Anarcheologos

Wink is a word that recently got my attention when I encountered it in German, where, in verb form as winken, it means “to wave” or “to beckon”.  I found it interesting that these two meanings, while not literally the same as in English, do seem to express an underlying idea that is similar to that expressed by the English word.    

For instance, a wave is something that is intermittent; think of the peaks and troughs of a wave in the physical sciences, or the back and forth movement of the hand.  In addition, a wave of the hand is generally viewed as a friendly and welcoming gesture, and to categorize it in some instances as a form of beckoning wouldn’t be going too far; think of a phrase like “they waved him over”.  In both examples, one can see the connection between the use of the word wave and concept of an intermittent action.  In addition, the act of waving is connected to the concept of attraction, of establishing a connection with another person and drawing them into one’s orbit.

Getting back to wink, when we use this word in English, we think of a short opening and closing of the eye, reinforcing the connection to the concept of being intermittent.  In addition, the connotation of beckoning is present in English as well in that a wink is generally something that is used to attract another person, whether sexually or simply to pull the person into something and make them complicit.  

All this thinking about wink brought to my mind the fact that the Dutch word for store or shop is winkel.  This is interesting because by utilizing the w-n-k consonant root that seems to be a feature of the Germanic languages for a place that sells goods to consumers, the Dutch word seems to suggest that a store is engaging potential customers actively, by waving, or beckoning to them.  In English and German the corresponding words (store and laden, respectively) are passive and appear simply to be borrowed from other domains related to the piling up of supplies, military or otherwise. 

In the end, wink is a good example of what I find so interesting about language families.  From one basic root (in this case the consonant cluster w-n-k) numerous permutations and meanings can be derived and, much like human families, different aspects of the underlying root are brought to the fore in each language within the family.   

I became interested in twilight only accidentally, by virtue of my interest in another word altogether.  A few weeks ago, I happened to come across the word crepuscle in its adjectival form (crepuscular) a couple of times in quick succession.  I had heard the word before, and never really understood its meaning from context, but for some reason or another had failed to follow up and track down the definition.  To the extent that I had thought about it, I had supposed it had something to do with veins or the internal workings of the human body, perhaps due to its passing resemblance to muscular.  As it turns out, I was nowhere near the mark.

When I actually bothered to look up crepuscle, it turns out to be a Latin-derived term that means ‘twilight’ or ‘dusk’.  My initial thought was that it was fancier, Latin-derived term that equivalent to one or more native English words.  At first glance, this is unremarkable.  Many concepts in Modern English are described by words from both Latin and Germanic roots which have come down to us concurrently.  The interesting bit here is found only when one digs beneath the surface to examine the roots of the words in question.

Crepuscle ultimately comes from a complex of Latin terms connected to creper, which means ‘dark’ or ‘obscure’.  Similarly, dusk stems from the Old English word doxian, meaning ‘to make dark’.  The meaning of these terms shows a strong degree of equivalency and it is notable that, though they are used in relation to the setting of the sun, both focus solely on the aspect of darkness.  These concepts don’t make reference to light.

This is interesting because twilight takes a different approach, literally meaning ‘two lights’.  In other words, the concept of twilight incorporates both the dying of the light and the growing of the darkness.  From this perspective, crepuscle and dusk are reductive in that they position the phenomenon purely as the decline or passing away of light, while twilight is synthetic in that it captures the balance between light and dark and draws attention to its true nature.

While dusk certainly has its uses (I think I can live without crepuscle), I find that I am drawn to the concept of twilight, the time of two lights, as by far the more beautiful and poetic term.

Naughty is a word that I have used for years in a silly way, almost always spoken to one of my children when admonishing them for something mildly bad they have said or done.  This usage and meaning are widely understood, but an interesting question arose as I thought about this word recently: why exactly does naughty mean “bad”?

No answer came to me immediately and I didn’t bother to pursue one, but I let the question sit in my subconscious for a few weeks.  Then, one day, I had a flash of insight that allowed me to connect naughty to naught, as in the phrase come to naught, or there’s naught else I can do.  Making this connection made me realize that the root of naughty is an archaic word for “nothing”.

This sent me running for dictionaries and websites in order to understand where naught comes from.  What I found was that naught derives from the Old English word nawiht, where na means “no” and wiht means “thing”.

From this perspective then, to be naughty is to act in a way that is not constructive, that is likely to lead to nothing.  This sense of non-constructiveness seems to be the root of the moralistic tone the word has taken on, perhaps as an outgrowth of the Protestant Work Ethic, which was particularly strong in England.  It is interesting to note that most other European languages (at least the ones with which I am familiar) do not maintain this connection, by which I mean that the common way of rendering naughty in these languages has no connection to the concept of “nothing”.

This moral angle would also explain how the word has come to be used as a humorous descriptor of (often “illegitimate”) sexual behavior.

In the end, I think I find naughty to be such an interesting word because it hides in plain sight, while remaining flexible enough to change with the times and be used in various ways.

Horn is a deceptively simple word.  As a noun, it refers to a hard protuberance that sticks out from the head of certain animals.  It also refers to a class of instruments played by blowing, which were originally made from animal horns.  From a third perspective, horn refers to a device installed in your car that is used to make loud warning sound.  This meaning, like that of the musical instrument, comes from the fact that loud warning sounds were originally created by blowing into an animal horn.

As a verb, the ancient connection of horns with cuckoldry survives in the modern phrase “to horn in on,” which is used to describe the act of taking possession of something that belongs to someone else.  This sexual connotation is also present in the adjectival form horny.

While certainly divergent, one can see how they are connected and how they likely developed without too much effort.  What got me thinking about this word, however, was a different usage that seemed not to fit with others: the baseball phrase “around the horn”.  For those not familiar with the phrase, following an infield out or strikeout, the defensive players on the field customarily throw the baseball to each of their infield teammates at the various stations of the infield diamond before tossing it back to the pitcher to face the next batter.  The more I thought about this phrase, the more I wondered why the infield diamond should be referred to as a horn.

Around the same time that I had begun thinking about horn and its various uses, I stumbled across the fact that the word for corner in the Scandinavian languages was some variation on horn (horn in Icelandic, hjørne in Danish and Norwegian and hörn in Swedish).  Initially, this seemed like a strange coincidence, but then I recalled that Germanic languages generally have an “h” in place of a “c” in Latin and its daughter languages.  For instance, the English word hundred (honderd in Dutch, hundert in German, etc.) comes from the same root as the Latin centum.  Similarly, the Latin canis and the English hound (hund in German and Scandinavian, hond in Dutch and Afrikaans) spring from the same root.  In each of the examples above, the Germanic “h” is a “c” in Latin and the Romance languages.

The word corner entered English through French (corne) and is ultimately derived from the Latin cornu.  It replaced the native English term hyrne, which was cognate with its Germanic cousins.  Based on this, I came to the conclusion that the use of the word horn in the phrase “around the horn” might simply be a survival of an archaic term and was simply another way to say “around the corner”.

At first, this seemed a bit unlikely, as hundreds of years lay between the adoption of the word corner into the English language and the invention of the game of baseball.  However, as I researched additional uses of the word horn, I came across it as a geographical term in reference to two specific locations: the Horn of Africa and Cape Horn in South America.  In both cases, the usage of the word horn fits with its archaic meaning of a corner, or a place where two sides come together and meet in a point.

The final twist in the saga of horn is that, in the case of Cape Horn, the name seems to be a coincidence.  The southern tip of South America was rounded and named by Dutch sea captain Willem Corneliszoon Schouten in 1616 and named Kaap Hoorn, after his hometown of Hoorn back in the Netherlands.  However, in a truly wonderful piece of synchronicity, the medieval history of the city of Hoorn indicates that it was so named because it stuck out into the waters of the Zuiderzee, and this despite the common word in Dutch for corner being hoek.

In the end, it seems that my initial hunch was correct and that a commonplace phrase used on a daily basis in American sports vernacular hides an interesting and complex medieval linguistic survival.

Glimpse has a beautiful ring to it which stems, I think, from the fact that it is both simple and complex at the same time.  It is simple in the sense that it is a commonly used, monosyllabic word with a clear definition (something like “a quick look”).  On the other hand, it is complex because it begins with the relatively unusual but aesthetically pleasing consonant cluster gl- which connects it to other words that begin the same way and raises an interesting question.  Namely, if glimpse means to have “a quick look,” why do we also have glance?

Glimpse ultimately comes from the Old English word glimsian, which meant “to shine faintly.”  In Middle English, this became glimsen and meant “to glimmer.”  So, from an etymological standpoint, glimpse clearly has a connection to something that is seen, but with some amount of difficulty, because it is faint or inconstant.

There is a secondary connotation of “quickness” attached to glimpse that I initially assumed had a structural source: something that is difficult to see is likely to be seen only briefly.  However, after a bit of thought I realized that there are other words beginning with gl– that have connotations related to sight and quickness: glint, and, as mentioned above, glance.  For instance, it would not be uncommon to hear someone say, “I only had time to glance at it.”

So, back to the original question posed above: if both glimpse and glance mean “a quick look with some degree of difficulty,” why are both in common usage?

The key factor that distinguishes glimpse from glance seems to be related to who is controlling the action when the glimpse or glance occurs.  Glimpse tends to indicate passivity in sentences such as “I caught a glimpse of the star,” or “I glimpsed a rainbow.”  In both of these examples, I am at the mercy of the object being viewed; it is the star and the rainbow that are the drivers of the action.  They are the thing that is happening to me and my attempt to “catch” a glimpse of them demonstrates the reactive nature of glimpse.  I can only catch what has been thrown, has fled, is falling, etc.

Glance, on the other hand, tends to be used to indicate an action such as “I glanced at the check,” or “I glanced in my rear view mirror.”  In both of these sentences, I am the one driving the primary action.  While the length of the action may be short (otherwise I would have said “look”), the implication is that I decided when the action began and ended.

The power of glimpse lies in the incompleteness and yearning that comes from not being able to fully see something, to not be fully in control of the object being viewed.  This withholding of the whole creates a sense of attraction, a teasing playfulness that pulls the viewer in.

While a glance might tell you how much your dinner cost or whether the car behind you is too close, a glimpse draws you into mystery.  It is the catalyst for an adventure.