What's in a Word?
Author: D. Michael Ryan	Date Published: 2003
While we use particular words and phrases often in our conversations, including 18th Century words, do we always know what they really mean or where they came from? For example, we know that many colonial newspapers were called a “gazette” (pronounced GAHZ-ette). Why? The word comes from the name of a Venetian coin which was the cost of the first newspapers distributed in Venice. As the item sold for a “gazette,” so was it called. Often, we are made to “eat humble pie.” Originally it was a pie made from the entrails of a deer (umbles). At a hunter's feast, while the lord and his friends ate venison, the common folk were served “humble pie,” and thus made to feel lesser. When a person is sick or thought to carry a disease, he may be placed in “quarantine” or isolated for a period of time. Used in common law, a woman followed the death of her husband by staying in her house for 40 days or quarantined (medieval Latin for the number 40) while the dower (her inheritance) was assigned. “Gossip” comes from the Saxon words for God and relation and meant to stand in for a child at baptism. Today it is a verb for telling personal, intimate, familiar details of another person or a noun when referring to the teller of such tales. Did you know that a sewer was once the officer who tasted food before the King ate? What's in a word?
About the Author: D. Michael Ryan is Historian with the Concord and Lincoln Minute Men, an 18th Century volunteer history interpreter with the National Park Service and Associate Dean of Students at Boston College.