Monthly Archives: July 2009

From last week’s New York Times obituary of Robert McNamara:

Robert S. McNamara, the forceful and cerebral defense secretary who helped lead the nation into the maelstrom of Vietnam and spent the rest of his life wrestling with the war’s moral consequences, died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 93.

A maelstrom, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is:

• 1. A violent or turbulent situation: caught in the maelstrom of war.
• 2. A whirlpool of extraordinary size or violence.

The second definition is the word’s original meaning. The OED etymology: “From the obsolete early modern Dutch maelstrom (now maalstroom), meaning whirlpool, which derives from malen (to grind, to whirl round) + stroom (stream).”

Garner’s Modern American Usage notes: “Originally a Dutch word referring to a grinding or turning stream, (maelstrom) is frequently misspelled ‘maelstorm’ “

You can see how that misspelling almost seems right, since “storm” sounds like it fits the definition of violence and tubulence.

Here’s an interesting observation from a piece in this week’s New York Times Magazine about women’s reactions to political wives who stand by their cheating husbands (or don’t):

I’m speaking as a woman here, one of those who have watched the cuckold wives (a word that technically doesn’t apply to wives; I can find nothing in the dictionary that applies to sexually betrayed women, though you would think Webster would have added one by now) and mentally placed ourselves in their shoes.

and

In general, researchers tell us, men are more threatened by a woman having sex with another man, and women are more threatened by a man falling emotionally for another woman. Since most straying from marriage vows includes sex but does not always include love, men find it more threatening when women cheat than vice versa (which may well explain why they’ve invented a word for when it happens to men).

The American Heritage Dictionary defintion of cuckold: “n. A man married to an unfaithful wife” and “tr.v. To make a cuckold of.” It also gives and etymology and interesting word history:

Etymology: Middle English cokewald, from Anglo-Norman cucuald, from cucu, the cuckoo, from Vulgar Latin cuccūlus, from Latin cucūlus.

Word history: The allusion to the cuckoo on which the word cuckold is based may not be appreciated by those unfamiliar with the nesting habits of certain varieties of this bird. The female of some Old World cuckoos lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, leaving them to be cared for by the resident nesters. This parasitic tendency has given the female bird a figurative reputation for unfaithfulness as well. Hence in Old French we find the word cucuault, composed of cocu, “cuckoo, cuckold,” and the pejorative suffix –ald and used to designate a husband whose wife has wandered afield like the female cuckoo. An earlier assumed form of the Old French word was borrowed into Middle English by way of Anglo-Norman. Middle English cokewold, the ancestor of Modern English cuckold, is first recorded in a work written around 1250.

While walking in the woods last week, I started wondering about the origin of the word game, as in animals that are hunted. Here’s what I dug up in the OED:

The etymology:

Old English gamen, gomen = Old Frisian game, gome, Old Saxon, Old High German gaman (Middle High German gamen), meaning joy, glee. Old Norse gaman (Swedish gamman, Danish gammen), meaning game, sport, merriment.

The word has seventeen definitions in the OED, but the first, ninth, and tenth are relevant here, and they give an idea of how the meaning of hunted animals came about:

1. Amusement, delight, fun, mirth, sport.

This is the oldest use documented by the OED, with citations from around the year 1000 and from 1160.

9. Obsolete. Sport derived from the chase. dog of game: one used in hunting or sporting. to be in game: to be engaged in the chase.

The OED’s oldest quotation for this use is from 1297.

10a. The object of the chase; the animal or animals hunted.

The OED’s first quote of this use is from 1486.

I saved this a few weeks ago and never wrote it up. It’s from a New York Times article about the challenger in the disputed Iranian election:

Mir Hussein Moussavi is in some ways an unlikely figurehead. Calm and deliberate, he has a soporific speaking manner, and even his most ardent defenders grant that he has little charisma.

Several dictionaries give the definition of soporific as “Inducing or tending to induce sleep.” Merriam-Webster Online gives this etymology: “probably from French soporifique, from Latin sopor, meaning deep sleep; akin to Latin somnus, meaning sleep.” The OED points out  a Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian equivalent: soporifico.

My wife and I went on a picnic last week, and I started wondering where the word came from.

From the OED:

• Definition: Originally: a fashionable social event at which each guest contributed a share of the food (now obsolete). Now: an informal meal eaten out of doors, especially as part of an excursion to the countryside, coast, etc.
• Etymology: French pique-nique (1694 in repas à piquenique; 1718 denoting a meal at which each person pays for his share or at which each person contributes a share of the food; subsequently also denoting a meal eaten out of doors, perhaps after English), probably from piquer + nique (14th or 15th century in Middle French in sense ‘nothing whatever’, second half of the 15th century in sense ‘small copper coin’; probably ultimately of imitative origin), although the latter word is apparently rare after the end of the 16th century.