Yay for lymph! It helps get rid of toxins and stuff! It also has a very cool etymology. Through French lymphe, lymph derives from the Latin word lympha, meaning "water", because lymph looks like water. This, curiously, used to be a word for "water nymph", a mythological guardian of water bodies. This comes from the Greek word nymph, so we saw a little consonant switch since the beginning. After this, the etymology is officially unknown. There have been many attempts to reconstruct an origin, the most probable of which is that it comes from Latin nubere, meaning "to marry", but that's really unsure because it breaks a plethora of linguistic rules. Some linguists have hypothesized a pre-Mediterranean origin or otherwise non-Indo-European root. Either way, it's pretty interesting how the word has changed this far, even.

The word picnic in French is pique-nique, and while pique may mean "pick", nique's definition of "worthless item" is not entirely accurate. It was corrupted over the centuries from niche, "spot" (as in "pick your own spot") and people modified it to make it rhyme. Anyway, pique comes from the Old French word piquer, meaning "to pierce", specifically with a pike or sword (which is definitely "picking" something; also the root of English pick). This might be from a Latin word like piccare, which meant "to sting", but nobody's quite sure. Niche, meanwhile (also a word in English, of course) has several debated etymologies, but the most likely explanation is that it comes from the Latin word nidus, meaning "nest", which would come from Proto-Italic nizdos and Proto-Indo-European nisdos, with the same meaning. So, etymologically speaking, a picnic can be "piercing nests".

How are the words infant and infantry connected? Pretty whimsically, it turns out. In French, the word for infant was infante, which originally meant "youth" under a connection of inexperience. Both of these words trace to Latin noun infans, with the same meaning as infant today. This, however, comes from two other parts: the prefix in-, implying an opposite (and hailing from Proto-Indo-European n, meaning "not"), and the root fans, which meant "speaking". An infant, therefore, is one who does not speak (and, by extension, so is the infantry). Fans comes from  the Proto-Italic reconstruction faor, from Proto-Indo-European bha, still meaning "to speak". In English literature today, the word infant is used about four times more often than infantry, although application of both has decreased over time.

When Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, he came across the Carib people. However, when they introduced themselves, he misinterpreted their name as the Caniba. Eventually this was corrected, but it was too little, too late: Columbus' error lasted long enough to seep into another language. It was picked up by the Spanish as the word canibal, meaning "one who eats other humans", because of false stereotypes by the Europeans. This became our word cannibal later on as well. Interestingly, the name for the region, the Caribbean, comes from the correct spelling of the native name, so human-eaters and the sea below Florida are etymologically connected. Cannibal showed up as a word almost two centuries before Caribbean did, which says a lot.

The etymology of Pakistan is so cool that it gets its own Wikipedia page, something I've never encountered with word origins before. At first blush, somebody knowledgeable in Middle Eastern languages would assume that it's from pak, the Iranian word for "pure", and -stan, the general Proto-Indo-European suffix meaning "land". While that certainly was an influence on the word, this is not an origin. It's actually an acronym of Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and the suffix of Baluchistan- together, the traditional five northern parts of India. It really was also kind of a pun; the name was intentionally designed to sound like pak and -stan. This was originally called Pakstan until people realized that it sounded better phonetically if they added an i, and that's where the name comes from!

Almost everybody on the Internet has come across placeholder text before; it's commonly used to show what the page would look like with text despite not having any yet. Quite often, this starts with lorem ipsum, and often goes on a tangent of irrelevant-seeming Latin words. So, what does this mean and why do we use it? Well, using any existing language as a filler would not be good, because it can accidentally get included as part of the text. So, the originators of the filler chose a dead language, Latin, to do the job, specifically one poem by the Roman poet Cicero about pain versus pleasure. At this point, generators take random clippings from that text and insert it for as much space as is needed. Fun fact: lorem isn't even a word in Latin, and neither are many of the other garbles of gibberish in there: they're actually fragments of words. For example, lorem ipsum is a shortening of qui dolorem ipsum; it's similar for many of the other words in the string of text.

You know how, on a six-sided die, the number five is represented with five dots in a sort of "x" formation? Yeah, that particular geometric arrangement is called a quincunx. The word's origin is quite interesting: it means "five-twelfths", because in the times of the Romans, a quincunx was worth 5/12 of a bronze coin. This was often notated using that cross-shaped pattern which is so familiar to us today. Eventually, the word lost its connection with the denominator, because it was more commonly associated with the symbol. Quincunx is a portmanteau of the words quinque, meaning "five" (through Proto-Italic kenke, this is from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction penke, with the same meaning), and unus, meaning "one" (from Proto-Indo-European oynos, through Proto-Italic oinos). Now you know.

Did you know the humble zucchini is actually a kind of squash? True. So it will come as no surprise to you when you find out that, in Italian as the word zucchino, the word zucchini meant "squash". This derives from zucca, which was a simpler manner of saying "gourd" or "squash", and which is thought to come in turn from the Latin word cucurbita, which also meant "gourd" in general. Now, while the origin for this is officially unknown, many etymologists theorize that it comes from cucumis, meaning "cucumber" (and, yes, the etymon of our word for cucumber, through Old French cocombre). This has cognates in both Greek and Sanskrit, but because the word is so weird overall, the prevailing theory is that the word may not be of an Indo-European language, possibly having come from a pre-Mediterranean tongue or one of the Semitic languages.

One of my biggest pet peeves is hearing people say ye olde the way it's spelled. The ye is actually an old way to spell the, as a stylized alteration of þe, the Old English version of "the". It should be pronounced "the old". And, besides, that whole phrase was made up in the 1800s to advertise taverns as being old when they really weren't. Olde wasn't even the old way to spell old; that was ald. The whole thing was made to sound archaic. Auuugh! Annoying. Anyway, þe as a word traces back to the Proto-Germanic word pa, which came from Proto-Indo-European to, with the same meaning. Ald is from Proto-Germanic aldaz, meaning "to grow up", which in turn is from PIE heleti, or "to nourish". There isn't much change in such simple, ubiquitous words... except for ye olde. Grrr.

Fun fact: there is no boy in boycott. It's actually named after a person, Charles Boycott, who was a bit of a jerk. An Englishman in that gruesome time before Ireland was independent, he tried to evict a bunch of sharecroppers and had it backfire on him. The Irish Land League was infuriated and got everyone in the area to shun Boycott, leaving him without any tenants and no way to farm his fields. He tried to flee America, but even people over there heard about what had happened and gave him a rough time. Satisfied in their new tactic, the Irish Land League and several other organizations starting giving people the cold shoulder more often, and used Boycott's name as a verb for the action. Ironically, when feminists started boycotting things in the '60s and '70s, they called them girlcotts, which really makes no etymological sense.

It's almost prom season, and almost nobody in my school realizes that prom is just a shortening of promenade​. Right now, the word's main meanings are "to stroll" or "a place where you stroll", but earlier, it could also mean "a formal dance"- the definition that became prom as we know it. Promenade comes from the French word promener, meaning "to walk". That in turn comes from Latin prominare, "to move forward", a portmanteau of the prefix pro- (meaning "forward and coming from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction per, "before") and the root mandare, which meant "to drive an animal", a way shepherds would walk (thus the connection). This, interestingly, is from minari, meaning "to threaten" and a conjugation of minae, "threat". Minae likely comes from a Proto-Indo-European word sounding like men and meaning "to project", which means that the word prom can be said to mean "projecting before" or "threatening forward", depending on how far back you go.

A milquetoast is a person who's meek and not very proactive. The word, curiously enough, is named after a comic strip character: Caspar Milquetoast from H.T. Webster's The Timid Soul. In the comic, he is portrayed as an indecisive, timid man, and he was so popular back in the 1930s that his name slipped into the general vernacular to describe somebody with a similar personality. When Webster named him, he chose milquetoast as an intentional misspelling of milk toast, a bland food considered to be unadventurous and good for meek people like Casper. The q further made it look effeminate.  Milk comes from Old English meolc, from Proto-Germanic meluks, from Proto-Indo-European hmelg, which still had the same meaning (because this is something very basic that would remain constant in definition over time). Toast has a bit more interesting origin that I want to save for later, so let me just say it traces to Latin torrere, which meant "to burn". Ironically, milquetoast also became the name for a cockroach character in Berke Breathed's Bloom County comic.

A parasite is often ingested alongside food, so is it really that surprising that the word itself means "beside food"? Because that's exactly the case. However, it's not for the reason I just listed. Originally, parasite only referred to humans who mooched off other humans, and got applied to other animals in the mere 1600s. So, through French parasite and Latin parasitus, the word traces back to the Ancient Greek word, which still meant the same thing, but literally could be defined as "one who eats at another's table". This is a portmanteau of the word para, meaning "beside" (from the Proto-Indo-European word per, with the same definition), and sitos, which meant "food" and has an unknown etymology. The idea is evident: a parasite is one who eats beside the host without reciprocating. Usage of parasite peaked in 1911 and has decreased since.

Curiously enough, the word biscotti was not borrowed into English until the late 1980s, when it was adopted as the plural of Italian biscotto (so, technically, a biscotti is incorrect; it should be a biscotto). Meanwhile, the word biscuit, which has been around for far longer, came from the French word bescuit. It was borrowed in the 12th century and took the form bisket for a while, until people decided they wanted to return to the French roots of the word. Both of these are from the same etymon: Latin biscoctum, which meant "twice cooked". This particular definition was applied because biscuits and biscotti in the old times were baked twice in two separate ovens. Biscotum is composed of the prefix bis-, meaning "two" (it's a lesser known variant of bi-, coming from Proto-Indo-European dwis, with the same meaning), and coctus, which is a conjugation of coquere, meaning "to cook" or "ripen". The latter, through Proto-Italic keko, comes from PIE pek, also with the same definition.

In the early 1500s, England began training with the rest of Europe more frequently. In this process, they picked up the Lombard word articiocco. As that developed in English for the next few centuries, people began to mistakenly use -choke instead of -cioccio as the suffix simply because they thought it was right; this type of change, known as folk etymology, is particularly fascinating. Anyway, articioccio comes from the Old Spanish word alcarchofa, and since they had a lot of interactions with the Moors because of conquests and all that, alcarchofa comes from the Arabic word al-kursuf. Throughout all this time the word retained the meaning that we know today, but before then, it meant something different. Philologists theorize that the Arabic term may derive from the Akkadian word arsupu, which described a type of grainy, braid-like cereal, but also a type of fruit and a fish scales. Akkadians were weird. Usage of artichoke has been on the rise since its first, accidental emergence in the mid-1700s.

On the 12th of May in the year 1588, during the French Wars of Religion, an uprising in Paris called the Day of the Barricades temporarily ousted King Henry III from Paris. In it, the townspeople blocked off major entryways and points in the city and generally rioted until the Bastille surrendered. This was the first time barricades were set up in a Parisian revolt, but far from the last, as that would become a tactic used many times over. In this first barricade, it had to be set up quickly, so the rioters used anything on hand, including barrels full of soil and stones. The barrels were used so much that they took the Spanish word barricada, which literally meant "made of barrels", from the root barrica, "barrel". In older times, this was spelled barril, and before that, it likely came from Latin, because there are cognates in basically all of the Romance languages. However, there are no records of such a word, so this is just conjecture. It makes so much sense in retrospect; I can't believe the etymology was under my nose the whole time and I never noticed.

Manatees are giant herbivorous sea cows native to the Caribbean. Therefore, Europeans didn't come into contact with them until the Spanish started exploring the region. There, it is theorized that picked up a local Taino word for the animal, which subsequently became the Spanish word manati, and eventually English manatee. It's likely the indigenous word meant "breast", and was applied due to a shared connection of bulbousness between the two. However, the origin is disputed. Some etymologists trace it to the Latin word manatus, which means "having hands", from the root manus, "hand" (referring to the large flippers manatees have). This, through Proto-Italic, would originate in the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction for "hand", which varies from mehr to mehn to man. Usage of the word manatee has been steadily increasing since its first application in the 1750s, and likewise for Spanish since the 1630s.

Right now, a gargoyle refers to an entire stone statue, usually of a grotesque, mythical style. In earlier times, however, the word solely meant the mouth of the "gargoyle" we know today; specifically the spout where water would often come out of. This comes from the Old French word gargouille (sounds like a tasty soup in my opinion), from the older Old French word gargoule. This meant "throat", which is not much of a stretch from "gargoyle mouth" but is still pretty crazy if you step back and look at the whole picture. Additionally, gargoule gave us our verb gargle, so that's fascinating by itself. This comes from the Latin word gargola, with the same meaning. The first part of this, gar, is onomoatopoeic of actual gulping sounds, and the second part, gula, still meant "throat" in Latin (also the source of gullet, through French golet). Overall, these words most likely come from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction gwele, which meant "to swallow" or something similar. That too is possibly imitative in origin.

A decal is a type of decorative design, but that word is actually a shortening of decalomania, which is the process of putting decorative designs onto things. This comes from the French word decalcomanie, with the same meaning. Eliminate the -manie suffix, and we're left with the word decalquer, which meant "to transfer" or "trace". Eliminate the de- prefix, and now we have calquer, a verb meaning "to imitate" (so the de- was a bit redundant). This is from Italian calcare, or "to press", and that comes, through a Latin cognate, from the noun calx, meaning "heel" (because heels press when you stomp on something). If you'll remember from four blog posts ago, this is also the origin of calque, which is quite interesting. As we've already discussed there, calx is from a Pre-Greek origin which is obscure to us. In a bizarre plot twist, it is likely that the word cockamamie comes from decalomania, because that actually once referred to decals before it was taken on as a word for something ridiculous later on.

Most people think that the letters in the SAT stand for "Scholastic Aptitude Test". While that it is indeed  what it was called when it first came out in 1926, the truth today is very different. You see, there was an error in its naming: the SAT does not actually measure aptitude, which is a natural ability. It's more of an assessment of learned abilities, so the College Board renamed the SAT to be the Scholastic Assessment Test in  1993, under mounting pressure. However, people hated the new name even more, because since "assessment" is just a word for "test", "Scholastic Test Test" is kind of redundant. Eventually, in 1997, the College Board just gave up, with one representative declaring that "the SAT has become the trademark; it doesn't stand for anything. The SAT is the SAT, and that's all it is." Basically, the three letters mean absolutely nothing, and if you're wondering why they didn't just make a new acronym, it's because changing the name would be "too confusing". Funnily enough, this type of development occurs relatively frequently. KFC used to be "Kentucky Fried Chicken" until fried foods got a bad rep in the '90s, when the company just dropped all meaning associated with the letters. The same is true for AT&T, AARP, ESPN, ACT (the SAT's sister test, ironically), and many others. 

Today, the word livid has two definitions: "furious" and "pale". Both of these interpretations can be traced back to the same Old French word: livide, which meant "blueish". While we may not call someone "blue with rage" nowadays, that's exactly what they did back in the thirteenth century, and the meaning soon got extended to anger. Nobody's quite sure how "blue" turned into "pale" for the second definition we use today, but a shift from one color to another is not all that strange. This all comes from the Latin word lividus, which "bluish" or even "black and blue", and in turn is from the verb livere, meaning "to be bluish". Due to centuries of soft pronunciation, this had lost the s that originally preceded it, making the true Latin etymon slivere. This, through Proto-Italic sliwo, comes from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root sleia, which still had connotations of the color "blue". Usage of the word livid has surprisingly decreased almost 85% since its peak in the 1770s.

Kiribati is an archipelago nation out in the Pacific Ocean, and until recently I always thought it had some kind of exotic native name. I also believed that it was pronounced like it was spelled, and, boy, was I wrong on both parts. It's actually pronounced kiri-bas, because that's the way plurals work in the local Gilbertese language. Now the word for the nation comes from the English name Gilberts (yes, there was a lot of modification), which was named after Captain Thomas Gilbert, who did a lot of discovering of islands in the Pacific-Indian ocean area. Yes, the local language is also named after him; he made a real impact on the culture, apparently. Anyway, the surname Gilbert comes from the Proto-Germanic roots gislaz, meaning "pledge", and berhtaz, meaning "bright". Respectively, these terms come from Proto-Indo-European gheydh, meaning "desire", and Proto-Indo-European bherhg, or "to shine". Despite all these IE roots, I think it's really cool how a common English last name came to be applied for not only a country's name but also the language they speak there.

In etymology, a calque is a word or phrase that is directly translated from one language to another. For example, the phrase "flea market" uses English words that directly translate from the French phrase marché aux puces. Meanwhile, a loanword in linguistics is a term taken from another language with no attempt at translation and minimal to no modification, For example, we use the phrase faux pas, which is a loanword from French. Anyway, the reason I'm boring you with this linguistic jargon is to introduce a mind-blowing fact: the word calque is a loanword, and the word loanword is a calque! Let's break it down. Calque was loaned from French calque, which meant "a copy". This comes from the verb calquer, which meant "to trace", which comes from Italian calcare ("limestone"; the connection was tracing veins of rock). This is from Latin calcare, or "to press" (because rocks are pressed), which is from calx, meaning "heel" (you can press with your heel), from a Pre-Greek word meaning "pebble". Now, onto loanword! It's a calque of the German phrase lehnwort, which was translated directly into English. These terms are pretty boring on both sides and go back to Proto-Germanic and PIE. I thought that switch was pretty whimsical.

Back in the 1530s in Italy, a new kind of lottery game emerged called Lo Giuoco del Lotto D'Italia. In it, each player had a sort of numbered grid, and if their numbers were drawn out of a bag, they would win. This game became especially popular in pre-Revolution France, where they changed the grid size. The first person to make a horizontal row would win. In the 1800s, the game was used in Germany to help children with math. Eventually, this found its way to America in the early 1900s. Here, people needed a way to keep track of what tiles were called without marking the paper, so they could reuse sheets. They made use with what they had, and they had beans. It was because of this that the game came to be called beano, and players would shout out beano! if they had their beans lined up in any row, column, or diagonal. Much easier to say than Lo Giuoco del Lotto D'Italia, anyway. Later, somebody somewhere accidentally said bingo! instead of beano! and it stuck, mainly because it gave the sound a more satisfying and ringing tone No connection to Old MacDonald.

The word and constitutes just under 2.4% of all words used in the English language, although usage has decreased since its peak around 3.2% in the 1650s. According to my extensive collection of Zipf's Law graphics, it's the third most common word in the English language. Now, if we look at the etymology of and, we can see very little variation in both definition and spelling. This is unsurprising, as it is a fundamental word- so basic that there's not much to change. It's been around that long. In Old English, more than a thousand years ago, it was still a conjunction meaning "and", but if we go a quarter millennium back to Proto-Germanic, it was either unda or andi, depending on the reconstruction. Even further, in Proto-Indo-European, it actually had a different definition, that of "in", as the word en. Why? Not sure. It's tentative at best.