My old blog, the Word of the Day, is defunct, and I’m getting ready to take it down. Before I do, though, I’m going to repost some of the best words here over the next few weeks. Enjoy!
America
In the English-speaking world, America almost always refers only to the United States, even though technically it could refer to North and South America together. The usual etymological story is that America comes from Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian navigator who voyaged to the Americas shortly after Columbus and claimed to have discovered them. His name appeared Latinized as America in a geographical treatise published around that time, and the name stuck. To be fair, Vespucci was the first to claim that the Americas were separate continents, and he was the first to refer to them as Mundus Novus, the New World. Why the cartographer rejected the name Vespucia is unknown, but personally I think we can all be grateful to him for choosing America.
The name Amerigo, by the way, is Italian, but ultimately derived from Gothic Almarich, “work-ruler” (compare German reich, “kingdom”), and is cognate with the English names Emmerich and Emery. Thus America is not originally Latin or Italian, but Germanic.
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Sarah, the name which represents her spiritual guidance in the social world, is a Biblical name, and one of the oldest: the name of Abraham’s wife. Actually Sarah’s original name, according to Genesis, was Sarai, which probably meant “contentious”. Some theologians think it unlikely that Sarai was a native Hebrew name — after all, who would deliberately name their daughter “contentious”? They think it more likely that Sarai was not a Hebrew woman, and the name Sarai wasn’t Hebrew, and meant something else; it just sounded like a Hebrew word meaning “contentious”. However, given the misogynistic nature of many ancient societies, I personally wouldn’t be surprised if it really were her name.