How do words travel?

HOW do words travel? Ways include: out from a centre; in long lines of successive borrowing; in apparent zigzags; by crazy mistake; and (more metaphorically) by changes of meaning, not sound or spelling.

Googling outwards

Google was so named when accidentally misspelt by its founders from the maths term

googol, coined in 1920, meaning 10 to the power of 100. Then, the Web being ‘‘worldwide’’, its use spread from Stanford, California, in all directions, like rays.

Orange

In past times, the trading of new things spread their new names, slowly and irregularly, but still in a fairly straight line. Take orange, proceeding backwards in time. English borrowed French orange or Italian arancio. Before that they came through Arabic naranj, its initial /n/ being lost or transposed in transmission. That was preceded by Persian narang, before which was Sanskrit

narangah, before which Tamil naram or Telugu narimja . . . The ancient and excellent fruit has a durable name, except for the lost /n/ and the changed first vowel.

Apricot

But another fruit has travelled by strange zigzags. We got apricot through French from Arabic Spain. It’s albercoc in Catalan, having been albarquq in Arabic, where it had picked up the prefix

al (‘‘the’’) from Arabic. So far, so good. But connections are suggested with berokokkia in Greek, and Latin apricus (‘‘sunny place’’), compare praecoquis

(‘‘early ripening’’). And its botanical name connects it with Armenia . . .

Conundrum and quandary

Here’s another twisted history, the mazy ways by which

conundrum and quandary connect, in form and in meaning. After all, a conundrum by nature leaves you in a quandary: the fields of meaning are found to overlap. There’s a jolly uncertainty about its spelling, as in spellings like French

calabradienne. Does it distort some medieval Latin phrase? Is it a burlesque Latin invention? All of these?! The vowels do a dance. Some consonants dip out and in. The k, d, and n sounds persist. Etymology isn’t an exact science, that’s why I like it.

Wit

Changes of meaning interest me even more than changes of sound or spelling. Take the word

wit. It has a straight line of descent from AngloSaxon witte, meaning mind, mental faculty. How it changed, was brilliantly explained by C.S. Lewis, in terms of the shift from ‘‘word’s meaning’’ to ‘‘speaker’s meaning’’. Often a word has a current meaning which, when applied to something in the speaker’s own world, diverts or ousts the full former meaning (like a cuckoo in the nest). This happened to wit. From meaning one’s general wit (mental capacity), or five wits (ways of knowing), as in startled out of

your wits, it became wit as strong comparison (like John Donne and his wife as a pair of compasses), then declined into

wit as dexterous speech; clever talk; verbal felicity; where a wide and clear application is usurped by a narrow or fashionable one.

Sense and sensibility

In another chapter Lewis explains how sense and

sensibility — now virtual opposites — come from the same Latin origin, sensus as perception (sensation) and as the sense which this makes of things. Yet, as a pairing, sense and

sensibility expresses the fundamental contrast in the character of the two sisters of Jane Austen’s novel. A strength in overdose becomes a weakness.

C.S. Lewis

Lewis’s book on all this,

Studies in Words, is the most enlightening book on English words I have ever read. Buy it! AT ONCE!!