Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

'Mini' and 'factoid' don't mean what you think, with Jess Zafarris

Episode Summary

1167. In this bonus segment that originally ran for Grammarpaloozians last October, we look at the surprising true origins of words that often fool people. We explore why "miniature" originally referred to a red color and not a size; the true, non-factual meaning of "factoid"; and how "hello" only became a common greeting because of the telephone. We also examine the indirect eponym behind the word "gasoline."

Episode Notes

1167. In this bonus segment that originally ran for Grammarpaloozians last October, we look at the surprising true origins of words that often fool people. We explore why "miniature" originally referred to a red color and not a size; the true, non-factual meaning of "factoid"; and how "hello" only became a common greeting because of the telephone. We also examine the indirect eponym behind the word "gasoline."

Find Jess Zafarris online: Useless Etymology, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram

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Episode Transcription

[Computer-generated transcript]

Mignon Fogarty:

Just a quick note before we start: This episode originally aired back in October for all the Grammarpaloozians who support the show. We’re able to do fun bonus episodes like this because of you, so thank you. Now, enjoy this bonus conversation with Jess Zafarris. 

Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. I'm here today with Jess Zafarris. You may know her as the co-host of the “Words Unraveled” podcast. She's also the author of the brand new book, “Useless Etymology,” that I absolutely loved. We spent the whole main episode talking about wonderful words from there, but there are so many more, so we wanted to talk about more.

Jess, welcome back to the Grammarpalooza segment.

Jess Zafarris: Thank you so much. I love this show and I'm so excited to be back.

Mignon Fogarty: Oh, thank you. So, yeah, I think the word "mini" has such a fascinating history. I was so surprised by its connection to the word "red," the color.

Jess Zafarris: Yeah, so "miniature," and thus "mini" as a shortening of "miniature," which is what it is. The first recorded instances of "mini" being short for anything are based on things like "mini camera" and "miniskirt," all miniature things. But the original sense of "miniature" had nothing to do with size, but with color.

So "miniature" is unrelated to words like "minuscule," "minimum," "minus," and "minor." Instead, it's related to the Latin "miniāra," which means "to paint red," from "minium," which was the name of a lead-based red paint used to illuminate medieval manuscripts.

If you look at minimum or go look for medieval manuscript illuminations, you will find that many of them have this very distinctive red-orange color. That was what this was based on, and it evolved over time. The meaning of this word "miniature" evolved over time because the paintings in illuminated manuscripts were, a, generally quite small, and b, a broader range of available pigments reduced the reliance on minium and illuminations. So the reduced syonomy between minium and illuminations combined with the related sounds of like “minimum” and “minuscule” shifted the definition of the assumed origin. Here's another folk etymology example of "miniature" to what we have today.

Another thing that sort of solidified the modern sense was the portrait miniature, which was a portrait style popularized in the 16th century that drew upon similar techniques as manuscript miniatures but didn't rely on minium.

Mignon Fogarty: Oh, wild. Wild. Okay. Well, that's a factoid—or is it not?

Jess Zafarris: Ha. Not a factoid technically. I mean, you and I think are both descriptivists, not prescriptivists. So if everyone uses the word "factoid" to mean what we think it means—fun fact—today, then by all means, it may mean that. But that was not the original meaning of the word. A factoid did not mean a fun fact.

In fact, it meant not a fact at all. It was a term coined by Norman Mailer in 1973 in his novelistic biography of Marilyn Monroe to refer to supposed facts in magazines and tabloids that had no basis in fact but were there to manipulate the emotions of readers. It's basically a predecessor to fake news, and he used the suffix "-oid" intentionally.

It comes from the Greek "idose," meaning appearance or shape, like a humanoid is human-shaped, not necessarily human. An asteroid literally means a star-shaped object that is not a star. And so, a factoid similarly was a fact-shaped, but not actually a fact.

Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Amazing. And then, so gasoline, that surprised me. It's named after a person.

Jess Zafarris: It is. It is indirectly, very indirectly, an eponym. It's somewhat of a brand name too, but not quite. John Cassell was an Englishman who sold refined petroleum for powering lamps based on his name. He called it "Cazeline." You might think that he used a Latin-derived chemical or elemental suffix "-ene" to make it sound sciencey. But he was trying; he wrote that he used a Greek-derived suffix meaning "olive."

Mignon Fogarty: Was it from olive oil?

Jess Zafarris: It wasn't, but he was referencing the notion that it was like that. So shortly thereafter, an Irishman named John Boyd began selling counterfeit Cazeline in his shop. Cassell found out and went after him, so Boyd changed the spelling of Cazeline to "gazeline," and American refineries, and this was G-A-Z-E-L-I-N-E, and American refineries  took "gazeline" and turned it into “gasoline.” And this is where we get our chemistry logic. So gas, because it combusts; "oli," from the Latin "oleum," meaning oil; so not the same root as Cazeline originally had.

And then "-een" from that Latin elemental suffix, chemical ending "-ine." But this is why we ended up with something called gas that is a liquid, right? Through the names of these odd people and how we ended up with it, because it was sold in the States, it ended up overtaking petrol or petroleum as the standard word for what you get at a gas station.

Mignon Fogarty:  That's great. So I want listeners to keep that in mind, the gasoline to gasoline connection. When we hear from, um, Danny Bate, who's gonna talk about the alphabet in just a couple of weeks, that'll be Ooh, very interesting. There's something cool there to learn. 

Jess Zafarris: Oh,  I can't wait to learn that. One little fun fact additionally about gasoline and petroleum: entirely coincidentally, the first British company to use the word "petrol" to describe its products was co-founded by a fellow who was very ineptly named Eugene Carless.

Mignon Fogarty: No, he was carless, at the gas company.

Jess Zafarris: Amazing.

Mignon Fogarty: It’s like an anti eponym.

Jess Zafarris: I also have a segment in the book on inaptronyms or aptronyms, which are words that are appropriate for the person who has them, like Usain Bolt being a fast sprinter. And inaptronyms are ones that are inappropriate.

Mignon Fogarty: Like our carless man.

Jess Zafarris: Like our carless man. 

Mignon Fogarty: Well, almost inappropriately. The last one we're going to talk about is "hello."

Jess Zafarris: Hello. Yes, indeed. This book starts with the origin of the word "hello." It actually also closes with the origin of "goodbye." This is similar to "escalate," which we addressed in our full episode, in that it is more recent than you might expect. The word "hello" didn't become a standard greeting until the introduction of the Bell telephone in 1876. People did not go around saying "hello" before that, which feels wrong because we say it now.

Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, what did they say?

Jess Zafarris: They would say things like "good day," "good morning," and "good evening." Open up, say, a Jane Austen book and you'll see the different kinds of greetings that people used more commonly. You could also say things like "well met" if you wanted to go with that. But the more polite thing to say was "good day," "good morning," "good evening." 

"Hello" did have a predecessor. It existed as "hollow" or "hallo" occasionally. But when you find these, and very rarely, they’re not necessarily things that you would say when you enter a room and talk to someone; they're things you might shout from across a field. Say you're approaching someone on a large property or you're hailing someone from another ship, then you might say something like "hello," like "hallo" or "hollow" You might note that I mentioned this being a thing that you might say when hailing a ship; a similar word is "ahoy," which is what Alexander Graham Bell wanted the telephone greeting to be. So they're the same logic as hailing someone from afar on the telephone. But Edison eventually won out with "hello," which he documented in a letter to one of the larger Pennsylvania phone companies in the 1800s. It became so associated with telephone communication that telephone operators were known as "hello girls," because they were the ones who were doing the work of popularizing this. It's where people started hearing this as a greeting; they would hop on the phone, dial the operator, and the operator would say “hello.”

Mignon Fogarty: Oh, nice. Yeah, and if Bell had gotten his way, they would have said "ahoy."

Jess Zafarris: Exactly, which is—there's a joke about that in The Simpsons, that I believe Mr. Burns greets people on the phone using "ahoy" or "ahoy-hoy."

Mignon Fogarty: Love it. Well, Jess, this book has to be the work of years and years of research. What are some of your favorite sources? How do you find all this information?

Jess Zafarris: So typically, when I wonder about a word, I start in the place I would recommend most people start, which is the OED. If you're affiliated with an institution, like a government institution or a school, you can usually log in for free with your email address and look at meaning and usage, which is very helpful in understanding and contextualizing the sort of dry definitions and etymology info you find. But then typically what I'll do is dig into the primary sources, which reveal a lot more about the word in context. So you'll see the first recorded instance of a word. Go find it; it's probably in the public domain if the word has been around for more than the past 75 years, I think is the cutoff for that. For example, I ended up reading Mort Walker's whole book, "The Lexicon of Comicana," after finding out that the word "growlix," which is a word for a typographic string of symbols that stands in for a swear word because it unlocked a whole bunch of additional lessons and silliness.

So I end up reading the books that I find these original pieces in. Or like if I want to learn about portmanteaus, I'll start with Lewis Carroll's works and then go digging in the Google Books archive to find more. So much is available in the public domain now and has been digitized that I find a lot of—another good example might be the origin of "okay." I found the OED's explanation to be kind of like: it could be this, it's probably this, it's definitely this, but you know, we have weird evidence for it. So go find the newspaper clippings where it first appears, and then you get a lot more detail about it.

Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. It's wonderful that so much is online now. You can search for it and, yeah, find it in the Google Books database or the newspaper archives. Not all of them.

Jess Zafarris: Another fun one on usage and spelling is Google's Ngrams tool. I don't know if you've played with it.

Mignon Fogarty: Oh yeah. I use it all the time. Yeah.

Jess Zafarris: Because you can take, like, if it can be difficult to search for, say, a Middle English word in context, because it had like four different spellings, but you can compare the three and see which one came earlier.

Mignon Fogarty: Oh, I wouldn't have thought of doing that. That's really interesting. I use it more for modern usage, looking at how usage has changed over time, maybe in the last hundred years or something like that, for historical research. Yeah. And I'll have to play with that more now. So, books, Google Books.

How about favorite books? We like to end with book recommendations. Of course, we want everyone to read “Useless Etymology” first. That's the book you should start with, but like, after you finish that, what are some of your favorite books?

Jess Zafarris: If you like “Useless Etymology,” I would definitely recommend “Friends with Words” by Martha Barnett. She's the host of “A Way With Words.” It's very fun. It includes—we actually even have a little bit of factual overlap—but it's written in a very different spirit, and the way she approaches her research and storytelling is a lot more... it’s almost memoirish, but it's also comforting. It's a very nice and pleasant read, and it has such a nice flow to it. Her writing style is wonderful. I would also recommend “Beat the Bots” by Jane K. Cleland. It's a writing guide if you're looking to infuse more of your writing with humanized storytelling. If you want to stand out in this sort of homogenized language world, then it's a great place to start. It has a ton of—I'm not just saying this because I contributed to it; I actually read the whole book. It's fantastic, and I would recommend it because it has a ton of expert contributors in there. And then it also just has fantastic advice. Jane Cleland has written at least 40 books, often mysteries and thrillers, but also wonderful writing guides, and she's one of my favorite resources for improving my writing.

Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I contributed to that too. Yeah.

Jess Zafarris: Oh, excellent.

Mignon Fogarty: It actually has really fun advice on how to get started on TikTok too for authors.

Jess Zafarris: Yeah, it's so good. And obviously your books. I still, I'm working my way slowly through all the puzzles in your grammar guide. And then, because it is almost spooky season, or I think when this airs, it will be proper spooky season. I would recommend if you're looking for a horror read. I just finished reading “HorrorStor” by Grady Hendrix and “Of Monsters and Mainframes” by Barbara Truelove.

Mignon Fogarty: Oh, nice. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for being here. So, “Useless Etymology” is the book. Where can people find you online?

Jess Zafarris: You can find me on my podcast, which is called “Words Unravelled.” It's on YouTube or anywhere you get your podcasts. The videos are really fun though, so if you like YouTube videos, it’s fun.

Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.

Jess Zafarris: You can find me on TikTok @JessZafarris. I have a really strong and fun community over there. And then you can find my blog, uselessetymology.com.

Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here. Thank you also to the Grammarpaloozians for supporting the show. These episodes, these segments exist because of you, so we really appreciate it. Thanks, everyone. See you next time.

Jess Zafarris: Thank you.