One hundred years ago today, the RMS Titanic set sail on its first and only voyage, and thanks to James Cameron, most of us know the story of the ship and its fateful meeting with a big block of ice. But how about the story behind those titanic words?
The RMS Titanic was a passenger superliner, an ocean liner “of over 10,000 gross tons.” In the 19th century, the term was coined “when ocean liners were rapidly increasing in size and speed.” In the first half of the 20th century, superliners became “the primary means of intercontinental travel … as passengers favoured large, fast ships.”
Why RMS? That stands for Royal Mail Ship or Service, “used for seagoing vessels that carry mail under contract to the British Royal Mail.” As opposed is HMS, which stands for “Her (or His) Majesty’s Ship,” a designated British warship. As for titanic, it means “of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the Titans; hence, enormous in size, strength, or degree; gigantic; superhuman; huge; vast.” Titanmay come from the Greek tito, “sun, day.”
How about that iceberg? An iceberg (from the Middle Dutch ijsbergh, “ice mountain”) is part of a glacier (from an Old French word meaning “cold place”) that has broken off by a process called calving. Calving is the same term used for when animals such as cows, whales, or seals give birth to calves. Thus, that broken piece of ice is often referred to as a calf.
Icebergs come in different sizes. Smallest is brash ice, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, fragments of ice “less than 2 meters big,” so-called perhaps from the “brittle” meaning of brash. Next is the growler, measuring less than one meter high and less than five meters long. Growlers, according to Mariana Gosnell in her book, Ice, “got their name from the sound they make when. . .they plunge deeper into the water, sucking and growling.” A bergy bit is slightly larger than a growler, while the iceberg that sunk the Titanic seems to have been medium-sized.
When glacier ice melts, it makes bergy seltzer, also called ice sizzle, “a crackling or sizzling similar to that made by soft drinks or seltzer water,” and “made as air bubbles formed at many atmospheres of pressure are released.”
Since glaciers are formed from snow “falling on the higher parts of those mountain-ranges which are above the snow-line,” they are freshwater, unlike floe-bergs, “ice resulting from the freezing of the surface-water of the ocean.” Floe probably comes from the Norwegian flo, “layer.” A cloud-berg is “a mountainous mass of cloud which looks like an iceberg on the distant horizon.”
Glacionatant means “belonging to or affected by floating ice, as distinguished from ice moving on land,” as in “The Titanic’s sinking was glacionatant.” The word comes from the Latin glacies, “ice,” plus natare, “to swim.” Naufragous means “causing shipwreck,” as in, “The iceberg was naufragous.” The word may come from the Greek naus, “ship,” and the Latin fragmentum, “a fragment, remnant.” Naufragiate means to cause shipwreck, while naufrage refers to shipwreck itself.
Jetsam (from the Middle English jetteson, “a throwing overboard“) is that which has been “thrown overboard to lighten a ship in distress.” Flotsam (from the Old French floter, “to float“) is “wreckage or cargo that remains afloat after a ship has sunk.” Ligan or lagan (possibly from the Old Norse lagu, “law”) is “anything sunk in the sea, but tied to a support at the surface, as a cork or buoy, in order that it may be recovered.” Have a dispute about these items? Enlist a scrutator, “a bailiff appointed to protect the king’s water-rights, as flotsam, jetsam, and wrecks.” Scrutator comes from the Latin scrūtinium, “inquiry.”
Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog.
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Welcome to this week’s Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news and culture.
Lynneguistcounted seconds, American and British-style. Fritinancy examined a name in the news, Oikos University, and for words of the week, picked stockist, “a retailer or distributor that stocks goods for sale,” and demise as a verb, “to grant or transfer by will or lease.” Erin McKean’s wordy choices were flexicurity, a blend of flexible and security; nibs, coffee beans with the shells removed; and adularescence, the effect of light on “adularia, a kind of moonstone.”
Word Spy noticed pink slime, “an industrial meat byproduct consisting of compressed low quality beef trimmings treated with ammonia gas and used as a filler for ground beef”; hashtag activism, “activism that uses a Twitter hashtag to promote a project or cause, particularly when it requires no other action from people”; and hackerazzi, “a person who breaks into a celebrity’s email account or computer.”
Easter is right around the corner, and you know what that means: a visit from the Easter Coney.
Don’t know what a coney is? Neither did we, at first. The word rabbit once only referred to rabbit young, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. An adult rabbit was called a coney, which ultimately coming from the Latin cuniculus, “like a rabbit.” (Cuniculus also refers to “a small underground passage,” similiar to rabbit burrows, and “a genus of lemmings,” so-called because they “somewhat resemble small rabbits.”) Coney got dropped for rabbit in the 19th century after “British slang picked up coney as a punning synonym for cunny,” a word for a certain female body part. You can still see coney in use today in Coney Island, aka “Rabbit Island,” named because of its “many and diverse rabbits.”
Many and diverse also are rabbit idioms. In cricket, a rabbit is “a very poor batsman.” In running, it’s “a runner who intentionally sets a fast pace for a teammate during a long-distance race,” perhaps named for the artificial rabbit in dog racing. A rabbit punch isn’t a punch from a rabbit but “a chopping blow to the back of the neck,” so-called “from resemblance to a gamekeeper’s method of dispatching an injured rabbit.”
Rabbit food refers to “vegetables, especially those that are raw.” To rabbit on is to “talk in a noisy, excited, or declamatory manner,” and is a shortening of Cockney rhyming slang, rabbit and pork. Rabbit rabbit is “a common British superstition,” in which one must say, “Rabbit, rabbit, white rabbit,” or some variation thereof, “upon waking on the first day of each new month,” to receive good luck for that month.
As for bunny, it first came around in the 1580s meaning “squirrel,” then in the 1680s become a pet name for rabbit. The word may ultimately come from the Scottish bun, “tail of a hare.” (Bun meaning a roll or biscuit may come from the Old French buignete, “a fritter,” which originally meant “boil, swelling.”) The bunny hug is “a syncopated ballroom dance” made popular in the U.S. in 1912.
The bunny hop is another type of dance, “created at Balboa High School of San Francisco in 1952.” A Playboy Bunny is a waitress at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club, while a badge bunny is “a woman who is romantically attracted to police officers.” Under most of our beds are dust bunnies, “a mass of fine, dry particles of matter, especially hair and skin particles, that is formed by static electricity,” named presumably for their fluffy, bunny-like appearance. An older term for dust bunny is beggar’s velvet.
If you want to get all scientific, there’s lagomorph, “any of various plant-eating mammals having fully furred feet and two pairs of upper incisors.” The word comes from the Greek lagos, “hare,” literally “with drooping ears.” Lagos also gives us lagotic, “rabbit-eared,” and related is lax, “slack, loose, relaxed.”
Rabbit fur is lapin, “especially when dyed to imitate a more expensive fur,” and is an alteration of the Old French lapriel. Civet is “a stew, usually of rabbit or hare, flavored with onion, cives, garlic, or the like,” and may ultimately come from an Arabic word meaning “cream.” Gibelotte is another type of rabbit stew originating from France, and translates as “fricassee of game.”
A fricassee is “a dish made by cutting chickens, rabbits, or other small animals into pieces, and dressing them with a gravy in a frying-pan.” The word probably comes from the French frire, “to fry,” plus casser, “to break, crack.” Meanwhile, Welsh rabbit, also known as Welsh rarebit, isn’t rabbit at all but a dish of “melted cheese over toasted bread, flavored in various ways, as with ale, beer, milk, or spices.” Welsh was “used disparagingly of inferior or substitute things,” while rabbit, according to World Wide Words, “is here being used in the same way as ‘turtle’ in ‘mock-turtle soup’, which has never been near a turtle, or ‘duck’ in ‘Bombay duck’, which was actually a dried fish called bummalo.”
And in case you’re wondering what the heck rabbits have to do with Easter anyway, Discovery News says the origin of the Easter rabbit “can be traced back to 13th century, pre-Christian Germany, when people worshiped several gods and goddesses,” including Eostra, “the goddess of spring and fertility,” whose symbol “was the rabbit because of the animal’s high reproduction rate.” As for Easter eggs, they “represent Jesus’ resurrection.”
We hope you enjoyed this trip down the rabbit hole of rabbit words. Now excuse us while we revive ourselves with bunnies of the chocolate variety.
Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog.
Here are our favorites from last week:
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Spring season signals the start of another season: baseball. The Seattle Mariners and Oakland A’s are opening their 2012 season today in Japan, and we though we’d celebrate with a Word Soup dedicated to Japanese baseball. Ready? Pure boru!
besuboru
“Now that each of the combatants in baseball’s most-storied rivalry features a Japanese superstar, the effort has begun to fuel the Sox-Yankees feud across the world in besuboru-crazy Japan.”
Besuboru is a transliteration of the English baseball. However, according to Robert Whiting in his book, You Gotta Have Wa, during World War II “American baseball terminology was banned,” and besuboru became yakyu, “fielding ball.”
doryoku
“When Japanese legend Sadaharu Oh – whose 868 home runs are out of reach even for the disgraced Barry Bonds – signs an autograph, he often precedes his name with the word ‘doryoku,’ which means ‘effort.'”
Other qualities valued in Japanese baseball are nintai, “patience,” and choubatsu, “discipline.”
gaijin
“”The craziest thing about 2009 was just how everyone was standing behind a gaijin (foreign) manager, really,’ says Rubin. ‘I mean, living in Japan as a gaijin is always a little bit weird, people have a lot of prejudice against foreigners, but the Lotte fans got together and started that campaign and got that much signatures.'”
A gaijin is a non-Japanese person. The word translates from the Japanese as “outside or foreign (gai) person (jin).” Gaikokujin is a more polite form of the word.
ganbare
“In 2007, he and his father became fans of the Dodgers’ Japanese pitcher, Takashi Saito. ‘Saito ganbare! Saito ganbare!’ they’d chant from the cheap seats. ‘Saito, let’s go! Saito, let’s go!’”
Ganbare roughly translates as “hang in there,” and is said “to encourage someone who is working hard, such as running in a marathon or studying.” Also ganbatte.
gattsu pozu
“Japanese also look askance at such long-standing American baseball customs as chewing tobacco and spitting it on the dugout floor—’disgusting’ is how cleanliness-conscious Japanese players commonly describe it. [American players] find confusing the myriad unwritten rules of behavior that major leaguers have concocted to protect their all-important pride: No bunting or stealing with a big lead is one; no crowd-pleasing fist in the air (gattsu pozu) is another.”
Gattsu pozu is a transliteration of guts-pose, which may have less to do with guts or courage than with former world boxing champion, Guts Ishimatsu, who after winning fights “would pump his fist up and down in the air.”
homu ran
“In America they call it baseball. In Japan it’s pronounced besuboru, but the form of the game in both countries is identical: umpires, nine players, walks, strikeouts, double plays and, of course, home runs (homu ran).”
“The Giants play in the Tokyo Dome, which uses enough electricity, even during day games, to power 6,000 homes. The idea of the vaunted Kyojin turning on the lights, running the air conditioning and playing baseball while residents in the surrounding Kanto region sit at home by candlelight, did not sit well with the general public.”
While koko may seem like a reduplication, it refers to two different characters that are homonyms, 高, “high or tall,” and 校, “school.” Yakyu translates as “fielding ball.”
Kōshien
“Kōshien isn’t a word that registers on the American radar screen. But it was Kōshien — the annual site of Japan’s riveting national high school baseball tournament — that turned Daisuke Matsuzaka into a legend. When he was still just a high school senior.”
Kōshien refers to Hanshin Koshien Stadium. Kōshien (甲子園) “comes from the Sexagenary cycle system,” where the “year of the stadium’s founding, 1924, was the first year kōshi (甲子) in the cycle.” En (園) translates as “garden or park.”
manrui homa
“On Thursday, [Matsui] sent an inside, shin-high fastball from Kyle Lohse into the right-field seats at Citizens Bank Park for his first career grand slam – ‘manrui homa’ in Japanese – and lacked only a single for the cycle.”
“Each Japanese team has an oendan — a highly organized cheering block that is part regulars who travel with the team and part local fans who bring out their bass drums when their team comes to town.”
Oendan translates as “cheering squad” or “cheering section.”
pure boru
“But the best thing about the Japanese game, perhaps, is that come opening day next year, the cry of ‘Pure boru!’ is guaranteed to ring out across the land.”
While homu ran is a transliteration of the English home run, sayonara is Japanese for goodbye. A walk-off home run is “a home run that ends the game.”
shinjin
“Enthusiastically received during that trip were two of the Red Sox rookies (‘shinjin’ in Japanese) from the 2007 team, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideki Okajima, the first-ever Japanese players to join the Red Sox.”
Shinjin translates from the Japanese as “new (shin) person (jin).” The transliterated form of rookie is rukii.
shuto
Question: “People say Matsuzaka’s slider is devastating and tops out at 90. Is that actually a cutter instead? And how about his ‘shuto’? Is it synonym of sinker in Japanese?”
Robert Whiting: “Yes on the slider. The shuto is a fast cutter and sometimes it breaks down. The Americans used to say shooter back in the 20’s.”
Shuto is a transliteration of shooter, apparently an old name for the cutter, a fastball “that moves sideways in the air, or off the pitch, because it has been cut.”
suketto
“If gaijin have historically been asked to fit in, to surrender some part of themselves and their expectations to the experience of a new culture, on and off the field, they have also been asked, expected, to stand out. There is a Japanese term, suketto, which translates roughly to ‘helper.’ The American-born players are suketto, hired to be difference makers, to produce.”
According to Robert Whiting in his book, The Meaning of Ichiro: The New Wave from Japan and the Transformation of Our National Pastime, the word suketto implies that “that one is there not as a member of the group but as an outsider with special skills or expertise to impart.” The term has been “applied not only to foreign ballplayers but to engineers, technicians, bond traders and others in the long string of experts Japan has employed to raise its level of competition.”
takoyaki
“More adventurous eaters might try Wann’s takoyaki; pleasingly squishy orbs of grilled octopus are sprinkled with bonito flakes that bob and ‘dance’ when heated. A popular festival food, takoyaki is served throughout Japan from temples to baseball parks.”
Takoyaki translates as “fried (yaki) octopus (tako).” Other Japanese ballpark treats include bento boxes, soba noodles, ramen, and unusually flavored ice cream. Yakitori, which translates as “fried chicken,” refers to fried and skewered food in general, and is also known as kushiyaki, “skewer fried.”
wa
“Wa was reflected in yakyu [baseball] in other ways, like uniform playing styles, a mostly conciliatory players’ union and the paucity of player agents and heated salary disputes, even though players’ salaries were typically one-fifth to one-sixth of those of their North American counterparts.”
Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. If we like it, your tweet will appear on our blog.
Here are our favorites from last week:
Thanks to everyone for playing! You’ll have another chance this week to perfect your word of the day perfect tweets. To get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.
