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In the United States this weekend is one for celebrating.

On the 4th of July there will be fireworks, there will be parties, people will be swilling drinks and laughing.

Historically though, to celebrate was to solemnly honor something very important.

The Latin meaning of celebratus was “to honor in a large group” so that when celebrate arrived in English just before 1500 with the enlightenment, it was associated with rigid rites performed in public as might be done in a church.

It was the large crowd at such celebrations that originally gave the Roman events the term from celeber meaning “populous”.

The modern meaning of celebrate only seems to have arisen in the last 100 years and contrasts somewhat with what The Oxford English Dictionary says about the word.

This highlights the ponderous task it is to keep a huge dictionary like the OED up to date.

Merriam Webster is no lightweight but it has a pretty modern definition alongside the traditional ones; “to engage in hilarious festivities usually including drinking.”

In contrast, the OED with its enormous ballast of having to include multiple dated first citations of every definition, has not yet gotten around to any hilarious drinking festivities in its definitions.

But you can be certain that eventually it will, and when it does I’ll raise a glass to celebrate.

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There are a number of different species of flower with yellow centers and white petals that are called daisies, but the reason they are called daisies is because one of them in particular grew in England as Old English was developing.

That species would spend its days looking up at the sky, rain or shine and then as darkness came on would fold its white petals over its yellow center and settle down for the night.

It was kind of like an eye looking up at the heavens.

That yellow middle gave it an especially sunny look during the day.

So people began calling this cheery little flower the eye of the day, which, rendered as day’s eye you can quickly see becoming daisy.

Another welcome flower is the daffodil.  In Greek a lily was called asphodelos and the “d” at the beginning of daffodil appeared on, and overtook, an already existing English word affodil after that d-less version had been in use for about 150 years.

Perhaps a less delightful etymology than that for daisy is the one for the flower known as cowslip.

The reason cowslip is called cowslip is because it tends to grow well when it has the help of a little extra nutrients and moisture as might be left behind by a passing cow.

That slip part of cowslip really does refer to the sloppy gloppy leavings of those bovine fertilizers.

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Pop the word expo into a search engine and you will be rewarded with a long list of trade shows and business conferences.

Expo is an abbreviation of exposition, which from Latin through French has a meaning of “putting something out in the open.”

But the literal meaning can be very easily seen by remembering that the ex in exposition—as in many other words starting with ex—means “not” or “out of.”

Displace the ex from exposition and we get position and thus the literal meaning of exposition is that something has been put “out of position,” it is “out of place.”

Although the word exposition has been around in English since before William Shakespeare was a glimmer in his parents eyes, the truncation down to expo didn’t happen until my own lifetime. The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1963 as the first occurrence of expo, and in this case it was spelled with a capital E.

That’s because it was during the planning stages of Expo 67, the world exposition for which the City of Montreal more or less built new islands upon which to stage the exposition.

I was there.

Expo 67 was such a big hit that two years later when Montreal got a major league baseball team, the team also got named after this wonderful new word; The Montreal Expos.

But I guess the Expos must have been—like their etymology—out of place, because in 2004 the were moved and became the Washington Nationals.

Somehow this too seems to me to be out of place; a team that had been Canadian suddenly becoming Nationals in Washington.

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For a while there, couple of decades ago, it was pretty common to hear people talking about “the state of the art” and meaning leading-edge advanced technology.

This really was a fitting phrase since the word technology in most dictionary definitions harkens back to art.

Technology evolved from an originally Greek word technologia, but got imported into English back in 1615.

Now, and even back to the original Greek, technology has been a careful, thoughtful, systematic approach to doing something; a technique.

Technique as a word came from the same source but came to English a little later through French.

The first part of the word, techn actually did mean “art” or “craft” from Greek, while the second half logy means more literally “the writings on” or “the accumulated knowledge about.”

This construct means that technology could be figuratively translated to mean “the field of knowledge about the art.”

The American Heritage Dictionary takes the techn root back beyond Greek to Indo-European teks meaning to weave, linking it to the root of the word textile.

These days the art in question is more likely to be developing the next generation of handheld devices, or the art of decoding DNA sequences, as opposed to weaving skills.

But when technology first arose as a word back in Greek, the arts then being systematically organized were things like grammar.

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It has been sixty years since the bikini came to world attention.

In the summer of 1945 the Second World War was brought to an end with the two explosions of nuclear weapons over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The following summer the US military decided it would be a good idea to do a few more experiments with these kind of bombs to see just what happened when you did set one off.

So far there had only been three such explosions.  The first took place in New Mexico and was just to show that the thing would actually work—the next two were—as one might put it—used in anger.

The place chosen for the testing was a group of small islands well away from most everything except the Pacific Ocean.

If you look at a map and find Australia and then trace north you’ll come to a fairly major island called Papua New Guinea. Then shoot off to the north-east for two thousand miles and you’ll come to the Marshal Islands. In the north-western area of the Marshal Islands there are a group of islands surrounding a lagoon.

This is the Bikini Atoll.

The biggest island is only something over a square mile or so.

Before the bombs were set off there were actually residents on the islands, but they were thoughtfully removed before two explosions shook their world, one from the air, the other from underwater.

I say that these people were thoughtfully removed, but in fact there is a movement these days to try and bring world attention to the descendants of people like these, who were forcibly removed from their island homes.  Check out the book Island of Shame by David Vine.

With respect to the bomb tests, as might be expected, they caught world attention and just happened to be coincident with the emergence in France of a new style of swimsuit formed in two pieces.

But it wasn’t until the following summer, in 1947 that two French guys took advantage of the fad and introduced their skimpier style swimsuit and named it a bikini on the theory that it was going to attract as much attention as last summer’s explosions.

It took another winter before the English speaking world picked up the word—in print at least—The Oxford English Dictionary first citation is in Newsweek in June 1948 in a piece that actually suggests a countertrend against the skimpy bikini.

From what I see around the old swimming hole, the countertrend hasn’t made much progress.

There is an interesting side note here in that there exists a kind of one piece bathing suit called a monokini, as if the leading B I of bikini meant bi as in “two” for the two pieces of the bikini.

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The black stuff on the road is alternately called asphalt, pavement or tarmac.

Tarmac was originally a registered trademark from 1903 and the black, smelly, gooey consistency of the stuff as it’s steam-rollered in place gives an obvious clue to the tar part of the word.

Before roads were essentially glued in place with tar they began as tracks through the mud.  Horses and wagons regularly almost disappeared into these impediments to transportation and thus a star was born when the Scottish surveyor John Loudon McAdam invented a new kind of road.

First he dumped a bunch of rocks along the surface and after they got trampled into the grime by the passing traffic he added smaller and smaller stones and gravel to eventually form a roadbed similar to that beneath major highways today.

For this wonderful idea the new type of road was said to be McAdamized, after John McAdam.

John was long dead before anyone thought to glue the gravel together with tar, but they kept honoring him anyway and so do we, since its from his name that we get the mac in tarmac.

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The first time I looked at the etymology of the word hurricane was in August of 2005.

At that time I don’t think I had really begun to consult Urbandictionary.  I do now, because I think it’s a good vehicle to show how slang usages are evolving.

I just checked now and I see that definition two and three tie the word hurricane to drugs and alcohol.

To some degree this shows that slang is slang is slang because according to The Oxford English Dictionary about the time of Samuel Johnson, 250 years ago, the word hurricane referred to a rip roaring house party.

Of course both the new and the older uses of hurricane in this way are pulled from the “blowout” meaning associated with the main meaning of the word.

That’s what the first entry at Urbandictionary refers to “A temporary alliance formed between the ocean and the sky…”

I posted a podictionary episode about the word hurricane on August 28th, 2005 and listened to news reports over the days and weeks following August 29th when Katrina hit New Orleans.

I look back now at the Google trends data for the use of the word hurricane and see regular blips of search activity every August-September hurricane season.

I guess it’s a reflection of human nature that the highest peak of hurricane searches was around the period of Hurricane Rita, the storm that came right after Katrina.

The word hurricane is a word that evolved from local languages in the Caribbean, was picked up by the Spanish before it made its way into English.

In other parts of the world such a storm is called a typhoon.

Neither the words typhoon, cyclone, or tornado have such a marked regular annual beat, or come anywhere close in frequency of use as hurricane on Google trends.

I suppose this reflects the dominant use of Google by Americans who care more about storms in their part of the world.

The word hurricane appeared in written English in 1555 and coincidentally the word tornado appeared only one year later.  For some decades these two words both applied to Caribbean storms, until hurricane came to dominate and tornado withdrew to a meaning of a more localized blowout by the early to mid 1600s.

The word cyclone was an invented word by a fellow named Henry Piddington in 1848.

Piddington took it upon himself to figure out what the heck was happening out there at sea when one of these big blowouts took place.  He became very respected and valuable in India and England because what he found out saved a bundle in shipping losses.

He named the storms cyclones and most etymologies give the Greek root of this as cyclos meaning “circle.” But he actually visualized the storms like a giant snake coiled up on itself and the appropriate Greek word for that was cycloma.

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Anatoly Liberman says in his book Word Origins that English is a conservative language when it comes to spelling.

The idea is that even though you might not be able to tell where a word comes from by hearing it, when you see it written down sometimes there are more clues because the spelling often retains evidence of its history.

Such is the case with the word lieutenant.  The word arrived in English from French in 1375 and within 100 years the English were pronouncing it “left-tenant” as if there were a “right-tenant” as well.  Yet the spelling that influences Americans to say “loo-tenant” survived this pronunciation change back in the old country and also shows us in stark clarity where the word comes from.

If you write lieutenant out, but put a space after lieu, the result is two other common English words.

Lieu might have a bit of a legalistic flavor to it but most people recognize that it means “instead of” or “in place of”—for example: “in lieu of paying me the money, she took me out to dinner.”

Of course a tenant is someone who rents an apartment. They hold the lease on the place and if it’s a nice apartment, in a desirable neighborhood, they might hold onto it tenaciously.

From Latin then, lieutenant literally means “place holder” and the military lieutenant acts on behalf of—or in place of—their commanding officer.

No one can really say why in the British Army the word is pronounced “left-tenant” but it’s notable that in the Royal Navy the pronunciation seems half way across the ocean. They drop the “f” and say “le-tenant.”

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Something that is miniature is small.

Often a miniature is something that’s a tiny replica of something else that is normally bigger.

It only makes sense that this word miniature would derive from the Latin word minimum, meaning “the smallest.”

It only makes sense, but it’s wrong.

Miniature is one of those strange words that has an etymology that defies logic. The actual truth is that before things that were tiny were called miniature, a certain kind of small portrait was called a miniature.

Before that, the art of illuminating those beautiful letters and figures in hand reproduced ancient books was called miniaire in Italian.

This miniaire art was in turn named for the red color that was especially popular for use in producing this art.

The red color was usually produced by use of a red kind of lead and it was the Latin name of this red lead that gave the color its name because the lead was called minium.

Thus etymologically, miniature and minimum actually don’t even have a small relationship with each other.

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Originally, in French, the word embarras meant a blockage or impediment to whatever you wanted to do.

The word found its way into English just after Shakespeare’s lifetime about 400 years ago.

Knowing that embarras meant a blockage, we can easily break the word in two; em bar.  To bar something is to block it.

This word bar arrived in English much earlier, back in the 12th century. It somehow snuck into Latin during the time after Classical times when the Romans were speaking Latin but was already part of the Latin leftover language that then grew into French.

No one knows were it originated before it was picked up by those vulgar Latin speaking pre-Frenchmen.

This sense of “blockage” is further supported by the diaries of early European explorers in North America. They used the rivers for travel and they called the large piles of driftwood that sometimes blocked their way embarras.

So how exactly does a word that means “blockage” come to have a sense of “shame” associated with it?

When embarrass first came into English it was applied to financial situations.  People were said to be embarrassed if they didn’t have enough money.

Not having sufficient funds blocked them or barred them from doing the things that needed to be done.

From there it’s easy to see how being embarrassed came to mean being put in an uncomfortable position and to be ashamed. It’s common for people with less economic means to feel awkward when someone else is conspicuously flashing cash around.