Today in “Surprisingly Connected Etymologies”, we’re taking a turn around the garden!When
we learn to spell as kids, we learn about the pitfalls of homonyms, words which sound
the same but are spelled differently and have separate meanings, like flower the bloom and
flour that you use in baking.
Funny thing is, those two are actually related!
They both go back to *bhlo-, the extended o-grade form of the Proto-Indo-European root
*bhel- “to thrive, bloom”, which itself probably comes from another PIE root *bhel-
meaning “to blow, swell”.
PIE *bhlo-, which is also the source of the word bloom through the Germanic branch, came
into Latin as flos “flower”, the stem of which is flor-, and this becomes flur in
Anglo-Norman French, coming into English as both flour our and flower ower.
The sense development for flour as in baking was through “the finest part” of the plant
and then “the finest part” of ground grain, to simply “ground grain”.Speaking of flowers,
when they have thorns, if you’re not careful you can give yourself a bloody cut almost
as if by a blade, and it turns out those words also comes from the PIE root, *bhel- “to
thrive, bloom”.
The suffixed zero-grade form *blə-to- became Proto-Germanic *bladaz, Old English blæd,
and eventually Modern English blade, which originally meant “leaf” in Old English
and wasn’t used for referring to knives, swords, and so forth until the 14th century.
Indeed today we can still say ‘blade of grass’.
The extended suffixed o-grade form *bhlo-to- became Proto-Germanic *blodam, Old English
blod and eventually Modern English blood from the sense “swell, gush, spurt”.Do you
think lilacs are a neat flower?
Etymologically you should!
Neat comes through French from Latin nitidus “well-favoured, elegant, trim” from the
verb nitere “to shine” from the Proto-Indo-European root *nei- “to shine, to be excited”.
This root may also lead to Sanskrit nila- “dark blue”, which passed into Persian
as nilak “bluish”, and it’s from a variant of this word, lilak, that English got lilac,
after it passed through Arabic, Spanish, and French.What does a clan have to do with a
plant?
Etymology!
Clan comes, unsurprisingly, from Gaelic, but Gaelic clann, originally meaning “offspring”,
was borrowed from Latin planta “offshoot”, which also comes directly into English as
plant.
And since Gaelic (and all members of the Goidalic branch of Celtic) didn’t have a /p/ sound
the initial consonant became /k/, but in Welsh, which is part of the Brittonic branch of Celtic
which did have a /p/ sound, plant means “children”.Of course, in a garden plants go into a bed,
and that gives a clue to that word’s surprising connection to the word fossil.
Both come from the same PIE root *bhedh- meaning “to dig, pierce”.
Fossil comes through Latin fodere “to dig” reflecting the idea that fossils are something
dug up from the ground, while bed comes through Proto-Germanic *badjam meaning “garden plot”,
and only by extension gained the sense of a bed you sleep in from the notion of a hollow
dug out of the ground like a den.Turning to a substance one might use to fertilize a garden
bed, when is manure like an opera?
When you’re talking etymologically, of course!
Opera literally means “work”, coming into English through Italian, from Latin opera,
the plural form of opus “work”.
The verb form of this word comes to be used in the phrase manu operari “to work by hand”,
which became Old French manouvrer and English manure, with the shift in meaning from “working
the earth by hand” to “putting dung on the soil” to “dung used as fertilizer”.
Also from this Latin phrase is the word maneuver shifting in sense from “manipulate” to
“planned movement of troops”.And finally, have you ever been hosed down with rain when
the skies have opened, a welcome event for most gardeners?
Turns out this is etymologically appropriate!
Hose originally referred to the article of clothing, only later gaining the “water
hose” sense.
As such, hose originally just meant “a covering”, coming ultimately from the PIE root *(s)keu-
“to cover, conceal”.
That /s/ at the beginning is called an s-mobile and sometimes disappears, and the /k/ sound
becomes an /h/ in English because of a sound shift called Grimm’s Law.
This root also produced the word sky, which had the original sense of “cloud” (which
covers), eventually transferring over to refer to the sky itself.Thanks for watching!
This is one in a series of occasional short videos about connected etymologies; to see
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