Search | Home | FAQ | Links | Site map | Book Store | New | Ask Us | Theory | About |
Interested in sponsoring this site, advertising here or making a donation to keep the site running? |
We are sure that most of our readers will be familiar with the expression to mince words. It is most often encountered in the negative sense, as in "He is not one to mince words". But how, exactly, does one mince something as intangible as a word? Does one buy a special verbal attachment for the Cuisinart? In fact, to mince one's words means to moderate one's language. This is frequently heard when a less offensive phrase is substituted for an oath or imprecation. Thus, when someone says jeepers creepers instead of saying Jesus Christ, that is a minced oath. These are so common that, in most cases, the speaker does not know that a substitution is being made. How many people who say for crying out loud realize that this is simply a minced form of for Christ's sake? Other mangled forms of Christ used as mild oaths are cripes, crimes, criminy and crikey. Also, the Irish bejabers, is a minced form of by Jesus. The exclamation drat or drat it is now considered so inoffensive that it could be used by a Sunday-school teacher in front of her bishop without risk of blushes. Its original form was God rot [it], however. Along the way to its present form it was 'od rot it and 'od rat it with a peculiar variation in some dialects as 'od rabbit it. (Perhaps they had some objection to saying rat.) At one time it was common to say great God but during the 19th century a prudishness fell upon the English-speaking world and people began to replace it with expressions like great sun, great Scott and great Caesar's ghost. The Scott in question is not the author of "Rob Roy" but a popular U.S. general, Gen. Winfield Scott, a hero of the Mexican War. Streuth, blimey and gorblimey are exclamations which can be heard in Britain and Australia. Blimey is a shortened form of gorblimey which is a garbled way of saying "God blind me". In full, streuth is "by God's truth" and it is a survivor of a large genre of God's [something]. Thus, gadzooks (or od's wucks) is literally "God's hooks", the hooks likely being a reference to the nails used to fasten Christ to the cross. Many of these God's... expressions were reduced to od's... or odds... as in odds bodikins. This exclamation, popular in Shakespeare's day, has nothing to do with needles - it means "[by] God's little body" or, more loosely, "[by] the precious body of Christ". Another exclamation from the same period that is even more fun to say than odds bodikins is zounds. This, in full, is "[by] God's wounds" and as before, it was "God the son" not "God the father" who was implied. Many other exclamations were formed along the same lines: 'sblood ("God's blood"), 'sbody or ods-bobs ("God's body") and ods-pittikins ("God's pity"). The use of these oaths was so extensive that, in time, they became quite divorced from their original significance and quite ludicrous expressions such as ods haricots, ods fish and ods kilderkins came into use. Odd socks! Look at the time! We must go. |
|
|||
From Len Pacer:
This is another one of those "no one is sure" etymologies. The earliest example of the phrase comes from a letter written by Jack London in 1910. It has been suggested that to get one's goat, meaning "to annoy or irritate", derives from the supposed practice of putting a goat in a racehorse's stall to calm the horse. A gambler might pay a stable boy to remove the goat, upsetting the horse and, possibly, the results of the horse's race. That explanation seems tenuous to us. Others, however, have suggested that the phrase might be related to the word scapegoat, which has a known, and very interesting, etymology. Scape is an aphetic form
of escape, with the same meaning, so that a scapegoat is
etymologically an The meaning of the Hebrew word is not known, though The Good News Bible suggests that it may be the name of a desert demon. |
|||
Read about other words in our bookstore. |
|||
From Norman Duane Turner:
|
|||
From Steve:
This phrase, and its British counterpart naked as a robin, do not have clear origins. Naked as a robin appears in writing in the mid-19th century, while naked as a jaybird is first recorded in wartime America. The only plausible, yet undocumented, reason that a simile about nakedness might refer to these birds is the fact that bluejays and robins, when they first hatch, look quite naked, even though they do have a small amount of down on them. Like bluejays, this "robin" is an American thrush and is unrelated to the European robin. For some reason, it was fashionable in the 14th century to give personal names to birds. Thus we have the robin, the martin, the jay and the magpie (i.e. Margaret-pie). It is interesting to note that the name jay here is probably also the same as in jaywalking. These words come from the proper name Jay, which was considered a common enough name in Britain that it came to be used to refer to provincial folk in general. In the U.S. it referred to unsophisticated rural people, and jaywalking was something those country folk did when they got to the city because they weren't accustomed to dealing with traffic back home. Jaywalk is peculiarly American and dates from the early part of the 20th century. Oh, and by the way, Jay as a name comes ultimately from Latin Gaius. |
|||
Find the origin of these and other words in our bookstore. |
|||
From Bruce Kendall:
Actually, most of the Romance languages, along with German and Russian, had words for nihilism and nihilist before Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev wrote Fathers and Sons in 1862. While Turgenev named, defined, and analyzed the philosophy of nihilism in the book, and while the political sense developed initially in Russia, English first used the word to refer to "a total rejection of current religious beliefs or moral principles" in the early part of the 19th century (it was first recorded in English in 1817). Nihilism comes from Latin nihil "nothing", a form of nil. The word annihilate comes from the same source. |
|||
From Greg Umberson:
"All the, all the oxen [are] free". |
|||
From Jim Savage:
You know how teachers used to make the class fool stand in the corner wearing a conical paper hat marked with a D for dunce? The size of paper required for this "fool's cap" was foolscap (1795). |
|||
From Kristen Orterer:
Christ means "anointed" and is a Greek translation of the Hebrew mesiach (messiah). Krishna means "dark". We realize that Krishna looks a little like Christ but there is actually no letter I in Krishna. It's just put there to make it easier for Westerners to pronounce. When written in the standard Sanskrit transliteration, Krishna looks like Krsna but with little dots below the R, the S and the N. There is no connection either in their meaning or their etymology. |
|||
From Sal Esposito:
We never cease to be amazed by the nonsense people dream up. Both in the black (1928) and in the red (1926) come from banking. On monthly bank statements, a positive balance was written in black ink whereas a negative (overdrawn) balance was written in red ink. |
|||
|
![]() |
From Reginald Thomas Aubrey:
We believe you misread Chandra McCann's comments. She (sorry, Chandra, if you're a he, which is conceivable as "Chandra" means "moon" in Sanskrit, and the "a" on the end does not necessarily denote feminine gender, at least not in Sanskrit) is perfectly correct in suggesting The Smiths' to people having a towel monogrammed, if they wish to convey the notion of their possession of the towel. We believe she was explaining that the monogramming department prefers Smith's over Smiths', the former being disturbingly incorrect. Ms. McCann didn't touch on the notion of plural forms of surnames, alone. You are, however, correct that "Joneses" is preferable over "Jones" as the plural form. The revered Fowler agrees with us all on that one. |
From Piet:
Fascinating. Even more fascinating is the similarity between "morgen gaan we vissen" and "tomorrow we go fishing"! |
From Fran Morris:
Indeed, it is there now, as is Issue 86. For future reference, if you ever want to get to a back issue quickly, or if we, due to technical difficulties (as happened last week), don't get a link to a back issue published immediately, simply use the formula http://www.takeourword.com/Issue0YY.html, where YY is the number of the issue you seek. When we get to Issue 100, the formula will be IssueYYY.html (we chose not to use three Xs in that formula as that would get us a bad rating from the automated web kid protection software out there). |
From Annice J. Paul:
Thank you, Annice! |
From Jerry Schatz:
Thanks, Jerry! Thanks for the home page
link suggestion. We suspect that many people didn't realize that the
|
Comments, additions? Send to
Melanie & Mike: melmike@takeourword.com
Copyright © 1995-2000 mc² creations
Last Updated 07/12/03 01:02 PM