Mildew – Podictionary Word of the Day

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When I think of mildew I think of camping gear that came home after a rainy canoe trip, was dragged into the basement so I could warm up in the bath, and then forgotten about for a month or so.

As I’m sure is the case with most people, I have no particular fondness for mildew.  I place it in a mental compartment very close to where I keep my images of mold.  If I am diligent in my household sanitation mildew and I can keep a respectful distance between us.

That’s why the other day when I was researching the word honey I was astonished to find that the Latin word for “honey” had given rise to the English word mildew.

Evidently when mildew first was used in English it meant “honeydew,” the sticky droppings left behind by aphids.

It seems that to a farmer a sick plant was a sick plant and if it was sick because aphids were sucking it dry and leaving it covered with a sticky coating, it was just as bad as if it was sick because of a fungal growth that was leaving it with a sticky coating; so why not call both coatings the same thing.

Less appetizing though, don’t you think.

The honeydew meaning appears first in Old English documents—so well over 1000 years ago—while the fungal meaning creeps in a little over 600 years ago.

One of the reasons we know that mildew relates to honey is because of a fellow named Robert Bruce Cotton.

He lived around the same time as William Shakespeare, so that’s 400 years ago.

He was particularly interested in antiquities and he was fortunate enough to be pretty rich.

We really should thank him because he came along at a very opportune time.  King Henry VIII had found it necessary to kick the Catholic Church out of England so that he could get on with some new marriages.  In doing so he had disbanded the monasteries.

But the monasteries were the main places of refuge if you were an old manuscript trying to hide from the ravages of time.  In kicking out Catholicism Henry unwittingly made homeless whole libraries of precious manuscripts.  Sir Robert Cotton went around collecting up these homeless waifs and giving them a roof over their heads in his own personal library.

The other day I talked about the Lindesfarne Gospels during the episode on the word amen; these fantastic documents were among those rescued by Cotton.

Similarly the first document to contain the word mildew was housed in the Cotton Library.

While most of the citations I report to you from the Oxford English Dictionary come from some book or other with a name, in the case of the word mildew the name of the old manuscript that gives us a first citation is a little curious.

It is called the Cleopatra Glossary A.III.

There is nothing in the document that relates to Cleopatra the old queen of Egypt.

Instead it was an idiosyncrasy of Sir Robert that earned the title.

Sir Robert Cotton arranged his library with busts of famous people from history along the top shelves, with each of the shelves below marked by letter and number.  So it just so happened that this particular word, in this particular document lay for some years beneath the marble likeness of Cleopatra.

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Five days a week Charles Hodgson produces Podictionary – the podcast for word lovers, Thursday episodes here at OUPblog. He’s also the author of Carnal Knowledge – A Navel Gazer’s Dictionary of Anatomy, Etymology, and Trivia as well as the audio book Global Wording – The Fascinating Story of the Evolution of English.