The curious origins of words

Although the origin of a word (its etymology) does not necessarily indicate anything of its current meaning, the stories behind words can throw fascinating light on the way in which people perceive similarities of meaning and draw links between meanings.

The word hurt is related to the modern French se heurter contre ‘‘to bang into’’, and is thought to come originally from a Germanic word for a ram ‘‘male sheep’’. The link between the animal and banging into things may be easy to see. The link between banging into things and being hurt takes the relationship and looks at it the other way round: if you hurt the door (by banging into it) it hurts you, and the resultant bruise hurts, too.

Hurtle is a related word. Originally it meant to keep banging into things over and over, and many modern dictionaries comment that hurtling involves noise (presumably, originally, the sound of collisions). These days, though, it is the speed of movement that is to the fore, rather than the banging which such speed might give rise to.

.A tenter is a framework on which cloth is stretched after being woven to prevent it from shrinking while drying. The cloth was fastened to hooks along the edges of the frame and stretched. Tenter was sometimes used for the hook itself, rather than the frame, and the hook was not necessarily for stretching cloth, but also for hanging meat.

If you are on tenterhooks, therefore, you are stretched and strained in a painful manner, or you are in suspense.

The word tent comes from a Latin word originally meaning ‘‘stretched’’, and the canvas for making tents was stretched on a tenter in the manner described above.

Today we think of pink as basically a colour term. But like orange, the colour is named after a thing (in the case of pink, a flower, which in New Zealand is now usually called dianthus, at least in garden shops), rather than vice versa. But where does the name of the flower come from? One clue is given by the word pinkeye (conjunctivitis), which seems to match with the colour meaning of pink. But another effect of untreated conjunctivitis is that it makes the eyes look small, and it seems that pinkeye originally meant ‘‘small eye’’.

The pink bit comes from a Dutch word pinck (which no longer exists in modern Dutch) meaning ‘‘small’’. There is still a Dutch word pinken meaning ‘‘blink’’ which is related to this, and a similar form is found in Scotland. We still have traces of that meaning in the word pinkie, used in many parts of the Englishspeaking world for the little finger, and there is another use of pink meaning ‘‘minnow, small fish’’. The pink (the flower) must originally have been seen as a small version of the carnation. The French word oeillet (‘‘carnation, pink’’) literally means ‘‘little eye’’, and is also used for an eyelet.

Words often change their meanings drastically over time, and it takes real detective work on the part of the etymologist to discover what they originally meant and how they got their present meanings.

Laurie Bauer is the author of more than 20 books on language topics, and winner of the 2017 Royal Society of New Zealand’s Humanities/aronui medal.