Many of us bibliophiles are also logophiles, amateur philologists, or even logomaniacs—quite simply, word lovers. But nothing is ever that simple when it comes to words, is it? Here, Bas Bleu’s editors present you with an amusing assortment of astonishing words: a few you may not know at all, and more than a few with meanings you never knew before. Dive in and read on, bibliophiles/ bluestockings/ bookworms!
Algebra
The term is Latin for the reunion or restoration of something broken—from the Arabic al-jabr. Originally, it referred to the bone-setting surgery used to heal fractures; literally the restoring of broken bones. In 830 AD, Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī laid the foundation for mathematical algebra in his treatise The Concise Book on Calculation by Restoration and Completion, which spread the word to the English world in the 1500s.
Bimbo
Derived from the Italian, bimbo and bimba are the respective masculine and feminine forms of the word baby. It’s unclear how the term found its way into the English language, but in the early 1900s, it was only used to insult men. In 1920, a Broadway show called Silks and Satins featured the song My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle, and although it’s the first recording of the word being used to refer to a woman, it was not insulting or derogatory. The song ends: “I don’t know what ‘bimbo’ means / But I think it’s something nice.” By 1929, talkies had utilized the term (in The Broadway Melody, stage dancer Hank Mahoney says to an actress across the stage, “One more crack from you, bimbo, and you’ll be holding a lily!”). Its masculine use has since fallen off, but as recently as 1947, Bas Bleu favorite P. G. Wodehouse wrote about “bimbos who went about the place making passes at innocent girls after discarding their wives like old tubes of toothpaste” in Full Moon. 1987 was “The Year of the Bimbo,” effectively changing the vernacular for a generation…and, as all dead words still have meaning, the resurrected term “himbo” first appeared in 1988.
Cloud
Strangely enough, the word is derived from the Old English clúd, for “rock” or “mass of stone.” It’s presumed that this etymological misappropriation is due to the dark, massive appearance of English rain clouds. Interestingly, the Old English word for cloud, weolcen, comes from welkin for “sky,” a word that appears in the poetry of Wordsworth, Longfellow, Charlotte Brontë, and more.
Down in the Dumps
Have you ever considered what it means to say someone is “down in the dumps”? We use it to define a state of depression, but what is the metaphorical “dump”? The word’s use in reference to trash only appeared in the early 1800s, but the word itself dates all the way back to fourteenth-century English. Believed to mimic the sound of a dull drop, “dump” evolved in the sixteenth century to define a daze or daydream-like state. Although it has since taken on a melancholic air, the term once contained all the preoccupation of mind with none of the dreariness.
Fathom
This word’s meaning still changes today depending on its use: as a noun, it represents a six-foot depth or length; as a verb, it represents comprehension. The word’s origins explain its mismatched definitions. Derived from the Old English fæòm, for “a person’s outstretched arms,” it eventually morphed into the expression “to make a fathom” (“to stretch your arms out as wide as possible”). Consider an adult man’s outstretched arms (as he is the most likely authority, given the time period): at approximately six feet long, he could measure size or depth from a fixed point…from there, the figurative meaning emerged.
Harem
One of the many other ways language gets distorted is in our desire to label everything…and our tendency for creativity. “Harem” used to refer to a separate household where the wives and female servants of a single Muslim husband lived. Now, its meaning has loosened to more general use, and in a delightful poetic twist of the tongue, it has also been applied to groups of seals.
Jargon
Although today we use this term as a catch-all for language that’s beyond our grasp, it’s believed to have once been onomatopoeic for birdsong, related to “cajole,” from Old French for “to chatter like a jay.” By 1387, when Chaucer wrote in The Canterbury Tales about January joining May in bed on their wedding night, “…ful of jargon as a flekked pye,” the double use is already evident (a “flekked pye” is a magpie). By the seventeenth century, it was used to refer to the hybridized sounds of languages mixing, and by the nineteenth century, the derivative “jargonize” (“to use jargon to talk about”) appeared.
Myriad
The Ancient Greek number system stopped at 10,000 in the third century BC. Archimedes wrote his treatise Sand Reckoner to address the issue, where the word “myriad” was used to define the number 10,000. The word’s precise origins are unknown, but it’s worth noting that Archimedes notated 10,000 with the numeral M, and he used “myriad-myriad” to represent 10 to the eighth power, or 100,000,000, thus expanding the number system. The word has since lost its specificity, but Archimedes’s question remains: How many grains of sand would it take to fill the universe?
Obstinacy
“Obstinacy,” or being obstinate, refers to a refusal to change one’s mind, despite facts against them. It makes sense, then, that a group of buffalo is also called an Obstinacy. If you know anything about the bold bovines, you know they’re fiercely protective and aggressive, not to mention huge! We don’t recommend trying to defend yourself against an obstinacy of buffalo with unbiased logic—this is one animal likely unmoved by the power of words.
Pink
You’d be surprised at the many meanings behind the word “pink,” both on the color wheel and off. It’s a name for a family of flowers from the Dianthus genus, a name for a small sailboat with a flat bottom, as well as a minnow, an eyelet, a puncture wound, or a private investigator. When used as a verb, it can also mean “to perforate,” “to add ornate trim to a garment,” “to peer suspiciously,” “to drip,” or “to apply rouge.” Strangest of all, however, is the color we associate with the word. In the mid-fifteenth century, “pink” actually conjured a “yellow or greenish-yellow pigment,” but the way we use it today comes from the hues in the Dianthus flower family.
Tiddlywink
The game Tiddlywinks involves flipping small discs, or “winks,” against a table into a receptacle for points. But the word actually used to be Victorian slang for a dive bar. From the early nineteenth century, “tiddly” has been employed as a synonym for drunkenness, but those etymological origins are unknown. In the 1850s, it was adopted as the name of a bar game that somewhat resembled dominoes, where the first to finish calls “tidley-wink,” wins, according to Routledge’s Every Boy’s Annual from 1870. It eventually turned into the game we recognize today.
“Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”