When I first heard the expression “vim and vigor”, I asked, “What is vim?” I had never heard that word used anywhere, and it sounded like a nonsense word to me. Vigor, on the other hand, was a word I knew. I could point to examples of vigor.

Vigor came to English from Latin and implies a certain energy, enthusiasm, or force. It came to mean healthy, as well, which makes sense. You have to be healthy to exhibit a lot of energy or enthusiasm. There is a sense of strength, as well, but primarily of the mind with physical power just sort of trailing in the wake of the effect of mental influence.

Vim may have also come from a Latin root meaning strength (also energy) or it may simply be a made up word which first appeared in English in the 1800s. In any case, vim’s definition is almost exactly that of vigor, so why pair them? Are they meant to be hyperbolic, an overstatement for emphasis? Yes, that it is exactly the reason for linking them with their subtle differences filling out the impact for the overall impression desired.

There are some confused people, however, who have complicated the life of “vim”. They pair it with vinegar, as in “he is full of vim and vinegar.” This is just a mistake, a malapropism, most likely cause by a confusion of “piss and vinegar” or “pep and vinegar”.  Vinegar seems to have become synonymous with vitality in the college slang of the 1920s. This may have contributed to the odd pairing as vitality and vigor would seem to be equals.

By the way, if you are full of “piss and vinegar” you have likely had too much alcohol of a quality more like vinegar than a valued vintage. In other words, you are drunk and behaving outrageously. The other half of the expression does not need to be explained beyond a nod to the usual reaction to the intake of large quantities of liquid.

When I decided to write about vim and vigor, I thought this expression was a holdover from much earlier times. There are, I am told, other pairings in English (unlike these), that come from a time when the occupants of the British Isles did not all speak the same language. Back then, there were language enclaves where a whole settlement of Danish speakers, for instance lived within trading distance from a village of Saxon speakers and both might be encompassed in the jurisdiction of the Latin speaking church.

There were class separations, like the Norman French spoken by the ruling class (outside Scotland) versus the Saxon spoken by their servants.  This made it not uncommon for the servants or vassals to take a word from their liege lord’s French, for example, and pair it with one similar in the local Saxon, German/Dutch, Celtic, Norse or Danish of the working classes, or even potentially to mix in Latin terms learned from the clergy.

This was an effort toward successful communication which I applaud. If I find any of these are still in use, I will share them in a later blog.

 

 

#EnglishLanguage #EnglishandEtymology #EnglishIdioms

 

 

 

 

Having chucked out and packed up in January, is everything in your home now spic and span? This expression is not a coupling of two English words. They are both, as a pair, a remnant from the 16^th century. When I looked at the origin of this expression, I thought at once it was odd for a cleansing product to choose this expression for its brand name.

The “span” portion works well enough, since it meant “new”. Something new is usually also clean. So far so good. However, the English word span is also a term for distance or something which covers a distance.

Even this sort of works. If you are talking about something that is fresh and clean, that something will have some surface. You can span a surface (go across) or measure the span of (distance across) a surface. So, the expanse of the something is clear of dirt, clean. However, that leaves “spic” unaccounted for.

But this “spic” is a variant of “spike” and is a reference to wood splinters, as in fresh wood shavings. It is not the slang prejudicial epithet used to insult people assumed to be of a certain nationality. That meaning would truly make a mess of this three-word expression.

Most people are familiar with places that cover their floors with sawdust—in circus tents, some restaurants, and bars, perhaps some agricultural buildings, too. But shavings? Are these not more likely to end up as tinder for a fire or mulch in the garden?

Perhaps homes with dirt floors used shavings as a floor covering. I know they used rushes, other herbs, and grasses for both their fragrance and as insulation. The used ones could be easily swept from the dirt floor and replaced. Thus, making the floor “fresh and clean” again, sort of. It is just as likely, that one layer was simply covered over with a newer, fresher layer.

Perhaps centuries ago, they might have used shavings as stuffing for mattresses. You could undo your soiled mattress, dump the shavings wherever, wash the cover and restuff with new shavings. Voila, fresh and clean mattress. But I doubt this is the association that led us to the interpretation of “fresh and clean”.

Perhaps, after all, it simply referred to the freshness of the cut wood and how cleanly the cut was that made the shaving. It might have been an industry-specific term that drifted into the homes of those workers and into the rest of our lives.

By the way, the language source is Norse with a flavoring of Dutch.

 

#EnglishLanguage #EnglishIdioms

At every New Year we begin to measure our lives. We consider the condition in which we have existed and the one we wish to be ours. It is appropriate therefore that today’s subject is the English word series used when we talk about our existence, the verb “be”.

I suspect that the English are not alone in making a hash of talking about existence. I know the verb forms in French and Spanish are labeled “irregular”. Well, the English, not to be outdone, have made theirs both simpler and very much more complicated.

We start with “be”, but the first use we make of this verb is to talk about ourselves, “I am.” Where did this A come from and what happened to the B? It continues in a sort of pattern to “You are.” Good, we are sticking with A, forget about that original B. Another human shows up and we continue with “We are”.  Even when more humans arrive, we continue with “They are.” English is looking not so irregular after all.

But, oh no, something not human arrives and “It is.” How did we get to I? Maybe we plan to use all the vowels (a, e, i, o, u)?*

Not true. Start talking about conditions yesterday and suddenly you get “I/it was” and “We/you/they were.”  W? How did W turn up? But, once again, English isn’t fussy. It settles for just two versions.

That’s what it looks like, until we start speculating about things, planning for or examining possible “what ifs” and the simple “Be” cannot cope on its own. It has to borrow other verbs: has/had/have, can/could, will/would, shall/should. These we call “helping” verbs.

English is not alone in this. Other languages need helping verbs, too, when speculating. Apparently, the originators of language struggled when thinking about anything more creative than the immediately apparent and the remembered events of yesterday.

In any event, once launched into the imagination, we return to the original “B” with just a little flourish. This gives us “been”. And that’s as complicated as we get. Aren’t you relieved?

Oh, yes, you also will need to learn the conjugations of all those helping verbs, and to this point we have only discussed the state or condition of a single moment or event and not circumstances that persist over time. But that would introduce “being” (which can also be a noun which takes us down a different road).

Here’s a little help for now and the New Year. You will only need to say “I/it/you/we will be” and you have all you need to plan. Just don’t complicate things with those pesky “what ifs”, and you will be fine.

*For those who want to know the reasons behind is/am/are and was/were, see comments in Shadows section of this site.

 

#EnglishLanguage #EnglishConjugations

 

 

Many years ago, the film “The Glass Slipper”, a retelling of the Cinderella story, had an odd fairy godmother who liked to recite her favorite words. One of these was “windowsill” just because she liked the way it sounded. She also had some words she did not like at all. After seeing this film, my mother and I played around with this idea.

As a goofy word, I nominated ‘ilk’. It sounds like you meant to say something else, but choked before you could get it out. It also looks like it is missing a letter or more. If you don’t recognize this word, you probably do not work many crossword puzzles. It is related to the word “like” and means the same thing as type, sort or kind, as in a group of something. At least, that’s its meaning in English. Just for fun, check out the meaning in Azerbaijani.

The word irk is a close second since its sound does not suggest a word, only a noise like a bark. Meaning to irritate, the word maybe self-fulfilling. But I don’t care. I still enjoy it for its individuality.

In the category of ugly words, both my mom and I agreed the winner had to be bladder. There is very little redeeming about this word, not its meaning or its sound, though its appearance on the page might get a pass. But only if you are kind.

Maybe it’s not pretty to anyone else, but whippoorwill is at least fun to say. The fact that the sound this bird makes gave it its name just makes this word more endearing to me like a song refrain, or the haunting melody of a distant bird calling in the night.

Now that I’ve opened this subject, I challenge you to select words that are special for you. Make it a game, maybe, the way my mom and I did. We got a lot of laughs as we argued in favor of the words we selected. Hope you do, too.

 

#TheGlassSlipperMovie #FavoriteWords #EnglishLanguage

 

 

As a child the word pumpkin seemed weird to me, especially after I learned to read. Pumpkin looked like a mashup of two words, like basketball or sunflower. But that was exactly the problem. The two words pump and kin, though perfectly ordinary words, together they made no sense.

I knew a pump was something I used to put air in the tires of my bicycle and that the action of forcing the air in was called pumping. But I could not see how this information matched up with the gourd fruit. I reasoned that maybe if you pumped it somehow and did it too hard, maybe you could squash it. It was, after all, also called a squash which was another goofy word.

I looked at all the forms of squash in the grocery store. They all looked pretty sturdy to me and I could only imagine smashing a pumpkin with a hammer. But maybe it was a squash because of the goop inside, that stuff you had to scrape out to make a Jack 0’lantern? You could call that mess squishy, I reasoned. And if something is smashed or squash-ed it could become squishy. But this was absolutely not a satisfying answer at all.

And the other word was no better. Kin meant being related in a family, like your uncle. Of course, there was another expression “akin to” which just meant like or similar to something else. What did this tell me? Did it mean the pumpkin was somehow related to pumps? And what kind of pumps? The gadget that pushed air into tires, or a type of shoe? No, no, there wasn’t any solution. Pumpkin was just a weird word.

When I decided to write about this word, I looked into its etymology. It seems the word wandered from Greek to French to land in England. The English over time changed the sound and spelling of the word to suit themselves. This is typical of English speakers.  Historically, they adopt a word from another language or culture and then shape it to appeal to their sense of hearing and ease of speech.

This habit of borrowing words makes English a wonderfully flexible language, but also can lead to confusion like my childhood struggle with pumpkin. However, in this case English speakers in early North America actually adopted the American Indian word for the squash which was and is, lo and behold, pumpkin. This version won out over the inherited strangled version of the French for the same fruit. Yet on first glance, it still looks like you are talking about a fruit which is somehow related to a pump!

 

#EnglishLanguage #Pumpkin