Forgive

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Spare me.

Dear Word Detective: I am writing to you from the research department of a large magazine. We have a story that I am fact-checking in which the author states: “… a friend of mine told me that the origin of the word ‘forgive’ means to untie….” This kind of statement causes fact-checkers a lot of stress. Of course I am unable to verify this “fact” and am forced to go hunting on my own. Do you have any insight into the origin of the word “forgive?” — N. R.

Hmm. Odd. But this brings up a question of my own. I have always wondered how many layers, so to speak, fact-checkers are expected to plow through in search of “the truth.” In this case, for instance, you have an author who reports that a friend said that “forgive” originally meant “untie.” Let us presume that you verify that the author’s friend actually said that. So the statement by the author is true. You then have to worry whether the friend is right? Perhaps the friend read it in a book written by a fellow in Helsinki. Where do you stop? After all, if that open-ended approach were applied to the statements of politicians, newspapers would contain nothing but ads for lost pets.

In this case, being the helpful sort that I am, I can report that the author’s friend’s cousin’s landlord’s parrot, or whoever we’re talking about, is seriously misinformed. “Forgive” never meant “untie.” The root of “forgive” is the Latin word “perdonare,” meaning “to give completely, without reservation.” (That “perdonare” is also the source of our English “pardon.”)

When the Latin “perdonare” was adopted into the Germanic ancestor of English, it was translated piece-by-piece, making the result what linguists call a “calque” (from the French “calquer,” to trace or copy) a literal transliteration. “Per” was replaced by “for,” a prefix that in this case means “thoroughly,” and “donare” with “giefan” (”to give”). The result, “forgiefan,” appeared in Old English meaning “to give up, allow” as well as “to give in marriage.” In modern English, “forgive” has also taken on the meanings of “to pardon for an offense,” “renounce anger at” (”I forgive you for feeding bean tacos to my dog “) and “to abandon a claim on” (as in “forgive a debt”).

As to where your author’s friend’s “untie” theory might have come from, I catch a whiff of New Age psychobabble in that story. It’s easy to imagine some pop-happiness guru explaining that our anger and resentment are the “ties” that bind us, and that only by “forgiving” others can we be freed to chase butterflies through fields of daisies or whatever. Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it practiced by the IRS.

 

 

Conundrum

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Unscrewing the inscrutable.

Dear Word Detective: I’ve got quite the “conundrum” for you. What is the origin of this very obscure word? It has at least three synonyms that I know of (riddle, puzzle, enigma), so I don’t imagine it’s the first of these four to mean what it means. The online dictionary explained its meaning quite well, but nothing about its origin, and a search simply yielded countless “conundrums” that other people had. Please help. — Neil, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Hey, you’re right. Googling “conundrum” produces 5,510,000 hits, and not a single one of them explains the origin of the word. I had to check each link, of course, because I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I didn’t follow every clue. Anybody know a good ophthalmologist? By the way, speaking of puzzles, I’m not sure I understand the second sentence of your question, so we’ll just skip that part.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “conundrum” as “a paradoxical, insoluble, or difficult problem; a dilemma,” which covers a lot of ground. In any case, “conundrums” are generally not good things. A choice between your two favorite flavors of ice cream is not a conundrum; a choice between paying your rent or buying food is a conundrum. But it’s difficult to imagine remembering to use the word “conundrum” in such a dire situation, because “conundrum” is the sort of fancy locution, like the word “eschew,” that I seriously doubt anyone uses without careful forethought. Real people generally don’t say “conundrum.” They say “jam” or “pickle.”

Ask the folks at Oxford English Dictionary for the etymology of “conundrum,” and the answer is a terse “Origin lost,” as if it had been misplaced in a word warehouse on the outskirts of the city. The truth is more likely “origin never exactly known.” The most reasonable theory is that “conundrum” originated as a joke among university students in 16th century England, probably concocted as a pseudo-Latin nonsense word and initially used as a derogatory term for a fussy, pedantic and silly person (what the Oxford dictionary calls a “crotchet-monger”). Over the next two hundred years, “conundrum” was used to mean “a whim or silly idea” and “a pun” before it took on the sense of “a riddle the answer to which is a pun” in the late 18th century, and, soon thereafter, acquired its modern sense of “an insoluble or very difficult problem.” So the answer, unsatisfying as it may be, is that the birthplace of “conundrum” was probably just the warped imagination of a 16th century college student.

 

 

Causeway, Sound

Filed Under December 2007, columns | 1 Comment

Or maybe “Tailgaters flunked physics.”

Dear Word Detective: I just spent some time on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and want to know if you can tell me the origins of two words. The first is “causeway.” I know it’s a bridge but where did this word come from? Also, we used the causeway to cross the Albemarle Sound. Where did the word “Sound” used in this context come from? — E. P.

Cool. I’ve never been to the Outer Banks, partly because I’ve always been afraid that they (you know, Them) would slap one of those lame “OBX” stickers on our car when I wasn’t looking. I’d much rather sport something truly interesting on our car, something along the lines of “We Went to West Florida Reptile World and Saw the Giant Flying Purple Iguana.” Something like that would inspire unquenchable envy in the cars that pass us. To me, “OBX” just makes your car look like a piece of luggage.

A “causeway” is, of course, a raised road, usually built on an embankment, often running across water or swampy land. It’s not really a bridge, since it is usually solidly resting on the earth for its length. Causeways can, in fact, connect small islands and the like to the mainland over distances that would be impractical for bridges.

There seems to be a difference of opinion between various etymological authorities over the exact roots of “causeway.” Everyone agrees that our modern “causeway” evolved from the older term “causey way,” meaning essentially the same thing as “causeway.” The dispute is over the origins of “causey,” meaning a raised mound or footpath. One theory has “causey” coming from the Vulgar Latin “calciata via,” meaning “limestone road” (”calx” being Latin for limestone), and posits that causeways used to be made with crushed limestone. The other theory traces “causey” to the Latin “calciare,” meaning “to stamp with the feet,” and holds that the name refers to the fact that causeways were constructed by stamping down earth and rock to make the mound firm. Whatever the truth, “causey” first appeared in English around the 12 century but has now been almost entirely replaced by “causeway,” which showed up in the 14th century.

“Sound,” meaning a body of water between an island and the mainland or an inlet of the sea (such as Long Island Sound, where I spent my childhood summers dodging jellyfish), has nothing to do with the kind of “sound” we hear (which comes from the Latin “sonus”). This watery “sound” comes from the Old Norse “sund,” which meant both “channel or strait” as well as “swimming.” (In fact, the Germanic root of “sund” was “swem,” which also gave us “swim”) “Sound” in Old English actually meant “the act of swimming” as well as “sea” or “water,” and in modern English “sound” was long used to mean the “swimming bladder” of fish, an internal organ that helps the fish regulate its buoyancy. Our modern use of “sound” to mean “body of water” didn’t arise until the 16th century.

 

 

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