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!
Boycott
Boycott is an eponym, a word derived from the name of a person. In this case the unlucky individual was Captain Charles Boycott, who was an English landholder in Ireland in 1880. He owned many, many square miles of Ireland, but didn’t live anywhere near his holdings, and charged exorbitant rent to the Irish families that had been living on that land for thousands of years. In September of 1880, shortly before the harvest was due to be gathered, many of his tenants demanded that he lower their rents; but instead of doing so, he expelled them. In return, the Irish Land League, a union of farmers and other concerned citizens, organized a boycott of Boycott: no one was to do any business of any kind with him. He was completely ignored by his workers, his personal servants, local businessmen, and the post office. He could not buy anything from shops, and people would not even sit near him in church.
Continue reading “Words of the Day: Boycott, Brillig, Buddha”
From Proto Indo European bhlewas, meaning “light colored”, applicable to anything from yellow to light gray to pale blue. In Proto Germanic this became bluwaz, and descended into Frankish as blao and Old French as bleu; this was borrowed as bleu or blwe in Middle English (when spelling was a creative art). Old English already had a perfectly good word for blue — blaw – but the French term was preferred. It’s uncertain exactly when the word changed from meaning “light colored” to “blue”, but color words tend to be slippery in that way — in Scandinavian languages, for example, it came to mean a deep black, while in Middle High German it meant “yellow”.
Bewilder is a compound word, first attested from around 1680, composed of two archaic elements:
In Tolkien’s cosmology, Arda means the Earth, as well as the sun and the moon and the stars. It is not Eä, all which is, because it does not include the realms of the Ainur (angelic/godlike beings) and Eru, the One. In the beginning times, Arda was flat, and there were no heavenly bodies. All was dark, until Aulë the Smith created the Two Lamps to provide light. At that time, Arda became green with growing things. After the Two Lamps were cast down by the treachery of Melkor, Arda was plunged into darkness; but after many ages, first the stars, and then the sun and moon were placed in the sky. During the great war in which Melkor was captured and chained, Arda was broken and curved into a sphere, as it is today.