1121. This week, we talk with Jess Zafarris about her book “Useless Etymology.” We look at three ways she says etymology gives you superpowers. We also look at the origins of simple words and learn why “girl” didn't always mean a female child, the unexpected historical figures behind “fedora” and “sideburns,” and why the word “outrage” has nothing to do with “rage.”
1121. This week, we talk with Jess Zafarris about her book “Useless Etymology.” We look at three ways she says etymology gives you superpowers. We also look at the origins of simple words and learn why “girl” didn't always mean a female child, the unexpected historical figures behind “fedora” and “sideburns,” and why the word “outrage” has nothing to do with “rage.”
Find Jess Zafarris online: Useless Etymology, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Jess Zafarris. You may know her as the co-host of "Words Unraveled," the podcast, or author of the book "Words from Hell," which we actually talked about when it came out a couple of years ago. But today we're talking about her new book, "Useless Etymology."
Jess, welcome to The Grammar Girl Podcast.
Jess Zafarris: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here again, so grateful that you're having me back and that I didn't scare you too much with the "Words from Hell" content.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh no, not at all. Although it was great for Halloween. Great Halloween book.
Jess Zafarris: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Mignon Fogarty: Before we start, I have to challenge you to give me three uses for etymology because I reject the idea that it's useless.
Jess Zafarris: Yes, and in fact, that is not what I think. I do run a blog called "Useless Etymology," and my entire career is largely based on etymology. So clearly, I do not think it is useless. Rather, that's a dig at folks who tend to think it is. So like, why would I ever need to know this? But truly, etymology gives you superpowers.
As I write in the book, it grants you the ability to infer definitions, like come across a complicated word you don't know, you can break it down into its parts to reveal its meanings. I think a good example that comes to the top of my head is “archaeopharaohequestrianology,” which means "ancient wing." Super long word, but you break it down into archaeo, which means old; pharao, which means iron; and ology, which is the study of something. So the study of old iron horses gives us the study of old trains.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice.
Jess Zafarris: I've also heard it as “archaeopharaohequestrianologist,” depending on your preferences there. Another usage is that it's a doorway into any discipline. So if I want to learn about astronomy or astrology or molecular biology, then suddenly the vocabulary and the origins of that vocabulary is my doorway into that discipline. I can learn about it at a surface level, and I can dig deeper from there. And then another one is you can build your own words. You can make portmanteaus, you can invent fictional names, or create a clever business name, for example.
So, those are my top three, but I would also say that you can be more inventive with the words you already know. Knowing your roots and stems helps you wield your words with precision and imagination and joy, especially when things sound a little cliché and inhuman in the age of AI.
Mignon Fogarty: I love a well-used word. One of my favorites is maudlin, which, you know, it's a, a reference to Mary Magdalene, who was crying at the tomb. And so if you're talking about someone being maudlin and they're crying, and if they're really, if nuns are crying and you describe them as malin, that is like the perfect use of that word.
Jess Zafarris: It absolutely is, a hundred percent. And to know that Anton Mesmer is the namesake of the word “mesmerizing” can add depth in context.
Mignon Fogarty: I love that. And also, etymology is entertaining, and I think we are going to be heavily entertained today. There are a lot of misconceptions about etymology. So let's start with some debunking.
Jess Zafarris: Ha. Can we talk about debunking and specifically the word “debunk”? Yeah. I love that you brought that up because it's, you know, we'll get into this later, but this might be what you call an unpaired word or lost positive or an orphan negative, though you don't hear, because you don't hear quite as many people saying like, "That's bunk," anymore.
But “bunk” was for a long time a term for nonsense. So debunk is an intensification of that. We do that sometimes with that de- prefix, even though it often creates negative words. But the bunk in the word debunk and the word “bunk” in general is short for Bunkum, which is a misspelling of North Carolina's Bunkum County.
And in 1820, a politician from North Carolina gave this long, boring, and nonsensical speech to Congress that he addressed to his home county of Bunkum. So, the idea is removing the bunk from a false claim. So you could also say that the prefix is not an intensification, but is in fact removing the nonsense from it in the same way that that “bunk” was the, was this nonsensical speech.
Mignon Fogarty: That's amazing. So it's bunk. So see the man is immortalized because his speech was so boring, long, and boring that it gave us “bunk.”
Jess Zafarris: Boring and nonsensical, I think is the key there. The other thing that made this word more popular, “bunk” in particular, was a 1923 novel called “Bunk” by William E. Woodward that sort of cemented it in the popular lexicon.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. So, what are some things we can debunk? I know I've heard that the word “girl” used to be used, a child of any sex, but you say in the book that they book useless Etymology, that it isn't always true.
Jess Zafarris: Yeah, this is a little bit bendy. It's not completely untrue, but it's the way you see it phrased. This goes around TikTok pretty regularly, is that male babies were called “knave girls” and female babies were called “gay girls.” That's the one that I've seen a lot, and the word “girl” referred to a child of either sex.
Now there's, there is a grain of truth to this, mostly incorrect though, and at the very least, it's a vast oversimplification of what actually happened. The part about “girl” referring to either sex was true, but very briefly, starting in the early 1300s, and it was around the time that the word “girl” came into existence.
The root is unknown, but the LE ending might be a diminutive. It was originally “GYLRE,” the word “boy” also dates back to the same period, even slightly before “girl,” and is recorded referring to a male child. And even during that period when girl was used as a word for any young child, it was primarily used for female children. Now, the notion of like gay girls and knave girls, that's silly. “Gay” was not specifically a word connected to girl at any point. Though because it meant happy, it could have been applied to happy children of any gender.
Originally, the most common use of the word “boy” was for a young male servant or a commenter. And for the most part, it wasn't used very nicely. You know? “Boy” has, in recent American history, been used as a way to divide, to create a class divide and sometimes a racist divide or to put someone down. That was the original meaning, but over time, it was ameliorated; it became less pejorative and less negative over time and simply became the word for boy.
In Old English, though, before this, the more common word for a young boy was “cniht” or “knight child,” which I love.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Old English loves its compound words, and that was something that I learned in your book. So it was a “knight child,” like knight, like the Knights of King Arthur. But I was surprised to learn that wasn't, a no, always a noble thing.
Jess Zafarris: Yeah. Similarly, it just meant a young man, especially a male servant or attendant, and then it became the male servant or attendant to a lord or someone in power over time.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that's great. Okay, so my favorite debunking in the book is “sophomore.” So “sophomore” doesn't mean wise fool.
Jess Zafarris: Right. See, a lot of people will say this one, and they're not wrong to think that because it has been a notion that's been joked about for centuries now. So if you're a sophomore in high school or college, you may have heard that the word is derived from sophos, meaning wise, and “moros,” meaning foolish. Those words do mean those things. And it is very apt and it's very entertaining because as a sophomore, you know, your brain's still developing. You think you're so smart, but you're not, you know. But it's more related to the notion of “Sophism.” “Sophists” were an ancient Greek school of thought that predates philosophers like Socrates, but continued into their era, and “sophists” were these became known as these traveling intellectuals or teachers known for their skill in oratory, rhetoric, or persuasive arguments. They were some of the world's first lawyers and in the late 1600s at schools like Oxford and Cambridge.
Second and third-year students were taught the arts of rhetoric, reasoning, and debate. They were called so first after the Sophists because that was their field of study, and all we have to do to get to "sophomore" from there is add a little bit of French influence. If you add French influence to this, you get "sufume," which evolved into the modern French word "sophomore." Unfortunately, "maures" never had any role in the development of that word. It wasn't involved in the French word at all. It's fun to think about. It's also a little bit funny, and one of the reasons it works well to think that they're wise fools, though, is that Plato wasn't super fond of Sophists.
Other philosophers at the time weren't, because they attached high prices to their skills and their knowledge. So, has also been used in a negative way, someone who argues in bad faith or uses logical fallacies, even in the recent era.
Mignon Fogarty: Is that where “sophistry” comes from?
Jess Zafarris: Yes, exactly.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, another thing, you know, we recently had someone on who talked about the alphabet, and we learned that if a word has a "k" in it, it often comes from Old Norse, like "sky" and "skirt." And then I learned another little trick I can use like that from your book about acronyms, so that if an acronym, like it can't be older than, I think it was the 1850s or the 1830s, 'cause people didn't use acronyms way back when. So, like, why did acronyms come to be? And then we'll talk about some fun acronyms.
Jess Zafarris: Really, the birth of the acronym was thanks to two factors: technology and innovation during the Industrial Revolution, and then the business development that came from it. Because, I mean, even today, the ways, the, most frequent instances where we see acronyms—that is initialisms that spell words, even though we use those terms a little flexibly, was in business environments and still is in business environments and in technology.
So, “scuba,” “laser,” “radar,” all of these are acronyms. And then, anything that spells a business name that spells a word, I'm blanking, like—
Mignon Fogarty: Well, like "Texaco" is a syllable acronym. We talked about that recently. Yeah.
Jess Zafarris: Exactly. We have these celebrated acronyms. Another real one is, I believe, "Adidas," which unfortunately is named after Adi Dassler, but same notion. And then "Jeep" as well is a short for "G.P.," a spelling of the American military slang G.P.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, how fun. So who is Adidas named after?
Jess Zafarris: Adi Dassler, who was the—sorry—Adolf "Adi" Dassler was his name. It's a contraction of his name. Sometimes it's re-explained as meaning "All Day I Dream About Sport," but that is not the case historically speaking. And they tend to downplay the fact that it's based on his name because he was a Nazi sympathizer.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh no. Oh, well, yeah, you definitely don't want to talk about that.
Jess Zafarris: Right.
Mignon Fogarty: And what about— I was surprised. "Pakistan" is an acronym that really surprised me, and it was coined by students.
Jess Zafarris: Yeah, it's both an acronym and a little bit of a portmanteau.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay.
Jess Zafarris: It was created by Muslim students at Cambridge in the 1930s who combined the names of the regions: Punjab, Afghan province, and Kashmir, which were meant to form the new country. And the "Pak" element is also a little bit of a—maybe not a pun, but a reference to an Iranian word for pure, and then "stan," of course, means country or literally a place that stands or is established.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing, so why did these students, why were the students the ones who came up with a country name?
Jess Zafarris: It appears to be sort of a thinktank situation.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay. Okay, that makes sense. And then, and so then there are a bunch of acronyms that—words that words that actually aren't acronyms that people think are. "Posh" is when you hear about a lot—not an acronym.
Jess Zafarris: Right. The argument there is that it stands for "Port Outward, Starboard Home," and the way it was explained is if you traveled to India from Europe or a peninsula on a steamship in the 1800s, the portside cabins remained out of the sun and therefore were considered fancier, and vice versa on the way back. Or they would put the higher-end cabins on that side. But it's existed for quite some time and is probably based on Romani slang and maybe a word originally for like money or coins. So someone who is posh is wealthy.
Mignon Fogarty: That makes a lot more sense because more people would know someone who's wealthy and want to talk about them than were going on ships at that time.
Jess Zafarris: Exactly.
Mignon Fogarty: And what about "tag"? I was surprised that some people think that's an acronym.
Jess Zafarris: It is. This one, like, it makes perfect sense that it could be short for "touch and go," but it isn't. “Tag” is a very old word. It became the name of the children's game in the 1730s before we have other, before acronyms were a thing that happened frequently. The word itself is probably a variation on the Scottish word "tig," meaning touch or tap, or maybe the Middle English "tech" or "tick." It's simply an A coic or imitative adaptation of the notion of tapping on someone or touching them.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Yeah. And one of my favorites is "news" because it's just stuff that's new.
Jess Zafarris: Yeah, it's just that.
Mignon Fogarty: But apparently some people think it's an acronym.
Jess Zafarris: Periodically, this one goes around the web and I'm like, why? Oh, really? It's like, it just means new things. The idea is that it stands for "Notable Events, Weather, and Sports," or "Northeast, South, and West." I even heard someone argue that "news" as in "newspaper" is an acronym for "Northeast, West, South, Past, and Present Event Report," which of course is insane.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, that makes no sense at all. That's very elaborate.
Jess Zafarris: We have plenty of evidence showing that the word "news," the English word "news," is simply an adaptation of the French word "nouvel," which was also used in the same way as a word for new things you read about in the local paper, in around the streets and things like that. And also, the first recorded instance of the word "newspaper" is like way back in the 1600s, and it was spelled differently than it is now.
Mignon Fogarty: Nothing to do with directionality.
Jess Zafarris: Right.
Mignon Fogarty: But this one surprised me because "SOS"—I don't think I ever had an idea in my mind of what it might stand for, but I always imagined it stood for something.
Jess Zafarris: Right. I always figured it, prior to doing this research, that it would be short for "Save Our Souls" or "Save Our Ship." Which I fully believed that; it looks and sounds like an initialism since it's, since you don't pronounce its soss. It's not an acronym. Exactly, but it is an initialism, and it's logical to want. To ascribe words to SOS. Sadly, it doesn't stand for anything other than the letters themselves and the dots and dashes that are used to transmit them into Morse code.
It's a universal distress call, so it's not specific to English. It was selected by the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in 1906 because the Morse code for those letters is really tough to mistake for anything else: three dots, then three dashes, then three dots. So it's pretty easy to hear and recognize, and the fact that it often implies a ship or souls in need of saving certainly made it easy for English speakers to look for words to correspond to it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that reminds me of the NATO phonetic alphabet where also chosen because they're hard to misunderstand over even like bad radio signals.
Jess Zafarris: Precisely.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, we talked about Mr. Bunkum, and we talked about Adidas coming from someone's name, and there are a lot of other interesting words that come from names too. And "fedora" was one. I loved this story.
Jess Zafarris: This is one of my favorites. The hat, although you often see more men wearing it these days, and it's kind of associated with the internet trope of the neckbeard, you might say. Although so often, like people will say, but those people are wearing trivia hats. That's a whole other thing. And also curiously has an interesting connection here, but it's named after a woman. It's named after a fictional woman.
If you're a theater aficionado, you've probably heard of Sarah Bernhardt. She took the world by storm as a French stage actress from the late 1800s and early 1900s. She played Hamlet, famously in a gender-bendy way that people hadn't seen frequently before, and she was one of the first big-name actresses to appear in motion pictures. But the name of this hat comes from “Fedora,” which was a French play by Victorien Sardou, about the Russian Princess Fedora Roff. And thanks to the popularity of Bernhardt's performance, the hat was named after the character she played.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. And so how did it get to be something that men were more likely to wear?
Jess Zafarris: Interestingly, that one came from Prince Edward in 1924. He started wearing the hat. He was very fashion-forward.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Jess Zafarris: So he would be more likely to break out of gender norms ever so slightly with his hat choice.
Mignon Fogarty: Was he a dude? Was that in the era where there were dudes who were the fancy dressers?
Jess Zafarris: That's a good question. He would be from a similar era, but dudes were typically from like the Northeast. That's why they ended up being associated with dude ranches. So these high-society gents from the Northeast who were very fashionable would want to go get the authentic Western experience, and they would stay at high-end Western resorts and basically cosplay as cowboys. That's where we get the dude. But let's see. First record in the late 1800s is where we get it. So he is in the right period around 1924, so a few decades later, but a dude dates back a little bit earlier than that.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay, so maybe not. So Fedora was a fictional person, and so was the person who gave us “pants.”
Jess Zafarris: That's right. All pants are named after a weird little Italian guy from the Italian commedia dell'arte. And he wore these distinctive, usually red single-leg pants that appeared throughout many different plays as a character trope. And eventually, his name was Pantalone. Pantalone pants became the inspiration for the word pantaloons, which could refer to men's knee breaches and women's baggy undertrousers. And then that gave us the word for “pants,” which of course is undergarment in British English and then outerwear in American.
Mignon Fogarty: Do you know what they were called before pants? Were they trousers?
Jess Zafarris: Probably so. Also, like this era of performance was, at this time, hose was more common as legwear than pants. So trousers certainly, I believe, did exist. Gonna double-check my timeline on that one too. You're challenging me with all these additional.
Mignon Fogarty: I am sorry.
Jess Zafarris: No, I want this. I like this.
Yes. Trousers date back to at least the 1500s, so they were around, and the word was around for them for quite some time. But hose were also worn just as frequently.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, we don't use that much anymore. Well, except for pantyhose, you know, but that's a different thing.
Jess Zafarris: Women's clothing now.
Mignon Fogarty: Which I never will wear again. I love that in my life. I never have to wear those. So, okay, here's another fun one. How about Mr. Burnsides?
Jess Zafarris: Yes, this is a good one. It sounds made up, but it's true. Sideburns are named after the resplendent and voluminous whiskers of Union Civil War General Ambrose E. Burnside, and starting around the 1870s, they were called Burnside. But shortly thereafter, the words were transposed, presumably because people thought the whiskers looked
like maybe a burn if you say, if you had dark hair on the side of your face. And it actually stirred a little bit of a literary kerfuffle because Ambrose Bierce, who is a literary legend and author of “The Devil's Dictionary” and a variety of other satirical works from this era, included “sideburns” on a blacklist of words to never use in his 1909 book. Write it right, insisting that “Burnsides” is correct because it's named after Ambrose Burnside.
Mignon Fogarty: So he felt protective of Ambrose Burnside.
Jess Zafarris: Presumably. And perhaps he was a little bit of a penant. But he was also a Union Civil War veteran, just like General Burnside, and also a fellow Ambrose. So maybe that was a dash of it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. No, like war themes did pervade his work now that I think about it. Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the, I think the last eponym we have maybe is "guy," and my dad's name was Guy. And so I always knew that the name came from French and that it meant a guide or a leader. So, you know, I had positive connotations in my family. But there's a reason that that is slightly less honorable, that now we use it to refer to a man or a dude.
Jess Zafarris: That's true. It also has an Italian correspondent too. Guido means the same thing and comes from the same source and also means leader or guide, and is related to that word too. But every sense of the word "guy" we use today is more directly from Guy Fawkes, which, if you've seen “V for Vendetta,” you're probably familiar with this person.
If you're British, you're probably familiar with this person. If you haven't seen that, if you are unfamiliar with the history behind it, he was one of the main orchestrators of the Gunpowder Plot, which was an attempt to bomb the House of Lords and assassinate the Protestant King James in 1605 by English Catholic dissidents.
This whole misadventure became the basis of Guy Fawkes Day, which is still celebrated. During that time, effigies of him were burned, and it became a celebration of the fact that the assassination attempt was unsuccessful and the bombing was unsuccessful. So in the 1600s and 1700s, "guy" became a pejorative, meaning a grotesque or poorly dressed person.
And of course, its derogatory sense faded with popular usage, especially after American English got ahold of it and perhaps lost its connection to the history that isn't celebrated here as much.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. Yeah. So there's a lot of outrage toward Guy Fawkes. And "outrage" is a surprising word in your book because it has nothing to do with "rage," which is such a surprise.
Jess Zafarris: I adore this one. It's one of my favorite examples of folk etymology when presumed origins or structure of a word influence the way it's spelled or pronounced. So the word "outrage" was originally pronounced as a French word that was pronounced "outrage," and that word is ultimately from the vulgar Latin "oltraticum," meaning excess. It's like extraness, basically. And it became the Old French "outrage," O-U-T-R-A-G-E, which was misunderstood as. And then further misunderstood in English as "out" plus "rage" because it looks like that. It was spelled exactly the same. But the A-G-E ending on the end of it is a noun-forming ending. It's not the word "rage."
Mignon Fogarty: Such a good little tidbit. Yeah. Another surprising one is "hangnail," which has nothing to do with hanging or nails.
Jess Zafarris: Right. It's from the Middle English "hag-nail" or "angnail," which was a corn on your foot, or then later, the sort of hangnail that's at the corner of your finger. The literal meaning of it was a painful spike. So it is related ultimately to your fingernails, but the original intent was an iron nail.
So it's when you're walking around on a corn, it kind of feels like you are walking around on a painful iron nail. And then over time it was understandably misunderstood as the little painful spike became the word for the thing that's hanging onto your nail. And of course, it is hanging onto your nail. Both are true.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. Amazing. Well, you know, I love gingerbread, so another one I was really surprised to learn that has nothing to do with ginger or bread, the name.
Jess Zafarris: Right. This is from the... well, it does have to do with ginger, but not with...
Mignon Fogarty: Okay.
Jess Zafarris: So it's from the medieval Latin "ginger-paratus," meaning ginger. It was an adjective, and that "brat" was imported over into Old French and then shifted over into Middle English. As it did, the "br" elements in it, that ending part of it, were misinterpreted as "bread." In Old English a word for a similar dish would probably be called a "ginger loaf" instead. Over time, "bread" took over because the word was affiliated with it, but even the earliest recorded instances of the word "gingerbread" didn't contain anything we would call bread today. It was mostly candied ginger or preserved ginger, and over time, the ginger loaf adopted the name of the ginger bit.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice, nice. Well, "escalate" is a fascinating word. It covers a couple of different things, I think. Let's talk about "escalate."
Jess Zafarris: This one's staggering. This is one of the most interesting chronology hiccups that I've ever encountered. The verb "escalate" is very recent. It didn't come around in English; it wasn't a regular recurring word in English until after the invention of the escalator.
So if you were, say you're writing again, like a historical novel about a battle or something, no one would say “tensions were escalating” because that word didn't exist.
Mignon Fogarty: Which is amazing. It sounds like an old word. It really does.
Jess Zafarris: It does, and it does have an older variation. There was the word "escalade," but it was specifically, it is spelled just like the Cadillac Escalade, actually.
It was specifically a word for climbing a wall with siege ladders. It wasn't very common. It didn't come up a lot. So like tensions didn't escalate a lot; you would climb over, and that would be your intent there. But the root here is "scala," which meant both scale and was a word for a ladder.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Jess Zafarris: This all comes back to ladders.
Mignon Fogarty: That's an example of a back formation because we had "escalator" first and then we got the verb "escalate." So what are some other back formations?
Jess Zafarris: Oh, there are so many of these. A lot of them have the Latin "-tion" ending on them because many of these words, many verbs that end in "-ate" and have a corresponding "-tion" noun that were introduced directly from Latin and Old French as the noun and then later needed an English verb form. For instance, "evaluate," "regurgitate," "exploit," and "destruct" entered English after "evaluation," "regurgitation," "exploitation," and "destruction," even though they feel simpler, right?
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
Jess Zafarris: So "resurrection" was adopted into English directly from Old French in the 1300s, but the verb form "resurrect" isn't recorded until the 1700s. In fact, as recently as the early 1900s, "resurrect," you'll find in writing guides, was considered to be incorrect because the Latin root verb of "resurrect" is "resurgere." So "resurge" should be, according to these writing guides, the verb form of "resurrection."
Mignon Fogarty: And there's something similar with "destroy" and "destruction," right?
Jess Zafarris: Exactly. That's a good question. "Destroy" is ultimately from the Latin “destruere” to tear down or demolish. So it means to unbuild. The verb "struere" is also the root of words like "structure," "construct," "obstruct," "destruction," "obstruction," and "construction." So why does "destroy" have a different ending? It's all because of the way it traveled through Old French from Latin into English. "Destroy" is the oldest word of the ones that I've just mentioned, entering in the 1200s in English. While it's originally from that Latin source, its spelling was influenced by its Norman French form, which is “destreue.” As is usually the case, the nouns entered English first before these verbs: "destruction," "obstruction," "construction," "structure," "construct," and "obstruct" with influence from their Latin noun forms, "destruction," and things like that. But they all share "reus," right? The verb "destruct" ends up being a back formation of "destruction." But because we already had "destroy," we usually say "destroyed" rather than... so "destruct" didn't appear in English as a verb until like 1958.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
Jess Zafarris: And the phrase "self-destruct" didn't show up until 1966 in the voiceover at the beginning of the TV show "Mission Impossible."
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, amazing. Oh, that's a great little tidbit. And that is so much more recent than I would've imagined. Wow.
Jess Zafarris: And it's all because we already had "destroy," so we had no necessary reason to have "destruct" as its own noun. And it even sounds a little funny to say, "you destructed something."
Mignon Fogarty: True, yeah. And I think the one that'll be a favorite among listeners is "edit." You know, so many editors in the audience like to talk about "edit."
Jess Zafarris: "Editor" came to English before the word "edit," and "edit" is a back formation of it, and it's simply because the role was adopted as the word first before the action.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing. Love it. So I think I want to end with, again, one of the most surprising things in the book. There are so many surprising things, but this one really surprised me: every meaning of the word "check" (C-H-E-C-K) comes from the game Chess, the board game.
Jess Zafarris: That is right. That's crazy. That's writing a check, that's checking a box, that's even the word. Words like "exchecker," things like that. Every sense—if you're double-checking something—all of these are ultimately from the game of chess and earlier versions of the game. Curiously, they appear to be from the Arabic and Persian phrases for "the king died" or "the king is routed," "the king is unable to move." "Shah mat" is the origin of all of these words. "Shah mat" came into Arabic from Persian with a twist. "Ma" in Persian meant "to be astonished," and "mata" meant "to die," so it could be one or the other there.
Either way, it became the word "checkmate." "Shah mat" became "checkmate." And then, like "checkmate," the word "check" goes back to the Old French adaptation of these words, which was a word for chessmen. They also come from "shah" too, so they are also related. Then "exchecker" was introduced. The word was Old French for chess. "Check" in chess, when you would say "to check the king," was adopted into English as "exchecker," which was originally a word for a chessboard, and then it became a piece of paper or cloth with a check pattern on it that you could use for accounting or to demonstrate the way money is moved around. Thus, an "exchecker" became someone who oversees money.
Mignon Fogarty: Amazing! Language is so much fun.
Jess Zafarris: Isn't it?
Mignon Fogarty: So the wonderful book is called “Useless Etymology.” Jess, where can people find you?
Jess Zafarris: Basically anywhere you get your books. I usually recommend that people get their books from bookshop.org. If you're not going to buy it from a bookstore in person, because you can route that purchase through your local indie bookstore and they get a little cut of the sales too. You can find me on YouTube where I host a show called “Words Unraveled.”
I'm also on TikTok. I'm quite active over there at Jess Zafarris, and you can find my blog, uselessetymology.com.
Mignon Fogarty: Thank you so much for being here.
Jess Zafarris: Thank you.
Mignon Fogarty: For the listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or at least share some of these fascinating tidbits we learned today. And don't forget to follow or subscribe wherever you're listening. If you are a Grammarpalooza supporter, we're going to have a bonus episode with the surprising origins of the words "mini," "factoid," "hello," and "gasoline." Plus, we're going to hear how Jess does her research to get all these fascinating facts and get her book recommendations. So look for that in your feed or in your text messages. If you'd like to become a Grammarpaloozian and help spread the love of language, we'd really appreciate it, and you can find more information about that at quickanddirtytips.com/bonus.
That's all. Thanks for listening.