I Am Words

wordjournal:

adjective • \ sak-ˈsi-kə-ləs \ • inhabiting or growing among rocks

From Latin saxum “stone, rock” and -cola “inhabitor, tiller, worshipper”

There are a number of similar words ending in -colous that have the same general meaning. For example, sanguicolous, “something that lives in blood”, or sphagnicolous, which has the remarkably specific definition “something that grows in/inhabits moss of the genus Sphagnum”. Humans and the animals we live alongside, willingly or not, are generally urbicolous. It is left to the reader to determine what that could possibly mean.

wordjournal:

/ˈɑbˌlaʊt/, /ˈɑpˌlaʊt/, /ˈæbˌlaʊt/ (all US)

noun • the substitution of one root vowel for another, thus indicating a corresponding modification of use or meaning - for example, get and got, sing and song - distinct from the phonetic influence of a succeeding vowel

verb • 1) to undergo a change of vowel (intransitive); 2) to cause to change a vowel (transitive)

From German Ablaut “sound gradation”, which itself is from ab “down, off” + Laut “sound”

For more information on this, Wikipedia has a page on sound changes, not just letters, within words that indicate grammatical information - this topic is called apophony.

wordjournal:

noun • /ˌsɪsɪˈparɪti/ • reproduction by fission (biology)

From the Latin past participle of the verb scindere “to split”, which is scissus “split”, and the verb parere “to bring forth”

ahdictionary:

In its most usual form nowadays, a wake is a gathering of people in the presence of a dead body to honor the deceased and to console one another. Most often such a gathering takes place during visiting hours at a funeral parlor. But historically, a wake involved one or more people who remained in the presence of the body continuously until the time of burial. It was thus a kind of vigil—someone would have to stay up all night near the body, possibly for several nights. Thus the name: the noun wake comes from the Old English verb wacian, “to be awake, keep watch.”

The closely related Old English verb wæccan gave rise to the verb watch, and thus gave its name to another sort of vigil, the watch night. A watch night is a religious service held on New Year’s Eve, traditionally lasting up until midnight. Watch night services date back to 18^th-century England, the first citation for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary being from the journal of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. But in the United States they are especially associated with African American churches (many but not all of which belong to the Methodist tradition) and have acquired a new significance since the 19^th century.

When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862, freeing all enslaved people in those states or parts of states currently in rebellion against the Union, the proclamation did not take effect immediately. Rather, it was to take effect on January 1^st, 1863. As one might expect, that date became a matter of great interest in the intervening months, as news of the proclamation spread throughout the states of the Confederacy. On the night of December 31^st, African Americans both enslaved and free celebrated the watch night with great anticipation, and ever since then the New Year’s Eve watch night vigil has had the dual character of both religious service and historical commemoration.

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ahdictionary:

At Hanukkah, many Jews enjoy eating latkes, pancakes usually made of grated potato, often mixed with minced onion for flavoring and egg as a binder, fried in a generous amount of oil and served with toppings such as sour cream or applesauce.

The word latke is Yiddish; it comes (via the Ukrainian oladka and, before that, the Old Russian olad'ya), from the Greek word eladia, the plural of eladion, meaning “little oily thing.” Eladion, in turn, is the diminutive form of elaion, “olive oil,” which comes from elaiā, “olive.” The English words olive and oil, too, are both distantly descended from that same elaiā—olives having been the chief source of oil for the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean. In those civilizations, olive oil was used not only for cooking but also as a cosmetic or medicinal treatment for the skin, as a lubricant for chariot wheels and machinery, and, crucially, as a source of illumination. And it is as a source of illumination that oil is of special importance to the celebration of Hanukkah.

According to the Talmud, after an army of Jewish rebels led by the Maccabees recaptured Jerusalem from the culturally Greek empire of the Seleucids in 164 BCE, they discovered that there was only one day’s supply of ritually pure oil left for the lamp in the newly-rededicated Temple. Miraculously, that one-day supply kept the lamp burning for eight days, until a new supply of oil had been prepared. It is in commemoration of this miracle that Hanukkah lasts eight days and is traditionally celebrated with oily foods; the branched lamp, or menorah, that is lit each night during the holiday symbolically represents the temple lamp, though modern menorahs usually use candles rather than burning oil.

If you are celebrating Hanukkah this season, here’s hoping that your oily latkes don’t burn, and that the candles in your menorah do!  

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ahdictionary:

You may occasionally hear people quibble (or even quarrel) over the correct pronunciation of forte in a sentence like You calculate the tip—math isn’t my forte. The most common pronunciation, and the one we list first in the dictionary, is “FOR-tay,” as if it were the same word as the musical direction forte, “in a loud, forceful manner.” Traditionalists, though, point out that the forte that means “something in which a person excels” isn’t the same word as the musical forte. The musical forte comes from Italian, a language in which final vowels are regularly pronounced; the other forte is from French forte, the feminine form of fort, meaning “strong.” In French, final vowels are most often silent, and indeed in the French forte the e is not pronounced.

Incidentally, that French adjective forte was adopted into English in the 1600s as a noun meaning not “a strong point” in general, but specifically “the strong part of a sword blade, between the middle and the hilt.” This fencing usage was soon extended into the general sense that we are familiar with today. Not surprisingly, English fencers of that time also borrowed a French adjective as a term for the weak part of a sword’s blade, the part between the middle of the blade and the point. That word was foible, which meant “weak.” And just as with forte, this fencing term was soon used in an extended sense, to mean “a minor weakness or failing of character.”

We all have our fortes and our foibles, even if we’re not fencers. As for the pronunciation of forte, even if English etymology is an area in which you excel, you may find that a pedantic insistence on preserving historical pronunciations strikes other people as a weakness or even a character flaw. Among the members of the American Heritage Dictionary’s Usage Panel, nearly three out of four personally prefer the “FOR-tay” pronunciation, a figure that has remained unchanged for the past twenty years.

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ahdictionary:

In a previous post we examined the origins of the word carabiner, finding that it may ultimately be derived from the ancient Greek kārabos, a word for various kinds of crustacean. But is kārabos related to the English crab? Let us examine the possibilities:

First, could crab have been derived from kārabos? This seems implausible; crab has been in the language for as long as English has been English; we can trace it back past Middle English crabbe and Old English krabba to the Indo-European root *gerbh-, whose basic meaning was “to scratch” and which is the origin of a number of Germanic words pertaining to crawling and scratching. (Crayfish, incidentally, probably comes from *gerbh- as well.)

Well, then, could kārabos have been derived from crab? Obviously it can’t come from the Modern English word, but even the Middle English crabbe and Old English krabba come too late in history to have been the source for kārabos. It’s conceivable that kārabos was originally derived from some earlier Germanic word, but we have no evidence for this. Besides, why would the ancient Greeks, who lived in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean where crustaceans of all sorts are abundant, have needed to borrow their term for crabs from the mostly forest-dwelling tribes of northern interior Europe?

A third possibility to consider is that rather than one being descended from the other, both crab and kārabos descend from the same Indo-European root *gerbh-. This is an appealing hypothesis, but it conflicts with known facts about how Indo-European roots evolved into words in different language families. Though the Indo-European <g> sound became a <k> in Germanic languages, it typically remained a <g> in Greek. And the Indo-European <bh> sound (a breathy, aspirated <b>) that became <b> in Germanic words became a <ph> (a breathy, aspirated <p>) in Greek. In fact, ancient Greek does have plenty of words derived from *gerbh- which precisely follow the expected consonant changes, and they end up looking nothing like kārabos. Instead, they wind up looking like graphē, “writing.” There’s simply no way that kārabos could be naturally derived from the *gerbh- root. The resemblances in sound and meaning are, it would seem, purely coincidental.

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*Here and in the dictionary, we use an asterisk to indicate that the root, stem, or word in question is not attested in any surviving documents but has been hypothetically reconstructed by linguists based on known forms and grammatical principles.