What do bikinis and marathons have in common?

Source: Wikimedia Commons public domain photo.

Well, you certainly wouldn't want to run one in the other, but let’s talk about words...

Where do words come from? This is one of the questions many students (and adults) never really think about. Words don’t appear in mid-air by magic. And thankfully, there is no governmental Ministry of English that issues an approved lexicon. Words develop organically and dynamically through usage, and they also change over time. Sometimes the spelling of a word morphs over time to match its pronunciation, and sometimes the other way around. For example, I've seen the word “lose” (the opposite of win) misspelled as “loose” (the opposite of tight) so frequently that I suppose dictionaries will soon recognize “loose” as an acceptable alternate spelling for “lose.” Sometimes existing words gather new, additional meanings; other times words drop out of usage and are qualified in the dictionary as obsolete or archaic. And sometimes new words are added to English by interaction with other languages and cultures. War, immigration, economic trade and various other cultural interactions and clashes add words to our language all the time. For example, the English word “macho” comes from Spanish, although this word in English has a negative connotation (Chauvinistic behavior) but in Spanish has a positive connotation (describing a strong and wise family patriarch).

Unlike Spanish, French and Italian (all of which descended directly from Latin), English began life as a Germanic language known as Old English. This language differs so much from modern English that today Old English must be studied like a foreign tongue. With the conquest of England by the Norman French (after the Battle of Hastings in 1066), Old English was infused with French (and the Latin contained within French) and softened into Middle English. With a glossary of a few words, Middle English (the medieval language of Geoffrey Chaucer) can be understood by most modern readers. Contrary to popular opinion (and the moans of today’s students), the much later Elizabethan English (the language of Shakespeare) is considered modern English.

One interesting exercise is to scour a good dictionary that contains each word’s etymology, then choose an interesting word, and research a brief “history of a word.” By tracing the roots and derivations of words through history -- whether from ancient Greek, Latin, Old English, French, Old Norse, or other languages -- you can gain great insight into English word meanings and connotations. For example, some words come from places. A bikini, the swimsuit in the title of this post, gained its name from the Pacific ocean atoll of Bikini, which after World War 2 was pulverized by U.S. nuclear bomb tests. The two-piece bathing suit’s designer hoped his invention would have an “explosive” impact on fashion akin to the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll (what a sad analogy). A marathon, the long footrace, comes from the name of a city in ancient Greece. According to the stories of antiquity, a Greek messenger ran from Marathon to Athens (a distance purportedly of 26 miles, roughly the same as a modern-day marathon race) to announce victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon. In the story, the messenger shouts “Victory!” and immediately drops dead from exhaustion.

How about this one? Bedlam means the eruption of chaos, anarchy and craziness, as in the sentence, “It was total bedlam in the out-of-control classroom.” This word is derived from Bethlehem, the name of the lunatic asylum in old London that locals with cockney accents pronounced “Bed’lam.” In English, words often shrink and contract. Think of the package delivery business Federal Express becoming FedEx.

Besides places, words can also come from the names of people, such as Chauvinism (mentioned earlier in this post), but perhaps we’ll name some of those in a later post!

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.