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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.

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Once upon a time my mother was knitting a style of sweater that had many open holes in the weave. My father looked at it and said “no wonder it’s going so fast, it’s mostly air.”

That’s the thing about nets too, they’re mostly air; but it’s what’s around the air that does the job.

I was looking at the web based dictionary wordnik and one of the features they have is a little graphic representing frequency of a word’s appearance over time. It’s interesting that their plot for the word net falls off during the 1920s to 1950s and then pops back up again in the 1990s.

It seems obvious to me that the frequency of the word net over the past decade would have increased as an abbreviation for the word internet.

I wonder what made the word less frequent after 1950; perhaps more grocery store shopping and less small-scale fishing? I don’t picture small-scale fishermen as being terribly prolific writers who’d have bulked up the word-stock before that.

If you have any ideas let me know.

Of course it could be that the wordnik stats feature has a kink in it.

Clearly the internet is so called because it is full of links between nodes, just like other networks; streets, train tracks, groups of friends.

All of these networks are so called because a real net is strands linking knots.

But it turns out that a real net is called a net not because of the strands but because of the knots.

I mentioned knitting and nodes as well as net and knot and all of these words go back to a knotty origin. They have a granular kind of Old English taste to them don’t they?

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In his play Measure for Measure Shakespeare makes mention of a garden surrounded by a brick wall. By his time the word brick had been part of the English language for almost 200 years.

It seems to have been brought to England by Flemish construction workers in the 1400s who worked with a newfangled building material that English speakers didn’t have a name for.

By the time of Samuel Johnson the word brick was so familiar that he used it without thinking in relating an opinion about Shakespeare.

Johnson said that anyone who tried to explain Shakespeare “by select quotations, will succeed like the pedant in Hierocles, who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen.”

If you’ve been following podictionary you’ll know that this sent me off in search of whatever Hierocles was.

Hieroclese was a Greek scholar who lived in Alexandria about 1500 years ago and who many people—including Samuel Johnson—credited as being half of the comedy duo Hierocles and Philagrius.

Modern scholars aren’t really sure if the joke book attributed to these two actually had anything to do with them but there is indeed an old joke book from which Samuel Johnson pulled that old chestnut; although in the edition I saw it was a stone not a brick that the homeowner had in his pocket.

Just to show that (other than bricks) there isn’t really anything new under the sun I came across articles on the web that point to Hierocles and Philagrius as being the originators of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch.

• Customer: “The slave you sold me died.”
• Merchant: “By the gods, he never did such a thing when he was with me.”

Compared to that, bricks are relatively new.

Etymologically some sources at least believe that the word brick is related to the word break and that originally bricks were not whole units but broken pieces.

Perhaps more speculatively, the theory goes that it was bakers who broke up their dough to bake loaves who used a similar word for these broken-off portions, and that this word found itself being applied to the material that was baked into bricks.

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Glass is an example of a word that has shattered into lots of meanings we currently recognize but also with many earlier and forgotten etymological branches.

In English the word shows up well over 1100 years ago in the works attributed to King Alfred the Great.

Then, as now, the word meant the substance glass.

Since people make lots of useful things out of glass these too began adopt the word as their name:

• windows,
• drinking vessels,
• bottles,
• hourglasses,
• telescopes,
• spectacles,
• mirrors,
• barometers,
• magnifying glasses, and
• microscopes

have all at some time in the last 600 years or so been called a glass.

Today, apart from the material itself, spectacles and drinking vessels are the things that come to mind when someone refers to their glasses without which they can’t find their glass.

The word glass arrived with the oldest of Old English, because the manufacture of glass is one of the oldest of technologies.

According to John Ayto’s book Word Origins, glass manufacture historically produced colored glass, not clear glass, and so ghel, the Indo-European ancestor of glass, was actually a color word that also gave Greek a word meaning “green” and English the word yellow.

The American Heritage Dictionary assigns this same Indo-European root ghel the meaning “to shine,” and so associates the root with the word gold.

Glass is sometimes said to be a super-cooled fluid as opposed to a solid.

The reason people say this is that unlike many minerals glass isn’t formed into crystals but made up of its constituent molecules all jumbled together at random as they would be in a liquid.

This is what makes glass so useful because unlike H₂O which turns from ice to water all in a rush, glass just becomes oozier and oozier as it warms up and thus can be formed into all the useful objects that people want to refer to as a glass.

This too is why the windows in ancient buildings are made up of panes that are thin at the top and thicker at the bottom. Over the centuries they too have oozed; just very, very slowly.

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There’s no other kinds once you’ve tasted the brine of pickled fish.

That seems to have been the feeling of sailors who’d been exposed to a tasty kind of sauce during their voyages to Malaysia.

According to most dictionaries the Malaysians appear to have adopted the word for this brine of pickled fish from Amoy, a Chinese dialect.

Since adding the brine of pickled fish to hamburgers and hotdogs is not currently standard procedure something has obviously changed about the meaning of the word ketchup.

According to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America the prime ingredient in what in the Far East had been called ketchup wasn’t fish but soybeans. As explained there Europeans couldn’t make the stuff themselves because they didn’t grow soybeans and so tried instead to produce ketchup using such things as mushrooms, walnuts, anchovies and oysters.

The Oxford English Dictionary entry for ketchup hasn’t yet been updated for the third edition and has as its most recent citation an item dated 1874. Sure enough the prime ingredient listed throughout this entry is mushrooms.

Tomatoes are mentioned in the OED entry but it was the year before that, in 1873 that the H. J. Heinz company began selling tomato ketchup.

So somewhere in there tomatoes came to dominate. And so it is that what we call ketchup is red and has a consistency of applesauce instead of more closely resembling soysauce.

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This is a special podictionary episode in which I interview Philip Durkin, the Principal Etymologist for The Oxford English Dictionary.

I contacted Dr. Durkin because his book The Oxford Guide to Etymology was recently released in North America and he was kind enough to spend a comfortable 20 minutes talking with me.

Podictionary often concentrates on the changes in meaning that a word goes through over time so when we talked we discussed the other side of etymology—changes in word form.

Dr. Durkin explained some of the tools of etymology as well as talked specifically about the etymologies of the words friar and penguin.

At the moment there is no transcript available of this interview but I encourage you to listen either by clicking the “download” link above or via the website audio player.

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Some people love getting joke emails but I try to avoid it; it’s hard enough to stay focused.

I did get one recently full of odd newspaper clippings and made the mistake of starting to read them.

I’ll just give you the one that influenced me to choose the word duck for podictionary.

“Dog attack: Lower Duck Pond, Lithia, Ashland. Police responded to a report of two dogs running loose and attacking ducks at about 11:20 a.m. Sunday. The officer cited a resident for the loose dogs. The duck refused medical treatment and left the area, according to police records.”

When I look up ducks in The Oxford English Dictionary one of the first things it says is “a swimming bird of the genus Anas.” So let’s start with that.

Like most scientific names for animals anas is Latin and you can tell right away that it doesn’t sound like duck.

It turns out that in Old English there was another word for “duck” that does sound more like the scientific Latin, that Old English word was ende.

Sometimes Old English words with Latin relatives arrived because of the influence of the church. Sometimes an older influence might have been that words rubbed off on the Germanic tribes as they fought and traded with the Romans before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain.

In the case of this outdated word for “duck” the roots appear to be much deeper because there is supposed to have been an Indo-European word for “duck” angti that percolated up not only into English and Latin, but Greek and Russian as well as other Germanic languages.

But for some reason English speakers more than 1000 years ago began to abandon this word and started using duck instead.

Why did they choose the word duck for this kind of bird?

Because ducks stick their heads under water to feed; they duck their heads.

The strange thing is that the verb to duck must have been a somewhat rare usage because it doesn’t show up in the written record until about 1340; almost 400 years after the first written record of the bird having this name.

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The word karaoke is a kind of ping-pong-ball word in that its elements have bounced back and forth across western and eastern cultures.

A few weeks ago at the podictionary website one of the words of the day was karate and I touched on the fact that this Japanese word literally meant “empty hand.”

The initial element of karate also appears in the word karaoke.

In the case of karaoke though what is empty isn’t the hand but the vocal track.

This is because karaoke is a kind of sing-along where the instrumental track plays while any tone-deaf romantic with a drink inside them can bellow out the lyrics.

This is an activity that could never have happened before the age of electronics and a word that could never have happened before the age of globalization.

The main money in karaoke is in supplying the latest popular songs with the voices of the pop-stars removed. For those who can’t quite remember the words these are provided, scrolling along the screen.

The word karaoke breaks down as kara meaning “empty” and oke short for okesutora.

If you don’t speak Japanese and think that you don’t know what the word okesutora means that’s okay because before Japanese borrowed the word from English they didn’t know either; in Japanese okesutora means “orchestra.”

Thus karaoke means “empty orchestra.” An empty orchestra just waiting for you to fill it up with your golden voice.

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I’ve talked before about JRR Tolkien and his association with The Oxford English Dictionary.

During his time there they were working on words starting with W, and one of the words he worked on was walrus.

The OED online in its newsletters section shows an image of some of JRR’s hand written notes concerning walrus and it is evident that he pondered over the word for some time. It is his work that is still reflected in the current OED entry.

There we learn that a walrus was called a walrus by 1655 but that as an animal it had been known long before and appeared with other names in the writings of Alfred the Great back around 893. At that time in Old English it was called not walrus but horschwael which we today might pronounce “horse whale.”

By reversing these words into “whale horse” we can see how the word walrus came about.

A walrus with its whiskered face, huge tusks, and baglike body  doesn’t look much like a horse but JRR goes on to speculate that there could have been confusion around what the name was in Old Norse since their word for a certain kind of whale was similar to “horse whale” and similar to their word for walrus.

An alternate name for a walrus that shows up in a few dictionaries—OED and the American Heritage Dictionary for example—is sea horse.

Morse was yet another name that appeared before walrus and seems to have spread to other languages only to drop out of use in English.  This word too is brought back to horse since it seems to have been formed on mo-horse.

So even though we might think of a sea horse as one of those little fishes with a horsey head and a curly tail—a species in which babies are hatched by the father—clearly people in the past didn’t make this association.

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A lot of the dictionaries I looked at don’t even include the word hobbit.

Most of the ones that do credit JRR Tolkien as having dreamt up hobbits for his books The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

This is both understandable and believable.

But when I looked at Brewers Dictionary of Modern Phrase and Fable I got a hint of something more.  While most of the other sources say that hobbits were created by Tolkien, Brewers slyly says that they feature in his stories.

To get the deeper truth we need to burrow deeper into the hobbit hole and The Oxford English Dictionary is the place to do that.

The OED is in a unique position of authority because Tolkien actually worked there for a few years early in his career. Plus a later editor had studied under Tolkien’s professorship.

So in the late ‘60s when The Lord of the Rings was making its first rise to popularity the OED added hobbit as an entry.

How better to check out the etymology of the word than to ask its creator?

Except that JRR Tolkien denied having created the word.

He helped them define it as an imaginary people, small but human, whose name means ‘hole-dweller’ but did not claim credit for their invention.

No citations were found that predated Tolkien’s 1937 use in the book of the same name, so that’s what’s given as hobbit’s earliest usage in OED.

But since that time, as reported in an OED newsletter, the word has been found in a 19th century folklore journal.

So even though JRR couldn’t remember where he’d first heard of hobbits, it turns out his denial of inventing them was justified.