. She kneels on the floor as a further reference to her humility—humilitas in Latin, meaning ‘close to the earth.'”

Interesting. The “hum-” portion of the word immediately made me think of humus, a term we often hear in this corner of the Pacific Northwest where gardening is a popular topic in newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV. Humus is the rich dark material produced by the decomposition of organic matter (think compost).

Indeed, humus is Latin for mold, ground, or soil. Humility, along with related words like humble and humiliate, all stem from this root, as does exhume (literally, “out of the ground”) and the now obsolete inhume (to inter, of which the “ter” part also means earth, like terra firma).

Posthumous, however, is an etymological sleight of hand. One would think it came from roots meaning “after a person goes into the ground,” but its original source was the Latin word postumus, one of whose meanings referred to a child born after a father’s death. Later, through a folk etymological association with either humus or humare (to bury), it took on its current form.

The Online Etymology Dictionary asserts that human is probably related to humus, but the OED is silent on the matter. The OnlineED draws from a couple dozen etymological sources, so we don’t know exactly who went out on that particular limb. Homo (as in sapiens) may also be a distant relative.

The Professor enjoyed Mystic Lamb for what she learned about art history and the history of art crime, including the ransacking of art pieces during Napoleon’s reign and both World Wars. Check it out if you think you might like a tale of looting, plunderage and conspiracy. One of the panels is currently still missing.
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¹ However, several sources I found list Jackson Pollock’s Number 5, at $140 million, as the most expensive painting ever sold
² Known as a polyptych, but having nothing to do with a colonoscopy. Formed by combining the Greek prefix poly- (many) with ptych (fold).

We all have those times when we suddenly realize that we’ve missed something obvious, times when we think to ourselves, “Duh.” That’s how I felt the other day when I realized it had never even occurred to me to look into why coroner looks so very similar to corona (Eng, “ring around the sun,” among other meanings); corona (Span) and other similar European words meaning “crown,” many of which have lent their names to their country’s currency; and colonel/coronel (Eng/Span). Just like colonel and coronel are the same word, coronel and coroner are practically the same word, I thought as I looked at them. The letters l and r do tend to dance around and trade with and morph into each other. (Example, Latin miraculum, English miracle, but Spanish milagro.)

In class last week, we had a guest lecture from a death investigator. For various reasons, there may be call for an investigation of a death outside of the investigation that the police, coroner and/or medical examiner have done. One of those reasons is because the family or insurance company wants a more detailed look at whether a death was a homicide or a suicide. Our guest lecturer told us that the coroner was so named because if a death was a suicide, the decedent’s possessions reverted to the crown. So the coroner was the crowner.

Off I went to the OED. There, coroner is defined as “An officer of a county, district, or municipality (formerly also of the royal household), originally charged with maintaining the rights of the private property of the crown; in modern times his chief function is to hold inquest on the bodies of those supposed to have died by violence or accident.” When they say “modern times,” by the way, they mean going back to about the 13^th century.

Coronel/colonel is a little more complicated, and it turns out that it’s related to the other “crown” words only by a linguistic accident. Both forms originate with the Italian word colonna, meaning column. This military position was in charge of a “small column”—colon(n)ella—of soldiers. As the word was adopted by French, it morphed through analogy with the word corona (crown) into various versions including colonel and coronel. This may have been because colonel positions are often “conferred upon…princes of royal blood.” (OED) That shade of meaning gave it both a phonetic and a semantic similarity to hold onto when it was deciding what it wanted to be.

I find it really interesting that we kept the spelling with “l” but the pronunciation with “r.” If you have always wondered why it should be so, you’re welcome.

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Apologies to all my intrepid readers for my dearth of posts lately. All my energy is getting sucked up by the career transition. I’m still thinking about words, but it’s been harder to write about them.

This morning, I went to say “background investigation” to The Professor, and I said “background invasion” instead. I’m pretty sure this will be a new term of art around our place.

I’ve been thinking about the word kerfuffle. It’s one of those words that sounds just like what it is. It isn’t an onomatopoeia exactly, because a kerfuffle doesn’t make a specific sound. But the word has in it for me the noise of chickens beating their wings as they flap about the courtyard due to a disturbance. It has in it sounds of fluff, and ruffle, and fisticuff. The soft puff of dust clouds being thrown up by stamping feet, or by bodies rolling on the ground during a tussle. All that imagery in just three syllables.

It’s not a very old word, documented only since 1813 in the Scots version, curfuffle, of which our American English is a variation. It’s defined as “disorder, flurry, agitation.” I’d advise poets against it, as it poses rhyming challenges.

There once was a mighty kerfuffle
When a guy tried to pilfer Sal’s truffle.
“That chocolate’s for me!
So kiss off and flee,
Or your body will inhabit my duffle.”

I clearly have partaken of too many books, shows and movies about murder. While I’m serious about my chocolate, I wouldn’t really kill for a good truffle. Not even a great one.

I’m from Wisconsin, and I like cheese. And no, this is not a blog post about tautologies.

Don’t you think it’s funny? The Italian and French words for cheese are very similar to each other—formaggio and fromage. Yet they’re nothing like other Romance language words for cheese—Spanish queso and Portuguese queijo—or for that matter, our own cheese or the German Käse. All of those in the last sentence have a common root. If you’re not an etymology buff, you might have to squint to see it, but it’s there.

It’s easy to imagine that early cheese, discovered by accident (and weren’t they brave souls who first ate it?), was soft, something like a current pot cheese, cottage cheese, or drained yogurt cheese. But the Romans needed to send provisions along with their soldiers as they fanned out to occupy most of Europe and create an empire. They came up with a technique of pressing soft cheese in wooden forms to squeeze the liquid out and give it a long shelf life. This hard, preserved cheese was known as caseus formatus—formed cheese.

Over time, a new word, formaticum, emerged to refer to this formed cheese. French and Italian, as well as Catalán, Breton and Provençal, chose this angle when a word evolved to refer to the lovely, stinky stuff. Several other languages, ours included, derived their words from the first part of the compound noun, caseus. Decades of family photos would have had a very different look if English had taken the other fork in the road.