-
Cockroach comes from the Spanish cucaracha
and has nothing whatever to do with the barnyard cock or the
roach, which is a common European fish. (In Spanish,
cuca means “caterpillar”.)
-
Another non-cock, although at least it is a bird, is a
cockatoo. That’s modified from Malay
kakatua, which seems to mean “ancestor”.
-
Curtail is interesting. Everybody agrees that the
first syllable is from curt, short. Some people
think the second syllable is English “tail”, so that the
word is “shorten the tail, dock”, which indeed was once
the meaning of curtail. Others insist that the second part is French
taille, to cut — the same root seen in
tailor, tally (cut a notch in a
stick), retail and detail (cut off
pieces to sell and the pieces so cut), so that the meaning should be
“cut short”. Unfortunately neither theory is correct;
they both are folk etymology for Old French curtald, applied
to anything short and stumpy.
-
The sword called a cutlass also shows confusion
between “curt” and “cut”. A cutlass has
nothing to do with either cutting or a female. It’s Dutch
curtelas, where the first syllable means “short”
again.
-
Meanwhile, a cutlet doesn’t have anything to do
with either cut or curt. It certainly is used to mean a
“small cut” of meat, but in actuality it is French
cotelette, small rib, from Latin costa, rib or side.
In anatomy, pulling an intracostal (between ribs)
muscle can be quite painful, and the feast of
Pentacost traditionally featured a large beef roast.
The nautical coast is the same word, from the sense
of “side”. In French, cote also means
“hill”, and this led to the verb to coast, i.e., slide
downhill. Accost is ad-costa, to come up
beside someone, presumably when uninvited. (I’m sorry I
couldn’t resist the pun — Pentacost is, of course, from
the Greek word for fifty.)
-
A shamrock isn’t any kind of a rock, let alone
an imitation of one. It’s Irish Gaelic seamrog, small
clover.
-
Sticking to Gaelic, a claymore used to be a Scottish
Highlander’s sword, and then it became a US Army land mine, but
either way, it is cleadheamh mor, big sword, so
it’s the opposite of a gladiolus, Latin for
“little sword”. (The -mor syllable is the same word as
more, i.e., larger.) Gladiator is
more obvious; it means “swordsman”.
-
Sand-blind is an old-fashioned term for partially
blind. It has nothing to do with sand in the eyes; the first element
is semi-.
-
Outrage contains neither out nor rage. It’s
derived from Latin ultra, beyond, through French
outré.
-
In Latin, postumus was the superlative of post-, after,
so it meant “aftermost” or “hindmost”. The
term was particularly used to describe a child born after the death of
its father. Folk etymology in Latin decided that the second part of
the word was really humus, earth, or humare, to bury,
as if the compound meant “child born after the father was
buried”, and so we have the current spelling
posthumous. Humus is still used as a word for
“soil”, and inhumation means burial. See
the section on humble humans for more relatives. (The spelling change
must have happened in Late Latin, because the early Roman Empire much
preferred cremation, treating burial as a foreign custom. Burial
didn’t become common until the empire converted to
Christianity.)
-
“All the livelong day” doesn’t
refer to the duration of one’s life. It was once the Old
English phrase liefe-long, literally dear long.
-
Sticking to mistaken living, livelihood originally
meant what it looks like — the quality of being lively. The
“job” sense is actually a perversion of livelode,
where the second element means “way”, and is the same word
as load and to lead.
-
For that matter, live as an adjective — a live
broadcast, and so on — is clipped from alive.
The first sense was “burning”, as in a live coal.
-
A hot-tempered person was first called a spitfire in
1690, but that’s because the word had moved to the parlor. Over
a hundred years earlier, such a person had been called a
shitfire. In 1578, Francis Drake captured a Spanish
treasure galleon called the Cacafuego, the exact same
construction. It took so long to unload all the silver bullion from
the captured ship that the sailors joked it should be renamed the
Cacaplata instead.
-
The Gin of “gin and tonic” is short for
“Geneva spirits”, but the item has no connection with the
Swiss city of that name. Gin was originally imported into England
from Holland, and genever is the Dutch spelling of
juniper, whose berries are the flavoring agent. (The
cotton gin, meanwhile, is a clipped form of
engine, a descendant of “ingenious”.)
-
A hangnail was originally an “angnail”,
where the first syllable meant “pain”, as in
anguish, angina,
anger, anxious, and
angst. That nail was an iron nail, not a finger or
toenail, because the original meaning of “angnail” was
what is now called a corn on the foot, and to the sufferer, walking
was like driving in a nail.
-
A chemist may or may not mean an Egyptian. Arabic
al-kimaya (English alchemy) literally meant
“the Egyptian art” — the Alexandrians were famous
for their attempts to transmute elements and so on, and even the Bible
fulminates against Egyptian magicians. (Khem or
kemet was the ancient Egyptian name of Egypt; it meant
“black land”, referring to the fertile delta and narrow
strip along the Nile compared to the red desert.) A second school
thinks that the Arabs borrowed Greek chymeia, to pour or
infuse, and that the Egyptian connection was folk etymology in Arabic.
Anyway, around 1600 French and English detached the Arabic article
from Alchemist to form chemist, still with the same
meaning. Chemical, chemistry,
chemo(therapy), etc. are all back-formations from
chemist, all with the original meaning. As a reputable science,
chemistry wasn’t split off from alchemy until about 1750.
-
A polecat has nothing to do with a rod; it was once
French poulechat — chicken cat — applied to a
kind of weasel. (A minority view thinks that the first syllable is
actually related to English foul and Latin
putrid, from the weasel’s strong smell, and
that the chicken is French folk etymology.) For that matter,
the obsolete weapon called a poleaxe wasn’t
named for its handle, either. The first syllable is Old English
pol, head, so the weapon was for chopping off heads. Other
words from the same root include poll in all its
senses (poll tax, Gallup poll), the verb poll (i.e., count heads), and
two different words for an immature frog —
polliwog (Middle English polwigle, head
wiggle) and tadpole (toad head).
-
A blindfold has nothing to do with a folded cloth.
It was Old English “blindfeld” or “-felled”,
the past participle of “blindfellen”, to strike blind. In
modern English, it would more properly be “blindfalled” or
“blindfallen”.
-
Pneumonia seems to be folk etymology in medieval
Greek. In English it originally was “pulmonia” from
pleumon, the Greek word for lung.
Cf. pulmonary and pleurisy.
Pneumonia was altered because of popular connection with Greek
pneu-, air. Pneumatic is a legitimate word
from that root. As might be expected, the root also meant
“spirit”, and the original meaning of pneumatic was
“spiritual”, as in “John is the most pneumatic
gospel.” Pneumatology is the study of spirits
in general— theologians have restricted it to the doctrine of
the Holy Spirit. Despite the pronunciation, apnea is
Greek a-pnea, no breath.
-
The card game called bridge isn’t related to
the thing that carries a road. The game is Russian biritch,
and when the game became popular in the late 1800’s, it was
first called Russian Whist. The Russian term is of unknown origin,
but it’s been speculated that since similar games have long been
known in the Near East, and the game became known in the West via
Istanbul, it might be Turkish bir-uts, literally one-three,
since only three of the four participants play a given hand. The
highway bridge is the same word as [eye] brow. In
Old English the brows were actually the eyelashes, with the modern
eyebrows called the “overbrows”. (By the way, to
browbeat doesn’t mean to hit someone in the
face, it means to scowl at them with lowered brows.)
-
Upside down started out life as the phrase
“up so down”. People had a problem with that; the first
attempt at rationalization was “upset down” before
everyone settled on the current version.
-
The oed has half a page of different perversions of the
pigment verdigris (copper acetate). Properly it is
French vert de Grece, green of Greece, but it has
been verdigrease (the most common),
vert-greese, wergresse, verngrass, and many
more.
-
All Yorkshire is divided into three parts, called the North, South,
and East Riding. These have nothing to with the verb
ride; the original word was Old English thriding, third part.
Folk-change caused the consonants to squash together, so “North
Thriding”, e.g., became “North Riding”. See the
discussion on haplology for more examples of this
sort of thing.
-
The herb called rosemary has nothing to do with
either roses or Mary — it is Latin ros marina,
sea-dew.
-
For that matter, a primrose isn’t anything like
a rose either. The name is a perversion of primula, the name
of the cowslip from about 1100, and still the scientific name of that
flower. The name comes from “prime” because it blooms
early in Spring. In fact, the first descriptions of the primrose all
agreed it was white, not yellow. The “primrose path of
dalliance” is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
where it was opposed to the “steep and thorny way to
Heaven”.
-
More botanical errors include the first element of
arrowroot, which is native American ara-ara,
food of foods, and the non-flower in safflower, which
was adopted into English from Italian saffiore, from Arabic
asfar, yellow. (Saffron is another plant
from the same Arabic root.)
-
Sticking to botany, the Jerusalem artichoke
isn’t really an artichoke, it’s a sunflower, and it comes
from the New World, not the Near East. The first word is Italian
girasole, sun-turner (cf. gyrate and solar), an obvious name
for the flower. (Greek helianthus translates into
English as “sun flower”, but it was also called
heliotrope,“sun turner”.) As long as
I’m on a roll, artichoke itself is really
Arabic al-kharshuf, so it is no more likely to choke a person
than anything else.
-
A frontispiece at the front of a book is not a piece
of the front. The division of meaning is “fronti-spiece”,
where the second part is the Latin spic/spec- root, to look
at, seen in words like spectator, inspect, etc., and the first is
frons, forehead. Latin frontispicium meant
“observation of the face” to determine character. In
English, a frontispiece was the facade of a building several hundred
years before being applied to books. To affront
someone is to hit them in the face — ad-frontem.
-
While on the subject of incorrect division of words, it certainly
looks like the first section of handiwork is the word
handy. Well, it is, but the derivation is backwards.
Old English handgeweorc meant “work with the
hand”, where the ge- (actually ȝe) was a verbal
prefix meaning “associated with” which is still seen in
many German words. Some are obvious, like Gesellschaft,
organization or society, but some are extremely non-obvious.
Geheim means “secret”, but the literal meaning is
“at home”. (Geheim is best-known in English as the
first syllable of Gestapo, Geheime
Staats-Polizei, secret state police.) Since the pronunciation of
Old English /G/ changed to /Y/, geweorc became
iwork, and the adjective “handy” was created by
erroneously taking the /I/ as part of the first element instead.
(Handicraft was once simply “handcraft”;
it seems to have gained its /I/ from an imitation of handiwork.) That
/ȝe-/ and then /i-/ on the beginning of verbs has further
mutated into a modern /a-/ in words like aware,
alike, again, and dialect forms such
as a-building and a-hunting.
26Mar11 “Again” is interesting.
The actual Old English adjective was gain, which meant to
oppose. The only living relatives are “again”,
gainsay, to contradict, and it’s embedded in
against. (The /t/ of “against” is fake;
the Middle English word was againes.) The first meaning of
“again” was “in the opposite direction”; a
1470 quotation says “The Welshmen were so strong they drove the
English again.” This got modified to“back to the starting
point”, whence the modern senses. Note these are not related to
the other gain, French gagner, which
originally meant “booty” as a noun (c.f. ill-gotten gains)
and to obtain or secure as a verb. (Gaining on someone in a race or
other contest is short for gaining ground or gaining time.)
Rather surprisingly, alike once meant
“resembling a dead body”. Germanic likam meant
“form”, producing Old English lic, corpse. A
relic of this is still in a church’s lychgate,
which leads to the cemetery. Gelic meant “similar in
form”; like other Old English words in /ge-/, this started as a
/ȝ-/, became /i-/ in Middle English and then /a-/, as mentioned
in the previous paragraph.
-
The phrase stark naked is unrelated to
stark, rigid or unyielding. It is really
start-naked, where steort is an Old English
word meaning tail or rump. Note there is a common European bird
called the redstart.
Stark naked therefore is of exactly the same formation as the
less-polite “bare-assed” and “butt naked”.
The French aristocratic put-down sans-culotte to refer to a
revolting peasant is of similar origin, although some fastidious
historians like to say that the allusion was to the poor wearing
smocks instead of britches.
(The more common start isn’t related to the
above, by the way. That’s a Germanic word for “cause to
jump”, more obviously seen in “You gave me a real
start” and startle.) The other
“stark”, meanwhile, is a member of the large
stand/stork/stable … tribe.
-
Black and blue is an error for the original
“black and blae” (still used in Scotland) or “black
and blo”, where the second word was an Old English term that
meant livid or bruise-colored.
-
Nothing could be more obvious than that a gridiron is
simply a grid made out of iron. Hah! Not only wasn’t there any
such word as “grid”, but the “iron” is fake,
too. Gridiron is actually a perversion of French gridel,
which itself was modified from the krat- root which meant
wickerwork, also seen in crate and
grate, not to mention crib,
cradle (little basket), and cart.
(The Germanic form gave hurdle, a wickerwork barrier.
The verb to hurdle and the noun hurdler only date
back to about 1900, from a “hurdle race”, where barriers
were placed in the path of a human or equine runner.) Anyway, once
gridiron had illegitimately established itself, grid
was created as a back-formation, with the meaning “criss-cross
pattern”. French gridel also is the source of the
obvious English griddle and the slightly less obvious
grill and grille. The
andiron, another hearth implement, doesn’t
contain any iron either. It’s French andier.
The actual Indo-European root behind all those crate and grate words
was ger-, which meant to bend. See “crank” and
“crutch” for many more relatives.
-
The city of Buffalo, NY is not named for the
animal. Western New York is a thousand miles from where the buffaloes
roamed, the antelopes played, and Buffalo Bill
shot them. The city’s name is a warped form of French
Beau Fleuve, a fine river, applied to the Niagara. This
would make Buffalo, NY a member of the “fluid” family
mentioned elsewhere. (Although it is a couple of hundred years too
late, I feel I must insert the obligatory disclaimer that the
“buffalo” of the Great Plains isn’t a buffalo (an
animal of Africa and Asia), it’s a bison. Sigh….)
-
Buffalo is nowhere close to the American geographical record for
mangled French, however. In Colorado, there is a place called
Picketwire Canyon. This unlikely name came about
because the locals made an exceedingly bad attempt at pronouncing the
Purgatoire River.
-
Another corruption of French is seen in
L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland,
famous as the site of the first Norse settlement in North America back
around 1100 ce. The half-French, half-English name
should raise suspicions at this point, and indeed the original name
was L’Anse aux Méduses, or Jellyfish
Cove.
-
26Aug11 This corruption of French is by no
means restricted to the New World. An English example is
Beachy Head, the highest chalk cliff on the English Channel.
It has nothing to do with beaches, but instead shares a first element
with Buffalo, NY. The Normans called it Beauchef, Beautiful
Head. By the way, Beachy Head is the world’s third most popular
spot for suicides. Number one is the Golden Gate Bridge, and right
behind it is the Aokigahara forest near Mt. Fuji in
Japan. The Golden Gate Bridge will soon lose its notoriety, though.
The authorities are currently building a safety net below the entire
length of the bridge’s pedestrian walkways, at a price greater
than the original cost (75 years ago) of the bridge itself!
14Dec11Sticking to English geography vs
French, there is a prominent escarpment in the Peak District of
Staffordshire called The
Roaches — it’s French
les roches, the rocks.
-
Turning to Spanish, the infamous hot and dry Santa
Ana winds that blow out of the Southern California mountains
during the wildfire season may not be named for the Santa Ana
mountains and Santa Ana canyon near Los Angeles. The earliest
references in Spanish refer to the “devil wind”, making it
likely that “Santa Ana” is really a modification of
Spanish Santanas, i.e., Satan. The first unambiguous
reference to the “Santa Ana” was around 1910, in an
Eastern newspaper report, and quite possibly their Spanish was not of
the highest order.
-
Surprise, surprise. A chestnut has nothing to do
with the thorax or a container (the latter being the original meaning
of “chest”). In reality, the last syllable isn’t
really “nut”, either. In Greek, the name of the nut was
kastanea (evidently from the city of Castanea, in Asia
Minor), which became Latin castanea and Old French
chastaine. (The Latin is also responsible for
castanet.) See “maroon” for more about
chestnuts.
-
Sticking to perverted place names, the Leghorn
chicken breed is so-named for Ligorno, Italy.
-
Still on the subject: The Rosetta Stone has nothing
to do with small roses. It is folk-etymology for Rashid,
Egypt, the city where it was found in 1799. (Rashid, sometimes
spelled Rasheed, is a fairly common Arabic name — it means
[rightly] guided.)
-
Several British cities have a street (sometimes quite fashionable)
named Rotten Row, but etymologists are
suspicious that this began as rottan, the northern plural of
rat. (Rot, to decompose, is an Old
English verb with no relation to rats; rotten, of
course, is the past participle. One cousin is ret,
to soak fiber in water until it is soft.)
-
It’s “obvious” that acorn is from
“oak-corn”, but it isn’t. The word is really
related to acre and agriculture
(Latin acer, field), and was applied to any natural foodstuff
of field or forest. The best translation of Old English
aecern is “fruit” or “produce”.
People insisted on associating the word with oak trees and with the
“corn” that means grain, by way of such misbegotten
variants as ake-corn and oke-horn. As mentioned
elsewhere, the Latin word for the acorn is gland.
-
In the word ransack, the first element is Old Norse
rann, house. The second element isn’t
“sack”, however, it is “seek”, and for
hundreds of years the meaning was “thorough search”. To
sack a city (or a quarterback) does seem be from the
sense of “put [plunder] into a bag”, though.
-
American Indians of the Pacific Northwest were well known for holding
an elaborate feast called a potlatch where expensive
presents were handed out. No pots, no latches — it is Chinook
patshatl, a gift.
-
A cesspool not only doesn’t have anything to do
with a pool, its meaning has literally changed 180 degrees.
It’s French suspirail, ventilation hole (related to
respire, inspire, etc.), so it led upward from a privy.
English changed this to “cespiral” and the meaning to
“drainpipe”, leading downward instead. From there, it was
also used for the receptacle at the end of the drainpipe, and the
change to “pool” was more or less inevitable.
The original sense of sewer was “outlet of a
pond”. The word was Latin ex-aquaria before the French
got ahold of it.
-
A nightmare has no connection to a female horse. The
second syllable is Germanic maron, goblin, from an
ie root that meant to harm. See “murder” for
more relatives.
-
To your complete lack of surprise at this point, neither component of
mushroom is legitimate. It is French
mousseron, from “moss”, which came to mean
“foam” in French, as in mousse. (The
intermediate was “mushroon”; English commonly converts the
nasal -on sound at the end of French words to -oon with a long-/U/
sound when that syllable is stressed. Other examples are saloon,
cartoon, bassoon, dragoon, picayune, and balloon from French
salon, carton, basson, dragon,
picaillon, ballon. If the English pronunciation
does not stress the final syllable, then the spelling is left
unchanged and the vowel is a schwa; e.g., baron, button, felon,
carton, etc.)
-
To buttonhole a person doesn’t make any sense.
Changing only one letter makes all the difference — the term
started life as to button-hold.
-
Lukewarm is a modification of “lew-warm”,
where the first element is an Old English term that meant
“mild”. The only other survivor in modern English is the
lee side of a ship, sheltered from the wind, although
the cald- words that mean “hot” are from the same
ie root.
-
Nautical types agree that a taffrail is at the rear
of a ship. Most of them would say it’s the stern railing, but
the word actually has nothing to do with “rail”. It is
Dutch tafferel, “little table”, originally
applied to the flat vertical panel on the stern of a sailing ship.
Unfortunately, the magnetic attraction of the railing immediately
above the tafferel proved irresistible.
-
Etymologically, a belfry ain’t got no bells.
It changed from Germanic bergfrid, which meant something like
“place of protection”. In Middle English a
berfrey was a movable shelter which the attackers pushed up
to the walls of a city or castle under siege. By the time of
Shakespeare it meant a watchtower, still without bells.
(Tower is not an Indo-European word, by the way.
Presumably the proto-Indo-Europeans didn’t build multi-story
structures and borrowed the word when they encountered civilization.
Its most obvious derivative is the smaller turret,
syncopated from “tower-ette”, although one occasionally
sees tor as a geographic term. In Gaelic,
Tara was the residence of the high kings of Ireland.)
-
The word maidenhead should be written
“maidenhood”. The Old English suffix -heit to
indicate a condition became modern “-hood” (boyhood,
brotherhood, knighthood, likelihood, etc.) in all cases except
maidenhead and godhead. (Once upon a time, there were words like
onlihead and beastlihead.) The erroneous association with
“head” led to maidenhead changing from an abstract noun
(“her maidenhead is obvious,”) to the concrete sense of
hymen. The suffix is still -heit in German; one notable
example is the borrowed gesundheit. The first
element is “be sound”, so the compound means
“soundness” or “good health” as a response to
a sneeze. (If your enemy sneezes, it may be handy to know that the
German opposite of Gesundheit is Krankheit, illness.
Krankenhaus is German for “hospital”, literally a
“sick-house”.) The name of the physicist Gabriel
Fahrenheit translates as “experience”
— literally it is faring-hood. See the large bher-
family described above. Afrikaans apartheid is
“apart-hood”, i.e., separation [of races].
-
To “run the gauntlet” isn’t related
to a glove; it’s Swedish gatlopp, where the first
syllable means path or lane — the same word as English
gate and gait — and the second
means to jump or run. The gauntlet was originally a minor military
punishment where the offender had to run between two lines of soldiers
armed with clubs who could hit him as he ran past. “Gate”
still means “road” in northern England and Scotland.
Cf. the Canongate and many other streets in
Edinburgh. The second element is also in English
leap, lope, and the second syllable
of gallop. If you “leap into” something
that is none of your business, then you are an
interloper, and if you elope
(ex-lope), you “run away”. (The first meaning of
“interlope” used the literal sense of “run
between” — it meant to smuggle.)
-
The verb to maroon certainly can’t be related
to the color. The brownish-red color goes back to maraon,
Greek for the chestnut. The Robinson Crusoe sense, meanwhile, is
perverted from Spanish cimarron, wild or untamed, used for a
runaway slave. Since runaways normally headed for the wilderness, the
word came to mean “abandon”.
-
A ten-gallon hat may be large, but it isn’t
anywhere near that large. The item is a bad translation of
Spanish sombrero galon, where the second word means
“braid”.
-
The children’s game of jacks used to be
jack-stones, and before that it was
check-stones, and before that it seems to have been
chuck-stones, from chuck, to throw.
-
As mentioned elsewhere, sovereign has nothing to do
with a reigning monarch; it is actually the same word
as soprano and superior.
-
To launch a boat is completely unrelated to the kind
of boat called a launch. The former is from a French root that
means to propel or throw; the rocket scientists have now taken over
the word. A (thrown) lance is a relative. French
elan has been taken into English; it means to “throw
out” and originally meant a sudden rush of troops; the current
sense is by way of “impetuous”. Meanwhile, the floating
launch is folk etymology from Malay lancharan through
Portuguese.
-
Headlong and sidelong don’t
have anything to do with length. They started out as
headling and sideling, where -ling is an
Old English suffix meaning “in the manner of” or
“concerning”. (Cf. starling, earthling, suckling, etc.)
Note that the verb to sidle is an erroneous
back-formation from “sideling”, taking the -ing as the
mark of a present participle. Strict logic would say English should
then have to headle, go forward. This mistake is also seen in
suckle and grovel.
Groveling means in a face-downward direction, from
Scandinavian[on] grufe, flat on one’s face, adopted into
Scottish. Homer would say “biting the dust”, q.v. The
mistake was helped along by the fact that -le is used to form verbs
with a meaning of “repeatedly” — sparkle, wrestle,
tinkle, crackle, paddle, etc. Wrestling is therefore
really wrest-le-ing. Oh, yes, at least two other
possible orientations once were seriously used in English.
Obstetrical texts of the 16th and 17th Centuries discussed how to deal
with babies that might be presented headlong, sidelong,
footlong, or arselong.
-
A greyhound can be any color, because the first
element is really Old English grieg or Old Norse
groy, bitch.
-
You will be startled to know that a strutting peacock
was not named for the green vegetable. Peacock, peahen, and
the generic peafowl are from pavo, the name of the bird in
Spanish and Latin. In Middle English, the bird was a po,
with forms pocock and pohen. “Feathered with po” was used
for a finely dressed person, and “proud as a pocock” is a
cliché that goes back to Chaucer. The Italian form of
pavo led to the slow and stately dance called a
pavane, although some experts claim it’s a
dance from Padua instead and this is a case of folk etymology. (If
the bird had been named for the vegetable, it would have been a
“peasecock”, anyway.)
-
Welcome certainly seems as if it should be
“well-come” as a greeting, but unfortunately for amateur
etymologists, it does not contain the element
“well”, i.e., good. The first syllable is actually
will, desire or wish. The German form,
wilkommen preserves the original form. “I will do
it” is “I desire to do it”, a last will and
testament records the wishes of the deceased, etc.
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In England a jumper is a loose jacket and in America
it is a sleeveless dress. Either way one might assume that it
doesn’t have anything to do with leaping, and one would be
correct — it’s Arabic jubbah (a long open coat)
through Spanish aljuba and French juppa.
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The ecclesiastical calendar has Ember Days in each of
the four seasons of the year. The word is a corruption of Old English
ymbe, around, itself descended from the ambi-
ie root. There is no relation to the glowing ember,
which is from the same “burn” root as
combustion, oast, and
anneal.
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A crayfish or crawfish (depending on
where you are from) is most definitely not a fish of any kind. Both
biologically and etymologically it is a crab. Old German for crab was
krebiz (modern krebs), which became crevice
in Old French, ecrevisse in modern French, and
“crevis” in English. The old long-/E/ sound was
pronounced like modern long-/A/, so it was re-spelled to
“crayvis”, and from there the “fish” was
pretty inevitable. (See the paragraph on “gig” below for
another false fish.)
-
While on the subject of foodstuffs, a gooseberry has
nothing to do with the bird. It’s ultimately French
groseille from the large “crooked” family.
-
Sticking to food, a certain pear-shaped fruit from the American
tropics was called an ahuacatl, which means
“testicle” in Aztec. The Spaniards perverted the
unfamiliar word into avocado, which really means
“lawyer” (i.e., advocate) in Spanish, and
English mangled that into an alligator pear.
(Alligator is Spanish el lagerto, the lizard.
Presumably the alligator pear got helped along by the appearance of
the avocado’s skin.) I have no idea if the Spanish word was
originally adopted by someone who knew the Aztec meaning — it is
possible some scholar perpetrated a sneaky pun on the related
definitions of “testify” and “testicle”,
mentioned above. The Mexicans particularly enjoyed
ahuacamolli, testicle sauce, which the Spanish modified into
guacamole.
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Quite near each other in the dictionary, one finds two related farm
implements, the pickaxe and the
pitchfork. Both are illegitimate, but in opposite
ways. The pickaxe started out life as the Latin picosa and
then French picois, relatives of pick,
pike, peck, etc. All these deal
with stabbing instruments, so the “pick” is fine, but the
word has nothing to do with an axe. On the other hand, the
“fork” of pitchfork is OK, but it used to be a
pikefork, spear fork, now modified as if it was somehow
related to pitch, i.e., throw. By the way, the first
syllable of picnic is the stab word again. It
originally was French piquenique, where the first syllable is
“peck”, and it was a sort of covered-dish dinner where
every guest contributed food. I mentioned elsewhere that the
voracious pike and pickerel fish are named for
their shape. A turnpike began as a swinging barrier
across a road at a tollbooth, and a picador is in
charge of stabbing a bull. Other relatives are
pique, irritation, and piquant, both
from the French word for prick or stab.
-
To carry something piggyback does not seem to match
with the observed behavior of pigs nor with the observed methods of
transporting them. That’s because the word started out as
“pitch-back”, to throw a load over the shoulder.
-
Mohair isn’t related to hair — it’s
Arabic mukhayyar, which means selected or chosen.
-
Calling a woman a baggage has nothing to do with
luggage. It is Arabic bagiy, prostitute (baga is to
fornicate), through Provençal bagasse.
-
The agreed-upon radio distress call is mayday, a
phonetic adaptation of French [venez] m’aider,
[come] help me!
-
A wiseacre may have come down in the world, but it
certainly has nothing to do with the area of a field. It’s
German wizzago, prophet, where the first element is indeed a
member of the wit/wisdom family. Once upon a time, a wiseacre was
therefore almost the same thing as a wizard, with no
derogatory sense.
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A man of dubious morality called a rake is short for
a rakehell, but that doesn’t have a legitimate
connection to either rake, the implement, or to Hell. It is folk
etymology for Old English rakel, rash or reckless. (PS
— despite a similarity in form and meaning, rakel is not
the source of reckless; the latter is a
“reckon” word which is related to the garden rake.
See erect and right for the gory
details.)
-
A compound, meaning an enclosure, looks like it might
be related to a dog pound, but it is actually Malay
kampong, fenced-in area or village. The other compound
started as componed (three syllables), the participle of
French compone, Latin componere, to place together.
Cf. component.
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An invoice has nothing to do with speaking. It is
French envois, something sent out. The creation of
“invoice” was done by someone who didn’t speak
French, since that final /S/ is silent. Someone who did speak
French imported the same word as envoy. Note that
English does have an “in-voice” word —
invoke.
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It is possible that some people in an uproar might
roar, but … You got it, there’s no
semantic relation. Roar is an imitative word for a full-throated deep
noise, but uproars can be silent. The term comes from a
kere- root that meant to mix or confuse, by way of Germanic
hror-, and an uproar is technically a confused tumult, used
to describe a riot or rebellion. (The spelling in English would
probably be “uprare” except for the influence of
“roar”.) Hence an “up-roar” is identical to a
“mix-up”. Its closest relatives in English are from Greek
krasis, mixture — idiosyncrasy
(“self-mixed-together”), and crater,
which meant “mixing bowl” in Greek. It can also be
demonstrated that the sense of “mix” led to
“cook” or “boil” which led to Germanic
rare, half-cooked.
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In a European bird called the lapwing, both elements
are due to folk etymology. The bird flies in an odd irregular
bouncing and tumbling pattern, and the original name was a
leapwince. (Wince used to mean
“waver”; it’s from the bending root that also
appears in wink, winch, and
wench. See “witch hazel” for more.)
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Beef jerky isn’t related to a sudden pulling
movement. It’s a perversion of Spanish charqui , which
in its turn was taken from a native Quichua (Peruvian) word meaning
“dried flesh”. At least three hundred years ago the term
was even turned into a verb — one still sees advertisements for
“jerked beef”. Maybe people think it’s somehow
related to “pulled pork” barbeque.
-
Apple-pie order, meaning very neat, is French
nappes-pliées, folded linen. Note that an apple-pie
bed is a term for the practical joke also called short-sheeting;
folding a single sheet in half so it looks like two until the victim
tries to find room for his or her feet.
-
Sticking to foodstuffs, the Jordan almond is
related neither to the country, the river, nor the basketball player.
The first word is French jardin, garden.
-
Another edible perversion is the sparerib.
There’s no relation to spare in either sense — spareribs
are rather fatty, and they certainly aren’t kept aside for
emergencies. The cut was originally a spar-rib, where the
first element is spear or spar. In
other words, spareribs were cooked on a spit.
-
And again, cold slaw is really cole slaw, from
Dutch koolsla, cabbage (kale) salad.
-
Chickweed started out life as chiken-mete,
chicken food. (See the discussion of meat
elsewhere.)
-
And yet another pair of kitchen items — cookie
is unrelated to cook. Cookie is a diminutive of
cake, from a Germanic term that meant “flat and
round”. Cf. “cake of soap”. It was originally a
Scottish word, probably borrowed from Dutch koekje, little
cake. “Cook”, however, is from Indo-European
pekw-, to cook or ripen. The root is also seen in
kitchen, cuisine,
terra cotta (baked earth), kiln
and its cousin culinary, biscuit,
concoction, ricotta, and
apricot (early-ripe, as mentioned elsewhere). With
its original /P/ still attached, the root also provided Greek words
which mean “ripen” or “digest” —
peptic, dyspepsia (bad digestion),
and pumpkin (originally any melon which was eaten
when ripe). Amusingly, Hindi pukka, good or genuine,
literally means “ripe”, by way of “fully
developed” and “mature”.
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Mistletoe has nothing to do with feet in the fog. It
started out as mistiltan, where mist is a Germanic
word for dung (the plant is propagated through bird droppings), and
the final syllable is Old English tan, twig. The first
element is also in words like midden and
muck, while modern Dutch for twig is teen.
Presumably the “toe” snuck in because the Old English
plural of “ta” (toe) was “tan” (cf. children,
brethren, oxen, etc.), but then the plant should be a
“mistletoes”. Sigh…
The other tan, light brown, goes back to Keltic
tanno, oak tree. Oak bark is used in
tanning leather, so the adjective means
“leather-colored”. Both meanings of “tan”
already existed in Old English. Tannin is the
chemical involved, often in the form tannic acid, while French
tané became English tawny.
Sticking to botany, the dogwood tree has no affinity
for canines. In Old English it was the dagwood,
unrelated to the masculine name. This dag- is probably
dagger, from the fact that the tree has very tough
wood used to make spears, skewers, tool handles, etc.
-
Dengue fever, a tropical disease now creeping into
the southern USA courtesy of global warming, is another example of
folk etymology in Spanish. The original Swahili
ka dinga meant “cramp”, but it was
associated with the Spanish dengue meaning
“fastidious” or “delicate”. In the British
West Indies, this was translated into “Dandy”, and in
Africa the disease is sometimes called “Giraffe”. All are
from the fact that Dengue, also called
Breakbone Fever, is characterized by
excruciating joint pain and muscle cramps, particularly in the neck
and shoulders, so that sufferers hold their heads and arms in a very
careful, awkward manner. Dengue and its viral cousins West Nile Fever
and Yellow Fever are mosquito-borne. Unfortunately, West Nile can be
carried by hundreds of species of mosquitoes, including many that can
live clear up to the sub-arctic zone, while the other two are limited
to the ever-expanding areas where it never freezes. (The viruses are
close enough that the mildest form of Dengue was used in an
unsuccessful attempt to create a possible West Nile vaccine. That
“mildest” is because there are three forms of Dengue, and
yes, having one does not leave you immune to the other two.)
-
Yet another Spanish example is the conversion of Mexican
marguan into the proper name Maria Juana (Mary Jane),
which became English marijuana.
-
I could write a whole section on folk etymology modifications of
American Indian terms — tomahawk, the
Seneca tribe, etc. As mentioned,
potlatch is from a Chinook word. American animals
with nonsense names include a woodchuck, which began
life as Cree wuchak, a muskrat, which is
Algonkian muscascus, red animal, and
chipmunk, also Algonkian. Squash
the plant isn’t soft and squishy, of course. Both that and
succotash are from Algonkian askutasquash,
green food.
As long as I’m on a roll… chinchilla is
literally “little insect” in Spanish. (Cf. the
chinch bug, originally Latin cimex, bedbug).
The conquistadors created the animal name from either Quechua
chichila, fringe, or chiphcila, shining.
Guinea is on the west coast of Africa. The
guinea pig is not a native, however. The animal
is native to tropical South America, and it has its name because the
English couldn’t tell the difference between Guinea and Guyana.
It isn’t a pig either, of course.
Although the prairie dog is a rodent, the name
is somewhat legitimate — it barks very much like a dog.
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The relation of vaccine to
baccalaureate is an example of folk etymology (or at
least a pun) in modern Latin. Latin vaca meant
“cow”, seen in the Spanish vaquero,
cowboy. It is well-known that Jenner developed his treatment for
prevention of smallpox by intentional infection
(vaccination) with cowpox, whose scientific name was
vaccinia. Now it gets tricky. In Roman times, a
baccalarius was a worker on a farm, a “cowboy”.
Eventually this became bachelor, with the meaning of
“beginner” or “assistant”. Some university
joker changed the Bachelor’s Degree to
“baccalaureate” as if it came from “bacca
lauri”, laurel berries.
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The turtle is another victim of folk etymology. The
English picked up and modified Spanish or Portuguese tortuga,
the tortoise. The original turtle was a bird, but
the new meaning was so successful we now have to say “turtle
dove”, and “the voice of the turtle” mentioned in
the Bible causes mystification. (The bird’s name was imitative,
from the “tur-tur” sound it makes, while tortoise is a
“torque/torture” word, q.v., from the animal’s
twisted legs.)
-
Needless to say, a mongoose has nothing to do with
the bird; it’s Hindi mangus. The “goose”
idea has so taken over that some people think the plural is
“mongeese” instead of mongooses. The Egyptian variety of
the animal is called the ichneumon, which means “tracker”
in Greek. It is well known for preying on crocodile eggs. Mongooses
are cousins of the ferret, which literally means
“little thief”. Furtive is closely
related. There are many more English words ultimately from the
ie bher- (carry) root —
bear, transfer, etc. See that
section for the details.
-
Apropos of crocodiles, it seems obvious that
seersucker fabric must be another example of folk
etymology, since neither part of the compound makes any sense. In
fact, it’s Persian shir-o-shakkar, milk and sugar,
applied to a variety of striped and puckered linen. The root of
sugar, saccharine,
sucrose, etc. is Sanskrit sarkara,
“grit” or “gravel”, and
crocodile is “pebble worm” (kroke
drilos) in Greek. This is allegedly from the animal’s
habit of lying on the bank of a river, but the name is quite possibly
Greek folk etymology for some foreign word. (The immediate source of
“sugar” is Arabic sukkar, but the experts debate
on whether Greek picked it up from Arabic or vice versa. The
Greek word is
σακχαρον, which
accounts for the odd /C-CH/ in the middle of
“saccharine”.)
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Remaining in the animal kingdom, foxfire has nothing
to do with foxes. It is the phosphorescent glow of decaying
vegetation, and the first element is French faux, false.
Cf. the Latin name, ignis fatuus, foolish fire. Some
experts feel that the “fox” in the
foxglove plant is also misleading. Given the shape
of the flower, both “glove” and the Latin name,
digitalis purpurea, are obvious, but foxes don’t have
hands. It is possible that the first part might be “folk”
instead, since in several other European languages the flower is
“fairy-glove” or “elf-glove”. (The name is
slightly misleading even so, since the flower doesn’t look like
a modern glove; it looks like a thimble.)
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Yet another animal: The dormouse is not related to a
mouse. The animal name is from French dormous, sleepy,
because it hibernates during the winter. Its relatives are
dormitory, dormant, and
dormer, from an ie drem-, to
sleep. Despite the apparent similarity, dream is not
related; that’s from a root which means to deceive.
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Neither the mandrake, the mandrill,
nor the mangrove have anything to do with humans,
drakes, drills, or groves. The plant is Greek mandragora,
which isn’t related to dragons, either. The name of the large
baboon seems to be an African /M’/ prefix attached to
dril, the native name of the animal. The tree is a
perversion of Portuguese mangue, but there is some debate
whether they got the word from the natives of Brazil or Malaya. An
intermediate form in English was “mangrow”, still used in
Jamaica.
For that matter, manhandle now is used as if the
source was “handled by man“, but it is actually a
perversion of mangle, the frequentive of
maim. The source of maim is unknown, but is
definitely the same word as mayhem after Norman
French got rid of the /H/. (The other mangle, a clothes press or
wringer, goes clear back to a Greek word for pressing with stones or
other weights, also seen in the military machine called a
mangonel.
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Etymologists insist that the curlew is named from its
cry, but the form has certainly been influenced by French
courlieu, “runner”, from the Latin curs-
root. (If you want to introduce a show-off word into conversation,
casually mention that curlews, storks, herons, ibises, flamingos, and
other long-legged wading birds are grallatorial, from
a Latin word for stilt-walking.)
-
The verb to gig, to hook or spear, (a very common
word in the vicinity of College Station, Texas) started out as the
Spanish noun fisga, a harpoon, possibly from Basque. This
was adopted into English as fizgig. That still didn’t
make sense, so it was altered to fishgig, still meaning
harpoon. Eventually that got taken as two words, creating the noun
and verb “gig” in the process.
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A penthouse is connected to a house by its
architecture, but there is no etymological relationship. The word is
actually French appentis, the same term as
appendix, applied to a shed or extra room added
(appended or hung) onto a larger structure. This makes a penthouse a
relative of pencil and penicillin, mentioned back at the beginning.
-
Another false “house” is Charterhouse as
a variety of monastery. It’s a perversion of French
chartreuse (a residence of the Carthusians),
and it is familiar from the English translation of Stendhal’s
1839 novel Le Chartreuse de Parme — The
Charterhouse of Parma. Chartreuse is properly the name of a
mountain range in southern France near Grenoble, the original
monastery of the order (La Grande-Chartreuse) is named for the
mountains, and the color is from a liqueur invented by the monks.
(Cf. Benedictine, another monastic product.)
The second /R/ in “chartreuse” seems to be folk etymology
in French. The original form was Charteuse, hence
“Carthusian”. The spelling seems to have been altered
through association with French chartre, prison, on account
of the strictness of the order.
-
The flower lavender was originally
“livender”, probably from its bluish
(livid) color. There is no argument that for a
thousand years there has been an association with the Latin
lav- words meaning to wash (lavatory,
lather, etc.) because the sweet-smelling flower was
(and is) commonly used to scent laundry. (The
original meaning of the Indo-European leu- root was to flow,
accounting for lava, and the original meaning of
lavish was to pour out in a flood or
deluge.)
-
An ancient variety of musket was called a blunderbuss
in English, which didn’t really have anything to do with kissing
the wrong person. It’s Dutch donnerbus, thunder-tube.
(If a blunderbuss is a mistaken kiss, then obviously
omnibus must mean the practice of kissing everyone.)
In Ye Olde Days, a blunderbuss was also called a
trombone. That’s a “large horn”
(Latin tromba) and came from the gun’s flaring muzzle.
A trumpet, of course, is a smaller
tromba-ette.
The Romance languages use an -one or -on suffix to mean
a larger or augmented version of the base word; it’s often
modified to “-oon” in English. In addition to
“trombone”, other examples are balloon
(big ball), bassoon (deep bass),
medallion (large medal), galleon (a
ship larger than a galley), cannons and
canneloni (big canes or hollow tubes —
cannoli are little ones), saloon (a
large salle, room), and so on. A squadron
is a group of soldiers bigger than a squad. (Squad
itself is ex-quadra, a square.) The original
meaning of cartoon was a poster-sized image, from
Italian carta-one, large paper, and a baboon
is etymologically a “big baby”. A
macaroon is etymologically a large
macaroni, although the taste is now somewhat
different. French bouffer meant to swell or puff up; this led
to both buffoon (a clown) and the
bouffont hair style. Buffer in the
sense of “cushion” or “shock absorber” is also
from this root. This has been generalized to anything “in the
middle” — buffer state, a computer’s buffer memory,
and so on.
Mille was the Latin word for 1,000, leading to the
“M” in Roman numerals. (This year is MMIX.) A
million is a mille-one, large thousand —
see the previous paragraph. Other words from the same root include
the milli- (1/1000) prefix, while a
millipede and a millennium
respectively have a thousand feet (pedo-) and years
(annus). A mile is Latin mille passus,
a thousand [double] paces. In finance, a mill is a
tenth of a cent, or a thousandth of a dollar.
Just to aggravate us, French sometimes used the -on or
-oon suffix to mean smaller, not larger. A
platoon is French peloton, a very little
ball or pill — a pellet is
already a diminutive). A pontoon seems to have
originally been a “small bridge” or maybe “temporary
bridge” — Latin pons. The French word for
“small cat” is chaton, which has been borrowed
into English as kitten.
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There was once a legal institution known as a
piepowder court, which had nothing to do with either
kind of pie (bird or comestible) although the powder was legitimate.
It was French pied-poudreux, dusty-foot, applied to wayfarers
and traders. The local magistrate would convene an ad hoc
piepowder court at a fair to immediately settle disputes between
merchants before they dispersed and to punish pickpockets and
swindlers while the witnesses were still available.
-
A basinet was a light steel head covering, formerly
worn under the heavier armored helmet. In form, it’s a
“basin-ette”. The oed insists that
bassinette, a child’s cradle, is the same word,
but some experts claim that it is really a perversion of French
berceaunette a small cradle (berceau), itself formed
from bercer, to rock. (In England, “bassinette”
also means a baby carriage or, as the Brits say, a
pram, short for perambulator.)
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Gingerbread isn’t ginger bread, it’s
ginger cake, so it is appropriate that the “bread” part is
fake. The word started out as Old French gingembras,
preserved ginger, and seems originally to have referred to a medicine.
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Elsewhere I mentioned that Cape Horn was not
named for its shape. It was originally Dutch Kaap Hoorn
for the city of Hoorn in the Netherlands, which has
nothing to do with horns but was the home town of the
discoverer. Not only did English change it to “Horn” by
folk etymology, but on Spanish maps it is
Cabo de Hornos, Cape of Ovens, which certainly fits
with Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire) on the roster of
inappropriate geographical names! 05Jul11 On
the other hand, the Horn of Africa really
is horn-shaped.
-
Causeway is really a perverted translation of Latin
via calciata, so it is related to calcium, calculate,
and chalk. However, that probably did not mean “stone
road”. Since Latin calx meant both
“limestone” and “heel”, the experts seem to
think the sense is “trodden way”. Old French
causey (from calciata) meant a [tamped down] mound,
leading naturally to “causey-way”, a road on a mound. The
“tread” sense also led to caulk,
originally to make a seam waterproof by forcing packing material in
with the heel.Directly from the “heel” sense, Latin
created recalcitrant, to strongly kick the heels.
This was originally applied to horses, mules, etc. but now has the
general sense of “violently stubborn and disobedient”.
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A placard isn’t a card. The division is
actually plac-ard, where the first element is a “flat”
word like “placid” or “plaque”. It first
meant a seal on an official document, and then the document itself.
Placket is the same word; it originally meant a
breastplate and then an apron before transferring to a slit in a
garment. (Shakespeare and others have puns about keeping hands out of
plackets, where the garment sense was definitely not meant!)
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Blind man’s bluff doesn’t make
any sense, given how the game is played, but the little light bulb
should come on as soon as you know the last word was originally
buff or buffet.
Bluff did have the meaning of "blindfold" in the late
17th century, but that would mean the game’s title was
"blindfold a blind man", which is also nonsensical.
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Somewhere back upstream I mentioned that the battle of Passchendaele
was fought near the city of Ypres, Belgium. The
British soldiers uniformly referred to it as the “Battle of
Wipers”.
-
Persona was the Latin word for mask, particularly that worn
by an actor in a theater, and then applied to the character being
played. Cf. dramatis personae. The source is unknown, but the
current version is apparently Latin folk-etymology as if the word was
“per-sonare”, to sound through. A
parson is the same term; it’s possible this
started out as an example of the “actor” sense, applied to
non-resident clergy whose actual duties were performed by a resident
vicar. Latin persona is still used to mean “mask”
in phrases like “The politician’s public persona
was quite different from his private life.”
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Heyday does not seem to be from “day”,
but rather from Germanic heida, hey there, used as a shout of
joy. The first syllable is, therefore, the same as the interjection
hey! and doesn’t seem to be related to hey or
hay, an old kind of country dance.
-
Country dance is another example of folk
etymology. It was originally a contre-danse because the
partners danced facing each other rather than side by side.
-
The bumblebee used to be called the
humblebee, from Middle English hummel, the frequentive
of hum. The original definition of
bumble was also “make a humming noise”,
so the change was easy. The current meaning of “bumble”
seems to be from the sense of insects milling around. Bumble is
distantly related to other noisy words like boom and
bomb. (The adjective humble is, like its
cousin humiliate, from Latin humus, earth.)
Humble pie is another example of folk etymology,
because it’s unrelated to the word for lowly. It started out as
umble pie. This was Old French nombles, from Latin
lumbus, loin, and originally meant the less-appetizing
“innards” of an animal fed to servants and such. The
lumbar region of the spine and
lumbago (lower back pain) are related, as well as
loin itself.
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For many years the word abominable was spelled
abhominable as if it was derived from ab-homine, away
from mankind, inhuman. It is really ab-omen, without an omen.
-
A certain group of Turkish nomads are usually called the
Tartars. Their actual name is
Tatar, but that was modified under the influence of
tartarus, the Greek and Latin word for Hell.
-
Wormwood, as you might expect by now, isn’t
related to worms or wood. Ultimately, it is German wermut,
(also the source of the French vermouth) where the
first syllable means “man” (as in Germanic
werewolf, i.e., man-wolf, Keltic
Arthur, bear-man, or Latin virile),
and the second is akin to English mood. Wormwood was reputed
to be a potent aphrodisiac. The drug is the flavoring agent in
absinthe, and as the old pun says, “Absinthe makes the heart
grow fonder.”
Mood, a mental state, is a Germanic word; it
isn’t related to a musical mood, which is an alternate spelling
of Latin mode.
-
Sandalwood isn’t used to make
sandals. The latter is a Semitic word for shoe, but
the tree is ultimately from Sanskrit candanah.
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02Apr11 Fort Ross,
California certainly looks English, but in reality the second word is
Rossiya, i.e., Russia. Krepost’ Ross —
Fortress Russia — was established in 1812 by Russian fur traders
about 80 miles north of San Francisco. It was the furthest southern
outpost of Russia, where the Russian pioneers ranging down the Pacific
coast from Alaska met the Spanish coming up the coast from Mexico.
03Aug11 (The Russian River is just a few miles
south of the fort, so Californians are well aware of this element of
their history.)
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Least but definitely not last, a forlorn hope is
Dutch verloren hoop, where the first word is indeed the
same as English “forlorn” (utterly lost), but the second
term means “troop” or “squad” in military
Dutch, and is related to the English word “heap”. In both
languages, the forlorn hope, i.e., the lost squad, was the body of
soldiers who had “volunteered” to be the leaders of an
attack, and who had great trouble getting life insurance at reasonable
rates. Some soldiers actually did volunteer for this duty, since if
one survived it meant a promotion. The French term for the
“point” soldiers is equally pessimistic —
enfants perdus, the lost children.
