英语四六级词汇复习：8天攻克8000词汇(六)

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        　　THRILL: to bore a hole in
        　　The words thrill and nostril are close cousins. When you are thrilled about a play, for example, the play has actually “pierced” you with emotion, because the Middle English word thrillen meant, at first, “to pierce.” And, similarly, our word Nostril used to be spelled nosthirl, that is ,a hole drilled in the nose.
        　　TOADY: first a toad-eater
        　　When we use the verb toady, as” He toadied to the wealthy,” we are using a word with a somewhat comic history. You see it was once the custom of charlatans to have attendants who ate, or pretended to eat, toads. The toad was regarded for many years as poisonous, so, after the attendant had apparently swallowed the toad, the charlatan would appear to save his life by getting rid of the poison. The word toady originally stood for toadeater, but in modern usage it is applied to a flatterer who will do distasteful and nauseating things to please his patron. He will toady to people with great names and great wealth.
        　　TORTURE: to twist
        　　In the days of the Spanish Inquisition victims were tortured by twisting and stretching them on the rack. The word torture come from the Latin tortus, a derivation of torqueo which means “turn” or “twist”. A tortuous road is a “twisting” and winding one. When a robber or blackmailer extorts (Latin ex, “from”) money from persons, he “twists” or wrests it from them by physical or mental violence. If a face is distorted (Latin dis-, “away”), it is “twisted away” from its normal shape, and a contorted (Latin con-, “with”) body is “twisted with” or upon itself. While a retort (Latin re-, “back”), is a remark “twisted” or turned “back” upon the challenger. And even our word torch seems to have come from a “twisted” wick.
        　　TRIVIAL: three ways
        　　The Romans were human and they knew that where their road crossed would be the spot where the women would meet and gossip on the way back from market. The words for this in Latin would be tri-, “three,” and via, “way,” that is, trivia, which in our language means “trifles.” The word trivial comes straight from the Latin trivialis which means in translation “of the crossroads.” That is , crossroads small talk. Just gossip.
        　　VILLAIN: only a farmer
        　　The villain whom we used to hiss on the stage started as a quite honest son of the soil. The word villa in Latin stood for a farm Or house. This entered Old French as vilein and Middle English as vyleyn, and until that time this villain of ours was just a rustic fellow, half serf, and bound to the country estate or villa of some lord. Of course he was of low birth, and hence, to the aristocrats, was a person of low morals and villainy in general. Shakespeare employed the word villain in both its ancient and modern uses, but after him the bad sense of the term took over.
        　　ZANY: began as a nickname
        　　You have probably seen a group of people acting like fools at a cocktail party, If so , you could properly call them zanies. At its beginning the Italian word Zani was a Venetian dialect from equivalent to Gianni, a shortened form of the proper name Giovanni, which equals our “John.” It was a nickname applied to porters and other servants. Thus in the Commedia dell’ Arte a clowning servant was a Zani. His role was to mimic and make fun of his master. By the time zany reached the English language, it meant any silly person.
        　　3. Romance Behind Business Terms
        　　BUCKET SHOP: originally a bucket of beer
        　　In the 1870’s this was applied to a low-down drinking establishment where patrons could come with a small bucket and carry away an evening’s supply of beer. About ten years later the name was transferred to a brokerage establishment that operates illegally, speculating against its customers, failing to execute their commands, and pocketing profits thus accrued. The Oxford English Dictionary claims that the first application of this term was in Chicago on the grain marker. In 1882, the Chicago Board of Trade refused to allow transactions of less than 5,000 bushels so an “Open” Board began to trade in small lots in an alley. If trade on the legitimate board was slack, members are supposed to have said, ”I’ll send down and get a bucketful pretty soon.”
       
            
            

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        　　BUDGET: just a little bag
        　　French merchants of the Middle Ages carried their money around in a bougette, or “little bag”, a word that descended from the Latin bulga, “a leather bag”. The English word bulge comes from the same source. Belly is a very distant relative too, although that’s not so obvious, but they all have the idea of “swelling” in them. When a storekeeper made up his budget in those days he opened his bag to find out his resources and counted the cash..
        　　BUTCHER: slaughtered the goats
        　　The original occupation of the butcher seems to have been the slaying of he-goats. Our word comes from the early French bocher, “butcher”, derived from boc, “goat”, An old French ordinance states that the bocher “shall not cast the blood of goats in public ways, nor slaughter the goats in the streets.” In olden times the butcher was of the very elite of tradesmen, as is evidenced by a 14th-century writer who reports: ”A woman that was queen of Fraunce by eritage wedded a bocher for his fairness.”
        　　CALCULATE: suggests pebbles
        　　When a shopkeeper calculates his accounts, he is apt to use an adding machine. But in Rome 2,000 years ago the merchant figured his profit and loss in a more primitive way. He used what he called calcui, or “little stones” as his counters. So the Latin term calculus, “pebble”, not only gave us our word calculus which we apply to one of most complicated forms of modern mathematics.
        　　CANCEL: a lattice of ink
        　　The word for “lattice” in Latin is cancelli. In a business sense, when a clerk in the Post Office “cancels” a stamp, he makes a lattice of ink marks right across it. Cancel is from the same source as the chancel of a church-originally the lattice division that separated the choir from the nave-now the part of the church so separated. And the word cancellarius, “usher of the law court,” who was so named because he stood ad cancellos, “at the lattice.”
        　　CAPITAL: from the human head
        　　The word capital in the sense of wealth comes ultimately from the Latin caput , “head”. The Latin root of caput appears in scores of English words in various forms depending upon whether it came to us through the French or directly from the Latin. Both of our words capital and cattle, for example, are from caput, for in the earliest days a man’s wealth, or capital, was reckoned in cattle, and we still speak of a herd of a thousand “head”. A chattel mortgage is really a “cattle” mortgage, and up to the 16th century the English spoke of “goods and cattals” instead of “goods and chattels”.
        　　CHARGE: from a Roman chariot
        　　When you charge a customer for a purchase you owe a debt to Rome for the term you are using. The Latin word for the four-wheeled baggage wagon that Julius Caesar used in his campaigns was carrus. In later Latin carrus developed the verb. Carricare which meant“to load on a wagon，”and the French took this over as chargier. A “charge account,” of course, “loads” a person with the obligation of paying. We charge, or burden a man with his crime. You charge or “load” your mind with a responsibility. And in the olden days, they used to charge a musket with powder and sot. They “loaded” it and when they discharged it they “unloaded” it. Beyond this the Roman chariot carrus gave other words. Our car came up through the North French word carre, and the carriage we used to ride in came through the Old Norman French cariage. Cargo is another great-grandchild of carricare, ‘to load.” Cargo is “ loaded” on a cart. But most curiously of all we inherit the word caricature from carricare which sometimes meant to “over-load” and so o exaggerate, as caricaturists are supposed to do.
        　　CHAUFFEUR: stoked the fire
        　　A French word that used merely to mean a fireman or stoker and that eventually goes back to the Latin calificare, “to make hot.” Around the year 1900, in the first days of the automobile when it often was a steam-driven vehicle, the French gave the bantering name of chauffeur of “stoker” to the professional who drove the car. The term chauffeur derives from chauffer, “to heat,” and this contributed another word to English. The Old French form chaufer went into English as chaufen, “to warm,” which finally changed into our present word chafe which used to mean “to make warm by rubbing,” but now is most commonly used by us in the sense of making the skin sore or sensitive by rubbing. The chafing-dish is the only modern use that retains the original meaning of “heat.” And the chauffeur is no longer a “fireman.”
       
            
            

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        　　COAL: first a glowing ember
        　　The word coal, spelled col in Old English, meant at one time a piece of carbon glowing without flame. Later coal took on its modern meaning; and confusingly enough, the word charcoal means something that has been “charred” and so reduced to coal. One of the earliest mentions of coal is found in the Saxon Chronicle of the abbey of Petersborough in the England of 852 A.D. The abbot had let some land to a certain Wulfred who was to send to the monastery in return, among other things, 60 loads of wood, 12 loads of coal, and 6 loads of peat. The type of hard coal known as anthracite owes the beginning of its name history to the Greek word anthrax, meaning “coal,” which was described by the Greek philosopher Theophrastus in a script he wrote on Stones aboyt 371 B.C. Bituminous, or soft coal, got its name from he Latin word bitumen, a mineral pitch found in Palestine and Babylon that was used for mortar. In the Douay Bible of 1609 we read: “Thou shalt pitch it (the arke) within and without with bitumen.” The coal called lignite is so imperfectly formed that it still has the brown look of decayed wood. Hence its name from he Latin lignum, “wood.”
        　　COBALT: a devil
        　　A tough, steel-gray metallic element, valuable to certain steel alloys, and useful in some of its compounds as a pigment. Its lustrous sheen often made the miners think they had discovered a more precious meal. Because of this, and also because the arsenic and sulphur it often contains was harmful to those working over it, this meal was regarded as the demon of the mines and was nicknamed from the German Kobalt, a variant of Kobold, meaning a “goblin.” The miners chose a similar name for nickel. In German it used to be Kupfernickel, “copper demon,” because this tricky ore looks copper and isn’t. We took the word nickel from he Swedish kopparnickel, dropping the first half of the name in transit. Nickel, then, is just a bit of he Old Nick.
        　　COMPANY: eats bread with you
        　　The term company corresponds to companion and this in turn derives from he Latin words cum, “with,” and panis, “bread.” A companion, then, is one who eats bread with you, a “messmate,” and when you have company at your house they share your hospitality. In its business use he romantic associations of the word company are drained off.
        　　4. Word Histories of Your Garden
        　　MISTLETOE
        　　It’s too bad to rob the mistletoe of any of its delightful associations, but the beginnings of the word are anything but romantic. When we trace mistletoe back to its origin, we find it spelled mistiltan, and mistily comes, of all things, from a word meaning “dung,” and tan means “twig.” So here we have a “twig of dung.” This all grew out of the popular belief that this plant sprang from bird droppings, In a 17th-century essay we read that mistletoe “come onely by the mewting of birds . . . which feed thereupon and let it passé through their body.” The ancient Druids thought that the mistletoe of the oak was a cure for the various ailments of old age, and William Bullein, writing in 1562 in his Bulwarke of Defence Against All Sickness and Woundes said: “The miseln groweth . . . upon the tree through the dounge of byrdes.” We regard the plant as an invitation to a kiss, but the American Indians, being on the practical side, didn’t trifle with it in this way. They chewed the stuff for toothache.
        　　NARCISUS
        　　The history of this flower-name leads us into an involved love story of the Grecian gods which eventually contrituted three useful words to the English language. Echo, daughter of air and earth, was an attendant on Gera, queen of the heavens. She happened to offend her mistress, however, and for punishment was deprived of all spech save the power to repeat such word echo. In spite of her handicap, she fell hopelessly in love with the beautiful youth Narcissus, son of a river god, but he spurned her love and as a result Echo faded away until only her bone and her voice were left. In order to punish Narcissus for his crime Nemeses, goddess of vengence, made the youth fall in love with his own reflection in the waters of a fountain; and since such love as this could never be consummated, Narcissus pined away and finally changed into a flower.So from this we have our word echo, the Freudian term narcissism, and narcissus itself, with its handsome and usually white or yellow flowers.
       
            
            

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        　　NASTURTIUM
        　　The pungent smell of these flowers caused them to be nicknamed “nose-twisters ” by the ancients. You see, the word nasturtium was made up of the Latin words nasus, “nose,” and torqueo, “twist.” It was the Roman naturalist Pliny who said, in the 1st century, that this flower “received its name from tormenting the nose.” And if you chew one of the seeds the bitter taste will make the meaning of the name more obvious.
        　　ORCHID
        　　The lovely and expensive orchid holds in its name the Greek word for “testicle,” orchis. Even Pliny the Elder, Roman author and naturalist, said,these 2,000 years ago, that the orchid was remarkable in that, with its double roots, it resembles the testicles. These are his Latin words:” Mirabilis est orchis herba, sive serapias, gemina radice testiculis simili.” The word orchis now survives in English only as a botanical and medical term. The meaning proper has disappeared along with the study of Greek from the general ken.
        　　PANSY
        　　Some poetic mind fancied that this dainty flower had a thoughtful face, and so named it pensee, French for “thoughtful,” which turned easily into our word pansy.
        　　PASSION FLOWER
        　　So named because its parts resemble the instruments of Christ’s passion. The corona is the crown of thorns; the flower, the nails or wounds. The five sepals and five petals are the ten apostles. Peter and Judas were not counted.
        　　PEONY
        　　These striking, heavy-headed plants so characteristic of early summer wereonce widely used in medicine so they were named after Paion, a personage of Greek mythology who was the physician of the gods.
        　　PETUNIA
        　　The botanists saw a resemblance between this small tropical plant with its white and violet flowers and the tobacco plant so they took the American Indian word petun, “tobacco,” and put a Latin sounding ”ia” on the end.
        　　PHILODENDRON
        　　A tropical Amirican plant that likes to climb trees, among other things, and so takes its name from the Greek philodendros, from philos, “loving,” and dendron, ”tree,” that is, a “tree-loving plant.”
        　　PHLOX
        　　The solid and variegated colors of the phlox glow like flames. Why shouldn’t they, since phlox, in Greek, means “flame”?
        　　POINSETTIA
        　　The Honorable Joel Roberts Poinsett of Charleston, South Carolina, was adistinguished diplomat, Secretary of War in President Martin Van Buren’s cabinet, author, congressman, authority on military science, Union leader in the Civil War, but for all that he would probably gave been forgotten had he not been appointed as a special minister to Mexico. It was while there that he became attracted to the large, flaming flowers that we now know so well. He brought some of the plants back to the States and his name Poinsett gave us poinsettia.
       
            
            

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        　　RHODODENDRON
        　　A rose tree,from the Greek rhodon, “rose,” and dendron, ”tree.”
        　　SALVIA
        　　The oldsters knew something of the mystical healing powers of sage tea. This idea is contained in the Latin name salvia, which is from salvus, meaning “sound” or “in good health.” In Old French this same Latin word became sauge which eventually gave us sage. But the scarlet variety of sage is an ornamentai plant, and it retains its stylish Latin name of salvia.
        　　SCABIOSA
        　　A thoroughly unromantic Latin name, a derivation of scabies , “the itch,” from scabo, ”scratch,” which is what you do when you have the itch. The plant was called this because it used to be thought of as a cure for certain skin diseases.
        　　SHAMROCK
        　　From the Irish seamrog, the diminutive of seamar which means “clover.” Therefore the shamrock is a “little clover.” The plant was used by St.Patrick to illustrate the Trinity because of its three leaves, and it became his symbol. It is for this reason that it comes in order on St.Patrick ’s day “to drown the shamrock” by way of a drinking celebration.
        　　SYRINGA
        　　This ornamental shrub with its sweet-scented white flowers got its name from the Greek syrinx, syringes, which meant “reed.” This name is said to have been chosen because the stems of the plant were used a good deal in the manufacture of pipes.
        　　TRILLIUM
        　　This flower of many colors with its whorl of three green leaves derives its name from the Latin tri-, which means “three.”
        　　TULIP
        　　Again among the descriptive names is the tulip which, with its showy colors and velvet texture, has somewhat the appearance of a turban. The word comes to us through the obsolete French word tulipan, from tulbend, the Turkish way of saying”turban.”
        　　VERBENA
        　　To us the verbena is a fragrant perennial with spikes of broad flat clusters of white, red, and lilac flowers, but to the Romans the word verbena meant “sacred bough” and applied to the sacred boughs of myrtle, cypress, and what-not carried by the heralds who declared war, demanded redress for wrongs, grievances, and all.
        　　WISTERIA
        　　A high-climbing shrub with flowers that run the gamut of white, pink, and violet, a plant that is especially popular in Japan and in the southern United States. It also grows in the northern states, but southerners usually refuse to recognize this fact. These flowers were named wisteria in 1818 for Caspar Wistar who was one-time professor of “anatomy, midwifery, and surgery” at what was then the College of Pennsylvania.
       
            
            

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        　　ZINNIA
        　　A plant, with striking, highly colored, but rather coarse blooms. Native toMexico and the Southwest, but for some reason adopted as the state flower of Indiana. The name zinnia comes from that of J.G.Zinn, an obscure 18th-century German botanist who seems to have no other claim to fame than this.
        　　5. Word Stories About Your Dining Table
        　　BREAD: merely a fragment
        　　If you had gone into an English bakery around 700 A.D. and had asked for a loaf then meant bread, and their word bread meant “a little piece,” “a fragment.” So when you spoke of a loaf of bread, the clerk would have understood you to have said “a bread of fragments,” than which nothing could have sounded sillier. Finally, however, bread came to mean “a piece of bread;” later “broken bread;” and in the end bread and loaf took on their present meanings.
        　　CANDY: broken bits
        　　Until quite recent times we said, not just candy but sugar candy, and the derivation of these words indicates that our confection must have always been on the hard side for candy is ultimately from the Sanskrit khanda which meant a piece of something, or lump sugar. These two words sarkara khanda are represented in Italian to form zucchero candi, our familiar sugar candy.
        　　CAROUSE: bottoms up
        　　Sometimes a party that starts innocently and pleasantly will end in a wild carouse. When we pronounce this word carouse, we are coming as near as we can to saying gar aus which is the German word for “completely finished.” When a celebrant is drinking in a tavern and his glass is gar aus, or “completely finished,” it is empty, and if it is gar aus too often he is starting to carouse. And when we drink we are usually hob-nobbing with other people, that is, we are chatting socially and being convivial. But in the 12th century when the English cried habban-nabban they were saying “have”-- “have not,” which was a sort of take or leave it invitation to a drink.
        　　CEREAL: named for a goddess
        　　When you are eating your morning cereal, you are paying a small tribute to an ancient goddess. In 496 B.C. the Roman countryside was cursed by a terrible drouth. The priests of the day turned to the Sibylline oracle for help. As a result of this divine consultation. The priests reported that a new goddess, Ceres, must be adopted, and they recommended that immediate sacrifices be made to her so that she would bring rain to the land. In the end, Ceres became the protector of the crops. The caretakers of her temple were the overseers of the grain market, which, however, the goddess controlled since it was her influence that determined the harvest, and to insure a good harvest the first cuttings of the corn were always sacrificed to her. The Latin adjective cerealis, which meant “of Ceres,” gave us our word cereal.
        　　CHARTREUSE: from a monastery’s name
        　　The name derives from La Grande Chartreuse, an old Carthusian monastery, where this cordial was originally made. In the early 17th century the Marechal d’Estréss gave the monks a recipe for the liqueur which consisted of fine herbs and brandy. But in 1880 the Order was expelled from France and they set up their distillery in Spain at Terragona. Connoisseurs claim that the cordial is not right now because the herbs are gathered in an alien spot. It is reported that the monks are using legal action to get back to their original spot so that the cognoscenti can have their chartreuse with the right flavor.
        　　CHOWDER: named after a pot
        　　In the little villages of Brittany, on the north coast of France, it has long been the custom for each fisherman to toss a bit of his catch into a common mess of fish and biscuit that cooks in a community pot or chaudière. This dish was so good that its fame spread to Newfoundland and so to the east coast of the United States, and the name of the pot was soon applied to the contents, and the spelling chaudière was restyled as chowder.
       
            
            

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        　　COFFEE: decoction of berries
        　　It is said that back somewhere in the year 850, a goatherd named Kaldi became puzzled at the strange way his flock was acting. He noticed that they were nibbling on certain berries, so he decided to try the berries himself. He did, and was so excited at the feeling of exhilaration he got that he rushed off to tell the other goatherds about the bush. The Arabs soon learned how to dry and boil the berries, and they called the brew qahwe. Its use immediately stirred up a great ruction among the orthodox Mohammedans.Some of the faithful drank their qahwe to keep
        　　awake during the interminable religious services,but for that reason others thought that qahwe should be barred as an intoxicant.Turkey took up the brew qahwe,and this gave France her cafe,hence our word coffee.
        　　COGNAC:named for a town
        　　When guess sip their after dinner cognac,they are tasting a liquor that has been in the world for more than 400 years.The name cognac is short for Eau de Vie de Cognac,“water of life of Cognac,”a town in southwest France where brandy-marking is the main industry.It was a Dutchman who discovered brandy they say,a sharp businessman who was worried because more grape-wine was being produced in Cognac than they could ship out.Sohe thought if he distilled the water from the wine there would be less bulk and more of the product could be transported. The idea was that the customer could pour the water back in when he received the stuff.It was a good idea at that,but for some reason it didn't work.Brandy as we know it seems to havebeen introduced into France from Italy at the time HenryⅡ,then Duke of Orleans,married Catherine de Medici.This was in 1533,and soon after cognac became one of the most famous Frence brandies.
        　　COLLATION:began with the monks
        　　In the Benedictine monasteries the monks used to gather in the evening and read aloud from the Collations,or lives of the saints.Then they would talk about these things and eat a light meal the while .Later this came to be called a collation,or a light meal that was eaten on fast days in place of supper.Finally in later days,and with the laity,it was used to mean a meal,and sometimes an elaborate one.
        　　COOK:just means cook
        　　The word cook itself holds little inerest for us.It traces back to the Latin word cocus or coquus,from coquo,“cook.”But the derivatives from it may be worth our attention.A biscuit,for instance,is “twice-cooked”or“baked”out of the French bis, “twice,”andcuit,“cooked,”which is similar to “zwieback,”from the German zwie,“twice,”and backen,“bake.”If you should concoct a story or a soup,you cook the ingredients together(Latin con-,“together”)until you've made up a good one.Both of the words kitchen and cake come by different routes from coquo.
        　　CORDIAL:close to the heart
        　　Should you ever in your life have sipped a cordial,it warmed your heart,didn't it? And it properly should,for the word cordial comes from the Latin term cor,cordis,“heart.”Likewise a cordialhandshake is a “hearty”handshake.When we are in accord(Latin ac-,“to”)with a neighbor,our “hearts”and minds are in harmony.But should there be discord(dis-,“awayuote ),our hears and minds are apart.A man of courage is a man of “heart,”for courage comes to us though French from the Latin cor.Again,the record that is kept divides into re-,“again,”and cor,cordis,“heart,”because in former times,when writing was not such a simple art,the records were often passed on by word of mouth and had to be leaned by“heart.”
        　　DATE:like a finger
        　　The fruit of the date palm was once thought toresemble the human finger,and hence our word date comes ultimately from dactylus,the Latin term for“finger.”As all Bible readers know, the date palm was common in the Mediterranean region long ago.Its introduction into America was due to the efforts of Spanish missionaries in the 18th century who started seedlings in Mexico and elsewhere.
        　　DISTILL:drop at a time
        　　When a substance is distilled it is vaporized in a retort,passed into a receiver,and condensed drop by drop.The Latin term distillo suggests this process when we split the word up into de,“down,”and stilla,a“drop.”And when we instill the young with wisdom,that,too, is poured“into”their minds“drop bydrop.”
       
            
            

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        　　EGGS BENEDICT:resulted from a hangover
        　　In the year1894 a certain Samuel Benedict,man-about-town and member of New York's cafe society,came into the old Wal-dorf-Astoria on 34th Street with a wicked hangover.He knew precisely what he wanted for his breakfast.He ordered bacon butter toast,twopoached eggs,and a hooker of hollandaise.Oscar,famous maitre d'hotel ofthe Waldorf was impressed with the dish,and put ham and a toasted English muffin in place of the bacon and toast,and christened the whole affair Eggs Benedict in honor of the genial rake.
        　　EPICURE:should be moderate
        　　If you are a lover of good food and wine and if you take a fastidious and sensuous delight in your pleasures,it would be correct to call you an epicure,although the use of the word in this sense is a gross slander on the hight in your pleasure,it would be correct to call you an epicure,although the use of the word in this sense is a gross slander on the original Epicureans.TheGreek philosopher,Epicrueans, taught moderation in all things.Pleasure,he advised,is acertain quota of pain,and so he instructed his pupils in temperance.When the English-speaking people took over the word,however,they seized upon the single idea of“pleasureand”and now the words epicure and epicurus and his followers so deplored.
        　　GOUT:just a drop
        　　This disease,down through the years,has been the honored ailment of oldgentlemen who lived high and drank large quantities of port after dinner.There may now be a medical doubt about the cause,as today gout is ranked under the vague and general term of rheumatism.But,be that as it may,gout goes back thourgh Frech to the Latin gutta,"drop." The notion was that morid matter"dropped"from the blood and settled about the joints,and so caused them to swell and become painful.In the 19th century folks had gout stools that were made to hold one foot.
        　　GRAPE: a hook for gathering fruit
        　　The original Old English word for this was winberige form the Germanic win,"vine,"and berige,"berry";literally,"berry of the vine." But in the 11th century William of Normandy conquered England and with his victory the fancier Frech words came in at a great pace.It is true that the humble farmer went on saying winberige,but his lords were now saying grappe,which really meant a cluster of fruit growing together,and this latter word ultimately comes form grape,the vine hook with which they gathered the grapes.By this route the word grape came to us,and also the lusty word grapple that you use when you grapple with a problem.
        　　HERMETICALLY: a god-given name
        　　When a housewife hermetically seals her jars of preserves,she would hardly guess that she was dealing with the magic of a Greek God. Hermes,an Olympian god, was a messenger like the Roman god Mercury,a god of magic,alchemy,and the occult.Our word hermetically is formed form the name of Hermes,possibly because the process of sealing wounds or jars hermetically seems to have to do with the mystic and magical powers of the gods.
        　　INTOXICATE:poisoned arrows
        　　The modern meaning of this word came about in a simple and logical fashion.The Greek word toxon meant"bow."The poison with which the soldiers tipped their arrows was calld toxikon(pharmakon) which led to the Latin toxikum,a more general word covering any poison.We then turn to the late Latin intoxicatus from the verb intoxico,"poison,"the base of our word intoxicale.And so we have taken a trip down through the centuries from the Greek warrior who poisoned his arrows to the intoxicated chap who says,"Name your poison!" Of course in our medical word toxic we have retained the ancient meaning.
        　　JULEP:merely rose-water
        　　Here is a name poetic as a Kentucky colonel. The origin lies in the Arabic word julab which meant"rose-water."This innocent potion became alcoholic in the good old U.S.A.As early as 1787 records show that the landlords of Virginia started the day at six in the morning with a julep as an eyeopener.
       
            
            

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        　　JUNKET:originally a basket
        　　We have here a strange tie-up between a rush basket and the pleasure junket that a group of congressmen take,we'll say, to the Philippines, and the junket that we feed to children.In old France the custard that was made there of"cream,rose water,and sugar"was taken to market in the jonquette,or basket of rushes,and this custard soon took on the name of the basket in which it was carried and was respelled junket.These baskets suggested a picnic and the junkets the congressmen go on certainly have the character of a picnic,and received their name because of this.So there we are,except that this all stems from the juncus of the Romans which was their word for "rush."
        　　LUNCHEON:a lump of food
        　　The origin of this common word is so old that it has become somewhat clouded.Lunch first meant"a lump"and lunshin,an English dialect word,meant"a lump of food."But there also existed the dialect word nonschench which splits into anon,"noon,"and schench,"a drink."High authorities claim that these two words nonschench and lunshin blended to form the word luncheon which could then roughly mean"a lump of food with a noon drink." Of course,when you have breakfast,you merely"break the fast."Dinner is from the French diner,"to dine,"and supper is"to sup,"which is really to "sip"either food or drink.And a morsel is a"little bite"since it comes from the Latin term morsum,"bitten."
        　　MANHATTAN:origin unknown
        　　Of course the name Manhattan,whether applied to the drink or the city,belonged to the tribe of Indians who originally inhabited Manhattan Island.The Manhattan cocktail came into vogue toward the end of the last century,and the year 1894 is the earliest recorded use of the name,but as yet there is no further explanation of the origin.The history of the martini is equally
        　　obscure.
        　　NAPKIN: first a little tablecloch
        　　The tiny paper napkins that we use at times would never have done in the old days when knives,and spoons were limited,or nonexixtent.Then you needed a tremendous linen square to mop up with.These enormous napkins were a sign of elegance long after flat sliver came in,and even in the 1890's large napkins were an important part of any top-drawer dinner.We have the word napery now for table linen,and in this term is buried another word,nape,which once meant tablecloth.In our language when we say napkin we mean a little nape,which is an Old French word,and so "a little tablecloth."In Old French the derivative of nape was naperon.This was borrowed into Middle English as naperon and an apron was first called a napron,but by error the initial n became joined to the a and an apron took the place of a napron.In similar fashion the snake,an adder,used to be called"a nadder."And all of this finally derives from the Latin word mappa which also meant napkin or"cloth."
        　　OMELETTE:originally a thin blade
        　　The history of this word is just as mixed up as a modern omelette.The term came to us by a series of absurd blunders.The Latin word lamella,"a thin plate,"entered French as la melle,and later the word was reinterpreted as l'alemelle.But the French already had a word alemette which meant the thin blade of a sword,and before we know it l'alemelle is being spelled l'alemette,and later on,omelette.So,if you have followed through this labyrinth,you will see that an omelette is really a thin blade and has practically nothing to do with eggs.And while on the subject of omelette the word yolk comes quite understandably form its color.It is a derivative of the Middle English word yolke through Old English geolca,from geolu,"yellow."
        　　ONION:related to a pearl
        　　In Latin there is a word union which is translated as "oneness"or"union".The word onion is derived form this Latin term.It rates its name because it consists of a number of united layers.There is also another interesting analogy between union and onion.The rustics about Rome not only used the word unio to mean onion,but they also thought it a suitable desigation for a pearl.And even today a cook will speak of "pearl onions"when she means the small,slivery-white variety.
       
            
            

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        　　ORGY:meant secret rites
        　　Dionysius was a god and giver of the grape and the wine.The grateful Greek held night festivals in his honor,and these often turned into drunken parties where the boys and girls danced and sang and violated all the sex laws.The Greek called
        　　6. Political Terms and Their Origins
        　　BALLOT: why we “cast” a ballot
        　　The ballot we cast and the bullet we shoot were both balls at the beginning, but are descended from widely different parents. Bullet comes down to us through the French boulette, “a small ball,” from the Latin bulla, a “bubble,” “boss,” or “stud,” while ballot traces to the Italian ballota. “a little ball,” a word of Germanic origin. With us a ballot is sheet of paper we put a cross on and drop in a box on election day, unless we are dealing with voting machines. But the ancient Greek dropped a white ball of stone or metal or shell in a container when he favored a candidate, a black ball when he was against-which explains why the undesirable are still “blackballed” in our clubs. The ball we throw and bat around in our games has a closely related parentage as it comes from the same Germanic source as the Italian ballotta.
        　　BALLYHOO: from county cork, Ireland
        　　When you raise a lot of ballyhoo you are making a general fuss and pother. This all is thought to have grown out of a village called Ballyhooly, that lies east of Mallow in Cork County, Ireland. As the congressional Record of March, 1934, says: “The residents engage in most strenuous debate, a debate that is without equal in the annals of parliamentary, or ordinary discussion, and from the violence of these debates has sprung forth a word known in the English language as ballyhoo.”
        　　BRIBE: a piece of bread
        　　Many of the words that concern themselves with the idea of companionship or conciliation (including these two words themselves) have to do with the sharing of food. Bribe is such a word. In modern French, and in the plural, bribes means bits, odds, ends, and leavings, but in Old French it meant a lump of bread, or, as an olden-time author said: “A peece, lumpe or cantill of bread given unto a beggar.” The development of bribe seems to have been along the following lines: first a piece of bread, then begging, then living by beggary, then theft, and finally blackmail and bribery in the modern sense.
        　　BUNK: a speech for Buncombe County
        　　Around the year 1820 a debate was in progress in the House of Representatives on the complicated question of the Missouri Compromise. In the middle of the discussion a member from Buncombe County, North Carolina, arose and started a long, dull, and completely irrelevant talk. Many members walked out. Others called for the question. Finally the speaker apologized with the now famous statement: “I’m talking for buncombe,” which meant, of course, for his constituents in Buncombe which was a county in his district. According to the Niles’ Weekly Register, published in Philadelphia from 1811 to 1849, the phrase “talking to (or for) Bunkum” was well-known in 1828. We clipped the word to bunk, which now means inflated and empty speech or pretentious humbuggery. A colorful and expressive derivative of this word is debunk which came into use in the early 1920’s. The debunkers were first a school of historians in the years between Wars I and II who were popular for the straightforward and outspoken ways in which they stripped some of our heroic figures.
        　　CANDIDATE: clad in white
        　　When a Roman politician went campaigning he took care that his toga was immaculately white so that he could make the best impression possible. The Latin word candidates first simply meant “a person dressed in white” but later it took on the meaning that our word candidate has, a seeker after office. The root of candidates can be recognized in our word incandescent which means “white and glowing” and in candid, for a candid person, in the figurative sense is white and pure, and therefore frank and honest.