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the only Weekly Word-origin Webzine | |
Issue 61 |
November 15, 1999 |
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This term, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “an act of bravado in which a person loads (usually) one chamber of a revolver, spins the cylinder, holds the barrel to his head, and pulls the trigger”, made its first appearance in written English in 1937. It was used at that time by Georges Surdez in a short story he wrote for Collier’s magazine entitled “Russian Roulette”. The term first appears in that story in the following passage:
It is interesting to note that Surdez describes above a version of Russian roulette in which five chambers of the gun’s cylinder hold cartridges, whereas today the understanding is that only one chamber holds a bullet. However, Surdez mentions both the five-cartridge and one-cartridge versions of this “game” in his short story. Cecil Adams makes the point that the five-cartridge version is basically suicide, while the one-cartridge variety is indeed more a game of chance. The latter is the form associated with the term Russian roulette today. All the available evidence suggests that Surdez made up the term based on the reputation Russian soldiers and officers had for violent and self-destructive behavior. It is just possible that he heard it somewhere else and adopted it for his story, but if so, we have no record of this earlier source. By the way, Mr. Surdez was not very prolific, at least not as far as his widely-published material goes. The only other work we could find by him was “Restricted!”, which was published in Adventure magazine in December of 1947. The figurative use of the term Russian roulette occurred at least by 1960; in 1976 even the medical journal The Lancet got in on the act: “Abusive parents are often the scarred survivors of generations of reproductive russian roulette.” The metaphorical meaning of the phrase had become “playing recklessly with chance”. How on earth did Russians gain a reputation for playing such a deadly game? While Russian officers of the Revolution and World War I eras were known for being violent and reckless, even depressed, crazed or drunk to the point of suicide, there is absolutely no evidence that they engaged in what we call Russian roulette. Cecil Adams did, however, find a Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time, by Mikhail Lermontov (published in 1840 and translated by Vladimir Nabokov in 1958), in which a character engages in behavior which is similar to Russian roulette: A group of officers, bored one evening, argue over the notion of predestination. A Serbian among them takes the position that one’s fate is predestined, betting against the others that he is correct. To illustrate this, he takes up a gun which is hanging on display on the wall, puts it to his head, and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He next aims the firearm at the ceiling and pulls the trigger, and a shot is fired. His companions pay their bets in amazement. Only a few hours after that event, the Serbian is murdered by a drunk. Now
that we know why this game was associated with the Russians, even if they
never actually played it, why is it known as roulette?
Roulette is a game of chance where a wheel with numbered |
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From Harvey Schmidt:
We tend associate this word with stage conjurors and, as a result, might therefore hazard a guess that it's... ooh... maybe as old as the last century, right? Wrong. This word is truly ancient. Abracadabra was first recorded in Gnostic amulets of the 3rd century A.D. and was once thought to be a word of real magical power. The amulets were worn around the neck and were supposed to protect against fever. The word was inscribed in the form of a triangle, thus:
Another popular, not to say cliché, "magic word" is presto. This is merely the Italian for "quickly" so, when a conjuror cries "Presto, be gone... away, fly, vanish" (from "The Case Is Altered", Ben Johnson, 1598), he merely means "go quickly away". In the mid-17th century presto was said to be "a word used by juglers [sic] in their Hocus Pocus tricks." Now, this hocus pocus is also quite fascinating as it is thought to be a garbled borrowing from the Latin Mass. At the high point of the mass, bread and wine are (magically) transformed into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. The priest then raises up the body of Christ and quotes Jesus' own words at the Last Supper, saying "This is my body..." or, in the original Latin, Hoc est corpus meum... It was this hoc est corpus which became hocus pocus. |
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From Joyce Wang:
Originally, exotic meant merely "foreign". It derives from the Greek exotikos, and ultimately from exo, which signifies "from outside", "foreign". Thus, in the 17th century, one writer remarked that the Welsh language "hath the least mixture of Exotick words of any now used in Europe." With time exotic came to acquire connotations of the strange and the bizarre, notions which are naturally associated with far-flung, foreign lands. In the 1950s, U.S. strip-tease dancers came to be called exotic dancers, perhaps playing on the similarity to the word erotic. The Indo-European root from which the Greek is descended is eghs "out". Other words having eghs as their source are exoteric, exoskeleton, and synecdoche. |
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From John :
T Bulldoze may have been influenced by the bull in bullwhip. Bulldozing is thought by some to have arisen after the American Civil War, when blacks were sometimes given a bull-dose by racist whites in order to coerce them to vote for a certain candidate. The "pushing around" meaning behind the term apparently came to be applied to machinery which pushed earth around, some time in the late 1920s; the term is first recorded with that meaning in 1930. |
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From Nyrican:
This is a very old word in English; it goes back to Old English
where it was cése or cýse.
It Where Latin got caseus is not clear, but John Ayto, for one, suggests that it may be related to Sanskrit kvathate "to boil", which could refer to the frothiness of the milk from which cheese is made, or to the cooking of milk to make the cheese. However, while kvathikaa means "a decoction made from milk" there is no direct mention of cheese or even of milk in this word. It just means "something boiled". In the cow-centered society which used the Sanskrit language, milk was considered the most wholesome (and holy) of liquids and boiling implied "boiling in milk". Caseate "to make cheese", casein "curd" and caseic acid (a.k.a. lactic acid) all come from the Latin source. |
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From Osirisburn:
The verb rave was first used in writing by the venerable Chaucer in the late 14th century. In Troilus and Criseyde he wrote: "Ye ben so wylde it semeth Þat ye raue" ("You be so wild it seems that you rave"). At that time, as it does today, the word meant "to be mad or show signs of madness; to talk or declaim wildly due to madness or some great passion". By the early 17th century the word had acquired a similar yet less dire meaning: "to speak in a frenzied or enthusiastic manner" and then "to speak of something with enthusiasm". It is the latter which gave us current usages such as rave reviews and "she raves about him". The "frenzied or enthusiastic" meaning also lent itself to a noun in the late 16th century, and that is ultimately where rave "party" comes from. This usage is first recorded in 1960 in London, and refers to such parties being frenzied or exciting. In those early days it was most often encountered in the form rave-up, as in "There's a rave-up at Peter's house tonight". This was soon abbreviated to rave, especially in the case of all-night parties which were called all-night raves. Rave's etymology is debatable. One school suggests that it derives from a variant form of Old French rêver "to dream, be delirious" (reverie comes from the same source). Another group believes it to come from Latin rabia, a Late Latin form of Latin rabies (which English took in the same form), from Latin rabere "to rage" (and rage comes from rabies, as well, via Provençal). |
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From John R. Ellison:
Thanks for the information, though Mike insists on putting in his two-pennyworth and saying that the "English long-bowmen" were, in fact, Welsh mercenaries. |
From John Broussard:
From Kathy Smith:
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From John Archdeacon:
For our American readers who don't know, Noddy and Big Ears are characters in a series of children's books written by English author Enid Blyton. Noddy's car has a bell on it which, in the books, goes "bring, bring". |
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