Odd/Even

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Level-headed.

Dear Word Detective: The desperate urge to find out the origins of words often creeps up on me, but I can usually work it out myself with the help of dictionaries or your excellent column. However, it recently it suddenly crossed my mind (as it does) that I didn’t know why odd and even numbers were called that. “Even,” OK — smooth, level, equal, etc. — but “being divisible by two” didn’t seem to come up with “even.” And as for “odd,” there’s nothing odd about 3, 5 or 7, any more than 2, 4 or 6, they are just as useful. And, oddly, there is no etymology for “odd” in my dictionaries. Can you help? — David, Ripon, North Yorkshire, England.

So, you’re saying there’s something odd about “even”? “Odd” seems quite a bit odder than “even” to me. Not as odd as otters, of course. Then there are the woodchucks chucking. It’s a wonder I ever get any work done around here. But I dare you to stare at “odd” for a while and not begin to wish you spoke some other language. It’s a seriously weird little word.

Before we get too far into this question, I should explain that I do not understand mathematics. Period. I once had a moment of absolute clarity in ninth grade when I thought I finally understood trigonometry. But the moment lasted all of fifteen minutes, and I’ve been abysmally innumerate ever since. This is relevant because explaining “odd” and “even” necessarily involves a smidgen of math.

Both “odd” and “even” are extremely old words. “Even” harks back to the ancient Germanic root “ebnaz.” It’s not known whether that root meant “equal, the same” or “flat or level,” the two primary meanings of “even” today, but when “even” first appeared in Old English, it carried the primary sense of “level, not sloping.” The application of “even” to numbers as the opposite of “odd,” oddly enough, dates only to the middle of the 16th century. The sense is that an “even” number of things, divided by two, would create two equal amounts with no difference — no slope, so to speak — between them.

“Odd” comes from the old Scandinavian root meaning “triangle,” which led to the Old Norse “oddi” having the sense of “three” (as in sides of a triangle), which evolved into a word applied to an “extra” element added to a pair or the “odd man” who might break a tie vote. The mathematical meaning comes, again, from division by two, which in the case of an “odd” number, results in one being left over and the two parts not being “even.” The use of “odd” to mean “strange” or “unusual” stems from this sense of an “outsider” that doesn’t neatly fit in.

 

 

Skosh

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It just takes a smidgen …

Dear Word Detective: I checked your alphabetical listing of words past but it didn’t help. The main problem is that I don’t know how the word would be spelled. I used to hear this term a lot as a youngster in the 1970’s (I believe it was even used in a blue jean commercial at the time), and heard it in “The Drew Carey Show” once in the last 5 years, but I’m considering reviving the word. The word is “skosh” (long o), and it means “a bit” or “a tad,” as in “a skosh more room in the seat of those jeans.” Do you have any history on the origins of this fun term? — Micki Morrison.

Well, you’ve done everything right in asking your question. You checked our archive of back columns, you’ve pinned down a time frame and suggested the venues in which you heard the word, and even supplied the pronunciation. This definitely beats the questions I receive that consist of just one bizarre word (”fisselstorp?”) and a mangled AOL address. By the way, you probably noticed that my web index is not as flawlessly alphabetical as one might wish. I guess I simply wasn’t paying attention for large parts of first grade.

Now all I have to do is pull back the curtain and reveal the answer, which fortunately turns out to be easy in this case. “Skosh,” meaning “a little bit,” is derived from the Japanese word “sukoshi,” which means “a little amount” or “a few.” The Anglicized form “skosh” first appeared in the US in the early 1950s (the first printed citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1955), and it’s likely that the term was imported by US service personnel serving in Japan either in the period of American occupation after World War II or during the Korean War. The word is usually pronounced, as you say, with a long “o.” Interestingly, in the Japanese “sukoshi,” the “u” is not voiced, so the English pronunciation is remarkably close to the Japanese.

You’re also correct about hearing “skosh” used in a TV commercial, one that ran in the late 1970s for the then-new Levis for Men, which featured a “skosh more room” in the seat for the increasingly pear-shaped US couch-potato demographic. Mercifully, most of those guys had stopped wearing bell-bottoms by then.

 

 

Understand

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… to do in a pigeon.

Dear Word Detective: I have a vague recollection from my high school days of one of my profs saying that the term “understanding” is derived from the Greek myth of Atlas, who was punished by being made to hold up the weight of the world on his shoulders, and in so doing heard all the many sufferings of humanity, i.e., he came to “understand” the world. Is that in fact the case, or have I (or my former prof) been misinformed? I have done some research, but have yet to find a resource to support the claim. — Stephen.

Nor are you likely to find one, at least not a credible resource. I’m afraid that your teacher was mistaken, probably repeating a story he had heard elsewhere, possibly one that has been passed around for many years. There is, unfortunately, no shortage of such colorful stories. English etymology, the investigation of word origins, is actually a relatively young science, and until the 19th century it was considered acceptable for dictionary editors and others in the field to simply take their best guesses at a word’s origin, inventing etymologies from whole cloth when necessary. Many of the etymologies found in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s groundbreaking 1755 “Dictionary of the English Language,” for instance, are little more than learned guesses.

But the story of Atlas that your teacher recounted does highlight the very real puzzle at the core of our English word “understand” — how did a word which appears to mean “stand beneath” or “support” come to mean “comprehend”?

The real answer is that the prefix “under” in “understand” is not our normal “beneath” kind of “under” as found in “underground” or “undermine.” The “under” in “understand,” although spelled just like the other “under,” comes from an entirely different Indo-European root word, one that carried the sense of “between or among.” When “understand” first appeared in Old English (as “understandan”), it carried the meaning of “comprehend, grasp the idea or details of something,” but literally meant “to stand among or amidst” something, and thereby be familiar with it.

One minor mystery is why the Old English “understandan” was carried over into our modern English while a more logical candidate, the Old English “forstand,” was not. “Forstand” meant literally “to stand before or on top of” and also carried the sense of “comprehend” (much as we say we are “on top of” a situation today). The answer is, as usual, that our modern English is the product of a committee consisting of many millions of people chattering away over the course of many centuries, and the result is often less than logical.

 

 

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