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I recently listened to a podcast from BBC History Magazine in which Neil MacGregor, Director of The British Museum talked about world history.

To paraphrase, he said that in today’s world a Eurocentric view of history is out of place. A measure of that is an exhibit they’ve worked on in which a British viewpoint is the exception rather than the rule.

I think the word geisha also illustrates this changing approach to the study of history; in this case word history.

The Oxford English Dictionary is currently in the middle of revising the dictionary for the Third Edition. Many entries available at the OED online have been brought up to date, but many others have not.

Geisha is one that has not.

Consequently the entry for geisha has as its most recent example citation a quoted dated 1947.

This date is relevant since geisha is a Japanese word and 1947 is only two years after the atomic bombing of Japan and its World War II surrender.

One might not be surprised to find that a dictionary definition of this vintage omits a Japanese viewpoint. Such is indeed the case with the OED Second Edition.

The etymology of geisha there is said simply to be “Japanese” and the definition reads “A Japanese girl whose profession is to entertain men by dancing and singing; loosely, a Japanese prostitute.”

I checked the OED definition for prostitute which had been updated as of June 2007 and I wasn’t surprised to find that prostitutes are expected to do more than dance and sing in their professional capacity.

Other dictionaries delve a little deeper into the etymology of geisha and in so doing expose a little more sensitive treatment of what a geisha might be.

Some break the word geisha in two explaining it as “art person.”

This sits better against the definition of a professional singer and dancer.

The Century Dictionary goes a little further saying geisha is built on words that were once Chinese: the gei means “polite accomplishments” and originally came from a Chinese word ki meaning “an art” or “a profession”; the sha ending conferring a meaning of “one who does” the art.

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In 1762, after Samuel Johnson had already achieved fame, “[his] friend Sir Joshua Reynolds paid a visit of some weeks to his native country, Devonshire, in which he was accompanied by Johnson, who was much pleased with this jaunt…He was entertained at the seats of several noblemen and gentlemen in the West of England…At one of these seats Dr. Amyat, Physician in London…happened to meet him. In order to amuse him till dinner should be ready, he was taken out to walk in the garden. The master of the house, thinking it proper to introduce something scientifick into the conversation, addressed him thus:

‘Are you a botanist, Dr. Johnson?’

‘No, Sir, (answered Johnson,) I am not a botanist; and, should I wish to become a botanist, I must first turn myself into a reptile.’”

In other contexts Johnson did use the word reptile to refer to people who were creepy but it isn’t thought that he had a particular distain for botanists.

You may have seen the portrait of Samuel Johnson peering at a book in his hand. As the painting shows, he was quite nearsighted.

What Johnson meant was that with his shortsightedness he’d have to creep along the ground on all fours to be able to see those things that it is necessary for a botanist to see.

In so saying Samuel Johnson expressed the ancient etymology of the word reptile.

Although Samuel Johnson was celebrated for his dictionary published in 1755, he didn’t have a great reputation as an etymologist.

seems to have understood reptile though.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots tells us that rep meant to “creep” or “slink.” This root made it into Latin as repere meaning “to creep” then through French to English by 1393 as reptile, originally meaning any creeping or crawling animal.

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The Indo-European root that likely gave us our word number was nem. It had a meaning of “assign” or “allot.”

This may have shown up later in an Ancient Greek word nemein with a similar meaning of “deal out” or “distribute.”

That Greek nemein is the root of our word nemisis which itself comes from the name of a Greek goddess whose job it was to dole out divine retribution.

By the time the word numerus showed up in Classical Latin the numerical implications of having to sort out allotments and distributions had given the Latin word many of the meanings that we give to the English word number today.

Of course the word had to morph from a Latin to a French word before being imported by the Normans and appearing as an English word around 1300.

So much for ancient history.

What have we moderns done with it? The phrase a hot little number doesn’t have much to do with numbers; nor does rolling a number or doing a number on.

Doing a number on something is said by The Oxford English Dictionary to have first appeared in print in 1967 in the Unbelievable Dictionary of Hip Words. It means to do some sort of damage and the OED claims it’s from Afro-American origins.

A joint is also sometimes called a number and this dates from 1963 and the Marihuana Dictionary (I checked and unfortunately there is no sign that this work was printed on hemp paper).

A hot number might be construed to be an attractive woman (or maybe a fancy car or speedy computer) but in 1919 when the phrase first applied to a woman it was a term of disgust. That according to Dialect Notes published by the American Dialect Society.

I’m speculating when I say that I think all these uses are using the word number where the sense of “thing” applies: a hot thing, rolling a thing, doing a thing.

A hot number or a nice little number might equally be used to mean a “pretty dress.”

That use that predates the others at 1894 and seems the only one of the group whose first citation didn’t come from a lexicographer’s pen.

Instead it came in the book The Real Charlotte by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross.

Martin Ross was actually Violet Martin.

Violet did indeed work with Edith on The Real Charlotte but later died while Edith kept on writing.

Edith also kept on publishing using her own name plus her coauthor’s pseudonym. She claimed their partnership endured beyond the grave.

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Although he lived more than 2000 years ago Horace seems to capture my dilemma with communicating in the internet age.

He said brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio, which means “I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.”

The balance is increasingly difficult to achieve don’t you think?

Twitter limits your message to 140 characters. A recipe for obscurity you’d think, but no, it’s wildly successful.

Long emails don’t get read, they get skimmed. If you take the time to lay out your message in full it risks not being read at all.

Thus Shakespeare’s “brevity is the soul of wit.” You have to think carefully about how to make your point and keep it short.

The word brief first appeared in English with a meaning of “a letter of authority” around 700 years ago from French.

That’s at least what the written evidence shows.

This meaning would have evolved out of the shortness of a letter or note compared with some longer legal document and have come from the Latin brevis meaning “short” which in turn likely related to a Greek word brachys with the same sense.

But the influence of the Romans plus their use of written instructions meant that the Latin word had actually been adopted into most Germanic languages early on and so quite possibly was in use in Old English.

It may be that it just never got written down or spawned any descendant words of its own, so we don’t know that it was ever part of English before the French influence that came after William the Conqueror.

Because lawyers gather their documents for a case into collections they call briefs we have begun to brief each other and lawyers themselves are sometimes called briefs.

It wasn’t until 1934 that a reference to brief referring to “underpants” entered the written record as found by The Oxford English Dictionary.

Although we might think of briefs as what are now sometimes called tighty whities they must have referred to something else at first because this style of underpants is said to have originated also in 1934 only being marketed in 1935.

Since we don’t know if brief referred to an earlier style or what that style was, brief continues to be obscure.

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Energy saving and a move to reduce climate change emissions have made compact florescent bulbs quite popular. Their coiled image is even becoming some kind of a symbol of responsible energy use.

But etymologically they aren’t bulbs at all.

Our word bulb comes from a Greek root.

In fact a literal “root.”

It was the roots of plants that were swollen that were called bolbos in Greek.

As the word came down to English in the 16^th century through Latin it narrowed its meaning from including things like garlic to mostly referring to onions.

So the spiral of a compact florescent bulb isn’t bulbous at all.

The next question is why the glass casing surrounding an electric light might be compared to an onion. The reason is that there was an intervening step in the analogous reference.

The technology of lightbulbs was preceded by the technology of thermometers.

A thermometer often now, and more often back in the early 1800s, consists of a glass tube up which a column of mercury or alcohol can travel from a reservoir at the base. The glass tube is long and thin, the reservoir at the base is a little fatter and rounder.

A thermometer has a passing resemblance in shape to an onion with its greens on. Thus the reservoir got called the bulb and from there any rounded glass thingamajig such as the one containing a filament for illumination.

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About 2500 years ago a fellow named Hanno was put in charge of sixty ships and sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the western coast of Africa.

The account of his voyage was later translated into Greek and much later drawn upon to give a scientific name to the largest primate.

According to the accounts that come down to us, Hanno and his crew came upon an island upon which they found what they called “wild people,” mostly female whose bodies were covered with hair.

They had made contact with local Africans who apparently told them that the females of these hairy people were called gorillas.

Hanno reported that they chased and caught three females but when the animals fought and bit savagely they were killed and skinned. Hanno and his crew brought the skins home to Carthage along with this story.

I’m not sure if the females being caught and killed influenced the association of the word with females in Hanno’s mind.

The fact that these wild people were caught in a way that allowed them to scratch and bite their captors supports the modern thinking that these were perhaps chimpanzees and not what we would think of as gorillas.

Then in 1847 a Boston missionary (appropriately named Savage) returning from Africa brought along some bones of a giant man-like creature to which he and a colleague gave the scientific name Troglodytes gorilla; pulling the second part of the name from the accounts of Hanno.

You may have heard the word troglodyte; figuratively it means “cave-man.” That’s because back through Latin and Greek troglodyte is built on two words meaning “hole” “go into.”

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There’s an etymological connection between the platform upon which speeches are made and squirrels, rats and beavers.

The platform I’m talking about is a rostrum.

A rostrum is so called because it was so called in ancient Rome.

People would stand on a platform that faced the senate and make speeches.

The reason we call such a speaking platform a rostrum is that more than 2300 years ago the Romans won a battle and brought their war trophies back to show off.

This battle was pretty close to home since the city they conquered was less than 50 kilometers from Rome itself.

The war trophies were the prows of six ships that they had captured. They hung these up on the platform where speeches were made and presumably made speeches about winning the battle.

Afterward people began referring to the platform as “the prows” because of this.

Except that in Latin a ship’s prow was called a rostrum and the plural of rostrum was rostra so they called the speaking platform rostra.

The reason a ship’s prow was called rostrum was because it was the beak or the snout of the ship and rostrum was also the word used to describe an animal’s beak or muzzle.

In turn the beak or muzzle was so named because to peck or gnaw at something was in Latin rodere.

Animals like squirrels, rats and beavers have teeth that keep on growing their whole lives so that they have no worries about wearing them down by gnawing on nut shells, household foundations or trees.

Since rodere means “gnaw” rodent literally means “gnawer.”

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In 1601 Philemon Holland came out with an English translation from Latin, of the now 2000 year old Naturalis Historia by Pliny the Elder.

Here’s what Pliny had to say about the word prevarication:

“The ploughman, unlesse he bend and stoupe forward..must..leave much undone as it ought to be; a fault which in Latine we call Prevarication  and this tearme appropriate unto Husbandrie, is borrowed from thence by Lawyers.”

These days when someone is asked a question and they skate around the answer they are said to prevaricate.

They are avoiding the question.

The word prevaricate was built on an earlier word varicare that meant “to straddle” which in turn came from varus meaning “crooked.”

It may seem obvious how a word that meant “crooked” grew into a word that means “avoiding the question” but how did the farmer get involved?

The “crooked” meaning of varus was also applied in classical Latin to the crooked legs of people who were knock-kneed.

The pre part of prevaricate might be thought of as “before” or “going forward” so that prevaricate comes to mean “going forward crookedly” or “walking crookedly.”

Thus the reason a negligent plowman was said to prevaricate was that the furrow he cut wasn’t straight. Hence a lawyer or politician who isn’t giving you a straight line is prevaricating.

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When I hear the word chauvinist I think of a person—male—who takes a superior view of the capabilities of his gender. I guess I’m influenced by the 1970s phrase male chauvinist pig that evolved out of the woman’s lib movement.

Dictionaries take a wider perspective and offer examples of chauvinists who think it is their country that is innately superior.

Chauvinist and chauvinism are words that demonstrate the power of the entertainment industry.

Chauvinist is a word that arose because of the over-the-top antics of Nicholas Chauvin.

The story goes that Nicholas Chauvin was a soldier in Napoleon’s army and was mad-crazy enthusiastic about fighting for his country and his leader. He sustained war wounds on 17 different occasions, lost fingers, had his face disfigured and still kept up his rah-rah attitude. Napoleon was so happy to have such a keen supporter that Nicholas Chauvin was given a ceremonial sword and a cash prize.

But eventually Napoleon himself fell out of favor and Nicholas Chauvin’s excessive enthusiasm began to earn him only ridicule.

At least two plays were written in the early 1800s that featured him as an over-zealous wing-nut. Through these plays people in France and then elsewhere began using his name to describe people who had an unreasonable superiority complex about their own social group—with particular emphasis on nationalism and militarism.

His name became so famous through theses plays and the adoption of the term chauvinism that people actually began to believe that he had been a real person.

I say this because in 1993 Gerard de Puymège went looking for authentic military records about Nicholas Chauvin and wrote a book about the fact that the guy had never really existed; he was just a creation of the theatre.

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A midwife is called a midwife not because the midwife is in the middle of anything, nor because during the birth of children the midwife is helping the wife as opposed to the husband.

It is pretty uncommon to find men who are midwives but I guess they do exist. The etymology of the word midwife reflects the fact that assisting in bringing a new little person into this world has long been a gender role and almost completely dominated by women.

The wife part of midwife has nothing to do with the marital state of the parents of the baby being delivered, nor that of the midwife herself.

The word wife predates an association with being married or unmarried and in our earliest records just meant “woman.”

If we paste that meaning on midwife we get midwoman.

Unfortunately this doesn’t get us much further along the way toward understanding why these deliverers of babies might be called midwives.

We have to take another step and examine the mid part of midwife.

In this case mid does not mean middle.

There don’t seem to be too many examples of words other than midwife that retain an old meaning of mid but what it is believed to have mean was “with.”

Thus midwife literally means “with woman” and refers to the fact that this woman called a midwife has the job of being with the mother during her labor and delivery.