Etymology @ MindSay

For the most part, I work nights. Being at the bottom of the totem pole means working the crappy shifts that no one else wants, thus, I work nights and weekends. This doesn't really bother me, as I am coming from the restaurant industry...so no big deal. The reason I am sharing this with you is this; the time when I have to watch tv is during the day or else the middle of the night. Primetime tv is mostly lost on me. Therefore, I watch dvds of tv shows long over. Right now, I am in the midst of "The West Wing." Truly, a fascinating show, and if you've never seen it, well, sucks for you. I own the entire series on dvd and I watch a couple episodes a day and once I finish the series, I put it away and move on to a different series.

Anyway, last night I was listening to my ipod and I was listening to Toby Keith sing "Love Me If You Can." (Apropos of nothing, but at this very moment I am listening to my beloved Bon Jovi sing "This Ain't a Love Song").  So TK is singing, and for some reason I tune in to the lyrics. I have heard the song many times before, but suddenly I start to hear what he is singing. The line that caught my interest was, "I'm a man of my convictions. Call me wrong, call me right. But I bring my better angels to every fight." I googled the lyrics just to make sure I was hearing them right--and I was.

What was so interesting to me was that a couple of days earlier I was watching the West Wing episode, "The Crackpots and These Women" and there is an interesting piece of dialog that goes like this.

Bartlet: "The other night, when we were playing basketball, did you mean what you said? That my demons were shouting down the better angels in my brain?"

Toby: "Yes, sir, I did."

Bartlet: "You think that's what's stopping me from greatness?"

Toby: "Yes."

Bartlet: "I suppose you're right."

Toby: "Tell you what though, sir. In a battle between a President's demons and his better angels, for the first time in a long while, I think we may just have ourselves a fair fight."

Bartlet: "Thank you, Toby. Now, go away."

If you haven't seen it, Bartlet is the President of the USA, while Toby is his communications director and chief speechwriter. I've always liked the exchange for a lot of reasons, but one is that it seems to sum up the fears we all share about politics. That the demons are winning the battle and the better angels are being shouted down.

Okay, so we have this quote and we have this song (both of which feature a man named Toby...) and I started to think it is a bit strange. I wouldn't exactly say that "better angels" is a common phrase. (See synchronicity). Obviously, I had to look it up.

When I first googled the phrase, the very first hit was, strangely, the first inaugural address by President Abraham Lincoln, dated March 4, 1861. The speech is primarily about the possible secession from the union, by the southern states. The address covers slavery, states rights, constitutional law, civil war, and ends on the note of unity. The last paragraph is this:

I am loathe to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

That was enough to make me think that perhaps the writer of the West Wing perhaps borrowed from speeches of president's past. But, it didn't seem to me that it was all that likely that Lincoln invented the phrase, so I kept digging.

Since this post is already somewhat more locquacious than intended, I will spare you the travails of my search and sum it up by saying this. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations gives credit for the oldest know use of the phrase to one, William Shakespeare from his Sonnets, published in 1609. However, the particular sonnet that we are working with is 144, which was originally published in 1599. It goes like this:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, but not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

So, there you have it. A virtual dissertation on the usage of the phrase better angels. Lincoln borrowed from Shakespeare, The West Wing borrowed from Lincoln, and Toby Keith, well who knows where his songwriters borrowed from? And my better angels are singing down my demons, keeping me from ending this on a sassy note. I'll let 'em win...this time.

Feels like it has been a while since we've had an installment of Things You Never Knew You Never Knew. Luckily for you, I am a dork and something came up today.

The weather here today is gorgeous; 80 degrees, bright and sunny, with a good breeze making it perfectly comfortable. After the humidity of the last couple days, it feels especially sweet. My mother, after finishing work, decided to turn off the air conditioning and open up the house. I was in the kitchen when she walked in and said, "guess I could open all these windies". She was referring to the windows in the kitchen and was just being silly (a pretty natural state for her) but it made me think: if she opens all the windows it will let in all this wind. So I said, "do you think windows are called that because they let in wind?"

Mom laughed and said, "I feel another blog coming on..."

So here's to mom. The etymology of window does in fact directly come from the word wind. The OED (remember my favorite dictionary...) gives the following etymology.

[ME. windo e, a. ON. vindauga, f. vindr WIND n.¹ + auga EYE n.¹ (See also WIND-DOOR, WINDORE, WINDOWN, WINNOCK.)

So in Old Norse, vindauga meant wind-eye and through the advent of the Viking Age, this term for a hole in a building that permitted you to look in or out was adopted into the English language and over time, was softened to the term we use today. That is what I took from the complete entry (some 7 pages long....not reprinting that here--you're welcome).

Therefore, a window is a hole in a building useful to the eye (allows you to see in or out) and also allows the wind to move in or out of the building. See how much you learn here at Livlife's Emporium of Useless Knowledge?

This one goes out to Justin, because he was telling me how much he enjoys the knowledge that I share on my blog...and he likes to see his name in lights.

Okay, so the other night I was watching "Sex and the City" on TBS and a commercial comes on for orange juice. A thought pops into my head...are oranges called that because of the color, or is the color named so because of the fruit? So I turn to my mom and ask her that very question. She said: "you mean like a chicken or the egg thing?" Yep, that's exactly what I want to know. Mom didn't have the answer, so I looked it up. Shocking, I know.

Here's your next installment: I did some research in the Oxford English Dictionary. Which is the definitive dictionary  and is chock full of all sorts of useful information. I also googled it and came up with an etymology, which is really close, from Wikipedia. But we'll go with the most authoritative source. The OED gives this definition--

1. a. Any of various kinds of citrus fruit with a usually reddish-yellow rind when mature and an acid many-celled juicy pulp; spec. (a) (more fully Seville orange, bitter orange) the fruit of Citrus aurantium, whose pulp is bitter and which is now used chiefly for making marmalade; (b) (more fully sweet orange, China orange) the fruit of C. sinensis and its varieties, which has a pleasantly acid pulp and is used for eating and making juice.

It then goes on to tell of the earliest documented uses of the name, the earliest being 1400 AD.

Then, if you scroll to a later entry you see this definition--

4. A bright reddish-yellow colour like that of the skin of a ripe orange; any one of a number of shades occupying the region between red and yellow in the spectrum. Also: a pigment or dye of this colour.

-AND-

a. Of the colour of an orange (see A. 4).

And the earliest documented usage of this definition...wait for it...here it comes....1532! Which is a full 132 years after they named the fruit. So, the answer is the chicken! Or is it the egg?

Okay, so I didn't solve that one, but now we know that the color orange is derived from the color of the skin of the fruit. I would have thought it were the other way around. Glad I checked.  Well, Justin, did you learn something? 

When I wrote my post yesterday, I was being a bit facetious by titling it "Can of Corn?". But as I moved on with my evening, I kept coming back to that phrase, wondering just where it came from.

Let's start at the very beginning. A can of corn, in baseball is a high fly ball, easily caught. The kind that any monkey off the street should be able to catch and therefore, a no-brainer for a professional ball player. But that isn't the question....I am wondering HOW did "can of corn" come to mean that? What is the correlation between baseball and canned vegetables?

So I did some research. Luckily, I was working at Hamline last night and was able to utilize their excellent reference collection, to little avail. In all of the sports dictionaries, histories, encyclopedias, and other reference guides, there was either no mention of the phrase or else just a basic definition. Google was no help. There were some answers thrown out there by yahoos who don't know what they are talking about, but nothing definitive.

In desperation, I turned to actual dictionaries. I started with the OED, but it doesn't have a listing or even a mention of the phrase. Then I came across the "Dictionary of American Slang," 1967. It gives the standard definition 1)In baseball, a high, slow fly ball. But then adds this interesting tidbit. 2) A man, a fellow, or a guy, especially one who has done something audacious. 1949: "Where would a hot can of corn like Dillinger hideout?" A. Hynd, "Public Enemies."

Hm, now I know the phrase isn't specific to baseball, which I didn't know before, but I am not really any closer to my answer. Finally, I stumbled across "The Dickson Baseball Dictionary," 1989. The book wasn't at Hamline, I had to run over to Macalester to look at it (yep, I worked really hard to spelunk this one). But I found a great entry.

It gives the same definition, but offers up this etymology: The phrase has long been assumed to have come from the old time grocery store where the grocer used a pole or a mechanical grabber to tip an item, such as a can of corn, off a high shelf and let it tumble into his hands or his apron, which was held out in front like a fire net. An alternate theory is suggested in Mike Whiteford's How to Talk Baseball, in which he quotes Pittsburgh Pirates announcer Bob Prince who said, "It's as easy as taking corn out of a can." Still another, suggested by Burt Dunne in the Folger's Dictionary of Baseball, is that the "can of corn" ball is hit with a "kerplunk" sound - presumably that of a can being hit with a stick. Peter Tamony developed a separate theory, which was published in the form of a letter appearing in Bucky Walter's "Mail Bag" of August 24, 1977, in the San Francisco Examiner. "'Can of corn' no doubt developed out of the complex usage surrounding 'cornball,' a confection made of pop corn and molasses, munched by the young for over a century. Popped corn flies wildly, of course, making a handy word association with a light popup to the outfield." Tamony, incidentally, determined that the term was in use in the early to mid-1920s, based on a series of interviews in 1953 with semi-professional players.

Okay, so there you have four possible answers. 1)Grocers used to knock cans of corn into their aprons, simulating the easy fielding of the ball. 2) "It's as easy as taking corn out of a can" 3)The fly ball being hit makes the same sound as hitting a can of corn 4)It comes from the term cornball and the similarity of popped corn flying about.

So, what do you think? Is it 1? 2? 3? 4? or none of the above. Perhaps there is a different explanation that no one has tracked down before. Personally, I am going with #2. That just sounds like something an announcer would say (have you ever paid attention to the stupid things they say to fill time? Try listening to Dick and Bert.) that someone else might pick up on and use to poke some fun or repeat because it sounded catchy. I could see the phrase developing because of this.

I doubt we'll ever know the true answer, but I am satisfied with the information that I found. Do you feel smarter?

Thanks for tuning in to today's installment of "Things you never knew you never knew."

I apologize for beginning with the most sterotypical greeting associated with Italian, but it IS actually used and so we DO actually have to learn it properly in class.  Properly mostly involves, "don't greet strangers in suits this way."  What fascinates me though is the word's history.  In a roundabout way, it actually comes from the word for slave!  Allow me to summarize: once upon a time, local dialects reigned supreme in Italy rather than what enthusiastic educators like to consider the standard language.  (Ok I know this is still the case, but play along...)  At that time, Venice, an entrancing city where all visiters instantly develop an unexpected love of velvet and small boats, was renowned for it's diplomats.  (I always thought it only had pirates, but maybe it depends who is telling the tale.  Anyway.)  In the Venetian dialect, the word schiao used as a greeting of sorts developed from Latin esclavum which meant slave.  Schiao didn't mean slave exactly, but was more of a "your servant" kind of greeting.  Picture people in coats bowing with dignity and perhaps placing one hand on the heart with another on the bill.  Now he says "schiao."  Somehow this turned into the ciao that people the world over know and love today.  Maybe they noticed how successful those Venetians were at selling velvet, or maybe they just wanted to seem well traveled and didn't count on everyone else using it, including folks who only travel through the special addition digital sattelite channels.  Who knows.  In any case, that is the slightly abbreviated, slighly embellished version of my textbook's culture point.  I know a few of our most loyal bloggers have a much closer connection to Italy's language and history than two days of language lessons, so please join in!