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Sunday, March 04, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #80

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself about the curious origins of interesting words.

1. Chess is an old game (well over a thousand years old), and the origin of check (in all of its meaning including a payment order to a bank), checkmate, and even exchequer. The game began in India and reached Spain by way of the Arabs, who called it shah (the Persian word for king). Thus, check was the English version of the French version of the Spanish version of the Arabic word, and meant "Your king is exposed." Checkmate is the derivative of shah mat (the king is dead). For what it's worth, the queen in European chess is the old Prime Minister or Vizier from Indian Chess. (The game is unchanged in over a thousand years, with the minor edition of the en passant rule as the game passed through France.) Exchequer (a system of government accounting) derives from the fact that in Medieval times, the government's accountants used a table divided into squares to pile up the money from each feudal lord who owed revenue to the crown.

2. Cavalry (horse soldiers) and chivalry (politeness, manners, and deference to women) come from the old French word cheval (horse). Chivalier was simply the French word for a rider, and that word spawned both cavalry and chivalry. (The word cavalry actually comes from the Italian version of chevalier.) A warrior rich enough to own a horse and a suit of armor was a knight (the lowest form of nobility). As knights dominated the battlefield and supporting a war horse and buying armor was expensive, warriors selected for their bravery and loyalty were given land (and its revenue) by a feudal lord, since the king expected all of his feudal lords to show up with a group of mounted and armored knights whenever a war started. (The whole concept of feudalism was basically a way to afford enough horses.) A knight swore an oath not just to obey orders but to behave in a suitable manner, that is, a code of chivalry.

3. Clerk, a secretary or office worker, is a shortened form of cleric, since priests were (a thousand years ago) the only ones who could read and write. Nobles employed priests not just for religious duties but as secretaries to handle records and correspondence. The need for more and more such secretaries sparked the training of non-priests to do the job and thus the spread of general education and literacy.

4. The Greeks knew that the world was round (or at least the top half was round; they didn't know about the southern hemisphere). They envisioned that the slope varied with the distance from the pole or equator, and klima is the Greek word for slope. The Greeks thought that there were seven klima from north to south, and later envisioned that each slope (klima) and its own weather (or climate). The old expression "a change of climate" originally meant to relocate to someplace farther north or farther south.

5. Cloak (a cape) and clock (a timepiece) actually come from the same word, cloca, the Latin word for bell. (A clock chimed the hours while a cloak looked vaguely like a bell.)

6. Clue comes from the middle English word for a ball of yarn. Chaucer retold the classic story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur and finding his way out of the labyrinth by means of a ball of yarn he unrolled as he entered the place.

7. Coach is the English version of the Hungarian town of Kocs, where someone (his name lost to history) first invented a heavier enclosed carriage that had springs between the axles and the body.

8. Cobalt is the English version of the German word kobold, a sort of malignant goblin prone to pranks. When German miners found what seemed to be metallic ore that actually produced no metal when smelted, they threw it aside as denounced the kobold who had tricked them. In 1735, scientists finally identified the mineral cobalt.

9. Coconut comes from the Portuguese word coco, meaning a grinning face. Portuguese sailors were the first Europeans to encounter this form of nut, and the three dark spots on the end of it reminded them of a grinning face.

10. Coin comes from the Latin cuneus, a word that defined the wedge-shaped tool used to hammer a die (containing the face of the emperor) into it. Coins had begun as mere droplets of metal, which had to be weighed in order to establish their value. Someone in ancient times got the idea of making droplets of uniform size to avoid the hassle of weighing them, and marked them as such. (The art of producing this uniform size evolved over time. Originally it involving taking random droplets and shaving them down to a desired weight. Modern coins have ridges or writing on the edge to show that no one shaved off some of the metal.) The government eventually stepped in and provided an official mark (and criminal punishment for producing coins of lesser weight or lower-quality metal), and that mark was stamped into the metal disk with a cuneus.