A word you never suspected had something to do with poets

Here in Canada we have an annual poetry award, the Griffin Prize. The prize for 2014 was announced last night, so in honour of poetry we are going to look at a word you never suspected had something to do with poets: scold.

Scold comes from skald, a Viking word for an ancient Scandinavian poet. Goodness knows what Viking poets were like, because the word subsequently came to mean "a person of ribald speech". From there it was but a step to "a verbally abusive person". By about 1400 the noun had morphed into a verb meaning "to use violent or unseemly language in vituperation" (gotta love those Oxford English Dictionary definitions!)

I think it highly unlikely that 500 years from now, English speakers will be saying something like "My mother really poeted me after I stayed out all night"!