1104. This week with Martha Barnette, co-host of "A Way with Words" and author of "Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland," we look at the concept of a "spark word" — the word that ignites a love of language. We also look at fascinating etymologies from ancient Greek, including the surprising connections between "Nike" and "fennel," and the origins of "panic" and "Ritalin."
1104. This week with Martha Barnette, co-host of "A Way with Words" and author of "Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland," we look at the concept of a "spark word" — the word that ignites a love of language. We also look at fascinating etymologies from ancient Greek, including the surprising connections between "Nike" and "fennel," and the origins of "panic" and "Ritalin."
Martha's book, “Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland”
Martha's podcast, "A Way with Words"
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Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and welcome to the Thursday Show, where I chat with people who are doing interesting things with language. And you are in for a treat today because we have Martha Barnette, and we're going to talk about Greek gods, Ritalin, dubious formication, and more. Martha is a longtime journalist and co-host of the popular show called “A Way with Words” and author of the new book, “Friends with Words: Adventures in Languageland.” Martha has a degree in English from Vassar, did graduate work in classical languages at the University of Kentucky, and studied Spanish in Costa Rica. Martha, welcome to The Grammar Girl Podcast.
Martha Barnette: It is so great to be here, Mignon. Thanks for having me.
Mignon: Oh, I am just delighted. So, one of the things you mentioned in your book is that you compare people who love words to birders. How do you do that?
Martha: Well, I like to think of us as worders in that, in the same way that birders love to discover new birds or just have a fascination with individual birds and really start to learn all about them one by one and collect them. It occurred to me because I got into birding last year, and it occurred to me that people like us are worders. You know, we do the same thing. And I was also thinking about the fact that one interesting word that I learned from birding is the term "spark bird." Do you know this term?
Mignon: Hmm. No.
Martha: This is the bird that really sets you on that path. You know, you go on vacation and you see just this gorgeous bird, beautiful plumage, colors you've never seen before, and that gets you all excited about birding, and people call that their spark bird. And I was thinking about the fact that I, and probably you and a lot of your listeners, probably have that spark word, that one word that just sort of set you off to become a language lover.
Mignon: Okay, so what was your spark word?
Martha: Well, this happened when I was learning Latin in ninth grade, and we had a list of vocabulary words to learn, and one of the words was "vestigium," which starts with a V. It looks like "vestigium," and it's the Latin word for footprint. And, you know, I'm trying to learn this long list of vocabulary words, just trying to cram them into my head. And it occurred to me, wait a minute, "vestigium," is that like "investigate?" So I went and I looked up the word "investigate" in the dictionary. And indeed, that word has the footprint of the Latin word for footprint in it, as does the word "vestige." And so I started looking up words like that from the Latin class that I saw a connection with in English.
You know, "agricola" means farmer. Well, you can see the connection with "agriculture." And so I would say that that was the spark word that just sort of set me off. I was off to the races after that. I couldn't get enough of it. I kept going back to the dictionary.
Mignon: Oh, that's wonderful. And you know, when you actually talk about birders, I think of, you know, they have their little notebooks where they track the birds they've seen. How do you keep track of all your favorite words? Because clearly from the book you have so many.
Martha: Oh man. Well, you know, years ago I put them all on index cards, and I had thousands of index cards, and I was forever buying the containers to put the index cards in to write my earlier books on word origins. And now I just, well, you know, our show "A Way with Words" has an archive online with hundreds and hundreds of past episodes. And so a lot of times I just go back to the episode if I can't remember a word or need to recall some detail about it. I also, you know, for a project like writing a book, I can use an Excel sheet or something like that to keep a list, but a lot of them, I just keep close to my heart.
Mignon: Do you have little scraps of paper? Like when you're out in the world and you see one, do you jot them down in all sorts of random places?
Martha: Of course. And I just stop everything down. You know, if I hear a word, I'm out in public, I'm whipping out my phone. I'm going to onelook.com, and I'm looking to see all the different dictionary definitions of it. Yeah, I've put so many movies on pause because I just don't want to forget them. And I usually don't have a piece of paper handy, but I usually have my phone handy.
Mignon: Oh, that's wonderful. So in "Friends with Words," you know, you start by talking about how you've had this lifelong love of Greek, and there are so many interesting word origin stories. And I want to know if you ever think of Nikes when you smell fennel.
Martha: I absolutely do. People will be surprised to learn that there is a connection - a very, very tenuous connection - but there is a connection between Nike and fennel because the ancient Greek word for fennel is a word that will sound familiar. It's "marathon." And in ancient Greece, there was a plain that was called, P-L-A-I-N, there was a plain called "Marathon," and that comes from the Greek word for fennel, probably because there was a lot of fennel growing there. Now, this plain was very important in Greek history because in 490 B.C.E., the Athenians fought a battle there with the Persians. And they were outnumbered, but they managed to win anyway.
And this was, of course, really big news for the folks down in Athens who happened to be about 26 miles from Marathon. So you may see where I'm going here, or you may remember the story of Pheidippides. Here's this soldier. He's been out there all day fighting so hard, and they win. And he's got to drop his heavy shield and sword and run all the way to Athens to tell them that the Athenians have won, the Greeks have won. And so he runs 26 miles or so to Athens to make this announcement. And as he falls to the ground, he says this word in ancient Greek that means we have conquered or we are victorious.
And the root of that Greek word in many versions of the story is the Greek word "Nike," which means victory. If you go to the Louvre, there's a statue that is very recognizable of Athena Nike. She's got wings, and she's winged victory. Now, fast forward about 2000 years, you're in Portland, Oregon, and you're part of a company that's trying to come up with a name for a new pair of athletic shoes, a new model. And they were trotting out names like "Dimension Six" or "Peregrine," and that didn't work. And somebody thought about the Greek goddess of victory, Nike, and they named the shoes Nike. And the rest is modern history.
Mignon: That's great. And it is true. When I think of Greek, I often think of the Greek gods and all their stories, and you know, we get so many words just from the names of those Greek gods.
Martha: We do. I'm thinking of words like "Atlas." Atlas was one of the Titans. Well, we get the word "Titanic" from the Titans, who were this giant race of gods, and Atlas was a Titan, but he got punished by Zeus, and the punishment was to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, literally. And he was supposedly situated, suffering this punishment for all of eternity, at the northwest corner of Africa, which is where the Greeks figured that the world kind of ended and the sky met the sea.
And so there's a mountain range there now that's known as the Atlas Mountains. And the Greeks figured that that sea beyond that should be called "Atlanticos." Now that probably rings a bell as well because that's Atlas's name fossilized in the word "Atlantic." And that's not all because if you're in the medical field, you may know that the uppermost vertebra in your neck is also technically called the "atlas" because it holds up the world that's inside your skull.
So, you know, Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry." And I think that's a great example of mythology, fossilized in a word that we use quite often. And I didn't even go into Atlas, the map, because, you know, we talk about a world atlas. And in the Middle Ages, pictures of Atlas were on top of, like, the first page or the cover of these books that had maps in them. And here he is, you know, holding up the world on his shoulders. Poor guy.
Mignon: Amazing. Yeah. Another one that surprised me was when you were talking about something that's hermetically sealed.
Martha: Yeah. The god Hermes, a lot of these gods in ancient Greece, were real multitaskers. They were sort of these divine Swiss Army Knives. They would do all kinds of different jobs. And one of the jobs that Hermes was supposedly tasked with was keeping the secrets of alchemists, you know, people who were trying to turn material into gold. And so he was credited with coming up with a kind of seal. They were struggling; that this was later on, the alchemists were struggling with how to create a seal on bottles that was completely sealed. And supposedly he helped with that. He inspired the seal that is now known as the hermetic seal. Or something is hermetically sealed.
And, you know, I was thinking also about Atlas and the punishment that he suffered. We should probably talk about Tantalus as well. You know, he was this earthly king who did some bad things and got punished. And his punishment was to be in Hades for all of eternity in a pool of water that receded whenever he bent over to take a drink. And there was fruit above him that was just out of his reach. And from that, we get the word, of course, “tantalizing,” from poor Tantalus. Yeah.
Mignon: Tantalizing. Poor Tantalus. And why do we panic?
Martha: Ah, panic is a great one too. Pan was the god of woodlands and forests, and he was also known as being mischievous. And he would make noises out in the woods or out in desolate valleys when people were out there by themselves or in small groups, and it was dark, and there were these mysterious noises that scared everybody. And from his name, Pan, comes the term “panic.”
Mignon: I know I have this in my notes on Greek, but I'm not sure it's related to the Greek gods. So, are nectarines being related to death? Is that from the gods or is that just from Greek?
Martha: It's from Greek because nectar and ambrosia were the things that the gods ate in order to be immortal. And so nectar warded off death. And that's how that came to be. But, yeah, it's related to words like “necrosis” in your tissue.
Mignon: Yeah. Another Greek one I like is “asterisk.”
Martha: Asterisk, yes. Asterisk. “Asterigos” in Greek means little star, and it's related to lots and lots and lots of star words. But, you know, it looks like a star. And I can go on and on about words related to this root because an ill-starred event is a disaster. And astronauts, those people who are flying around, who are sailing through space, the “astro” is star, and the “naut” is related to words like nautical. So they're literally star sailors.
Mignon: And nauseous. That's related as well. Well, not to asterisk, but...
Martha: Right. But it's related to all those words that begin with N-A-U because if you're on a ship, and it's tossing, you're gonna get nauseated.
Mignon: So actually let's go from, you know, the highbrow words from Greek to the more modern attempts to coin words, some of which were actually just disastrous.
Martha: Yes. Well, speaking of light, the term “flashlight” is a weird one if you think about it. And there was an attempt to coin a better word than flashlight, but we should probably talk about the word flashlight itself because, you know, you think about it. The beam is steady, right? Why do you call it a flashlight?
Well, back in the late 19th century, flashlights were literally flash lights because the batteries were really weak. They didn't last very long, and they became improved over time. And in 1916, the Eveready Company, which produced batteries and also flashlights, wanted to show off that they had created this flashlight that worked really well. You could keep it on for a long time. And so somebody had the brilliant marketing idea to hold a nationwide contest. And this contest got press everywhere. You know, everybody wants to win $3,000, which was a lot of money back then. And so there were ads in newspapers all over the country. And people were talking about it everywhere. And people were supposed to send in a better name than “flashlight” to the Eveready Company. And they were gonna award the winner $3,000. And they got so many entries that they had to count them for months and months. And they finally decided to give out four awards to choose four winners. They were all women from all across the country. And the four winners, the entry that they offered, they all offered the same entry, and the word was "Delo."
Mignon: Four people came up with "Delo."
Martha: I don't know how that happened. I think it's just a ridiculous word. I mean, D-A-Y-L-O, and the company made a big deal out of this and said, "This is a wonderful word that combines the idea of daylight and also the idea of ‘lo and behold.’” I think it's a terrible name, and obviously everybody else did too because it may have had a very short life, but it flickered out like those early flashlights. It did not last very long.
Mignon: And then did that start sort of a trend for companies or people to have these contests to coin words?
Martha: Yeah, weirdly enough, that contest was so successful that people started trying to run contests to stir up public interest in this or that. And one of the interesting things that I found was that in 1924, there was a contest to rename “jazz,” which really surprised me. I think jazz is a great name. But there were a lot of jazz musicians, I was surprised to find this out, there were a lot of jazz musicians who didn't care for the word. Duke Ellington and Charlie Mingus and Miles Davis, they just weren't fans. Duke Ellington didn't like its association with less-than-savory places. And so this bandleader in 1924, named Meyer Davis, ran this contest, nationwide again, to come up with a better word than “jazz.” And again, people, you know, people are so creative; they do try to cut, and people love to play with words, right? So people came up with all kinds of names, like “Frisco” and “Frolic” and “Happy Tone,” and just ridiculous names. But the winner of that too, I bet you've never heard of. It was "Syncopep."
Mignon: No. No, I haven't heard that. Syncopep, I mean, so "synchronous" and "peppy"?
Martha: Yeah. That was the idea. I mean, a lot of the names that people proposed suggested the characteristics of jazz. But I'm so glad that "jazz" stuck around because, I mean, imagine syncopep hands; it's just, it's not the same.
Mignon: Jazz hands.
Martha: Right?
Mignon: That's great. Was there a cash prize for that one too?
Martha: I believe there was. Yeah. I don't remember the amount, but again…
Mignon: We should bring that back. I think companies should start doing that again. We should. We should get prizes for coming up with words that no one's ever gonna use.
Martha: Yeah, I think a lot of people these days do it for free. You know, we're forever getting calls on the show about, you know, what's the word for this? You know, what's the word for when your favorite restaurant closes? I wanna nominate "melancholy" or "gone appétit."
Mignon: Those are good. It's fun to play with words. So when “scuttlebutt,” was that the result of a contest too?
Martha: “Scuttlebutt” was not, but “scofflaw” was.
Mignon: Oh, scofflaw.
Martha: Yeah. Scuttlebutt has to do with cutting a hole in a barrel to let liquid out. You know, if you talk about scuttling somebody's plans or scuttling a boat. But did you want...
Mignon: Scofflaw.
Martha: Scofflaw. Yes. That's a fascinating story. And that involved another contest that was run during Prohibition by one Delcevare King, who was a Boston philanthropist. And he was very, very much in the Prohibition camp, and he just really hated the idea of anybody drinking alcohol in any form. And so he ran this contest with his own money and offered a lot of money for people to come up with a term for somebody who drinks liquor illegally. And so again, there were lots of goofy suggestions like “clinker,” and “flounder,” and “slacklaw,” but somebody came up with “scofflaw,” and that took. For some reason, that one stuck around, and we still use that one today. We don't, you know, Prohibition's over of course. But these days, "scofflaw" is sort of a... it's not that bad a term, you know. It's like somebody who doesn't pay their parking ticket or somebody who goes over the speed limit a little bit. You might term that person a scofflaw, but it's fascinating to me that that one stuck and "syncopep" didn't.
Mignon: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it has a nicer sound to it. And I guess, you know, with "syncopep," we already had the word "jazz" that maybe most people liked, whereas there wasn't a word for "scofflaw."
Martha: Yeah, you're right. And I think another point is that it's really hard to impose language change. It's really hard. You know, you can try to get people to adopt a word, but usually when groups say, you know, we want everybody to start using this word that way, it just doesn't take. Language arises organically, you know, it bubbles up from the people, and it's really hard to change people's language that way.
Mignon: Absolutely. I mean another, actually, it reminds me of another one you said that your listener, one of your listeners coined, actually coined the word “fluffle.”
Martha: Yeah, well, yeah, she was involved in this term “fluffle,” which is—you may have seen the meme going around on the internet that goes something like, I just learned that the word fluffle means a group of bunnies, and I've never been happier or something like that. And there's a cute picture of little bunnies, but yeah.
People use this term “fluffle” as a collective noun for bunnies. And we had a caller to “A Way With Words,” who called us and wanted to find out if a story she'd been told was true, because one of her friends said, “You know, that term fluffle? My friends and I coined it when we were at the University of Alberta in Canada, and we added it to Wikipedia as a joke.” So this caller wanted to know if there was anything to that, and we did some digging, and then we turned it over to linguist Ben Zimmer, who also did some digging for The Wall Street Journal on this. And it turns out that these are probably the people who coined the term “fluffle” just as a joke and stuck it in Wikipedia. There's enough evidence to assume that that's the case.
Mignon: That is so wonderful because it's one, it's fun to say, and two, as we were saying, there wasn't already a word for it. So, and then it got some great publicity with pictures of cute bunnies.
Martha: Right. That's, yes, exactly. Exactly. And we'll see if that one lasts, but I suspect it will just because it's so fitting. You know, it sort of sounds like what it is.
Mignon: Absolutely. And then let's back up a little and go to more to like everyday words, like words we hear all the time. Some of them have such interesting etymologies like “butter.”
Martha: "Butter" is a good one. It comes from the Greek word for cow or ox and turon, which means cheese. And so it's "bouturon" in ancient Greek, and that's related to other cow or ox related words like “bulimia,” actually, which means “ox hunger” literally. And "bucolic," you know, is a place where cows dwell. It describes that kind of pasture kind of.
Mignon: That's wonderful. And you have a whole section in your book on flowers and words related to flowers, and that's just lovely.
Martha: Well, thanks. Yeah. I wrote a whole book years ago, years and years ago called “The Garden of Words,” where I took the names of flowers and kind of jumped off in all different directions. For example, the word “gladiolas.” You know, a lot of people think that we call it that because you're glad when it blooms. Well, no, that goes back to Latin. Gladiolus in Latin means little sword. And if you look at a gladiolas, you know, the leaves are long and sword-like. And actually in German, it's “Schwertlilie,” which means sword lily. So that's a great one.
I love words like “daisy,” which comes from Old English dægesege, which comes from Old English words meaning “the eye of the day,” because some of them open during the day and then close at night. That's why we call them dais eyes or daisies. And another beautiful one is “tulip.” That comes from a word in Turkish that means turban because it looks like a little turban. It comes from Turkish, and it goes back even farther to Persian.
Mignon: It does now that I think about it.
Martha: Yeah. Very picturesque. So many of those flower names are picturesque. And we, you know, we talked about the word “aster” earlier, and that's another example. It has those sort of starry rays coming out of it.
Mignon: Oh yeah. Well, another sort of modern-day word that surprised me, the etymology from your book is “Ritalin.”
Martha: Ritalin. Yeah, that's a fascinating story. It's an eponym, a word that comes from the name of somebody else. Because in 1944, there was an Italian researcher who was researching stimulants, and his name was Leandro Panizzon. And he, as a lot of researchers have done in the past, he first tried the drug on himself. There's a whole history of researchers giving the drug a try themselves, and he didn't really feel much of anything. But his wife, Marguerite, who went by Rita, tried it. And the drug really improved her tennis game. She took the drug, she went out on the tennis court, and she was running faster, and jumping higher, and hitting the ball with more force. And she was much more focused, and she was so excited about the effects of this drug that her husband Leandro had been researching that he named it in honor of her. He named it in honor of his wife Rita. So that's Ritalin.
Mignon: Rita's tennis game and now we have—that's fabulous.
Martha: Yeah.
Mignon: Another one that surprised me that was named after someone was “tawdry.” That is a great story.
Martha: Yeah, that's an adaptation of a saint named Saint Audrey, who was known in her youth for loving frilly neckwear. And later, when she was much older, she developed a huge tumor on her throat, and she was sure that this was divine judgment somehow. And so it was associated with her and the frilly neckwear. And what happened was that in this little town where she lived, there were fairs where people sold little trinkets and things like that. And St. Audrey's Lace was also sold there, as a sort of frilly kind of thing that women would wear on their necks. And St. Audrey's Lace, which was kind of cheap and so, not so well made, St. Audrey's Lace became Tawdry Lace. And then ”tawdry,” like, not so desirable.
Mignon: Amazing. And you know, there's not much I love more than a well-used word like describing a nun as maudlin because the word comes from the idea of a repentant Mary Magdalene weeping, which is often shown in medieval paintings. Um, do you have favorite words like this where you delight when you find an especially good way to use them?
Martha: Wow. That's a brilliant question. Yes, “maudlin” comes from this image of Mary Magdalene, or Maudlin, as she was referred to, being sad. I'm trying to think of something similar. I guess, you know, when you think about someone who has a mellifluous voice, which is beautiful, you know, soothing like a flute. If that person is sweet, I secretly delight in knowing that “mellifluous” comes from Latin words that mean literally flowing with honey. The “mel” in “mellifluous” is a Latin word that means honey. And you see that in the Spanish word for honey, “miel,” and other words like that.
Mignon: Is that related to the name Melissa?
Martha: Funny you should mention that. Yes. The name Melissa means honeybee in ancient Greek. Yeah. And if—
Mignon: If Melissa has a mellifluous voice—
Martha: Wow.
Mignon: Also apt.
Martha: That's pretty much a hat trick, Mignon. That's really good. I hadn't thought about that.
Mignon: Well, we've done a lot on Greek, and there are, you know, so many words that come into English from Latin too. I wanted to talk about a few of those that you cover in “Friends with Words.” How about “preposterous”? I liked that one.
Martha: That's a good one. What a picturesque word. And I always laugh when... That's another example, actually. If somebody's preposterous, it comes from Latin words that literally mean before—“pre.” Everybody knows “pre” means before—and “posterous,” which means behind. So, somebody who's saying something preposterous is sort of putting the cart before the horse. It's a silly image. It's preposterous.
Mignon: And then what is “formication”?
Martha: Yeah, formication with an M is the feeling of having ants crawling all over your skin because the Latin word “formica” means ant. It's related to the Spanish word “hormiga,” which also means ant, and formica has nothing to do with the countertop that you may have—a Formica countertop. It's spelled the same way, but it's different. A Formica countertop is from the words “for mica.” Literally, it's a substitute for how they used to do countertops with mica.
Mignon: Oh my gosh. It's just for mica. I think I'm procrastinating wrapping up because this is so delightful. But what—so why don't you tell me about the word “procrastinate”?
Martha: Oh, that's great. I'm so glad you brought that up. That was another one of those words that I learned early on in Latin class. In first-year Latin, you very early on learn the word “cras,” C-R-A-S, which means tomorrow. And that was another one of those lightbulb moments where I thought, oh my gosh, does “cras” have anything to do with “procrastinate”? I ran to the dictionary, looked it up. Yes. If you're procrastinating, you're putting something off for tomorrow.
Mignon: Perfect. What a great word. Well, again, I'm here with Martha Barnette, the author of the book “Friends with Words: Adventures in Language Land.” We would love it if you shared your favorite words with us on social media. Martha, where can people find you?
Martha: Yeah. Well, I invite you to visit my website, marthabarnette.com. That's Barnette with an E on the end, and you'll find me on BlueSky, Facebook, and Instagram under my name.
Mignon: Wonderful. And of course, we have a bonus episode for our supporters, our Grammarpaloozians. We're gonna talk about an amazing tutor that Martha had on her journey to learn Greek, a bunch of fun regionalisms, and, of course, Martha's book recommendations. So look for that in your feed. And if you'd like to become a Grammarpaloozian to support the show and get the bonus episodes, visit quickanddirtytips.com/bonus to learn more. But for everyone else, that's all. Thanks for listening.