Crisscross

In my post on the etymology of the word "index", I mentioned that the alphabet had been called a "Christ cross row" because in schoolbooks it was often preceded by a mark in the shape of a cross, called a "Christ's cross". "Christ's cross" is, somewhat amazingly, also the origin of our word "crisscross". Just as "Christ's mass" became reduced to "Christmas" with its first syllable pronounced CRISS, the same thing happened to "Christ's cross". But, unlike "Christmas", the spelling started to reflect the new pronunciation, as early as the 1600s, first losing the "t", then losing the "h". By the 1800s, "criss-cross" was being used to mean a pattern of intersecting lines. with all sense of the ultimate allusion completely lost.
For another word that surprisingly has its origins in the symbol of the crucifixion, see this post.

When luxury and indolence were Bad Things...

Do not use "enervate" when what you mean is "energize". You could unwittingly insult someone if you get this wrong, for instance if you told them a talk they just gave or a class they just taught "enervated" you, for "enervate" means "sap of energy or strength", or, as the OED puts it (with a rather Victorian tone of disapproval of self-indulgence):

"To weaken physically (a person or animal); now only of agencies that impair nervous ‘tone’, as luxury, indolence, hot or malarious climates."

The word comes from the Latin ēnervāre (to extract the sinews of, weaken), from ē out + nervus sinew, and was originally used to mean "cut the hamstrings of a horse". Now, my hamstrings take a beating in my ballet classes, but for all that, I find my classes energizing rather than enervating (probably because of the lack of that character-sapping indolence!).

On the index

 

As I promised in my post about the plural of "index", here is the story of the word "index".

There were a lot of words competing for the honour of designating alphabetical lists in the Renaissance. I suspect that this is because indexes as a concept only really came into being at the Renaissance (before then “table” was used for such lists). In fact, apparently you couldn't index before the Renaissance, because before then we had no alphabet! 

Well, really we did, but the alphabet wasn't called that till the early 1500s (1513 being the OED's first quotation). The alphabet had been called a "cross row" or "Christ cross row" (more on this in another post) for a while, because a cross sign began it in schoolbooks. 

One famous lexicographer, Cotgrave, even sniffily dismissed the word "alphabet" as vulgar in 1611: "Touching the French abece, for alphabet I will not call it, according to the vulgar error, that word being peculiar only to the Greek tongue." (Yet more proof that lexicographers have less power than you might think, and that usage objections have a way of fading away with time.) 

But back to indexes. Some down-to -earth person wanted to call them “finders” but he was doomed to failure, because the Renaissance was a time of borrowing from Greek and Latin, especially for highbrow intellectual pursuits.The Greek-derived word in the race was "elench" from elenchos (cross-examination). There were three candidates from Latin:

1. concordance, from con (together) and corde (heart)
2. repertory, from reperire (to find)
3. index,  from index (the forefinger, or “pointer” , from indicare to point out). 

In the Middle Ages the index finger had beeen called the “teacher”, because "teach" originally meant "point out", but once again the word of Anglo-Saxon origin had to lose out to a Latinate one. It could have been instead the delightful, and equally Latin, “insignitor”, another word that was popular for the index finger in the 1500s. But for fingers and finders, "index" was the ultimate winner.

For what magpies have to do with indexing, see this post. 

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Update on enrol vs enroll

Further to my post on the spelling of enrol(l), the results of my highly scientific facebook poll are now in, and "enroll" has taken a commanding lead amongst Canadians of 33-14 over enrol. Many of those who answered "enrol" only did so after checking a dictionary, which suggests to me that if left to their own devices they might have said "enroll". Which reminds me, when I conduct a survey like this, please tell me what you would do spontaneously, not what your dictionary says you should do.

Get, got, ....?

Just to make people's lives miserable, I suspect, usage pundits like to seize hold of common everyday words and make up "rules" about them which are the exact opposite of what Joe Language User would do if left to his or her own devices. After all, how would one get a power trip if one made rules only about words people rarely if ever use, or if one said, "Go ahead, what you say intuitively is ok"?

The past participle of "get" is such a case: there is a tradition among usage books maintaining that "gotten" is wrong or obsolete. It is indeed obsolete for the British, but it is alive and kicking in North America, so the question is: is it wrong?

Considering that it is one of the most frequent words in English, you might expect "get" to be Anglo-Saxon in origin, but in fact we owe it to the Vikings. For them, the infinitive was geta, the simple past gat, and the past participle getenn. But English verbs with an e vowel commonly changed that vowel to an o in the past participle, as in "steal" becoming "stolen". So when this Old Norse word was borrowed into English in the 1200s, people used the familiar conjugation pattern, and getenn became goten. The vowel in goten even migrated over to the simple past, so that "gat" became "got" by the 16th century (although you will still hear "gat" occasionally in quotations from the King James Bible, dating from 1611). As time went on, the English abandoned gotten in favour of got for both the simple past and the past participle (though they maintained the distinction with "forgot" and "forgotten").  But, like many older forms abandoned by the English, gotten has survived in North American English. So, if anyone tells you it's obsolete, ignore them!

Why not hopwelsh?

Children are back in the schoolyards. Do they still play hopscotch, or has some Wii version taken over? You might think that there's some cute story about Scotch whisky involved with hopscotch, but in fact, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the Scots. Back in the 1400s, the word "skoch" turned up in English meaning "cut a line in" or "make a gash in". Recipes recommended that fish to be grilled should be "skoched" first (today we would say "scored"). If you think of what a piece of steak that has been scored with a knife looks like, you can see the resemblance to a hopscotch drawing on a sidewalk. "Hopscotch" means "hop over the lines", more or less. The earliest references to the game, from 1688 (when they definitely didn't have a Wii version) called it "hop scotches", in fact.

Enrol(l)

It's the time of year when people are enrolling in all sorts of activities (I recommend taking up ballet classes if you haven't done so yet). A faithful Wordlady reader has written to inquire whether "enrol" or "enroll" is the correct spelling in Canada. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary gives "enrol" as the headword with "enroll" as the variant, so, as with many things, both are correct. Personally, I use "enroll" because I see no good reason to spell it differently from "roll"; English spelling is way too complicated already without adding even more complication!  Frankly, I think I was surprised to discover when we edited the dictionary that "enrol" won out over "enroll" (though the margin was probably slim). Both spellings have existed since the word was borrowed into English from French in the 1300s,  but "enrol" is now preferred by the British and "enroll" by Americans. Often these differences date back to Samuel Johnson's Dictionary on the one hand and Noah Webster's on the other, but in this case Johnson included only "enroll". It seems that the single-l spelling won out in Britain in the course of the 19th century. I've just started a facebook poll to see how usage is going currently, and I will keep you posted.